Blockchain Wellness: Cultivate Financial FREEDOM | Robert Breedlove | @WellnessAndWisdom

Bitcoin is this pattern of pure honesty, like there's nothing hidden. No matter which way you look at it, you see it in its totality. And if money is such an important pattern for the human species, doesn't it make sense that an honest, truthful, sincere pattern like that would resonate into us? Like in the same way that Fiat corrupted our character and our souls, doesn't it make sense that this unincorruptible money would. Would cleanse us of.

What is. What is really lighting you on fire? You know, as an educator, as a podcaster, as somebody that people look to for sound financial intelligence, what is something that, you know, wants to come through your heart today?

I mean, the whole concept of fiat, and it. I think you're smart to integrate the financial aspect into your media channel because it is so essentially human. If we don't have the cooperative, economic, financial aspect to ourselves, then we are animal and we go nowhere. We can't get ourselves out of depravity. And the big thing that is really lighting me on fire recently is the entire notion of fiat itself. I think it's all rooted in fear, ultimately, on both sides. Both the. The individual or group imposing fiat and the victims of the fiat are both acting out of fear rather than love. And I think that is the. The fundamental psychological schism on humanity.

This love versus fear concept around fiat maybe just describe what fiat even is used to be. Things were backed by gold, backed by seashells. We had tribes in the world where they actually traded goods. But fiat is essentially two people rubbing their fingers together. But I love the way you described it, where it's one is love, one is fear.

Yeah. So before Bitcoin, the term fiat currency was virtually unknown, even though it was ubiquitous. We all use fiat currency, but the term fiat is even bigger than money. Money is a very important part of it. But the original fiat was fiat Lux, actually. And this is God saying, let there be light. This is the original decree that initiated everything and that cosmological description of reality. And essentially, fiat means do something because an authority said so, not because you want to, not because you decided it's in your best interest, not because you decided it creates value for you or your loved ones, but because if you don't do it, you will incur some type of damage or injury or attack from this authority. And this is something that we use this in our home. If you have kids, you raise your kids by fiat. You say, do this because I said so. Why do you do that? Because your child, your toddler they don't have reason yet. They're trying to come online, they're trying to bootstrap themselves to have human reason. But until they get to that point, you actually have to be the one that calls the shots, right? You have to tell them, don't put this in your mouth, put this in your mouth, go to bed, wake up, take a bath.

I have an eight month old son, so I know this well.

Yes. So this is fiat because I said so. You have to control their environment because they don't have human reason. They have not come online yet. However, you only do that because you hope that they will grow into fully autonomous, self sovereign adults. Right? You don't want to tell your kids how to act because you said so for their entire life, right? You're doing that with the intention of setting them free, right? Getting them out of the nest, letting them be free individual actors. So there's this element of fear, frankly, right? Like the child respects you and listens to that order. And if you've been a parent, you know very well, especially around the age of 2, 3, 4, they're testing the boundaries non stop. They want to know how much can I get away with before mom or dad really puts the foot down, right, and invokes the spank or the timeout or whatever the thing that I'm scared of is. So they're trying to establish these boundaries. The parent has to set these boundaries by fiat. But the long run game is, hey, we're all adults here, we're all free adults. And I think that at the level of statism, we've basically taken that model and applied it to adult collectives. This is not again, not just money. This is all regulation, all taxation, all inflation. Anytime you're doing something that you did not sign up to do, this is not to say that there's no rules. When I go into a restaurant or a nightclub or some establishment, I'm agreeing to operate according to their rules. I'm making an exchange of money for food or beverage or whatever it is, and I'm agreeing to conform to their rules. Maybe I'm wearing night attire or the right shoes or whatever it is, but it's a mutually voluntary exchange. There's no one coming and kicking in my door, putting a gun to my head, saying, hey, put on your night attire to go to this restaurant. Right? It's, I have voluntarily decided to do it. I have voluntarily agreed to come into your arena and play by your rules. So that's the key point is this notion of voluntarism or mutual reciprocity, something like that. And so there's clearly an element in the domain of fiat. And those that are being victimized are fearful, right? They are afraid of the consequences of not doing what they are being told to do. But the more I thought about this, I think there's equally an element of fear on the perpetrator of fiat as well. The authority saying do this because I said so, because why else would they say that, right? This. And we, most people would traditionally associate this with a hunger or thirst for power like political power or control. That is an expression of fear too. Because why else would I be trying to control or dominate you if I wasn't scared of what would happen otherwise? So it's an expression of fear by both the victimizer and the victim, I think. And so fiat itself, legislation by fiat, we're psychotic. Basically today we think we can fix the environment by passing a law. We think we can stop, we can change people's behavior. In China they had a one child policy. We've had tax incentives trying to get people to spend more, do this, do that. And it's all, I think it's just all broken because at the end of the day you're wielding the rod of fear to try and get people to do what you want them to do. And that not a sustainable mode of organizing human beings. Because even if, even if it works, even if I will the rod and say do this because I said so and you do it, you're still keeping tabs right in your mind that okay, I didn't want to do this and I did it anyways. So the first chance I get to backstab this guy or cut out or dodge the authority or cut corners, bend the rules, whatever, I'm going to take it. You're creating this incentive to abdicate from social organization because it's all done by fear. And the alternative universe here, this would be the libertarian Bitcoin or freedom maximalist viewpoint is that you just let people choose for themselves. Let the adults be adults. The adults will choose what's best for them. If they don't like it, they'll say no. If they do like it, they'll say yes.

