"Thank God"...For Bitcoin, Raw Goat Milk, Colostrum, Yogurt, Liver & Meat, With Robert Breedlove.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, what happens when people can hold their property in a medium that cannot be violated? They can hold money that cannot be stolen. Scary, actually, because I know a lot of really smart people that invest a lot of money and they don't get it. They still think this is good. You know, it's a good idea to print money. What services people seek to render from money, or what properties they seek in money. Bitcoin is effectively the most perfect monetary technology that's ever been invented.

Well, folks, my, my guest on today's podcast actually wrote, wrote a book about bitcoin called thank God for Bitcoin. We were actually just riffing a little bit before we started recording. And it's kind of funny because my, my 13 year old sons were actually reading that as part of their financial and economics curriculum and I, I wasn't aware that they were actually going through it. And then I, I saw it on the counter a couple weeks ago and realized I was actually interviewing the author in a couple of weeks because he's a very prolific voice in the crypto space and the economic space. His name is Robert Breedlove and he's known as a bitcoin focused entrepreneur. He is also a content producer who writes articles and records podcasts and had some fantastic interviews on his show, which is, I believe, where I originally found him about bitcoin, of all things. His background is from Tennessee, but he lives in Kauai now. And he'll be able to share with us a little bit of his story about how he eventually got into Austrian economics and the teachings of Jordan Peterson and what has kind of brought him to where he's at now in terms of his status as what he calls himself as a freedom maximalist. And so we'll delve into that and a whole lot more. Everything that Robert produces, his book, his podcast, he has a great Twitter feed as well where he posts about bitcoin and macroeconomics and philosophy. I'll link to all that if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com BreedLove BenGreenfieldFitness.com breedlove is where the shownotes are gonna be and we're just gonna dive in. So, Robert, how's Kawaii these days?

They've been, yeah, things are good. It's been a peaceful place for us to ride out all of the craziness in the world. You know, as I was saying, offline, it's a very quiet place to live. Yeah, it's pretty much a Small town on an island. I think there's 70, there were 70,000 people here. I've heard that the population has expanded 20% since COVID so maybe we're somewhere in the ballpark of 85,000 people.

It's, it's expanded. Really?

Yeah. Which makes sense. You know, with everything in the world, Americans can't vacation. A lot of people working remotely. It makes sense that people would move to paradise.

Yeah, it's a, it's a great hiking down there though. I mean like I've been to Kauai a few times and usually of all places, when I go to Hawaii I tend to go to Kona because I like to, I used to do the Ironman triathlon down there and now I like to go down there and do bow hunting. But Kauai, oh my gosh, for the, the hiking and the 8 billion different species of fruits down there and, and just the general vibe of the island is very, I don't know how to describe it. It's, it a very different kind of peaceful, laid back feeling.

Yeah, it's very aloha as they say here. So it's a slower pace of life and there's trade offs. So you know, as I mentioned, there's in our opinion essentially no good restaurants, there's no city life, there's no shopping. You know, you're kind of, you're in the United States but you're not, you've kind of got one foot out. So unless you are really obsessed with nature and like you just like to get outside and hike or go to the beach or do water sport, then I think you would not enjoy living here. But fortunately for us, we enjoy all of the above.

Or do Kundalini yoga in your crystal room. There's a little bit of that vibe down there too. But I, I, I think that if I lived down there, despite the, the seeming lack of decent restaurants, armed with a spear gun and a decent Traeger grill, I think I could be happy for quite a while.

Yeah, plenty to eat here, that's for sure.

Yeah, yeah. So I'd love to hear a little bit more your story, man. You know, you call yourself a freedom maximalist and I'd love to hear a little bit more about what that means and what a freedom maximalist actually is. But feel free as you explain that to describe to me a little bit about how you got down this rabbit hole in the first place.

Anyways, yeah, you know, I'll start with just a quick overview of the journey because that really informed my self Designation as a freedom maximalist. My educational background is in accounting and finance. Master's degree in accounting. I focused in taxation initially. My first job out of college was as an entrepreneurial strategist essentially. So I would consult with high net worth individuals and other investments vehicles typically. So they're like investment partnerships and whatnot. And the aim of that consulting was to optimize tax strategy. So these individuals or vehicles that were generating income, they could basically do so in a tax advantaged way. So I learned a lot about kind of the underbelly of the beast, so to speak. But I also discovered pretty quickly that the linear career path of accounting, public accounting was not for me. You kind of start out on staff, junior staff, senior staff, junior manager, senior manager, partner. And it's like a 10 to 15 year career path, typically before you make partner and then you make low seven figures a year, typically forever. So it's a good, it could be lucrative, but it's very hard work. You are somewhat living life as a computer, depending on what specific role you're in. But it's very heavy on the cognitive, cerebral, mathematical side of the brain.

Right. A dangerous career, by the way, to be involved in. In an era where computing and automation, artificial intelligence, does a large degree of the computing. If you could describe your job as being a computer, you might be be out of a job at some point in the next decade or so.

