Robert Breedlove - The Future Of Bitcoin, Money, And Inflation

Foreign.

Team. Welcome back to the Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and joining me today is a long awaited guest, a guest that I have wanted to interview for some time. And this man is an expert, is a leader in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency space, specifically within bitcoin. He has a show called what Is Money? The what is Money show. And joining me today is Mr. Robert Breedlove. He's a bitcoin focused entrepreneur, writer and philosopher. He's done a tremendous amount of writing around bitcoin, its importance within the world, how it can shape governments, how it can shape culture, communities, etc. And he has done a good amount of conversation through his show, the what Is Money? Show about money, about fiat currency, what money is, what inflation is, what bitcoin is, how it differs. And so that's what we're going to talk about today.

We are going to break this show.

Into a couple different parts. The first one is talking about what money is foundationally and I found this part to be quite interesting. It's a very sort of broad question.

That I asked Robert and he digs.

Deep into what money started out as and how it has changed over the years, over the centuries. And then we get into a conversation about inflation, the state of money right now within our world, fiat currency, what's happening with the economy right now. And then we start talking about bitcoin, what it is, the possibilities that it can unfold. And Robert is very much focused in on bitcoin versus the rest of the cryptocurrency market. So you'll hear him talk extensively about bitcoin specifically and not really so much about the rest of the crypto market. So I hope that you enjoy this show. If you are wanting to learn more about this kind of stuff, let me know because this is something that I've become very interested in and just learning more about money, financial markets, how to.

Invest, how to save, also like what.

To do with our money. You know, is cryptocurrency and bitcoin specifically a good place to invest some money? And so I hope that this conversation sheds some light for you and is educational and informative and inspiring and uplifting, but also eye opening in some ways. So without any further delay, please welcome Mr. Robert Breedlove.

All right, Robert, welcome to the Man Talk Show. How you doing today?

I'm good man, thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's good to see your face, you know, on the other side of the screen. I've listened to a bunch of your shows and conversations and heard you on other podcasts. And you're one of the guests that I. I've very much looked forward to having on the show. Sometimes, as you know, you have people.

On the show that you don't really.

Know, you're not super familiar with. But then there's always the guests that I like source out and hunt down and I'm like that person I want to talk to.

Awesome. Well, I'm honored to be one of your hunted guests.

Let's just start off how I always start off, which is tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

Yeah, that's a great question. The first thing that came to mind was I did some amateur boxing in college. So there's this charity boxing tournament at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where I went to college. And every year a bunch of fraternities come together. They, they've been doing this for a long time. I want to say like over 30 years, could be longer than that. And they hold this tournament. It's a boxing tournament. You know, there's multiple weight classes, multiple fraternities enter. You know, they have competitors in each weight class. And then everyone trains for like six months for this thing. And then in one big night, I think these were, I think it was in late February or March, perhaps they'd have about 5 to 10,000 people come out, fill the gym, rafter seating and all that. The whole area was sectioned off kind of by fraternity. And then there was an area for the non fraternity spectators as well. And they would hold a tournament. It was a multi day tournament. Anyways, at first I did that. I decided to participate in that my junior year of college and I was a heavyweight. I made it to the finals. I met the. I think he was the two time champion at that point. He needed one more win. If you win three years in a row, you get inducted into the hall of Fame, you know, you get your picture on the wall and all that. So I met him in the finals and his name's Nick Moore. We didn't know each other at the time. We. We sort of hated each other, as you might imagine. And anyways, we fought, it went the distance and I lost on decision and it was whatever, I lost basically. Now that hurt. But what really hurt was our teams were tied going into that final match. So my losing that match cost my entire team the victory. So that one really hurt, as you might imagine. And we went back. I had other friends in the tournament. Obviously mixed success. Some guys had Won. Some guys lost. We went back to the fraternity house after. After that tournament. And for me, personally, I had not. I had decided not to drink for the four or five months of training leading up to that. So it had been like a long sober period. And then that night, we started drinking and, you know, having fun. So I was pretty beat up about that, you know, physically and figuratively. And I. I'll never forget. We're sitting in my buddy's room. This song. This is a song by Muse, I think it's called Resistance came on, and it's just about, you know, fighting for your right, for whatever you want. And I just decided that, you know, I really needed. I wouldn't be satisfied with my life if I didn't go back and try that again. I needed to go and not. I didn't need to finish on such a low note. And so I decided I'd enter the tournament again next year, and I was going to be serious about it, you know. And so, you know, several months go by, training season comes back around, and I do the same thing. I stopped drinking, like, six months before start training. This time I was much more focused on boxing because the time before when I was training, I was still doing other things. Like, I was still, you know, lifting weights, playing football, all this, everything else. But this time around, I was like, I'm just gonna box for six months. That's what I did. Tournament comes back around, I end up making it to the finals again against the same guy, Same guy, meet the same guy in the finals. And I'm wrong about this. He was actually. The year he beat me was the second year he won the tournament. So now the third year, he needed to beat me again to get into the hall of fame. Now this time when I met him in the finals, it was a little bit different because our team had already won. We had won on points. So I didn't have that pressure that time. Anyways, I beat him. I beat him in the finals. So same thing went the distance, but I beat. I beat him more decisively. We saw it still went to a decision, but it was the year before. There was a lot of controversy, like, oh, did I win that? I lose, whatever. This year it was much more decisive. And, yeah, we went back to the fraternity house, and I couldn't even get out of the car. There's, like a hundred guys in front of our house, in our yard, all over our porch, just pouring all over this. This little house. We have guys just ripped me out of the car and, like, forcibly Crowd surf me inside. It was, it was pretty intense. And yeah, that was a, that was a good, not really a moment, I guess it was kind of two year ordeal, but in that moment when I was being forcibly crowd surfed, it was quite a overwhelming experience of glory, I would say. Just felt, felt really good to have reached kind of a pinnacle moment after, you know, many, many, many months of training and a lot of years of kind of setting your goal on something, setting your aim on something. So that's what came up for me when you asked that question.

