#1099 Robert Breedlove On Money, Power, War & Bitcoin

Robert Breedlove is one of the great thinkers in the Bitcoin space. In this conversation, we talk about money as a proxy for power, the difference between physical & political power, and Bitcoin as an indestructible symbolic system. ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Alto CryptoIRA lets you invest in more than 200 different coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your Alternative IRA or CryptoIRA via your 401(k) or IRA rollover or by contributing directly from your bank account. There are no setup or account fees, and it’s all you need to do to invest in crypto tax free. Let me repeat that again:You can invest in crypto tax free. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Even better? Eight Sleep recently launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with double the amount of sensors, delivering you the best sleep experience on Earth. Go to eightsleep.com/pomp ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  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. Now let's kick this thing off. Robert Breedlove is one of the great thinkers in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In this conversation, we talk about money as a proxy for power. We define the difference between physical and political power, and then we talk about Bitcoin as an indestructible symbolic system. I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert, as always, and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. Once you listen to this episode, make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, and then get on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agree with, and what you disagreed with. We enjoy the conversation as much as we do actually recording them. Alright, let's get into this episode with Robert. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

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• 2:11Speaker 03

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Robert here with me. I thought a great place that we could start the conversation is money is a proxy for power. This is one of the big ideas I think that you've been thinking a lot about and talking about. What does that mean? Money is a proxy for power?

• 2:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess I should first probably give a shout out to people that have helped me form these ideas. You know, Saylor's been very noteworthy for bringing this energy element into the discussion of money. Before him, I was really focused on the time aspect. And then people like Lowry have started to bring this power projection thesis to the foreground. And when I really started to dissect that, and you look at power through the lens of physics, there's a formula for power, actually. And it has components of both energy and time. So I'm hoping that this framing is a little bit more useful

• 3:29Speaker 04

  and telling about the nature and history of money. And then it also, but to get there, we have to kind of decompose power itself and start to define it. In my opinion, you know, most people, I think today, when we say power, they think it's just like arbitrary, political, like I'm your boss, or I'm your statesman, something like that. I can tell you what to do. My willpower is superordinate over yours. But that's all of this political power that we create in our imaginations. There's this other form of power that's very important, which is physical power. And, you know, so money, I guess, is it somewhat obvious? Like, if we talk about money in terms of purchasing power, which is what we ultimately want, you don't want...

• 4:15Speaker 04

  Whether you know it or not, you don't want a number of dollars in your bank account. What you actually desire is the purchasing power that money provides to you.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  So when we talk about inflation being a diminishing of the purchasing power per unit, um, that's why prices go up, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a, there's a parasitic relationship occurring in fiat currency. Where producers of that currency are basically siphoning power off of those that use it and save in it. So this isn't like an original idea, really. Like, again, if you just, what you want in money is purchasing power. So money is a proxy for power. But then it gets interesting, I think, when we break it down into how it relates to the physical dimension of power versus the political dimension.

• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Talk about the physical one first. What does it mean, the physical dimension of power?

• 5:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think the first, you know, when we start these deep conversations, we need to back up a little bit first. So. First thing to understand is that humans are animals, right? We, we are participating in this Darwinian process of survival. Um, I like to say that, you know, we are basically genetic information.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  Encoded for survival or programmed for survival through eons of evolution. Adapted to our surroundings to survive. So we are this message, if you will. Propagating through blood, flesh, bone, et cetera. And in that way, all life forms, it's not just humans, obviously, all life forms are basically these survival strategies. Propagating through organisms. And I think this is, honestly, this is a good through line too, because your, your organs individually. Have their own survival strategy. They've specialized, if you will, in this economy of your body. The organism itself is a, a macro representation of that. And then even organizations that we create in the world.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  They behave like organisms, right? They have life cycles, they live and die. Uh, in terms of economics, they have to have more inflows and outflows, just like you have to eat more calories than you expend, otherwise you die. So this is, these are all systems of energy or power.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  And that, like, we were talking about the Italian Prime Minister video earlier that just aired. And she had this great line in there, where she said something to the effect of, "Each of our genetic code is unique, non-repeatab, and therefore sacred."

• 6:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  It's like, yes, that's what we're doing. Like, and if you, you have kids, I have kids, you know what it's like to be a parent, like, Mother Nature sort of flips a dial inside of you. It's not something that is really within our control at all. Like, we are part of nature, rather than just controlling nature. And so in that sense, I think, you know, Nietzsche is famous for his, his will to power quote. And I think he's right, honestly, but he has, you have to understand power through the physics sense. And so I'll read his quote real quick. Nietzsche wrote, "Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals will have to be an incarnate will to power. It will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Not from immorality or immorality, but because it is living and because life simply is will to power." So what we're doing right now, like, to breathe, to speak, to think, to talk, to move, these are all expressions of a will to power, because, well, to define power in the physics sense, it's ultimately just to move energy across time. So it's the capacity to move. That's what power is in a purely physics sense. And to get into the formula, physics is power equals work divided by time.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Work, so I have to decompose that formula further now, work equals force times displacement. Which basically means a force applied across space. So what do we do when we, we combine that? You basically get power equals force times space divided by time. That sounds ridiculous. But what it basically means is, power is just the capacity for movement.

• 8:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  All right, that's what we're doing here. That's what we're doing in economics is we're trying to increase the amount of natural resources we can mobilize and bend it to our will to further our our wants in the world, to satisfy more human wants.

• 8:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it reminds me of two things. One is like weapons of war is who can move analog, physical assets.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Faster, larger, create more destruction, right? All these things. So if you think of a bullet is basically the ability to project power at a speed and in a very concentrated surface area to penetrate, whether it's armor, a human body, whatever. The other thing is things like an RPG in the most general sense, basically are able to puncture armor and then insert a grenade, you know, like object to then explode, right? Which is another kind of secondary use of power. So like the weapons of war is very obvious, but also if you think of a corporation, which really is one of the key foundations of the industrial revolution and the ability to organize resources and people and capital and all these things.

• 9:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It was done not because people sat around and was like, let's create more bureaucracy, like, oh, we're unorganized. It was done because there was leverage to create more force, more movement and the ability to increase output.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so in both of those situations, you are creating output. One is for an economic agenda. The other is for kind of a geopolitical or a war agenda.

• 9:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:54Anthony Pompliano?

  But it is all output.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  That's a great, great example, actually. And obviously closely related are the weapons of war and the political power structures. And I like the example of the corporation too, because that is an imaginal structure, right? We fabricated that in the imagination of ourselves and we we implement it into the collective imagination, if you will. And I'll expand on what more of this means as we go, but. But that's, I guess, the key point so far is that it grounds out in physics, right? As reality grounds out in physics. If you're not moving, breathing, talking, you're not alive, right? You're not relevant to this socioeconomic game we're all playing with each other. So in economics, you know, the entire point is to increase the division of labor.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  And we talked about this last time on a previous episode, but basically there is a physical principle that human beings accomplish more working cooperatively rather than they do in isolation. And so if that was not true, we would not trade with one another. It's not like we just decided to do this out of the kindness of our hearts. It's a very pragmatic mode of being, let's say.

• 11:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Another kind of point to this, which I think is very interesting. There's a book that I recently read called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. It talks all about 1870 to 1970. And it completely changed the way that I looked at so many different things. But one of the key concepts was pretty much 1870 to like 1900, 1920, somewhere in there. Every single home was essentially an individual node. They were what they called unnetworked. So they were not connected when it came to electricity, when it came to sewage and water and like all these different things. And it basically had to operate in a way where you said you have humans who live inside of this home, they have to get water and food and power and, you know, all these different components.

• 11:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And the people in that home went out into the world every day and did the things necessary to be able to do that. And so, you know, it was something like 75% of all people who lived at that time ended up doing jobs that were undesirable. A very large portion of them were farmers and they operated off of the land, like all this stuff. By the time you get to, for sure, 1970, but even as early as like 1920, those homes now had, you know, four or five different components. They now were networked for electricity. They were networked for water. They were networked for all these different things. And so in some way, while we think of individual versus a group from a productivity standpoint, also on a societal standpoint, if everyone was siloed in a single home and they had to live off the land, there's production that happens. But damn, is it powerful when you put all these folks together in a network and they

• 12:33Anthony Pompliano?

  work on, okay, you're going to be the power company. You make sure we all have power. Somebody else, you're going to be the water company, right? And it ends up bringing people together in a really unique way that ends up increasing economic output.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  100%.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  What did, uh, biology said this at the conference yesterday, many apes strong.

• 12:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  A line from Planet of the Apes, I think. So when we cooperate, especially when we cooperate intelligently, right? Like you specialize in this, I'll specialize in that. We'll each honor one another's property rights and we'll trade. That's what increases the division of labor and allows us to accomplish way more than the sum of our parts.