Debt is one of the most powerful entry points to a conversation about digital currency and about the freedom that it brings that I've ever heard. And I love it so much because I think about what it means when I parent my son. I do it from a place of love. I'm not trying to control him, I'm trying to keep him safe and it's a genuine intention. So I'm curious from your standpoint, and we're going to go so deep into the different terms around money and blockchain and for people that are just starting this journey of financial independence and financial freedom, we'll go deep today. But to pull the E bra and go back to the way you started this, that was so powerful. If there was a timeline of money that you could just glance with us, where did we start to go wrong? Was it on the seashore when we were in tribes? Was it the golden age? Was it the powers that be in England? Like where did we actually start to use fiat from fear instead of controlling people just through a natural system? And it's actually not even true, not even controlling people. Where did we go wrong? Where we started to go towards control rather than just letting life live itself. People caring and trading for and with one another.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there because it's not about fiat is about control. It's about I want to project my mental model onto the world and I want you to be a chess piece in that mental model so I can move you around like a cog in the machine versus which is clearly just bullshit. First of all, humans are not cogs in a machine. We're not mechanical in any way. We're dynamic, complex adaptive systems. Each of us is self sovereign. To try and reduce someone to a piece on a chessboard just doesn't work. This idea of control like it's been with us for forever basically, right. I would say this is the thing we've been trying to wrestle with as a species since the beginning of time. It's this realization that, you know, the unique power of humanity is this, that we can, what we're doing right now, we can tell and believe stories so we can construct imagined orders, to use the Yuval Harari term. And we can organize ourselves within these imagined orders to coordinate human action flexibly and in large numbers at a scale that no other animal can. So the common joke here is, you know, a chimpanzee troop can maybe be 150 strong. That's kind of like the limits of their social organization. It's called the Dunbar number. But you can unite a million Americans under a flag and send them across the ocean to go to war. Right? That is a symbolic, imagined order. You've coordinated a million humans. You've scaled up the ability for humans to cooperate and coordinate and project force in a way that no other animal can. That's why we run Shut. That's why human beings run the world, because we have the power of imagination. The problem is we now have given that great power of imagination and imagined orders in particular nation states. That is the dominant imaginary order of today. So much effort goes into trying to control the levers of that imaginary order. This is political power in a nutshell, right? If you just believe in the fable of the nation state, then you'll give anything for it. I think it was Huarachi, he called this the oldest lie, that it's a glory to die for one's country. This is something we've been trying to get away from forever. And it's a. Statism in general is a form of slavery ultimately. So this idea that we'll shift a little bit here into taxation. So we know about taxation. What's the most common thing you hear about taxation? There's two certainties in life, right?

Death and taxes.

Okay, well we all know we're going to die, but do we all have to be taxed? Let's pull that apart a little bit. So what is taxation? What's so unique about it? Taxation is the only way governments generate revenue. Revenue in any other business in the world is done through mutual consensual voluntary exchange. Two parties come together and say, I like what you have more than what I have and you feel the same. So therefore we're going to trade and we both leave that exchange feeling psychologically better off. I've created psychological profit and value for myself, as have you. And if we iterate that process where only people are coming together and making voluntary trades, then we can accumulate psychological well being and profit. But when you introduce the idea of taxation, you have a non consensual exchange occurring. It's robbery, effectively. It's someone under the threat of legal attacks, violence, coercion, compulsion. You will give me this much of your property or else, right? So the very useful framing for this, because people get very hung up here because we're talking about something that's been with humans since the beginning of time. So I'm talking about taxation and I'm saying it's theft. People just want to throw it out. They're like, there's no way. How could it be theft? It's everywhere. Everyone pays taxes. It's the normal way of things. Let's just. You're clear. You sir, clearly have a tinfoil hat on. Let's go on about our business. Well, let's think about this. If your effective tax rate is 100%, if the product, all the product of Your labor goes to someone else, goes to a tax collector, you are by definition a slave. That is literally the definition of a slave. Right? I work, I don't get anything. None of the value I create do I get. It's all going to someone else and hopefully they give me enough to survive if they value their slave. So a 100% effective tax rate is a slave. A 0% effective tax rate would be fully self owned, self sovereign, individual. They keep all the product of their labor. No matter what value I create in the world, I keep it and I'm free to trade it with other self owned people. In that process of mutual exchange I just described, that creates more value, more wealth for everyone. So in the world today, you just take a look at your effective tax rate. If you live in the Western world, you're probably in the 10 to 30 to 40% range and that is what percentage of a slave you are. Because that amount of your wealth, the product of your work, your labor, the fruits of your past freedom, are being given up to a taxing authority and you have no negotiation in that process. There's no negotiation, you just get a bill.

There's a perceived power, but it's really so much red tape and so much like of a fractional system that when we think we cast votes or we elect superintendents or government representatives, that they will go to bat for us. The unfortunate piece about what you're talking about, which is so profound, it's so profound here we're talking about slavery and freedom, is that there's no structure in place that actually keeps in boundary the elected officials or the people that regulate these things. So they too fall prey really to what I think you started this podcast with, and that is fear or greed. Right. Greed and fear, I think are brother and sister. So there's something about the way that we have, like you said, the oppressor and the oppressed fallen into this trap of if I just not make a big deal about paying 10 to 40% of my money as a slave, then I can drive on nice roads, I can go to the beach and I can quote, be safe. But what's fundamentally flawed about that and how is that unraveling now?

Yeah, the fundamental flaw in all of this, and I would encourage people to read Murray Rothbard if they haven't. He's an American philosopher and libertarian on this subject. But he makes very clear distinction that in any system where taxation exists, you are bifurcating society into two classes. There are those that are benefiting from taxation on a net basis. And there are those that are being harmed by taxation on a net basis. And this can change year over year. You could be an oppressor one year and oppressed the next year.

Right?

If you're, I don't know, if you're working at the fda, getting a big fat salary, making a bunch of backroom deals, benefiting off the fiat currency complex one year, maybe you're an oppressor, and then the next year you go into private industry and, I don't know, start a landscaping business and start to actually render real value to the productive economy and pay taxes. Then all of a sudden, you're the oppressed. This is a very hard point for people to understand. It's not like these people and those people. It's a fluid line that's moving all the time based on your economic participation. And so this bifurcation, though, creates what I think it's all about property, ultimately. And property's a really important point to define because people tend to believe that property is the thing itself. I own a car or a house or stock. They would say, that car is my property, this house is my property, the stock is my property. That's not what property is, though. Property is the relationship between that owner and that asset. You can think about it like a list of who owns what. And there's a list that someone keeps, typically a government, and they say, hey, Robert, here you are, here's your identity. Here's your Social Security number, and it's attached to this house such that if any other person comes into your house and tries to take a nap in your living room, you have recourse to some legal apparatus that can expel them from your home. You can call the cops or whatever it may be. So taxation itself, another way to frame this is it's just a violation of your property. It's just an erosion of that relationship. It's a breakdown of the integrity between owner and asset or owner and the fruits of their labor in a way. So. And we've been kind of trapped in this situation historically because everything is physical. This is where things get kind of bananas and you start to really look at the digital age with fresh eyes. Everything in the physical world requires physical security to protect that property. Right? If someone's going to steal your car or your house or your stock certificate, you need to be able to call on some higher force to stop that theft.

Or you need to defend it yourself.

Or defend it yourself. You can defend it yourself or you can outsource defense, basically, just like any other business. The real problem we've been stuck with though is that we've been communizing our defense. We have a communist defense model today. So we all outsource our defense to the state and we say, all right, I'm going to sit inside of this enclave of peace that's created by the state and play by the rules. Those rules are going to be whatever are imposed upon me. Well, when you're sitting in that enclave, you have property rights. You can create wealth according to their rules. But the, the problem is the institution that we call the state that's charged with preservation of your property rights is at the same time generating revenue from violating your property rights. So you can immediately see, I think the conflict of interest becomes quite evident. You're like, wait a minute, the organization that we put together to protect the relationship between me and my assets is the same organization that preys on the relationship between me and my assets.