Love that, man.

No, I love that.

I mean, it sounds defining, it sounds like it taught you a lot about resilience and pursuing something. And, you know, from the little that I know about you, just based on the interviews that I've listened to with you, it seems like that's a pretty important attribute. You know, I remember you talking about going all in on things and that seems to be an important sort of a character trait that you try and embody and a value that you try and carry forward in everything that you do, which I think is honorable. You know, it's noble. I think it's something that not a lot of people in our modern culture carry. So let's shift gears a little bit and because I do want to talk as much as possible, you know, about crypto and about bitcoin specifically and maybe some blockchain stuff, but I want to talk just broadly at first about money. You know, you have your show called the what is Money?

Show.

And I actually just want to start with that because I remember hearing you talk about what money is and the role that it plays, you know, throughout our evolution in our society.

And I was like, huh?

I've actually never really thought about what money is outside of just this currency, you know, this paper note or plastic note or, you know, ledger sign, you know, that I, that I use to purchase things. And so I'm going to start really broad and then we're going to narrow down as we go through this conversation. So let's just begin there. What, what is money? How do you classify that and anything that you think that people need to understand first before we go deeper into this conversation?

Yeah, I would first like to say that I have a show by this very namesake, the what is Money Show. And I think we're around 200 episodes now. We talk about this question a lot and there's a lot of answers, a lot of different answers, and a lot of answers that have many branches. You know, like one of the things people will tell you, when you ask that question, what is money? They'll name the three functions of money. Store value, medium of exchange, unit of account. Well, each of the answers to that question have their own branches below them. Because all of a sudden you're like, store of value. Okay, well, what is value? You can go down that rabbit hole. That's a whole rabbit hole. There's a whole book about it that is really mind blowing called Leela by Robert Persig. But that's an aside medium of exchange. You actually get into, well, what is exchange? And you get into kind of the basis of economics. That's what economics is all about. It's individuals trading and innovating to overcome scarcity, basically. And then you also, you know, the unit of account, accounting. What is accounting? What does it mean to be accountable or accounted for? That has its own rabbit hole. So I just want to say that whatever answer I can give you now, it's going to be sorely inadequate. You can mine this question for answers. And I think if you've watched the show, it opens up many vistas into other domains. Like we do. We do series on Platonic philosophy, we talk about metaphysics, we talk about, you know, history of government, corruption, psychology, sociology. It touches a lot of domains, is the thing I want to say. Now, to try and answer this question inadequately, given our time constraints, you could just go with a very general answer, which is one the Austrian economists use, which is money as a universal medium of exchange. Maybe a more clear way to say that is, money is the most marketable good. So in any trading economy, something has to necessarily be the most tradable or most exchangeable or most liquid or most marketable asset. That asset is money. You get one important realization out of this is that it's not what governments say. It's not like there's a government that comes in and says, hey, we have the monopoly on violence. You're going to use gold as money. That's not how it works. There's an emergent phenomenon of free market trade, people engaging with one another voluntarily in consensual trade. Through that process, something becomes the most tradable asset, right? The most marketable asset. So money is a naturally emergent phenomenon or an emergent property of free trade. And then the close relationship between government money across history is that, well, if you can control money, it's the most economic way to control people. If I can just control the money. This goes back to the old Rothschild quote, give me the power to issue a nation's currency. I Care not who makes its laws. Money is the layer one of human civilization. And if you, if you don't believe me, it's like, okay, maybe they won't take your US dollars in China, but I guarantee fucking tee you, they'll take your gold or your Bitcoin. It's just, it supersedes nationalism. But in the modern conception of money, we tend to think of it as a product of your nation, right? Like your national currency. You think that is money. But to use a, to invoke a computer analogy again, if money's layer one, well, currency is an application of money. It's a layer two. And indeed that's how we got to government paper currency is it used to be redeemable for gold. The dollar was redeemable for gold. It was a call option on gold or a warehouse receipt. You could take this token to a gold warehouse or a bank and exchange it for physical gold. And so that's really important to realize that money is something emergent. It's not a government controlled technology. And that currency itself is not money. It's a derivative of money. It's an, it's a layer two. It's an application, as I like to say. And you might ask yourself, well, why, why do we have currency as an application of money? Why not just use gold then? That gets you into the properties of money. It's like the reason gold became money. And I, I won't go down this rabbit hole because I've touched it a million times in my work, but there's basically five qualities that market actors are looking for in money. When the, when this process of trade and emergence of money is occurring, it's the asset that is the most divisible, durable, recognizable, portable and scarce. That's what gets favored as money over time. That's what gold was. Gold was gold best satisfied those properties. That's why it was favored as money. However, of those five properties, gold sorely lacked in the portability department. Gold is physical, it's heavy, it's hard to move across space if you're going to have a globalizing society. Doesn't really work like we're going to send treasure chest of gold around to each other for every transaction we need to make. I mean, can you imagine if you didn't have things like Venmo or PayPal and had to bring you some fucking gold coins every time you bought my dinner? It would just get very cumbersome very fast. So deficiency in gold's portability is the reason we put all the gold in one place and issued warehouse receipts or banknotes for that gold. It's the reason we put the currency application on top of layer one gold. Because gold lacked portability, we needed to increase its portability. So humans being human, what do we do? We use our ingenuity and say, hey, why don't we just put all this gold in one place? One custodian. The custodian will then issue these tokens that we can trade, currency units, basically, that are as good as gold. Because indeed, you can take a currency unit to the custodian at any time and redeem it for gold. That model works. We figured out how to scale gold, if you will, for a globalizing society. We made gold faster by adding the currency application on top of it. But what we also did is we introduced the element of human fallibility and corruptibility into the equation. Because before, when we're transacting in physical gold, I don't need to trust anyone that the supply will be counterfeited or compromised, because that was a property of gold, that it was. It was scarce, right? It didn't matter how hard you tried to produce it. We didn't know how to fake it. We didn't know how to artificially make it in a lab. We didn't know how to arbitrarily expand its supply. It was hard money, right? It's hard to produce. So it's a commodity money. Well, once you put that, all the gold into the hands of one custodian, and now they're issuing paper on top of that gold for us to trade, that's no longer the case because that custodian can now issue as much paper as they want. They can lie, they can defraud you, and they could have 10 tons of gold on reserve and they could issue 100 tons worth of receipts.

