Scarce Assets E006: Robert Breedlove – What is Money?

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Hello, my name is Andy Edstrom and I'm happy to welcome you to the 6th episode of Scarce Assets, the show that examines scarcity, the most fundamental driver of economics and markets, and the scarcest asset of all, which is Bitcoin. Happy to be here with my great friend and Co host Jesse Myers and our guest, the great Robert Breedlove. Now I'm going to say a few things about Robert. I met Robert for the first time at the Bitcoin 2019 conference, which I also I almost can't believe was five years ago now, and we had a great conversation. I was immediately impressed by him and that was at a point when he was really just starting to hit his stride. He had recently published Money Bitcoin in Time, and in the subsequent few years he published several articles that are now must read pieces for understanding Bitcoin, including both Bitcoin and the #0 and Masters and Slaves of Money. But he then took his scholarship to the next level when he launched the What is Money Show, and it's on my personal very short list of Must Listen podcast. And Robert has produced fantastic collaborations with a lot of brilliant people, including Jordan Peterson and Michael Saylor, and I'm sure I'm missing some of his other great accomplishments. But I also must say that Robert has always been kind to me and I couldn't be happier to have him on the show. So Robert, how are you today? I am great Andy. Thank you for that very nice introduction. Although, if my brain is not mistaken, I think we may have met before the 2019 conference. Did we really? I remember we had lunch at one point in Santa Monica. Yeah, we had lunch in Santa Monica when was that, though? Wasn't that 2018? Maybe? You you might be right about that. I in my mind the first intro was at the conference, but I may have those reversed. It would not surprise me. Yeah, How far things have come in such a short period of time. A lot of water under the bridge and I'm, I'm sure we're going to talk about some of those topics today. So I. I want to piggyback Andy on on #0 in Bitcoin. Robert for me was actually probably the final nail in the coffin for me on like the altcoin possibility and so like that. That was like, that was the last piece of the puzzle that I didn't have like a solid answer for. And that took care of it. And from there it's just been, you know, Bitcoin Maxi for me, so. I appreciate. You for that. I'd love to hear that because that was the point of the piece, as you know, the opening line. And it's a hard part of Bitcoin to understand, right, the social layer, that it's not just a technology, there's a social institution aspect to it. And you know it. It sounds ridiculous, almost like, what do you mean you can just copy and paste Bitcoin, but there's only 21 million, so you can just copy and paste it forever. So to explain that is pretty tricky and you have to invoke a lot of kind of esoteric ideas like path dependence and network effects and blah, blah, blah. So I'm really happy to hear it had that impact on you because I was, yeah, really struggling to find a good historical analogy and I think it worked out pretty well. It's perfect for it and for anyone who hasn't read it. What the hell are you doing? Go read that. That's it. I've actually, I've actually sent clients to it because that's one of the hardest questions that I've had, you know, attempted to have to deal with is the Oh, well if you can just copy it, you know, why, Why can't there be, you know what's the difference between Bitcoin and, I don't know, Litecoin or something on that on that logic. And yeah, so I've leaned on your piece. It's, it's saved me, I think a little bit of time and you certainly articulated it more clearly, you know, than I ever could have. So yeah, we both gotten some good mileage out of that piece. That's great to hear. So definitely the fan favorite. I think of all the feedback I've received is that that one's the favorite. Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, let's talk about, you know, some of your more recent work now. You know, I want to talk about some of the more timeless themes that interest you and that you've explored on the What is Money? Show this, You know, your work touches numerous different disciplines, how they intersect money, you know, society, economics, philosophy, a lot of different areas. I'm curious, are there any fields of study that you found surprisingly interesting in their intersection with money? It's a good question. You know a lot of people it would. So when people first hear the title of the podcast, the What is Money Show, they're like, oh, it's a finance show. I'm like actually not really at all. We talk almost nothing about finance. It's much more philosophical slash psychological. I mean, there's obviously some historical stuff, some economic stuff, but I have found myself recently obsessively reading a lot of Western philosophy. Before Bitcoin, I'd read Eastern philosophy. So this is like Sun Tzu, Musashi, some Krishnamurti. I was very into those philosophers. Those are Indian and Asian. But then in Conversations, obviously, Jordan Peterson was a big inspiration for me even to start the podcast. Through Jordan Peterson, I discovered the work of the likes of John Vervecki. He was a colleague of Jordan Peterson's at University of Toronto. Vervecki's been on the show a couple of times. He has an amazing podcast. Through John Vervecki I discovered the author DC Schindler, who wrote this book, Plato's Critique of Impure Reason. And it's just so damn good. Like, I can't. It's one of those books you read. And like, I can't believe a human wrote this, but a lot of that philosophy, like it talks about how things are dramatic in nature. So there's not, you know, we use, we typically use words and think that, oh, the word is the thing, but there's really reality is more relational than that. So that's why there's always context and you know, you have to read between the lines and what we even need things like language and money, right, Because action is continuous and complex. It's not discreet and simple. And so I guess to sort of answer your question, in DC Schindler's books, he writes often, he's writing about the work of Plato, Socrates, You know, Socrates is like the, the main character of Plato's writing. Effectively, he's kind of like the archetypal philosopher. So he, like, embodies his philosophy. But one of the ideas and a lot of his writing is this the idea of a mediating third, that between any two poles there's always a mediating 3rd between them. And it's it's kind of complex to unravel. But I just thought that was so fascinating is like, you get you get to the bottom of Western philosophy and you find this notion of like the mediating 3rd and I can't help but think that of money in that way, right? Like money is structurally similar to that. And that's why I think you know the show. We end up talking a lot about language, a lot about definitions, actually. Socrates said the the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. Ian Rand said something like definitions of the guardians of rationality, something that that protects US against mental disintegration. So very easy to forget. This open source software that we're running called language is not the thing itself, not the actions and the phenomenon or the phenomena themselves. But we, we talk as if they are, but they're not. So we have to remember that, you know, we're always kind of like mapping this territory. So it gets very meta and complex that you're trying