• 13:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  So, and that's the whole, that's why we tinker, that's why we innovate, that's why we trade, is to achieve greater results with less efforts. That is equivalent to wealth, right? We can do more, satisfy more wants, enjoy more of a luxurious lifestyle ultimately. Cause let's face it, we live in absolute luxury compared to people a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago. And that is, you know, there's a lot of problems to solve in the world, but if you can solve that one, that at least creates the freedom for people to go and address other problems. So I think it's the most fundamental thing we should try and address as a species. So to do that, and this is among the defining features of humanity, we use open source technologies largely to contribute to that.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Language, mathematics, even money, as we've talked about before, like gold, I would argue is kind of an analog, open source technology. Everyone could see how it works, no one could do anything about it. So it, you know, took over the world for a number of reasons. But all of these are designed to optimize our coordination. And there's a great term from a guy I talked to named John Vervakey. He calls these psychotechnologies.

• 14:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  So whereas a technology, like a physical technology increases our fitness to the world, or fitness to purpose somehow, a psychotechnology is just something that enhances our cognitive fitness to the world. So the fact that I can make these sounds with my mouth right now, and you know what I'm saying, like, it's because we're both users of this open source technology called English.

• 14:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  And so that is very fundamental to creating that division of labor that creates all this wealth and allows us to engage in the process of civilization. So. Technologies, psychotechnologies, all really important to human flourishing. But I think the key, a key point that, and this is where I hope this conversation is a little bit unique. These things are all born in the human imagination.

• 15:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Like, we, we always forget to stop and consider that.

• 15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  And when you start to have this lens on the world, when I walk around downtown Miami, and I'm looking at all these, you know, high rises and cars and all the software people are using, I'm just, it can get almost overwhelming, like, all of this was just born in someone's imagination. And then, oh, many people's imaginations over time. And you, they go and imprint that imagination into physical reality to create all this stuff. So it's a very key component to all of this that we're talking about. And that's it. So we said, humans are animals. But humans are different because humans are animals with very sophisticated imaginations.

• 15:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  So we create these tools to increase our fitness to each other, uh, and to the world. And again, if you have kids, this is sort of obvious. I have to thank my daughter for inspiring a lot of this. They grow up just playing imaginary, nonstop, right?

• 16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Nonstop, like, new, new outfit, new role, new name, you're this, you're that, here's my stuffed animal that's named this. And then we just think kids stop doing that arbitrarily somewhere like in teenage years? No, we don't stop at all. We're doing it right now, right? Like, you run a business, several businesses. Those are all imaginal structures, right? People willingly engage in those hierarchies and assume a role in that structure. But it's all imaginal, right? The authority that the boss projects over the employee, like, it's, they've connected their imaginations together in this enterprise called the business. And that's what we do. That's how we run the world, is because we engage with the, our imaginal realities

• 16:47Speaker 04

  to reshape physical realities in a very sophisticated way.

• 16:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I think a lot about real estate, like, commercial real estate. So, um, there is a couple of blocks from here, huge, uh, uh, entire block of grass. And it's kind of in a weird part, because it's in downtown, but it's grass, there's nothing. There and so I've walked by it hundreds of times and I've always said to myself like somebody's gonna do something with that, somebody's gonna do something with that, right? Something could be a strip mall, could be a high rise, like there's a bunch of different things that you could do, someone could build a parking deck there, right? Whatever it is. Recently it was announced that they are going to create a very large, high-rise building that's residential with restaurants and all stuff. Well, when they make that announcement,

• 17:30Anthony Pompliano?

  they say who's gonna do it and what do they do? They publicize the renderings of what is gonna be there. And so somebody sat down and drew, this is what we could do. And they socialized it with the group and the group was like, that looks awesome. We should do that. People will want to live there. That will create economic activity. The numbers work, like all of these other things started to follow. But it's not very different than a young kid sitting down saying like, look at this house I drew, right? And what becomes fascinating is, and I think that this was maybe one of the Carlson brothers at Stripe, or somebody I saw tweet and was like, you forget when you walk around that things that exist in the world, buildings, businesses, cars, all the

• 18:14Anthony Pompliano?

  stuff. Somebody had to have the idea, somebody had to have the conviction and the courage to go try to build it. And then somebody had to operationalize it to actually say, yes, it's possible to build a car. But what if we built tens of thousands of cars every single year? What if we were able to actually create lots of concrete? What if we were able to create elevators? What if we were able to use glass for windows and do all this stuff? And it sounds so stupid because you're like, yeah, guys, duh, like there's buildings. But if you really kind of draw it back, it's like, human imagination in some way is the same thing like oxygen to the human body. Right? Without the imagination, you don't really have a society.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  There's no civilization for sure.

• 18:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that you, all you have is just straight up, I kill you, you kill me, I need food for my family. The imagination is what gives order, organization, and ultimately economic productivity.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Super well said. Yeah, we're fighting against, you know, nature gives us plenty of uncertainty to deal with. And the imagination is our greatest defense or weapon against that, let's say. And I don't know if that's the same tweet you're referring to, but someone referred to The entire world is a museum of passion projects. So when you see all of these buildings and businesses and ideas and games and everything, everything that humans create, right, starts here. And then through a whole lot of work and perseverance, sometimes if it's successful, gets imprinted into the real world. And then we just like plug into these realities and take them for granted in a lot of ways. But it's easy to forget how much it took to get to this point.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  So I guess the point is, most people think kids stop playing imaginary at some point. But I would say if you've got a job, if you use money, if you're a citizen of a country, then you are engaged in serious imaginal play, whether you understand it or not. Yep. And I would say if you don't understand it, actually, you're more likely to be possessed by one of those structures. Rather than if you understand how this works, you can just be a voluntary participant, let's say. And so I want to call these something, I want to call these imaginal structures. We often call them hierarchies. You could call them social institutions. You could call them imaginal structures. Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens, I think called these the imagined orders.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  I today, I'm just, so all these terms, I'm going to use the term symbolic structure. Okay. So language is symbolic, right? We're using code to communicate. And then when we press all those ideas together and then push them into the physical world, when we press them together, we create a symbolic structure that gets pushed into the physical world to become a skyscraper or become a battleship or whatever it is. So your company, money, nation states, these are all symbolic structures that we inhabit in this imaginal space.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  So we're storytellers, right? That's what we're saying here. These are just stories, is like Jordan Peterson always talks about, we live in stories. First time I heard that, I was like, that sounds ridiculous. Of course, everything's a story because everything's a description of a sequence of events, but that's not, I don't think that's what he meant. He meant something more like this, that we're creating these imagined realities and then we inhabit them, like as a member of society, let's say.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Plato has a great quote, he said, "Those who tell stories rule society." This is fucking Plato, right? Like, he got this. He, very brilliant guy. There's another quote that, someone said this reminded them of, uh, when I posted this on Twitter, they said, "Who controls the past now, controls the future." "Who controls the present now, controls the past." So, in these-

• 22:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Very deep, but very true.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Yes. In these symbolic structures, you know, we've heard this quote, "History's written by the winners." It's very often that the symbolic structure gets written or rewritten by the winner, uh, in the, the domain of the physical, right? So, physical warfare. If a new country, uh, undergoes a, a revolution and a new leader is installed, they'll typically go straight to work rewriting history. Alright, if you go to North Korea today, there's all these statues, deifying Kim, whatever his name is.

• 22:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Kim Jong-un.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Kim Jong-un. So, he's, that's how he is dominating the symbolic structure of North Korea is by deifying himself as part of it.

• 22:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it's even, uh, I believe, uh, you have to have a photo of him in your home. So, it's not just like the public, you know, uh, I, I would say, uh, open spaces, I don't know how open they are.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, but like literally in your own home, you have to have a photo of him.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  That's crazy. But, and so, the, the Yuval Harari thing in Sapiens, his whole punchline, sorry to ruin the book if you haven't read it,

• 23:20Speaker 04

  "Human beings are the animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers." There's many species that can cooperate flexibly.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  Uh, example escapes me here, there's many that can cooperate in large numbers, like bees, but they can't, the way he puts it is, only human, you can only unite 10,000 human beings on a battlefield under a flag. So, whereas all these other animals are, are subject to the Dunbar number or something equivalent for their species, human beings are not. We can combine our forces in a way that no other animal can, and that's the reason we're the top of the food chain, basically. And so, I think this is, points to, to why this struggle has always been for the collective human imagination, right? Religion, propaganda, even modern nation statism.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Where you, it's much more energy efficient to get people to subscribe to your symbolic structure than it is to force it on them.