And now even that, and it sounds bad, but even that's acceptable if the terms of that custody arrangement are disclosed in the contract. And if people have the right of convertibility, meaning if the bank produces to an excess proportion of these warehouse receipts or banknotes to their gold deposits, individual customers can call their bluff and go say, hey, I think you're running a. A fractional reserve here, which is to say a fraudulent operation. I want my gold. I don't trust you. Here's the paper. Give me my gold. And what that would do is basically maintain a system of honest banking because of the banks that were dishonest would ultimately go under, right? They would suffer a bank run, as we've typically heard of, and it's Important to note there too that the bank run this is not. That's only possible when the bank is engaging in this fraud called fractional reserve banking. If you're a 100% Reserve bank and I've issued 10 tons of paper on my 10 tons of gold reserves, I don't have anything to worry about. All my customers can come and redeem today. Okay, I'd made all the redemptions and we're done. There's no fraud that I need to cover up. It's only when a bank is engaged in fractional reserve banking and too many customers come at once to redeem their gold that you get this bank run. Like you might have seen in the old movie It's a Wonderful Life, right? So that's important to note and I think just to fast forward to where we are today. We're basically, we've gotten rid of the notion of gold redeemability. This scam has been run so many times. And every time the banks, they get over their skis in terms of over issuing currency banknotes relative to gold reserves, there ends up being some type of run on the bank once the confidence is shaken. Banks then suspend convertibility. Like they stop giving, they stop giving people their gold. People really go crazy then. And we've been through this process enough times at multiple scales. You know, this has been not only your local community bank, but in 1971 this was Germany trying to repatriate their gold from the United States. And Nixon came on TV and said, we're closing the gold window. It's only going to be temporary. It's all the fault of these greedy capitalists. As the state politicians like to always blame the productive market actors. They never blame themselves. And again, it was said to be a temporary measure. And here we are 50 some odd years later, still off the gold standard. We're now on the zero reserve standard called fiat currency. The application of currency has been divorced from the base layer operating system called money. And now it's bullshit. The money is fake. It's like, have you ever seen the show Whose Line Is It Anyways? The points are made up and nobody cares. That's the game we're playing now. You just have one central currency counterfeiting monopoly which we call the central bank, producing new money, new currency, I should say based on criteria we don't know, undisclosed criteria, behind closed doors. We don't know how many dollars exist, we don't know how many dollars will exist, we don't know how many dollars have existed, we don't know who profits from the production of dollars. We don't know who owns the central bank. It's just a giant scam. It's the giant, the most desirous asset in the world which is the US dollar represents units in a pyramid scheme. Basically that's. And you wonder why the world's so fucked up and corrupt and a mess and culture's torn up and divided and everyone's confused and feeling the pain of inflation. And that's why the. Let me say it again. If this doesn't hit you like a brick, then I'm not saying it right. The most desirous asset on earth is a pyramid scheme. The US dollar is a pyramid scheme. I'm not. This isn't my opinion. This is mechanically how it works, right? There are higher level banks that produce new tokens either via currency or credit issuance that then rolls down to lower tier banks who then relend the money. There's a money multiplier effect here where because each one is a fractional reserve, if a New bank gets $100 in deposits, well they get to turn around and re lend out 90 plus dollars of that. So the original $100 in deposits after it gets lent out through multiple layers expands to be like a thousand dollars or more in additional money supply. And it's all leverage. It's all fake, it's all promises, it's all IOUs. Right? There's. And it's an IOU to what ultimately it's like there's no redeemability for gold. So there's no connection to real money. The central bank hoards all the gold. Made private gold ownership illegal in 1933. That was lasted for 40 years. It's a giant scam and it's a scam that runs the world. So that's where we're at with money today.

Yeah, I mean it's. I've heard you talk about.

I don't.

I definitely want to probably switch here into, you know, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin because I think a lot of people that talk about it talk about it, you know, as a kind of. Some people talk about it as a salvation, some people talk it as a solution. You know, some people talk about it as, as just a different scam, you know. And so that's, that's an interesting thing to, to see as well pop up. And I've heard you talk about inflation as a different form of tax that the government uses is something that should be illegal. And maybe we'll interweave that as we go along, but let's maybe, let's just switch gears into to crypto. All right, so Satoshi comes along, you know, creates this concept of bitcoin.

How do you.

To the average person who has very little understanding of, of cryptocurrency or blockchain technology or what bitcoin is, let's just start high level. How do you explain what, what bitcoin is to the average person?

