You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 19: Robert Breedlove - The Truth about Money

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

My guest today is Robert Breedlove, the host of “What is Money show”, with 400+ episodes to date. Robert is a freedom maximalist and philosopher in the Bitcoin space. To him, Bitcoin is fundamentally a humanitarian movement exposing the greatest con in human history: central banking. Robert covers the connection between honest money, entrepreneurship, and civilization, to renew hope for the future of humanity. Robert's mission is to restore freedom, truth, and virtue in our world by tenaciously asking the question: "What is Money?" A conversation about money may not sound exciting, but if you’re like me, a freedom and truth advocate - money is the most important rabbit hole to explore, as it directly impacts our daily lives, and more importantly, has the potential of building a different future than the ‘powers that be’ plan for us. This is why this conversation is very significant for me.  In this episode we discuss money, censorship, the corruption of fiat currency, gold and bitcoin. Robert explains the impact of wokeism on society, the link between fiat currency and warfare and the importance of Bitcoin as incorruptible, perfect money.  ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, subscribe and support my work. Thank you! -- SPONSORS -- ►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the latest episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  -- LINKS -- Robert’s⁠ Twitter⁠ |⁠ Instagram⁠ | ⁠Website⁠ | “⁠Masters and Slaves of Money⁠” article Efrat's Twitter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://twitter.com/efenigson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Efrat's Telegram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://t.me/efenigson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Watch/listen on all platforms:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://linktr.ee/yourethevoice⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Support Efrat's work:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Support Efrat with Bitcoin:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson⁠⁠ -- CHAPTERS -- 00:00 - Introduction 02:05 - 3 Recommendations of Robert’s “What is Money” Podcast Episodes 03:35 - Robert's Background & Journey 08:10 - Being a Podcaster & Content Creator 13:10 - Censorship & Free Speech 20:30 - Impact of Woke-ism, Divide & Conquer 24:50 - The “Kibbutz” Concept 28:30 - “Scale Variant” Social Ideologies (Communism, Socialism, Capitalism)  33:00 - The Corruption of Fiat Currency 38:00 - Money & Wars: Impact of Fiat Currency on Violence 42:00 - The Theory of Violence Cycles 45:00 - Central Banking as Organized Crime 53:30 - Fiat: Genius Slavery System or Financial Serfdom? 55:40 - The Right to Life - Most Important Human Right 56:50 - What Makes Bitcoin the Perfect Money?  1:04:00 - From Gold to Fiat to Bitcoin 1:08:50 - BlackRock / Wall Street & Bitcoin’s Price Manipulation

Hello, Robert Breedlove, and welcome to Your The Voice. Hello, Efrat, thank you for having me. Thanks for being with me. It's really a pleasure and an honor. For those who don't know Robert Breedlove, I envy you, because after this episode, you're going to discover a whole new world of deep discussions about money. Now, it may not sound exciting, but if you're like me, a freedom and truth advocate, this rabbit hole is the most important rabbit hole to explore, as it directly impacts our daily lives, and more importantly, has the potential of building a different future than the powers that

b plan for us this is why i'm so excited to have this conversation with you today robert i feel it has the potential to affect timelines of reality um and and i want to say a little bit more about you for those who don't know you robert is the host of what is money show with more than 400 episodes to date is it in less than three years how long has it been yes we started november 2020 so we're three years one month so that's crazy for those of you who don't know recording 400 episodes in less than three years is crazy and so robert is a freedom maximalist a former hedge fund manager and philosopher in the bitcoin space to robert bitcoin is fundamentally a humanitarian movement listen to that humanitarian movement exposing the greatest con in human

history central banking by learning about the connection between honest money entrepreneurship and civilization we are renewing hope for the future of humanity to this end robber's mission is to restore freedom truth and virtue in our world by tenaciously asking the question what is money so i'd like to recommend three episodes for those of you who are curious that i've i've listened to lately on robert's show uh 408 can the state stop bitcoin i know many of you may have this question of is it possible to stop bitcoin and so i encourage you to go and listen to that because we're not going to repeat everything that robert said there so go and listen 401 the creature from jekyll island with the legendary g edward griffin boy you brought