I would say yeah, anything that can be done algorithmically is at risk in the digital age. Tax as a whole, it's a mess though. So much there, so much there. The IRS tax code I think has nine. This is again a decade ago when I worked in tax. I think it has 9 million words, the IRS tax code. So it's just a staggeringly gigantic tech, like no one knows all of it. And it's just a complete disaster of arbitrary arbitrariness. And anyway, it's just a mess. The career path in that field, very linear, very predictable, the work is very monotonous. And I just figured it wasn't for me, you know, I just, in those few years that I spent doing it, learned a tremendous amount of. I went through four tax seasons essentially. And when you go through a tax season, you're working like 80 plus hours a week for months on end, three to five months, you're working 80 plus hour weeks. So it's very much an inhumane grind. But I had this, I guess, desire to do something more entrepreneurial, frankly. So I ended up leaving that field and went to work as a CFO for A startup company. I was initially in special event planning. We did trade shows and conferences, largely in Las Vegas, but all over the country. Then I then transitioned into tech. So as a CFO for a hospitality technology company, followed by a healthcare software company. And I was. I guess I should back up a little bit. As a kid, I grew up on computers. I'm 36 years old now, so I'm like an old millennial. I was one of those kids that was. I never learned to code or anything like that, but I was always really good on a computer. I just knew my way around and was really interested in tech. So by the time I made it, made my career path back into. Really into the tech field, which was something I had had an affinity for as a child. Tech CFO was kind of a good role for me. Had some good success there for some time. But I reached a point in my career that I decided it was a real crossroads, actually. I had been offered the role of CEO, actually, in the company I was currently in. The board had fired the CEO. I was effectively made executive in charge. And then after a few months, I was offered the CEO position, which was a tremendous opportunity for me. I was maybe 33, 32 at the time. 31 five years ago. Yeah, I was about 31. So it would have been a tremendous opportunity. We were buying a public company, so I would have been a CEO of a public company, sitting on the board. All the bells and whistles you could want in a position for a young man. But in my heart, I really wanted to work for myself. I didn't even know what that meant at the time. I just wanted to do something on my own. Again, leaning more entrepreneurial. This point of decision was 2016. I wrestled with this idea for some time. I made a comparative spreadsheet, shared it with friends and family. I was like, here's the pros and cons. What should I do? Basically, everyone told me to take the money and the perks of the position, the CEO plus board seat. The money was crazy because we all.

Know money and perks by happiness too. So that's another bonus.

Definitely arguable on that, but not a position I expected to be in. It came about by surprise, but I ended up deciding to. I was living in Vegas at the time. We're back and forth between Vegas and Vancouver. Vancouver was the city we were buying the publicly traded company. I ended up. I just decided I wanted to live on the ocean and start my own business. And so I had basically one client at the time. I was doing Some consulting, CFO work. And I just up and moved to Los Angeles and started my own consulting company, which was initially just sort of CFO consulting services. But at the same time, I was going down, at least starting to go down the crypto rabbit hole. And I had.

Was that 2016?

It was 2016. So I had previously. It was 2014. I had heard about, engaged with, and even bought some bitcoin, but I ended up selling it. I think I bought it in the 3 to $400 range and sold it in the $500 to $600 range, something like that, and thought I was a genius and just never looked at it again. But then Fast forward to 2016. I actually crypto, quote unquote, crypto, got its intellectual hooks into me through Ethereum. Ethereum was marketing itself pretty heavily. It was describing itself as a smart contract platform. And that piqued my curiosity. So I was like, what the hell is a smart contract? I need to dig into this. As I started doing some homework, it was getting more and more interesting to me. But when I finally stumbled across the work of Nick Szabo, who had written about smart contracts in the late 1990s, and he described how pervasive smart contracts really are, the very simple example he uses is the vending machine. The vending machine is a smart contract that holds candy or snacks in a certain sector or a certain silo. And then you punch in a certain code and insert the money, and there's a small algorithmic process that unfolds and drops you the snack or the candy bar. Well, that's a smart contract. That's a system that automates a commercial relationship between buyer and product. Szabo's key insight was like, okay, anything, any work function that can be adapted into an algorithm is essentially what he called dry code and could be provided orders of magnitude more efficiently by doing it with something like a smart contract, which is you could take that same mechanism that the vending machine represents, but you can make it much more sophisticated when written in software. But one of the key pieces to this was you needed digital native money. You need digital native money to make a smart contract, right?

Essentially with the smart contract, what you're saying is you're able to basically embed the contract, any type of property that has some kind of value, and that property is then controllable by a digital means of some way.

I mean, you can think about it as a self executing contract where you actually have different terms in the agreement. And when the terms or conditions are satisfied, payments would be released to the provider. So it's a contract. You can't take it to court necessarily. It's just this is a whole theoretical complex field. There's Oracle problems and all kinds of things, but in general that was the theory. My big light bulb moment was, and what really threw me into the crypto rabbit hole was the entire finance industry is a smart contract facilitated by human beings. So finance is just an intermediate function. It's not adding any real value to the productive economy. Now you could argue it reduces transaction cost and borrowing costs between buyers and sellers, which it does. So it does add value, but it's not producing anything. It's not producing a tangible good or capital. My realization was, holy shit, that's like a massive chunk of US GDP. I want to say it's in the 13 to 15% range of US GDP is the finance industry. And this entire thing was poised to be eaten by software and not entire. Okay, you could argue with me. There's things that smart contracts can't do that finance industry does, sure. But the vast majority of its core function was vulnerable to disruption by smart contract. So that was my light bulb. I was like, oh my goodness, this is going to be a really big wave of innovation. This is something on par with the Internet itself. I need to learn more about this. I really want to be at the cutting edge of whatever is happening again. As I'm transitioning out of the CFO CEO role into my own gig, I start buying positions in the top market cap weighted crypto assets.

To clarify real quick, what you're saying is essentially finance could be automated. And I think I read an essay at some point by Nick Szabo that went into the idea. I think he used the analogy of a car. Like if you, if you had a car and the key that came with the car was cryptographic, then the only person who could operate the car would be the person who rightfully owns it based on ownership of that crypto contract. So basically, if you know, if the car wasn't being paid off properly or something like that, you basically just have like a, like a smart, lean type of protocol where if the owner doesn't make payments, the smart contract invokes the lien protocol and returns control of the car keys to the bank or something like that.

Yeah, there's a whole matrix of theories and examples given out there about it. But it's essentially that is you're creating contractual relationships that are much higher fidelity versus hey, you and I put something on paper and it's like, okay, do we agree to those terms? Do we mutually understand what each term means if there's any disagreement whatsoever? We're not even really relying on the contract, we're relying on the contract and the shadow of the law. Essentially. No one wants to go to court, no one wants to get in a legal entanglement. But that whole model, that analog contract model, is very inefficient because again, things that the contract could do, it's like, okay, when you have delivered X number of widgets, release Y number of payments or quantity of money, these things that could be just automated should be automated because that increases wealth for humans. The more we can do, the more results we can accomplish with less effort, the more wealthy we are. In a nutshell, the smart contract became, in my view, one of the key components to unlocking tremendous amounts of wealth in the digital age. And so you could almost say like what you've seen robotics or automation due to blue collar work, smart contracts, crypto assets, things like that, I thought at the time, and still think will do to white collar work.