Yeah, I mean, there's bitcoin. If I have to hit someone with a. Because sometimes people recognize me or they. I have one tattoo. I have a bitcoin tattoo under my right arm. I got this when I was 33 years old. Sometimes people see the tattoo and they're like, what's up with that? And if I have to give someone a 30 second explanation of what is bitcoin, I just say that bitcoin is an insurance policy on central banking or fiat currency or the US Dollar, depending on their level of understanding. The more dollars, the more that are produced, the more valuable the insurance policy called bitcoin becomes. That's it. That's basically the whole thing. Like, you just leave it at that. So, and I think people know, like, even people that haven't done a deep dive into monetary history, if you just kind of like sit with yourself for a minute and think like, printing money, what does that mean? Obviously that doesn't make sense. If printing money worked well, we'd all just fucking print money and that would be that, you know, like, we'd have all the money we need, everyone would be happy, we'd all be rich. But money does not equal wealth. Obviously. Money is not equipment, factories, plants, technology, innovation, human capital. You can't print any of these things. All you're doing is printing the claims to those things or the access tokens to those things. And in that way, I think it's somewhat intuitive that there would be value to a money that no one can print, no one can arbitrarily produce. Because we know that the printing of money has been bad historically. It's not like there's not. You don't hear many stories about printing money and there was a good outcome. I can't think of any actually. So if you've ever heard any of these historical anecdotes of, you know, there's been many thousands of episodes of humans thinking, this time it's different, we'll print money. We know what our ancestors did three, three generations ago, and they printed money and had a hyperinflation and all these horrible socioeconomic consequences. And they lost their minds. But that's okay. We learned from the past, and now we're going to do it differently. That little recurrent intergenerational self deception has happened so many times in so many places. It's, it's crazy. So you could leave it at that with Bitcoin. Like, it's this money that cannot be printed or inflated, and that becomes especially relevant and valuable in a world awash in inflated currency or artificial liquidity. Counterfeit currency, ultimately. So one of the other key points here, as we described, with fractional reserve banking being a fraud, that is the same, like mechanically the same thing as counterfeiting the currency. Even if I'm the bank and I have a customer that's deposited $100 with me, that's an on demand deposit. That means the customer can come at any time, demand that I give them their money back, and then I would owe them the $100. Now if I take that $100 deposit and I lend out $90 of it to other customers, who then come back and deposit it into my bank, and then I lend out 90 of each of those deposits, 90% of each of those deposits and so on, that whole thing is the same. It's an indistinguishable practice from counterfeiting the currency. It's the same as if I'm a guy in a basement that, you know, built some printer from some parts he had, he found online that could produce a super accurate representation of the US Dollar that I can go and try to pawn off on merchants around town like it's the same thing. So a key realization here, and I've crystallized this into one quote that's become a little bit popular. Inflation is legal counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is criminal inflation. There is no mechanical distinction between the two. There is only a legal distinction. And the legal distinction obviously favors those inside the state that have awarded themselves the exclusive legal monopoly to engage in currency counterfeiting. Okay, so what are the consequences of currency counterfeiting? Well, if you can print money and I can't, then you can steal from me because you can award yourselves new units of the currency to go out and buy real wealth. When you go out into the market and buy real wealth, if I'm holding for both holding dollars, you print yourself new dollars. You go into the marketplace and bid up property, plant and equipment, things that I want to buy. Well, if I'm still in the original, if I'm still holding the whatever, the $100 I had originally, all the prices for Those assets have been bid up, but my dollar balance has stayed the same. So what's happening is the purchasing power of my dollars is being diluted via inflation. So taxation and inflation are the same thing. They're both theft. This is another really bitter pill for people to swallow. Like, what do you mean? I thought the government had my best interest in mind. Why? What? Why is taxation theft? What about the roads and what about all this? And as it turns out, that's a whole rabbit hole in and of itself. But let me just deliver the punchline that there's nothing human beings can produce with non consensual exchange, which is theft, that we can't produce more efficiently with consensual exchange. So.

There'S no justification for theft, basically. And I think people know this, most people know this. You probably get this in your guts a little bit. I mean, you get it when you're three years old, for God's sakes, right? You're like, you have the toy and the toy is mine, please don't take it. Well, you grow up as an adult and it turns out you got a lot of toys and you don't want anyone to take them. I mean, that's just pretty, pretty basic, I think, to the human animal. So how does Bitcoin fit into all of this? You know, as we said, you could look at it as an insurance policy on that whole debt based disaster we have called the global fiat currency complex. You can also look at it as a technology that's disruptive to gold. Again, if the pro. The desired properties and money are divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity. That's why gold became money. Bitcoin essentially perfects those properties. Again, I won't go into detail here. I would say you check out my written work, the number zero in Bitcoin, I go into excruciating detail on this. But basically Bitcoin's better than gold across all performative dimensions of money. So if you disrupt gold, that's what the central bank is hoarding all the gold. Remember what Rothschild said, give me the power to issue the nation's currency, I care not who controls its laws. Well, what does the central bank do? It hoards all the real money, you know, and China, and this is worldwide, not just in the U.S. china, for instance, is the biggest net producer and net importer of gold. And they also have one of the highest currency and debt production rates in the world too. Right? So they're hoarding the real money, forcing everyone else to Use the currency. And through the inflation of the currency, they're basically defaulting on their debt. So the nation will accumulate a lot of debt and then when it needs to pay them, pay the debts, it will print new money, push that into the productive, the network of productive market actors. As long as interest rates are held low, as they're being right now, you have negative real yields. Everyone's being robbed, basically. So you're forced to keep your money in the bank. Can't put it in bonds. You'll get whatever, 25 basis points. Real inflation rates running at 10%. You've got a negative real yield of nine and a half percent. There's an invisible tax of nine and a half percent and no one gets it. And the real, what really fucks people up on this is that they see stock values going up, their house value going up. Right? Because the currency unit is being diminished. All the prices conveyed in that currency unit are going up. Not all, but the prices of things that can't be printed. Like more. The house is a durable consumer good. You can't print it as quick as you can print the US dollar. So what happens when we engage in excessive inflation or counterfeiting in the U.S. well, home prices tend to go up and they go up and they go up and they go up and they go up. And that's not normal. But after enough decades of that, people think it's normal. People literally think in the US today, your house is your savings account, right? If you can just get into a house and own a house, own a house, you don't own it, because if you don't pay your 3% property tax after a few years, it's not your house anymore. So if Bitcoin is disruptive to gold, which is the real money that central banks are hoarding, possession of gold is what allows them to enforce this law. The legal monopoly that protects the currency counterfeiting monopoly we call the central bank. That's how they're externalizing the cost of this debt. So now if Bitcoin actually disrupts gold as money, well, then the entire central bank falls apart because the money they've been hoarding is no longer relevant. Now this is not something that happens fast. I want to be very clear here. Gold's been money for 5,000 years. Bitcoin's been around for 13 years. This is very likely an intergenerational game. Who knows how long it takes? We have no, no historical precedent for this whatsoever. The few little observations we do have are what does it look like when A nation state goes bankrupt. You could study the collapse of the USSR in the 20th century. Basically it's what happened is they got economically out competed by the US So what did you see? You saw a large nation state fall and fracture into 30 to 40 states. I think it's very likely that that is the long term consequence of Bitcoin's monetization is that it causes all nation states to fall and fragment in the long run. So, and in the long run, that's really good for people. It's really good for humanity to have a much smaller government, much less invasive government, much less theft, much less inflation. Essentially no inflation. If Bitcoin really succeeds, that whole term will just go away. And people look back on us like we're batshit fucking crazy for letting a few guys in one place hold and control our currency.