This might be very alarming to people that are just hearing this for the first time, but what you're saying has always been there since the very beginning, always in some ways much more violent than now. And I think the subversiveness of the taxation and the subversiveness of the way that it's happening now is under the guise of it's good for you, it's there for you, there's unity. The statism you talked about, you can send a million people to war, but Dunbar effect happens at 150 with monkeys. These are things that we all need to take serious mental stock of because they really trap our amygdala. So as you know, I'm sure in your studies around money and people's wounds around money and beliefs around money, the amygdala is the fear center. So if my amygdala is toning my vagus nerve way over to the sympathetic side, I'm not going to breathe, I'm going to be in fear. I'm going to do what I'm told. I'm going to be a good little boy and a good little girl. I'm going to pay my taxes, I'm going to do what I'm told and I'm not going to ask any questions. There's a psychological wounding, Robert, that happens. And I'm curious, you know, you've been on some of the biggest podcasts and you've spoken at some of the biggest lectures and people look to you as a source of information when it comes to financial intelligence. What is the financial wound that we are experiencing as humanity and how are we transcending that wound right now with digital currency.

This could speak to actually the emergence of money. So we've been in this trap, the sticky situation, let's call it. I need to outsource defense of my property to this organization. But that same organization also preys on my property. So it's a pretty sticky situation. And the state has always been dominant, but we've gotten better through social revolution, through time, through the discovery of things like natural law, which I think are life, liberty and property. That's what this country is based on. The United States is the greatest testament to the effectiveness of life, liberty and property. We've clearly gone far, far astray 250 years into this experiment. But we started off really strong. We had strong rule of law, low unpredictable taxes, and we had sound money. So it allowed us to accumulate a lot of wealth in that aim of creating wealth for oneself and having high integrity property. I'll skip this, but let's just. Everyone knows that gold is money, or everyone knows that gold is valuable. At least let's just say that gold was selected as money because it was one of these forms of property that was most difficult to violate. I could hold a ton of economic energy in a small space, in a safe, or buried in my backyard that no one knew about. That is what made gold become the dominant money in the world. The fact that it can be held in a nondescript way at high density. You get high economic density in a small space. It's really important. And that is why governments today hoard gold too. Gold as money is the geopolitical prime mover, right? You'll see, especially now that we're seeing Russia and China fracture off of the west, they're going to start demanding more payments in gold. Any countries that go to war, the victor will always demand payment in gold from the vanquished. So it's like this is. We could think of gold as the most pristine form of economic energy historically. However, problem with gold as money is that it doesn't work, doesn't work for day to day transactions. You and I, we're in a global digital society. I can't send gold to you through the Internet. I can't pay for coffee with gold. I can't carry gold in my wallet. I can't throw a bunch of gold in my backpack and go on a plane. I mean, you can, but it's like this shit's so impractical, it's not even funny. So you end up with this very. Although gold is great as money for holding value across time. It's terrible for moving it across space. So what did we do as humans? Well, we introduced the central bank. The central bank, and there's a long history here, but starts out as a warehouse, becomes a bank, becomes a central bank. Essentially it's an organization that takes custody of your gold and issues a paper certificate that's redeemable for that gold. And all this is designed to do is to increase the transactability of gold. So you and I can now trade in this paper or the electronic representation of that paper super fast, super easy, no problem. And we all have the call option to the gold should we need to settle. Right. So it's kept on us. We can move value across time and space. Everything's great. What's the problem? Well, you've now introduced human beings into the equation of money. It's not. Gold was something that we were prevented from counterfeiting due to the laws of chemistry and physics and thermodynamics. There's nothing we could do about that. We were governed by unbreakable law in dealing with gold. But once you put gold into a vault and say this paper certificate is a debt certificate for gold, as an IOU for gold, you've now interjected the human political element into, into that monetary system and surprise, surprise, what happens. It gets super corrupt to the point where these banks, which became central banks, start initially running fractional reserves. So they'll be issuing 2, 3, 5, 10, 100x more paper than they have gold on deposit. So it's a fraud, they're perpetrating a fraud before finally reaching 1971, where they just broke the, the peg to gold entirely. And you just have this zero reserve fiat currency standard.

Can you go in depth on that a little bit? Because people don't know about Nixon, they don't know about the gold standard. This is the first time we've ever really gone into this topic, Robert. And it's so powerful because as you know, the fifth element of the Pentagon for well being is financial health. So if people don't know the source of money, what money is, where money came from, and how we transitioned away from gold with Nixon, and I think it was August in 71, then really there's no conversation. So this one. Can you just shed light a little bit on what exactly happened in 1971, how does that impact us today in 2022?

Yeah. So again, government, as the organization charged to preserve property that actually violates property that doesn't. Not just their own citizens, but governments, typically the most Powerful government also tends to be an imperialist. So they try to go out and conquer new territory, bring in new taxpayers into their tax base to increase their revenue. The state is a business, just like every human organization. This is another big point. All human organizations are businesses. They're all accountable to their bottom line. Even your church people are always like, no, not my church. They don't do. Does your church pass around a collection tray?

Yes.

Yes. Are they trying to build a new building or expand or bring in new people or whatever? Yes. All human organizations, every group you're involved in is a business. There's no exceptions to this. Basically, we get to the 20th century where we're deep into the industrial age. Human beings have figured out how to project force across space and time in really new, unique and savage ways. And what happens? We go into the geopolitical theater and we start testing things out and things get out of hand. We erupt in this global warfare that we had never seen before. World War I, World War II. There's a deep history there about how fiat currency enabled a lot of that. Hitler was born from the ashes of the Weimar hyperinflation. So there's something to think about. Do you think Hitler's bad? Hitler would have never existed if not for fiat currency, could have never come to power. There would have not been a hyperinflationary event. He would have never taken power anyways. I'm going to skip some of this in the interest of time, but United States WINS World War II. We have at that time the most physical gold in the world. So we are the dominant institution in the world. We have the richest and most dominant geopolitical institution in the world. What is the first thing we do after World War II? People want to talk about this. The war was about this or was about that or was about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and that's what started World War I. No, it's always about the money and about the property. Every organization is a business. Don't bullshit me with your moral narrative. It's always about the money. The first thing the United States does after it WINS World War II is hold the Bretton Wood Conference. It rewrites the rules of the global economic order. And it says the dollar will be pegged to gold. All of your currencies, everyone else will be pegged to our dollar. This gives or gave the United States the ability to print dollars ad infinitum as much as they want, send them overseas. Other countries send us goods and services in return. Pretty good deal for Us, Right? We just. It's not even paper, by the way. These are just entries on a database. So the Federal Reserve adds zeros. They buy US Government debt. Government takes that freshly printed money, sends it overseas to buy whatever they want. It's this form of imperialism. It's like economic serfdom at the geopolitical scale. Right, yeah, that works. Okay, we're still on a gold standard. The United States is in charge. They hold the most gold. Dollar's pegged to gold. Every other currency is pegged to the dollar. There was a clause left in that agreement in Bretton woods, though, that other countries could redeem their US dollars for gold. US citizens could not. This was outlawed back in 1933. But other countries could. Well, countries are smart. They're competitive businesses. They see the United States issuing more dollars than we have gold in reserve, countries start to call our bluff. They say, okay, hey, you've sent me a lot of dollars. Just paper. There's no wealth. Paper is not wealth unless you're going to draw on it or wipe your butt or something. It's a very low form of wealth relative to the goods and services and machines that were being sent in exchange for it. So countries start to take this dollar that the US Dollar is exporting and try to redeem it for gold, per the terms of the Bretton Woods Conference. And a couple of redemptions take place. I think France redeemed a few other European countries, And finally in 1971, when Germany tried to repatriate some gold. Germany is a very productive economy. They put out a huge net trade surplusly, notorious for a lot of things, but specifically for being an enterprising country. They. They have precision engineering, et cetera, et cetera. They try to start redeeming some of these dollars for gold. And that's when Nixon stepped in, and there was this what's now called the infamous Nixon shock, where he closed the gold window, which was said to be a temporary measure at the time. The United States is going to close down the redemption of gold temporarily. I think the blame was placed, as it always is, on market actors. Right? It's like speculators or someone is causing. Creating turbulence and volatility in the markets. So the government.

But the reality was, is we didn't have enough gold to back up the.

Pieces of paper 100%, full stop. Someone was calling the United States bluff. Germany, of all people, of all countries.

How ironic is that?

The United States is like, okay, enough of that. We're going to stop sending you the gold now. And then you have the US dollar pegged to nothing. There's nothing. It's a confidence game at this point. All of the currencies in the world pegged to the US dollar. This is the experiment that we're seeing unravel in real time. We're 50 years into this fiat currency experiment. We've had many fiat currencies across history. I think the first one was in. I want to say it's in 7th century BC China. I could be wrong about the exact century. They all end in hyperinflation because it's bullshit. It's fiat. Once again, use this money or else. This gives the perpetrator the power to just produce more of that money and engage in more of that violent enforcement. And it dumps all the cost onto the victims until the victims get to a point to where they just can't bear the cost anymore. This is what a hyperinflation is. You're in Venezuela. Physical cash is clogging the gutters. People are eating dogs and cats to survive. Why? Because the money broke. This is where we're at today. It's very bleak. It's very bleak. But fortunately we have Bitcoin.

It can be overwhelming at times because I think about even this word fiat. You know, it's this government issued currency that really, it's not backed by any commodity. It's just a promise. It's like me telling you, hey, I promise that if you give me nine reams of paper that it's worth me mowing your yard nine times. But it's literally a promise. And on your podcast you talk about this, which I love so much, you said, you know, what is money? This is the podcast that you host, that we'll link in the show Notes. You said it's a device for expressing value across space, time. That's one of the coolest things I've ever heard. And it flies in the face of the spiritual people that I sometimes play with that say, money's just energy, Josh. Which I believe. I do believe that money is energy. But just like any energy, no energy can be created or destroyed. It can only be moved. It can only be altered. I can't create more energy. I just access what is here. So do you believe that money is spiritual? I mean, it's a very spiritual question for a spiritual man.

Let's keep it in the realm of energy. Spirituality is much harder to talk about. We could talk about the moral aspects of one, but let's stick with energy because this is a useful framing for money. Money Is energy. That's right. It's a lot of things, but one of the things is energy. What is it about gold that allowed us to secure its economic value across time? What was it about gold? It was the proof of work necessary to create gold. You cannot counterfeit gold. No one has figured out how to create gold in a lab more cost effectively than we can mine it out of the earth. So there is an expenditure of energy necessary to obtain gold. And the supply, even when we allocate time and energy to it, we can only increase the supply of gold a little bit year over year in relationship to the total supply. And a lot of this has to do with the properties of gold. It's indestructible. It's basically infinitely durable. So the more we mine, the more supply we have. I think the total supply mined by humans across history feels like two Olympic sized swimming pools. And we're only increasing that supply by 2% a year. Despite gold being one of the most important assets in the world. It's $11 trillion market. It is energy. It is energy that secures the money from counterfeiting. Compare this to the US dollar, which is a centralized SQL database maintained on premise at the Federal Reserve, where you can increase the money supply, which is to say inflate or counterfeit the money supply at the press of a button with the approval of seven old guys. No energy is necessary. How much energy is it to press a key on a computer versus to go and mine energy out of the earth?

It's a beautiful way to describe it.

There's no security model. There's no security model in fiat. There is a security model in gold. So what happens if money is energy? What's happening when you're just producing fiat ad infinitum? Well, you didn't spend any energy to create it. But those dollars can then be taken into the marketplace and used to acquire goods and services that are based in energy. You want to buy some steak? What is steak? Steak is the energy, the solar energy that's been converted into grass. It's been been converted into beef. And now I can take these US dollars to buy that beef. So what is this doing when one group can arbitrarily expand the supply of dollars that we are all forced to work for? This is very key point. Here's a phrase that people that really resonated with a lot of people. Inflation is legalized counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is criminalized inflation. They are the same thing. Somehow people have, I guess, drank the Kool Aid. So to speak. And they think that inflation is a normal and healthy aspect of a productive economy. And even the word inflation, it's euphemistic. Sounds great. If you don't think about the money and I'm just depreciating the dollars, well, then your house is going up in price, your stock portfolio, your assets, your wages, everything. The first order level of just an illusion seems wonderful, but what's actually happening, it's not the value of those things going up. You are being robbed in broad daylight all the time. It's happening right now. This whole conversation we've had. I'm sure you have dollars in a bank account or under your mattress or whatever. You can't even put them in your yard or under your mattress. You're still going to be diluted through fiat currency inflation because the central bank is a legalized counterfeiting operation.

Some people right now might be experiencing a lot of fear or confusion when you come across these people at their level of development or at their level of awareness. Do you explain this counterfeiting metaphor in the guise of this is the love versus the fear, or is this just the podcast that you're doing that on right now? In other words, how do you explain that to the normal peeps that are just. That have maybe been drinking the Kool Aid for a long time?

Well, I explained it a lot of ways to a lot of different audience cohorts, and I talk to the smartest people in the world to try and evaluate this thing from multiple perspectives and deliver an assimilated truth. This idea of looking at it from a lot of different angles. But yeah, for this particular podcast, I think that the focus on energy, and for me personally, you mentioned me as a spiritual guy. I am a bit of a spiritual guy. Energy is everything, frankly. E equals MC squared. It's actually everything. Mass is frozen energy. Everything in the universe is made of energy. So, surprise, surprise, money is energy. So again, what happens when we put money into a legal monopoly and we say this group of people can counterfeit money? Everyone else is forced to use the counterfeit money. What's happening? It's energetic parasitism. They are sucking life energy out of the productive economy and we have a central bank in every single country in the world? There is no exception to this. Zero exceptions. Here's the perverse thing about it. When people get screwed up psychologically about money, it's usually like a scarcity. They can't figure out how to get enough money. Well, they're kind of responding to the reality as it is it's not their fault. That's why I don't like people that come down on an individual like, oh, you just need to have the abundance mentality. And then the money will just flow in and it's like, bullfucking shit. That dollar that you're holding, that you're trying to save, you're trying to get ahead, you're trying to make ends meet, you're trying to plan for the future is being rug pulled on you all the time. It's being pulled out from under you all the time. And now it's more abundantly clearer than ever. If you look at gas prices and food price inflation again, energy, gas, food, all the fundamental things, premier real estate, the things that require the most energy, are increasing in price fastest. Why? Because they're the biggest target for the parasite that is the central bank. And if you start looking at it through the energetic lens, it does get you to that spiritual landscape a little bit. Because, and I've written about this and one of my pieces titled Masters and Slaves of Money Money, we've tried to create this technology that allows us to engage with everyone in the world in a trustful way. Monetary historians would call this trust minimization, actually, that I can do business with anyone in the world. If I'm holding Bitcoin and they accept Bitcoin, I don't need to know about them or their reputation. It's like, do you have the money? Great, I'll do the thing if you don't have the money. No, I won't do the thing. Your reputation, it doesn't come into play nearly as much. Again, back to this idea of humans being able to collaborate and scale in a way no other animal can. That's because of money. If you inject theft into that trusted substrate, that medium that we're all depending on to not need to worry about. I need the money to just hold the fruits of my labor so I can go and trade it with other people and we can all produce more in cooperation. That's literally. It's called the division of labor, the economic division of labor. Human beings acting in concert are more than the sum of their parts. I'm not making this up. This is by definition how we create wealth. When you inject deceit, fraud, dishonesty into that medium, that's supposed to be the opposite of all those things. It's supposed to be trust, integrity, reliability. Don't you think that has that re patterning of the meta narrative of money? Don't you think that has a re Patterning effect on us, of course. Don't you think it fucks people up? There's a whole rabbit hole here.

But this is the money wound. But this is the money wound, Robert. The money wound that. I love what you said. You hate the abundance mentality where people say, well, if you're broke, you know, just think more abundantly or just think positive. No, I think it's actually take a deep breath and pull back 30,000ft above the sky and see the landscape that we live in. Because the landscape that we live in. Ever since I was a little kid, I always wondered, why are these adults so pissed off? Why is there this interstitial tension among businesses and adults? And I know we all feel it, y' all feel it every day when you go outside. And we're feeling it and seeing it more now than ever because of Instagram and Facebook and social media and the mainstream narrative. So I think about really what money is. And I love that you said that it was energy. And however people want to describe it, I think money is just something that we feel that is a promise that is delivered upon with honesty. But like you said, when energy gets in there, that has malice or energy gets in there that has different intentions, that really, in my opinion, is a demonic energy that has probably been here for a long time and we can go into another rabbit hole on that. But there is dark energy in this world and there's loving energy in this world, I think. And I'm curious how you'd describe this. What is the loving energy of bitcoin? Bitcoin itself is a solution to this really 30, 40 minute problem that you've barely scratched the surface on because it goes much deeper than what you've described. You've done an amazing job of describing the vacuum of the problem that created bitcoin in the first place. What is the loving energy of bitcoin? And for people that don't even know what is bitcoin, how did it come to be?

So I just want to round out the discussion on the moral implications. So there's a long literature about this in Austrian economics, actually, and it's called time preference. And it's a little bit counterintuitive, but the lower your time preference, the longer term thinking you are. So the more versions of your future self you're taking into consideration with every decision. And conversely, the higher your time preference, the shorter term thinking you are. There's a lot of things that contribute to time preference, but money is a major one. If your money is of a high Integrity, supply, and it's predictable, and you can depend upon it to hold its value across time. You're much more likely to have a lower time preference, which is to say a longer time horizon in all of your decision making. Conversely, if your money loses value over time and it's unpredictable, we don't know how many dollars are in circulation, how many dollars will be in circulation, who has them, who gets to decide who's profiting from it, what are the rules? It's to the point. Now, I don't know who else is experiencing this, but when I try to send a wire, I have to complete a fucking form and tell them who it's for and where it's from and where it's going. It's like, fuck you, it's private property. I'll do whatever I want with my money. We're regressing badly. So when your money deteriorates and robs you all the time, we are elevating people's time preference. Again, this is an economic term, shrinking their time horizons for decision making. And this is argued to be a demoralization or a decivilization by definition. Right? Because think about it. If I'm going to make a decision right now, I could either go to the gym and work out and eat healthy and go to bed early, or if I know I'm going to die tomorrow, I've got a really high time preference like, well, shit, all bets are off. I'm going to go do whatever, drink and eat and spend. It doesn't matter. There's no certainty about my future. I'm sorry? There's no certainty about the future of my life. There's a certainty about my future demise. So all of your decisions become immoral. The less you consider your future in any one decision, the more immoral your decisions tend to be, the more consumptive you tend to be. I think with the debasement of fiat currency globally, we are shrinking the time horizons of both individuals and socioeconomic collectives in a way that decivilizes humanity. This is why the Austrians wrote that. I forget who wrote this exactly. They said the moral standard and the monetary standard are inexorably linked. We're actually dialing up or dialing down our morality, our consideration for one another based on the integrity of the money. And with something like that in mind, you could say that the integrity of civilization is really dependent upon the integrity of money. Ultimately, when you had a society on a gold standard, you had human flourishing when there were not war times. But when you start to debase the currency, you start to see the opposite effect. And I think that's what we're moving into today. To get to the point about love, let's say this first. So if the integrity of money is a core contributor to the integrity of civilization, that's one useful way to look at the value of Bitcoin is that we have for the first time in human history, a perfectly predictable money. It's a fixed supply of 21 million. No one can change it. No political force can do anything about it. No government can outlaw it, sanction it, seize it. If it's custody properly, it cannot be seized. That's very important. We talked about the evils of inflation if it can't be inflated. That's very important. We talked about the nature of property, where all property and physical space needs physical security. Therefore we need a government or some institution of security specialization in violence to protect that property, right? Well, guess what? Bitcoin's the first property, right? Independent of the state monopoly on violence, it lives orthogonal to the whole thing. You're just outsourcing your security to a distributed network of self interested miners. So they're just participating in a competition to run your transactions and you're paying them based on when you want to move the money. The whole sphere of property has. Now the government's been rug pulling us on the dollar for centuries. I say the dollar, I mean fiat more generally. The state has been rug pulling people on money for centuries. Well now Bitcoin's rug pulling the state, it's taking property, not all property, but the most important form of property, money out of the hands of government. And this is something that Friedrich Hayek is a very famous philosopher and Austrian economist, said a long time ago that we would never see the separation of money and state until we discovered some sly roundabout way to take it out of their hands. And a lot of bitcoiners believe that Bitcoin is that sly roundabout way that we finally introduce something that the government itself cannot stop.

