#502: Robert Breedlove on Bitcoin As The Apex Predator

Robert Breedlove is a bitcoin educator and runs the “What is Money?” show. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of bitcoin, corporate America protecting their balance sheets, when central banks will join us, and what the world will look like in 25 years. , ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global full-time employees and contractors. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Learn more about Remote and their new Remote for Startups program at http://www.remote.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Robert Breedlove is a Bitcoin educator and runs the What Is Money show. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of Bitcoin, corporate America protecting their balance sheets, when central banks will join us, and what the world will look like in 25 years. I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products include a high-yield interest account where you can earn up to 8.6% APY, a US dollar loan account, where they'll give you a US dollar loan against your crypto collateral, and a no-fee cryptocurrency exchange trading environment, where you can go and you can buy things like Bitcoin, Ether,

• 0:52Anthony Pompliano?

  and others. They also are coming out with a Bitcoin Rewards credit card. That's right, they have a waitlist. If you have a BlockFi account, you can get on the waitlist. And that credit card will allow you to use a regular credit card, but rather than get cash back or airline miles, it'll give you Bitcoin back. I'm super excited about it. I'm an investor in the company, and I can't wait to use the credit card. So go to blockfi.com/pomp and sign up today. Again, blockfi.com/pomp. Next up is Choice. Choice is rebuilding the way you approach retirement, which starts with making it simple to include Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in your savings. More than 20,000 Bitcoiners, myself included, have already signed up to start investing

• 1:35Anthony Pompliano?

  via this vehicle. Whether we are talking about crypto or stocks, Choice lets you trade real Bitcoin and Tesla in the same place, all without paying a dime in capital gains taxes. It's your retirement account. And if you want to hold your keys all the way to the moon, you can do that, too. Either way, Choice is on a mission to give you full control over your retirement savings. So head on over to retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, that's retirewithchoice.com/pomp and sign up for an account today. And one more thing, you know how I feel about this, but if you have a pro that manages your money, don't take any BS from them. Choice has tools for them, too. Take back control today and

• 2:15Anthony Pompliano?

  visit retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com/pomp. I've got an account there. Most of my retirement savings are there. You'll love it. Go check them out. Lastly is remote. In 2021, every business is a global business. But how do you pay your global team and comply with international labor laws? Remote handles payroll, benefits, taxes, and compliance to help companies of all sizes pay and manage full-time and contract workers all over the world. No matter where your team lives and works, Remote's global employment solutions keep your team, your finances, and your intellectual property secure.

• 2:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Remote never charges percentages or fees, just best-in-class global employment solutions for a low, flat rate. The world's top global companies love Remote. GitLab, the world's largest all-remote organization, trusts Remote to manage their global team, and so should you. Remote is funded by Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and a host of other top-tier investors. Learn more about Remote and their new Remote for Startups program at remote.com. Again, remote.com. If you're running a business, use remote at remote.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Robert. I hope you enjoy this one.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Robert back with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Glad to be here, Pomp. Thanks for having me.

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  The last time we talked, it was pre-COVID, and we had a fantastic conversation, really just breaking down kind of Ray Dalio's thoughts around gold, stores of value, Bitcoin, et cetera. Sounds like he has come around quite a bit, and maybe he's not a full-blown Bitcoiner yet, but he's definitely closer than he was back then. Maybe give us just kind of an overview in terms of what you've been up to over the last year and a half or two years.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, last time we spoke, almost exactly a year ago, and it was, I guess, about two weeks before the COVID meltdown.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  And that, as we were just touching on, it's been like this singular accelerating event for the Bitcoin thesis, the digital age in general.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  So, very strange times, but also kind of exciting to be in the Bitcoin space. Dalio, it seems, has come around somewhat. I think his most recent stance on Bitcoin was that it's one hell of an invention. So he's still not, he still seems like he's a bit lost in the blockchain buzzword jungle. And he still has some concerns about volatility and could Bitcoin be disrupted by another crypto asset, et cetera, et cetera. So he's still kind of looking at it as a consumer product. I don't think he's fully grasped the nature of an internet protocol,

• 5:45Speaker 03

  the nature of the social layer built on top of it, right? That people, holders specifically, all the rules in Bitcoin are optimized for holders. So there's really, you can't, there's not any design space left to introduce a value proposition that can break that network effect of Bitcoin. I mean, not a conceivable one. I mean, anything can happen, who knows? But Bitcoin is essentially, as we touched on in the last episode, has perfected all the properties of money. And now, we're talking about a $1 trillion asset. I mean, this thing,

• 6:21Speaker 03

  as Sailor alluded to, that when these digital networks get above $100 billion, which is 10x ago for Bitcoin, they tend to become indomitable, right? They have such an entrenched network effect.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  You know, I guess you could say the brand recognition too is really important, that you can't even mention a competitive crypto asset without comparing it to Bitcoin. So Bitcoin has this kind of self-reinforcing narrative in the world. And that's ultimately what it is, right? It's an idea. The whole thing's an idea. And it runs countervailing to all of the entrenched power interests in central banks, right? Their premise on the opposite worldview, that we should just be able to expand the money supply arbitrarily at will to fix all of our problems. You know, Bitcoin flips the whole thing on its head and says, no, we should have a firmly

• 7:17Speaker 03

  fixed money supply that is a sound power reservoir for the energy that we sacrifice, the time and energy we sacrifice to obtain money. The money supply should reflect the scarcity of the time and energy we sacrifice to obtain it. And this idea, I think, is just tearing, it's just breaking out throughout the world, right? You know, again, COVID, we have this, the sharpest liquidity collapse in market history. This is in the March 12th Black Thursday event, was a faster global equities drawdown and flight to safety than the 1929 collapse.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Now, so far, the repercussions of that have not been as severe, but as we know, when you just increase artificial liquidity to try to paper over these disasters, you're just delaying and exacerbating the ultimate correction to economic reality. And I think there was one headline, I think it was Jim Cramer's show, where it showed like, bottom of the screen, stock market all time high, screen behind him, 40 million Americans unemployed. So we've, the central bank model has totally diverged the market from its underlying valuation fundamentals. And now, everything's become much more a product of policy than supply and demand.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  And, you know, things would be pretty bleak and grim without Bitcoin right now, because it's the only thing that, I guess, is still rooted in supply and demand, almost that you can find in the world. Everything that can't be printed right now is overpriced, right? Commercial real estate, equities, anything that's being substituted in as a store value, since the store value function of money has been totally compromised, fiat, is at a historic