Not necessarily to insert a fine point there, not necessarily in a way that would create a bunch of jobless white collar employees, but that would instead free people up for more arguably creative or intellectual work because of the fact that they're not engaged in autonomous jobs that can be replaced by smart contracts.

For example, people forget people are always looking at local discontinuity and market configurations due to innovation. So one day you're a custom Italian leather shoemaker, the next day a shoe factory opens up down the street and you're out of the job. So that sounds like a bad thing, but that's the seen result. The unseen result is you've increased wealth for everyone because you're making more shoes per man hour. So even the shoemaker that's out of a job is able to buy shoes more cheaply. People very often miss that second order effect. So the fact that a smart contract type innovation could disrupt or unemploy many white collar workers today, it's not a bad thing. That's a great thing. You want that. You want jobs to be automated out of existence because that means the aggregate wealth increased for all. The whole pie of wealth grew for everyone. Everyone's cost of declined. So it's a very key point. It's not to get hung up on this. Basically I always like to say where my money went, my mind followed. I had investments in these assets. This was late 16, early 17. Then 2017 happened, which was an infamous crypto bull run. I Think the market was up 1,800% that year and I had put some real money to work. So it was quite a staggering year.

For me to put things in context from a timeline standpoint. The first bitcoins from what I understand were used to purchase a couple of pizzas at a Papa John's. About what year did that take place?

Bitcoin pizza purchase? You'd have to look it up, but I want to say it's like 2011.

Okay, so a few years before that.

It was 10,000 Bitcoin used to purchase two pizzas. And 10,000 Bitcoin today is like a half a billion dollar.

Yeah.

So there's a lesson in there, don't spend your bitcoin. But in any case, where my money went, my mind followed. I started studying a lot about history of money, which I should back up again here. I had this background knowledge of central banking. I had read the Creature from Jekyll island around 2005. So this is now 2016, like 11 years later. And another light bulb moment for me. I guess the real crystallization of my current thesis was that when I came to see bitcoin as disruptive to gold. Gold is the prime money of geopolitics today. If two countries go to war, they want settlement in gold. If one country conquers another, the conquered is going to pay tribute to the conqueror in gold. Central banks today still hoard gold, for instance. China is the biggest net producer and biggest net buyer of gold in the world. Even though we've decoupled our understanding of money, we think most people, most citizens think money is the paper in their pocket. It's not true. That's an artificial rule set imposed upon you by the holders of real money, which are largely nation states that hold about, say nation states via the central bank hold about 20% of the global gold supply. That's the real wake up call when you're like, oh my gosh, this tool called gold that's 5,000 years old, it became the dominant money in the world on the free market. It's still the dominant money of dominant institutions which are nation states and central banks. This tool, this pristine collateral, ultimate monetary technology, whatever you want to call it, is now undergoing disruption by a 13 year old. At the time I was an 8 year old, I guess digital upstart called bitcoin. It's a big deal. It's a big, big, big deal. If you think the digital age has been wild so far, just wait until bitcoin really does its thing. Because the follow on Consequences of that are really hard to get your head around. And that is the true Bitcoin rabbit hole. It's like what happens when central banks can no longer print money to fund endless government initiatives. What happens when people can hold their property in a medium that cannot be violated? They can hold money that cannot be stolen. The first thing that you notice is, okay, the ability for governments to tax and inflate falls precipitously. You have the dominant institution in the world or dominant business model, which is statism, and the central bank are now going to see their revenues collapse. What happens when these dominant institutions see their revenues collapse as they start to shrink? What happens when the nation state starts to shrink? How do we reorganize ourselves? What services are we giving up anyway? You get into this deep rabbit hole and I guess you could encapsulate that in the term software is eating the state. Andreessen said software is eating the world. He said this 10 years ago, proved to be very prescient. A16Z has made a lot of very intelligent and lucrative investments based on that thesis. But what it fails to articulate in a more nuanced way is that the world includes the state and the central bank. I think that's exactly what we're living through today. This is something we've been talking about for five years, but only in the past two years have governments really started to show their true colors. I think that's what we're living through today, is the state fighting for its survival age where technological realities have made it antiquated.

Yeah, and you mentioned the book the Creature from Jekyll island by Edward Griffin. I think is the author of that one. And that's another one that I had my sons read as a part of their economics curriculum that kind of sets out the dangers of the Federal Reserve and fiat money and the failures of the fractional reserve banking system. I think probably a better, more up to date book, and I don't know if you would agree with me, but it would probably be the 1, 2 combo of I have the hardest time pronouncing his name. Cyphedine Amus. I don't know if I said that properly. I read his name a lot, but don't pronounce it that frequently. His two books, the Bitcoin Standard and the Fiat Standard, I think lay things out even more comprehensively in a more contemporary flavor with the addition of the consideration of crypto as a possible, better alternative to gold, which I want to ask you about. And so this idea that Federal Reserve is essentially creating what amounts to.

A.

Store of value that really is not valuable at all and leads to inflation and usury and excess interest. And all the issues laid out in a book like the Fiat Standard or the Creature of Jekyll island dictates that we may be reaching a point here where we have to return to gold or we have to move on to something better. And, you know, I think that that probably leads to a. A question that I wanted to ask you, because when. When we look at what we're going to actually choose as a. As a trading medium or a store of value, you know, your entire podcast, it's called what is Money? Right. And so that. That's something that I actually wanted to ask you. You know, when we step back and look at what we actually want to use as a. As a form of trade or however you would define it, why do you actually call your podcast what is Money? In your opinion, what is Money?