to talk about the mapping instrument, whether that be language or whether that be the language of value or human action, which we call money. And so I think that's for me, that's what's really fascinating and I think that's what a lot of people in the audience kind of seize on to. It's kind of a cerebral rabbit hole ish podcast. Yeah, I love that the IT is fascinating and surprising. It certainly was surprising to me that an exploration of what money is can cut so deeply into our understanding of the meaning of the universe. Frankly, it really is quite, quite incisive. I certainly wish I'd I'd read more philosophy up to this point. And so I'm gonna make it make an effort to to catch up a little bit with you in that regard. But I highly recommend the John Verveke episodes. I listened to both of them. I thought they were tremendous and highly recommend him to to watch or to listeners and and viewers for sure. He's one of the best. I love the joke that Jordan Peterson is a gateway drug to John Verveke. Well, if you think Peterson's good, then you're going to love Verveke. And I would argue, maybe I don't. Verveke for me, was a gateway drug to DC Schindler, and DC Schindler's been on Verveke's show. And I've read two of DC Schindler's books. The one I mentioned previously, Plato's Critique of Impure Reason, and then the one I read recently is The Perfection of Freedom. That's a good book, too, man. Excellent. If I could speak a little bit about that. So this is a little bit off the deep end and I might not go for. It. So you pick up that book, The Perfection of Freedom. I have no idea what I'm getting into. All right, it's a 500 page philosophy book on the nature of freedom. If I may spoil the ending. It's not a fiction book, it's it's non fiction philosophy. Towards the end of the book, DC Schindler, I guess, asserts that marriage actually is the ultimate form of human freedom. And now you might think that's quite paradoxical because marriage is, you know, you're, you're you're giving up your options, right? You're giving up your freedom to commit to one person, one family for life till death do you part. But the an argument that he makes there and again, I'm I'm not going to do this justice. You really got to read the book. It's one of those books I found myself highlighting more than half the book. Like, it's that good. His writing is so good. He says marriage enables 2 forms of transcendence. One is a vertical transcendence where two people become one in the sacred union of marriage. So unlike a contract, like a legal contract where you and I enter into it, you know, Andy's on one side, he's a counterparty, Robert's the other counterparty. We enter into a contract. On the other side of that contract, we're still Andy and Robert, but on the other side of the contract of marriage, you're no longer separate beings. You're literally one unit basically and it's until until death do you part. So he gets into that. It's like you're you get you gain this vertical transcendence where two people are basically becoming one and then it enables horizontal transcendence, which is well, you get to have kids, right. You have the container for children and be you know you can be fruitful and multiply, as you might say. So marriage ends up being this like choice that you're giving up one form of choice, but you're gaining this other thing, right? You gain this union one of another human and you gain this container to have children and, you know, build a meaningful life and all of that. And so I'm reading this and I was just thinking how private property and marriage or sort of maybe have a structural similarity because basically private property is, well, you are wedded, the owner is wedded to their assets in a way, right? Like it's a bond between owner and asset. Now it's not exactly like marriage because obviously it's you don't marry your car for life and you know, reproduce with it or whatever. But one thing, a vertical form of transcendence that private property enables is the pricing system. So that we all kind of merge our minds into one thing. And we can see, you know, the total supply and the total demand for any commodity in the world is just data compressed into this one market price. So you don't need to know anyone's story, anyone's business, anyone's P&L. You just see everything through the market price. And if it goes up and you're a consumer, then you're incentivized to consume less or use substitutes. If you're a producer and the price goes up, then you're incentivized to produce more. So the market price is how we're we're alleviating scarcity in the world frankly which what your guys show is all about And then the so that would be like the vertical form of transcendence that you you actually mind meld through the pricing system. And then the horizontal form of transcendence which is we get the multiplication of capital right, we get more quantity and quality of consumer goods, capital goods etcetera. So anyways, bit off the deep in there, but it's those like those types of things like what? In the world? Studying money. You end up reading a book about Western philosophy that tells you marriage is the ultimate form of freedom, and then you're drawing parallels to private property. These are the kinds of explorations that I've been having over the years, and it's a lot of fun. That's the multidisciplinary approach that I love that you take. Robert and my wife will be very happy to know you know you're so you're so pro marriage and believe that it enhances freedom. Love to love to hear that Jesse, you know, Jesse recently, more recently bit the bullet and has also been horizontally. I think he's going to horizontally expand as you put it. I think that's coming up for him relatively shortly. Yep, in a couple months. So we got that coming down the Pike and very excited about that. And yeah, it's it's very interesting to think about those themes with regard to money and regard to you know that that question of what is money and how you're pointing out it's about intermediaries too. Because, you know, in our relationships and our romantic relationships were floating around in the marketplace until we decide to to commit to a single a single counterparty as it were and and turn that into something else like a, a, a life. So you're right. It's, it's so funny that I think I guess you're kind of at the forefront of this of like recognizing that explorations of Bitcoin is really an exploration of money and an exploration of money is an exploration of the world and like human nature and the human experience because it is the ultimately the currency for how we value everything that's important to us. Bingo. So you're doing that more than anybody else, which is really awesome. Well, I mean, yeah, I I thank you. I think we're all it feels like bitcoin's going to suck everyone into that. It's just I've been kind of aggressively running at it because I'm already naturally curious person and Bitcoin has just been this bottomless rabbit hole to just plunge and plunge and plunge the other thing that came up to me. Is You and Gigi are near the bottom, but neither of you have found it, huh. Nobody will ever find it, I don't think, because of what you just said, actually, if money is the language of human action, and this is the title of Mises's famous book, obviously, And human action is basically everything. Literally everything, right? We don't have any perception or observation or experience that's not a human action. Because guess what, it's coming through your eyes, ears, nose. Like it's all human action in a way. And also, humans. Every