While they hold all the money and say, here's the currency. I mean we're going to be laughed at historically, but the, so the, the long game is good. Should bitcoin succeed? The middle game is very messy. Who knows what this looks like? You know, states don't give up power willingly. But the big question with bitcoin, and this is the question, how do you stop it? Nobody knows how to stop it. Nobody. And that's, that's where we're at. If you've got ideas, get your ass into the marketplace, stop bitcoin, short it and become really rich. But nobody knows how to do it. So eventually you realize you just need to own some of it since nobody knows how to stop it.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that, you know, what you just laid out probably warrants. I'm going to try and recap some of the stuff that you just said and we'll, we'll continue on. And please correct me if I've, if I've misrepresented or misinterpreted anything you said. So fiat currency is a replicatable inflatable currency that is centrally controlled that you have very little access to. And one of the things that I learned that I was, you know, because I didn't know anything about money or currency or really savings, you just not taught it in school. And so one of the things that I, you know, when I started to learn about inflation, I was like, oh, my savings have to out earn inflation, otherwise you're just in a net negative constantly. Right? So when inflation's at like 8, 9% like it is right now, and your savings are at like 3%, you know, if you're a very conservative person, you're.

Not going in the right direction.

That's a negative real yield.

It's a very challenging. Yeah, it's a negative yield.

Right.

So, so bitcoin is, and correct me if I'm wrong in this, Bitcoin is more of an asset than it is a currency. It's more like gold than it is like a fiat currency. And it's a non inflatable, non replicatable currency.

Right.

So there's 21 million Bitcoin. You can't print more of them like we're seeing right now in the last couple of years where they've just printed off trillions and trillions of dollars. And. Yeah, so I think that kind of covers the high level stuff. Did I miss anything in there that's very important?

No, no, I think that's pretty spot on. And the main difference between, because bitcoin technically the terms get a little muddied here because bitcoin technically has inflation in that there's new bitcoin issued every 10 minutes, but it's at a reducing rate. The main point though is that there is zero unexpected inflation in bitcoin. We know the total supply, it's 21 million. Can never be more than that, can only be less than that. Honestly, as people lose bitcoin with the dollars, it's the opposite situation. We, we can never know. You never know. You can't even audit the total supplies you. We don't know how many dollars exist today. We don't know how many dollars will ever exist. You have no idea when they're going to print more. You have no idea who's going to get the dollars. You don't know who profits. You don't know who owns a central bank. So it's the total opaque black box central bank versus the nothing is hidden, universally transparent bitcoin. That's the difference between these two systems.

Yeah. And so maybe if you can just in a very brief way, because I definitely have a couple of things that I want dig into. Can you explain why, what makes bitcoin transparent? Because I think for the average person that doesn't know, you know about crypto or blockchain, that's a foreign concept.