• 24:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Because if you force it on them, they're gonna, you know, cut corners, backstab you at every chance you can get. And we know this, we know this intuitively. So, the, um, the game, I guess, is to try and be influential, right? And so, I wanna focus on, we could talk about that for a long time, because there's a lot of history there, but I wanna focus on the nation state. Because that's the one we live in today, alright? This is the dominant symbolic structure in the world. And, I'm here, as you were there yesterday, to attend, uh, an event, talking about the network state. Which is this, let's say embryonic idea for the future of nation states. And there was a small gathering here in Miami, and a lot of really interesting ideas thrown

• 25:05Speaker 04

  around. And, one was shared with me, that you could actually decompose nation state into nation and state. Sounds pretty obvious, but, the nation is more, uh, uh, the root word of nation is natility, I wanna say, and this relates to like natal, so like the birth and, and growth of a people. So this is gonna refer to the people, the culture, the wisdom traditions, uh, the modes of being, et cetera. The state, though, is the like administrative layer, or the political apparatus within that area.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  That's really there, it's a monopoly on violence that exists to resolve disputes over, uh, resolve disputes of people over scarce resources. So another way to say that is, the state exists to preserve the relationship between people and their stuff. So if you create something of value, and someone tries to take that from you, recourse to the state is how you resolve that. So we've outsourced the defense of our property, effectively. And at its best, a nation state wields political power, and I'm going to get into what political power means shortly, to defend the market process from interruption. So you want people

• 26:23Speaker 04

  to be maximally free, and to be maximally free, you need strong property, or you need an integrity of the relationship between you and your stuff, so that you can engage in the process of a consensual exchange, increase the division of labor, increase wealth, and therefore increase the collective physical power harnessed by human beings in the marketplace. Right? So it's this, and as we talked about last time, I framed this as useful ideas a lot. And so it's kind of the same thing. It's more useful ideas are implemented, whether it's property, whether it's an iPhone or a laptop, these are just better ideas for communicating or accomplishing human purpose, that gives you more movement,

• 27:04Speaker 04

  more wealth creation. So that's what the state acts as like this insulating layer to prevent that from being attacked. But we've been trapped in this situation with the state for a long time, that it tends to start to prey on the very thing it's supposed to protect over time, which has been a real problem.

• 27:23Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start to kind of unpack the division of labor and a lot of these pieces, it feels like the sum of the parts are more valuable than them individually. But also, when you then overlay things like property rights, you then are able to do something very different, because actually, property rights usually are thought of as defense. So you cannot take my property. But in some way, it's also a tailwind to give people more conviction to specialize.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think of the farm, why did you have the ability to get water, food, and all the things you needed for you and your family to survive? Because you had no confidence that anyone else was coming to save you, right? Now, when you move to modern society, I don't think that I know very many people who have a farm because they have greater confidence that the food supply, whether you like it or not, or think it's good, or it could be improved, or whatever, will provide food. And so they have the confidence to not have to go spend time on farming because they say somebody else in our society has taken on that division of labor. And I am going to go specialize in whatever, whether it's a white collar

• 28:44Anthony Pompliano?

  job, a blue collar job, or anything in between. And so property rights not only protect what you're doing, but it gives you the confidence to become more and more and more specialized, and still have the safety net of society that says, yes, food will be at the grocery store.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Whether you have property rights or not, if at any point you're confident that food will be at the grocery store, or clean water is going to be there, or any of these things that you don't specialize in, if that ever breaks down, that's when all hell breaks loose. And we return back to a world where no one had confidence, and they had to be self-sufficient. And there's just not a lot of people that are prepared to do that.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah, that would be the collapse of the division of labor, the collapse of wealth creation, which is equivalent to the collapse of civilization.

• 29:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  It's like I hammer this point so hard, people, wealth is demonized a lot. Wealth is, should not be demonized. It's the basis of the solution to most problems, I would argue. And I think that point you made is so good, because what does that mean, right? Confidence in property rights. That means other people are engaging in this symbolic structure, playing this imaginal game with you. And it's the confidence you have that they'll continue to honor the rules of the game, as will you. Now, if confidence is shaken for any reason, it unwinds the whole thing. The whole thing goes involuted.

• 30:07Anthony Pompliano?

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• 30:53Anthony Pompliano?

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• 31:36Anthony Pompliano?

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• 32:19Anthony Pompliano?

  okay, now that used to be out of bounds, now it's not out of bounds anymore. And then people start running over there and the game continues. Like that is the exact equivalent of legislation and laws and like all these things that grownups are playing.

• 32:34Anthony Pompliano?

  But also, uh, laws and human nature, uh, are at sometimes at odds.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But the beauty of good laws is that it is able to use human nature as, uh, and align those incentives so that humans will do what humans are going to do, uh, but do it within some agreed upon, uh, framework.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, you know, I always go back to like, if there was no laws, would most people go out in the streets and start killing people? Probably not.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But if there was no food in a city and families were going hungry, it doesn't matter if there's laws or not. At some point, right? I think there's a saying like, uh, uh, you really see what a man is capable of if, uh, if he doesn't eat for three days.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 33:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's almost like the laws have to align with the human nature because you can't have people, like the laws don't matter if people are hungry.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:36Anthony Pompliano?

  The laws don't matter if people feel like, uh, their life's in danger.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And you actually see this in society, like thou shall not kill is written into law.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 33:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Except for if he's gonna kill you, then you can, you know what I mean? Like, it's a very weird way to look at it, but in some way, the law and human nature do have to align, or therefore society eventually rejects the law.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  Uh, 100%. So much good stuff there. Um, Peterson, again, this idea that,

• 34:13Speaker 04

  what you just said, thou shall not kill is written directly into the law. There's a mythological substructure to Western civilization. A lot of it is the Judeo-Christian mythology. Right? We, we would not have gotten to property rights if we did not have thou shall not kill in our history. Like, that's another important, it's a, it's almost like the blockchain of the imaginal structure. Right? It, it's building in layers over time. We didn't just decide out of the blue that we're gonna create the United States. I mean, read the Federalist Papers, papers. These guys were diehard Christian, or at least inspired by the Bible to a large extent. And what you said too, like, good laws map on to good incentives.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  And I would argue that people don't really follow laws, actually. People follow incentives. Right now, if there's a credible threat of force behind a law, then that's a disincentive to break it. So you might follow it for some period of time, but ultimately, people are going to bend to their own incentives. And the point with the kids, the kids, hey, that's out of bounds, now that's out of bounds. What do you think we're doing with national borders?

• 35:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  We're, that's it. This is, this is your country, this is my country.

• 35:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's layers to it, like, there's national borders, but even if you think of like, voting districts. Like, that's the one that always cracks me up, right? Is that like, you ever seen them drawn and it looks like a square? And then in one corner, it like, reaches out and grabs like a city, right? And comes back, and you're like, if I was just to come up with a random voting city or voting district, that's not the shape that I would draw, right? Now, it may be for good reason or bad reason or whatever, right? And people love to debate that stuff, but like, that is the drawing of imaginary lines that then feed into a game that is around voting.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 36:00Anthony Pompliano?

  That then dictates who gets to play what role in the game.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  Who benefits from the proceeds stolen from taxation and inflation? That's what that game is, right? You get voted into office, and then you get to decide what to do with the stolen booty. So, again, we needed to play that game because we needed to create integrity of relationship between people and their stuff in the physical world. But the problem with that game is that monopolist on violence, the security provider, over time, has tended to start to bend the rules to their own favor. The individuals that come into power inside of the state have tended to corrupt the state. And we'll, we'll get into corruption a bit later, but.

• 36:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And I also think a key piece is that's part of the division of labor, which people tend to forget of like, if you go back 200 years, like, guess who protected your home? You better.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because if you didn't, or you and your, you know, equivalent of a neighborhood did not, you were fucked.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 37:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And so at some point, the farmer said, "Okay, this other person's gonna be the farmer and gonna provide food for the village. And this other person's gonna provide the security. This other person's gonna provide, you know, whatever, the horses or whatever the division of labor ended up being." But you had to have the confidence, not only in the property rights and all this, but they would do their job.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Because the fastest way for people to get really interested in self-defense is to look at a group of people and say, "You can't protect me."

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And you see this, actually, the place where unfortunately we see it is look at natural disasters. Natural disasters come in and it breaks down so many of the agreed upon kind of structures of a society. And so if you go back to Hurricane Katrina and maybe a decade ago or so now,

• 37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I remember that there was, the National Guard was being called in. And literally you had armed National Guardmen and women who were patrolling Walmart. Because Walmart was selling their physical goods and they were keeping the money in the back because there was no armored trucks to come pick it up.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, you start to say, "Okay, hold on a second. Did Walmart call? Did an individual in the community, did the governor, like, I don't know how it happened, but the reason why we don't have armed soldiers in every single store is because there's a general belief that the local police, the security systems, the technology, all this stuff can protect. The goods and the store owner.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 38:42Anthony Pompliano?

