The Government’s Biggest Scam? Inflation & Money Printing EXPLAINED | Robert Breedlove PT 2

In the compelling second half of this episode, Tom and Robert dive deeper into the philosophical and practical aspects of decentralization and its potential to reshape society. They tackle the controversial rise of populism, reflect on the power dynamics of state versus individual, and unpack the revolutionary promise of Bitcoin as a tool for personal sovereignty. Robert shares his visionary thoughts on a future marked by strong private property rights and minimal government intervention, while examining the role of sound money in achieving this ideal. Prepare for a thought-provoking dialogue that not only provokes thought on economic decentralization but also envisions a more equitable society where power is balanced and the individual is empowered. SHOWNOTES 01:20 The Concept of Private Property and Minimal Government 01:36 Why Inflation is Considered Evil 01:49 The Role of Bitcoin in Promoting Individual Freedom 02:16 Potential Transformations in Government Structure 02:44 George Washington’s Legacy and Modern Implications 03:00 Robert’s Vision of a Free Market Future FOLLOW ROBERT BREEDLOVE: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22 Website: https://www.whatismoneypodcast.com https://www.whatismoneypodcast.com/ CHECK OUT OUR AMAZING SPONSORS: Range Rover: Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://landroverUSA.com https://landroverusa.com/ Audible: Sign up for a free 30 day trial at https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY1 Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com https://www.vitalproteins.com/ and entering promo code IMPACT at check out. iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACT when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Tax Network: Stop looking over your shoulder and put your IRS troubles behind you. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit https://tnusa.com/impact Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Found Banking: Try Found for FREE at https://FOUND. COM/IMPACT https://found.com/IMPACT American Alternative Assets: If you're ready to explore gold as part of your investment strategy, call 1-888-615-8047 or go to https://TomGetsGold.com https://tomgetsgold.com/ ITU: Ready to breakthrough your biggest business bottleneck? Apply to work with me 1:1 - https://impacttheory.co/SCALE  ********************************************************************** Do you need my help? STARTING a business: Join me inside ZERO TO FOUNDER here https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=6762613-Scaling%20YT%20%26%20PC%20Ads&utm_source=IT_PC&utm_content=ztf_it_pc_ad SCALING a business: Click here to see if you qualify https://tombilyeu.com/scale?utm_campaign=6762613-Scaling%20YT%20%26%20PC%20Ads&utm_source=mindset_PC&utm_content=bdceo_mindset_pc_ad Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT atwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:27Tom Bilyeu?

  How Bitcoin challenges the banks, what digital currencies really mean for your freedom, and why the financial elites are fighting to keep their grip on power. Let's jump right back in with Robert Breedlove. What do you think when you look out at the world and you see every civilization of any size has a government?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it is a reality of physical force, like I said, like we do.

• 1:53Tom Bilyeu?

  That people want somebody to take care of them.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's not that you want, it's, it's a protection service, right? So if we look at the origin point of government, it comes in the agricultural age. Once we stop being hunters and gatherers and we settle down in one place and we start to create an economic surplus, right? We've got grain in the silo, so to speak. Well, you now need to defend that grain in the silo from other people that want, that are hungry, that want to come and take it. So the. Local area defense network that protects intruders from taking the grain in the silo is basically the origin point of government. And so that's what you want it to do.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Defend the property and lives and liberty of the individuals living within a territory. However, it's a very complicated and bloody history, right? Because once you give people that physical power, that monopoly on force, what do they start to do? They extract tribute from people inside of the territory, right? And so how do you, this has been like the age old problem is how do we create a central monopoly on force and entrust people to run that monopoly on force in a way that they won't bend it to serve their own interests? Right? And we've, there's been many experiments on how to do this best across time.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  I would say the United States and the founding fathers are the best one we've done yet, right? The decentralization of power, checks and balances. You know, the US constitution was written basically to prevent the implementation of a central bank, to maximize local state power and to minimize central state power. You know, we were, we were founded as a constitutional republic. So a constitution being an enumerated list of things the government can never do, right? This is the bill of rights, right? Cannot infringe on the freedom of speech, cannot infringe on the right to bear arms, et cetera.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  These were meant to be absolutes, that absolute spheres of human freedom that government could not violate. However, after three attempts, we got the central bank, right? We got the Fed in 1913.

• 4:15Tom Bilyeu?

  What is it people are clamoring for? So they clamor for protection when they put in a government. Protection and coordination, I would say is probably fair. And then what are they clamoring for when they say yes to a central bank?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Well, we don't really say yes to a central bank. I mean, if you read, at least in the United States, um, you could read the book, The Creature from Jekyll Island. This thing was snuck in over a holiday weekend after a private meeting of, on an island off the coast of Georgia called Jekyll Island.

• 4:48Tom Bilyeu?

  But are there any modern economies of any significance that don't have a central bank?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Um, there are not. Uh, these, you know.

• 4:58Tom Bilyeu?

  So someone somewhere is clamoring for something.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  You're not voting it in, though. Like, these things, they're private banks that are basically installed. It's not the will of the people that is choosing to have this thing installed.

• 5:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Is it a signal of corruption?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  It is the ultimate institution of corruption, in my opinion.

• 5:13Tom Bilyeu?

  So you look out at all the governments having one of these and you're like, that is a tower to memorialize the corruption in the country.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  It, okay, again, if we define corruption as the uneven application of rules, well, a central bank has the legal authority to counterfeit money. If anyone else counterfeits money, they go to jail.

• 5:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Let me give you a counterpoint.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  How is that, like, those are, that is the bifurcation of rules, right? If you and I go and play basketball and I put a gun to your head and say, my shots count four, your shots count two. Like, is that a corrupt game?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Or I can print points for myself and you can't.

• 5:51Tom Bilyeu?

  If I were playing against my wife, it would be very fair, and I think that's going to be one of the arguments. So there's that. I think the, you're probably not recognizing the power of people who want things to be fair in this whole equation. But the reason I think that people are clamoring for a, um, a central bank, even if they didn't vote for it, is the promise of stability. Hey, we're gonna manage things. You're not gonna have the Great Depression. You're not gonna have people jumping off of buildings in Wall Street because we're gonna make sure that you're protected. Yes, it's fractional reserve banking, but it's FDIC insured. And so that, the same desire that makes them want

• 6:34Tom Bilyeu?

  to have a government to protect them from a bully, they want the central bank to be able to print money because they don't understand inflation, and they feel like, ah, I'm now protected.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. But they're not protected. I mean, yes, the aims of the Federal Reserve are low and stable unemployment and stable prices, right? Low and predictable inflation.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Have either one of those things happened? I mean, you look at the purchasing power of the dollar since 1913, I think it's down 99%. Does that sound like stable prices to you? I mean, it's the prices of everything have gone up 100 fold in over 100 years. Uh, we've had worsening boom and bust business cycle. Uh, each time we have a bust, we have to print exponentially more money than we did the round before. Because each time we print money, we inject more liabilities into the system. Um, it's just, it just doesn't work. And Austrian economists like Mises, you can read his book, The Theory of Money and Credit.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  He has laid out a very strong theoretical foundation for why printing money, counterfeiting money, centrally planning money doesn't work. Um, and I've, I don't know any honest intellectual on this planet who has ever sat here and said that it does work. The only thing it does is act as a source of limitless purchasing power extraction for the shareholders of central banks at the expense of everyone forced to use the currency via legal tender laws and other acts of compulsion. So I don't know how you could ever justify that morally, ethically, pragmatically, economically. It just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And I think the corruption of money also leads to the corruption of many other things in the world. Right? When you're printing money and you can steal purchasing power from everyone. Well, then you can use that purchasing power to buy narrative or to buy mainstream media outlets or to create fake news or to wage wars. It, it is a very insidious power, right? If Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I don't think there's anything closer in the sphere of human affairs to absolute power other than the printing of money, considering it is the thing that everyone works for. And if you are the institution that can create it without performing any work and you can use it to extract the work energy of other people.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Well, then you will do everything in your power to deceive them into believing that it is good and necessary for them and their economy, which is indeed what Keynesian economics does. It's a pseudo-scientific paradigm that tells us every time there's a problem in the economy, the government just needs to pull that lever and print more money, baby. And everything's going to be all right this time. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine. And what happens? Well, we get this look recent history. We print 700 billion in 2008.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  That was a big number back then. We thought that was a very serious amount. That's less than one tenth of what we printed in the post-plandemic world. We printed 8 trillion dollars. Okay, give it a few years, we're gonna print 10x that. It doesn't stop until the currency hyperinflates into worthlessness. And I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news, but anyone that wants to challenge me on this, open a fucking history book about fiat currency. Tell me how all of them end. Either the country gets conquered or the currency hyperinflates. Alright, the oldest and most successful fiat currency to date, I think, is still the British pound, which has lost over 99% of its value in 320 years. Um, so those countries, UK, US, we're still in power.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Fiat currency is still working. But all of those before us have failed, been conquered or hyperinflated. So, you know, how many, how many times we need to learn this lesson?

• 10:26Tom Bilyeu?

  A lot. Alright, so you've got a magic wand. You, uh, you're holding tight to that magic wand. Trump comes to you and he says, Robert Breedlove, with your magic wand, what do we do? We want to make everything better. What do you do? If you were gonna do three big things, and I mean, you can do anything. What are the three big things you would do to right the ship?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Promote Bitcoin education and help people transition to a sound money economy. I can say Bitcoin and gold for that matter. I'm not actually partial. People want to stick with gold and that's their thing. Freedom.

• 11:05Tom Bilyeu?

  So not make Bitcoin the, uh, official currency.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Well, here's what I don't like about that, because it's legal tender tends to be the compulsory use of something. So I don't want to tell people they have to use Bitcoin. But just educate people about, oh, this is how money actually works. We suggest this as the best money. It's the ultimate sound money. However, gold also works if you want to use that. Or Or you could also have free banking, right? Just let banks issue their currency and go through that whole painful experience of different banks blowing up and people learning their lessons the hard way and let the market sort it out. So, I mean, I'm admittedly radical in my views as an anarcho-capitalist. I think we need just the preservation of life, liberty,

• 11:49Speaker 01

  and property, and then the market solves everything else better than any central institution possibly can. And so, the big theme of those three things is just minimizing statism, minimizing revenues to the state, therefore shrinking the state and maximizing human freedom and the market process. I think that solves the most problems with the least effort.

• 12:10Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. If you abolish taxation, you're saying the government has no sources of revenue, or the government has to become a maker?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Well, so that, again, pre-income tax, the US government used to fund itself through tariffs, right? So it's actually charging taxes on imports. Those are at least imposed on outside countries, and those are countries that want to access domestic markets. I'm not, I still don't think that's a good idea. I think that actually is still destructive to net wealth. You know, people would probably accuse me of being an idealist or utopian in this respect, but I don't think nation-state structure really works. I'd like to see a world more of like free private cities. Instead of 200 some odd nation-states, we have 20,000 free private cities that can trade with one another with very little friction. You know, if there

• 12:59Speaker 01

  have to be tariffs to fund that security network, so be it. Maybe they charge a flat tax just on land, right? They're actually defending land ultimately. Maybe the owners of that land need to pay a consensual, not even a tax, a consensual protection fee. So you're paying a percentage to that protection service to provide that protection, that physical protection from foreign invasion. And again, you know, it's, it's the devil's in the details, because when you put that power in the hands of one group of people, it's very difficult to prevent them from using that power to extract more resources than, than the consensual protection fee was agreed to be.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And so that is like an ever-present risk or threat. And I think that's where something like Bitcoin is very important because if a jurisdiction starts to treat people unfairly, let's say they agree to a certain protection fee and then the state says, actually, we're going to take 2X, 3X, whatever it is. People can vote with their feet very effectively, right? They can leave that jurisdiction with their purchasing power intact, their Bitcoin private keys intact. Even if the government gets nasty and starts seizing their physical assets, well, then people still have a much better chance, basically, of leaving with purchasing power and a digital bearer asset and therefore incentivizing, you're like creating a free market competition

• 14:26Speaker 01

  dynamic between different jurisdictions. So all of a sudden jurisdictions now that can't print money, they are accountable to their P and L, right? Their revenues are protection service fees and their expenses are providing physical security. If they mistreat their citizens, well, their citizens will leave with their capital. So that will actually decrease their revenue. So you will be incentivized as one of these free private cities to be accountable to the preferences of your customer. You want to keep them. And you already see a little bit, again, like, you know, a place like UAE, I think, is kind of competing, basically, for global talent and capital by offering really low taxation. So that's more of an ideal world that I would like to see.

• 15:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Woo, that certainly, uh, that was not the answer I was expecting. Now, do you think that there's an element of chaos that's going to be born out of that? Because as you're describing it, I'm like, running through my head, I'm like, okay, gangs are definitely going to rise up in some of these cities. They're going to coerce you into staying. I know they're not supposed to, but of course they will. People will try to leave. They'll put capital controls on it, like they'll find a way, even if it's just a wrench attack, but then people will escape as much as they can. It just feels like, whoa, I get why, in my mind, I get why people try to consolidate into larger groups of people where there's a stable, non-corrupt government. Feels like the human tendency. Um, but play that scenario out.

• 15:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Where do you think the, what would be the points of friction you would worry about?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, so you're worried that gangs will rise up. I mean, that's what governments are, frankly. Government is the biggest gang in the room, right? They have outcompeted all the other gangs and deemed themselves to be the legal authority of the land.

• 16:18Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:19Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:34Speaker 01

  Government is the biggest gang in the room, right? They have outcompeted all the other gangs and deemed themselves to be the legal authority of the land. So I don't think that the absence of the biggest, most centralized gang

• 18:53Speaker 01

  is actually going to create, yeah, you're gonna have, well, when we say gang, it's like, yeah, people organize themselves into groups and those groups compete for their self-interest.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  You know, what we associate with gangs is that they tend to engage in physical coercion and crime, right? So in a world where people do have digital bearer assets, I think it is much more difficult, much less profitable, let's say, to engage in traditional gang activity, like trying to physically coerce people and take their stuff. Much easier to do that in a world where people are using physical cash or physical gold. So, yeah, would it be more chaotic? It's like, there's this example of wildfires in California,

• 19:44Speaker 01

  which, you know, there's like this, uh, kind of the same topography that's in California, also is the same in, down in Mexico. And so there's a lot of government intervention. And this is like Baja California area where they were trying to manage forest fires, basically, right? That they would burn, they would try to burn. Every time one of these fires would start, they would extinguish the fire and try to basically dampen it. Whereas down in Mexico, they would just let these fires burn, basically, right? It's more anarchy, if you will, they just let the fires burn. Well, what happened is that when you prevented those fires, micro fires from burning,

• 20:27Speaker 01

  underbrush accumulated until a big fire did hit, and then it burned so fucking hot that it burns away the topsoil and does a lot more damage, basically. It becomes this giant conflagration, whereas down in, you know, Mexico is just this uh, sequence of smaller fires, it's more of a natural process. And so it's that pressure release kind of mechanism where when we try to centrally plan something, sometimes we create the unforeseen consequence of creating something much bigger and worse. You know, we could say, oh, we've had this long period of peace in the 20th century and this nuclear stalemate and everything's been great, but what is that setting us up for? You know, we don't really know, is it better to just have, you know,

• 21:10Speaker 01

  disputes resolved at a smaller scale more frequently, rather than having disputes delayed and resolved with a very low frequency, but with a lot more catastrophe? You know, an author like Taleb would say, delayed volatility is exacerbated volatility. So we have to be careful when we're trying to manage systems and dampen volatility, because ultimately volatility is a reconciliation to reality. And if we stop that reconciliation to reality and engage in it much less frequently, then the ultimate reconciliation can be a lot more painful. So I think the argument for decentralization is just, you want more, you want less, uh, more power, more widely distributed, basically,

• 21:55Speaker 01

  so that you get whatever pressure needs to be released, it's released in smaller, more frequent pockets and places, rather than being compressed for many decades and blowing up in World War III or whatever the catastrophe might be.

• 22:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, absolutely fascinating. Few answers have ever made me want to write a story set inside of the world I imagined than that one. I utterly, utterly fascinating idea. Now I'm gonna take away the magic wand. Right now, you've got Trump coming into power. He, it looks like he's gonna have Senate, probably House, judiciary and the Supreme Court's pretty much on his side. What do you want to see him do in order to take steps to alleviate some of the wealth inequality that we have? Start moving towards stronger personal freedoms, private property? You mentioned tariffs earlier. You didn't seem to love the idea. What, what should he

• 22:53Tom Bilyeu?

  do in the real world, starting when he takes office?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he's flirted with the idea of abolishing the IRS. That's a great first start, right? You abolish the IRS, you abolish a lot of wasted human energy navigating. I think the IRS tax code is somewhere between, when I, I have a master's degree in taxation. When we studied it in college, I want to say it was like nine million words long.

• 23:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Good lord.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  It is literally impossible to navigate, also impossible to comply with. You comply with one law, you're out of compliance with another law. It's like, it's designed to just be this fucking trap, basically. And there's so much human cognitive energy pouring into gaming this thing, right? Like this whole army of tax accountants and tax attorneys, like trying to find loopholes and exploit loopholes. And all of that's non-productive energy, right? If we had a simplified, or preferably a non-existent tax code, these guys could go be engineers and build something that people actually fucking use, rather

• 23:56Speaker 01

  than just navigating a purposelessly complicated set of rules that have just emerged because of, you know, I think it's- The fiat currency complex, right? It's a lot of people having these competing interests inside of the rule structure trying to benefit themselves. When you looked at these things in the tax code, it's like, okay, here was the original law, then it was modified this way. Oh, then it was modified that way because someone didn't like, you know, this lobby group, they didn't like what they got, so they lobbied for this counterproposal. And then on it goes. And you read this law, and there's all these exceptions and back and forth and rules. And by the time you're doing this, you know, we have things like the alternative

• 24:37Speaker 01

  minimum tax, for instance, I don't know if you've heard of this. It is this weird other, like, parallel calculation you have to do on yourself. In your tax world, it's like, if you meet certain criteria, then all of a sudden you can have this other giant tax liability that just pops out of nowhere. And so, anyway, I won't go into it because I don't frankly, I haven't looked at it in a decade, but it was just a nightmare to learn about in college. It didn't make any sense. It's totally arbitrary. It doesn't map on to anything in the real world, right? It's like, we're just putting ourselves in this cognitive trap. So, to abolish all of that and liberate all that cognitive human labor and reduce all the associated violation of private property, I think that would be a hu- huge win. So, if Trump's gonna make

• 25:21Speaker 01

  good on that promise, that would be absolutely massive. I don't know what he said about the central bank, if anything. I mean, he has said that we're gonna start stockpiling a national reserve of Bitcoin. He wants the United States to be a leader in what he says, crypto and Bitcoin mining. I think, you know, he's still suffering from the conflation between crypto and Bitcoin. Only Bitcoin mining would be of any geopolitical significance, so far as I can tell. That would also be a huge win, just to get, you know, it's contributing to the monetization of Bitcoin. Obviously, that would put the United States in a better position

• 26:03Speaker 01

  economically as against other countries. But I think also by contributing to the monetization or the acceleration of Bitcoin's monetization, this accelerates the de-monetization of the state, right? Or the defunding of the state. By removing in the long run, money printing as a revenue option. And then ultimately, you're, you know, enriching this asset that's hyper portable, hyper concealable, and lets people vote with their feet very effectively. So all of that would be good for our move away from centralized statism towards a more decentralized world.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  What other promises has he made? I, you know, I think

• 26:43Speaker 01

  just, you know, the, the general theme of deregulation that tends to come with Republican administrations. That's a good thing, right?