I would just say look up the topic of open source software. There's been a lot of open source software projects and once you understand what that means, you'll know what I mean. I mean you can just. Bitcoin is just code. You can just print it all on paper and there it is, you've got Bitcoin. It's speech, it's code, it's language. There's literally nothing hidden. It's not possible. That's what open source technology is like whatever. We're on Riverside right now. I assume they're probably a closed source company, right? They have code that makes this remote telecommunications technology work. Well now if they open that code, if they, you know, open the proverbial kimono and let everyone have this code and just it circulates for free on the Internet, anyone can inspect it, change it, modify it, tweak it, talk about it. That means it's open source. That means it's open for all to see, right? It's basically, it's a public idea at that point. It's something like. And it gets really interesting there because all of a sudden you're like, oh well the wheel, you know, the wheel is just a public idea. You can't put that one back in the box. You know, even a text, something like the Bible, right There's been. So the Bible is a book can be destroyed, but this Bible, that is just the structure of information that's all over the world in so many different formats and translations, et cetera, that's just an open source idea at this point. So how are you going to get rid of that? And that's what Bitcoin is. It's like, it's just an idea, it's in code. Everyone that's using Bitcoin has a full copy of Bitcoin's history, code base, et cetera. How are you going to get rid of that?

Yeah, I mean I think what I like about it is that it is, it has that transparent element, right, that you can see transactions, you can reference them. You know, it's not closed source, it's not something that, you know, people can hide transactions necessarily. And I think from a logistical aspect of, you know, I mean when I think about looking into the future and the, the applications of it are, are pretty astounding. I have two questions because I'm being mindful of the fact that we don't have a ton of time left. It's amazing how quickly these types of conversations can rip through. And I wish I could have done your style where I, you know, had you on for like a three part series and maybe we'll have to do that at some point. But I have two, two questions. One is about the restrictions around Bitcoin. You know, government being able to restrict, limit and put legislation in place around btc because you know, I'm originally from Canada and you know, we recently saw the Canadian government try to essentially freeze people's bank accounts, but also trying to freeze their cryptocurrency, which was interesting. I think that was one of the first attempts. So that's question number one. And then question number two is around cbdc, central bank digital currencies. And I've been very interested in these and the application of them. And the, the government's sort of looking towards a deeper sense of control within society as cryptocurrencies come online. So I'm curious to get your thoughts around central banking, digital currencies, how they'll be used, what they might be used for, what the effect might be on the crypto market in general.

Yeah, so I'll first say that, and you'd know this pretty quickly. Following my work is I'm focused exclusively on Bitcoin. Everything else. Everything else is bullshit. And look, am I, am I generalizing? Yes, I'm generalizing. But I think you'll also find that generalizing in this way will save you time, will save you money, will save you headache. The current description I'm using for this, and I hope it lands with people. You know, we all pretend as if every gun is loaded. We know not every gun is loaded. So why do we do that? Why do we pretend like every gun is loaded? When you're handling it or cleaning it or treating it, you know, you always point it away from you and others. Why are we doing that? Well, obviously it's the safety precaution, right? The cost of it being, of you being wrong about it being loaded is way too fucking high relative to the expense of. Just pretend that it's loaded, okay? Just pretend it's loaded. I'm not telling you that it's actually loaded, but just pretend it's better for you, it's better for me, it's better for everyone. Okay? That same generality I think we can apply to crypto. It's like if it's not bitcoin, it's a shitcoin, bro. They're all scams, they're all a waste of time. If you point them the wrong direction, you're going to hurt yourself or someone else. Just ignore it. It's not worth it. And I'm telling you, I've been here for six years. You know, I started a multi strategy, multicoin fund. I've evaluated hundreds of these things. I've traded them, I've looked at them, I read about this stuff nonstop. I mean, I'm not asking you to trust me. And bitcoin, we say don't trust, verify. But this is the conclusion I've reached and it's reflected in my portfolio construction. I hold a hundred percent Bitcoin, I hold some dollars. That's it. I don't hold