him on well done finally took a long time but we got him on wow this man is a legend huh yes he is he is the man that originally opened my eyes to central banking so it was a real milestone for me yeah i could see that that was a really special one for you and number 394 anthropo An Anthropological Theory of Money with Natalie Smolenski. She's something also, this one. Yes, she's brilliant. We spoke in person in Lugano, and I think she's done a great job

synthesizing a lot of these different views on money, which we haven't gotten into yet, but there are many, many, many, many, many different views. Wow, so many. We'll get to some of them. we'll see what we have time to cover um but let's start with that Robert can you tell us a bit about your journey prior to embarking on a media career yeah sure so I um I'll give you the quick version because I've gone deeper in other episodes but um I guess the first thing to say is

I've been born very curious. And I think after I pestered my mom with enough questions trying to satisfy my curiosity, she finally just realized that I wasn't going to stop. So she needed to teach me to read so I could go and satisfy my own curiosity rather than pestering her. So she really encouraged me to start reading and studying at a young age. I would say by the age of like 10 or 11, I was reading pretty seriously. And I just kept that up my entire life. Um, and I've, so I've been down a lot of rabbit holes, just following my curiosity, things I wanted to learn to understand. When I went to college, I studied accounting and finance, got a master's degree in accounting, um, somewhat ironically with a focus in taxation,

considering now that I teach people about taxation and its true nature, which is theft in a nutshell. And I had done some public accounting work. I was working in public accounting for a few years before I decided I wanted to work in industry instead. I didn't want to work in the accounting field. I wanted to work as a financial executive. And so then I moved into mostly the technology sector. Uh, I was in healthcare software, hospitality software. Um, and I was also in some, some specialty construction stuff earlier on, always in kind of a financial and operational capacity. Yeah. And, um, have been, you know, pretty much just a lifelong nerd um always really into computers into reading a lot and uh the last

thing i did i ended up deciding i wanted to work for myself so i left my last cfo position with one consulting client i had a cfo consulting client and i was like okay i'm just gonna do this see where it goes and that's what gave me the the intellectual bandwidth to really start to study bitcoin and at the time crypto um and that basically took me into the bitcoin rabbit hole and i ended up so that was late 2016 and early 2017 and by by mid 2018 i I would say I was what most people would call a Bitcoin maximalist. Although I identify as a freedom maximalist because I think Bitcoin is a means to an end and that end is human freedom.

So I try to focus on the end rather than the means, but it is one of the ultimate means to human freedom, which we can get into. And in that time I had also operated a hedge fund for a few years prior to starting the podcast. And when I was doing that, i was writing investor updates i was researching the space a lot and i started tweeting a lot about bitcoin and so the tweets became popular the writing became popular i started to be invited on the podcast to talk about the writing those podcasts became popular and finally i just decided

you know the feedback from the market was we want more more more writing more talking from you So I eventually jumped on the podcast bandwagon in November 2020 and was very fortunate to have Michael Saylor as my first guest. We had nine episodes initially together, and we went on to have 17 total episodes. And the podcast just blew up. So it went from a hobby to a serious gig pretty quickly. And that is where I am today. Super serious. and most people don't know what it involves to be a content creator and uh that's that's a lot of

work the experience is awesome but it is really hard work and i'd love to hear your experience on you know you you've done a big shift like me a little bit like being now a full-time content creator that that is something else and um in the digital age as well it can be very consuming to just do be digital digital all day and just be on the platforms and it's like it can suck you in right and so i'm curious to hear how how do you balance that with your life yeah it's um i mean on the bright side you get to talk at least my show i don't have any pressure about who i bring on it's simply who i want to talk to about topics i want to talk about so it's very things that interest me so it's still a great i'm still getting to