• 26:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think Elon has a shot at actually doing something meaningful there?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  He's flirting with this idea of the Government Efficiency Agency.

• 26:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Doge.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Cutting-

• 27:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Department of Governmental Efficiency, yes.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Cutting two to three trillion of government spending. I mean, like, all the government spending, by the way, euphemism for stolen purchasing power, right? So you're reducing the stealing of purchasing power, you're increasing the integrity of taxpayer private property. Again, that's a step in the right direction. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, I, you know, I don't trust these guys any further than I can throw them. I mean, maybe I can throw them a little bit far, but I don't trust them.

• 27:28Tom Bilyeu?

  You might be able to throw some of these guys.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  I, we'll see. We'll see what plays out. I, my general philosophy would be never trust a politician. Don't think that a politician is coming to save you. There's very few instances in human history where politicians have, have stuck to their word. Maybe now would be a good time to bring up Mr. George Washington, though.

• 27:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Tell me about it.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Who is, I don't know if I'd classify him as a politician necessarily, but-

• 27:54Tom Bilyeu?

  He was a president.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  He was a president, but he was different, right? This is one of the founding fathers of the United States. The leader of the American Army that rebelled against the British Empire. I think their decisive victory was this, I think it's 1781, the Battle at Yorktown, if I recall correctly,

• 28:20Speaker 01

  where Washington defeated General Cornwallis of the British Empire.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, we had been fighting for these principles of establishing the United States as a constitutional republic, right? It was largely a tax rebellion against the British Empire, also a rebellion against the Bank of England, which was the central bank of England. People wanted to be free, right? These were highly educated men, they were very strong Christian men, mostly. The seal on Benjamin Franklin's house, I think, said rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God. Like, these were guys that were very, very fucking serious about expanding human freedom.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And the thing I like about George Washington is that he led and won the ragtag group of rebels, American soldiers, against the British Empire. Now, we had help, too, but we won, right? He earned the victory, right? He had skin in the game, he was a leader of men, he went to war and he won. Years and years and years.

• 29:25Tom Bilyeu?

  An incredible story.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  And at the end, when he achieved victory, they wanted to make this man king, right? We fought to become a constitutional republic, but at the end of that, it was, they put the keys of power into the hand of this man, and all he had to do was accept and close his hand. And frankly, he earned it, right? He led the army, he conquered the new territory, but the old way of kings, well, he is the new king. He would have been the new, you know, the king of the American empire, and his lineage and his descendants would have become the next kings to who we all paid tribute and homage and forevermore. And what did he do?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  He channeled this, like, it's really like a staggering amount of philosopher-king energy. You could call it Christ consciousness, right? He refused that temptation to near absolute power.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  He put the interest of the human family above the interest of his own family lineage in a way, and he said, absolutely not. I will not be your king. I will be your president. And I will be your two-term president, and I will refuse the third term. And we will be the constitutional republic that we set out to be. So he put the interest of human freedom above his own direct, more selfish, you know, genetic self-interest, let's say. And that is just a staggering accomplishment, as far as I can tell. Like, we often talk about Marcus Aurelius as a very significant philosopher-king, and he was, but I don't think we give enough credit to George Washington.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  And I hope that, you know, we can cultivate more male leaders like that, that actually take the larger perspective on what this is all about. Like, we're trying to advance human freedom in its totality, not just trying to advance me and my freedom here and now and for my future descendants, right? That's the, that's an old game, and it's a bloody game, and it's nasty, and it, it's, you know, it, it gave us the life that was, what was, uh, brutish and short, that someone said. And by channeling this, you know, Christian sort of value framework,

• 31:51Speaker 01

  this philosopher-king energy, if you will, by doing what's right in the greater scope of humanity, you know, th- this was a man that was integral to his word in a way that few people possibly can be. But he sets a very powerful example for all future leaders. And so I hope we can get back to that, you know, it's, um...

• 32:17Tom Bilyeu?

  How do we get back to that?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Well, so...

