How Money Printing and Central Banks Harm Society with Robert Breedlove and Tom Bilyeu

Business Wars: Follow Business Wars on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. True Classic: Upgrade your wardrobe at https://trueclassic.com/impact Linkedin: Post your job free at https://linkedin.com/impacttheory CashApp: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl #CashAppPod HomeServe: Help protect your home systems – and your wallet – with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month at https://homeserve.com Quince: Go to https://quince.com/IMPACTPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Huel: 15% off with this exclusive offer for New Customers only with code impact at https://huel.com/impact(Minimum $75 purchase). Netsuite: Right now, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://NetSuite.com/Theory http://netsuite.com/Theory Raycon: Up to 20% off during this holiday season at https://buyraycon.com/IMPACTTHEORYBC ButcherBox: New users will receive their choice between filet mignon, ribeye or NY Strip in every box for a year + $20 off! at https://butcherbox.com/impact What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Tom Bilyeu welcomes prolific Bitcoin philosopher and decentralization advocate Robert Breedlove for an electrifying conversation about money, power, and the future of civilization. Known for his rigorous critiques of central banking and his optimistic vision for personal sovereignty, Robert Breedlove brings decades of economic insight and philosophical inquiry to the table. Together, he and Tom Bilyeu break down the practical and ethical problems underlying today’s political headlines, including the resurgence of socialism, the structure of the “deep state,” and why incentives drive the behavior of individuals and institutions. In Part 1, Tom and Robert explore the fundamental flaws of centralized systems—from socialist governance and political theater to the mechanics and consequences of central banking and inflation. The conversation examines the history of money itself, the unintended consequences of trying to organize society from the top down, and the anatomy of coercion versus consent in economics. Whether you’re skeptical of government spending or on the hunt for financial security in turbulent times, this episode offers a lucid roadmap for understanding the motivations and incentives shaping our world. FOLLOW ROBERT BREEDLOVE: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22 Website: https://www.whatismoneypodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:07Speaker 01

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• 1:37Tom Bilyeu?

  There are very weird things going on in the world that I think you have a unique lens on. So over your shoulder, I see Ayn Rand.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44Tom Bilyeu?

  And we just had a socialist get elected as the mayor of New York City. So as a sovereignty guy, as somebody who thinks about money and wealth from cause and effect, ground up, how do you feel about that?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, well, first of all, I don't follow politics closely. I have heard of this individual being elected. I found it very concerning. People were reposting him tweeting Marx's infamous line, "From each according to their ability to each according to their need." And like, if you've been a student of history... You will know that those words have, you know, underpinned the murder of millions, hundreds of millions potentially. This idea that we can just come together in brotherly love and organize an economy, like it doesn't work, right? People move based on incentives. And so, you know, as Mises proved in his crowning achievement of the Austrian Business

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Cycle Theory, like socialism slash communism does not produce prices. Therefore, there is not data propagating throughout the market space. So you end up with just the government being the arbiter of all goods and services. You end up with a lot of shortages, a lot of surpluses and a lot of coercion and confiscation, basically. So it's like, it may sound, you know, benign. Oh, this idea of all of us coming together and ignoring money and ignoring market incentives and ignoring economics and we'll just, you know, from each according to their ability to each according to their need has such a romantic tone to it. But the reality couldn't be further opposite, almost. Like it is an actual murderous ideology.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  So to see it coming back, I think is very concerning. Now, my deeper conspiracy theorist hat thinks, cause this guy is, he's Iranian. Is that right? Middle Eastern?

• 3:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, he's from Uganda.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Uganda, okay. My mistake then. I thought he was Middle Eastern.

• 3:44Tom Bilyeu?

  By, he might be, I actually don't know his ethnicity, his nationality is he was born in Uganda.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Right. And he's socialist. He's also been accused of being an anti Semite, at least by his critics online. I don't know if that's accurate or not.

• 4:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Certainly, he won't condemn the phrase, "globalize the Antifada." So I would not say that he is a friend of Israel, to be sure.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Yes, okay. And so, yeah, my deeper conspiracy theory hat thinks maybe you let a guy like that get elected so that you can justify more atrocities in the Middle East. You get, you foment Americans, you know, associating Middle Eastern with socialist, with anti-Israel. And then if he does a bunch of bad things in New York, then that justifies atrocities abroad.

• 4:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Who, now I'm curious. All right, I put my conspiracy hat on. Who, who would be driving that agenda?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  The term that people like to use is the deep state. I have no idea who that is. And again, this is just a speculation. I have nothing to back it up, but. I think politics is a complete sham, utter complete sham. Javier Malley, for instance, the libertarian candidate, right, that's been elected in Argentina. He's not libertarian at all, right? The chainsaw he was going to take to the state, which was a platform he ran on, the central bank he was going to abolish, like, they're still expanding the money supply. Saifedean Ammous has done a lot of good work on this, especially on Twitter, just showing how oxymoronic it is for this guy to even call himself a libertarian.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  He's just a closet statist, basically, but he's putting all this lipstick on the pig, saying he's implementing these libertarian policies, and it's just not the case.

• 5:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think he would institute the policies if he was able? Like, they're already behind the eight ball. So is it possible that coming in and just being sort of laissez faire, it's just there's so much momentum going in a negative direction? Or do you think that, no, no, no, he's just another guy that wants control, wants to see the state wield power, and he's doing whatever he needs to do to wield that power?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I think he is another puppet. I think all these politicians are puppets for deeper power structures. I think nation-states are front organizations.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  When we even think in terms of like, what is the United States doing? What is China doing? It's like, you're not, you're not mapping your mental model onto the resolution of reality, right? Reality is composed of individuals that act. We form cohorts and coalitions, and we struggle for power amongst ourselves. We don't move as one indivisible unit called the United States, right? There are millions of power structures inside the United States vying for control. And it's not just political, it's often economic as well. So I think the world is basically a bunch of gangs. And nation-states are, you know, the biggest gangs. But when you get people thinking in those terms, you can distract them from the other games.

• 6:42Tom Bilyeu?

  When you say those terms, what do you mean?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  What are the terms? In terms of the nation-states themselves, right? Like, US foreign policy, you know, Chinese trade policy. Like, these things do have effects, but it obfuscates the reality of who's in actual control. For instance, the shareholders of the Federal Reserve in the United States, right, there's an undisclosed set of shareholders. They have a lot more power than any politician that's ever in office, but you never hear that discussed in media.

• 7:08Tom Bilyeu?

  You do if you listen to my channel.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Well, there you go. Thank God for decentralized media.

• 7:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Okay, that's very interesting. This is not the mental model that I thought you had of the world. Okay, so let's go with Javier Malley. I think a lot of people have been broadsided by Trump and Secretary Besen doing the, whatever they call it, the currency swap, where they're essentially bailing them out. I think a lot of people were surprised by that. Hey, if these systems are so good and these policies work so well, why do you suddenly need a bailout? So you think that there's something more, and I'm putting a word in your mouth, but nefarious. There is a power structure that people are trying to hide from us, and this is a way for us to see the real

• 7:55Tom Bilyeu?

  movements of that underlying power structure. Now, if you don't know specifically who they are, help me understand how you map what goes on and how you interface with the real world if, like, that's an unknowable sort of, again, you're not using the word evil, but I will paint that brush.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's, I mean, the term that I use is the shareholders of central banks, right? I've identified, in my opinion, central banking is the most problematic institution in the world. You know, it controls the money supply, controls the interest rate, which is the price of time or the price of money. This is the most important price in the world. That price is being centrally planned rather than discovered like all other market prices. So that itself is very problematic. It's an anti-capitalistic institution that underpins all economies worldwide, even the, you know, so-called capitalist ones. So as I've said before on your show, if money is one half of every transaction,

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And the money itself is Marxist, and I'm not, this isn't an opinion. This is 1848 Marxist manifesto to the Communist Party, measure number five. The state has to have a central monopoly on cash and credit in order to be communist. Right. It's a pillar of communism. So we have a pillar of communism here in the US and in every nation state worldwide. That we have central banks. So if money is one half of every transaction and the money is Marxist, then how could we even call our, begin to call ourselves free market capitalists? Right. We are at best 50% capitalist and at best 50% Marxist. And so this is like, when I, you know, that's what I try to focus on. I'm not looking for the whodunit, like who are these individuals? Who are the bad guys? Because I don't believe that's very useful.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  I think it's that people ultimately are incentive responsive creatures and that you have to reform the incentive landscape itself. That's how you change human behavior or human action over time.

• 9:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Fair.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  It's not useful to just vote harder or even have a revolution and, you know, uninstall this guy and uninstall your new guy. Like, that never works. That's just, that just leads to the endless cycle of bloody revolutions.

• 10:13Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting. I will reject the idea that it doesn't work. It isn't stable. It works for a while. I think part of the problem that we have right now is that it worked for so long here in the US that we're forgetting that you have to earn a functioning government. You have to earn a functioning economy. You have to be prepared to be hardcore, disciplined, et cetera, et cetera. But I want to get back to this. So, okay, you, world is gangs. The worst gang of all is the central bank. I'm gonna try to find the perfect way to ask this question, but if I don't nail it, I'm gonna keep going until I get there. What I'm trying to figure out is whenever you have a philosophy, take physics. If you put forward a philosophy of physics, you, your philosophy must accurately describe the world that we see.

• 10:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Otherwise, I know it's false because I see the world I'm interacting with it. So. When you think about the philosophy of what drives governments, what incentives the gangs or anybody else are following, it's going to have to describe the world that I see. Nation states, that you can create stability in some countries. America's been great. The West has been great for a long time. So if half of the money is, at least half of the economic exchange is Marxist, does it need to be? Like, why does that rise up? Why does that emerge? So consistently, yeah.

• 11:40Tom Bilyeu?

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• 12:25Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:06Tom Bilyeu?

  We're back. Let's dive right in.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I think humans are opportunistic. So if there's a possibility of monopolizing and controlling the money supply. Then if any, if that's available to any set of human beings and they're going to embrace that opportunity. There's this great clip of a, I think it's a New Zealand central banker. And he says it very succinctly. He says, "Central banking is a great business. We print money and people believe it."

• 14:35Speaker 02

  That sums up pretty nicely what this institution does. It's a currency counterfeiting cartel. And the reason it is, it emerges, I think, is because of opportunism. You could get, we could go into a bit deeper of a discussion. It's like, okay, gold is actual free market money, right? This is something that emerged on the market. It did not require any government intervention to become money, unlike fiat currency. Fiat currency requires anti-competitive laws. It requires legal tender laws. It requires legal coercion to exist, basically. That's not true for gold. What's the problem with gold is that it's heavy and it's physical.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  And you can't move it across a telecommunications network very easily. So as the world modernizes from gold standard to telecommunications. Our information systems started to outrun our monetary system, right? We're transmitting promises to gold, not actual gold. And in that accumulation of promises, you get a lot of counterparty risk. And when that counterparty risk accumulates at large, you get what's called systemic risk. Right? A lot of people owe a lot of people money, but it's all deferred settlement. There hasn't been any final settlement to occur yet. So you get all of this tension, right? And Jeff Booth on the show a long time ago said this summarized this well. He said currency wars lead to trade wars, lead to real wars.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Right? Or as Basti out said a long time ago, if goods don't cross borders, soldiers will. So the opportunism of individuals to control the money supply and have a business that basically produces perpetual profits. Right? It's impossible to be unprofitable when you print money out of thin air. Right? So your shareholders are enriched ad infinitum. You can then use the purchasing power stolen to that money printing to fabricate false academic narratives like Keynesian economics, fake news propaganda. Right? To convince the victims that 2% inflation is really good and healthy for you. And you need it for a growing economy. Even the term inflation itself is a euphemism. The money is depreciating.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  That's what's actually happening. It's not, nothing's inflating. The nominal prices of assets denominated in the depreciating money are inflating. So that euphemism of people like, yeah, growth sounds better. I'd rather have inflation than deflation. That term alone, I think, is a purposefully implanted euphemism to get people thinking in terms of inflation being a good, necessary and healthy thing.

• 17:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so I want to.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  So what we need to do is remove the opportunity. And that gets us into the Bitcoin conversation.

• 17:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Remove the opportunity. Okay, we'll get to that in a second. The mile markers that I am picking up here in terms of your worldview are there is something in the human psyche that longs for control. If it needs to be coercive control, it will be coercive control.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  I don't think it's control. I don't think it's control. I just think it's pursuit of profits.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Just pursuit of profits.

• 17:39Tom Bilyeu?

  That, that isn't, uh, that is not my understanding of what you just walked through. So if it were just pursuit of profits, then, um, it wouldn't naturally follow that you would get central banks, but we do get central banks. And so when I look at the world and I say, whatever philosophy comes up, it's got to describe that. And given that central banks, as far as I can tell, are everywhere, uh, then whatever the philosophy is, has to account for the fact that it becomes everywhere. Also, you said that basically even nation states are just gangs. So that tells me that gangs rise up. Very easy to understand why that is. Weak men need to congregate in order to protect themselves from strong men. I don't think that's bad, though I'm sure the use of the word weak makes it sound like I think it's bad.

• 18:24Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't. I can certainly understand how if your, um, your tribe is constantly being raided and the cost is you dead, wife raped, uh, then I get why people real fast go, I'm going to start banding together with a bunch of people. We're going to come up with ways to protect our stuff. Um, so I understand that, but there is something that's driving people that if they can get more and more control, they will seek it out, which is why, um, you get the central banks, because it, it's, you're not entering into a world where people can't profit and you create a central bank. America didn't have a central bank until 1913. In fact, our best years of growth were before the central bank. So there is something else in the human psyche.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  That's a good question.

• 19:06Tom Bilyeu?

  That leads people, well, I feel like you've already answered it, which is.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  But why? Why were, why were the best years prior to the implementation of the Fed?

• 19:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, because you have creative destruction and you don't calcify in terms of, uh, creating a caste system where people can't lose. So when you have, like, if you believe, as I believe, that innovation is almost all that matters, that freedom is necessary for innovation, that people will do well for a while, but then they'll burn away, and that the collective cares not at all whether Elon Musk is the greatest thing for 20 years and then falls off the face of the earth and ceases to be interesting at all. And so. If people can create regulatory modes or otherwise, or like with central banks where, and this is one of those things, it hides in plain sight and I don't have simpler words to say it,

• 19:58Tom Bilyeu?

  but inflation is stealing from everyone and only giving to those. Well, I probably got a lot of the stuff from you when I first discovered you.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Well, when we first spoke, you thanked me for saying inflation is theft. Cause you said you thought inflation had been like giving you.

• 20:14Tom Bilyeu?

  I thought it was a natural law.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:16Tom Bilyeu?

  I just thought it happened.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  And now to hear you, when I see your clips of you saying inflation is theft.

• 20:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah. Listen, man, you've been, this is why I sit across from you whenever I get the chance. So if inflation is stealing from everybody and only giving back to the rich, then, and you're willing to do it when a bank fails or whatever, what you're doing is creating a permanent caste system because once you're at the top, you're building the network, you're building the policy to make sure that you can never fall.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. So if I'm right, that, uh, that is eventually going to hurt innovation because you're not getting rid of the people that did dumb things. You're propping them up. And so now the true innovator has undue hurdles that they have to overcome in order to actually aggregate the capital to innovate. Now the whole world begins to suffer from that. So, um, I get why people that get to the top want to yank the ladder up, but nonetheless, it has all these horrific ramifications for a society as a whole.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  100%. That's well said. Um, so there's two things I want to talk about here. One is the genesis of gold. I think this will answer your question. How did we get, how do we get central banks? How do they emerge from otherwise free market activities? Right? So we mentioned that gold is physical, right? It doesn't work in a world running on telecommunications, meaning that you can only transmit promises to gold. It's very slow and expensive to send actual physical gold. So your physical final settlement lags your informational settlement, trade, communication. Right? That produces a gap, um, that creates systemic risk and whatnot.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Now, it might be useful here to define money. One very useful definition of it is that money is a tool for moving purchasing power across space and time. And the purchasing power is simply what the money can buy you, the goods and services that that amount of money can acquire in the marketplace. So gold, because it has a relatively inflexible supply, right? No one can counterfeit it. It does a really good job at holding purchasing power over time. It functions as a really good means of savings for people. However, as we just covered with the gap between gold and telecommunications, it does not move purchasing power across space very easily.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  It's very expensive, it's slow, it requires a lot of security, there's a lot of risk associated with it. So, human beings, being the innovative ingenious animals that we are, we innovated around this shortcoming of gold, right? Gold has money, really good at transmitting purchasing power across time, but not space. So what do we do? We put all the gold in one vault, and we trust this, originally these were called money warehouses. We trust this warehouse operator to issue warehouse receipts, right? Paper IOUs saying, "Hey, I've got this much gold on deposit with the warehouse." And then people could go and trade these paper receipts with one another, as if they were as good as gold, because indeed they

• 23:29Speaker 02

  were for a long time. And then you have solved the space problem, right? All of a sudden, gold can move really, really easily across space, or much more easily when it's in paper form, even more easily when it's abstracted into electronic form, right? Or digital form. These promises can move at the speed of light, and then so long as the warehouse operator is honest, you can always go and redeem the gold from the warehouse operator. Now, looking at the incentives of the warehouse operator, what do they face? They face the...

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Incentive to run what's called a fractional reserve. Okay, a full reserve warehouse is one in which all of the assets match all of the liabilities. So all of the, the paper certificates that are in circulation, that say someone has owed gold, is matched one to one with the gold actually in the warehouse. Right, that's a full reserve, non fraudulent, legitimate money warehousing operation. What is a fractional reserve? A fractional reserve is when you issue more paper, more liabilities than you have assets to back. Once you do that, you're engaged in an insolvent fraudulent practice, right? Known as modern banking. Known as all of modern banking.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  But the, the thing is, from the warehouse operator's perspective, that's pure profit. As long as everyone doesn't do a run on the bank, right? As long as not more than whatever the percentage of people is. If I've, if I'm running a 50% fractional reserve, then as long as 50% of my clients don't come and redeem at the same time, then we're good. I can loan these other paper certificates into existence as if they were as good as gold. The market will not detect this error unless there is a run on my bank. I can earn interest on this printed money out of thin air. And so goes the scheme, right? Now, this can sort of work if you have competition among money warehouses, right? So that the bad actors would get exposed and go out of business and good actors,

• 25:25Speaker 02

  well, good reputations would be promoted and preserved. However, once the government intervenes in this game and says, you know what? We really like that money printing business you got there, that fractional reserve bank. And you know what? We're going to war, so we need a good spigot of money. I think we're gonna take that fractional reserve bank and make that our own now. That's how you get this, you go from genesis of gold as money to paper certificates, warehouse receipts, augmenting the portability of gold to make it more useful for moving it across space, to creating this opportunity for warehouse operators to run a fractional reserve, to creating this source, this limitless profit center for governments to intervene and basically confiscate, right?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  And so that's how, that's the centralizing tendency that gives rise to the central bank. And, you know, there's the Bank of Antwerp, Bank of England, like this is not an American thing, right? This has been going on for about 600 years, I think. And the American.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Nation was founded largely in response and in rebellion to not only taxation, which we always hear about the Boston Tea Party, right? 2% tax was 2% or 4%?

• 26:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Something like that.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Throw the tea in the harbor and you know, start killing redcoats kind of thing. Well, we were also rebelling and escaping from the Bank of England, which had tyrannized people for a really long time. The US Constitution was written in a way so that we would not have a central bank. And indeed, we resisted one implementation of it. We had one for 25 years. The charter expired and then we got the third attempt in 1913. You know, obviously read the book with the creature from Jekyll Island, if you want the story on that, but that one was successful. And we've had a central bank now for 113 years or whatever it is. So that I hope answers at least bridges from how we get to gold to central banking. And the other thing I wanted to say, I think-

• 27:21Tom Bilyeu?

  The only thing that I'll say that's left out of that, and I really am trying to bring my audience along in this is if it were just profit motive, as you put it forward, you can sort of forgive it. It's a product and hey, isn't that wonderful? But either the people that do it are completely ignorant to the following, or they are sinister and I put them in the sinister camp.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that when you issue additional paper-

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:47Tom Bilyeu?

  That you are robbing the purchasing power of all the people that hold that paper.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:56Tom Bilyeu?

  And then in a modern banking sense, you reward anybody who holds assets.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, while anyone can hold assets, 10% of Americans hold 93% of the assets. And I'm going to guess even that 10% falls on a power scale. So now you're going to have some ridiculously small number of people that benefit from the fact that inflation is happening. But if people do not understand that second part, which is that as you inflate the currency, that you are enriching asset holders. And this is the flywheel that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Then you have to begin to say, well, hold on a second. Are they completely naive to that effect? Or is that exactly why they're doing it? And I will put forward that that's exactly why they're doing it.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  The shareholders.

• 28:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, the shareholders of the bank, asset holders are now incentivized. Like technically I'm incentivized for inflation to happen because I own a ton of assets. So the more that the money supply is inflated, the wealthier I get. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief.

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• 30:35Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 30:39Speaker 02

  I would argue that in a zero-sum game perspective, yes. As the currency is depreciated, the assets that you own as a larger percentage of your portfolio will be bid up more than the currency will be depreciated, right? So people living on fixed income, paycheck to paycheck, pensioners, they're the ones getting robbed.

• 31:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  And asset owners are getting rewarded. But here's the tricky thing is...

• 31:07Speaker 02

  This, it all comes back to private property, right? That the, the existence of the central bank is premised on the violation of private property of savers through money printing, right? Savers put purchasing power in money. They expect it to be preserved or ideally grow across time. The central bank intervened, that's where we get gold, right? The market selects gold as money for that very reason. But then through state intervention, opportunism, whatever you want to call this, the profitability of coercion, and this is an important thing to disentangle, right? Because profitability, there's nothing wrong with profit in and of itself, right? That's a signal that we've, we've solved the problem, basically, right?

• 31:49Speaker 02

  If I'm, if I'm delivering a good or service into the market space, into a market space, I'm solving consumer wants better, faster, cheaper than anyone else, right? That's, that's basically what the profit says. That profit also induces competitors to enter, right? They want to come in and they want to get a piece of that margin, thereby competing prices down and quality up, right? Which all benefits the consumer. Profitability is great. It's a very important signaling mechanism. It's what coordinates economics, right? You know, prices, profits, all these things denominated in money. But when you talk about profiting from coercion, like the violation of private property, that

• 32:28Speaker 02

  you're profiting by stealing from someone else, what you are doing in aggregate is you are reducing total productivity.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  And this happens in two ways. One, if I steal something from you, that is time, effort, and energy I spent in the non-productive activity of confiscation, right? I didn't produce any good or service. I actually produced a, I didn't produce a good, I produced a bad, right? A bad for you, namely, right? Like, I had a table, you stole my table, what happened? Now I gotta go buy another table. Okay?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  When you do that, my time, effort, and energy that could have otherwise been allocated towards some productive activity, building a business, building an asset, labor, whatever it is, was instead spent extracting from you, right? So that's one way in which the violation of private property reduces productivity. But now, look at it from your perspective. If, say, I stole 20% of your assets, right? And you acquired all of these assets through consensual work and trade, well, then you now have a 20% reduced incentive for any further production. You're like, "Well, the last time I produced 100% of the fruits of my labor, 20% of them got stolen. So my incentive to work has just gone down 20%." So it's this, this is the problem.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  This is why the integrity of private property, as Mises said, right? The history of civilization and the history of private property are inexorably linked, I think is how he put it. That's the whole purpose of civilization, is so that people can own things and specialize in things and trust that other people will own and specialize in things, and we can all trade, and we can all enjoy the fruits of one another's highly specialized labor in this modern lap of luxury we call 2025, despite all of the anti-market and anti-capitalistic forces that we're also dealing with, like nation-states, like central banks, like politicians.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  So it's a matter of, do we reward productive, peaceful cooperation? That would be the profitability of consent, consensual activity? Or do we reward non-productive, coercive, and violent activity? Which would be, that's how the central bank is profiting. That's how nation-states are profiting, right? They engage in these activities. For their own profit, but it comes at the expense of others. So this economics game is positive sum, right? It's win-win, right? When you and I trade something consensually, we both do that because we believe that we will leave the trade better off than we were before. So both of us walk away with what's called psychic profit, right? We both at least think we're better off.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  We could be wrong, of course, but we did it consensually because we both believed it was in our best interest. Right? So we've generated value on both sides of the trade. Once you violate that principle of consent, by definition, it's one person's gain at someone else's loss, right? Your psychic profit, if I steal your table, your psychic profit has gone down. You've lost one table that you had before, whereas mine has gone up, right? I gained a table. But then we have all those issues related to productivity that I described. So the integrity of private property, this is, and it basically, some people get caught up in that it maybe is a bit abstract, but it's just a prohibition on killing and stealing and coercing. That's all it is, right?

• 36:06Speaker 02

  This is biblical ethics encoded legally, right? Encoded as a social institution, we call private property. But this is the most important social institution in the world. This is what coheres civilization. This is what allows us, you know, Hoppa makes the point that it's even presupposed when we have a conversation.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  You are presupposing by listening to me right now that I have freedom of choice, that I control myself, that I have something that you could possibly learn. And then if you didn't do that, you just, you know, thought there's nothing you could learn from me and you know everything. Well, then all of a sudden, we're not having a conversation, right? It's something more like, I don't know what it is at that point, but it's not a conversation. So for to have this free exchange, we have to presuppose that each of us individually owns ourselves.

• 36:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, all of that makes sense. The thing that I want to drag into the light for people is that if you let this get philosophical, you're going to miss that it's nefarious. And the reason that I brought all of this up in the context of M'Nani is that I think that there is a very bad thing that is happening that has very noble cause and effect. And people's failure to accurately understand the cause and effect is what makes them elect the person who is absolutely the worst for them. So, once you understand that the government can steal your money, if there's a central bank, the government can steal your money by, as you said, counterfeit money print. It will come under a much nicer name, but

• 37:35Tom Bilyeu?

  it's counterfeiting your money. When the money is counterfeited, then your dollar no longer buys the dollars worth of stuff. It buys 90 cents, 80 cents, 70 cents, on down to nothing. And then people get into this where, ah, I can't make ends meet. They start feeling very anxious. That anxiety needs to get transmitted into something that feels far more powerful. That tends to be anger. You go into a populist moment. And, great irony of ironies, is you end up voting for the guy that is really just trying to get elected. So he promises you free stuff. The second they promise you free stuff, what they are promising you is that they're going to money print. As we just covered, they're going to counterfeit money, take from you, but in a way that you may think you're psychically

• 38:19Tom Bilyeu?

  profiting, but in reality, you're being stolen from. And the inability to track that is how we end up voting for these problems. Now, one, these problems being very clearly socialism. Now, one thing that I want you to explain, why, why does socialism so consistently, so necessarily, become murderous?

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Well, let's start with some definitions. I think I've shared this with you before, but I really like the spectrum. Again, this is inspired by the libertarian philosopher Hoppa. And on one end, he has capitalism, which is the universal respect for private property and the trade of private property via contract, right? Via consent, basically. So not only can we own things, but we can also trade things consensually, right? The rule of law, legal coercion, exists only to preserve that, right? That's an ideal capitalistic world. The opposite end of this spectrum would be communism or Marxism, right?

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Which, as Marx himself said, could be summed up in one sentence: the abolition of private property. No one owns anything. The state owns everything and tells you what to do, right? That's the opposite of capitalism. Socialism is the gradient between. It's just what, you know, you tell me what percentage your effective tax rate is, and I tell you what percentage socialist your society is and what percentage a slave you are, right? Again, if 100% of the fruits of your labor are being stolen, that's the definition of a slave, right? You keep nothing of your work. And if you keep 100% of the fruits of your labor, then you are sovereign, right? You're not subject to anyone, right? You are a fully actualized sovereign agent, basically.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  And so socialism is the spectrum between. There's a lot of different flavors of it, but again, if we're looking at it through the lens of private property, it's just at what rate are we violating private property? And Hoppa takes this further and says that, okay, the percentage, the rate at which you're violating private property is the same rate at which you are incentivizing those non-productive, coercive, violent activities, right? If it's profitable to go and get elected to public office and benefit from tax dollars and printed money, no matter what promises you have to make people, there are individuals that will take that opportunity, right? As we're seeing in New York City today.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  But if those opportunities don't exist and we're just rewarding people...

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Profits from consensual activity, right? In this domain of pure capitalism over here, then we're only rewarding prudence and trade and pragmatism and problem solving, right? We're not rewarding problem making. You almost call coercion problem making, right? Like it is making a problem by definition for the person being coerced. Otherwise, it wouldn't be coercion. Again, if it was consensual, they would, they're at least leaving. They may have real problems to deal with because their psychic evaluation of the situation wasn't right, but at least their psychic profit, their belief is that they are better off after the trade. But once that principle of consent is violated, you start sliding from the world of ideal

• 41:43Speaker 02

  capitalism into the spectrum of socialism. And then it typically degenerates ultimately into communism or Marxism. So it is this like chink in the integrity of civilization, I think, where the darker side of human nature can fester. And I think that's why socialism has emerged in that, you know. But why does it become murderous? It becomes murder. I think it has a very clear mechanism. Okay. I think it becomes murderous. Again, the way Booth put it is like you're, you know, currency wars lead to trade wars lead to real wars.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Once you're getting, you're earning profits from coercing someone, stealing from them, right? That instigates backlash, backlash. The other side of that trade is going to seek retribution of some kind, right? So you're sparking a memetic cycle. So basically, people are going to be pissed. They're taking their stuff. And they're going to strike back, right? And then that, you get into these like blood feud situations where like, okay, whether it's social revolution, whether it's basic petty crime, whatever it is, people get desperate and they start to act in more of a zero sum game manner, right? My win necessarily comes at your loss, right?

• 43:08Speaker 02

  That's the only way for me to succeed. And the less so from the positive sum mentality of, hey, let's trade, right? Let's have free trade. Let's act according to the same rules. Let's all play pretend that we each actually have the exclusive right, rights to the things of value we create. Right? That's kind of the LARPing that we're doing with private property, but it's very useful LARPing. Cause when we do that, we play that game of pretend, we get a lot of peace and productivity. When we start to break the rules of that game, or twist the rules of that game, or violate the rules of that game as politicians do, specifically socialist politicians, that's when it starts to degenerate. And I think you start moving along that spectrum

• 43:51Speaker 02

  straight towards communism. And what we know what communism does, right? You want to talk about murderous.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  What are the numbers? How many people did Stalin murder? 60, 100 million?

• 44:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Stalin is tougher to pin down, but there is a political scientist, I'm forgetting his name right now, but he clocked the number at over 200 million dead in the 20th century alone due to government policy.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  There you go. Dimicide, I think he called it.

• 44:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. So the thing, we might be saying the exact same thing, but in different ways. Where this breaks for me is because it doesn't work, people start raising their hand and saying it doesn't work.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:30Tom Bilyeu?

  But for me socialism is born of a very simple idea. I know better than you.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:36Tom Bilyeu?

  And so when you look at the marketplace and you say rents in New York are too high, you never stop to think, too high by what metric? What do you mean? You just mean that some people can't afford it? That's the nature of things. So when somebody goes, I know better, then they try to control the market from the top down and things start breaking. Like for instance, if you tell a landlord, you can only charge X amount of rent, but it costs more than that to maintain the building. You're just wrong. You don't understand capitalism. You don't understand incentives, all of that. And so that person raises their hand and says, this doesn't make any sense. And then because they are right, you ultimately have to shut them up. And once you understand the only way to shut somebody up is to let them vote. And so you're at risk of being voted out of office.

• 45:20Tom Bilyeu?

  You force them to be quiet and now the guns have come out and hence the murder. It really is that simple. Like, I don't want people to lose sight of like, this becomes a problem because the plumbers aren't going to work for free to repair the building. When you stain the carpet or get mold, the people that remove that stuff won't work for free. So you either have to force them to work for free, which I think everybody would agree is a terrible idea. But in socialism, you have to, because that's the only way that you can guarantee those outcomes. And so this is why I'm trying to like, I don't want all this stuff to be super heady. I want people to understand, listen, you won't work for free. And if you won't work for free, then I, things can be given to you for free,

• 46:04Tom Bilyeu?

  because somebody at some point has to work for free for that to happen. And then, of course, people are going to say, well, Tom, just tax the rich. You could literally tax not just their income, but their wealth, and nobody understands wealth. Wealth is fiction, but even if you could tax their fictional wealth, you would only get like two years runway.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  I don't think so much.

• 46:25Tom Bilyeu?

  All gone. It's all gone. And so I'm like, ah, this is so basic. This is really simple. And if people could track that you won't work for free, no one will work for free, and if people don't work for free, nobody can get anything for free. And that over and over and over, every time this is tried, you end up having to kill a whole lot of people, because eventually somebody goes, hey Mao, planting the same crops at the same time across a country the size of America, it doesn't work. They're not going to grow. And then everybody starves to death. And so you got to shoot a bunch of them. It's really that basic.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  I think we're in deep agreement, honestly. Like, I may be saying it in a much more heady way, and you're saying it in a much more accessible way, so God bless you for that.

• 47:15Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm just trying to get like, I think America is racing towards a problem, and they're being stolen from. So like, they get, M'Nani is right. There is a huge problem.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  All the Marxists are right.

• 47:28Tom Bilyeu?

  And the question becomes a why is there a huge problem?

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Yes, and what to do about it.

• 47:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct. And so if you can't map out, oh, the, I'm being stolen from, like, if I could just get everybody to understand two things. Thing number one, if your government is deficit spending, they're stealing from you. Thing two, if the government is inflating the money supply, they're stealing from you. Like if I could get them there so that

• 47:52Speaker 02

  That's the only way they can deficit spend.

• 47:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Right. So if I could get people to look at, oh, wait, you want to make this thing free? That means that you're allocating governmental budget towards that. What are you cutting? Because we're already deficit spending. So if you're adding more to the deficit, well, then that's going to create more and more problems. But it's proving very difficult to get people to follow said cause and effect.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  I can totally relate to that as someone who's been beating the what is money drum for, I don't know, close to a decade now. It can feel a little frustrating in that you're trying to liberate victims from their victimage. But

• 48:31Tom Bilyeu?

  So do you just, are you a Bitcoin is life raft guy?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Well, private property is what we're going for, right? The ability to own things that are independent of the opinions of other people. And I think to that end, Bitcoin is the strongest form of private property we've ever had. You know, first of all, you know, money by definition can be used to obtain any good or service in the marketplace. All right. So in a way, it's kind of like a meta private property, right? It gives you access to obtain anything the marketplace can bear. Any property that anyone has, well, it's mostly for sale, not all of it, but you know, mostly anything people can create of value. It's available through money. The printing of money is the violation of private property of savers, right?

• 49:20Speaker 02

  People are holding, and here's a, here's a good way to think about this.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  When you go to work, for instance, and you trade your time for money, right? You are expending your labor, producing a good or service for someone else. You're solving someone else's problems and you're paid in money, right? You can then take that money back into the marketplace and you can give it to someone else. So they'll solve your problems, right? They'll sell you a pair of shoes or they'll fix your sink or they'll sell you a car, whatever, whatever the thing is. This trading of favors, that's another good definition of money, the medium through which we trade favors, basically.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  When you do that, right, so let's say you just go to work and you provide services or you render labor to provide goods or services and then you are paid in money and then you hold the money, you save it. What's happened in aggregate to the world?

• 50:19Speaker 02

  You've increased the productive output of the species, right? By rendering your labor to produce goods and services, you've been paid in money, but you haven't spent it yet, you're just holding it, right? It's just potential goods and services in the future. So you've added to the productive output of the planet, but you haven't yet subtracted from it. So this is like when, when it's extremely moral, it is extremely moral to save. Hoppa would point out here, too, this starts the process of lowering time preference, which is the rate at which we prefer present satisfaction to later satisfaction. And he later says that civilization itself is the externalization of our individual

• 51:00Speaker 02

  time preference. So the lower our total average time preference becomes, the more civilized we become. So money is this meta-private property lets you obtain anything the marketplace can bear. Money is this medium through which we trade favors and to earn money is to do something that's very moral and useful. Now, if that money you're saving in is now being counterfeited by the central bank, well, then the purchasing power, right, the moral act, the reward for the moral act you did of going to work is now being depreciated. Someone who's benefiting from that money printing is stealing from you, they're stealing your labor, they're stealing your time, your energy, your effort.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Bitcoin is money that cannot be printed, right? It's fixed supply money, so it is invulnerable to the violation of private property through currency expansion. And that's very important, right?

• 51:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, is the goal, though, just to get people off of government-controlled money?

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Well, that obviates the need for central banking entirely. So if we go back to our definition of, our first definition of money, as an instrument for moving purchasing power across space and time. Bitcoin is like the internet and gold had a baby. Right? I've probably said this to you before, but gold was really good at moving purchasing power across time because it has the inflexible supply, but not space because it's physical. So we augmented gold to have gold-backed currencies, which are really good for moving purchasing power across space because it's just paper or electronic, but not across time because it introduced the warehouse incentive problem where there's an incentive to run a fractional reserve, which leads to inflation of the currency and ultimately hyperinflation. Bitcoin threads the needle.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Bitcoin is a pure digital asset with a fixed supply. It's the only fixed supply asset in the history of the human race, the only one there will ever be, so far as I can tell. So it is, it perfects the preservation or transmission of purchasing power across time. Also, because it's purely digital, it's just information, you can move it at the speed of light.

• 53:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Why do you think it is the only one that will ever be, though? Like, it's the easiest thing in the world to replicate.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Because of game theory. We have 40 million replications of Bitcoin right now.

• 53:13Tom Bilyeu?

  You're just saying it's the one that got adopted.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  I'm saying that absolute scarcity, a fixed supply of money can only be discovered once. I think it's in this way, you have to compare it to something like the number zero, or people also compare it to like, to the wheel, right? Like, are we going to invent something that disrupts the wheel? Like, no, the wheel is very fundamental.

• 53:31Tom Bilyeu?

  The wheel's a concept. I can make a-

• 53:33Speaker 02

  So is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a concept made real.

• 53:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, I don't know if this is where we want to take the conversation, but just because I know people are going to hammer in the comments on that. This is adoption. I'm going to channel Peter Schiff right now. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value whatsoever, at least gold can be turned into a watch.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  If we're going to do a show on economics, let's not use the term intrinsic value. Peter Schiff is the worst for that. All value is subjective, right? It does not exist, it does not inherent things, to quote Mises.

• 54:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Agreed, but that means-

• 54:05Speaker 02

  It exists in how we respond to the conditions of our environment.

• 54:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Bitcoin can be replicated, has been replicated a gazillion times. It's just a question of whether people adopt it or not. What I'm, the reason I'm, I'm asking about Bitcoin, though, is I'm trying to make, like, I, I have two options before me. Path number one. Move to Singapore and just be a rich guy.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  We were talking about that this morning.

• 54:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, path, path number two. Stay engaged in America and try to get people to understand why they got raked over the coals. For now, it's path number two. I really want people to understand this. I've always had beef with people that are just like Bitcoins a life raft? The reason I have beef with it is while it's true and it has all these fancy properties, the reality is people just need to get the hell away from anything that can be inflated. And so, right now, while I Bitcoin is my single biggest investment, Bitcoin is also moving more like a tech stock than it is like gold. So, people need to, I would say, be very honest about the state of Bitcoin currently

• 55:07Tom Bilyeu?

  and make sure they understand the cause and effect of all this stuff so they can figure out how to eject out of just the everyday fiat currency that they are currently trapped in. I want them to know where to put their money, how to invest, and how to vote. Like, those are my, like, just super small breadbasket of things. But unfortunately, no matter how much I try to simplify, even like the slightest amount of nuance, I know I lose people. So, yeah, I'm curious as to, like, you're gonna be fine because you understand the nature of money, but like, if you had to make this accessible and understandable to somebody who is gonna get lost very fast,

• 55:50Tom Bilyeu?

  is Bitcoin the punchline because it can't be inflated and it's not government-controlled? Or is there something else?

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm gonna try to make it as accessible as I can.

• 56:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, buddy, let's go.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Make it accessible. Let me try to speak like a caveman. Money printing bad.

• 56:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Money printing bad.

• 56:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Love it.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  Steal from you. Money printing steal from you, okay? Money that cannot be printed, therefore good. Really good, right? Really good thing. It protects your purchasing power, which is your ability to survive in the real world. Right? The work that you expend to gain resources, to improve your own and your family's survivability. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm getting fancy words again. That improves your chances for survival. That seems reasonable enough. That is depreciated through money printing. Okay, so Bitcoin is money that you cannot print. Okay, so money printing bad, money you cannot print good, Bitcoin good. Okay.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Further, this back to this idea of private property, which is ultimately about the integrity of the relationship between the owner and his assets. Right? You were doing so well. Now we're back to integrity of ownership. I'll try to simplify. Yeah, so can't be printed. We got that part. Okay, let's use this. Let's uh. Government control is not a part of this? Marriage. What is marriage? A union between two people. Right? And there's exclusivity, right? Most marriages. Not always. But consensual, like even if there's not exclusivity, you would consent to let someone else sleep with your partner. You wouldn't agree to a marriage and then she can just sleep behind my back whenever she wants.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Unless you've consented to like a don't ask, don't tell, or whatever the thing is. Okay, private property is pretty similar. It's like you, the creator or buyer of that asset. Own it. You own it. You decide what to do with it. You can exclude people from its use. You can include people for its use, you know, renting it out, whatever. You can sell it. You can destroy it. You can eat it, whatever it is, right? Like you decide. So it's a exclusive relationship like marriage between husband and wife, between owner and asset. I hope that helps.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  The reason Bitcoin excels here is because to physically custody or to have Bitcoin in your possession is to just have a private key, is to just keep a secret. And so the ability, you know, was once put to me, this was a funny guy, sharing a story about a Middle Eastern gentleman that said, what he really loved about Bitcoin was that he could put a hundred million dollars of Bitcoin on a hard drive and stick it up his butt and get on an airplane and go anywhere in the world if things ever got bad. Someone really needs to tell that guy about a brain wallet, by the way, because you don't have to do that sticking up the butt part, you could just memorize 12 words. And then he went on to say, you cannot put a hundred million dollars of gold up your ass. It would be tough.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Right? So like, okay, I hope this is accessible for people.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  I hope this is accessible for people. It's like, if you want to be able to control your means of survival, which is purchasing power in economics parlance, with the, with the most assurance that no one else will be able to override you, right? They'll be able to take it or whatever, then Bitcoin is that thing, right? You can own an asset that is technically unseizable.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  We could get into the multi-key custody and whatnot. We're like, yeah, sure, a brain wallet, you can be tortured and someone can force you to give up your 12 words. But if you put your Bitcoin in a multi-key and all of a sudden those 12 words are, let's say, chopped into five pieces and you need three or five of those pieces to unlock it. Well, this is the highest security custody scheme that we have. This is what we use for nuclear launch codes, right? If you've ever seen a movie where the guys have to like put in the keys at the same time, turn them in the same sequence and then they can access the nukes or whatever. That's a multi-key setup. You can do that with Bitcoin. So in terms of money printing bad, money you cannot print good, and then assets that cannot be stolen easily, also good, because that lets you control your livelihood, your means of survival.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Bitcoin excels everything in both of those respects. And in turn, now we could go into the Bitcoin versus shitcoin thing, like, oh, well, why? If Bitcoin's just open source software, why doesn't everyone just copy it? And make a million different copies of it and, you know, and then it, then it's diluted, then it's hyperinflated. Well, first of all, we have 17 years of market tests. Okay, that's already been happening. We have like 40 million shitcoins in existence. Bitcoin's outperformed all of them for 17 years straight. It's the fastest growing asset in human history. And to try to make it accessible. The metaphor I've heard used is that you are free to fork the rules of chess. Right? Chess is open source software too, right? It's just rules, the game, we sit down and we play it.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  You can change those rules all you want, whatever way you want, right? People do it. There's 3D chess, there's all kinds of stuff.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  But chess isn't going anywhere, right? Like as a game, it's a shelling point. People have, people have coalesced on it. As an existing thing. So even though, as you said earlier, it's a concept, like these things really matter. The essay I wrote was the number zero in Bitcoin, right? Like the number zero, if you could imagine something disrupting that. Or disrupting the wheel, as we said earlier, like this is how you need to think about Bitcoin. It's that type of innovation. It is something so fundamental, something that like is so mind blowing and hard to comprehend. That's why we're all the six blind guys, you know, describing the elephant.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  That we struggle with different metaphors, you know, the internet of money, digital gold, internet and gold had a baby, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so, but if I'm trying to make it, I don't know if this is accessible, but elemental, it is the perfection. Or optimization at least of private property, which then leads to the optimization of price discovery. And I think also leads to the optimization of political freedom. Why does it move like a tech stock and not like gold? Well, it's gone from zero to $2 trillion in its first 17 years of existence, which makes it the fastest growing asset in human history. Price volatility is inverse to market cap. So the smaller an asset is, the more volatile its price will be, right?

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  You could think of this as like a little boat on big waves versus a big boat on those same waves, right? There's more volat- the little boat will experience relatively more volatility as those waves move, whereas the big boat will be more stable, right? So you're saying it's not big enough yet to match gold? Well, as it grows, its volatility goes down. This is already also market proven and it's not just Bitcoins, provable for a number of assets. You could look at Amazon, right? Amazon declined like 94% after the 2001 tech bubble.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Amazon went down 94% and then it's grown like 40,000% since, right? Okay, so the year, I think it was like 18 months that the Amazon price declined that much. It was like, you know, its annualized volatility was, we'll say 80%, something like that, right? What is Amazon, but it was a whatever, $5 trillion asset then, not $5 trillion, $5 billion asset then, now it's a multi-trillion dollar asset. What's its volatility today, right? It's, I guarantee you it's less than whatever it was then. It was 80 vol then, it's probably a 30 or 40 vol now, right? The volatility has declined as Amazon stock has grown. Same is true for Bitcoin, right? So, gold is a, what is it now? $20 trillion asset, 22?

• 1:03:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure, with the total market cap, but it soared in the last year.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Soared. Yes, soared less than Bitcoin, but still soared.

• 1:03:49Tom Bilyeu?

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