  When that breaks down, it goes back to get armed men here.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. That's a great example where Hurricane Katrina was kind of like a real dose of physical power, totally obliterating all of these symbolic structures. A lot of them premised on.

• 38:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I never thought of it that way. Yeah.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  And then, as you said, the armed guards, they coalesce around the money, right? That's being taken in. So political power coalesces to the physical power that that money represents.

• 39:09Anthony Pompliano?

  In in some way, you could actually argue, uh, does society put more value on human life or on the money? And if the armed guards or the help come into an area and they go and they protect the money.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It opens up a lot of questions.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 39:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And and thankfully, it's not binary, right? It's not like, hey, there's only one person. Which way do they go? It's a fork in the road because at the same time, we had helicopters flying in and rescuing people off of roofs and and doing all of these like heroic actions where it was obvious that some value was being placed on the life. But it does start to open up the nuance of a conversation that's like very interesting to think about.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. I I was actually there for a mission trip after like I guess it was nine months, maybe after.

• 39:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  In Bay St. Louis, where the eye of the hurricane had. Did you know the Canadian Mounties made it there before the US National Guard?

• 40:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I did not know that.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:03Anthony Pompliano?

  That is crazy.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  So.

• 40:04Anthony Pompliano?

  On their horses?

• 40:05Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't know if they were on horses, but they made it down there.

• 40:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  Um, so their symbolic structure, right, was actually being more faithful to the people of this country at that time, which I thought was shocking.

• 40:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  Um, and then just one other point on the Walmart thing. Had that been Bitcoin, though, and the money was dematerialized, you would have, there would not be a need to defend the property in a physical way, assuming you custodied it properly. So I'm kind of foreshadowing what we're going to talk about later, but.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  The physicality of money is what leads to the relevance of political power and force, let's say, in the physical world. And, and the value of, of human life versus monetary energy. You know, I would argue, again, there's the through line there of power, right?

• 40:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  People are a will to power. They're alive, they're, they're useful to other people, they can perform labor, they have ideas. We can think, we can talk, right? We have, humans are amazing, we're the most amazing asset we have, frankly, is us. And so to the extent that you can defend that, right? To protect the sanctity of the individual or that sacred genetic code, as the Italian prime minister said earlier, that's, that's the whole game here.

• 41:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Um, okay, so a bit of a segue, but just on the emergence of the nation state itself. It emerges as a result of the industrialization of military technology, right? There's a reason World War I and World War II were of such a scope, scale and severity that the world had never seen before. Those reasons were the mechanization and industrialization of warfighting equipment. Um, and I would also insert fiat currency here, that these governments were not on a gold standard, right? So they would suspend redeemability for gold, start printing money to finance the war up to the point of hyperinflating the currency.

• 42:06Speaker 04

  Um, and then that has follow-on negative consequences when you consider Hitler was born from the ashes of the Weimar hyperinflation, right? Currency collapse, people, when the currency collapses, people go crazy, the whole world breaks down, the entire symbolic structure collapses, let's say, and there becomes this rousing demand for strong leadership, law and order, and that's what led to Hitler. So.

• 42:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Without getting too much into the details, many people, I think, know the high level. Hitler and kind of somewhat of the rise to power and then his attempted and thankfully ultimate failure to take over much larger areas of geographic land. But there's some scary nuance as you learn more and more about that situation where even in American politics, there was a lot of people who were very supportive of Hitler for a very long time. And part of it was because there was this great fear of Russia. And so a little bit of the your enemy, my enemy's enemy is my friend.

• 43:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And then there was a long kind of this journey or timeline, certain actions that Hitler and kind of his whole crew took that then was the tipping point. Okay, fine, now I don't like it. Okay, now I'm worried. Okay, now there's a threat. But it's not like, to your point, that's a bad person, they have no power, they have no organization, they have no weapons, they have no anything, and we know that's a bad person. It's a lot different, right? It's a much more complex story. Osama bin Laden is very similar in that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Maybe we should help that person defeat our enemy. And then the power consolidates and the weaponry and the training and all these things.

• 43:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And the next thing you know, it's like, oh, wait a second. Like, actually, maybe the ally is the enemy.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And it becomes this weird thing, and it's a story as old as time, over and over and over and over again. But it does, it is worth learning about for people to understand.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. And it follows the wealth, right? It follows the money. So the reason so much gold ended up in North America prior to the end of World War II, during World War II, was because Hitler would invade a country and he would plunder the central bank's gold supply. So enough countries had seen this happen, they started sending their gold across the Atlantic. So when enough gold ended up in North America, at a certain point, we were very reticent to enter the war for a long time. But at a certain point, it was like, well, we got all the gold. There's been enough devastation over there. We could probably just go clean it up, declare ourselves the victor, rewrite the global banking rules at the Bretton Woods Conference, and then be the global dollar hegemony.

• 44:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Which indeed, we did, and have been since 1944. And so-

• 44:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It's funny how it doesn't read that way in the history books.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  It's funny how it's been rewritten by the winner, right?

• 45:01Anthony Pompliano?

  It also, uh, simple things at the time. How fast did the ships go?

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And I think today, people are so removed from a lot of this, that we don't think like, oh, who has the faster fighter jet, or who has the better technology? Like, that competition still happens to, uh, to a great degree. But at the time, like, the difference between 24 or 30 knots, literally could determine force.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And still, about power, right?

• 45:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Energy channeled across time. The faster you can channel it, the more effective you are as a combatant, or as an entrepreneur even, right? If you can move people in a plane faster than you can move them in a car, then people are gonna prefer planes to cars, obviously. So, the nation-state is built on gold, as we just said about the United States. And for reasons we talked about in our last episode together, gold was already selected by the free market as money, right? It best satisfied five properties of money. But chief among those qualities that make gold good money is its scarcity, which was protected by the proof of work necessary to mine, or discover, mine, extract, refine gold, and use it as

• 46:08Speaker 04

  money. And so, that, and this is the same thing that maps onto Bitcoin, is that expenditure of energy necessary to produce gold, as it is to produce Bitcoin, that secures the supply from counterfeiting. And as I've said a lot, inflation and counterfeiting are the same thing, right? The central bank is a global currency counterfeiting operation. That's all it is. It doesn't add any value. It's parasitical on the market economy. That, when you, when you break, like, fiat currency has zero proof of work, effectively. That's why it gets produced ad infinitum, and leads to World War I, World War II, global debt to GDP at 350%, et cetera. But I don't want to dwell on that. I'm gonna stay on the power track here.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  Proof of work basically means you need to expend energy to acquire the value of the money. Right? You need to expend power to acquire the purchasing power, let's say. And this basically means you're protected from political power. If you hold gold, there's no political institution in the world that can arbitrarily say gold's not money anymore. And that's really important, especially in a world where Russian central bank reserves are being seized at the tune of $600 billion. Canadian truck protesters are having their assets seized for a peaceful democratic demonstration. You know, you need seizure resistance in this world especially. So I would argue that gold was a good proxy for power

• 47:38Speaker 04

  because it required power to obtain the purchasing power stored therein, right? It's skin in the game, it's symmetry.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  And you can't counterfeit energy. This is very key, right? If you want a money that can't be counterfeited, well then root it in the thing no one knows how to counterfeit, which is the thermodynamic physical reality of energy itself. Cannot be created nor destroyed, cannot produce it without work. And so the nation state historically is the most politically powerful institution in the world. But I would argue it's only because they hold the most physically power relevant tool, which was gold, right? The state that accumulated the most gold became the dominant state in the world. So a little bit more on gold and then we can move on.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  As I said earlier, the physicality is kind of a double edged sword, right? So the physicality of gold, as we're talking about when the Walmart, the guards were securing the cash at Walmart, right? There's physical cash that requires physical security to protect it from theft or seizure from others. So in a physics sense, the physicality of gold makes it a good proxy for power, if that's how we're defining gold, in the sense that you have to expend energy to earn the energy that gold represents. But I would say in a political sense, and I'm gonna define this more shortly, gold's bad because it incentivizes incentivizes the centralization of gold into one location.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  And I think that's because gold's just not portable, right? We need money to be movable. It needs to be transactable. It's much better if I can beam money around the world at the speed of light than it is load a bunch of gold bars on a container ship and wait three months. Right? If we're gonna increase the division of labor, we need fast money. So another definition I've given is money's a tool for moving value across space and time. Gold was good at time, but not space. Currency is good at space, but because we break it from gold, it does not hold value over time. That's why dollars are a terrible store of value. And as we'll talk about a little bit later, you know, Bitcoin perfects both of these effectively. So

• 49:56Speaker 04

  the lack of gold's portability led to the creation of this derivative application called currency. But then when you break, with that application, you have to trust someone to maintain the peg to gold. Otherwise, you radically empower the currency issuer. If they can just start producing currency with no check, meaning citizens have no option to redeem that currency for gold, then the issuing institution, which is the central bank, will grow and grow and grow until it pathologizes the whole world. That's what's going on in the world today, in my estimation.