• 32:23Speaker 01

  He's a trustworthy man, right? Because he did what he said he would do, even in the face of great temptation. And the words "trust" and "truth" share an etymological origin. They're both related to a word that basically means steadfast, true, solid, right? Something that's dependable, reliable, has integrity. Right? Whether if it's the truth, it's a representation of reality that is high fidelity, right? It's an accurate portrayal of reality. And if someone's trustworthy, that means they do what they say they will do, right? They, he is a man of his word. He is integral. His words and his action are integrated together. Bitcoin is a system of absolute truth, right?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  It's if, if money is a language of human action or a language of power, it's a language in which lies cannot be told. It's something that incentivizes people to interact cooperatively rather than coercively, because, you know, it's hard to steal, impossible to inflate, all these things we've talked about.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  And

• 33:28Speaker 01

  you know, there's a saying that no man is better than his incentives. So that I guess is an open question to how much does that honest incentive system induce honest, integral moral development in men? I'm not sure.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  But I hope that Bitcoin enables the process of individuation in a way that helps people become more like

• 33:53Speaker 01

  the, the spirit that the founding fathers were tapped into, like taking seriously the collective human enterprise, not any specific nation-state, not any specific lineage, but uh, creating something that's sustainable for all of us across time, right? That, that ideal of equality in the eyes of the law, the ideal of innocent until proven guilty, freedom of speech, right to bear arms, all these things that give us a symmetry of power. Such that there's no asymmetries where one group is exploiting another group. Like, this is the ideal. This is the principle. And so my hope is that Bitcoin can enable the cultivation of more men like Mr. Washington.

• 34:35Tom Bilyeu?

  George, the could-have-been Bitcoiner.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think so.

• 34:42Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we've got some speed round stuff from our fearless producer over here. Drew, what do you have for us?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Yes, I have a couple of clips and a couple of tweets. Just want to get your opinion on it. Quick take, minute, 30 seconds, nothing crazy.

• 34:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Hang tight, we'll be back in just a moment.

• 35:01Tom Bilyeu?

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• 36:04Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, thanks for sticking with us. Let's jump right back in.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Money is just a number in a database. That's what it is. And it's primarily an information mechanism for labor allocation. And my opinion of Bitcoin is that, I mean, I think Bitcoin is probably a good thing. I think it's primarily going to be a means of doing illegal transactions. But that's not necessarily entirely bad.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  You know, some things should be, maybe shouldn't be illegal. It will be useful for legal and illegal transactions. Otherwise, it would have no value as a use for legal transactions. Because you have to have a legal to illegal bridge. I don't own any Bitcoin.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  All right, is that a hot take or a not take?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  I think it's a useful definition of money that it is a database of labor, right? It's you could think about it as tokenized human labor as we described earlier. Someone goes to work, they provide labor, they receive money in return. That money is redeemable for labor from others later, right? So to call money a, what did he call it? A labor information system? Is that what he, the term he used? Or a database for labor? It's basically a spreadsheet tracking who has provided what favors? And who has rendered what favors and who has do what favors, basically? That's a useful definition.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  What I think he misses though is that Bitcoin is the only error proof database? It's the only database that can't be manipulated, right? So when a central bank owns that database and all of a sudden they award new tokens, you know, new units of tokenized human labor energy to themselves, or whoever is nearest the currency spigot. They are debasing the units of tokenized labor energy of everyone else. So they are introducing an error or entropy to that database. This corrupts the signal that money facilitates, which is the price signal. It also disincentivizes savers from saving and incentivizes savers to become debtors,

• 38:09Speaker 01

  right, to accumulate debt as we described earlier. So yeah, you could call money a database of tracking labor. However, the ideal database would be one that is error proof, one that cannot be manipulated or changed willy nilly by the whim of any bureaucrat. You want something that can only be changed by those who are actually rendering useful work to other people, and that's what Bitcoin is.

• 38:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Very interesting. So I'll say that was a weird take. Um, the, there's two things that I wanna get to and I, it's weird because he's obviously, this is so old. So I think he's sort of just encountering it. There's two things. One, once you understand that money's a technology that allows people to capture the, um, energetic value of their labor to be used at a future date, then all of a sudden it's like, whoa, that's really incredible that we came up with a way, whether it was shells back in the old day, grain, salt, whatever, that you were able to say, I went and did this thing and I have a reward for that, that I don't have to spend now, I could spend later. It's

• 39:18Tom Bilyeu?

  equal in the, um, importance to giving somebody else food so they can store fat on their body in your behalf.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Equal to language, I would say.