• 9:17Speaker 03

  All time high price point. And Bitcoin, it seems at least, although it's at an all time high, it's really just beginning this long run to actually do what we say it was going to do, which is consume all the monetary premium in the world. And, you know, what we're trillion dollar asset today that store value market cap globally is probably closer to 250 trillion. So hard to believe, as it may be, there's still a lot of upside in this market.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely. One of the people who, unlike Ray Dalio, really, really understands Bitcoin and has become a massive proponent since last time we talked is Michael Saylor. You recently produced an entire series called The Saylor Series, where you just talked with him. And so maybe talk through a little bit in terms of your understanding of his worldview and then what you took away from the recording of that series.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so another one of these just out of the blue events was actually Saylor and MicroStrategy. You know, he was in a unique position in that his company was sitting on a lot of cash. Saylor, for the audience that may not know, is the CEO of MicroStrategy, their NASDAQ listed business intelligence firm. They had been running a pretty conservative ship financially, at least for the past decade. They're sitting on a nice treasury of cash, about $500 million. And in the wake of COVID, you know, as Michael's been making his media rounds, he just had to figure out what to do with this melting ice cube.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  And they evaluated all their alternatives and ultimately decided on Bitcoin. So it was interesting. I think this was August, maybe, when he announced originally. And I just woke up one day, saw this announcement, I'm like, what is this? This is crazy. Some big corporation has bought a ton of Bitcoin. And then in my, I've got a Twitter DM from him and he's sending me a link to the article. And so we started having a conversation. And, you know, it turns out he had been following a lot of the maximalists and, you know, your show and other people's writings for a long time, or, you know, relatively long time, a few months. And he The interesting thing about that for me was that this guy went from essentially,

• 11:45Speaker 03

  you know, he had disclaimed Bitcoin back in 2013. I don't think he thought a lot about it between 13 and 2020, to my knowledge. Then all of a sudden, he has this COVID event where he has to reevaluate his liquidity profile and how he's going to maintain shareholder value in the treasury. So from March 2020 to August, so we're talking about a course of five months, he basically fully accelerated on the Bitcoin rabbit hole, right? He went through all the, all the content we produced, all the writing, he knew it all. And so the amazing thing about that to me was, and I, I thought this before, that the thesis of Bitcoin, although it's extremely complicated, it's very multidisciplinary, you have to understand

• 12:30Speaker 03

  things from many different angles to really to grok Bitcoin or to understand it, the general value proposition is not that complicated, once you get it, right? It's just money that has a fixed supply. So you can't, it's money that can't be stolen, value that can't be stolen through inflation, deauthorization, confiscation, all of these things. And I had this thesis that people would wake up to this relatively simple, once this idea got out and it sort of shook off the fud that, that still plagues it a little bit, that people would take this idea up very quickly. Because it's just money that can't be reproduced in a world where money is being infinitely reproduced by the central bank.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  And I thought he, you know, Saylor's acceleration in the rabbit hole was one great example of that. He was just, he went zero to hero, so to speak, in this course of a few months. So, in our conversations, I was talking to him and I said, you know, I had this idea for a show, I didn't even know what it would be at this point, podcast, YouTube channel, whatever. I just said, I wanted to sit down with the best thinkers in the Bitcoin space, but also in, in the macroeconomic world. So it's not just a Bitcoin focused podcast, and talk to them in a long form discussion. So I would sit down and talk to you as long

• 13:53Speaker 03

  as it took. We could talk for 50 hours if you wanted. And the idea was to get to the first principles of your worldview. So basically externalizing the mind of these amazing thinkers and show the world how they think, how they build their worldview. And my thesis behind this was that in a lot of this coming from the book Sovereign Individual, which we talked about last time too, in the 1500s, I guess it was around 1490, when Gutenberg invented the printing press, we collapsed the cost of information access. So all of the sudden, we went from like 10 million books produced in the prior 500 years,

• 14:34Speaker 03

  there were 10 million books produced in a decade, once the printing press was made available. And the consequence of this was, there was a great many more thinkers emerging in the world, a great, much more variety of thought emerging in the world. And a lot of this new critical thinking was actually heretical to the institution of the day, which was the church. So the printing press sort of led to the downfall of the church as the dominant institution of the world. But the thought there was that it's the, when we decrease the cost of accessing information, we actually increase general critical thinking or general intelligence, right?

• 15:14Speaker 03

  People can access information more freely, ideas are much more free-flowing. So I thought that here in the digital age, maybe we're seeing something similar. We once again collapsed the cost of information. You know, we have the library of the world, so to speak, at our fingertips through a smartphone or a laptop, that maybe this would be a similar type of event to the Gutenberg printing press. And we're actually going to increase critical thinking in the world and increase kind of general intelligence. So what I wanted to bring into this new paradigm was long-form discussions that would, that would almost be like the intellectual Olympics in a way.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Like you sit down and you see someone that's got, you know...