Well, there are many, many answers to that seemingly simple question. We go through it at length in the show. I named the show the what Is Money? Show out of an effort to incept this idea that I think is very important. Getting people to question the fundamental presuppositions of their worldview or reality. And money is just such an obvious one. It's like we think about it all the time. People are thinking. It's what gets most people out of bed in the morning. Even if you say, people want to say, I don't care about money, it's like, okay, what did you do last week? Oh, well, I went to work for 40 hours and spent the rest of the time with my family. Okay, then by definition, your actions speak louder than your words. You went to work to earn money to provide for your family. So this idea that money is something that motivates a lot of human action, people think about it a lot. People think through it a lot. When you're actually negotiating a deal or planning a vacation or even just ordering stuff online, you're using money as a perceptual apparatus. If I even say something like a $10,000 car or $100,000 car, there's a distinct perceptual shift between those two. You don't even need to know what the car is necessarily. There's a perception there that's very telling just by communicating the dollar amount. So it's a way we perceive and quantify value. We get very specific and say it's economic value. But money also is used to denominate things of aesthetic value, like great Art, things like that. So my aim with naming the show that was to just get people to start. You can say again, we're thinking about money or through money, but very often are we stopping to take off the glasses through which we're looking at the world economically through money and examine the glasses themselves. What is this dollar that I'm looking at the world through? It's a prism I'm looking at the world through. But what is the dollar itself? Where did it come from? Who made this the thing that I would use to see the world through and to transact and trade and so on and so forth? And that's a very key question to start to dig into the history of money, the history of government, the history of warfare is largely, as I've tried to sum up, the history of human conflict is been both funded by and in pursuit of money. Almost always. You could generalize that slightly. Slightly more to say resources in general or wealth, which is true. But typically the easiest thing to do is to go and conquer a place and have them pay you tribute, which is typically paid in money. You also get, in the history of taxation, which is, as I've written about extensively, nothing more than a systemized form of theft. People that believe otherwise don't understand economics. It's economic axiom. It's not an opinion which can be a little bit disheartening, actually, because when you're arguing about the nature of the state and the nature of taxation, say, on Twitter, and then you have other people saying, oh, no, taxation is necessary. We need that. It's as if you're in the 15th century telling people that the medieval church is taking advantage of them with. With. I forgot the name of the term, where they used to pay to basically get into heaven. These indulgences.

Yeah, indulgences.

Telling people that they're paying these indulgences that are not in their best interest, and then you have the very victims of that scheme arguing to protect the victimizer. That's kind of like what people are today that argue in favor of taxation. They've been. I guess it's been normalized or they've been enculturated to just believe that taxation is the regular way of things, but it's not. It's theft. It's systemized theft. And that's all it is. Yeah, I'm just hoping to help people speak behind the curtain, I guess, by asking themselves that question and also as a way of educating people about Bitcoin indirectly. And that instead of just delivering some Set of punchlines or findings like, this is why bitcoin is the best money. I'm placing my faith in that if people ask themselves that question assiduously and they actually try to get to the bottom of it, that they'll find bitcoin. Because you ultimately, you're like, okay, what is the dollar? How did we get the dollar? Well, it turns out the dollar was just a paper token redeemable for gold. That's all any paper currency has ever been, ultimately, was redeemable for some monetary metal. So you're like, okay, the gold, then, is beneath the dollar. What's beneath gold? You get into the first principles of money, which I articulate as the properties of money. There's five of them. I've enumerated them extensively on the show. And then you also get into this concept of proof of work, securing the supply of money, which is what gold was. The energy necessary to extract gold from the surface was the security mechanism that protected its supply from counterfeiting or excessive expansion or inflation. That's what gives it a store of value function. That's what enables its supply to be predictable over time, is the simple fact that no matter how much energy is allocated towards its production, gold's production, that no one could expand its supply arbitrarily. And that meant everyone else could invest economic value, could hold this as a means of exchange right across space and time. That means of moving value across space and time. We could say, without being vulnerable to the opinions of anyone else. Once you get all that and you're like, okay, I understand why gold. I understand why money, why it became a dollar. I understand why human beings running the central bank and basically corrupted the dollar, detached it from gold. You understand all of that, all of that history in your noggin, you can then look at bitcoin properly, which is like, okay, what is bitcoin? Well, let's look at it through the properties of money. Let's look at it through the prism of proof of work, and let's see how it stacks up to gold. And I think that's just the most useful framing for really understanding the socioeconomic significance of bitcoin.

Yeah, I want to catch people up here just so we don't lose anyone who might be listening and unfamiliar with some of the concepts that we've laid out so far. But when we talk about the creature of Jekyll island or books like the bitcoin standard, the fiat standard, which I think are wonderful, wonderful reads, if you want to bring yourself up to speed on all this, along with Robert's book, thank God for Bitcoin. You know, we've seen over the past century or so a real, not, not a total destruction, but, but a near complete destruction of fiat currencies, you know, led largely by the world's global economic superpowers and a lot of senseless money printing that, that has resulted in a weakening of the US Dollar and other currencies as well. And so there's like this, this chatter right now that a collapse may be imminent. And so a lot of people are looking at different ways to store value. Gold or Bitcoin being two that pop up repeatedly as a financial instrument that might safeguard against inflation. And so gold has a long history and Bitcoin is kind of like this new player on the block, both of them being potential stores of value. And so, you know, gold in the past has served as a good store of value. It's like got good scarcity, it's got good demand to supply ratio. A lot of countries have based their currencies and their paper money on gold reserves for those reasons for a long time. And then I think it was during World War II, was it the, the, the Bretton Woods Conference, Robert, where, where the situation kind of changed, where, where a lot of countries agreed to get rid of the traditional gold standard model in favor of a different system?