• 39:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Huge. Uh, the other thing that I wanna focus on is this idea that I think is incredibly important now, as you see the Chinese government ratchet up what they're doing with the social credit score is you, you need to allow things to have a potential illegal use. And if you try to get illegality down to zero, you have to go into the precog business. Where now all of a sudden you are trying so hard to eliminate every possible way that somebody could do something wrong, that you do end up with a 1984, thought crime stuff. And so, uh, he said it a little bit awkwardly, but even if money, Bitcoin, whatever, is used for illegal transactions, if it has

• 40:07Tom Bilyeu?

  a real utility, you should let that in. It's just like freedom of speech. Of course, people are gonna use speech to say hateful, horrible things, but that doesn't mean that you eradicate speech.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or just like US dollars, right? US dollars are used for all kinds of illegal activities. It doesn't mean they, they turn off US dollars or an invention as simple as the knife, right? Well, people use knives to prepare dinner every night and other people use knives to kill people. So we don't make knives illegal. People have used cars to run people over. So you're not gonna make cars illegal. Like it's, the tool is amoral, right? Money is a tool. You can't impute any morality, the tool. Like, oh, someone used this for an illegal purpose. We need to legalize the tool. That is fucking nonsense. Makes no sense whatsoever.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  All right, number two, a hot take from Andrew Take.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  What do you think about cryptocurrency? Are you invested?

• 40:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I'm a proponent of crypto. I do use crypto, Bitcoin, ETH, the big ones.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 41:04Speaker 05

  I think that chasing crypto pumps is now over. We're not, the bull runs over, the stupid money is gone. I see they launch these coins and then they start a Telegram community. Everyone's like, yeah, we're all in this together. No, you're not. You're not in this together. If you buy crypto at a dollar and then you sell it at $10, someone bought it off you at $10. They start these stupid communities so all of you sit there and don't dump so that the developer could dump.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 05

  You're all dummies. You're all dummies.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  That's a pretty good description of crypto. Not Bitcoin. Yeah, it's in general crypto could be described favorably as gambling devices and unfavorably as pump and dump schemes as he's describing, right? You create a token, you create a community,

• 41:52Speaker 01

  some kind of value proposition, a website, a white paper, whatever. You create this hype. You know, it's going to be the next decentralized world computer, whatever, whatever. And you get people to buy this hype, this innovation theater, as I call it. The price goes up. That's good. You're the original issuer of the token and then you just dump it after it's 10x or whatever your your multiple is. And so, yeah, that's basically what crypto is. They're pump and dump schemes. The, the, you know, people are basically being used as exit liquidity. So people are getting rug pulled all the time and that's why it's such a disgusting space overall. What's unique about Bitcoin? Once you understand like the properties of good money, like we've talked about before and

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Bitcoin is basically this ultimate sound money, you know, call it digital sound money. It's, it's an ideal asset. You have that same type of dynamic. But there's no better asset to dump it into, actually. So, you know, win at 10x's, what are you gonna do? If you're gonna sell your Bitcoin for what? Like, for, you don't wanna sell over dollars because dollars get debased. You don't wanna sell over gold because gold has, you know,

• 43:08Speaker 01

  more seizable, has a more, a higher inflation rate, all these things that make it inferior to Bitcoin. So Bitcoin, you're left with just this perpetual pump scheme, basically. It just goes up because it is the most superior monetary technology we've ever had. So it's, you know, yeah, crypto is pump and dump, and then Bitcoin is crypto minus the dump. There's just no better asset to dump it into, so therefore it just pumps.

• 43:34Tom Bilyeu?

  For me, I think people need to understand that all capital markets are gambling, full stop. And there's something about the way that it gets crystallized and manipulated in crypto that's extra creepy. But if you fail to understand that the stock market is a big gambling pool that attracts gamblers, you will be very confused. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't like them, it doesn't mean that I don't think that there's a huge purpose to the capital markets there are. But you, a hedge fund is literally betting against things, for things, it's gonna go up, it's gonna go down, like, it's gambling, so.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mises would say all human action is speculative because we can never know with certainty that our actions will create our intended outcomes, ever, right? So it's all speculative, it's all gambling, right? It's all gambling. You don't, you don't know anything that you're trying to do is gonna work out in your favor. So we're dealing with probabilities in every step of our lives.

• 44:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yup.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  All right, this one you're familiar with, you've seen this one before.

• 44:43Speaker 05

  The US government can't go bankrupt because we can print our own money.

• 44:48Speaker 05

  It obviously begs the question, why exactly are we borrowing in a currency that we print ourselves? I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say, why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?

• 45:01Speaker 06

  Like you said, they print the dollar, so why, why does the government even borrow?

• 45:05Speaker 05

  Well, um, the...

• 45:09Speaker 05

  So the, I mean, again, some of this stuff gets, some of the language that the M M, some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money, and it definitely lends that money, which is why, the government definitely prints money, and then it lends that money by, by selling bonds. Is that what they do?

• 45:33Speaker 05

  They, they, um, they, yeah, they, they, um, they sell bonds. Yeah, they sell bonds. Right? Since they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah, so a lot of times, a lot of times, at least to my ear with M M T, the, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing, but there is no question that the government prints money, and then it uses that money to, um, uh,

• 46:02Speaker 05

  so, um, yeah, I, I guess I'm just, I don't, I can't really talk, I don't, I don't get it. I don't know what they're talking about, like, because it's like, Jesus. The government clearly prints money, does it all the time, and it clearly borrows. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this debt and deficit conversation. So I don't think there's anything confusing there.