• 16:04Speaker 03

  A long track record of experience, you know, clearly a brilliant guy. He wrote a book in 2010 called The Mobile Wave that basically said, go out and buy Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, they're going to dominate the world. Clearly, that thesis played out perfectly over the past decade. And just, you know, help spread, I guess, the information that these people have obtained, that they've won, basically, if you hard won through experience throughout their careers, and share that with the world and see if people would have an affinity for it. And it turns out, I think the thesis is right so far. I'm getting feedback on the Sailor series specifically, that it's some of the best

• 16:49Speaker 03

  content people have ever seen. Because this guy, to give you a little idea, we really tried to build his entire world route from first principles. So we started in the Stone Age. We're talking about Stone Age technologies like fire, hydraulics, which are, you know, using water to overcome gravity, missiles. And building this view of how mankind is the animal that channels energy across time and space toward the achievement of aims. That's what distinguishes us from every other animal, is that we can plan, we can build these intellectual structures. We then go out and harness energy to energize those structures and we create things in the world.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  That's what civilization is. And just brick by brick, building this intellectual edifice that took us from the Stone Age into the Industrial Age, into the Digital Age, frankly, and then evaluating Bitcoin through that long scope of how this impacts everything going forward, how it totally changes the game. And Sailor is just a master speaker. He drops in so many wonderful analogies comparing Bitcoin to the discovery of steel or Bitcoin to the discovery of antiseptics, right? Making the point that fiat currency is like toxic money, actually. It infects our socioeconomic structures.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  And now we have a money that's basically free of unpredictability. And how that's just a total game changer. So we recorded.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Two sessions initially, about five hours each. That came out to about nine episodes. We're scheduled to do at least one more session. That could be between another one and three episodes. Going forward, I'm going to sit down with other prolific thinkers in the space. Jeff Booth is next. We're already working on that conversation framework. Just got an all-star cast lined up. And for me, this is amazing because this is something I would be doing no matter what. It really is a passion project. It's deeply satisfied my own intellectual curiosity as I'm trying to write and think about these things. New and varied perspectives, like to get inside someone's mind to this extent changes me.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Like I'm, I now think differently as a result of interacting with Sailor throughout this series. And yeah, I'm just super excited about it. I think we can keep, you know, I think people really like the first one. And I'm hoping they're going to like the ones to come here, so.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So Michael Saylor kind of cracked open the dam, if you will, in terms of corporations buying Bitcoin and putting it on their balance sheet. He did it in a very kind of transparent, honest way. What I mean by that is he basically said to shareholders, I am considering doing this. If you do not want to be a part of this strategy, basically I'll buy back your shares at a premium. And then he went ahead and started to execute this strategy. He has continued to kind of take out very low interest loans or debt. And by using capital markets is able to continue to fund the further purchase of more and more Bitcoin.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  He's at now over 90,000 Bitcoin that is put on that balance sheet. Kind of four, four and a half billion dollars worth of value based on today's prices. Talk a little bit about what you evaluate the impact of this decision. Obviously, we've seen Square go out. They did a $50 million purchase, then another 170 million. Comes out to about 5% of their cash position. We've seen Tesla, about 7, 8% of their cash position, about 1.5 billion. And there's a whole host of other kind of crypto-related businesses that obviously hold Bitcoin on their treasury as well in the public markets. But how do you evaluate kind of what we're seeing with corporations actually buying Bitcoin and putting it on their balance sheets?

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think at a very high level, we're seeing this game theory that many Bitcoiners have long identified, you know, as early as 2011, 12, 13, 14. We knew how the game theory of money operated. What was different about Bitcoin is that this is the first asset that kind of emerged at the retail level first, before permeating these larger levels of organization. So I think that it's a really, really big deal. I mean Sailor is, will probably go down. I joked with him at the opening of the show that for a company called MicroStrategy, this

• 21:30Speaker 03

  might be the most brilliant macro strategy ever executed. If the Bitcoin thesis continues to play out in the way that we think it will, in the way that it currently is, you know, he stands to become one of the most wealthy people in the world, and MicroStrategy stands to become one of the most successful companies in the world. And it's all a result of the game theory, or you can also think of this as the vortex of incentives, that is Bitcoin, in that it basically has bootstrapped itself into existence by paying everyone to interact with it. And again, we saw this work at the individual level initially, where people could just

• 22:15Speaker 03

  mine it, convert electricity into Bitcoin, then people found some value in its exchange properties, you know, it can't be seized, it can be moved 24 by 7, et cetera, et cetera. So then it gained a market value, and as has been said, that was kind of the miracle event. Once Bitcoin established a market exchange value against fiat currency, it became, that was the beginning of its monetization essentially. Everything from that event has just been a step function of its constricting supply flow. So every four years it's constricting by 50%, and it's just bootstrapped itself upward.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  And for Sailor to make a move that bold, I mean...

• 23:05Speaker 03

  First of all, this guy was, is predisposed to understanding Bitcoin. Again, a guy that wrote the Mobile Wave, he understands network effects. He runs a business intelligence firm. He gets software. I think the last piece that he dropped in after March 2020 was just, you know, central banking, basically, or monetary policy, or Austrian economics. Whatever that monetary element was that he plugged in just sort of crystallized this worldview for him on Bitcoin. And no matter what amount of work we have done, like us Bitcoin ambassadors and talking about it, educating, writing about it, money always speaks louder than words. You know, actions speak louder than words.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  So the fact that he's now up to, you know, the initial allocation was $500 million from his treasury. He has since taken on some very cost-effective debt. I think his first round of convertible notes on secured debt was at 75 basis points. I think the latest round was at zero. So it was literally taking on free debt capital. And the reason he's able to do that is because of the optionality Bitcoin is installed on his balance sheet effectively. So credit providers are willing to lend him money at 0% or 75 basis points

• 24:29Speaker 03

  so that they can get the option on a micro-strategy stock, which has the Bitcoin on its balance sheet, so it serves as a proxy for an option on Bitcoin effectively. And this all points to kind of a point he's made repeatedly is that every company now faces similar incentives. They have to decide to plug into the Bitcoin network in one way or another. Either putting it on their balance sheet, or as Square is doing, they're selling Bitcoin, right, which forces other corporations to adopt a similar strategy. They have to compete or die effectively. So now PayPal's selling Bitcoin. Yeah, I expect to see that continue. And this...

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Points to where I think fiat will just ultimately fail against Bitcoin, because everyone, so now we've seen this game theory permeate from the retail level to corporates. We had now expected in the next, say, five to 10 years to see it permeate at the sovereign wealth fund at the central bank level. But every market actor, whether you're an individual or you're at the other end of the spectrum, faces incentives today to borrow dollars or borrow fiat at low cost to buy Bitcoin on term debt and then pay back depreciated dollars. So this is, and this is something Pierre Richard wrote about in 2014, it's called speculative attack.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  Right? When every market actor faces incentives to borrow in the weak currency, buy the strong money. I don't like calling Bitcoin a currency because it's not governmental. So buy the strong money, sell the weak money, buy the strong money, and then pay back the weak money after inflation has eroded some of that real debt burden. This is like the

• 26:24Speaker 03

  the digital asset or something that's going to be eating the fiat structure from all sides. And that everyone wants to now borrow and sell, basically go short dollars and long Bitcoin. And this incentive is faced by all market actors.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Really starts to make you believe that this thing could all play out much more quickly than we thought. You know, even this time last year, we were talking about this, it's like, you know, Ray Dalio

• 26:53Speaker 03

  had not taken any, had not taken Bitcoin seriously at all up until that point. So in my mind then, it was like, oh, we're probably 25 years out from a central bank taking this seriously. But now, you know, COVID as this great accelerator has just changed everything. And it seems now that

• 27:14Speaker 03

  the musical chairs, the game of musical chairs has started at the corporate level. People are going to be racing to take a seat at the table that is the Bitcoin network. And now that we're north of a trillion dollar market cap, we're almost at the point where it's taken very seriously as a macro asset. I'd say once you break five trillion market cap, it is a very serious macro asset. And then every capital pool of the world will want to have some exposure to it. That's when things get really interesting, because

• 27:46Speaker 03

  The supply curve of Bitcoin, like it's it's perfect information. We all know what it is now, all the way into the future. And thus far in its history, its price has adhered to that supply curve. So we're still, what we're seeing today is still a function of the May 2020 halving. We typically have these halving events, 12 to 18 months later, we have a huge price bump. If that pattern continues to repeat, the incentives to front run Bitcoin become astronomical. Because everyone's looking at the same curve, saying, this thing's just going to keep going up. I, my strategy is to sit down at this table before anyone else sits down at this table. As the, as market actors do that, they're actually increasing the market cap of Bitcoin,

• 28:31Speaker 03

  increasing the likelihood of its success and further imposing that calculus on other market actors. So I think it is just a very interesting event. I think Sailor will be regarded as a pioneer, frankly, in Bitcoin. And he, you know, he is proving that thesis at the corporate level. And now I think we're just waiting with bated breath to see it happen at the central bank level.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so speaking of that, I think that everyone knew individuals were buying. I think that there had been a lot of focus on financial institutions, kind of Wall Street showing up. I actually think we have really bad short-term memories. Not that many people were ready for corporations in 2020 and into 2021. But that has happened in a much faster clip than I thought, you know, was previously expected. Anyone who would have claimed in the beginning of 2020 that within a year, Tesla would be buying a billion and a half dollars of Bitcoin on their balance sheet, I think would, would be absolutely nuts.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  And I think from there, what you end up getting is the final question, which is, what about the central banks, right? So we have individuals, we have financial institutions, we have corporations. That next big inflection point is a central bank, or many central banks doing this. I think your opinion is that it is inevitable, but is that actually inevitable? Why do you think that? And kind of what is the timeline that you think is as most reasonable when evaluating?

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tesla is a great example of just the second step in that game of musical chairs, right? Sailor Buys 1.3 billion at the time, I think, that was 1.3. Tesla Buys 1.5. And so I would, I think those numbers are closely related for a reason, right? Saying like, how much should we buy? And Tesla's treasurer CFO saying, well, how much did the other guy buy? About 1.3? Let's buy 1.5. So that, as silly as it sounds, I think that's actually how a lot of this game will be, we've played out. In terms of the timing of central

• 30:51Speaker 03

  bank purchase, it is so impossible to say, and I know it's kind of a cop out, but the digital age, if it has proven anything to us, it is that the exponential change it has brought about is so holistically unfathomable, how fast it can be. You know, we've gone from, in the past 20 years, from the internet, say 25 years, the internet is a joke, to everything's on the internet now, everything, right? Everything we do. And not only that, the internet also is in our pocket now, the fully baked internet. We're not talking about

• 31:36Speaker 03

  the little Nokia flip phone with a mediocre browser. It's, it's a supercomputer now in our pocket. And it's only getting faster. So the, I really am increasingly of the belief that we are in a Renaissance-like event. The world will look back on this, this period in history as a major mega-political transition from an analog age into a digital age, right? In the same way, we look back at the transition from the agricultural age to the industrial age, for instance. And all of the institutions that served us in the past, right? If we, if

• 32:21Speaker 03

  you think, just looking at the central bank itself.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  The structure of the central bank is characterized by the money, right? So the money is upstream of everything. The reason we have a central bank, frankly, is because gold is expensive to secure, and it's heavy and it's hard to move across space. So we had a great tool that was selected on the marketplace for holding its value across time, which was gold. Gold became kind of globally dominant money, but it constricted our ability to scale economic activity because it's hard, it's very expensive to transact it across space. And for a world becoming characterized by globalized trade, if you imagine that we

• 33:10Speaker 03

  had to actually ship gold around the world for every transaction, it kind of points towards how self-defeating and how expensive that would be. So the central bank emerged as the ultimate custodian of gold, and it issued paper currency to augment the lack of portability in gold. So now we had this large custodian that centrally manages the gold and issues paper back by it. But with this custody model came the requirement to trust the central bank, that they won't abuse the money supply, right? That they'll always maintain a one-to-one peg with currency and gold.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  And clearly, that trust, if nothing else defines the history of banking, is that that trust is violated repeatedly. So in a way, it's as if gold is the game we've always been playing. You know, we could say that another way to think about this is that...

• 34:16Speaker 03

  The common misconception today is that governments are the originators of money. Governments issue money, but that's not actually true. What money emerges when we have property rights, basically. So when we, in the agricultural age, and we started creating savings in the form of grain, capital, etc., to protect that capital, the protection service was the government. So it's the local group that specialized in violence that protected you from other specialists in violence to protect those savings. So money, government actually emerges from money. Basically, once we have property and savings, the government emerges as a protection service for those savings.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  The type of money we have, again, has shaped the institutions we have today. So we've got gold leading to the central bank. And the question now becomes, we've been playing this one game, everyone's trying to accumulate as much money as possible across history, that led to gold becoming the most dominant money in the world. The question now becomes, 5,000-year-old tech, gold, 12-year-old tech, bitcoin, a digital disruptor to the only game we've ever been playing, the original governor of human action, if you will. Money is the governor of human action, not government. It's whoever holds the gold makes the rules, as the old accent goes.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  This, I think bitcoin makes it so interesting, is that it is the latest and greatest testament to the disruptive potential of the digital age. We've already seen digital age totally upend, say, the media landscape, the advertising landscape, taxis, ride-sharing, like you name the industry, it's been impacted more or less severely by digital technology. But at the pinnacle of this recurrent analog institution disruption, the largest and most dominant in the world is the central bank, which is premised on gold.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  And now we have this digital tool disrupting it from the bottom up, right? It's disrupting gold, which then upends the central bank model, makes it irrelevant.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  And the, you know, the hundred trillion dollar question, so to speak, is what are they going to do about it? What are they going to do? It's increasingly obvious that most attack vectors on Bitcoin just will not work to stop it outright. There's, in all of the thinking that's been done about Bitcoin, no one has identified a credible unilateral attack vector that could take down the network. I mean, the analogous question is, how do you shut down the internet worldwide forever? It's not even good enough to shut it down for just a day. You need to shut it down permanently, everywhere.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  So, short of like a super global catastrophe, there's not a lot that can be done to stop the internet. Therefore, there's not a lot that can be done to stop Bitcoin. So then the question becomes, what are they going to do to adapt to this new reality? And as I've argued in a lot of my writing, uh, this is kind of like the old, I think it was Gandhi that maybe said this, but who knows? I read it on the internet, so I might be wrong. First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they, uh, adopt to whatever.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  First, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  That's right, exactly. So Bitcoin's going through that progression, essentially. And I think we may be somewhere at the fight stage, maybe kind of coming out of Bitcoin's honeymoon period. Maybe they do, uh, attempt to increase regulatory hostility towards Bitcoin at the endpoints, you know, exchanges and custodians and other venues, uh, which is, points to the importance of always holding your own keys.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  But I think Bitcoin survives that because again, the network will survive that. There's none of, government doesn't have any mechanisms that can really jeopardize the network itself. They can sort of just impact the consumer endpoints. So when we get beyond the fight stage. That's when I think they just start acquiring it as a means of insurance against its success. You already hear rumors about Venezuela doing this, they're selling passports for Bitcoin. You hear rumors about countries in the Middle East actually monetizing some of their energy there with Bitcoin mining, also using it as a means to circumvent US sanctions.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  So there are all of these sources of demand for Bitcoin that no government can eradicate. And I think the first central bank that publicly discloses the purchase of Bitcoin is just going to heat this thing up to a level of game theory that we can't even imagine. Because then you're running the same calculus, but at a level where not only do they have the largest balance sheets in the world, but they can also just print money and buy this thing.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  So that's when I expect escape velocity for Bitcoin to be achieved.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  So if we zoom out for a second, and we basically look at this as it's pretty well understood how we got here at this point, right? If you've been paying attention, if you've been kind of interested or curious, you can go read that everywhere. I think what people are trying to figure out is where are we going? And so if we look forward, I don't know, 25 years,

• 40:11Speaker 00

  what does that world look like? Is Bitcoin in every individual, every financial institution, every corporation's balance sheet, and every central bank's reserve? Are there all-out violent wars over this? Just walk me through from where we are today to what you think 25 years from now the world looks like, and then how do we get there?

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is an extremely complicated question because we quite actually have no historical precedent whatsoever. Another way to maybe think about this is the way the models of socioeconomic organization we have, whether it's capitalism or socialism, they're really just social devices, or you could think of them like a tool basically itself. So in the 20th century, for instance, we had this both ideological and economic contention

• 41:15Speaker 03

  between Soviet Russia, which was a command and control economy, and US capitalism. And the reason US outcompeted the USSR and the USSR ultimately broke down, bankrupted and fragmented, is because the model of, we'll say capitalism in parentheses because it's not pure capitalism, they've always had essentially planned money, but it was, most markets were free compared to Soviet Russia where no markets were free. It's because they were able to mobilize the collective intelligence of market actors through the price signal, and therefore they're able to create a lot more wealth through trade.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  So it's a more energy efficient, we gain more energy efficiency or productivity by trading with one another than we do having one singular plan or director tell us what to do. Because the intelligence of that bureaucratic body can never rival the intelligence of a distributed network of market actors. So you had this distributed computing network of free market capitalists competing against a centralized computing network of Soviet Russia pricing czar, right?

• 42:32Speaker 03

  US capitalism therefore outcompeted Soviet communism for that reason. It was a more energy efficient tool, if you will. And I think that whatever this model that comes in the wake of Bitcoin, we could say it's purified capitalism, like in the original sense of capitalism, which has minimized state intervention. I, in some of my more recent writings, have started to call it sovereignism. Because for the first time in history Bitcoin gives individuals and entities, any market actor, full sovereignty over their own money. They don't need to depend on any other custodian or institution to facilitate value flows across space and time.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  So it enables this new mode of socioeconomic organization that was never before possible for Bitcoin. And that's why I think it is difficult to comprehend the implications of this. And difficult to explain frankly, because we don't have a lot of direct historical analogy. But to get a sense of where this goes and why I think it goes that direction, we can just look at the average US taxpayer. So the average US taxpayer today is paying about $10,000, $10,500 each year to the IRS.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  So direct taxation, that's the average tax bill. That does not include inflation. So that does not include loss of purchasing power on inflation, which as we touched on before, the quote that everyone loved is, "There's no better way to fertilize the rich man's field than with the sweat of the poor man's brow." That's what inflation is essentially. It disproportionately affects the poor, retirees, pensioners, anyone living on fixed income. So it's an additional invisible tax. But we won't even look at that, we'll just look at direct taxation. $10,000, $10,500 per year paid in direct taxes to the IRS.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  If that amount of money, that $10,000, was instead put into a savings account that yielded 10% per year, over 40 years, so after 40 payments and 40 years of interest accrual to that account, that sum becomes $4.4 million.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  So the incentive that just the average US taxpayer faces, the guy paying, stroking a check $10,000 per year to the IRS, the decision of whether or not to adopt Bitcoin becomes, would you switch your savings account from your local bank to the Bank of Bitcoin for $4.4 million in retirement savings? And again, we haven't even included inflation, which if we look at inflation, in 2020, US tax revenue, direct tax revenue was $3.9 trillion. We printed about $4.1 trillion. So we could say that the inflation tax was, you know, effectively doubled the direct tax rate.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  So you could say that $10,000 payment per year, probably getting hit for another $10,000 per year based on inflation. Now, again, it depends where he's at in the hierarchy, does he hold assets, does he hold dollars, et cetera, et cetera. But we could say that, okay, that $4.4 million would then be an $8.8 million decision for your average guy, your average guy or girl. This, although I don't think, clearly not many market actors have awakened to this calculus yet, I think over time, as governments are increasingly bankrupt, right? We know that governments are the least efficient operators in the world.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Just go to your local DMV to see how inefficient things are. They, they're not accountable to their P and L like every other entrepreneur in the world. They're just able to print money and paper over mistakes and bad decision making and continue. And the example of this that I think Safety and pointed out was in Lebanon, they have the Lebanese Rail Authority, Railroad Authority, still operates today, and they haven't had to track a railroad in Lebanon for like 30 years. So it's like these, these. I forget who said it, but there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government solution. So the only reason they're able to do that is because they're able to steal from society.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  So governments need to steal more and more over time to remain relevant. As that overreach escalates, market actors are going to wake up to this option, this exit option. Like, I can just go into Bitcoin and get out of the inflation game, or whatever tax they're being hit with. They can go and hold Bitcoin, borrow against it even, right? Which is a tax-efficient strategy of taking liquidity against it and suffer no tax impact. I think this creates a hydraulic pressure pushing market actors to the exit, right? It will be to exit the fiat currency complex and go into Bitcoin.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  And every incremental saver that decides to hold their savings in Bitcoin necessarily has to divest their fiat. So they're selling fiat to buy Bitcoin, right? And this further accelerates the inflationary pressures on the dollar, which further accelerates other market actors exiting. So this is the feedback loop that I think drives people into Bitcoin, people in market actors, institutions, and everything over time. So then the question becomes, which is very deeply and interestingly explored in the book, The Sovereign Individual, what happens next? Because if everyone moves their savings into Bitcoin, all of a sudden inflation is no longer a revenue source for the government.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Which, again, if we look at the US government last year, that was 50% of their revenue, pretty much, was inflation. Direct taxation becomes much more complicated because all of a sudden you're in this asset that is largely unrealized gains for people that are holding savings in it. You can't really tax unrealized gains, like you could pass the law on it, but you're just then encouraging people to take their savings elsewhere. Which with Bitcoin, you have this hyper-mobile capital. You can move to any jurisdiction in the world, anyone that treats you well, right? You can go and take the residence there. So it's...

• 49:06Speaker 03

  This escalation, I guess this option for people to move their savings into a non-state bank, what we call Bitcoin, like the ultimate offshore bank, if you will, is going to force governments to treat their citizens more honestly. It's going to force them to compete for citizenship, to compete for their business, so to speak. So it's imposing the free market paradigm at the governmental level, which is not something they're accustomed to. They're accustomed to treating their taxpayers like cattle, right? They could just raise them up, shear them down whenever they need to, which is the analogy that the book uses, actually, it says, "In the 21st century, those cows will grow wings," basically. "And we can

• 49:51Speaker 03

  now take flight and go and move to where we are treated best." So as inflation revenues go to zero or near zero, taxation revenues start to collapse as well. This bankrupts the nation-state model of human organization. And so the big question is, what happens now? How do we organize ourselves post-statism? And I've started writing a series on this. It's difficult to explain and comprehend what happens. We have a few analogies, like I alluded to the one about Soviet Russia earlier. The book

• 50:33Speaker 03

  goes into some more examples about what happened post-feudalism, how society restructured itself. But it's important to realize that it's the old Andreessen quote, right? "The software is eating the world." That just rings louder and louder to me with every passing year. It's not just every business is in the technology game now. You can't not be in the technology game. Everyone uses technology. It's very deeply enmeshed in our day-to-day life, as we're proving right now on this call. It's also eating the institutions we have used to organize ourselves across history for hundreds of years. The dominant institution of the world now faces digital disruption by Bitcoin.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  I don't know. I would say for deeper thoughts on that, come check out the series I'm writing. It covers the sovereign individual, but also putting some of my my own lens on it. And also things I've learned in these conversations, like with Sailor and others, about how they see the future playing out.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  When you think back to what does happen when that kind of statist environment fails, or at least drastically reduces in its power and kind of reach? Soviet Russia, I think you mentioned feudalism. What happened in those situations? Or what are the main takeaways that people should know about?

• 52:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, the first thing that tends to happen is governments get increasingly desperate. Right? They're basically, so you can think of inflation, by the way, as a slow implicit default of government. They have cash or they've written checks that they can't cash effectively. So they're defaulting on this debt in slow motion by inflating the currency. So they'll print more currency to pay their bills. And they they externalize the cost of that money printing onto society. So by printing money or engaging in quantitative easing, the central bank is harvesting the economic surplus of entrepreneurs, of the productive economy.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  They're not infusing any new wealth into the economy. Printing, like creating a new paper certificate that we call the dollar, that is not value. That is just a claim on the savings that we've created in the world, the buildings, the equipment, the time, the knowledge, all of that.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Late-stage governments tend to be printing faster and faster. Because this thing, as we've touched on previously,

• 53:17Speaker 03

  The fiat currency complex being a debt-based money, it requires steadily more collateral and leverage to remain sustainable. There's this increasing appetite for interest, basically, to be siphoned off the productive economy and back to the owners of the debt. And this thing, and all of the costs of that are externalized through inflation. So it tends to accelerate. When we look at something like WYMR Germany, this has really perverse consequences, actually. Because people think they're getting wildly rich. Their homes are becoming more valuable, their businesses are increasing in value.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  So all assets denominated in the failing currency are becoming nominally more expensive. So it has this deceptive quality of thinking you're becoming wealthy, when in fact, it's the currency that is failing. So I'd say that tends to be one thing. Another thing that happens, which I would argue we're seeing today is that since nothing holds value, there's no sound store of value. People become, their time preferences increase a lot, which means they become much more likely to gamble and engage in super risky ventures.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Gambling in the stock market was a big thing in WYMR Germany. I would say that's what we're seeing today in a lot of ways. There's a lot of, you know, not to knock on the Wall Street Bets group. I think they've done an amazing thing by proving the effectiveness of a decentralized organization versus centralized organizations. But there's a lot of gambling there, too, right? People are just getting easy money, borrowing easy money, and they're just betting on stock prices going up forever. So.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  Increased speculation in in stock and other other asset categories.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  And then. See, the the currency is getting deprecated all the while. And then.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  What finally happens is that people try to get their money out of the country. Right. When the the the writing is clearly on the wall for everyone.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  That this thing's going into a hyperinflation, people either try to get. Trade their money for consumable or durable goods, things that can't be printed. Things that have.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  An energy intensity or or require sacrifice to produce, whether this is food or buildings or anything that that's a real capital asset. Or they try to get their money actually out of the country and transmit it to somewhat to a jurisdiction of the more. More stable monetary regime. And. The. The end game of that, too, like we saw with USSR is that. The whole this giant nation was held together, basically. By its ability to confiscate wealth from all its citizens. When that mechanism breaks down.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  The country tends to fragment. So so government shrinks, things relocalize. In the case of the USSR, there are a lot of these countries that end in Stan that were formerly conquered that became independent countries again. So the the overarching theme is that. As the nation state model is bankrupted, it tends to fragment. Into smaller pieces and and.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  You know, ultimately relocalizes government.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  When you think through.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  What would happen in the United States? Is it a replica of those situations that you just described? Or do you think that the creation and kind of pervasiveness of technology? Would actually change maybe what happens in the analog geography based world? And actually, there would be more of a fragmentation and a coalescing in kind of a digital world. Like, how do you look at? Soviet Russia, it's really hard to kind of understand what would have happened if there was the internet and kind of when all that played out. But any thoughts there of comparing the digital world and kind of the analog world?

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the big difference here is that, again, market actors in those situations would try to leave one bad situation to get into a less bad situation. So to get out of maybe the Russian rule and into the US dollar, for instance, there was no true exit option. There was no way out of fiat currency because all, or we could say monopolized currencies. They haven't always been fiat, but they've always been centrally controlled and planned. You could only move from one centrally planned monetary regime to another. It's kind of your best hope. But Bitcoin is, it's a radically new frontier because it

• 58:29Speaker 03

  is this unstoppable free market money, right? You think of it as a global digital non-state based money for a, for a non-state economy, right? That we can actually enter this digital domain that no nation-state has dominion over. And actually, the individual is empowered maximally to, with options, basically. You have optionality, and optionality is freedom, that you can now move your capital anywhere in the world, you can custody it in any number

• 59:08Speaker 03

  of high-security schemas and whatnot. So how this plays out in, say, maybe the United States is, I think you could see a similar fragmentation. I believe, actually, in the Texas state constitution, they have the right to succeed from the United States based on a number of parameters, and someone can fact-check, you know, that. It's been a few years since I've looked at it, but.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  When centralized power structures are getting, you know, defunded, so to speak, as savers are moving into Bitcoin, they lose relevance in many ways. And so I think you would see especially powers that are, we could say, say governments that are self-sufficient, like Texas has its own energy grid, it's got coastal access, it's, you know, relatively large geography. You'd see something like that maybe take place first, and Texas could actually break off in the US. But in the long run, people just start to self-organize.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  It moves away from this top-down monopolistic command and control economy where you're told what to do, right? You just, how many of us have consensually negotiated our tax treaties with the government, right? We don't. We get a bill that says, this is what you pay, these are the services you get, you're welcome, right? You don't get any say-so in that, that commercial interaction, but...

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  Or we will, or we will send armed men to put you in jail.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Exactly right. And Saleh had a great analogy for this too, saying that everyone in Miami is very polite because most people carry firearms, right? So even a sweet old lady, like, you're gonna be extra polite to everyone because you never know who's packing heat. So this, the, the option to do a thing can be more powerful than actually doing the thing. Doesn't mean people are running around Miami shooting each other necessarily, but just the fact that they possibly could tends to make people accord a little more nicely than they might otherwise. So Bitcoin restores this symmetry of power between the individual and government or

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  institutions in a way that we've never seen before. It really is something radically new.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that we already see so much self-organization in the digital age. Right? The groups like these Clubhouse chats, I don't know if you've been involved in a few of those recently. Like, these are people just coalescing around an idea, talking about it, forming their own independent networks. We're moving information and capital now through these apps and electronic media, through digital media. It's like, and the property rights, basically, which, by the way, that's what government's original intent was, right? It was to preserve peace in the local environment and protect the property. So people could trade and people could resolve any disputes about private property non-violently.

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  They could have recourse to the courts, so they didn't have to go and, you know, raise pitchforks against one another. Well, now, property rights and Bitcoin are preserved by the mining network. Right? It's disrupted the need, the original need for government. So government, just like gold is being disrupted from its original principles of money. Like, the five properties, Bitcoin's more divisible, durable, recognizable, portable, scarce than gold. That's why it's outcompeting it. Bitcoin better secures property rights. Again, if we look at a tool or socioeconomic structure as being the system or idea that best allocates energy across time. So how do we spend the least energy possible towards satisfying this aim?