No, actually. So Bretton woods was Post World War II, and essentially it's the United States who was victorious. Right? We won, quote, unquote, won World War II. There's a very interesting history there too. It's not like we came in and saved the day. We kind of came in and cleared the theater of war of our war wearied opponents, and then declared ourselves victorious. But in any case, as I mentioned earlier, money being both the means and the ends of all human conflicts, what's the first thing we do after winning World War II? We hold the Bretton Wood Conference. This essentially represents the United States rewriting the global banking rules in order, in a way that the dollar, the US Dollar, would be pegged to gold. Every other currency would be pegged to the dollar. So this gives the US who is now in a dominant position of gold holding, by the way, a lot of the gold that was in Europe ended up in North America as a means of being a geographic safe haven from Nazis. Nazis were basically plundering the gold of every country they conquered. European countries quickly wise up to this and changed their custody arrangement to not be plundered. Well, the end result of that was most of the gold was In North America, most of the gold was in Fort Knox. So the United States, again, money being kind of the base layer, whichever group of humans holds the most money is the global superpower. And that's when the United States became the de facto global superpower was Post World War II, because we had all the gold. So we write the rules in a way that we can effectively externalize or export our inflation. We can print these new slips of paper called dollars ad infinitum. We can ship them offshore to any country we want, and they will send us goods and services in return. If you just imagine the asymmetry there of being able to just send someone paper, which is very cheap to produce and send to them, often it's not even paper. You're just updating database entries at the Federal Reserve or at one of the networked banks, and then they will send your country or constituents goods and services. That's the structural intention of the post Bretton Wood world. The problems arose when countries started to redeem. Countries started to call the bluff of the United States saying, you guys have printed a lot of currency. I think I want to redeem the dollars you've been sending me for gold. So nations would actually send cargo ships across the ocean to collect their gold to redeem the dollar that they'd been.

Sent at a pretty high transportability cost, it should be noted. Back to the consideration of Bitcoin, but go ahead.

Well, of course. But better than the cost of just holding a paper currency that goes to zero because the issuing authority just prints it ad infinitum. Anyways, a few countries, I want to say two to three countries, had redeemed their gold from the United States under the post Bretton Wood arrangement. But it was when Germany tried to redeem their gold in the early 1970s that we had the infamous Nixon shock where he suspended gold convertibility, which meant the dollar was no longer pegged to gold, which meant all the other currencies pegged to the dollar worldwide were no longer pegged to the gold either. Indirectly, this was said to be a temporary measure. There was a lot of rhetoric and platitudes used. It was fixing trade imbalances. And it's all the greedy capitalist fault we have to fix prices, blah, blah, blah, all the bullshit, and we went off the gold standard. And that was it. That was the temporary measure that Nixon invoked to solve some of these problems that were really just camouflage for the truth. And the truth was the US Government, with a monopoly on money, used the printing of dollars to implicitly default on its debts and to break the integrity of the post Bretton Wood agreement, which was rooted in gold. Gold is the disciplinary force that kept governments honest. And when you suspend convertibility, there's no accountability. There's no mechanism to check government or government action. They can just steal from society through printing money, externalize the cost via inflation, and fund any effort, any initiative they want with no there's no risk of loss. You can take on as much debt as you want and then pay off the debt with newly printed dollars. You can imagine how perverse this is. If you gave any business power to just print money and dump the cost on everyone else, what do you think would happen?

Well, 2020 is a perfect example. I mean, our money stock supply would increase by like almost 25% with money printing.

In 2020 alone, the numbers I saw were 40%. Okay, so more than that into expansion. So that means in the course of less than 24 months, it was actually within 18. I think global narrow money expanded 40%, which means everyone holding any fiat currency worldwide was basically taxed 40%.

Right. Well, at the same time, commodities and assets are increasing and salaries are staying the same.

Well, commodities and assets are increasing in the diminished dollar. This is a key point, too. Part of the success of the deception that is inflation and central banking is if I just print money and on paper, you have more wealth. Stock portfolios are up, your house is up. Whatever asset that can't be printed or produced more quickly than the dollar tends to go up in dollar terms. But that does not mean it has gone up in value. That means it has gone up a nominal price. When you price things in a diminishing unit of economic perception, which is the dollar, you're seeing, you're seeing the same asset through smaller dollars, through weaker dollars, but people don't get that again because they don't understand money. So they're like, oh, everything's fine, my paper wealth. And you can see this. This is acutely obvious if you look at the net worth position of billionaires post Covid post the past 24 months, most of the. I think the top 10 billionaires in the world doubled their net worth in paper terms over the past 24 months. There's not a lot additional that they've done. Sure, you could argue Amazon's become more popular and it's increased in revenue and all of that as a result. Post Covid so Bezos is richer, but it hasn't doubled. The value of Amazon hasn't actually doubled. It's the dollar we use to enumerate the economic value or price of these assets, including Amazon stock that has been diminished, that causes it to look like it's expanded in value. It's a trick. It's a parlor trick. And it's been working like it still works so amazingly well. It's scary actually, because I know a lot of really smart people that invest a lot of money and they don't get it. They still think this is good, it's a good idea to print money.

Right? There were a few people that did pretty well post Covid from a billionaire status though the, the whole probably rabbit hole here, but the whole mask flipping job that a few people picked up on, that you could actually act as a broker for a seller of mask. There are people making billions off of basically trading PPEs. I don't know if you heard about that, but it was this crazy thing that happened for the past two years. Some people made a ton of money just trading PPEs.

Well, that's great if you're taking advantage of a market opportunity, an imbalance in supply and demand, whether it's mask or anything else, and you're making a profit and you're satisfying consumer wants, I'm all for that.

Unless you get into Charles Eisenstein sacred economics idea of what's that do with all the masks in the ocean? There's more to it than just the financial implications that might be positive, but the environmental implications, not so much.

Well, the only way to actually protect and incentivize ecological preservation is, is through the implementation of private property rights. So I don't know much about sacred economics, but unless he's making the case that we need to privatize ownership of the ocean such that if someone's having mask dumped into the ocean that they could sue whoever's doing the dumping, that's how you prevent pollution.

That's the only way he comes at it. More from an incentivization standpoint, incentivizing businesses to engage in more environmentally friendly practices. But yeah, that's a general idea, but what's the incentive?

There's no incentive other than private property that will do that. So any.

I don't know.

Again, I don't know anything about sacred economics, but I've read a few of these books about spiritual economics or this or that, and it's always some appeal to this nebulous concern like, oh, we just all need to come together and agree to do this thing. It's like that never works.

Well, the reason for that is because most of those books and theories are based upon what I would argue is the faulty assumption that that humans in their hearts are good and will always make the good decision based on the golden rule. And we all know when you look at actual chaos and entropy and the fact that we are, in my opinion, I know you have a background in Christianity, we're fallen creatures. Our go to is selfishness. And incentivizing based on the assumption that people will make the right choice and do the good thing is a dangerous, dangerous road to go down.