to satisfy my curiosity you know where it's instead of just reading and writing I now get to talk to the authors of some of these books or like you mentioned G. Edward Griffin earlier like I got the privilege to talk to him for two hours so that is a really shining advantage of the entire content creator slash podcaster career is you get to run wild intellectually and then you get to go and talk to the smartest people in the world about some of the biggest ideas in the world. I mean, obviously, when you're doing my type of podcast, which is basically very cerebral, some might even call it nerdy, kind of rabbit hole content. They're very deep conversations, not a lot of banter or chit chat. I really enjoy that, right? That's part of just

who i am it's suitable for my nature um i think too i'm introverted so i like spending a lot of time alone and i do have to spend a lot of time alone preparing for these conversations you know typically reading the author's work or or otherwise researching them or their ideas and then there's a lot of there's some as you know there's like an admin side to it you've got a team of you know that's pushing everything out on social media editing um etc etc marketing and promoting um so a lot of that is done through just digital chat basically you know we we run most of it through telegram so it's a very much a distributed business there's not a lot of face to face i have calls with a few of my team members a couple of times a week but a lot of it is just

you're on your computer a lot. I would say that's maybe a bit of the, the negative is you spend a lot of time on your computer. Um, I'd much rather be outside and, you know, being active. I do. I mean, I do get a good dose of activity. You know, I try to exercise and move and get some sun every day, but I have developed more of a, an intimate relationship with my computer than I otherwise would. Let's just say that. But I guess that's basically any job these days. So it's not that big of a deal. But I've really enjoyed it. You know, it's expanded my mind a lot. I've, I feel like a totally different person today than I was even three years ago in terms of my worldview and just how my cognition works. Even I don't, it's, it's almost like you pick up little pieces of

these other guests and how they think and how they see the world and you use it to reassemble your own perspectives and it's just been very very enriching um so it's it's definitely work it's like kind of heavy cognitive labor but very worthwhile yeah i'm with you it's uh very rewarding and the fact that you actually spend time when you go to your you know all the speaking opportunities and conferences and you actually meet there with people and sit with them and interview them there that's part of the fun too because having that those kind of conversations is priceless it's amazing yes yes for sure um especially the bitcoin events i really really enjoy i've somewhat joked that i don't know if it's a joke because it's kind of serious

but hanging out with bitcoiners has become my favorite social experience because very intelligent people and they're always talking about some radical far-out ideas you've never heard of before never a dull moment yeah i spent time in amsterdam with uh jimmy song and mark moss and alex swetsky and it was so much fun yes they were the wildest bunch it was really fun um i wanted to ask you with your content and the work that you do how are you seeing the whole trend to control free speech that is happening around the world now censoring you know controlling the media the social media and where do you see this going and would it impact your work at all i'm sure it will impact my work because i touch on a lot of subjects that they don't like me

to touch on but what about you yeah so i mean i guess i could i've already been impacted by censorship um we've had i can't remember two or three episodes flagged on youtube we had one of them removed um i was i've been shadow banned on twitter multiple times i'm not now i guess since it's become more of a free speech friendly platform i've also been shadow banned on instagram there's still a flag on my instagram account where if you hit follow it says something like are you sure you want to follow this account it's repeatedly violated our community guidelines something i tried to tag you once and and they told me are you sure you wanted to do that this guy's a dangerous conspiracy theorist so i i kind of consider it a badge of honor in a way because

it seems like everyone that's actually truth-seeking gets one of these battle scars but it's certainly concerning because censorship it's just so antithetical to the ethos of western civilization right and my favorite description of the purpose of free speech is that we need free speech so that our thoughts and ideas can go to battle and die so that our bodies don't have to and i mean this goes all the way back right it's all the way back to plato and aristotle they're saying that if you can't resolve your disputes with with rational discourse and argumentation the only substitute is raw physical power or violence right there's no in it's very black or white it's like you either resolve it consensually through discussion and argumentation