• 50:34Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think through the ramifications of that, so that's what's happening. What is like the biggest ramification that you identify?

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Well, I think it is, and again, the next thing I wanna do is define political power, which sort of rounds out the other side of this. So far, we've basically said that physical power is the essence of being alive and everything we're doing in the world. But to maximize our physical power footprint in the world, to harness more energy and channel it across time, we need these symbolic structures, right? We're the animal that plays imaginary. Acting in concert enables us to move a lot more matter than we could in isolation, as you described with your example earlier. So, but the symbolic structures themselves, if they're just stories, they can be, they're subject to political power.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  And so I want to define political power as something born from the faith humans have in that symbolic structure and the roles that individuals play inside of it. So when you go into a meeting with, I don't know, a representative of a sovereign wealth fund, right? He's just a guy playing a role inside of a symbolic structure that has authority over certain assets, that may or may not invest in whatever project you're there to talk to him about, for instance. So this, but that gives the individual a lot of power, you know, political power, that they can start to, again, follow their own incentives rather than following the laws

• 52:12Speaker 04

  and bend things in a way that benefit them, perhaps at the expense of other participants in the symbolic structure. Because often, there's an information asymmetry, right? An individual, an insider may know certain things that outsiders do not, and they can use that information to arbitrage and other activities to profit for themselves at the expense of others. Which, again, the central bank, I would say that's exclusively what they're doing. Correct. Right? It's a monopoly on currency production to externalize the cost, privatize the profit. So, and again, you know...

• 52:45Speaker 04

  So political power exists everywhere that basically everywhere that we're being human, it exists to at least some extent. It doesn't matter, again, if it's your company, right? You've got company politics, surely you always have state politics, country politics, all these things. But the symbolic structures and the power anyone has over you inside of them results from the collective imagination, right? You, you could always quit your job, you can always start a new company, you can always opt out of these things. So it's not a real physical power that the president has over 330 million apes in the United States. It's all premised on this symbolic structure. Yes.

• 53:28Speaker 04

  Which has a political dimension to it as a result of us just being human. So. Paul said this yesterday, it's like, we have to LARP these things into existence. LARP being the acronym for live action role-playing. And it really seems like that's what we're doing. We have to kind of pretend, fake it till you make it, pretend these realities into existence. But then the, we kind of start to forget, you know, like, we just think it's real. Like, we think the United States is some permanent fixture of reality, or any other country, or any other company, whatever, maybe not companies so much. And we forget that we just, it's just play, it's just imaginal, serious play that we're engaged in.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  And so a couple of these ideas that we've created that have been tremendously important, we've already alluded to this earlier, the idea of the individual, actually. This is one we take so for granted, it sounds funny for me to even say. Yes. But pre-Christ, the idea of the individual was not really that strong. It was about, they called it the paterna familias, I think I'm pronouncing it right, the family, right? You were just a component of the family. Typically, it was related to a very distinct geographical plot of land. They used to have, like, a fire they would maintain in the hearth, and they would always keep the fire alive, and if they ever had to move, they would move the fire, and it was symbolic of their ancestors. So the idea of, like, the individual, much less a sovereign individual, didn't exist

• 54:58Speaker 04

  in our symbolic structure, pre-Christ. And without, and for, I won't go into this topic, there's a great book called Inventing the Individual, Inventing the Individual, where I got this, and I would just encourage people to check it out.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  With no idea of the individual, you cannot have an idea of private property. Obviously, it doesn't make sense that an individual can have an exclusive relationship to assets if you don't even have the idea of the individual in the first place. So, that, I mean, it just shows you, like you said earlier, this segue of Christianity leading to the founding of the United States, and then private property, and then economic success stories like FAANG stocks. You would not think that Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Google are related to Christ that much. But when you understand how integral property is to the process of civilization, I think you can draw this through line. And so like, to that end, the US Constitution, in terms of symbolic structures, it's been

• 55:58Speaker 04

  one of the most successful that we've ever created. And it was, you know, we're set up as a decentralized republic with checks and balances built in, and again, built on this Christian notion of honoring the sovereignty of the individual. So it's just, it's tremendous how-

• 56:13Anthony Pompliano?

  In some way, the Constitution is the codebase.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 56:17Speaker 04

  It is.

• 56:18Anthony Pompliano?

  The Constitution is kind of that initial codebase, and there are amendments, right? That there are changes, there are additions, whatever. And in some way, also, there is the ability to propose changes. There has to be discussion, and eventually, there has to be a process as to which to reach agreement on those amendments or changes. But it is very similar to the creation of software, both in kind of the initial inception, but also in the upgrading-

• 56:50Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 56:50Anthony Pompliano?

  -of that document, those ideas, and at the end of the day, those words and language-

• 56:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 56:57Anthony Pompliano?

  -for a society.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  And it is. It's distributed cognitive software that we're writing, rewriting, you know, stories we're building, we're inserting ourselves into, taking ourselves out of. I would take it a step further and say, the way you describe the Constitution sounds a lot like the way the Bible was written, actually, right? It was a long process, a lot of people, a lot of amendments, rejections, changes, et cetera.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  That's almost like the moral codebase. Or a moral codebase, not the, a moral codebase. And then the US Constitution was like the legal ratification of that moral codebase into something political.

• 57:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think of the dictionary a lot, too. Like, there's a movie, I think it's like A Genius and a Madman or something. And you you forget that, like, somebody sat down, it was like, we are going to write a list of every word.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 57:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And what what the definition is, right? That's it, that was like the idea for the dictionary. Uh, and um,

• 57:51Anthony Pompliano?

  it is a database of words and those words actually end up getting debated. And we have seen in recent times, some of the definitions have changed. Some of those definitions have been upgraded. Some people would argue that they actually are being changed for political reasons, right? Whatever. But it's a database of words that goes through these processes. And what's fascinating is that if a language is derived from all of us, there's like this one little group of people, Merriam-Webster, right, as one example, who gets to decide what is in their list of words.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that a collective decision? Or is that, have we outsourced words and definitions to an organization?

• 58:36Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, it's kind of the centralizing effect on that open source software we call English. And it's, man, it's such a good point because when you consider that every, the word is almost like the elementary particle of the symbolic structure, right? Obviously, like, you need language to be a human, to create these things. But my understanding of a word and your understanding of a word, like, the degree to which language is useful is that the degree to which our understanding aligns on those words. But I obviously don't, right? You've lived a different life, you've had a different experience, as have I. You've heard the word used in different contexts, as have I. Now, in a very common word, like "the," it's probably pretty sharp, our consensus on that word.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  But on some more abstract term, it might be a little more deviated. So this whole thing is like, we're constantly engaging in dialogue to try and reach consensus on the meaning of words and then use those words to create these stories that we live in. And integrity is key.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  The thing needs to mean the same thing over time, so to the extent, I don't know about this, but to the extent Webster or whatever political institution or symbolic structure is changing the definitions of words, and the word recession came up for me there.

• 59:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Recession, the response.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Male, female.

• 59:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, also, things like the CDC expanded the definition of vaccine, these types of things. But also, what is even fascinating is it doesn't have to be maybe what I would say are the most controversial or debatable, where people get into the cultural wars and things like that. The idea of political parties, Republican and Democrat, over the years, the stance on certain topics, or the ideological kind of position of those political parties, has changed drastically, sometimes changes and then changes back.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  Like a 180.

• 1:00:33Anthony Pompliano?

  But the word Republican or Democrat, the definition has naturally changed, and what's most interesting about it is that the definition from an objective standpoint may not change, but from a kind of understanding through society, changes because the ideological position isn't necessarily on every single topic written into the definition of what is Republican, what is Democrat.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  Right, 100%, yeah, yes.

• 1:01:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It's kind of like theory versus reality.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And I think that's what you see with a lot of these concepts.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  And I think that's why aspiring dictators seek, well, historically, seek to control the media and control the money, right? These are two very important symbolic structures for allocating and moving information. So, I said the US Constitution is one of the most useful symbolic structures we've created to date, and this, I would say that's true because the problem, the very pragmatic problem humans have been trying to solve for a long time is like... How do we preserve the relationship between us and our stuff? As we've said, property, right? That's the exclusive purpose of government. I know it's grown a lot and expanded beyond the scope of that originally, but that is really all we need it to do. The market can do everything else.

• 1:01:57Speaker 04

  The other way to say that is like back to the will to power. How do we preserve the extension of the individual will to power into the world? So that if the entrepreneur goes into the world and engages all his ingenuity and faculties to create something other people value, we don't want other people to come and steal that from him because then that disincentivizes entrepreneurship and leads to decivilization. So we need a security provider, as we said, to, to enshrine and defend that, that idea of property. And in that way, the property, property is, and I talk about this till I'm blue in the face on my show, but I really think, I agree with Ayn Rand, property is the basis of civilization. It's the, there are no other human rights possible without property.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  If you can't preserve the fruits of your labor across time, there's nothing else beyond that.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  And so it's, it's also the source of all this political strife because the state exists to preserve property and it is also preying on property through taxation and inflation. So as, you know, there's a great quote by Clausewitz, who's an old German philosopher in warfare. He says, "War is just the continuation of policy or politics by other means." So it's, it's fighting over stuff. That's all we're trying to solve for here. Honestly, it may sound like an oversimplification, but I don't see where there's anything else there.

• 1:03:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:04:07Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:04:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All you need to do to start mining your own Bitcoin is go to compassmining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compassmining.io today. The idea also of war ends up being

• 1:05:08Anthony Pompliano?

  the point at which some portion of the population intersects policy. So if you were to look at the United States, 330 million people or so.

• 1:05:19Anthony Pompliano?

  How many of those people could tell you what the policies of the United States are outside of laws? What is our stance from an economic perspective? What is our stance on a geopolitical perspective? What is our stance on climate change or on energy or in ecological preservation? Or, you know, all these different, you can go really, really deep in the rabbit hole. You can start with the really high ideas. Most people have no fucking clue. They're like, I go to work every day. I do the best to do a good job there. I get paid and take care of my family and like, leave me alone, right?

• 1:05:50Anthony Pompliano?

  But when a country engages in war, that is the point at which it becomes, uh, policy has risen to the severity and conversation level that now everyone, for the most part, is aware of. Right. Not, not 100%, but 90 plus percent of people.

• 1:06:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in some way, whether they agree or not with the policy, if your nation is at war, you will be asked to participate, directly or indirectly.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And that is like a very interesting way to back into, like, politics don't matter, don't pay attention, all that, until you get to the extremes, and then all of a sudden, it's the only thing that may matter for an individual.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm reminded of that quote, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

• 1:06:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:06:40Speaker 04

  Right? Again, when the physical, the situation of physical power comes to the foreground, right? Whether it's Hurricane Katrina, or it's World War II, all of the sudden, everyone in that symbolic structure is oriented one direction, right? It's towards that in some way. So, the danger, all right, again, we said this earlier, the danger of these things is that they're stories, so they can be corrupted, and I want to try and define corruption here. I would define corruption as participants inside of a symbolic structure that understand the rules and expectations to be one thing, right? There's consensus on the rules, consent

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  of the governed, as we say in the US. If an individual operating in a position of authority inside that symbolic structure will now bend or twist those rules for private gain, and that does not apply to the public, typically it costs the public, because they're often extracting resources that the public has generated through the market process, that is corruption, right? So bending a rule for private gain, I'm sorry, bending a public rule for private gain, I would define as corruption. And this is like that phrase that we've heard recently, "Rules for thee, not for me," right? That is, that's corruption in a nutshell. So...

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  Again, symbolic structures, and this is could be a social institution, hierarchy, story, whatever you want to call it, necessary for us to live at the top of the food chain. But given the ethereal nature of these things, they're not real, right? That we can, they can be twisted in the imaginations of people and the imaginations of inhabitants by others, right? You can tell a new story or a competing story. These are often called narratives too, right? Like information warfare, narrative warfare. And this is the domain of propagandists, rhetoricians, bullshitters, right? They're trying to feed you some false symbolic reality to get you to do something that they want you to do. They're trying to bend you to their will, effectively.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  And so, that is corruption in a nutshell, and we know corruption precedes self-destruction, right? Have you ever had a corrupted hard drive? Have you ever seen the endgame of a corrupt government? Uh, look what happened to Enron, right? They bent this reality of public accountability for private gain and vaporized $70 billion of wealth in the process, right? Corruption is like, it's pathology, it's destruction, it's disease. And so, the more we can prevent public rules from being bent, twisted, or broken to the end of private gain, the less corruptible the symbolic structure becomes, the better off we all are.

• 1:09:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:09:33Speaker 04

  And so, what we really need, what humans need, is an incorruptible, which I think is the equivalent to saying an indestructible symbolic structure. Because if you can't corrupt the story, then you can't destroy the story. I mean, at least, I know this is a bit abstract, but seems about the same thing to me. And so, we need a story to inhabit that cannot be rewritten by the winner, right? By, by the most violent. You need an actual, um, story, hopefully based on something like principles, right? Truth, justice, freedom, all these things that we all want and seek, with a natural inclination towards. We want that integrated into the symbolic structure that we inhabit.

• 1:10:17Speaker 04

  And so, you know, if it's justice, to just keep what you earn or get what you deserve, that's what the justice system is, right? And that's what our natural idea of justice is, is people getting what they deserve. So we've all, this is not something new. We've been attempting to do this for a long time. Uh, I think, hopefully I'm just throwing light on it in a kind of a new way, but. So in that world where people get what they deserve, I think that's similar to saying, we have a world where property is unbreakable or inviolable. So people, what they work to create, they keep. And what is stolen is returned, right?

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  Like, that's the kind of the general themes of justice we would like to see in socioeconomic reality. It's where the relationship between people and their assets is a non-revocable relationship. And that would make all trade consensual, right? Cause you wouldn't, in that world where you can't steal people's stuff. I always say this on the show too, there's two avenues to wealth acquisition. There's making and there's taking. To the extent that you cannot engage in taking, if I can't take stuff from people, I'm left with no other option than to go to work, right? Make something, trade with people. So the game we've been playing is trying to reduce the incentives toward taking in our symbolic structure so we can tilt people towards making.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  And if we had something like that, there was like actual inviolable property, an indestructible symbolic structure, that would maximally amplify the individual will to power. All of a sudden, people would be able to go out and to the best of their abilities, create what they want for themselves in the world with the, the limiting principle of other people's will to power, right? You can't tread on other people to take their stuff. So everyone's almost, they're sovereign, right? This is the sovereign individual idea. And it's.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  I would say that indestructible symbolic structure like that is absolutely necessary to maximize human freedom. We have to have a symbolic structure to the extent that it's not corruptible. It lasts longer over time. It produces more wealth. It creates more satisfaction of human wants. It increases the carrying capacity of the planet, for God's sakes. So like if you if you if you have a will to power, which you do if you're alive and listening to this, you would want this as a thing. And again, I think that's what the US was an attempt at, right? We tried to create this decentralized, less corruptible governance mechanism with checks and balances intrinsic to it such that it would resist corruption.

• 1:12:59Speaker 04

  But I think also that is what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin has... It's the closest thing to an indestructible symbolic structure we've ever had.

• 1:13:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  These are rules that cannot be twisted or broken for private gain. It's essentially, and it's paradoxical in a lot of ways, but it's essentially this public utility used to facilitate the transfer of private property. Like two things we never thought we could get into one bucket and we somehow have. Rules that can't be changed. It's based on a purely opt-in, opt-out social consensus. Nothing, there's no coercion in it whatsoever. There's nothing hidden, right? There's not even the opportunity for information asymmetry because it's open source technology. So towards this idea, which we've been working, I think Bitcoin is the greatest reach yet.

• 1:13:49Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of the rules, not rulers, right, idea? It does feel like the financialization of this software. In some way, imagine if the Constitution had a stock, you know, price or ticker price attached to it and people could trade it. People may not put as much importance on the Constitution's words, the ideas, like all of these other components that we find so valuable. It, the birth of a nation, the kind of North Star, if you will.

• 1:14:27Anthony Pompliano?

  If you are able, which is hard for humans, if you're able to look past the volatility in an exchange price, and you are simply to evaluate the system based on the technology, the ethos, and the idea.

• 1:14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, I would venture to say, probably the only piece of technology that we have, which provides rules without rulers, which allows for this coordination on a global scale with the ability for people to opt in or out. And as you said, cannot be used for corrupt purposes in the sense of the people that are actually using the system as people of positions of power and influence. Because I think one of the other things is when you hear rules without rulers, there's a difference between the ruler, right, having a government with a monopoly on violence,

• 1:15:25Anthony Pompliano?

  or whatever, political powerless stuff, right, the president, or prime minister, or whatever. That doesn't mean that there aren't people that have positions of influence or power. A single mining node, right, or a single ASIC, that has a position. Now, it may be a very small position of power or influence in this larger network, but it is still a position, is a seat at the table in that specific consensus mechanism part of the system. Also, individuals who simply just hold the asset have a position of power and influence. It may, again, be very small in the grand scheme of things, but it is a position.

• 1:16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in some way, it is rules without rulers, but there are still people who are involved in this process. Because it goes back to this part of like, the people make up the society, the people make up a kind of civilization, the people end up making up the network as well. Now, they may choose to exhibit their participation via buying and holding, some people want to do it trading, some people want to do it spending, but also they may say, no, actually, I want to coordinate resources to buy machines to secure the network, or maybe I want to Great content around it, or whatever it is. But it's still, at the end of the day, people participating on an individual level. And that's what ultimately makes up this huge network. But it doesn't allow anyone to rise to the position of ruler,

• 1:16:47Anthony Pompliano?

  which is one of, if not the greatest advantage the system provides.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah, what we're talking about, I mean Bitcoin is a global decentralized organization. It's the first of its kind, right? So it's a leaderless, CEO-less organization. And it has a gigantic market cap. It's been stunningly successful in what it's set out to do. And to your point, the individuals inside of that network are maximally sovereign or individually empowered. Their will to power is being honored such that they don't suffer kings, right? There's not, there's not an opportunity for political authorities to rise to power as much in a Bitcoinized world. Because citizens can always vote with their wallet or vote with their feet.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  If you're not treating me well in a certain jurisdiction, I can take my capital and leave very easily. Which is, you know, obviously in countries today, a lot of that's inhibited through capital controls and all kinds of other bureaucratic machinations. So all we're talking about here is increasing the individual will to power holds the symbolic structure of government in check, right? It makes it accountable to its P and L and therefore accountable to its customers, which are citizens. That, I would say, is kind of the core problem we have on the fiat standard is that government doesn't care about its P and L because it can paper over all of its losses by printing new money. That's why we get all these antiquated government organizations that never go away.

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  And if you're not accountable to your P and L as an organization, why do you care about the preferences of your customers? You can just steal from your customers. So that, like, this is the problem. This is the human problem right now, is that we have this, the dominant symbolic structure in the world extracts from us. And we don't have a way to cast, well, pre-Bitcoin, we did not have a way to cast a credible vote of no confidence and say, "This doesn't work for me, Uncle Sam. I'm gonna do something different." And Bitcoin is an emergent alternative to the whole game, right?

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  It's like the first level playing field we've ever had. Or the first true, you know, equitable story, whatever you want to call it.

• 1:19:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I almost think, in some crazy way, if you've ever played backyard football or street football, and let's say it was in a neighborhood as a kid, and you showed up and you kind of sort of knew the kids, they lived in the neighborhood or in the general area, and you're playing a game, and you pretty much knew almost immediately, like, hey, this is a game where the rules are very well defined. Or like, oh, you stepped out of bounds. Where's that a bounce? Ah, it's like, kind of like lined up here, you know? And you would very quickly be able to tell, like, oh, these people are going to bend the rules however to try to gain an advantage in the game. In many cases, although, yes, we do have the rules written down,

• 1:19:44Anthony Pompliano?

  we have seen those rules changed in what I'll call the legacy world. And so that can be around taxation, that can be around monetary policy, it can be around fiscal policy, and that can be around a whole bunch of other aspects. It is not to argue that they don't have the power to change the rules, they do. It is not to argue even sometimes that the rule changes aren't positive. Sometimes they are positive. But it is just that the rules can change unilaterally based on those in power. Yes, and there's unpredictability. The difference is, if you showed up to play that backyard football, and they had basically a granite, you know, tablet, and they had chiseled the rules in, and it said, these are the rules.

• 1:20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  If you play the game, these are the rules we play by.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:20:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And now there is no debate.

• 1:20:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:20:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, there are the rules, and no one's going to walk over even with a eraser and a marker, and oh, let me erase rule number three and write a different one. It is, they are literally chiseled into granite. That is two different environments. And that's, I think, ultimately, what we're talking about is this analogous situation where you cannot change the monetary policy.

• 1:20:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:20:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And it does not matter how many people you get that want to do that. Because there have been people who have wanted to change, whether it's monetary policy, technical components, whatever. And they have even been able to loosely coordinate with more than 50% of the hash rate and the miners still cannot do it.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:21:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And this idea, which I haven't heard a lot of people explore, is that in the United States government, which I think most people would look at and point and say, this is a democratic government, and it's the best that we've seen so far. Can somebody come up with a better solution? Maybe. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. But right now, this seems to be the best way of governance that the world has ever seen. We have three branches of government, and those three branches of government provide checks and balances on each other. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, we also have three branches. You have the developers, you have the nodes, and you have the miners. And those three branches of Bitcoin end up providing checks and balances on each other. And so when you compare those two things, I don't know if people can argue that there

• 1:21:59Anthony Pompliano?

  is a better way to actually protect the rules of economic trade.

• 1:22:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:22:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Than what we already know is the best way, system of governance we've ever created. We simply are now just copying and pasting it via software and technology.

• 1:22:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:22:15Anthony Pompliano?

  For this new system.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it's an upgrade of what the US, the spirit of the US Constitution lives in Bitcoin.

• 1:22:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:22:24Speaker 04

  Right? And that, the idea of the rules chiseled in granite, the immutable rule set, I would argue that is the bedrock of peaceful gameplay.

• 1:22:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:22:35Speaker 04

  I've talked about this a lot, right? If you sit down to play poker and the hand rankings or rules change every few hands, you're just going to go nuts, right? You can't play the game. How can you form a productive strategy when the rules are changing all the time? There's too much unpredictability in the system. So that's all we're saying with Bitcoin. It's like, just give us a level playing field and let people play the game of the market process, and let's just create as much wealth as possible to solve as many problems as possible.

• 1:23:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:23:03Speaker 04

  And the further point to it is that... When they're immutable and changeless and open and transparent, it's all opt-in, right? No one's forcing you to use Bitcoin. And in the episode I did with Jordan Peterson, he talked about this, that it's kind of obvious. Kids only like to play games that are voluntary. As soon as you try to go and play a game, it goes like, here are the new rules and duh, duh, duh. Like, okay, bully, we're gonna go over here and play. Right? So there's this natural inclination to organize around the rules that are voluntary, open, clear, changeless. And kids do it, like, how about we start doing it as adults, right? We actually learn something from kids in this respect.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  So to try to bring this thing full circle, as we said at the beginning, money is a proxy for power. And I decompose power into physical and a political sense.

• 1:23:57Speaker 04

  And I think Bitcoin is the best proxy for power we've ever had. And that it's a story that can't be rewritten by those that wield violence, right? This is very important. It's a story that can't be rewritten by the winners.

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  It's a property relationship, so, again, relationship between owner and asset, that's virtually independent of the monopoly on violence. Like, if you hold your private keys in a proper custody schema, and I always recommend multi-signature, distributed geographically,

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  you're very independent or isolated from the political apparatus. There's no law passing that can change anything. There's no confiscation or inflation that's going to affect you. And it's an incentive structure. It's a brand-new symbolic structure that has very strong incentives, that tilts all of humanity away from warfare and towards peace. And this is like, probably the most beautiful promise of the whole thing. And it's a good proxy for power, in my opinion, because it's rooted in physical power through proof of work. You have to spend energy to gain the purchasing power stored therein. And it's also, so that like, it's like gold in that respect, but unlike gold,

• 1:25:20Speaker 04

  it's resistant, more resistant to political power, because it's dematerialized, to use Saylor's awesome word. And it's, it has this, I would even say the Satoshi creation myth is part of this as well, right? It's, it's a foundational to that symbolic structure, to the idea of decentralization that's encoded into Bitcoin. And it's the reason these other projects can't seem to achieve decentralization, right? They can't get the magic of that in a bottle. Not to say that it's not possible, but it's proven to be damn hard so far. And so I'm, on the Satoshi creation myth, I'm reminded of that movie Batman Begins, where

• 1:26:01Speaker 04

  Bruce is coming back from his training and wherever he was in the mountains. And he's on the plane, I think he's with Alfred, and he says, "As a man, I'm flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol, as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting." So when Satoshi vanished, like, he took Bitcoin from some project that a guy started, to this symbolic structure with no individual, right, to attack or denigrate or anything like this. So he transcended. Like Satoshi is now just a symbol, right? We don't know who he is. He's just symbolic. And he's like the godhead of this mythological structure we've created in Bitcoin. And so I think Bitcoin is a fundamental reimagining

• 1:26:46Speaker 04

  of human civilization, right? We have a perfect proxy for power, if you will, something that optimizes the individual will to power, and is bounded by the will to power of others. So my interests stop where yours begin, right? We can all push up against each other, but it's only through consensual exchange in a Bitcoinized world that we are productive. The taking strategy for wealth acquisition is less profitable than the making strategy.

• 1:27:15Speaker 04

  Its integrity is rooted in the laws of physics, as we've already said with proof of work, and it's resistant to politics because it's dematerialized. So I think that's it. Bitcoin optimizes our ability to express our will to power and therefore lets us be free.

• 1:27:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll leave you with one last part of this idea that I think is really important. You can't kill an idea.

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:27:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is a saying that I think as people understand a lot about history, they realize many of these ideas have been passed down. But there was a bifurcation of history. Ideas used to be passed down exclusively by word of mouth. I would tell you something, you would tell somebody, who would tell somebody, who would tell somebody, and then eventually their kids and their grandkids and their great grandkids, and it would get passed all the way down the lineage and it was all word of mouth. And at some point, somebody figured out, we should write it down. And writing it down meant that that piece of paper had to survive. And there was great care that was put to have that piece of paper survive. And then the idea of, well, maybe we should multiply it.

• 1:28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So that if one gets destroyed, the idea is available in other places. And so you get kind of this history of how ideas got from inception all the way down to modern day. Bitcoin is the exact same thing. There is this idea of decentralization, of being able to create rules, not rulers. Being able to build a system for economic trade on a global scale that is dematerialized, that uses economic kind of value protected by energy. It's an idea. Somebody wrote it down in code. And then that code was able to garner enough attention

• 1:29:05Anthony Pompliano?

  where it is protected to some degree. But it also was then multiplied and sits on every single node. And so if one copy gets destroyed, it still lives on. And so one of the key ideas that I think is really hard for people to wrap their heads around, a company is an idea. A building is an idea. The idea of a company, or the idea of a building, can actually not be killed. People will always know what a company is, they will always know what a building is. A specific company, the idea of Enron still lives on.

• 1:29:46Anthony Pompliano?

  But that company is dead, and so there's this separation between the idea and the asset. With Bitcoin, what is unique is that unless you were able to convince every single miner, every single node, and every single holder to essentially walk away through coercion, force, or whatever, the idea will never go away. But the asset will not either because of the multiplication effect. It's like having, taking a idea, put it into books, and then have created millions and millions and millions of copies.

• 1:30:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:30:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You can burn half a million, a million, five million, 10 million, 20, 500 million.

• 1:30:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:30:29Anthony Pompliano?

  You can't burn them all.

• 1:30:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that that ends up being this kind of Hydra-like

• 1:30:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:30:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, uh, kind of concept that once people wrap their heads around it, it gives you a very different perspective as to what the future will look like specifically related to a concept like this.

• 1:30:46Speaker 04

  I love that. It's the anti-fragility of an idea, right? Of these symbolic structures. And it's, to your point, rooted in that technological reality of copying, right? When we create the printing press, and all of a sudden the cost of book production collapses, you can burn as many bibles as you want. The bible, as an idea, is not going anywhere, right? It's totally decentralized. It's here, it's here to stay, basically.

• 1:31:13Anthony Pompliano?

  There are people who can recite it without even reading it.

• 1:31:16Speaker 04

  Right, right. And so Bitcoin is, again, just taking that principle a step further, right? It's replicated in so many different places constantly, all the time, that it makes it very close to indestructible, or definitely anti-fragile at least. And so it's phenomenal, you know? And it's interesting how much, again, if we're just ideas, we're just genetic information, we're imprinting these ideas into the world through various substrates, right? Whether it's paper or digital. And then that somehow feeds back into us, like we're engaging in this co-evolutionary process that we call civilization. And so- You know, there's a, there's a moral imperative here.

• 1:32:01Speaker 04

  It's ethical, it's technological, it's pragmatic, it's financial. And, you know, I just hope that all this talking we're doing about Bitcoin is helping nudge the world in the right direction.

• 1:32:14Anthony Pompliano?

  The

• 1:32:17Anthony Pompliano?

  concept of Bitcoin

• 1:32:21Anthony Pompliano?

  has a lot of surface area. It'd be seen as a financial asset, as a technology solution, as an ethos, like all these different things.

• 1:32:29Anthony Pompliano?

  What I find so powerful for it is you can take a single idea, which is the Bitcoin system.

• 1:32:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And if it only had one surface area, it would not be nearly as valuable. Because in some way Bitcoin is different for everyone. What, what is the value to you? If you are fleeing a country, the idea that you can now move your assets without having it confiscated is pretty damn important. You don't care about volatility. You don't care about cheap fees or any of these other things. You just want the ability to have sovereignty.

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:33:04Anthony Pompliano?

  There are other people who say, all of my assets are completely sovereign. I can go to the bank, I can do all these different things. The sovereignty aspect of it is not very important to my day to day life.

• 1:33:15Anthony Pompliano?

  But I send a lot of money back home to my family in another country. And so the ability to do that very cheaply and quickly is important to me. And so when you have that, what it does is it also opens the surface area of the addressable market. And if you really look at it, money may be the only thing that has an addressable market that matches the number of humans on Earth.

• 1:33:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:33:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not sure that there is another technology. The internet probably would be the one other technology that people would point to. There are plenty of people.

• 1:33:48Speaker 04

  Language, right?

• 1:33:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Language, right? Yeah, I guess is another one. But, but there's not many of them. And everyone speaks, everyone transacts. Not everyone uses the internet.

• 1:33:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:33:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:34:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:34:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and so it's like this very weird thing where we're headed towards a world where

• 1:34:07Anthony Pompliano?

  these assets that you and I kind of think through and, and talk about.

• 1:34:13Anthony Pompliano?

  The person who adopts them or, or is interested in them 10 years from now, they're not going to care so much about some of these underlying elements. So I think a lot about sequence.

• 1:34:26Anthony Pompliano?

  10 years ago, the technical components of Bitcoin were really fucking important. Because you needed to attract a certain type of individual who could then help to propel Bitcoin forward for the next 3, 4, 5 years. But we've gone through some of these regime shifts. The technical components obviously still matter for Bitcoin in terms of the security and the decentralization. But not a lot of people, or the majority of people are not showing up now, being like, "You know what I love about Bitcoin? I love the difficulty adjustment and the beauty."

• 1:34:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:34:58Anthony Pompliano?

  That's not the mainstream group of people who are showing up now. But a lot of them are showing up and saying, "Hey, the fact that with the backdrop of undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy, that no one can unilaterally change that, that's really important to me."

• 1:35:11Speaker 04

  Which is corruption again. I just want to emphasize monetary and fiscal policy are both corruption.

• 1:35:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you then fast forward 5 years from now, I don't know what it will be at the time, but there will be something else that then is attracting people to the idea. And to me, that's the beauty of this, is that it's constantly evolving.

• 1:35:29Speaker 04

  It's beautiful indeed and indispensable in the current macro backdrop of the world, where we're actively witnessing legacy symbolic structures collapse around us, right? Rome is burning. And so there will come a point where people may think they don't need the sovereignty aspect of Bitcoin because they trust their bank and they trust their brokerage account and whatever. There could come a point where that trust is diminished significantly to where they will seek shelter in an indestructible symbolic structure like Bitcoin. And so, you know, not only is it, as we said, indispensable to human freedom, but as the other ones collapse, there's going to be this like osmotic pressure, I think, that forces

• 1:36:14Speaker 04

  people into. And I think this is where a lot of detractors just don't get it. They think it's some arbitrary choice, like, "Do I choose dollars? Do I choose Bolivars? You know, it doesn't matter. Why would I choose Bitcoin?" It's like, this is why. Because all of the other structures are being corrupted and breaking down. And so people will naturally, you know, in expressing their will to power, they will seek shelter in the one that is resistant to corruption and destruction.

• 1:36:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Without a doubt. Where can we send people to find you on the internet if they would like more ideas from your brain?

• 1:36:47Speaker 04

  I'm on Twitter at @breedlove22, B R E D L O V E two two. I've got a Substack and then you can check out the What Is Money show, whatismoneypodcast.com. We're on RSS feed and YouTube and thank you so much for having me as always.

• 1:37:02Anthony Pompliano?

  We could do this literally every day. I don't think we'd run out of things to talk about. So I appreciate you coming and we'll definitely do it again.

• 1:37:08Speaker 04

  Thanks, man.

• 1:37:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.