This is just another version of the adage, hope for the best, plan for the worst. You have to design your systems in a way that incentivize good behavior, otherwise it will not work. If there's even an opportunity to game it, it will be gamed. This is pointing also to the genius of bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first social institution in the world that just totally disincentivizes dishonesty and rewards honesty. And the network effects related to that are tremendous. Because as we said earlier, human beings create more wealth by cooperating. That's the only way we create. It's called the division of labor. In the school of economics, we can just say it very simply that free trade is what increases our productivity and it's also what accelerates innovation, which further increases our productivity. So to try and enshrine that, I mean that is a sacred process. The fact that all we have to do is do what we're best at and honor the property rights of others, let other people do what they're best at and we all trade. That increases the standard of living for everyone. That is the experiment we're living through right now, which is this post enlightenment capitalistic society. Semi capitalistic. Because the central bank at the heart of every economy is anti capitalistic. This is straight out of this is literally 1848 Manifesto to the Communist Party. Measure number five, Central Control and state monopoly on all cash and credit. Central bank is a Marxist institution to the core. That's exactly where it comes from. Yet we have it in the heart of every major economy in the world today, including the United States. And we call ourselves capitalist. It's bullshit. We're one half socialist because our money's socialist. The point being that that's what you need for peaceful and productive and wealthy society is strong property rights. You need people to be able to store the fruits of their labor in a medium that cannot be violated arbitrarily via inflation, taxation, regulation, whatever it may be. That's what bitcoin is. Bitcoin is the most expensive form of property to violate in human history. Again, like a base layer for human civilization. I even think that perhaps civilization starts in earnest with the genesis block of Bitcoin in 2009. I don't think we actually had civilization up until this point. We've had attempts at civilization, but civilization always devolves into rampant violation of property, which we're seeing in the world today right now. Again, printing dollars is only a violation of property. You're taking wealth from those that depend on the dollar to hold value to those that get newly printed dollars first or hold dollar denominated assets. That coercion or theft that's embedded in our social fabric doesn't work. It's not civilized. I think bitcoin's a really big deal. It's almost like the discovery of fire.

Absolutely. There's a lot of people who are screaming, oh, it's just imaginary digital money. But I mean, first of all, the bitcoins are backed by real monetary value that are basically kept stable by the fact that it's an asset with limited supply for people not that familiar with the. Like. All of your listeners, Robert, are really, really intimately familiar with finances and crypto and economics and bitcoin, or at least are likely to be. A lot of my listeners, they're really tuned into health and fitness and nutrition and biohacking and. And may not be as familiar with this idea. You know, that Satoshi Nakamoto designed bitcoin in a way that it can generate only 21 million coins. So that's one value that bitcoin gets. But then you've got the blockchain network where miners are keeping the system alive by validating transactions and getting rewarded with bitcoin for every block of transaction that's verified. And so basically what Nakamoto designed was a way to make these mineable coins to always remain a little bit lower than the existing circulating supply. So that's what's called kind of similar to gold. A stable stock to flow ratio is, I think, the actual term for that. And so it's a great store value asset. And you mentioned a few characteristics of what you might call money that I think are important when it comes to bitcoin. We touched on the idea of shipping gold around. And bitcoin is, of course, you know, it's essentially weightless. You know, so it's. It's completely portable. So it's far easier to transfer, like, you know, than a million dollars worth of gold or a million dollars worth of seashells or oil. And so it's got a great amount of portability, which makes it very, very convenient. You just can't transfer a million dollars in gold near instantly from say, you know, San Francisco to Hong Kong. It's just that the physical transportation is a pretty big barrier to entry there. And then it's got. Is fungibility another one of the characteristics that you talk about?

Yes, I lay out five and there's. People lay out their own framework for this, but I just sum it up with divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity. And for me, fungibility is a subset of recognizability.

Right. Meaning that's like the sameness. Like two pounds of gold can have the same value as another set of two pounds of gold seashells. Maybe not so much. Two pounds of seashells might have a different value than another two pounds of seashells. You'll find some fungibility in other financial instruments like stocks or bonds or currencies. But one Bitcoin is always going to be equal to one Bitcoin. I would say Bitcoin is pretty fungible, isn't it?

There's some debate about that. Because if you've only transacted Bitcoin on the main chain and it's never been anonymized or mixed, then you can trace that Bitcoin's history. It presumably if it was ever transacted through an entity or an individual or group that say is blacklisted by the US for instance, it at some point and now the US government has traced it technically Bitcoin would lack fungibility in that regard. And that this could be a coin versus a non tainted coin. But the market realities don't show that playing out too much. I don't see coins trading at a premium or discount based on that. That's just sort of theoretical. But then when you add on things like lightning network, as the density of that network increases, it's going to become all but impossible to trace Bitcoin transactions. And at that point Bitcoin is fully fungible.

Yeah, because you're not now seeing many decentralized exchanges flagging certain coins. So it is kind of a theoretical problem. I would say even right now it's highly fungible. And then you mentioned divisibility. Right. You can obviously my sons were like, how many bitcoins would that cost to add? And I'll be like, well, less than 1. And then I explained to them that just like gold can be cut down into tiny, tiny units and sizes down to like a tiny Earring on mom's ear. Bitcoin, same thing, right? You've got like these satoshis, I think they're called, where a single Bitcoin has 100 million Satoshis in it. So it can obviously get broken down pretty well. Whereas gold still has a decent amount of volatility and it's got some things going for it. It's just that bitcoin is just more slick, it's transportable, it's instant. And it seems as though if we are going to move on from the fiat standard rather than going back to gold, going forward to bitcoin. Seems like a pretty logical choice.

Yeah. Not only a logical choice, but it becomes a game theoretic imperative to succeed in the marketplace. It's in every individual organization and institution's best interest to hold the money that is maximally resistant to the opinions of others. That's to say that money that can't be inflated, can't be stolen, can't be taxed, can be preserved and moved cheaply, easily, securely. That's what the world, via the free market, zeroes in on. That's what gold was. Gold was the most divisible, durable, recognizable, portable and scarce monetary technology we ever had as a species. Historically, bitcoin has just taken those critical economic properties of gold and effectively perfected them. There's a long spiel here I'd say just go check out.