come to some compromise or agreement between the disputing parties or there's some element of coercion or physical violence or threat of physical violence and so it's it's it is one of those things that I think is actually black or white. Like if you don't have free speech, then you are going to incite physical violence and the shredding of the social fabric. And so it is concerning to me that we are seeing censorship become more normalized. And then the arguments for it are are just ridiculous you know it's um what's what's it called in the u.s the ministry of information so it's basically the the ministry of truth from 1984 yeah for whatever they called it in the u.s version of it i mean these things are really happening right that

yeah censorship the digital the dsa the digital um what's it called digital something act yeah it's and it's happening all around the world in ireland it's happening here in israel and coincidentally they have all these great excuses to to put it on you know now in israel we have war so you cannot talk about the enemy in a way that will um demotivate the people of israel so if you talk about the enemy you know in such a way you'll be censored and it's in the law now that's crazy and you know yeah it's happening everywhere that they have these these um you know Islam is taking an extreme angle, so we have to ban things that are related to Islam online.

In Ireland, people are being murdered. Oh, there's an excuse to... Or in France it happened. There were riots. There's an excuse to shut down social media. And everyone's... That's how it's being normalized, right? It's...

yeah okay they're coming to protect me i'm gonna allow them to do that because this is a good good reason but people don't see the double-edged sword yes no it's absolutely true and this is everything the state does right it's always for your safety for your protection this is the the moral camouflage that statists always don when they're trying to push forward something that is that would otherwise be resisted, right? As they always have to tell you, it's for your own good. And this reminds me too of the purpose of propaganda, which is basically, I'm paraphrasing someone here, I don't even remember who, said the purpose of propaganda is to cause us to forget those who are being propagandized against are also human, right? So we name them things, right?

the anti-vaxxers the um you know they're always the other right the deniers the deniers the the terrorists even the radical this the radical that like they're humans right they're humans they're always humans this this labeling is really intended to short circuit our our empathy right or short circuit or rational um thinking about uh the the employment of violence and coercion as a solution. And so it's, yeah, it's very unfortunate to see that playing out again. And it's, I mean, I'd be remiss if I didn't say I've lost some faith in the resiliency of humans over the past few years. Like I guess because I'm around a lot of critical thinkers, you know, a lot of Bitcoiners, a lot of people that question centralized power structures in general,

that I came to believe that that was a fair sampling of the human race, but that's not really. It's a very, very specialized, specific group. Most people, like we saw during the pandemic they really just fall in line and they the amount of narrative i narrative regurgitation i saw occurring where people would just repeat whatever the news was saying and hold on to that as if it were their own original opinion was was mind-blowing uh to say the least and then And to see people also falling into this wokeism, this state-sponsored psyop of wokeism, which is just cultural Marxism rebranded effectively, right? That you're trying to confuse, again, it's all about free speech, because if you can confuse people on the definition of terms, then even if they want to engage in rational discourse, they can't, right? you're confounding people and you're fragmenting society across so many different lines right is

it straight or gay or black or white or this or that um just it's a classic divide and conquer strategy right you're just imprinting this this ideological fragmentation onto society and then therefore creating more demand for law and order and less resistance because no one is unified all right the one thing the state really fears well two things one is critical thinking two is a unified populace if people are unified they're very difficult to to govern and so you know woke ism like the people that have fallen for that um has just been very concerning and and i get it you know this is we've been this cultural marxist thing has been used to prey on people's compassion circuitry in the past you know the obviously the the the mantra of of marxism was from each

according to their ability to each according to their need it's one of these things it sounds wonderful all right it's like oh of course why don't we just do that and everyone will be happy and we'll take care of the people you know that need and the people that have ability will provide and we'll just live in this utopian world yet when you actually try to implement that you create an incentive system where anyone with ability has no incentive to provide anything and everyone is incentivized instead to just need and then you get into the complexity of well who determines who needs what right it becomes this arbitrary allocation of resources which of course the the allocator becomes the state so you get into the situation where the state owns everything

people own nothing and you have a ussr soviet russian style collapse on the wake of that ideology so all of that is rooted in this this attack on our compassion circuitry you know you're trying to get people to buy into an ideology by wrapping it in a moral camouflage but it's it's like it's a it's the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing and you've just got to very like you've got to be careful of that um you've got to be very alert the modern version of it was in the pandemic was nobody is safe until everybody's safe it's like what does that even mean that makes there's no like analyze that statement how can no no individual be safe until every individual is safe like what are you talking about what is safety who determines who's safe

not safe what are the criteria like it's just nonsense and you know if socrates was right when he said the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms then wokeism is this state sponsored attack on wisdom itself and like it is destroying critical thinking rational discourse and wisdom like i can't think of a much worse um attack on the the ideological foundations of western civilization yeah when it's combined with an emotional attack an attack on the feelings and a push of fear on everything you do it's very effective yeah get the get the shot or you you're jeopardizing grandma right exactly speaking as a marketeer you're gonna have that combination of the intellectual gaslighting together with the right emotion at play

so that people eat your lie and fall for it. And that's very, very effective. That is safe and effective, to be honest, this propaganda. By the way, are you familiar with the notion, with the concept of, in Israel, kibbutz? Do you know what that is? no it sounds familiar but i don't know what it means when israel was built in 1948 the one of the common um organization of people inside a village would be called the kibbutz it's a socialist

communist idea where every it's a very small village and the whole community is acting on communist uh principles and ideology and everyone in the kibbutz is working um to get some pocket money but they don't get a salary it's just pocket money for what you need the very very basic but the kibbutz takes care of all of your needs so you have a a communal dining room for everyone you have very very small housing kids are living in a kid's house all the kids of the kibbutz together not with the parents the parents live in very small houses and everyone is working for the kibbutz so you may work at washing your clothes milking the cows or or working the the field but everything you the energy that you that you invest and the the work that you put in

all goes back to the kibbutz not to you and so that's a that's a social experiment in a way until today we have in Israel these kibbutzim but not many of them left because most of them have been privatized and my grandparents when they came to Israel in the 1940s they were part of a group that were building some of those kibbutzim and my late grandparents story was that after a few months I think in in one of the kibbutzim that they lived in they were a young couple I think they were in their early 30s after the war or late 20s and one of the things they would do is take all your clothes from you and they would give you like one pair of trousers and one dress and this is after the second world war after the holocaust and both my grandparents are

holocaust survivors they would come to Israel to build a new home and a new future and a new life and all of a sudden someone's telling them a little bit similarly to like a camp that they would be and you know these are your clothing and this is what you can have or you can't have and you're working for your money but you can't get that money it goes back to the kibbutz so after a few months my grandma told my grandpa you know i got it i got the the gist of it and you know you you can stay if you want yeah i know we got married and everything but i'm leaving this thing i'm going to tel aviv to live my capitalistic life and no one's going to tell me that i can only have one dress you know i've finished i finished with that in europe like i

came here to build something new so um sorry for taking the time i just thought it's no that's interesting you know and but many many people were um were living there and they were living a good life people think that when i talk about communism or socialism i say that it's bad or wrong but it's not that black or white if people decide that that's the kind of life they want to live and it works for them in their small community fair enough go for it do it you know it's a free choice but dictating that on a population that's where it starts to get problematic 100 percent um there's maybe something i could add to that so there's this idea of different social ideologies being scale variant so for instance in your household right you're with your spouse and your kids

you're probably a communist actually you know you you just give your daughter breakfast you just buy her clothes she doesn't have to earn it there's not like private property transfers inside of the home it's just there's kind of like a breadwinner or breadwinners and they just provide yes and if the kid acts up you know you probably take their toy away you know you just violate their property or whatever so it's kind of a communistic environment in the nuclear family actually if you scale that up to like the community level that doesn't really work so well right you need a little bit more respect for private property rights obviously you're dealing with adults or, you know, adults that run multiple households, you might get more like a socialism