market in the world exists to serve that market. Like we would not accumulate goods or capital if we were not going to be making a new generation. So I thought about that too, that all these markets, all the trade, the economy and everything, the real point of it is the people that come after us, right? The legacy we leave our children. Because if we didn't have, we didn't reproduce. Well, why would we economize? Why would we accumulate capital? Why would we build civilization? Because we'd all be gone in a generation. We just have one big party, right? Call it a day, but we do all of this economization, learning, knowledge transfer for the kids basically. And I mean it's somewhat obvious to say that, but it's kind of interesting to think about it through a a market perspective. Amen. It's all for the kids. That's why we're doing the Scarce Assets podcast here. It's all, it's all for the kids. I can certainly attest to the fact that learning about Bitcoin has made me think longer term and have a longer time preference, I have to say with respect to the informational element, you know in the in the price mechanism. I I always think of some chat that I saw on YouTube Winces Caesaris and he really focused on the on the measuring stick. I mean he really focused on the fact that Fiat money is this measuring stick that's been shifting and and moving on us. And I was really not prepared to comprehend at the time you know that that was maybe the most important element of it but it certainly has has weighed heavier on my mind. And and I'm I'm always brought back to that to to that moment in time when I, when I was exposed to the thing wasn't quite quite ready for it. Which of course is true about Bitcoin generally for people and and how and when they fall down the rabbit hole. But we all take our own journey and our our own unique path in getting there. I have a related question for you Robert. You may not have a an answer for it, but what percentage of of people do you think so? You know, the whole world is going to have to come to Bitcoin eventually in some capacity, but what percentage of people will really wrestle with what Bitcoin means versus just adopt it because it becomes money? Yeah, it's a great question that I don't have a good answer to. But I think we see, I mean I guess bit corners in the world today by definition are the early adopters, right? The 1st 100 million some odd people. And of that 100 million some odd people that have adopted Bitcoin, there are a small percentage that are really, really going down the rabbit hole are either right, like you mentioned, Gigi, writing about it a lot, these very profound essays or talking about it on podcast like this. I don't know. But but that alone it's exciting to me that Bitcoin can inspire that type of inquiry, that people. It's strange, isn't it? Just just engaging with a new technology somehow inspires you to ask fundamental questions and lower your time preference and think more about your legacy etcetera. It really calls into question how significant incentives are. You know what, Bitcoiners. We disagree about a lot of things, right? We're very disagreeable by nature. That's probably 1 common personality trait among bitcoiners. But I think one thing most, if not all bitcoiners would agree upon is that incentives really matter. Like, a lot. And maybe we just haven't taken that seriously enough up until now. I mean obviously we, you know, we use proverbial carrots and sticks to try and guide human behavior but we haven't taken things. Incentives may be seriously enough in at the institutional level, right. The fact that a central bank or Fiat currency exists is a testament to that. We're just we're playing with what is that one there's a quote the the problem with people is we have primeval emotions medieval institutions and God like technologies. So it's like we're just trying to we're playing with fire in a way, and we have to get burnt a few times before we learn how important certain things are. And I think Bitcoin is probably going to teach us that about money slash incentives that we really should have just let human self organize and choose the best tool for the job and don't not engage in all of this intervention and coercion to try and treat the market as if it's a machine, right? Pull this lever, lower interest rate, increase economy, blah blah, blah. It's like it's not a machine, guys. You have the wrong metaphor. It's a complex adaptive system. Central bankers cannot control the economy any better than meteorologists can control the weather. So hopefully Bitcoin helps shake that tree and and wake us up to that reality. That's it. We need to dismiss the the arrogance of yeah of of those who believe that they can deterministically manage this thing bringing in the the notion of kids and marriage and all that good stuff. I have a so I have a three-year old and I see her absolutely learning you know learning about the world touching the stove you know falling over hurting yourself. I think we do that as a species. I guess one of the virtues of childhood is that the the stakes are low in the sense that you're you're tiny, you don't control much, you don't have those you know those God like powers. Prometheus. You don't have the Prometheus situation where you've been handed fire, although certainly kids will find the fire if you let them. So you do have to keep the keep a lid on that in the household. But yeah it's at the at the level of a complex adaptive system like the whole economy or the world. Certainly the stakes are are much higher, and I personally have taken it to heart the incentives concept. You know, when when dealing with my kids, it doesn't. It doesn't always work. And I try to be deliberate about it. Sometimes I get, sometimes I get emotional about it and my my limbic system takes over. But I do. We all do our best, yeah. Well said. The other thing that comes up for me about Fiat, it seems like it's very much fear based. You know, obviously people are complying to define Fiat, you know, do this because I said so or else right, like do this under threat of force basically. And that's not something that we had historically like we take it for granted now if Congress signs a new bill into law and we all have to abide by that or else, you know, we get in trouble. But historically, it was much more like a legal discovery process. You know, like Moses observed everyone fighting amongst themselves for a long period of time and then finally he writes down like, OK, here's what you guys have been doing. Here are the rules. It's not like he sat down and just wrote the rules and said follow these or else there was a discovery process that took place. So people that are complying with Fiat, you know, do this or else are obviously doing it out of fear. But I think also the people that are imposing or benefiting from Fiat are doing it out of fear, right? The fear that if you just leave people free to their own devices, then there will be anarchy and chaos and there won't be an economy and there won't be any goods. It's kind of this circular logic of of socialism in a way. It's people are greedy and evil, so they need so they can't be trusted. So they need to be governed by people who are greedy and evil. You know like it's it's really crazy and I hope that by getting some Fiat out of the world, you know by Bitcoin emerging and and sort of clearing hopefully Fiat out of our money, Fiat out of our legal system to some extent that will you know get rid of fear. Not not entirely of course, it's part of life, but I think a lot of people operate from a very