But is it really that sly though? I mean it seems like it's very 01 logical out for all to see. On a global ledger where everybody verifies transactions, it doesn't seem too sly.

Well, it was sly enough to get to a $1 trillion market cap without being squashed. And at that size, it's really hard to stop. We're not there today. We're off the all time high by quite a few points. But that's the $200 trillion question. Can Bitcoin be stopped every Vested power structure in the world wants to stop it. But Bitcoin is specifically designed for this. It's a monetary technology wrapped in military grade encryption designed to survive all attacks, literally. It doesn't do anything else except that it just creates a new block every 10 minutes and sticks to a supply cap of 21 million and survives. That's why people, they get so stumbled on bitcoin because it's too basic. People call it old technology or it's not fast enough, or it doesn't do this thing that my other crypto does. None of that shit matters. We need it to only do those three things and do those three things well and forever. And that's all it needs to do. And that's what it's been doing flawlessly for 13 years. So love deep, deep, deep topic. Here's something that's interesting though about bitcoin. So let's first say, all right, fiat currency, we've talked about the self destruction that it imparts. Another aspect of this is that governments are addicted to fiat currency. I mean this literally. When you become addicted to a substance, alcohol, drugs, whatever, you engage in a process called reciprocal narrowing. So you can think about it this way. I'm a guy struggling at work. Maybe I've got some family problems. I'm having a hard time making ends meet. Probably also has to do with the central bank that's robbing me that I may or may not be aware of. But I'm struggling, right? Well, I struggle. Yet I find relief in alcohol. I like to drink. I like to drink with my buddies on the Friday, take a little bit of the paycheck, okay? The drinking though, is causing me problems at home and at work, right? So I go to the bar on Friday and Saturday and maybe my wife and kids don't like it. And then I'm showing up late for work and so I get into this vicious cycle where things are getting a little bit worse because of my drinking, which actually drives me to want to drink a little more because things are worse. And what happens is we get caught in this vicious feedback loop and we spiral out of control. That is the definition of addiction. Go Google reciprocal narrowing and addiction. You can read all about it. I had a long conversation with John Vervaeke about this. We did an eight part series. It was a real eye opener for me.

I've also heard addiction described as a separation from self. So the opposite of addiction is connected either with myself or with you. That's addiction as well, which is taking.

The words out of my mouth.

It's such a mirror for what you're describing. I don't mean to like stop you in your metaphor here or in your story, but like, wow. I mean, if the lightning isn't striking everyone's minds right now, rewind and listen again. Because what you're sharing is ultimately the key you're leading.

You know exactly where I'm going with this. So addiction, this act, this process, let's say, of reciprocal narrowing, self destructive. Reciprocal narrowing, which can be done with an individual, with a substance abuse problem is the same thing that's done with fiat currency. You print money to try to paper something bad happens. You print some money to try and harvest additional economic surplus and go fix it. Well, what does that do? It sows the seeds for future inflation that you need to inflate more money even faster, even worse next time to get less of an effect. So this is the whole. Your first beer, you fill it. Your second beer, you don't, you start to chase that original high, right? This is what addicts do, this is what governments do, only they do it across spans of decades. What is the opposite of that? What is the opposite of addiction? This reciprocal narrowing, self destructive process is love. Love is reciprocal opening. The best in me wants to see the best in you. I want to see you succeed and flourish. Your success and flourishing feeds into my success and flourishing and then I feed back into you. This is the whole and this is the essence of capitalism too. The division of labor and specialization. It's like everyone do what they do best, own yourself and trade with self owned others and we create more wealth. There's a recipe reciprocity there that it's not just this soft thing called love. It has very tangible, pragmatic economic results. Well, what is bitcoin? Bitcoin is a money that once you hold. Like if I hold Bitcoin and you hold bitcoin, we now have, here's another definition of money that's useful. It's a call option on capital. So the money itself is not capital. I can't eat the money, I can't turn it. The money will not produce cars for me. I can go buy a factory that will produce cars, whatever. Once you and I are on a bitcoin standard, we now have a call option on global capital. Not only all the global capital that is presently available. Bitcoin is just a pure money. We can use it, we can spend it to buy anything. Let's just agree that money can be used to buy anything the market can bear. But you have that Forever. If you have 1000 Bitcoin, you have 1000 Bitcoin out of a possible 21 million forever. If you're just holding that position and bitcoin continues to outcompete these other monies that all fail, by the way, all fiat currencies go to zero. Then you have this call option on global capital forever, forever. So now the whole game changes. My whole perception of reality changes. Because I want you to succeed. I want you to get insanely wealthy and innovate to your heart's content, satisfy human wants, create a business, become famous, rich, famous. I want all of that for you. Because what does that mean? That means the global capital stock has grown and I am now richer. So there's this transformation of incentives, like a complete polar flip where in a fiat world you're just trying to stay ahead of inflation and you'll steal, you'll lie, you'll do anything to outpace the theft of inflation that's being perpetrated on you. To Bitcoin that has zero unexpected inflation, zero percent unexpected inflation. Now all I want to do is see my fellow humans succeed. Because the more they succeed, the richer I am.

How do we know if Bitcoin will stand the test of time? You already talked about its military grade encryption. And for people that just want to begin this journey. So two questions. How do people begin cultivating this financial independence for themselves? What's the first two or three steps they take? And then lastly, from your education and from everybody that you know, some of the top people in the world world, when it comes to financial currency that's digitally traded, what's going to stand the test of time with Bitcoin?