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  The aim of property rights just being that whatever fruits of my labor that I sacrifice to obtain something, I can preserve that in something. So if it's a physical item, I actually need a little bubble of protection around me. Otherwise, people would just come and steal your stuff, and you don't have police to call, you don't have courts, etc., etc. But with Bitcoin, we have this property right that's, you know, it's metaphysical. It's just digital information, much more cost-effective to secure. And it exists independent of the courts, of the monopoly on violence, of government entirely. So now that people are able to do this, people are empowered with all of this optionality

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  to communicate and move capital across these self-organizing digital networks. It just obfuscates the need for nation-state organization and private property protection. So, you know, my high-level thesis on all of this, because, again, it's...

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Hard to get it all into words is that the world is becoming a video game, basically. It's more and more of our relationships and important functions in life are mediated by digital technology and screens. Dating is a video game now, people are swiping left, swiping right. All of these important things that we used to need to do, many of the important things we used to have to do in person, we can now do digitally. And that just decreases the need for the analog institutions that provided security pre-digital in the digital age.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  So, and who knows, like, you know, the tech is just getting started, by the way. Like, we're still hamstrung, I think, in many ways that we need a laptop or we need a smartphone. What happens when augmented reality or virtual reality really becomes more mainstream? And then we're able to overlay the real world with digital data? Either, you know, the whole idea of Google Glass was to get the tech out of the way. So the more the hardware gets out of the way, I think the more we accelerate this transition into sovereignism or post-state capitalism, whatever you want to call it.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's fascinating to me to kind of think through this because I think you said it perfectly. Nobody actually knows, right? Before we wrap up, is there anything specific that you can identify that, other than central banks starting to buy Bitcoin, that you would say is, hey, this is an inflection point or a milestone that I've got my eye on? I don't know when it happens, but when it happens, people will be able to say that is, you know, an important moment?

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely, you know, you touched on the central bank buying it. I think... I'll say this about the pandemic situation. That actually, the book Sovereign Individuals has been pressured in a lot of ways. And a pandemic was actually predicted in that book to be used as one of the main state responses to social upheaval. And immediately before the pandemic, we had unprecedented millions worldwide protesting their government. There's still a lot of it going on today. So I don't, I don't know.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  You know, that's the timing of that is quite interesting to me, either that. I'm not saying necessarily that a lot of people call it the scamdemic. Like, I don't know that it was purely manufactured or created, but the state response to the virus has certainly been many orders of magnitude more severe than prior health scares. You know, we had the swine flu and all these things before that government didn't react in this way. So there seems to be mixed motives, let's say, of this latest response.

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  I think, you know, another breakthrough will be when we see a lot of state, like, so there, for instance, in North America, a lot of the energy infrastructure, specifically on like, related to natural gas and whatnot, is just wasted today. So that wasted, that flared natural gas could be capped with a Bitcoin mine and monetized instead. So Bitcoin, as we've discussed previously, it provides this energy buyer of last resort. I think states too will be really forced to embrace Bitcoin for that reason.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  Because again, they're suffering financially as well. They're trying to print more money to stay ahead of, stay ahead of their own bad decision making historically. And I think that they kind of get forced further along the risk spectrum as well, that they need to start mining Bitcoin. And that states that control these energy sources or energy producers that would otherwise not That otherwise would not have a way to monetize that energy will now be forced to start monetizing. I think that could become an inflection point for Bitcoin. That when you actually see, you know, large territories monetizing unused or underused energy sources into Bitcoin.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  Then it's only a step functional way of those producers themselves accepting payment in Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin. You've now reduced the selling pressure on Bitcoin again because miners, which today are the source of most, most of the open market selling to cover their, their energy bills and operational expenditures, that source of selling goes away. So now you put even more upward pressure on the price.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  And you know, another point that was made recently was a lot of these miners that are going public. They'll go into capital markets and borrow at, you know, borrow against their balance sheet at zero or 50 or maybe 100 basis points. And just pay their bills with, with lever, with debt capital, leverage, lever up and take, uh, pay their bills with debt capital. Such that they could hold more of that Bitcoin on their balance sheet. So I think there's a lot of these avenues that are going to really constrict the selling of Bitcoin by miners over time. And I think those will be major inflection points. Because they'll just put so much upward pressure on the Bitcoin price that it will, you know, potentially push us into this hyper Bitcoinization type scenario.

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  I am, uh, I am on the same wavelength as you are as, uh, this is all going to happen. It's a foregone conclusion. Uh, it's just a matter of how aggressively it happens, uh, and ultimately what that timeline looks like. But as we have learned, those who have the kind of longest term horizon, uh, tend to get the best rewards, uh, in this game. And so, uh, I think you've done a fantastic job of articulating that over, uh, over the years and, and continuing to do so now. For people who want to, uh, go watch the Sailor series, uh, or watch some of the other series that you've coming out. Where can we send them to, uh, to find you on the internet or find those, uh, pieces of content that you're putting out?

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I think you're doing a great job with this platform. You've definitely pioneered a lot of this space yourself in bringing more mass awareness to Bitcoin and this mass transformational wave of innovation that we're living through. So thanks for that.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  My Twitter page is where I post links to most of my work. My last name is Breedlove, so my Twitter handle is @Breedlove22. B R double E D L O V E two two. The show is called The What Is Money Show? And I named it that, by the way, because as we know, describing Bitcoin in a few words, especially for someone that doesn't understand it, is not very easy. There's a lot to unpack there. But I found that this question, what is money? Like, if you can get someone just asking themselves that question seriously

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  and researching it diligently, that they'll stumble on kind of the gold in Bitcoin thesis at some point. So I'm trying to kind of incept, sort of like Inception, that movie where you're just planning this little seed of getting people to ask themselves the question, what is money? And I think it just continues to uncover a lot of interesting truth for me as well. It's a really deep question, seemingly simple, but actually really deep.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  So that's on both YouTube, so it's The What Is Money Show. You can search by my name on YouTube. We also have a website for it, which is whatismoneypodcast.com.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  We just, again, released the Sailor series. We're almost done with that one. Booth series will be next, and then I've got a big cast for the first 10 long-form series.

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it. That's me.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  All right, @Breedlove22 on Twitter, right?

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  Awesome. And listen, Robert, I really, really enjoy talking to you every time. We will definitely do this again in the future. So thanks so much for doing it, and hopefully everyone learned its teachings.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  I hope so. Thanks again for having me.