fear based paradigm today. And what is that Bob Marley quote when the when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world with no peace, something like that. And Bitcoin has that kind of flavor to it. So yeah, I just hope we can help us. You're asking earlier about will everyone go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole? Probably not, right. There's going to be just a few people. But a few people can inspire a lot of people to stop leading a fear based life, even if they don't know why necessarily, right. Just a few courageous people setting an example, living out of love, etcetera. And I think you see that in a lot of bit corners, So I hope Bitcoin keeps pushing the world that way. And and and that goes back to your point about property rights. I mean, if you're living in fear about money, it's related to, if not primarily driven by a fear of like is my money mine? Am I going to get more dollars? The cost of everything is rising. How am I going to pay for my family? But if you shift to a a world where you have this guaranteed property right, because it's, you know, protected by math and nothing else, that shifts some of that psychology from a scarcity mindset of like, holy shit, how am I going to get, I need to get a raise because I need to keep up, and that's inherently fearful from that to, oh, my savings are going to grow in value. I'm doing pretty well. Exactly, exactly, yeah. And that, and we've all experienced, right? The lowering of your time preference. Almost equivalent to becoming a better person, right? Whatever. You know, Bitcoiners take a lot of different directions, but the commonality would be whatever, not whatever. But several bad things they had about themselves. Free Bitcoin. They start to address them post Bitcoin, whether that's you know, taking better physical care of yourself, going to church, drinking less, whatever it may be, saving more. Even just something as simple as that. And who? It's strange because you wouldn't think if Bitcoin weren't an actual thing happening, that would maybe be a difficult argument to sell. I mean, the Austrians have been making it for a long time, and not a lot of people have been listening, but now we see it, You know, you see people's lives actually changing and who knows how far that thing can go. And yeah, just the idea that your ability to own a thing is premised on other people's inability to take the thing from you. All right, this is very simple idea. But if the incentive is there and the opportunity is there to take it, you know, States and criminals have engaged in it for a long time. So it's almost like we needed an actual incentive or or technological solution to the ethical problem of of letting people keep what they earn. And Bitcoin, obviously, we've made advances along this front in many ways. You know the rule of law and you know English common law, things like that. But Bitcoin, private property, Bitcoins like an advancement of that idea, basically. But it but it's a tool plus an idea that moves us forward on that ethical continuum. So it's very it's fascinating. Yeah, it's it's got the technological element in addition with the sociological element and and the philosophical and it's and the politically scientific. I honestly, after studying this thing for a number of years, I sometimes wonder whether I could articulate it at all because it's so expansive and and and all-encompassing and touches everything, you know, getting back to the multidisciplinary approach with your thinking. One particular discipline is history of science, which touches on a few of these these topics. I'll say I never, I'll never forget taking a survey course in College in the history of science. And there was one professor who that was his specialty and unfortunately was a terrible, terrible class. And I think it turned me off. It turned me off to the discipline. And so it was refreshing to hear your great survey that you did with Michael Saylor, which launched the What is Money show. Have you returned to the to the History of Science concept recently? Does it kind of just, does it percolate in the back of your mind or had there been any recent touch points in that regard? You know, well yeah. First of all, the series of Sailor was remarkable. Remarkable. Agreed. I take little to no credit for that other than just pressing record, but the guy really brought it and definitely reframe my thinking about it. You know, I've been thinking about money as time. He brought in the whole energy element and then he tied in all this anthropology, history of technology, history of science. Obviously he's a great storyteller. It was really enjoyable, right? Almost like pushed me further into the rabbit hole on the history of science question. I am. I am very fascinated by it. But I've been mostly focusing in terms of science, scientific literature. It's been mostly economics focused, not entirely pre Bitcoin. I really liked physics and biology. I think they're very interesting, like the book The River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins. So I think I'm going to have on the show this year. Oh cool. Really impactful. Selfish Gene got me pretty good in college. Yeah, Selfish Gene is fantastic. There's a book called 7 Brief Lessons on Physics, I think by Carlo Carlo Ravelli. I hope I'm saying his name right. He also has like A History of Time, I think is one of his books. So I've always had an interest there. But since Bitcoin, because I didn't have Austrian economics prior to Bitcoin, I've been mostly focused on that. And people like, you know, Mises Rothbard, Hapa, just really, if you've ever read that stuff, you know, it's it's hard stuff to read, but it's really. Tough Mises is tough Mises is. Mises is dense. I I yeah it it's it's slow going. Repetition helps. Yes, yes. Repetition, backtracking. Take it easy, take it slow. I'm current. I just picked up A theory of money and credit, actually just starting that of his. But I read through Human Action twice and one of the points he makes, I think it's in Human Action that economics is the youngest science basically. So we're we're coming out of the economic dark ages, if you will. And Bitcoin is a huge piece of that because anywhere you have Fiat currency, which is everywhere, we have this very serious intervention into the market process, right. Like how does safety put this? You're almost you're going backwards. You're going towards barter and away from the division of Labor every time you, you have a a central bank or regional monopoly on money, right? It's you're not letting people exchange freely. So it's it's unwinding the global division of Labor, the global global civilization frankly raising time preference and so. Regressive. It's economically regressive, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And then it's interesting to think how much that plays on us psychologically, right? It's I think a lot of well, people's day-to-day decisions are economically driven, right. And anyone that has a full time job, I always find it funny that people have a full time job will say something like I don't care about money. It's like really why do you spend 40 hours out of every week doing something for money? Like don't it's, it's very serious. And you know, it's crazy to think that even what mid 1800s we thought that they were like particles in the universe called utils that gave things economic value. And then, you know, this pen had 65 utils in this jug of water, had 46 utils and that's what determine their value. So we're like, we're very fresh out of this economic ignorance, I