We don't know that Bitcoin will stand the test of time. We don't know any. There's no certainties in life, by the way, including, well, there's death, there's not taxes thanks to bitcoin. But I would argue those three things. Bitcoin needs to do new block of transactions every 10 minutes, adhere to a supply cap of 21 million and survive. It's done perfectly for 13 years straight. Perfectly. I mean, there's minor arguments here where people are like, well, there was this one bug that got announced and then so on, but nothing's changed. Bitcoin's hit a trillion dollar market cap. Its supply is 21 million. Blocks come out every 10 minutes. It's done what it has set out to do perfectly for 13 years straight. The bet on Bitcoin is that it will continue to do those things. If it does those things, a study of monetary history tells us that it will outcompete every other money in the world that is depreciated by fiat all the time. Try to make it real simple here. We're producing more and more dollars. Like as I described, that reciprocal narrowing process. We have to produce more and more dollars to keep the debt structure intact. So 2008, 700 billion people were like, wow, that's a crazy bailout number. We just printed $700 billion. That's insane. 20, 20, was it $6 trillion in the U.S. so 10x in roughly 10 years, 12 years, the next one will they go up by orders of magnitude. The next one will be another 10x. Whatever shakes out next, who knows what it's going to be. Whatever excuse comes to the surface here. Governments are going to print tens of trillions of dollars. You're producing more and more and more and more, exponentially more dollars, and we're producing exponentially less Bitcoin. Every four years, the new supply of bitcoin gets cut in half. Every four years, it gets cut in half and half and half and half and half.

I have to interrupt you here, and I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you. So if somebody wanted to get bitcoin, there's really no guarantee for the future, but there's definitely no guarantee for fiat in the way that money's being traded now. So it's almost like not the lesser of two evils, just the lower, more loving path than compared to what we've experienced before. Because there is no guarantees that any of these two structures will 100% with certainty work.

Oh, there's no guarantee that anything works. I would say we're pretty sure the sun's going to come up tomorrow, but we don't have any guarantees. But fiat is especially bad in that every fiat currency fails except the ones that are active today. Just open a book, study. There's a lot of great books on this, but one I would recommend is fiat currency inflation in France. It just goes through all these moral and socioeconomic implications. The bet is this. The bet is that even if fiat survives, we have to produce exponentially more fiat. If bitcoin survives, we're producing exponentially less Bitcoin. If you're pricing bitcoin in terms of exponentially more dollars, you have exponentially more dollars chasing exponentially less bitcoin. This is a higher dollar price for bitcoin every year. Not every year, every cycle. Every time there's a reset. I think it's as simple as that it's just being able to store the fruits of your labor in a medium that cannot be confiscated, cannot be inflated, cannot be stopped, cannot be seized, cannot be reversed, cannot be sanctioned, can't be tracked. If you do it correctly, it's a return to life, liberty, and property, which are the foundational principles of Western civilization, which the state is actively destroying today.

What do you think is more important? Because you mentioned natural law earlier. Is it more important for people to learn how to grow their own food, protect themselves, use responsible for firearms, cultivate community where there's somewhat of a hierarchy that's based on people's natural wants, desires, and talents? Or is it subsequent? Or is it different than just investing in Bitcoin and making sure that digitally that our money is sound? Which one's more important? Or are they both equally important right now for what's to come?

Well, it's hard, you know, everyone has to reconcile their own hierarchies of value and decide what's most important for them. But in my view, in times of great uncertainty, when you're in a situation that you actually cannot, no one can predict where we are right now. We're deep into uncharted territory with fiat. It's been global, it's been coordinated. We're 50 years in. The state is literally insane right now. I mean, you've seen that for the past two years. You know, it's really, really bad. Things are really uncertain. Let's just say that. What's the best strategic response to uncertainty? Optionality. You want as many options as possible because you don't know which way things are going to move. Right? And that's what money is. Money is an instrument of pure optionality. But it's not enough. I can't shoot people with money. I can't eat money. There's other options I need to cultivate for myself.

When the Titanic was sinking, the rich man tried to give the guy money to get on the boat. He was like, your money's no good.

Exactly.

We're kind of there in an analogy right now.

We're there now. I would just say constructing a personal portfolio of options is what's most important. Those options. Money is clearly important, affords you a lot of options in the world, especially a money that you can put in your brain and cross a border with. You can't do that with gold. You can't do that with fiat, a money, you know, that can't be inflated money. It just gives you a great deal of certainty by being in Bitcoin. Now People argue with me like, oh no, what do you mean? The price volatility is so high, it's like, I'm not advocating to use Bitcoin as the money you live off of. I advocate for Bitcoin as a savings technology. So if you're looking to save and accumulate savings over the long term, that's what I use Bitcoin for. So I run a profitable business. I buy a certain amount of bitcoin every single day. My revenue stream is not even. I have peaks and valleys in my revenue stream. If I have excess USD revenue come in and I'll be opportunistic on bitcoin, I'll buy bitcoin price dips and I put all of it in long term savings. So my strategy is to just accumulate as much bitcoin as possible and never sell it. Never sell until I have to sell it, and hopefully that's never. Other pieces of this I think are looking at self sufficiency with food, 3D printed firearms, decentralized media. What we're doing right now is a big hole in the state's edifice. Control over mainstream media is what allowed the state to be so dominant in the 20th century. But the Internet has blown holes in that.

We're going to link something here as we say goodbye. And it was on your ig and it was like, I don't know who it was, but it was a room of people. And there was this woman speaking and she was like, trump's trying to control how people think. And then she stops and she said, but that's our job. She said it on accident, but it was actually. What was there anyway? I think you mentioned like, oh, here's someone being human. It's like, we can only be this man behind the curtain for so long as a society before we do have to learn some tough love lessons. And like you said before, love isn't always soft and kind. Sometimes love moves swift. And I really hope, and I'm curious how you feel as we say goodbye for the future of money and humanity, because I think there's a corollary within money's integrity and our, in our, in our health as a society.