Yeah, even with the time we have available right now, we probably won't even be able to get into that. I don't want to position this podcast as the ultimate go to guide to bitcoin as much as getting people thinking about this stuff.

If you evaluate money through what services people seek to render from money, or what properties they seek in money, Bitcoin is effectively the most perfect monetary technology that's ever been invented. Darwinian self interest game theory indicates to the rational mind that all economic actors will adopt this money out of self interest at some point. It's just a matter of what the bitcoin community here calls the IQ test. Bitcoin is an IQ test. Have you done your homework to understand what money is and realized the importance of holding hard money or honest money or money that's resistant to opinion? You can do the homework and adopt it now, or you can just live through the pain that's ahead via inflation, taxation, shrinking of the state, increased aggression of the state. All of these things you're going to want to be insulated from. And bitcoin is the mechanism that lets you insulate yourself from the. Of others.

Yeah. And my only hesitation is that due to the. At least the current volatility with the current moves over the past couple of months being a perfect example of bitcoin compared to gold. And then the fact that bitcoin does have a lot of periods of what I think is called high correlation. Right. It mirrors the price action of a lot of assets and commodities and currencies. And so it does have a little bit more volatility and a lot more correlation than gold does. And so my philosophy is I'm not putting all my eggs in the bitcoin basket. Right. I've got gold, I've got silver, I've got guns, I've got ammo, I've got sardines. Right. But bitcoin, I would say, is where I'm putting a decent amount of my focus at this point as far as where I feel that we're probably going to be moving on to from the current fiat standard.

Yeah, I mean, everything's a. But ultimately, I don't know what's going to happen. But for me, I agree with you on all the points above. I don't hold physical silver. I don't think that's useful. I don't hold physical gold. I think it could be marginally useful under certain scenarios. But I feel good holding US Dollars right now. And bitcoin, I only hold US Dollars because of the historical patterns of markets. We tend to have these giant deflationary bust, these liquidity crises like we saw in March 2020, that becomes an overwhelming buying opportunity for holders of dollars, somewhat paradoxically, actually hold dollars as a insurance policy on central bank induced volatility. And really I'm looking for one of those big liquidity crises so I can go in and buy a shitload more bitcoin at a 40 to 50% discount. I also buy bitcoin every single day. I just have an automatic recurring price.

Do you do daily dollar cost averaging?

Do daily dollar cost averaging. And daily. Well, not daily, but every time it reaches a certain quantity, it automatically withdraws to cold storage.

Do you have that set up on an automated basis or you have to do that manually?

No, I have it set up. I use Swan Bitcoin for that currently. And then I also. The revenue that I generate in the business is not smooth, it's not consistent every month. So sometimes I have big chunks of dollars come in and I'll use that to be opportunistic and buy more bitcoin, preferably on a price step. I have a lot of peace of mind in that portfolio construction because I have the most supreme store value asset that the world has ever seen as my primary savings, technology or treasury asset, then I have dollars as an option on all the bullshit in the world. If things get volatile or crazy or there's a crisis, then I can step in and buy things at a discount from four sellers.

Okay, so I know we're getting a little bit long in the tooth and we have actually accomplished my objective of basically bringing my listeners up to speed on why they might want to be thinking about this and also introducing them to you as someone I would consider to be a trustworthy and wise voice in this realm. But I would be remiss, of course, as many of these podcasts are focused through the lens of health. Not to ask you a couple of questions, one that's just kind of been rolling around the back of my mind that you may or may not have insight into. It seems like a bunch of bitcoiners are into things like the carnivore diet and biohacking and like nootropics or smart drugs. Am I just seeing things or is there like this flavor amongst like the crypto crowd that seems to include considerations of some of these more fringe like dietary and supplementation concepts?

Well, bitcoin specifically is very interesting in that it seems to be inducing these personal transformations in people. It's one of the most fascinating sides of the bitcoin culture and I've experienced this in my own life. There was the fiat me I mentioned, this earlier version of me that was a career CFO stepping into possibly CEO position. I was very well compensated, but I was single, no kids. I was just becoming a darker version of myself. I was just traveling and enjoying all the fruits of that lifestyle, but at the same time feeling emptier and emptier inside. My work was not as fulfilling and a lot of this was probably contributing to my desire to go work for myself. There's something missing increasingly on the fiat path. But then getting into bitcoin, it's argued and amusing, popularized this concept of time preference, that the ability to hold a money that holds its value over time reliably lets you consider the future more. Which is to say, lower your time preference. When you start to lower your time preference and more deeply consider your future or more further consider the future, looking further into the future and making decisions in the present that include all the information and consideration from a broader spectrum of possibility into the future, you start to make better decisions in life. You start to eat healthier, you start to Focus more on sleep, focus more on community and stress management.

That by the way, that's a good point. The ability to hold a form of money that holds its value into the future reduces the uncertainty about the future. It leads to what you just called a lower time preferences or less discounting of the future. And a lower time preference is basically what allows for the process of civilization to take place. You get increasing capital accumulation and rising productivity and improved living standards. And people take better care of their health and better care of the planet because they're not living for today.

Yeah, the aggregate time preference is quantified by the natural interest rate. This is somewhat of a bit complex topic, but essentially time preference is civilization. The lower our time preference, the more we plan for a more distant future. Which is to say we accumulate more capital as a buffer against the uncertainty and risk inherent to an unknowable future. The more capital we create, the more wealth we have as a civilization. The more wealth we have as a civilization, the less we need to fight over things. There's just more to go around, there's more abundance. And you also, in these institutions that have say, strong property rights, for instance, there's a direct financial incentive embedded in that to increase morality. Because that's actually going to be a more wealth producing strategy, to be honest, and have a long term trading relationship with someone. And that would be in a world where property is strong. If I can't take your stuff from you, then my only real wealth creation or acquisition strategy is to make some stuff I need to actually create value in the world. There is this deep relationship between these structural characteristics of money, financial incentives and what types of morality emerge. Bitcoin seems to be people that swap out their life and start to denominate themselves. On Bitcoin there do seem to be observable differences in their lives and their behaviors again and they tend to be positive. Like people focusing more on family, less drinking, better exercise habits, better dietary routines, et cetera. So I used to drink a lot more, just kind of a social drinker, party type guy. And then getting into Bitcoin, that's almost fallen to zero for me. I didn't drink at all for 18 months. I do it occasionally now, but not much.