• 46:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, he lied on his resume. Like, that is crazy. That, that clip is crazy.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 46:32Tom Bilyeu?

  It, I've seen it titled as the scariest clip on the internet. That is by far the scariest clip on the internet. That guy was actually advising President Biden on his economic policy. That's insane. I can't, I can't fathom.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  I think he has a music degree or something, like, he doesn't even have a degree in economics. Um, clearly, I would say, in short, that's your brain on Fiat, basically. Like, it just makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Um, if I were to try and demystify what he's saying,

• 47:05Tom Bilyeu?

  He doesn't know what he's saying.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Well, I think, what, I think he's trying to say.

• 47:09Tom Bilyeu?

  If you could answer her question, what he wishes he understood.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Here's what's going on. And I'll try to say it in as simple terms as possible. US government issues shitcoin called US Treasury. It can issue as many of these shitcoins as it wants, right? This is debt. Creates it out of thin air. Uses treasuries to borrow dollars from the Fed, the central bank of the United States. That can also issue US dollar shitcoin out of thin air at infinitum, right? So, US government is issues U S T shitcoin. As many as they want to borrow as many USD shitcoin from the Federal Reserve as they want. The doll- that's how dollars come into the system. They are born at interest.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  They are borrowed into existence. There's an interest rate paid to the private owners of the shareholders of the Federal Reserve. Whose, uh, names we don't know, but we have some ideas about it, right? In general. Um, that's the, the circle jerk that's going on here. And the cost of that is externalized onto everyone using USD as a savings vehicle. They're getting their purchasing power debased with each new dollar that is counterfeited into existence via this mechanism. And this is what, this is the circle jerk that Bitcoin fixes.

• 48:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I was, I still can't believe that clip is real. It looks like parody, but it's not.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Clown world.

• 48:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Jesus.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Clown world.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  All right, last one. After Bitcoin just hit an all time high, somebody was right, but I know this is not financial advice. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. How bananas do you think it's gonna go?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is a tweet I put out on March 6th, 2024. Um, this was right around the Bitcoin halving, which I believe was May 2024 this year. Someone could check me on that, but I think it was May. Um, and historically Bitcoin puts in a new all time high price roughly, approximately 18 months after the halving. So I put this tweet out, um, you know, I hope you guys like bananas because over the next 12 to 18 months, Bitcoin is gonna go bananas. And I retweeted it today or the, yesterday, sometime recently here in November because well, Bitcoin's at a new all time high price. But I think we're just getting started. I think we're gonna put in, um,

• 49:39Speaker 01

  A really face melting number by the end of 2025 and you're gonna, I'm already getting bombarded. By the way, it's so weird to be in Bitcoin because you go through this entire cycle of drama. Where Bitcoin price goes up, people are all texting me FOMOing, how do I buy? And then as soon as Bitcoin price goes down, they're like, oh my God, it's going to zero. Right? Like it's all over. Like, should I sell it? And then Bitcoin goes into sidebound trading for three years, you know, between having cycles before it goes into that giant blow off top. And everyone's quiet. Everyone thinks, oh, Bitcoin's still a thing. Like, no one talks to me. It's radio silence. You know, you're still into that? What's wrong with you? And it's like, I've seen this, this is the third cycle, I guess I'm going into now.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  And sure enough, you know, Trump got elected. I'm getting blown up with people asking me questions about it. And so, you know, those who live by the crystal ball are bound to eat glass. I'm not making this prediction for any reason other than entertainment purposes. This is not financial advice. This was just my read on Bitcoin's prior price movements. As it relates to prior range bound trading and mapped over its halving cycles. But I, I put this prediction out, I think three years ago at this point, that I, I thought it would trade north of $300,000 by its next market cycle peak.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  That was my prediction three years ago. So I'll just stick to that one for entertainment purposes only.

• 51:11Tom Bilyeu?

  And what time duration is that?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Before the end of 2025.

• 51:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  300K before the end of 2025.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Above 300K.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 51:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow. Well, if it hits that number, my friend, I'll take you out for a very nice steak dinner.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  And that would put it around a little bit less than half of Gold's market cap. Gold's market cap's around 15 and a half trillion. I think that would put Bitcoin probably around five or six trillion market cap. Again, someone could check me on that, but I think that's about right. Five or six trillion. Seems like a reasonable number for this cycle. And the next cycle, I would expect it to eclipse Gold's market cap and, and go on up from there.

• 51:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Be fascinating to watch. And speaking of which, where can people follow along with you to see what you're up to?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, thank you for having me. Always love talking to you. A lot of fun. Uh, I'm whatismoneypodcast.com and I'm on Twitter at Breedlove22.

• 52:04Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it. All right, everybody. Speaking of other things that I love, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

• 52:22Tom Bilyeu?

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