think. And so there's a lot, there's a lot to be learned and that's I guess that's absorbing a lot of my attention. Just thinking about what what else are we going to figure out in economic science in the years ahead? Like, I have no idea, but it's fascinating to to think about. Thanks for tuning in. If you're interested in exploring any of these topics further, or want to learn more about how we can help you secure a new or existing Bitcoin allocation, get in touch with our team at on rampbitcoin.com. We look forward to supporting you on your Bitcoin journey. Yeah, I I I've been lately thinking a lot about the like the geocentric model of the solar system and the universe I guess. And and how in science there's so many examples like that of like like you know leeches and bloodletting or you know the four humours model of of medicine and things that we look back on is like oh that was dumb of. Course. It just took a little bit of inquiry, a little bit of really thinking and pushing the the ball forward before civilization woke up to, Oh yeah, there's actually like logic and some reasonable rules that you can, you know, infer by studying something. Here, With economics, we're still in that bloodletting era. Yes, that's, I mean the metaphor. Bloodletting to Fiat currency inflation are the analogy. It's more than it's very close, right? You're talking about actual you're draining people, their actual vitality and energy when you drain their blood. And it's the same thing you're doing when you print money, right? People have actual lifeblood, purchasing power, labor stored up in that money. When someone else is printing it, they're basically engaging in like an economic bloodletting, right? It's very similar. And I also think it's interesting that philosopher David Hume said you can't get an ought from an is all right. So he's saying you can't take a description of reality and then make a prescription about what you should do about it. This is the domain of ethics, basically, right? We kind of decide collectively what we should do about the reality. Objective quote, UN quote objective realities we face. But when you look at something like bloodletting, there's a reason we have medical ethics, all right? It's like that the is of bloodletting. It kills. It doesn't help people, let's say get better. I'm not not a doctor. I don't know, maybe there's some weird Internet conspiracies that it does. I'm not. I'm just assuming that it is actually bad for you. So we we decide that the is of bloodletting is not good for humans. So the ought is let's not do that to each other, right? Let's create a system of medical ethics and stop bloodletting, guys, to kind of advance the human enterprise. And so we need an equivalent of that in the sphere of money, right? We need monetary ethics. And that's sort of like what Bitcoin is. It's just the emergence of this money that you can't economically bloodlet, or it's much more difficult to do so at least. And yeah, it's not enough like that. We all just kind of get in a big circle and say, let's not print money anymore. We've actually tried that. I can't remember. It was, it was it. There was a law passed in Britain. Fuck. This is on the Twilight of Gold series, probably in the 1600s, where they said this is the final money supply. We're never going to print money again. Fix money supply. Here we go. Everyone just trade and create value. We're never printing money again. And like six months later they're printing money, you know? So, like, we don't have the capacity as humans to make that to to tie ourselves to that mast and not do it. So we had to invent Bitcoin to prevent ourselves from economically bloodletting one another. The the siren song is too strong. We just we just can't help help ourselves, you know, Talk about the bloodletting. I'm reminded of Semmelweis the the Doctor Who figured out that, you know, I think it was microbe theory, germ theory, but specifically that it was very important. The doctors washed their hands right and purified themselves before treating their patients. Delivering babies for. Example. Yeah, exactly. Before delivering babies, the next generation. And nobody believed him, right? They. Attacked him. They attacked him. Yeah. They really said you were like the establishment. Attacked this guy, you know, threat. It was crazy. It's crazy, right? It's crazy. We look at that today. Like, are you kidding me? It's wild. It's wild And so it makes me think about, you know, this so far peaceful learning and adoption process for Bitcoin, the world's most scarce asset. I'm sure this is something you've thought about you know the possible path and and how this could go. It seems to be going pretty well so far, I would say. What are what are your thoughts about, you know, potential reactionary forces? Does this occupy a lot of your time thinking about it, or you do you just take it as it comes? Well, yeah. So I guess the the question is like what if Bitcoin does continue to monetize and eventually become a globe the OR a global monetary standard, How rocky is that transition, right? Will there be retaliation by the state or or what have you? I really have no idea. Like my it does seem to be going really well so far. By the way, that's a great point. And my view on it is that, you know, ultimately society is comprised of acting individuals. Again, it's one of these abstractions. We're always like, oh, what is the state going to do? But the state is comprised of a bunch of individuals, right? A bunch of individual people that are assembled into individual little power factions and they're all competing with one another, serving their own individual self-interest. So I've long, I don't know if it's wishful thinking or not, but I just thought that well, the cost of acquiring Bitcoin and insulating yourself or insuring yourself against its possible success is so low, you just buy the thing when the cost of attacking it is so high. It's like, how do you, you know, you? This is a weird paradox. So Bitcoin solved the Byzantine Generals problem, right? Which is, how do you propagate a message through a network of antagonistic actors in a way that the message gets through unchanged or undistorted, right? Passing a message with high fidelity through a bunch of people you can't trust. Basically, we didn't know how to do that prior to Bitcoin. Now, to attack Bitcoin, the state would need to solve the Byzantine Generals problem, right? You need coordination among states who are inherently distrustful of one another to really take a good shot at Bitcoin, right. You would need China and Russia and United States, etcetera to collaborate and really squash it. But as that collaboration, if that were to come together, the incentives to defect from that would get higher, right, If ever. If you did get that collaboration going on, all of a sudden China's like, well, if we just support it and mine it, then we could undercut all of these guys and make a ton of money, you know, blah blah, blah. So I've I've long thought that Bitcoin it's so asymmetrically advantageous for the individual that it was just going to dissolve centralized power structures over time that P individual group people and then individual groups would just hold this thing even if they hate it right? That the central bank like we hate this thing but we need to own put 1% of our assets in it in case it succeeds. Because if it succeeds it's an existential threat for our entire business. And so Central Bank A does that, They put 1% N will Central Bank BC and D say, oh, Central Bank A did that. We now need to put 1% in. And every time you