any crypto anything. And I think it's best that way. I have. I've had the best performance that way. I've had the most peace of mind and I'm immune from everyone's opinion and all the regulatory. There's nothing that a regulator on earth can do to change my relationship with my Bitcoin, so literally nothing. They can't inflate it, they can't confiscate it, they can't make Bitcoin. You can make Bitcoin illegal. You can't stop the network from operating. There's nothing anyone can do. So Bitcoin only would be the core to that message. There. There's no blockchains, no cryptos, no crypto assets, no crypto coins, no cryptocurrencies. It's all bullshit. And they're all loaded guns. So just point them the other direction, please. On the freezing of bank accounts, this is, I mean, this again is highlighting a problem with the current system that you don't have money. You don't have money in the bank. When you log into your online banking and you see your numbers on a screen, that's not yours, that is a bank. And it's in the, it's in the terms of your agreement. Get your agreement and read it. You're in a debtor and creditor relationship with your bank. You have loaned the bank money when you deposit it into an account, and the numbers you see on the screen is how much money they owe you back. It's not your money. You have submitted the property. You have loaned your property to a counterparty, and now it is their decisions that impact your real wealth. Right? You have, you've abdicated your property. Right. And money, or currency in this case, once you've deposited it into a bank, and you know, as we say in Bitcoin, not your keys, not your coins, if you're not holding the asset, if you're not holding the physical gold in your hand, that paper certificate to gold doesn't mean shit. Like you have to take that to someone and get them to give you the gold that may or may not materialize, depending on the circumstances in the world. Well, the same is true for Bitcoin. If you're holding your Bitcoin on an exchange, I don't care what exchange it is. I don't care if it's regulated and blah, blah, blah, and it's Coinbase and they've got a hundred billion customers, doesn't matter, it's not yours. I cannot say it any more clearly than that. You could wake up at any time and it's on the news. The US government nationalized Coinbase, whatever. Apply this to your exchange, your country, same story, different place, different time. That's a very distinct possibility at any time. So all that, you know, dollars or Bitcoin or whatever you thought you had on Coinbase could just go away. And the Canadian trucker situation was just such a terrible instance of this that we saw how far we have fallen from the, the foundational principles of the West. Life, liberty, property. What do we have now? Like, and these are just freedom, right? This is life, liberty and property is freedom, right? If I take your life, I've taken your future freedom. If I take your liberty, I put you in prison. I've taken your present freedom. If I take your property, I've taken the fruits of your past freedom. That's what you went into the world and built. It's a value you've been accumulating for yourself over time. If you decide to put that all in currency and put all that currency in a bank and the bank freezes your access to the currency, what are they doing? They've basically, they robbed you. The point is this, that there's no freezing Bitcoin. I holding my Bitcoin in self custody. It will never happen to me. It's not possible to happen to me. It's not that I'm trusting someone. I'm not like trusting Bitcoin's team or Bitcoin corporate, which there is none of this by the way. You're not trusting anyone. I'm not asking anyone's permission to please not steal my stuff, please not freeze my account. It's not possible. It's just not possible. You just possess, you physically possess an asset that is a open global monetary protocol. So yeah, that's all really bad. And then if you think that's bad, just wait till central bank digital currencies come online. It's basically central banks consolidating a lot of these middlemen. They currently have to deputize a lot of these banks and financial regulators and even merchants, right? Like, I don't know if in the US I send wire transfers still for some of my business stuff. The, the rate at which they've been flagged has gone up a lot, like over nothing. It's a tiny wire transfer and they're like, well, who is this? What is this for? What did you buy? What did you do? So this whole, like, encroachment on your relationship with your private property should be alarming to everyone. An implementation of a central bank digital currency will be removing a lot of these intermediaries that are currently looking over your shoulder and just giving more power to the central bank. So the central bank will grow, the state will grow. And I. You know, this leads you to like a China social credit score dystopian future where if you say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, buy the wrong thing, your money gets turned off. So. And the only way to avoid all that, obviously is. Is bitcoin.