Yeah, yeah. Our health and our wealth are clearly very bound up. You know, as. As we have advanced as a civilization, so has our lifespan, for instance. It's not perfect. Right. We have a lot of these fiat issues like fast food and whatnot that are destroying our health today. But in terms of my optimism, I'm extremely optimistic for the deep future of humanity, like the long Run of humanity. I think the digital age is going to be the transcendence of statism. I think we're going to wake up from this hallucination and be like, what the fuck have we been doing for 5,000 years? It's so perverse because the less coercion we have, the more wealthy we are. So it's like we're fighting over the wealth. But that is a self defeating effort. The fighting over the wealth is the reason there's not more wealth. Because we're engaging in taking and not making. We're creating less aggregate wealth in the world. People are all screwed up mentally. It's a whole thing. The medium, the mid game though from here to there is just fraught with uncertainty. I recommend a book called the Sovereign Individual on this topic. It was written in 1997. I actually had one of the authors on my show recently. We'll be dropping that episode soon. But this book predicted, again written in 1997, the emergence of social media, the emergence of bitcoin, the use of a pandemic by states to reinforce the validity of their borders, and it ultimately predicted the dissolution and collapse of the nation state in the digital age. There's a whole another rabbit hole to explain that. But let's just say that the digital age, the social institutions suitable for the digital age are going to look nothing like what we had in the industrial age. We're starting over and that is going to create a lot more peace, prosperity, wealth, less coercion, less violence, less fear. But to go from here to there, you know, the states are going to fight to hold on to everything they've got. I don't know what it looks like. So none of us do optionality well.

And I think of healing as a spiral. So as we go up, we're still going around and so as we fight and not fight and learn how to love and still be in fear, it's never going to be this linear. One day a light switch flicks and all of a sudden bitcoin is king. It's going to be this arduous path of the tree shaking. So my viewpoint and as we give people a place to find more information about your podcast, everybody right now can go listen to Robert. I've really enjoyed this is like one of the least amounts I've ever spoken on an interview because I just wanted to listen. I just wanted to hear what you had to say because my financial intelligence has always and continues to be a huge spaciousness for me. A white space. And I'll tell you and the wellness industry. And in the spiritual world, there is no greater place where it's apparent that people are broke because you have a lot of people that want to help other people, but their financial intelligence isn't there. So it's been phenomenal to learn from you. The podcast is called what is Money? You can go to whatismoneypodcast.com but as we say goodbye and I talked about the spiral, and we think about all these ways, there's so many things that we must learn in order to be be sound. Financially, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. How do you define wellness? And what is money's role, either digital or gold, in you living your personal life? Well, how would you define wellness? How does money weave into that?

Well, there's something really transformative about bitcoin or interacting with bitcoin, and this is. Things get a little weird when you get to this point, because there's a lot of people that are deep down the bitcoin rabbit hole that are experiencing radical personal transformation. I've got my own long story about that, but let's just say in a nutshell that discovering bitcoin and going down the bitcoin rabbit hole transformed me from a fiat fuck boy to a bitcoin think boy. Maybe you could say something like that. I haven't unpacked that story yet for anyone, but it's been radical. And maybe this is the time preference thing that the Austrians wrote about. Once you can put your money in a place that you know will be there and no one can violate, all of a sudden it unlocks you psychologically. And maybe part of this, too is when you're studying bitcoin and what is money. You are also studying history. So you're looking deep into history. You're also unlocking yourself to have a lower time preference and expand your own perceptual horizons in the future and the past. And it is civilizing in a way, almost fortifies your morality in a way. My health has improved a lot. I'm a father now. I gave up alcohol just kind of voluntarily. I never really had a problem with it that much, but I just. My reading list was outpacing me. So I was like, I'm just going to stop drinking. Then I can just focus on these books all the time. I found extremely meaningful work. I was never satisfied. I was a CFO before, mostly focused in tech, but it was such a cutthroat, kind of deceptive, scummy type of affair all the time.

The oppressor and the oppressed model you talked about.

Yeah, exactly. You're always trying to sell more than you have and cut deals that are in your favor. It's just such a. Energetically not a good space. But in bitcoin, I've found a community, I guess, that's suitable for me. And, and I'm not the only one. Again, I'm just speaking for my own personal transformation. It's like, okay, sure, dude, you found bitcoin and you improved your life. That doesn't mean it's for everyone. There's a great guy, a good friend of mine, John Vallis, and his podcast focuses on this. You should have him on actually. He's a super smart, well spoken guy. That's his specialty. He dives into bitcoiners that are experiencing personal transformation in their life as a result of interacting with this technology. I don't know what that means. Is bitcoin involved in the revolution or acceleration of consciousness? I don't know.

I feel like it is. I feel like when you speak about this, if it's really a global ledger, that's like a big basket where every single one of us is part of the weave and there's no way to make a hole in that basket because every. Everyone's connected to each other, then really it is about honesty. And it is finally a way for us to all be at the seashore, be in tribes and trade goods and services without this oppressor and oppressed, this non duality that's talked about in this world. Sometimes I feel like, man, is that even possible? And I think it is. I think there's always going to be a certain degree of duality. There's always going to be love and fear, dark and light a little bit. But we're so out of keel right now and we're so towards the path of fear collectively, energetically, objectively. I mean, it's. It's radical. So I've really appreciated this kind of conversation with you because we didn't get into the weeds and the nuts and bolts of, you know, how to trade bitcoin and what to look for. For people that want to take that first step, where do they go, you know, if somebody's getting inspired by this and they want to be a part of that basket, we're all holding it together as a global society. Where do they go? How do they start?

Yeah, I mean, this is a hard one to answer because there's a lot of options out there, but I would say you can find me on Twitter. Reedlove22 b r w d l o v l o v e22. That's breedlove22. I have a link tree there and I have links to companies that I use. Like I use Swan to buy my bitcoin. I use CASA to custody my bitcoin. There's a lot of options out there, but I'm happy to make recommendations. You know, feel free to DM me. I respond to the best of my ability, but there's a lot of them out there. I just wanted to echo back the thing you said about the basket, because that's beautiful, you know, the idea that we could all be part of something and, you know, a global institution, if you will, that's perfectly integral. Something that can't really break. This would be quite a bit meta. But I think it would be appropriate to say here the level of realization I'm at now is that it's all patterns. All of reality is just a bunch of interacting patterns. Bitcoin is this pattern of pure honesty. There's nothing hidden. Literally, there's nothing hidden. It's open source code. It's definable. No matter which way you look at it, you see it in its totality. And if money is such an important pattern for the human species, doesn't it make sense that an honest, truthful, sincere pattern like that would resonate into us in the same way that fiat corrupted our character and our souls? Doesn't it make sense that this unincorruptible money would cleanse us of that? So I think that. I know I'm out there right now, but that is what it's felt like for me in my own personal transformation.

No, I feel like you're right here. I don't think you're out there too much. I've really appreciated this mindset and really this consciousness, this perspective that you've given us today. Lots of wellness, a ton of wisdom. Robert Breedlove, thank you for coming on the show.

Thanks, man. Really enjoyed it.

Sam.