type ideology at a community level where maybe it's, you know, decided that certain people need to make certain sacrifices for the group. Um, and it, you know, sort of depends how you define socialism. Um, but you might get people buying into that, right. That say, Hey, sometimes if the community needs it, you can seize some of my stuff or violate some of my property. Maybe there's some people that would agree to that, you know, more power to them. But when you get kind of beyond the community level, like to the city level and beyond, the only thing that works is capitalism, right? Like people need to be able to keep what they earn. Everyone has private property rights and all transactions are consensual, right? That theft and expropriation

civil asset forfeiture. These things are not legal. They should not be legal in a civilized world beyond, say, just the community scale. And it might also be useful because these isms get thrown around a lot. I love Hoppe's definitions of communism, socialism, and capitalism, because I think it puts it all in one common frame and makes it very easy to understand. If we take Marx at his word who was the the creator of Marxism or communism he said you could sum up communism in a single sentence which was the abolition of private property so nobody keeps what they earn the state owns everything and doles it out arbitrarily basically so there's no private property rights at all in a

communist society. That's one end of the pole. On the other end of the spectrum, you have capitalism, which is individuals own everything, right? So you have an institutionalized system of private property and consensual transfers of private property via contract. So you keep what you earn and you can trade whatever you earn with other self-owned people and we get a system of trade, innovation, capital creation, basically. So that's the two ends of the spectrum. We get communism with no property rights, capitalism with absolute individualized private property rights.

And then in between, the spectrum in between is socialism. Socialism is, per Hoppe, is an institutionalized policy of aggression against private property. so you could say if the average um average tax rate the average effective tax rate is 20 let's say that means people keep on average 20 you know 20 cents out of every dollar that they earn they keep 80 cents and they give up 20 cents is stolen if it's 50 then people keep 50 cents of every dollar they earn the state keeps 50 cents right you're moving you're kind of sliding on that scale whereas if you're a 20 effective tax rate you're closer to capitalism

if you go to 50 you're closer to communism you go 80 tax rate you're even closer to communism and when you get to 100 effective tax rate you're in pure communism so people don't get that we don't really have pure capitalism anywhere in the world absolutely not anywhere you pay taxes or you have a currency that is inflated arbitrarily you are being taxed and you are not in a free market mm-hmm okay that takes me beautifully to the topic of money and wars it's a topic that unfortunately is highly relevant and timely um monetary systems that drive wars fiat is corrupting our societies and leading to wars both in the physical and i think in the spiritual cultural sense can you talk a bit about that i i've seen a lot of work of yours about this

topic um one amazing conversation but i think it's very advanced even for me it was really hard with um rachim taggy's i don't know how to say his surname it's very hard to say surname yes very i have trouble with this theory of violence cycle you know so that was an amazing conversation where you talked about this subject a bit and i also heard you explain debasing the money debasing morality while fixing the money fixing the world you know so there's so much to cover there and how money is corrupting um societies and leading to wars so i'd love to get your take on that yeah there there's an incredible amount to talk about here and i would say a lot of it is still to be fleshed out i mean there's there are very deep intuitions and there's

a lot of historical evidence that when we start to corrupt the money which we typically what we mean by that is monopolization of the money and then arbitrary debasement so typically one typically the monopoly on violence which is the state monopolizes the money and then they start to print money quote unquote print money in times past this was called coin clipping um where they would basically debase the metal content of the coins keep the residual metal content for themselves. So you have this dynamic where the central power is monopolizing money issuance. And through that monopoly, it is diluting the money over time, either through coin clipping or money printing. And it's using this as a mechanism for implicit taxation or

invisible theft basically um because people see and they bear the consequences of rising prices but they don't necessarily understand the causal link that it has to do with the coin clipping or the money printing so there's some plausible deniability and we see this today the federal reserve printed six to eight trillion dollars in 2020 and then you have biden on tv calling it the Putin inflation, you know, and then certain headlines will say, Oh, it's because the Beyonce concert came to town. The prices are high. It's like, they'll say everything, you know, supply chains have been disrupted. That's why prices are high. They'll, they'll blame anything and everyone other than the obvious answer, which is your counterfeiting currency at scale,

which is milky. It's a, it's a, it's taxation via inflation basically. And so what's the problem with that i mean and the corruption i guess one of the thing on the word corruption that's what we mean like we're talking about monopolizing and debasing the currency but if you look at the word corruption itself um because you might say like oh this this government agent was corrupt and what do you typically mean by that is they accepted a bribe to maybe bend a rule or twist a rule or ignore its application. That's what we mean, I think, when we invoke the word corruption is that there's a rule set that's meant to be universally applied. And we are instead applying it unevenly. You've heard this said on Twitter, probably, people say rules for

the not for me, you know, so you get this two tier, really apartheid economic system where there's one set of rules for insiders and another set of rules for outsiders. And that's effectively what you have with fiat currency. There's a group of individuals that are licensed and authorized to counterfeit currency to enrich themselves. And there's the many, many, many outsiders who are forced to use the currency and pay for the cost of that inflation in the form of rising prices that are not allowed to print money. So it's a bifurcated rule system, and therefore it is inherently corrupt.

And the consequences of corrupt money, on warfare in particular, are especially bad. Historically, in the situation where a country does not have access to print its own money, if it goes to war, which is the most expensive and destructive endeavor human beings can engage in,

it is forced to fund that war from its own balance sheet. Like only the assets that the government actually has in reserve can it use to go out and pay for the war effort, right? Pay soldiers, build up capital, et cetera, et cetera. If instead the government has recourse to a money printer, And there's a civilization that's forced to use, or a society that's forced to use that currency. That state can now print new units of currency and dump the cost on the productive society. So they can, the war chest, if you will, of the state has expanded through fiat currency from its own balance sheet to the balance sheet of the entire society using the currency.

so when you look at world war one and world war two for instance the scale scope and severity of those conflicts was like nothing we had ever seen before right this is a product one of industrialization that we had new weapons uh new technology that made killing much more efficient but it was also because of the funding mechanism that countries were printing money to fund this war whereas typically two warring states go to war again it's a very expensive activity one of them goes broke and then they're kind of forced into a situation where they need to sign a peace treaty or an armistice you know they just can't afford to go on but when all of a sudden every belligerent nation in the conflict can print money and keep going until the currency hyper inflates

then you get very long, very destructive conflicts. And that was, you know, the proverbial gas thrown on the fire of world war one and world war two. So, um, yeah, it's, it's, what's a way to say this, that fiat currency is a function of warfare. Uh, it was also, you had experiments going on i think it was the norabito laboratory in japan and there was also a german effort to do this um the nazis wanted to bomb london with counterfeit pounds that was one of their strategies like oh we're gonna literally drop pounds all over the city hyperinflate the currency and then they'll be they're basically economically crippled right so this idea of currency counterfeiting it's a tool of war did they do that i don't think it would ever happen i mean i would brush up on my

history you could also research the norbido laboratory in japan that they had intentions to do it i'm not sure if it was ever done or or if not why but um the point is this thing doesn't benefit its users right it's not useful for us the users of the currency that it can be arbitrarily depreciated and printed ad infinitum, it's being used as a tool to violate our private property. That's the only thing money printing does is it violates the private property of savers and it enriches central bank shareholders in this case. And so that's, I mean, that's just kind of the general connection that fiat currency is kind of the gas thrown on warfare. The episode you mentioned the theory of violence cycles with rahim that's a very interesting paper he wrote