put you know 1% in of, and I'm, I'm picking on central banks here, pick your large capital holder. Doesn't matter what institution it is. Every time someone puts purchasing power into this thing or buys some of it, they're actually increasing its odds for success. So the game theory just kind of ratchets up, right? Each time someone puts it in and they're like, well, now I need to evaluate the probability of its success a little bit higher and therefore put a little bit more of my assets to protect myself. And then the sequence goes on and on and on, and you get hyper bitcoinization. So I hope that's what happens. Might be wishful thinking. If you talk to someone like Eric Cason, he thinks we're all going to the gulags. So who knows? Useful to. Have useful to. Have a thought. So just to finish is like optionality, optionality, optionality. So Bitcoin's obviously a great form of optionality, but if you're concerned about the state level risk, diversify, right, get other passports, get other residencies, etcetera and and have backup plans. Yeah, that's great advice. Really well said. I agree with you. I think that one of my favorite things about Bitcoin is the bigger and bigger or higher and higher levels that it achieves and the larger and larger the capital bases as you just mentioned. So for every, you know, first, first it's a few cypherpunks playing around with it, then it's, you know, some parties that can't transact otherwise really need it. And there's these bigger, larger and larger pools of capital. And as you said, we're at the central bank stage at or maybe the sovereign government stage and and I love that there are certain large participants that can't even touch it until it gets big enough right for them to to dip their toe. So there's always a bigger and bigger buyer, a bigger and bigger pool of capital and feels like that's that's where we're finding ourselves these days at, you know a trillion plus market cap of Bitcoin and and there's still such tremendous upside to look forward to. It's well said. And the other component to that that's really important is that the more purchasing power that is stored in Bitcoin, the not only the more likely it is to succeed. Well, the more likely it is to succeed because it's harder to stop, right? The network becomes more secure as it grows. So you get this safe, that becomes harder to crack, the more treasure you have in it, basically. And that's crazy to think about. So I don't, you know it, anyone that's running that calculus honestly will just buy it. It's like, what what are you going to do to try to attack it? I don't know. So yeah, I think that's the way it will go. And then you just get states then are incentivized to deal with their citizens more honestly, right, Because people be able to move their capital more easily. States will have to explicitly tax people rather than print money. So it'll be less less of this surreptitious tax and more of this explicit tax and that people resist that right when they see the bill. The warrant. I was left siding the War on Terror as an as an example this was between 2001 and 2019 I think pre COVID the US printed $2.8 trillion and we spent 2.5 trillion on the War on Terror which came out to something like $80,000 per US household. I might be off somewhere on these numbers slightly but it's in the in the if they didn't have the money printer and they sent each US household an $80,000 bill. How long do you think the war on Terra would have lasted? I don't think it would have made as far as it has. So which obviously gets into bitcoins whole value proposition as a peacemaking technology. So just stop guys. Just stop blowing each other up, stealing from people through money printing to go up and go and blow up other people and take their stuff. It's just we can't call ourselves rational or civilized animals until we stop these mass murder campaigns funded through money printing. And hopefully Bitcoin helps with that. Amen. One of my favorite stats about I can't remember, I think it was Afghanistan. It was either Afghanistan or Iraq was the pallets of cash that were literally lost in transit, right. They can't account for the IT was like a couple couple billion dollars worth, which ironically accounts for a very small percentage of the expenditure on those on those war efforts. As you said, trillions of dollars. But literally at that scale, you just physically lose money. Where does the money go? Who knows? Yeah. It's such a scam and it's a bit ironic that I guess I don't know. Most of the world maybe thinks Bitcoin's a scam. Still, I don't think that would be too much of A stretch to say more than half. Yet it's the only money that's absolutely not a scam. I mean, you guys could say physical gold, but it's just not practical for everyone to deal with physical gold. So that tipping point's coming, right? There's going to be a tipping point where more than half the world knows that Bitcoin is the only non scam money and that will be an interesting day. Speaking of the scam and the my personal view is that perhaps the single biggest reason that people view it that way still is, is the volatility in the you know, in the price or the purchasing power. I wonder you know, do you have any thoughts on that in general, I mean you know the three of us are probably comfortable with the fact that that's a shorter term phenomenon and the volatility in purchasing power has been reducing over time. But what do you what you know what, what thoughts do you have for people on getting comfortable with with that reality and how it's likely to play out? It's an excellent question. And yeah, it's so we again, if you don't think about what money is, then you don't realize that you're there's there's like a software integration into your mind, right. You're thinking about the world through dollars or in terms of dollars, right. And this people get so focused on the Bitcoin dollar price or, I'm sorry, the Bitcoin price expressed in dollars because, well, that's the global reserve currency. But you don't, I guess if you don't think about it critically, you'll fail to see that, well, anything can be priced in terms of anything, right? With money is just kind of the convenient common language we use. But you can really think about anything in terms of anything else. And that's what purchasing power is, right? You're flipping the ratio. Instead of saying, oh, that steak is $32, you're saying, well, how much steak does my unit of money buy me? Basically and so. A lot less than it used to, by the way. Yes, yeah. It is basically tripled in price since the pandemic started. The pandemic I haven't. Heard that before. As a frequent Beefeater, I keep a close eye on the beef price. So there's that. Just the whole denominator issue that people don't understand, you can denominate anything and anything, but then yeah, I guess the other piece is, it is market capitalization and volatility are inversely correlated, right. So the the bigger and more liquid an asset, the less volatility it's going to have in terms of both either price or purchasing power. It's not a deterministic law, but it's just what it tends to look like. And so, yeah, that's just not easy to communicate to people. Like, I've analogized, if you'd look at something like the Amazon stock, right, that I think Amazon crashed 94% in the.com bubble and then it grew, I don't know, 60,000 percent cents or whatever it is now. And what are the daily moves on Amazon now, right? It's it's much it's not 94% right. It's become much less volatile as it's grown larger and Bitcoin as you said is following a similar trajectory. But how do you explain that to people, man? It's hard. It's really hard. That's why. This is why I have 400 something episodes on what is money like. It's a very. It's a tricky topic and. Comfortable. With it, Yeah. I don't know if they get comfortable with it. I don't know. I mean, I guess you just have to get some skin in the game. Treat it like long term savings, dollar cost, average long term accumulation. If you're sensitive to the price and you probably own too much of it, right, you really shouldn't care about it that much, right? If you really intend to treat it like savings, the way savings is intended to be, well, savings is intended to be saved and only used in case of emergency sort of thing, or to build your dreams or something like that. But the more you're treating Bitcoin like checking, I think the more you're going to get shocked by the volatility, But the more you treat it like savings, the more you're buffered from that shock. So I hope that's helpful for people. Yeah, that's it. I know you've got some thoughts on on that. You've been you've been communicating that Jesse to to friends, colleagues, clients, family for a long time. How do you get how do you get him comfortable with the ball? Yeah, I I mean, Robert's right. It's it's it's kind of impossible. It's an impossible question. But it's like it's a journey that everybody has to go through. And I think going back to what Robert was saying of, you know, the the vast majority of people think that Bitcoin is the scam. But you know, once you go through the looking glass, then you have a totally different perspective and then you appreciate Bitcoin for what it is. And you realize that Bitcoin is the the one thing that is not a scam and everything on the other side of the looking class that was the scam. And so I think, I think that I mean you guys have probably experienced this too, that the people in my life that I have managed, the few, the few people in my life that I have managed to bring into Bitcoin, had to just take that leap, you know, had to dip a toe and then learn more and then increase their allocation until they got comfortable with Bitcoin on its own terms. And that's that's just an uncomfortable and hard process. And I, you know, that's part of me wondering how many people will do that. But the other reality is like, if people choose not to make that leap, Bitcoin will make the leap for them. Bitcoin is going to keep encroaching on all territory until you know you. Pretty soon everybody's four O 1K is going to include Bitcoin because they have micro strategy and S&P. Yeah, and and so it grows. That's it. That's it. Well, let's, yeah, let's continue to look to the future a little bit, Robert. If you think about allocating your time, which you understand better than anyone, is the truly scarce resource, do you imagine spending more of your time thinking about policy issues, or is that not so much of interest to you? Do you prefer the fundamentals to the to the layer to the human layer? To the very flawed human layer with all its busted incentives? Yeah, if I could respond to something, Jesse said. Then I will answer that question. The looking This is the thing about studying money like you're looking at the looking glass. John Vervecki actually has this great example where he's talking about human rationality. It's like whatever frame of reference you're using, it's almost implied and you you take it for granted. And he uses glasses like eyeglasses as an example. It's like you're looking through the lens and you're seeing the image as it appears to you through that lens. But how often do you take off the glasses and examine the actual glasses? Right. The frame of reference is implied. And this is the thing about studying money is like, you have to do that meta cognitive leap. It's like, wait, whoa, what am I thinking through that is causing my thoughts to be distorted in a certain way. And that's the whole unplug the dollar, you know, plug in the SAT's thing. And I I agree. Like, you can't, I don't know. It's one of those things you can't just read in a book and get it. You almost have to have some Bitcoin, basically. And I think everyone has some amount of money they can put into Bitcoin. Like whatever it is, I don't know, whatever amount of money you can stand to literally lose, right? It could be a dollar, whatever. But where your money goes, your mind will follow. Like once you have some of it, you'll just start paying more attention. You'll probably start listening to podcasts, maybe you'll read a book and you you should probably do that. I I don't like the word should, but I will say it here because again, and we're talking about again a dollar or whatever, the amount of money you can totally stand to lose is because if you don't Start learning about it, it's like you either take the orange pill or the orange Suppository as someone said, right. You can take it voluntarily now or involuntarily later. And it's. I don't know. It's. I think it's the most important question of our time, right. Like what is well what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is money. Well what is money? You better start figuring it out. Otherwise you're going to be figuring it out under duress soon. So on the question of policy issues, it bores me. Frankly, it bores me. Suppositories Not an interest, not a topic of interest for you. It's just, I don't know. I went on a few of these podcasts where, you know, people can be very. It seems to me like a lot of people really love being political, right? They love, and this is part of the state's game, by the way, right, that you can rotate in this politician, put Biden in there and everyone's directing all that animosity at him. And then you just pull out that puppet, put in another 1-8 years later and they direct all the animosity at him. But it's like you never get any systemic change because everyone's animosity is pointed at an individual. And it's like, has anyone ever thought that maybe, you know, one ape to rule 330 million apes is just bad math? Like we should just systemically doesn't work. You can be mad at Trump, or mad at Biden or mad at whoever, but it's just never going to work, frankly. So that's why we're politics in the Fiat world we're currently in really bores me. Now back to DC Schindler. I am reading some of his book now about the traditional sense of politics, right? Is like the the distributed ethics. Like the if the marketplace is distributed cognition politics is supposed to be like distributed ethics. Like we were saying like how do we ethically Orient ourselves towards the good collectively. There's a lot of dangerous socialist words in here, as you may have noticed. But I that's intriguing to me, but I don't know much about it. I'm just learning. But the idea of like going to Washington or like trying to campaign for money and go fight that leviathan in in the belly just sounds horrible to me. Much more interested in being a student and being an entrepreneur. Yeah, that's probably probably time better spent for you. So on the entrepreneurial front, is there anything you know that is of interest that you want to talk about with us today? Well, the show is my main focus and I may have some other interests coming up, but the show has been really my main focus the past three years and there's a lot to it. Actually, it doesn't. I mean, well, you guys know, setting up a studio here. I just moved to Miami, so I'm setting up a studio here in my home. So I'm trying to do a lot more interviews in person, and there's just a lot of moving pieces. So I hope to get that really dialed in and then maybe I'll have more to say on the entrepreneurial front after that. Well, as a fan of the show, I can attest that it shows in terms of the the input to the output. It's definitely, it's definitely on the must listen category and people should understand. I mean obviously it's like it's like with buying Bitcoin, like, you know, just go try it if you haven't already. Although I suspect a large percentage of our audience will already be involved but but it does touch so many aspects it's it's much broader I would say than than almost any other Bitcoin related show out there. So highly recommend highly recommend. Well, you've been you've been very generous with your time. Robert want to give you an opportunity though, to touch on any topics that we haven't covered up to this point. You know, including in addition to the What is Money? Show you know where else can people learn more about your thoughts and find you? Sure. Well, I had a little thing I wanted to say about scarcity since this is the title of your guys podcast. Please, please do. Let's do it. So, you know, what do we think here? Most people, I guess when you use that word, scarcity, I think most people think that it's just a supply thing, right? Like, there's just not enough of the thing, which is sort of true in a sense, but in a in a strict economic sense, scarce scarcity is not purely a function of supply, right? There's well, it's wherever demand exceeds supply. And so it's also not necessarily related to value or significance, because if you're talking about something like oxygen, right, that's very important, very essential to human life. But it's so super abundant that the supply exceeds the demand. We don't have a price for it, right. We don't have to ration it. The supply so far out sees it exceeds the demand, it's not scarce, whereas something unessential like the Mona Lisa painting, right, can have an extremely high price because well, there's only one, but there's a lot of demand. So I think that's just an, I don't know if you guys would agree with that, but like seems like most people think it's just a supply thing, but it's not, it's supply and demand and then we often and Andy you know I've talked about this a lot in your book. I think you have 14 properties of money, was that right? That's it. That's it. I wish there were fewer. I wish there were less of them. Well, I, I narrow it down to five, right, to try and make it and this is, I'm lifting this from Gary North. And one of them, you know is divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability and the last one's scarcity. So you might ask yourself like what? Why if scarcity is And by the way, I should have should have said this earlier, scarcity is the starting point of all economics, right. It's the point of all economics. It's let's collaborate so that we can create more supply per unit of effort to satisfy all that demand anywhere demand exceeds supply and The thing is scarce, right. So we're creating more stuff, more solutions to problems, whether this be goods, services, etcetera. So you might think, well, if scarcity is what we're trying to overcome in economics, why is scarcity a a good property of money? It's almost like a counter intuitive thing and maybe it's a bad word. It's like a lot of people have argued that like you don't need, it's just a bad word, it's confusing people. You could go with something like supply integrity or predictability perhaps. But the way I like to think about it is and and safety goes into this in his book, right? Like ultimately and you said this earlier, it's all a function of human time. Ultimately that's the only thing that's actually practically scarce. Like if we point enough human time at anything, we can get more of the thing right to satisfy maybe not all the demand but a lot of it. And so really it's it's our time that's scarce. And so if money is this and obviously all goods and services require time to produce, so therefore goods and services are scarce by extension. So if money is this tool we use to acquire goods and services, and goods and services are scarce, you might be able. If you follow that line of reasoning, you might be able to intuitively grasp why non scarce money would be a problem because you have the money that represents something that is scarce. But if it's if it itself is not scarce and someone can just artificially expand the supply, then they can use that to steal the actually scarce stuff from the people that can't print the money. So. So it's kind of a maybe it's confusing people more. You can just dispense with this whole argument if it is, but it for me it it was kind of intuitive in a way. It's like, and Jeff Booth sums us up, right, if you have scarce money, you have abundant goods. If you have abundant money, you have scarce goods. Basically you need, we need something that represents the scarcity of human time. That's, you know, if you consider money to be a tool for trading human time, you need something that reflects that scarcity. And This is why Bitcoin is so perfect. I mean, I think I'll use that word perfect, right? It's absolutely scarce, right? It has a perfectly fixed supply, just like your lifetime, just like the human time. That money is intended to be an emblem for, and so you know, scarce assets. Podcast good name might be scary for some people, but scarcity is a very important topic and if you get your cognitive grip on that, I think you'll get a cognitive grip on on at least to some extent, on Bitcoin. And hopefully that's really useful in your life and in your family's life and your future family's life, etcetera. I love that. I love that insight, Robert. Sorry. Go ahead. I cut you off, Jesse. No, no, that was it. That's why I spiel on scarcity. I wanted to bring that one to your guys show and see you fitting. It's it's perfect. You encapsulated it. It's exactly, that's the whole story. The whole story of Bitcoin is that, you know for all of our lives we've had a form of money that is incompatible with what it represents. And and now Bitcoin is like to like with what it is intended to value, which is our time ultimately. And you know, and that kind of ties it back to the through the looking glass analogy of like everybody's been living in bizarro world thinking that infinite Ponzi units are a fair representation, a fair measuring stick for how we value our our finite time. And now you go through the looking glass and you have a different perspective that is more in tune with, you know, the the alignment of those two things. It's very well said and here, welcome to the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Right is radical and you could in many way. I I think Bitcoin is basically the invention of money, right? Or at least the invention of pure money. We've never had anything that's 100% monetary premium. It has no other use case, right? Yeah, gold has other uses. Everything has other uses but the. Invention of the #0 the invention of money. It's the same thing. Exactly. So. It's a singular, idiosyncratic event, right? It's never going to happen again, It's not repeatable. And all this sounds ridiculous. Maybe at first blush, but I don't know. Welcome to the rabbit hole. Come disprove it. That's it. Well, Robert, I really want to thank you for sharing or spending some of your scarce time with us. It's been a pleasure falling down the rabbit hole, learning from you, with you and from you about Bitcoin over these many years. I hope we have a chance to do it again with you. And yeah, on behalf of our audience, this has been scarce assets. Thanks guys.