Yeah, I mean, I kind of had a. It's been interesting to see universal basic income and, and, you know, central base, central bank digital currencies sort of get talked about all at the same time. And it seems like a great way for governments to control, you know, if you're giving a universe of basic income to, to people and you only want them to purchase certain things at certain places, with the cbdc, you can actually do that. Right. You can control what they're allowed to purchase, when they're allowed to purchase it, where they're allowed to purchase it. And so it creates a very useful tool for governments to control the, the spending of people that are, that are accumulating universal basic income. And. Yeah. Anyway, I know that we're kind of up for time, and I have a ton more questions. I would actually love to have you back on to talk about Bitcoin in time. I found your work on that really fascinating and it's something that I've thought quite a bit about. But listen, thank you so much, uh, Robert, for being here and for anyone that wants to check out more of your work, obviously they can go to the one is what is Money Podcast. Uh, but where else would you like for. For listeners to follow along, learn a little bit more about you and your work?

Yeah, Connor, thanks for having me. Um, first one, you said there's spot on whatismoney podcast.com that's got links to the RSS feed and our YouTube channel along with the other show links. Um, you could find me on Twitter @ Breedlove22. Breedlove is my last name spelled B R double E D L, O V E2 2. There's links on my Twitter profile to a link tree that have links to all my other work. And yeah, you know, I hope your audience got some value out of this. Please feel free to engage. We try to, you know, interact with the audience a lot, ask questions, answer questions, rather. So, yeah, it's a crazy world. And I think that studying money will help you see through a lot of the bullshit. So that's what I'm hoping to help people.

Do. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I would say you're doing a pretty goddamn good job of that. So I appreciate your work and your and your time. And for everyone that's out there, we'll have the links for everywhere that you can find Robert, in the show notes. And this might be a good episode to listen, you know, with with a buddy or, you know, with your group, with people that are in your network and have some conversation around and dive into a little bit. And as always, this is Connor Beaton signing off. Talk to you next week.