Well, now you're on Kauai. So it's all fresh pressed juices and kombucha, right?

Something like that. So now actually I've become very, I'm almost carnivore. I mean they call this the abundance diet actually. So I have in the morning I do a raw Milk smoothie with blueberries and some collagen protein powders. I have steak for lunch and I have steak for dinner. Steak, butter, salt. Steak, butter, salt. And you know, I surf, go to the beach, hike, and go to the gym.

That's a pretty darn good protocol, man. You got water, you got, you got photonic light energy, you got negative ions, you got nutrient density of all those components. Honestly, the only thing I'm hearing that you may not have that you could consider adding in would be a little bit of organ meats. You know, like some liver or heart or kidney, like some of thesome of the nose to tail components if you're not doing that already. But that's a pretty darn good program, man.

I do eat some organs. I have a ground beef that has I think kidney, heart, liver in it. So I also, I eat that pretty often as well. But yeah, I need to eat more raw organs.

I do a smoothie very much like you. Most of the mornings my smoothie is bone broth and like a raw goat yogurt. And then I add goat colostrum to that and I blend it all up with ice. But I always have like frozen liver bites in my freezer and all I do is just buy liver. I soak it in buttermilk or kefir for a day and then rinse it, blend it in the nutribullet, pour it in little molds. And I keep those molds in my freezer. So when I make my morning smoothie with the, with the colostrum and the goat yogurt and everything, I just throw a handful of the liver in there and it's like, feels like I'm drinking lifeblood. It's amazing.

That sounds really good. So you're with Kion? Actually, I use your colostrum as well in this movie. I think it's beef colostrum.

Yeah, that's exactly what I use is the colostrum is a cow colostrum, the yogurt. I've got six goats, so my sons actually go out there and milk them every morning. So I just always have all this goat milk in the fridge. And there's a doctor named Dr. William Davis, and he has developed some of the most amazing gut healing, sleep enhancing, muscle building yogurt recipes that exist. He tells you which probiotics to buy on Amazon, you buy them once because once you've bought them, you can always use one batch of yogurt to make the next batch. So I made a bunch of this yogurt using Dr. William Davis's recipes. I'm going to interview him in a couple weeks, actually, about the yogurt. We're going to do a whole podcast just on yogurt. And so that's what goes in my smoothie with the liver and the colostrum. And then you just dress that up, whatever. Ice, stevia, salt and. Yeah, like I said, it's like lifeblood.

Well, I need to look that guy up. I had some, I guess, mild gut inflammation from, I guess, my past lifestyle, kind of drinking and high stress work or whatever. And I've been dealing with that through this new diet and that's part of the reason I use the colostrum. But I'd like to learn about this William Davis.

Yeah, his new book is called. I think it's called Super Gut. Super Gut. And again, I'll do a podcast with them soon where all, like, the book's big, but all I want to hone in on is the yogurt. Because the yogurt, I think is the best part of the whole book. We gotta go soon. We gotta go soon. But what I'm gonna do is for everybody who wants to check out your book and also, like, I would. Robert's podcasts are dense, I'll tell you guys that. But just like go at least check out a few, maybe some of his earlier podcasts. I think, Robert, you did a series with Michael Saylor. I think that was your best series. Because what Robert does for you guys listening is he'll interview one person five or 10 or 12 times. It'll be a series. So I would say if you were going to go and dig into any of Robert's work, at least from my subjective viewpoint, his series with Michael Saylor is really good. And then his book, thank God for Bitcoin is really good. I'd also, if you're thinking about it, pick up the books, the bitcoin standard and the fiat standard, which I think pair pretty well with Robert's book. I don't know. Am I forgetting anything, Robert?

No, that's it. You can check me out on Twitter. It's eedlove22. It's B R double E D L O V E22. There's links to all my work there. And yeah, I'm happy to engage on any of these ideas. I really feel fortunate to be working in this space and I consider it to be my life's work. I've got a deep passion for, you know, fixing the money to help fix the world. So hopefully the area that I'm Contributing to is education, but it's education I'm learning out loud basically. And I get to engage with the smartest people in the world and very sophisticated, deep, long form dialogue and people really seem to enjoy that. So that's what the show is all about. You mentioned the sailor series. That was my first series. We did 17 episodes together so far for about 20 hours of content. And you haven't Michael Saylor speak yet. Then what do you cancel? You know, put it to the top podcast queue. This guy is like Steve Jobs on steroids or something. I mean he's really, truly a phenom.

Yeah, it's a great series. Matter of fact, it was so good. I do this a lot just based on the concept of space repetition. I'll listen to a podcast and then sometimes go over like the, the podcast notes website and review over there. Or in some cases I will have my assistant do a, like a, a big vision overview of all the key points and key takeaways from the entire podcast and create these comprehensive show notes for me. And that sounds like it's expensive to go through a 17 podcast series and then pay somebody to transcribe it and make shownotes out of it for you. But I'll just put them in a binder and then after I listen, I'll read them all.

There's a guy on Twitter, Stephen Chow, he transcribed the entire series. So those are also, I think I linked to those in the show notes, but if you can't find them, just DM me. I'll do my best to respond. I get a lot of dm.

Careful what you wish for. All right, well, I'll link to all this stuff@BenGreenfieldFitness.com BreedLove it's BenGreenfieldFitness.com B R E E D L O V E. Robert, thanks so much for giving your time and coming on sharing this stuff with us. I think it's an important conversation and I'm hoping that it helps out a lot of people.

Yeah, Ben, thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.

All right, cool folks, I'm Robert. I'm not Robert Breedlove. He's Robert Breedlove. Along with me, Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to products are often affiliate links of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer.