TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #162: Robert Breedlove

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Robert Breedlove, Founder & CEO of Parallax Digital, to discuss: - Bitcoin and Zero - How the Church lost power - Why Central Banks are unnatural - Bitcoin + energy efficiency - Thinking from first principles - Logos - Human freedom - Much more Follow Robert on Twitter Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

Sup freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt on a windy Tuesday morning. I sat down with Robert Breedlove, co-founder of Parallax Capital, who's written a lot of incredible long reads about Bitcoin and why it's important, why it's revolutionary, how it's revolutionary, and the future that it can unlock. in this episode we focused on his piece comparing Bitcoin to the number zero and how both are revolutionizing different parts of the world

zero revolutionized math and the world of numerals Bitcoin is revolutionizing money and the world of distributed consensus we hopped around his paper a bit went on a few tangents it was an incredible cosmic

conversation all around i think you guys are really going to enjoy this one this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by our good friends at the cash app you freaks already know all about them helping you stack sats or helping you send sats receive sats and sell sats if you're so pleased you don't have to sell the sats but you can if you want to if you have to sometimes you get in a pinch you have to think about the tax burdens when you do that just think think through it on top of that you can stack slivers of stocks you don't have to but if you want to you can the option is there i know there's some stonk stackers out there as well so if you want to stonk a sliver stonk a sliver if you want to stack a sliver of a stonk you can do so via cash

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Wow. Go help our friends out at Al's Lacrosse. by downloading the cash app and using the code stacking stats. Enjoy your day, freaks. Enjoy this episode. I think you guys are really going to like it. Take care. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here.

Second recording this Friday afternoon. Very excited for this conversation. I'm very excited to end the week on this conversation because I think we're going to get pretty cosmic here. I have the founder and CEO at Parallax Digital on the phone, Robert Breedlove. Robert, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Marty. Thank you for having me. Appreciate you coming on and being so flexible. You had some technical difficulties right before we hopped on this, so you're calling in via the phone.

Apple snuck a software update on you right before you were about to hop on the Zoom call yeah that's exactly right careful what you click out there freaks be very careful

that little banner pop up in the corner has caught me a couple times well at some inopportune times you gotta don't trust verify you gotta verify that you're hitting the right button but regardless we got you um on the phone you're coming in loud and clear and yeah we're here to talk about bitcoin how you found bitcoin uh some of the incredible

pieces you've written particularly uh how bitcoin relates to zero uh as a concept and how zero revolutionized the concept of math and numbers and and how bitcoin's revolutionizing money but first before we get into that how the hell did you get to bitcoin and find yourself writing these these long intricate uh fascinating pieces about the subject yeah i i had an interest in central banking actually way before bitcoin and i was growing up i had always been uh reading was my thing so i'd always been very curious uh reading a lot and i had stumbled across in my early 20s um a creature from jekyll island which is a great book kind of on the history and inception of the federal reserve central bank

here in the u.s and i arrived at this i guess conclusion that central banking was really at the root of the most or many problems in the world and i remember getting i think this is in 2005 or six i got many of my friends and family this abridged version of the creature from jackal island which is like a 700 page book so i got them this abridged version called dishonest money that's maybe 100 pages like very easy to read but captured the essence and i gave it to all my friends and family for christmas and i'm like hey you know knowledge is power here's what's wrong with the world let's do something about it and i'll never forget the response like from the few that did read it they just came back to me and were like okay great this is a problem i agree

with you but what can we do about it and there was just this feeling of like uh yeah i don't know what to do about it really i just thought awareness would kind of help fix it so fast forward to like 2014 um i had my undergraduate master's degree in accounting i've been a cfo for a number of tech companies and i was in on vacation in costa rica actually having an argument with a banker where his thesis was that digital currency was absolutely never going to happen was never going to take hold and my position was the opposite i thought it was absolutely inevitable and but at the time and i'll always kick myself because at the time i was operating under the fallacy that Bitcoin was version 1 and the version 50 would be the thing that you know

challenged central banking and I'd invested a little bit at the time but I did not fall down the rabbit hole and always kicked myself for that one but then actually later on in 2016 in studying aetherium of all things and I when I stumbled across the concept of smart contracts and specifically Zabo's work on smart contracts which was written in the 90s my light bulb moment was the entire finance industry is a smart contract with people on top of it and that's when i was just it was like an epiphany i thought this technology is going to be gigantic so i started making um personal investments weighted market cap weighted crypto assets and where my money went my mind followed

and I just fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and over time have become much more of a Bitcoin rationalist or maximalist. The hero's journey. So between the time when you were handing out the abridged version of the creature from Jackal Island and the time in which you got exposed to digital currencies, of bitcoin specifically were you uh what was your mindset were you sort of uh pessimistic about the state of the world and the future uh of the world or were were you looking

for these alternatives or did you sort of just forget the subject and try to go on about your life the best you can knowing or thinking that you may not be able to fix a central banking problem you know i guess it's kind of a blended story i never lost my libertarian roots you know i've always always held on to that very tightly i think that and i want that for everyone i don't want everyone to kind of like maximize their own freedom i think it not only creates the best outcomes for people but it also creates the most fulfillment because you know it allows people to sort of pursue what's most meaningful to them and create the most value in the world and for themselves in the process so I've never lost that that philosophical premise but I guess I did

you know through my executive roles I was like sucked up in the fiat world too you know I was making a lot of money and traveling internationally and doing all those things had all those trappings that you know you would think that many people think make you happy but but they didn't necessarily um but i guess the discovery of bitcoin really has and this there's been an effect like this on everyone that really discovers it and goes down the rabbit hole that it brings out this like these latent qualities in them uh usually for the better like you know in terms of lower time preference or being more family oriented health oriented etc etc i think bitcoin is definitely reinvigorated my my nerdiness like i read uh non-stop you know i've started writing

which was you know inspired by everything i've learned diving into bitcoin and um yeah i think it's better money kind of makes a better you which you know collectively leads to a better world so i think it's really amazing that we can see these that interplay in real time right it's not just this mirage future of like oh yeah one day when we have a bitcoin standard the world will be better you see it in individuals like their lives changing in real time which is really fascinating yeah bitcoin changes you then you change bitcoin it's uh it seems a little crazy to say at first but then you interact with the protocol and and attempt to stack as many sats as possible and it just changes you um sort of it just naturally and it really has shifted

my perspective on the world how i view it um and it seems to be having that effect on a lot of people and i guess let's dive into that like why why do you think that is what is is it simply the concept of lowering your time preference and thinking longer term um is it optimism for the potential of a better future via a decentralized protocol that is a really difficult question to answer um i will say that it seems at this point and i think everyone that's in bitcoin would agree the rabbit hole is bottomless and almost because money and the concept of exchange touches everything it just seems to be like an inexhaustible teacher so like if you just keep i always tell people to follow that rabbit the question the rabbit is the question what is money just keep

following that rabbit and see where it takes you and for me that's what's you know led to everything that i've been writing and and such and um i keep digging deeper into history to try and see what is the answer to that question why is bitcoin such a big deal like and this is off topic for today but the latest thing that i've stumbled across that i'm really piqued my interest reading more into it i've been reading maps of meaning by jordan peterson and uh first of all his podcast he's he does a great job of bridging sort of like psychology mythology and religion He just kind of gives a good scientific foundation to mythology and religion, which is helpful for, I think, a lot of people that tend to be more empirically minded. And towards the end of his book, the book is amazing.

It's very dense. Towards the end of his book, he starts talking about, of all things, alchemy. And, you know, today, us moderns, we always think alchemy is like a joke, right? Like, oh, those are the people that tried to make gold but never figured it out. but what it actually was were it was a group of people where the church was founded on the principle that christ was like the final redeemer so that all was known through christ that there was no additional redemption to be had by exploring the material world by experimenting on material reality but the alchemist forked off of this and they said they thought they could find

redemptive knowledge by experimenting in the material world and it's really like a whole thing of worms unpacked but in general alchemy became a form of like proto-science because it was the alchemical methodologies that gave way to the scientific method and this lasted for centuries all over the world but even isaac newton was a known alchemist and he like you know the newtonian model of the universe which governed everything until relativity uh was introduced by einstein basically it had its its roots in alchemy so long short the and i just encourage you to read into it it's just another rabbit hole in and unto itself but the goal of alchemy we always think was to produce gold but it wasn't at all it was to produce an incorruptible substance

and you know in my mind I think Bitcoin is the first incorruptible substance humanity has ever had so I don't know that just resonates with me sounds like a really big deal

and I'm looking into it that's fascinating and I'm definitely somebody who has I mean this is the first time I'm hearing alchemy through this lens it's always been that that crazy um that crazy study where again like you mentioned scientists trying to turn other things into gold but turning them into an incorruptible substance was gold just the best example they had of what they believed an

incorruptible substance was and that's why it's the example that people harp on or it's just completely off base well it's symbolic and in line and they were actually trying to refine material reality and there's a whole let me just say i'm kind of new to the subject here but the other interesting thing about it thinking back to your original question of like why is bitcoin changing people uh alchemists found that in trying to refine uh material reality they found that they could only um you know figure things out or establish the correct ritual or experiment by elevating their own morality so it was sort of this recursive process where you're trying to refine nature to you know be a better tool or substance basically

again the early stages of the scientific method but they found that that very practice and process refining their own moral character and they actually believed in the mind of like pre-scientific man there was no subject object duality they just it was all connected so they actually thought they had to refine their own character to bring out refinements in nature and so on and so forth so yeah it's mind-blowing yeah so following that path sort of demanded um a a higher standard that they had to hold themselves to which is interesting higher standard and um you know it's funny jk rowling just tweeted today i don't know if you saw that i did i just saw that between between recordings yeah the author of harry potter and she tweeted out you know

i'll just comment like what does bitcoin explain it to me um but it just it like gets back to those mythological underpinnings of money because it is where sort of like story meets reality right where belief system meets fundamental empirical scarcity um so yeah i just it seems like it points towards a dimension that maybe is even beyond space and time like the moral dimension and that's where the the it gets blurry between like the character of man and the character of the money right i think it was i forget which book but says the monetary standard is inexorably connected to the more we have people if you have business models you know high time preference this whereas if we have hard reliable money honest money as a substrate for trust that people can

interoperate with you know trustfully then it just frees you up to become more moral spiritual artistic all these other things yeah this is something i was talking about uh on a recent episode too that that whole idea that an easy money system uh sort of incentivizes bad behavior and a misallocation of money and a hard money system uh maybe may make people more virtuous and and make society better off overall it's just hard for people to take at face value um it's too the concept is almost too easy to believe too i mean too good to be true at a certain point something so simple as getting the money right can have uh crazy ripple effects throughout humanity and people don't want to believe that it's that simple if you fix the

money you fix the world yeah it sort of reminds me of that there's an essay called this is water and basically there's a guy that comes by sees two fish swimming and he makes a comment about the water and then he passes along and then the two fish look at each other and they say what is water it's like it's so hidden in plain sight and it's so intertwined with everything we do like our thoughts our actions um it actually you know money reshapes reality this is crazy thing about too is if you have a table and you're resting your drink on it then that table is an accessory to you like in line with your motivations in the world that table is serving a purpose for you but if you turned around and gave someone you know offered them a thousand dollars to jump over

the table and through the window like that table would then become an obstacle to them so money changes the motivational significance of reality for us and that's you know it's the most powerful incentive scheme there is in the world so hence the reason people have fought to control it forever and for the first time ever we have something that can't be controlled like it's it's placing the the the strings of money you know for the the people that it's always drawn people that want to be a puppet master over money right which i would argue central banking is and it's placed that control permanently beyond the reach of man and it's for our benefit in perpetuity yeah i mean i would completely agree the central banking is i mean it is obvious they

are puppet masters trying to micromanage an extremely complex system in uh the monetary system and yeah that's what history is like people say it all the time history doesn't repeat itself but it certainly rhymes and history is filled with uh instances of of governments or nation states or dictatorships or whatever it may be messing up the money and then society sort of devolving into a chaotic hedonistic shit show um which i would argue like today it's pretty easy to argue that that is happening it seems to be humanity on a wayward path due to the excesses that exist in our modern time and i would argue yes it stems directly from central banking policy and modern fiat monetary systems yeah i think if you look you know gloss over a lot of history but

a super high level view is that we've progressed from, you know, pure dictatorships, like in ancient Egypt, to more monarchical, to socialistic, to eventually capitalistic economies or modes of human organization. So the power among the social system has naturally been decentralizing over the course of history. And I think the latest expression of that is what we have in Western civilization, right, is, you know, we call it democracy, but basically it's free market capitalism, I think is the foundation of that, which is based on sound and reliable rule of law, private property rights, and hard money. and when you when you violate any of those you you um you know you toxify the environment if you will like you corrupt the environment and it just so happens that the money has always been the thing that's easiest to corrupt it's easiest to take advantage of in the shadows because

you know private property rights and rule of law these things are much more visible let's say whereas the money again because it's so like water like it's it's everywhere that it's almost hidden in plain sight um so yeah it's uh it's crazy yeah it is and so let's dive into it and now that we have an uncorruptible money how does that change humanity do we have a situation where we have like a new atlantis rising metaphorically you say in your piece that many believe that bitcoin is just one of thousands of crypto assets but you would you would argue that it's not it's it's the same way that the number zero is just one of an infinite series of number reality bitcoin is special and

so is zero and that's how you start your piece why is bitcoin special and how does this change us moving forward yeah so in that progression you know i think bitcoin really i like to distinguish between central banking which i call monetary socialism and bitcoin which we can call monetary capitalism in the sense that it embodies those three cornerstones of capitalism right and it's it's an inviolable property right you hold your keys you hold your coins uh the laws you know code is law basically on the bitcoin network consensus is law and then um it is hard money right so it is it's the in that long progression man has moved closer and closer to truth and if we think of truth in the form of what's most provides the most utility um that's

what free markets do right they generate new innovations which are our best attempts at solving problems in the real world and they generate uh prices that you know as we say in markets price is truth so in that sense i think bitcoin just is that it's very different in that it's almost like the capstone of capitalism it may be seen as you know the the greatest innovation we've ever had, you know, at least as big as the Internet, as many of us believe, probably a lot bigger. So in trying to answer that question, though, because the one question I have found difficult to sum up is when people say, why Bitcoin? I know very smart people ask me, what makes Bitcoin any different? There's thousands of these things. It's just open source software.

it can be copied pasted you know how do you know which one's going to win which i think is first of all it's a smart question if you look at the world today i have these national currencies everywhere like no one understands how they work uh what makes you think we're going to have one you know crypto asset versus the the many hundred national currencies you see today And this paper was basically started out as an answer to that. I wanted to explain why Bitcoin is fundamentally different from all alternative crypto assets. And in searching for that analogous concept, I landed on the number zero. And it's fascinating.

like i never thought of uniqueness of the number zero until you you wrote your piece and and how profound of an innovation just that simple circle added to to our numerals meant for society at whole and how it sort of changed the way we look at the universe and interact with it particularly and that's uh you were talking about looking at the history of alchemy in the beginning of the episode but that's another incredible you dive into a bunch of history here from ancient india and cambodia to uh buddhism to greek mythology history of the church you put on a lot of threads here uh yeah i've i've found a lot of my inspiration in seeking ancient wisdom from taleb you know he's

i think he's just done an amazing job of blending modern knowledge with ancient wisdom to you know produce all of his inserto and all his great writing so i guess um yeah just trying to answer those questions you almost have to really look deep into the past and that's that just to me that's a reinforcement as to how big of a deal bitcoin is like you can't just look 100 years ago and find an adequate example you can't even look 500 years ago you could say maybe double entry bookkeeping and this is triple entry bookkeeping that big of a deal but i think it's even bigger than that frankly because yeah again if you look at all of history we've been trying we've been fighting over the money for all of history so now

we have something that really honors individual sovereignty and mitigates state power yeah it's it's powerful going back to like the the natural question that people have like if we have thousands of currencies on a global scale different currencies for each um for each nation state or section of of states living within certain borders that is a natural question to ask and that's what most people don't realize is that's not an open competition for money like money hasn't been capitalistic in quite some time like these these monies are being decreed onto their people and yes there may be many of them and they may have different values and exchange rates at any given point in time but

they are and they may seem like they compete with each other in an open market but they do not and that concept is is is mind-blowing when you actually have that aha moment like oh bitcoin actually does provide a open, provide a currency that actually does compete in the free market with these other currencies. And its incorruptibility may prove, and I think we both believe will prove, to be superior to these fiat currencies that are forced on people. Absolutely. The currencies today, they're just regional monopolies or pyramid schemes constructed by the central bank that has jurisdiction.

And at the base of that pyramid is gold, right? That's what central banks are settling with one another in, with finality. They want to extinguish a debt with finality, they demand gold. the only form of money that has zero percent counterparty risk it's 100 equity zero percent debt the final extinguisher of debt and so to really like get to how we got to today you really have to understand why gold became money and that's where i get i get frustrated with dalio like he doesn't even go first principles on that he's like well this is what banks have always done and gold had intrinsic value like he doesn't go deep enough because as we know intrinsic value

is bullshit um so when i try to answer that in a nutshell i say historically you know money arises in a society is just the most treatable thing whatever is the most tradable thing becomes money and historically there are five traits that sort of define what makes something tradable and it's divisibility durability portability recognizability and very importantly scarcity So, historically, monetary metals best fulfilled those five traits. And of the monetary metals, gold was the most scarce. So, that's why gold became money. In the game of money, gold is the shelling point because it's the most secure strategy to employ when you're playing the game of money in which you cannot trust other players, right?

It's a game theoretic backstop, if you will, to what money is. So that's what made gold universal money historically. And then so if you look at it through that lens, we can then look at Bitcoin. And since Bitcoin is just pure information, it basically maximizes divisibility because information can be infinitely subdivided and recombined at virtually zero cost. It's infinitely durable because information, especially when stored in a distributed fashion, it does not decompose. It's infinitely recognizable because that's what we are, right? We're harvesters of information, like the written word is the most discernible objective substance that we have. And it's portable.

We know information is portable, clearly, thanks to telecommunications. And then, you know, finally with Bitcoin, the genius is that Satoshi was able to connect thermodynamics and sort of a human self-interest element to make it absolutely scarce. So it's like, you can't be more scarce than Bitcoin, right? It just maxes out all these traits of money. and when you see it like that and you historically all human action expressed through free markets has zeroed in on the money that best fulfills these five traits and now we have the money that perfects them for all intents and purposes that to me is like there's the light bulb for bitcoin right and and again it's i feel so fortunate to have had this light bulb

go off at this particular point in time in bitcoin's existence for me because it's so early and people are so hypnotized what's the word i'm looking for they're so stuck in their ways and they just believe the world works the way it is and there's no new way to do it but like this again the humanity modern humanity has the ability to get back to a sound monetary system via bitcoin and the implications of how that affects humanity are going to be massive i mean my i'm witnessing firsthand alone with the the mining company and i'm working for great american mining and that's something i want to posit to you too like i don't know like satoshi did definitely think of

these design decisions very um very hard and made some incredible design decisions but like do you think even he could have foreseen the these sort of secondary and tertiary effects of the network and how what it has on um humanity outside of the protocol right so we're using waste energy energy that would other otherwise be wasted to to make this network run and that's creating efficiencies across the energy sector like do you think he even could foresee that i i really don't know if he could foresee that but you're you're talking about something great and i not enough people talk about this aspect of bitcoin because the entire purpose of the world economy is to make us more collectively energy efficient right that's why we trade

that's why we burn fossil fuels that's why we innovate we're literally just trying to find a way to accomplish greater results with the same or less efforts that's the whole whole game right and now you know bitcoin mining so brilliantly created this perpetual global bounty program for unused and underused energy assets so it's like dry it it converts the game theoretic race to the bottom associated with fiat currency in which central banks race to devalue their currencies into worthlessness and acquire assets along the way into a new game where we have a race to the bottom in terms of energy prices so actually we've given this perpetual incentive to everyone forever to seek out and find better ways of producing cheaper energy and that the the

the knock-on effects of that are not they're unimaginable right if we could drill down and make energy so abundant and so cheap our cost of living would plummet like we could who knows how low it could go right we worked 40 hours a week now in the u.s that's the average it could go to four or less who knows um so yeah again you're just you're back to having to look at things at a very first principle basis to understand the profundity of it and as far as what satoshi knew or didn't know i mean clearly the guy was or gal or team was a genius but i don't know how much i don't this is such like a positive black swan event i don't think even he could have seen or seen all of this no like it's like again just because of where uh products of the time that

we live in and we can only reference our experiences on this earth up to this point like so hard to fathom how that even changes like humans like what do we do in the in a world if this all becomes as massively successful as we hope it can what do we do in a world where people only had to work four hours a week and what is what does humanity look like like are we just building beautiful things and enjoying our families are we ever going to space what does that open up like how much getting people out of the hamster wheel and into things that they actually want to do and enjoy how does that change the structure of of of the way humans uh cooperate it no it's impossible to perceive but i just think in general when people can live their lives under

less duress they are naturally inclined to seek out more meaning right whatever of whatever idiosyncratic thing talent quality you have about you that you then don't have to go and expend all your vital energies 40 hours a week at a job just to like get by you could start reallocating a lot of that energy towards something that you truly find meaningful and in doing so like that's what creates value in the world right that's what a free market is like it it minimizes barriers to exchange to allow people to seek and discover their own comparative advantages you know guided by a profit motive but in whatever lessons and learnings and innovations they create along the way it benefits the collective so like just this move away from

you know the idea of central planning or imposed rules or socialism towards just a freer and more interactive society where people are living in their own truth they're actually they have the luxury to ask themselves this question or listen to this podcast and explore that concept and figure out what it means for themselves that's what this breakthrough is i don't know what it looks like i i it's a better world we know that right we we just know that it's a better world if people are freer so and that's the direction this thing is going yeah and it's massively necessary right now and needed in the world because just think of how many people are sitting in cubes around the world doing stuff in excel that really doesn't need to get done at the end

of the day it just helps a society or a machine a market machine that's being manipulated and depends on continuous cons uh conspicuous consumption you're sort of just feeding into that and you know a lot of people are living soulless lives like the uh what was it mark between most men live lives of quiet desperation. It feels like that number has been rising more and more as the consumerist society has, has sort of peaked here in the, in the beginning of the 21st century.

Like, and it's, it's necessary. It's, it's a weird time when you have 40 to 60% of Americans unable to afford a $400 emergency expense without using a credit card or something like that. Like that's not a situation in which you want your society to be in. It seems like a very fragile state.

Absolutely. And yeah, you could zero in on that, that, that notion actually just on central banking monetary policy, right? Like just to establish what will the supply of money be and what will it price? Well, how will it be priced? The interest rate? How many armies of people and countless human hours and analysis pouring over their their every word, every word of central bankers, what they're wearing, what their body language is, like all to try and arrive at this conclusion that Bitcoin has already established. It's there. It's the rule set is out for everyone to see it. No one needs to look at the rules and see how they're changing over time and how this political agenda might influence that political agenda. You don't have to even look into the opacity of the complex system that is central banking and the macro economy to understand what the rules are, right?

It's just 21 million. Those are the rules forever. And, you know, another thing Mark Twain said, he said, to make a man covet something, one needs just make it scarce. right, or hard to obtain. I think maybe you said hard to obtain. That's what Bitcoin is. We have cracked the nut on absolute scarcity in an unconfiscatable format.

Like that, it's just such a gigantic breakthrough that it's hard to get your head around. Yeah, and so in what ways do you think we could fail at this? Do you think we could fail? Do you think the Pandora's box has been opened, there's no putting this back in you know i argue very strongly in the piece that absolute scarcity for money is a one-time discovery a path dependent uh event essentially that you can't put the proverbial genie back in the bottle so like and when you kind of go through

the piece i and i believe this to be true that you can't like how do you kill the idea of absolute scarce money like it's it's out like even if and of course looking forward you're always vulnerable to black swans forever because there's always unknown unknowns it's just unavoidable so could the coin fail sure there could be some whatever i don't know what some black swan take it out but how do you kill the idea of absolutely scarce money you know i just it just seems like that is really taking root now and and it's germinating quickly you know i when i published this piece i've had people from all over the world contacting me like thank you this is such an eye-opener it's been translated being or has been translated in like five or seven languages so it's just been

i think the idea is out i don't i don't know how you would ever put that away um as far as you know what that would look like if bitcoin was black swan out of existence how it absolutely scarce money re-manifests itself i'm not sure but i think it would yeah no i completely agree set to uh play devil's advocate there but and you say this in the piece too like only unstoppable ideas could break otherwise unmovable institutions and so let's jump into the concept of al zero brought down the church um and bitcoin's bringing down the church that is the fed and modern central banking yeah so the i make reference in the piece this is uh referring to the the old catholic church

what i call the church and um their worldview was basically premised on some teachings of aristotle and in the aristotelian view of the universe shape and number were the same thing so even today when we say like x squared what that actually means is we're taking uh a line with length of x turning it into a square and calculating its area so for for like aristotle and the pythagorean um pythagorean mode of thinking that prevailed back then shape and number were like the same thing they really thought they were part of uh the universe and but because of that view they didn't they didn't have zero as a number because zero represents nothing there's no shape associated with zero so they didn't have a concept of this

so in that aristotelian view of the universe there was no such thing as the void which is just like very deep philosophical concepts um that actually arose in the ancient east and was discovered in meditation and that's where we got the number zero which is mathematician Brahmagupta. He said, you know, the absence of a number essentially is a number. And he discovered that in meditation, which is, that to me is mind-blowing. And then the Aristotelian view of the universe said there was no void. And they looked at the universe as based on the atomic paradigm. So everything's made up of atoms, which are indivisible and cannot be divided ad infinitum and then the entire

universe as the part of it is earth earth is at the center of the universe and then the universe itself is a macrocosmic atom so it had this sheet of stars if you will on the outermost layer they're all linking down towards earth and that was the that was the universe the finite universe there was nothing beyond the outermost sphere. There was nothing below the atomic surface. So it was this Pythagorean, Aristotelian finite view of the universe.

And the movements of the stars on the outside of the sphere that drove all the motions and the cascading forces downward towards Earth, even into the motions and movements of man, that was considered the officially accepted interpretation of divine will. So that was the prime mover, God, basically, the guy, the force that moved the sheep. And this, so that became the philosophical underpinnings for the church. The church, as it was sweeping across the West, that was basically, they relied on the explanatory power of that finite universe to proselytize people into their religion.

so the entire power base of the church was premised on their being no void and no infinity and that's when zero started to sweep across the world because of its superior utility which we can get into more of that it basically made math way more efficient and better for everyone so this concept was sweeping across the world as well and it met a lot of ideological resistance when it hit the church initially but eventually you know it zero became so ingrained in things like art was a big one uh and i put this in the piece if you look at old art it was like uh i'm sorry pre-zero art let's say it's very flat and lifeless and like it's not true to form at all And then you see post-zero art, this is like the renaissance in the visual arts, when the vanishing point was included, that gave things like much more spatial proportion, like it just looks real when you include the vanishing point in art.

You'll know this when you see it. It's just, it's the, you know, the point out on a horizon, essentially the vanishing point. and that once it became ingrained in art it started to really propel itself across the minds of man and eventually bishops in the church started calling assemblies and they were questioning like this doesn't make sense if if uh god is omnipotent this is one of the one of their questions for instance they said if god is omnipotent then he could move the heavens that that finite universe he could move them in a straight line but if he did that then what is left in the wake of that universe and through what substance is it moving so like the aristotelian philosophy

started to crumble under its own weight because either god is not omnipotent because he couldn't move the heavens in a straight line or there was a void or a vacuum left behind the universe as it moved if you moved it in a straight line so this whole thing started to crumble under its own weight at the same time while zero was being used um you know in a world enriching itself on commerce people needed a zero-based numeral system that was quantitatively faster qualitatively better and less prone to error so you had these confluence of factors uh that just really broke the church yeah and it's i mean it's crazy how how powerful the church was at this point too And once something like Xero comes to the world and starts to proliferate as an idea and sort of shines a light on the fact that the emperor may not be wearing any clothes and the Wizard of Oz may not be as omnipotent and powerful as once thought,

But Bitcoin is certainly doing that for central banks, especially in an environment like the last 12 years where you have the Fed specifically setting these projections, doing very, very drastic things to attempt to keep the market in a state of stasis, let alone growth. and people are starting to question, especially as it's becoming clear that their recent market interventions have not been as successful as they claimed they would be when they started doing QE and stuff like that. People are beginning to question

and then Bitcoin does provide that idea that they can sort of flock to as well. Yeah, if you really boil it down, Bitcoin is an automated central bank, right? So it's establishing account balances, handling international value flows, and maintaining monetary policy. That's all a central bank does. So we now have open source software to do that. We don't need central banking anymore. So that all sounds prolific and amazing.

Wow, I brought the truth. But for practical reasons, the reason zero was disruptive to the church, and to kind of just really touch on the functions that zero brought to the numeral system and the reasons it out-competed. First of that, it's a placeholder in our numeric system. So, for instance, in the piece, let's say the number 11104, if you didn't have a zero, which represented nothingness at the tens place, the tens order of magnitude, that number cannot be represented unambiguously. Is it 1104 or is it 114? And as silly as that sounds, there's like tons of ancient cultures used to operate with that ambiguity in their numeral systems. And you just had to figure it out based on context. like they're talking about you know 1,104 apples or 114 apples you just had

to figure it out based on context so that was a big breakthrough that zero gave all the other digits much more this scalar mechanism for other numeral systems so it added a ton of efficiency there and I called that the store I analogize these functions of zero to money so I said that's the store value function for zero and the medium of exchange function for zero is that it acted as the gateway between positive and negative numbers so before the idea of zero like the idea of negative numbers had been touched on by ancient Chinese and stuff but they didn't get into explicit

arithmetic use of negative numbers and it is by going into the domain of the negative that we discovered all kinds of crazy mathematical substructure that all of modern reality is dependent upon and to just name one

is the imaginary number so the square root of negative one equals I you might remember from high school and it's imaginary because you can't have square root of negative one there's no number right so it sounds like oh silly concept until you realize that when you plot these things on an axis the real number plane and the imaginary number plane you develop these rotational

patterns that that turn into they can turn into fractal modeling which fractals are like the geometry of nature they are their precursors to wireless technologies like we still use imaginary number numbers and software for telecommunications and things like this so it was like this gateway into the negative domain of numbers opened up this huge field of possibility for humanity and the argument I make there is in the same way like a medium of exchange encourages trade and innovation, so too did this zero as a medium of change into the negative territory lead to this proliferation of civilizational

advances. And then the third function of zero that's really important is it gave us a better ability to handle ratios and fractions. So historically Egyptians would deal with fractions like if you had to add one one half and one fourth and one sixth they didn't convert them to a common denominator they just kept these long tables of unit fractions that became very unwieldy to do complex calculations with whereas with zero you could just very simply convert one half to 0.5 you convert everything to decimal form and calculate it very quickly so i argued that that was the unit of account function for zero because it gave us a system for better handling numeric ratios

in the same way money gives us a system for better handling exchange ratios. Because as we all know, when you say this house costs $440,000, what you're really saying is this house costs 11 cars, $1140,000 cars. In the economy, we're just valuing everything as an exchange ratio of something else. And money just gives us that common language of numeracy through which to interact. yeah it's like before you wrote this piece i never really thought on how special zero was but it's like it's sort of mind-blowing that's something that's so ingrained in our everyday life and what makes the world go around was not always a concept and that it had to be discovered

um which is which is crazy and in the piece um you say in the beginning there was the ratio and the ratio was with god and the ratio was god so it's sort of giving us uh like math and finding and you you use the mandelbrot set as an example of how zero helped us create like beautiful fractals and and really helped us sort of conceptualize what what these what a world with zero means and then it seems like it is integral into how the universe is made up and how it runs and like so it's almost got it's almost like a a way to figure out uh like how god operates or how god designed the universe yeah i i argue there that and so basically this capacity to better handle ratios of all sorts

led to the development of rationality clearly which was like behind the the renaissance the reformation the enlightenment like all everything that we enjoy today was a result of this new mode of thinking that was a result of this new way of dealing with with ratios and that quote from uh the bible was in the beginning um the word was with god and the word was god right if you translate that from greek it was originally the greek word for logos which means both uh word and ratio and if you really think about what a word is a word is just a medium of exchange as well right if you it only makes sense in relationship to other words if you look up a definition of a word what do you find you find more words right and everything is contextual and it just doesn't

makes sense in a vacuum right so and that word logos like that is so powerful that's getting back to the intrinsic what the only case of intrinsic value in the world i argue is the individual human being that has been empowered with logos so we have this power to speak truthfully and you know confront chaos convert it into order um and that's kind of the divine spark within us all that really western civilization actually does honor so like you know which we've come a long way like in the u.s we have innocent until proven guilty that is a that's an expression of the respect for the sovereignty of the individual above the state that's saying that even if this person has done wrong even if they're you know they have committed crime or whatever there's

still something special about this person that we have to honor and elevate and so it's the and another thing is like logos is our kind of our superpower basically and there's this great book by victor frankl the man's search for meaning and this guy had it rough like as rough as you can have it basically right he was in an internment camp or concentration camp he lost much of his family he was tortured beyond imagination just a very rough go at life and he wrote this book and one of the phrases in it is there is a singular final human freedom that no one can take away from you and it's that gap between your circumstances and your attitude towards them and he developed a psychotherapy after writing that book called i think it's called logotherapy

like it's based on that logo so that that gap that he's talking about that fund gap of fundamental freedom that's where logos lives and it's born and it all like it's all connected back to zero which is fucking crazy to me right yeah man said search for meaning i read that a couple of times in high school and yeah the the um the realization that it's mind over matter mind over circumstance you can you can will yourself to to a better life if you if you um if you have a strong mind and you're you're willing to believe not even believe you just know that uh you can achieve what you want to achieve if you put your mind to it and think through it is this very strong um feeling to get

home and then sticking on logos here though like is logos being attacked in our in our modern and in our society today like our it seems like especially uh with these lockdowns that are going on thinking individually and questioning the script of the state is getting attacked by some people. Not everybody, but it seems like Logos is under attack in our modern age. Would you agree with that? I couldn't agree more. And to get very first principles about that,

the even the the idea of speech like language as a technology like it because of our ability to manually like with our hands dexterously manipulate and nature and categorize it and refine it that's how we develop language so like like action became speech and thought that we have today right and those actions you know that one of the most important one of them is innovation and money is one of the most important innovations so i think it's very fundamental to say that money is speech like it's not it's not it's not even like an analogy it's fundamentally true like money is speech and the bedrock of western civilization again is founded on freedom of speech and expression you should be able to

verbalize your ideas and let them go to battle for you and with others so that your ideas and conceptions can fight it out and die so that your bodies don't have to and if we suppress that freedom of speech suppress the logos in any way then it leads to our bodies going to war instead and that's what i think central banking is central banking is a suppression on our freedom of speech it is a suppression of the logos and it is a funding mechanism for perpetual warfare and all these things are connected this isn't just you know it's not a coincidence there's no there's no coincidence here and for mankind to just see it for what it is and get back to a stronger moral substrate like you just have to ask yourself what kind of world you want for your

kids and their kids and you know think intergenerationally because this model does out work and if you don't believe me just turn on the news all right all right and it's again going back to the concept of it sounds too good to be true fix the money fix the world but it's true and like it's people yell at bitcoiners for the bitcoin fix of this meme like bitcoin doesn't fix everything but it's like if you actually drill down to first principles like yes it does because everything is affected by money and uh when you bastardize the money you sort of bastardize incentives which then bastardizes human action at the end of the day yeah we we're we're playing god or we're trying to play god that's what central banking government's trying

to do play god they know best they know better than the market right the market isn't it like for the same reason a tree grows and seeks sunlight is the same reason a market adapts to reality like it's a it's a natural organizing design principle it's independent of any individual's thoughts about it and for them to try and fight and suppress and control that is just it's like the ultimate act of sin if you want to use that word but just arrogance and hubris like who do you think you are what what makes you think you can control the free market impulse that has guided humanity up until this point what makes you think that your small board room of uh you know institutionally minded individuals are smarter than the collectivism

of humanity it's like it's impractical it's immoral and it's it's also failing before our for all these reasons so it's not like just a good thing it's like a very practical thing to be involved with bitcoin yeah i mean just to think like like a fed board meetings trying to make decisions without complete information nobody's ever going to have complete information but the people spread throughout an economy are going to have better information about what they're doing immediately in front of them the fed can have there's no way that could have all that information at hand and make educated decisions.

Like, it's just not possible. And so I think this is actually a good opportunity to circle back to the beginning of the conversation when you were talking about your fascination with the creature of Jackal Hyde. And that's one thing I think people really need to understand is how the Fed was created and how corrupt the actual Federal Reserve Act was

and how it was passed and who decided that it should be written and when it was brought to the congressional floor to be voted on. So let's dive into that for a little bit. Like the inception of the Fed alone was one of the more corrupt things to happen in modern human history,

or at least the last couple centuries, in my opinion. Absolutely. So, again, to really try to approach it from first principles forward, I like to analogize the free market to a distributed computing system. So, each one of us, we have our five senses. We're predominantly visual. And we can take in, I forget the exact number, I think it's like four bits of information per second, right, through our visual acuity. and that's it so it's kind of a small bandwidth data load but the free market which assimilates the perspectives of all of us can handle a much higher data load right and that's what

churns out kind of all of our inner subjective realities against you know pressing up against the objectives uh scarcities of economic reality and that's what churns out truth in terms of price and innovation and to think that you can take that distributed computing system and outperform it by installing a you know i don't know a hundred people it doesn't matter ten thousand pick your number anything less than the intelligence of all of humanity into a central bank boardroom and say these guys know better these guys will guide the economy more effectively like you've constricted that bandwidth down from whatever four bits times seven billion people is down to times a thousand people right and so the model doesn't work like distributed computing

outcompetes centralized computing for the same reasons that free market outcompetes essentially planned market and that's what it is and the federal reserve is just the latest attempt this is not the first by the way human history is littered with these attempts people trying to control the money you know clip the coins or inflate the supply to benefit themselves and externalize all those costs onto whoever they can that's the fucking you know painful truth of industry and the federal reserve is just the most successful iteration of that experiment we have become the central bank of earth through bretton woods which again how did we get to bretton woods there's a war right world war ii every time nazi germany invades a country first place they go is

central bank they seize their gold because that's what war is about war money is the means and ends of all warfare so every time germany invades the country they go straight to the central bank and seize their gold well european countries start to wise up to this and start shipping gold into north america as a geographic safe haven from this nazi plundering and eventually enough gold lands here in the US that the United States steps in, finishes off the war-weary opponents, and then declares himself victorious, and holds the Bretton Woods Conference to rewrite the rules of the economic order such that we are the central bank of the world, the dollar is pegged to gold, and all of you guys are pegged to our dollar, thereby giving the United

States and the Fed absolute control, essentially, of the global economic order. so that's how i like to look at it i mean there's a lot of dirty details with jekyll island like how it was also done surreptitiously and behind the scenes but i just like to take that high level view like once you see history for what it is you you know you see why bitcoin's so important it's a money that it's not worth fighting over because you can't confiscate it you can't change it you can't you know it's you can verify its supply and transactions with cryptographic certainty at the individual level like you can settle with finality in real time and you can't easily confiscate it because again it lives much closer to that logos much closer

to that gap or you can actually store your bitcoin in your mind right or in your own local circle of trust right your family or your business or whatever is applicable it's just infinitely more flexible and i think it just shatters this model that we've we've seen incarnation after incarnation of in throughout history and of which the federal reserve is the latest and greatest or worse i would say yeah yeah it's been the greatest at doing what it does but probably the worst institution for human history at doing what it does but so this is a question i've been mulling mulling around matt adele particularly and some other guests more recently is is transition to a bitcoin standard do you see do you see a transition to

bitcoin as a peaceful transition and and actually bitcoin existing provides the opportunity to have a somewhat controlled transition to a more peaceful monetary system or do you do you think the fed has gotten to a point where they're going to mess this up so bad that things get pretty crazy for a while and people um just slowly come over to bitcoin because they realize it's better slowly over time you know i feel very i feel a lot of dissonance about this topic because on one hand you know this this is the crown that's been fought over throughout all of history like the the the ability to control the money right that's like the contentious crown that everyone's been fighting over throughout all of history so that would lead me to believe that the state and the

fed will fight with everything they've got to maintain control of that monopoly but on the other hand there's another ingenious aspect of bitcoin is that the game theory behind it right like once you have some bitcoin all of a sudden you're again the world has been reshaped for you you no longer see it as a threat uh necessarily and all of a sudden you know at least part of you is rooting for its success even if you first buy bitcoin say you're say i'm totally sold on central banking i think it's a 99.98 chance central banking is going to succeed and it's the best model for humanity that has ever been then it is still fiduciarily responsible of me to allocate at least 0.02 percent of my assets into bitcoin as an insurance policy should it

succeed because the the appreciation of bitcoin should succeed will be an extinction level event for central banking but i would be even money because it was in theory suck up all the value that i just lost in my central bank so as more people get allocated into bitcoin even at that small marginal percentage it changes minds it changes perceptions and i just kind of see bitcoin is like this liquid it's just it's spilling everywhere like between everyone's mind and heart and consciousness you can't like you can't avoid it and then once it gets into you as you know a lot of us have experienced the game theory just sort of tweaks you and then you start to see the moral dimension and you can just become a you know full-blown bitcoiner like you and i i

guess um but i see that i feel dissonant i'm like okay this is like the most important thing in the world this is the this is control over the earth basically you know versus this substance it's so incorruptible and pure and uh infiltrating it just infiltrates every nook and cranny that um i'm not sure i'm not sure which way it's going to go yeah no i agree it's uh it's very much up in the air right now but i do i do think we're getting we're at a point 11 years in where We're getting very strong allies that really help the cause. And again, the longer Bitcoin goes on producing blocks without taking a huge hit from governments

or a huge attack from governments, I think obviously the higher its chances of succeeding in the future are. And what we're trying to do at Great American Mining is obviously we want to produce a profitable mining operation and make money and stack as many sats as possible, but then we want to win the hearts and minds of some of the most powerful industries in the world with the energy sector.

And I think that's a great sherds and whores to create a peaceful transition to a Bitcoin standard is to get powerful allies that actually benefit greatly from Bitcoin. And then going back to what we said earlier, like it's crazy the secondary and tertiary effects this network has on our physical world. and just thinking of the course, the order of operations,

how this could play out. Like if we really want to be energy independent and sort of self-sufficient as a continent here in North America, it's a very, very good case to be made that Bitcoin is integral in making that happen. Yeah, you know, we're actually looking at an energy project as well, Bitcoin mining, connecting Bitcoin mining operations with energy producers here in North America and I agree like that I think is where the puck is going

in the sense that a lot of these energy producers like every other business they're over leveraged they're searching for fresh capital investment or ways to augment their revenue streams and when you consider that as one of the executives we talked to at a big energy company said he said The entire North American energy infrastructure was designed for one hot afternoon in August. And what he meant by that is that there is a ton of slack and inefficiency in the system. Either surplus energy production, like, for instance, some of the wind sites we looked at, they're producing too much energy at night to sell into the grid. Like, there's just a capacity constraint that could be used if you co-located Bitcoin mining. you just monetize that surplus energy right there on the spot and at the other end it's just when

there's uh excess capacity you can use that to mine bitcoin as well so it seems like there's a match made in heaven there where you have these over leveraged inefficient energy producers and this you know bitcoin is the energy buyer of last resort which you can just co-locate and you know basically unlimited configurations there's you can do bitcoin mining any way you want right you can do it at the source you can do it through a substation you can do it in a data center it's just it's so nimble again it's like a fluid just leaking into all the nooks and crannies that i really think that's going to pull a lot of hash rates in north america and then that changes the game because then all of a sudden you have energy producers

able to monetize their energy directly and all of the sudden why do you need a bank you know as one of the founders were working with he has this really interesting vision he says he thinks that energy companies are the banks energy companies of today are the banks of tomorrow because if you can monetize this energy directly you can offer some financial services which are very commoditized around it you could effectively be your own bank independent of the banking network and that too could be the kernel for kind of a closed loop bitcoin economy where you have bitcoin miners being paid in bitcoin and energy producers

receiving bitcoin and everyone's holding so i mean i'm very bullish on that space overall and then you know what it's we're getting back to capitalism right that's what capitalism is like we're solving problems in real time like we're addressing inefficiencies and profiting from it so we're We're getting away from monetary socialism through Bitcoin, monetary capitalism, and getting back to like our free market roots as a species. And that's a beautiful thing. It's incredibly beautiful. And I completely agree.

And that's something I say a lot and bring up a lot in conversations with people when I'm explaining what we're doing at GAM. There's going to be a moment in time where there's a huge flip where the energy producers get so comfortable with bitcoin mining and uh sort of understand it that yes they they don't sell the bitcoin anymore and they maybe they even demand to get paid in bitcoin and when you think of how the dollar part of how the dollar cements its reserve status in the world today via the petrodollar and the fact that everybody has to go convert their currencies in the u.s dollars to buy oil uh it is crazy not to think that this will happen and that bitcoin won't become a reserve

currency because it'll just be uh the currency of the energy producers like we have a we have a theory that bitcoin miners may flip the script to become the energy producers of the future if they're they're smart with their operations yeah yeah and it's it is happening right because But I think Iran, they said, I think they announced the sub $10 million mining operation that they are using exclusively to circumvent U.S. sanctions. So like that, the game is going already to the nation state level. Like it's already, it's been there for some time. They've all been looking at it. But now there's like skin in the game.

and once that domino falls you know again you have to to to be a responsible nation state if someone else is taking a position in the bitcoin network that could in theory out compete your entire financial backbone the only prudent decision is to take at least an equal position to them to protect your own interests and that just ratchets up right until we hit this uh reverse bank run as safian calls it on bitcoin where everyone's just like rushing for the exits It's like the light has gone off for everyone that we see the new monetary shelling point for the world and everyone's like rushing to get into Bitcoin.

I think, was it Odell that said, it's very likely that when you need Bitcoin, you're not going to be able to get it? Yeah. Like that's what's going to happen. It's, no. And then like you can also see a path to like world peace where it's like, all right,

instead of just trying to uphold this global reserve currency or where it creates a lot of tension because everybody's pissed off that they have to convert their currency into uh our currency to get the most uh the most sought after energy source in the world start that starts tensions number one and number two like uh we're defending this reserve currency via war and military if we were just all over like all right fuck it let's Just adopt the currency of enemies in Bitcoin and you don't have to worry about any of that. Slowly but surely, there may be some friction in the beginning, but as you play it out and extrapolate it further and further into the future,

it just enables freer trade. You can't weaponize the Bitcoin network against other nation states because you can't control it. And that just naturally will lead to less friction, less head-on conflict, I would imagine. Exactly. There's the old quote that says, I don't know who said it, but it's Will. And we know inherently that fiat currency creates frictions to global trade. Right. Everyone's enforcing tariffs and sanctions and racing to the bottom to incite their currency and manipulate their monetary policy. So by lifting those frictions and you're basically removing the mechanism by which the state funds its war efforts, you really move to a much more peaceful and coordinated society.

And that creates more wealth. So we have this, like, Bitcoin's like hitting it from both sides, right? It's like driving us to find lower cost energy, making us more energy efficient. But it's also, you know, in theory, the promise of it, at least, is to remove these frictions in international trade such that we become, in aggregate, much more wealthy. There's much more, the pie has grown, so to speak. There's a lot more to go around. So, you know, when you look at it through that lens, it's hard not to be bullish. All right.

well it's hard not to be bullish after reading your pieces thank you for writing them thank you for putting some skin in the game and and putting your thoughts out there that's the other beauty of bitcoin right it's so raw so new it's an alien technology that everybody's trying to describe in real time that you're getting such a plethora of different ideas and angles from which this topic's being being approached and explained and like i'm sitting down with brandon quittem next week to talk about how bitcoin acts like mycelium and it's and oh yeah that whole stream makes a lot of sense too it's crazy how oh yeah like network theory applied to bitcoin and other types of networks

well it's crazy that you can describe bitcoin in so many ways and have it make sense yeah brandon's awesome he's been a huge influence on my thinking um that that the decentralized network archetype like it's fundamental to nature right the uh if you look at the universe it's galaxies are clustered in that that type of structure we have the mycelial network which is like the organic internet and then we have now the internet um and our brains look we also we all share the same structure it's truly fascinating like his work to get first principle biological perspective is the best. And then, you know, for like, again, here in the U.S.,

I just wish someone would step out on the Senate floor and say, look, we messed up. Monetary socialism, just like total socialism before it, is failing. It's failing all of us. Let's get back to the roots of what, you know, the idea of what america was founded upon was free market capitalism right and free speech and that's what bitcoin is man it is free speech and an unstoppable free market capitalistic

technology and it automates the automates away the need for a central bank and like someone just needs to it's not even it's not like it's a difficult truth to once you see it i think it takes a lot of work to get there. There's a lot of layers to peel back and really see it. And once you see it, you're just like, oh, we're just getting back to our free market roots, which is the sole generator of everything good in life, right? Like all the truth, all the innovations, all the luxury we enjoy in the modern age is a result of free markets. So I just wish someone would get on that Senate floor and say, hey, let's switch from monetary socialism to monetary capitalism with bitcoin they'd get shot on the spot probably it's crazy i just well that's

well that's another reason why i'm optimistic in bitcoin because i don't think that's ever going to happen like i don't think it's going to happen via dc like it's got to happen via via bitcoin or systems outside of it maybe it could happen in dc but i'm not hopeful i mean the people the swamp the people that are are make up our our government our federal government specifically they're not incentivized to to listen to that um and and actually act on it there's few i mean there's a few within the federal government that do um do believe that and fight for that but i think the the powers that be and the centralization that has occurred in that system And particularly that level of our system is maybe too far gone.

But maybe I'm just too pessimistic. No, I agree with you, actually. And it does have to occur bottom up, as with all natural systems. But I think there is an inflection point where, yeah, maybe today they don't have the knowledge or the skin in the game or the incentive to speak out on behalf of Bitcoin. But that time could be ahead of us. And I think, you know, actually cannabis provides sort of an interesting allegory to that, because that was a bottom up thing, right? Communities are like, F you, we're going to grow cannabis. And then eventually states are like, well, they're doing it, we might as well pack it. and then federal governments like you know initially seething and raiding and burning all these cannabis crops and then eventually like all right well we'll just let the states

do what they want like if enough people like enough people decide to move a direction you can't fight the the tide so to speak and you know i agree with you that no one at that level today maybe Ron Paul I'm sorry he's not pro-Bitcoin yet but no one else has the incentive or the wherewithal to speak on its behalf but in another five ten years if all these things play out you know as we see Bitcoin becoming integrally connected to the energy infrastructure and you know we know we know the government's like I put this out the other day I said Bitcoin's not the only that's gone parabolic in the past decade the m1 money supply u.s federal debt these things are all

full-on parabolic over a multi-decade trend that's like the u.s government and other federal governments are going out of business effectively like they can't keep monetizing their debts now that people have an alternative right so i think the incentives can shift very quickly yeah i like that thought i like that optimistic thought yeah let's think about yeah specifically the parabolic moves and monetary base and debt like that has to collapse it's like you can't go straight up forever it just has to collapse under the weight of itself at some point and maybe soon i i'm very interested to see what the next six months look like shutting down the economy printing a bunch of money um the milestone we look for there is in 2022

uh the interest expense on the national debt in the u.s will exceed total tax revenue so if you could imagine you know you make a hundred thousand dollars a year but you pay 120 000 a year in credit card interest like that's the situation the u.s government is in you can only go one direction from there yeah we fucked up the money real bad oh yeah Robert I hate to

have to cut this conversation because I'm having such a good time this is a good riff right here but I have to get back to my fatherly duties we should definitely do this again and expand on some of these topics in even greater depth yeah man this is awesome thank you for having me marty i really appreciate it

i appreciate again appreciate you writing some incredible stuff some incredibly thought-provoking stuff things that i've never thought about especially the concept of zero and how it relates to changing history um where can we find out more about you what you're doing about parallax how can we help um is there anything any final thoughts you want to get out there before we wrap up here uh i think in general for people just never let anyone trammel on your right to free speech like if you if there's a violation of free speech that that goes towards total tyranny and always social disease that's why i like jordan peterson coming out against the compelled pronouns thing in canada like they were trying to legislate him what words to call people

and he said fuck you i'll never do that like that's the attitude you have to take when it comes to freedom of speech and it is a it's a zero tolerance domain like you should always be able to speak your mind speak freely um that's my general message i guess i think with bitcoin and everything else and i i'm on twitter so my name is robert breedlove my last name it's just like it sounds, Breedlove, B-R-E-E-D-L-O-V-E. My Twitter handle is Breedlove22. And then I post my writings on Medium. And then most recently, thanks to you, Marty,

I posted that piece on Dig. And our website is ParallaxDigital.io. That's P-A-R-A-L-L-A-X, digital.io. And we have, like, blog and resources and a few things there, too. so go check it out freaks highly recommend uh anybody who's listening go read uh the number zero on bitcoin and a bunch of robert's past uh medium posts as well including uh bitcoin and tyranny of time scarcity an open letter to ray dahlia regarding bitcoin uh money bitcoin and

time that series was another great one there's just incredible amount of content long reads long reads so uh next next few months if you have saturday long read sessions sunday long read sessions get the coffee ready get the tea ready whatever floats your boat and get sit down get ready to dive in to some really incredible concepts uh about bitcoin robert it's been a pleasure again we should do this again and expand on some of these topics the rabbit hole is infinitely vast there's plenty to talk about in the future thank you for coming on peace and love freaks