because he's making a rational argument so this is not an empirical observation this is saying something more like one you know two plus two equals four or two parallel lines never touch that he is deducing from economic axioms this idea that once you start to how would I say this there's the Austrian business cycle theory that says once you start to print money you exacerbate the boom and bust business cycle he has kind of a parallel theoretical structure that says once you start to print money you're expanding the the production of bads in the world as opposed to goods so he's going into how fiat currency can actually amplify violence um and it's again it's not the word theory doesn't

land for a lot of people because when you say theory they think it sounds like it's something hypothetical but it's actually it's a rationally deduced theorem is maybe a better way to think about it and um yeah a very hard episode but very um important consequences or important explanation for the consequences of fiat currency he's really distinguishing between two ways to acquire wealth in the world one one is making or trading consent consensually and the other is taking confiscating right and and by the nature of these actions you can understand how fiat is enabling violence because it is a violent way of taking something or grabbing something without permission that's right yeah fiat is literally taking that's what um the way i've crystallized

this that a lot of people appreciate inflation is legal counterfeiting counterfeiting is criminal inflation there is zero economic distinction between the two phenomenon the two phenomena there's only a legal distinction so there's you know insiders and outsiders which back to the point on propaganda that's what it is right it's like there's just this arbitrary line this group of people can do it these people can't and um i don't you know it's just fundamentally unfair right it's an unlevel playing field basically and as uh rothschild said give me the power to control a nation's currency and i care not who makes its laws that's right right they um this these people with power really just need the control over the money because then

they have control over everything yes and that takes me to the central banking um point you argue that central banking is not only the biggest con but also the largest criminal enterprise and i'm repeating that because some people don't get that they don't get that this is a criminal organization in a way yes it is it sounds almost oxymoronic when you understand that a central bank is a legal monopoly so again there's just an institution that has basically irrigated itself the privilege to print money and if anyone else tries to get into the money printing business they get shut down right like the rule the force of law is used against them so they're violently coercively shut down it's the opposite of free market competition

where anyone can enter and exit the business right and in free market competition you get really high product quality at really low prices, it benefits the consumer maximally. Well, a monopoly is the opposite, right? If I'm the only show in town, I'm going to charge you as much as I want. And I don't give a shit about the product quality because you have no other options, right? I'm the only shop in town. And so when we say that central banking is a legal monopoly, people get a little confused because they're like, well, how can a legal monopoly be organized crime isn't what is legal uh lawful and what are illegal criminal and there's actually a distinction um you know you can for instance uh there's this term war crimes you've probably

heard all right there's certain acts uh per the geneva convention and other pieces of legislation that are considered criminal in war um but i would think ethically or morally you would say that war war is crime right the libertarian perspective on this would be that if you're not individually defending yourself from someone who has initiated aggression against you right this is the the self-defense principle then it's not justified and so when when you go to war and you have one army invade another place that those individuals didn't initiate aggression against the individuals doing the invading like it is criminal it might be legally authorized it might be legally condoned it might be within the the guidelines or the

parameters of the geneva convention but it's still criminal right and that's what you're basically saying with central bank i mean if stealing is wrong or stealing is criminal then the central bank is organized crime and it doesn't matter about its legal status um again this it sounds strange but um one thing that's where you have to to get that nuance it's really important and you back to socrates right the the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms and if you've listen to our podcast long, you will know we go into the definitions of terms a lot because I think most of the fruitless argumentation in the world is two people talking past one another because one person has one meaning associated with the term and another person has another

meaning and they're just talking past each other. But if you stop and you get very high resolution on the terminology you're using, then you can resolve this dynamic where people just aren't connecting cognitively when they're engaged in dialogue. And so, yeah, it is a massive criminal enterprise. And I would say it is the biggest, longest running financial fraud and scam in human history, in terms of purchasing power stolen. And by purchasing power, you're basically saying labor or time, right? And to make this intuitive for people, this one's very intuitively obvious, I think. You go to work to trade your time for money. And then you take your money into the marketplace to trade it for the time of others, right? To make your food or clean your

hotel room or make your shoes, whatever the good or service is. Money is in that way a mechanism or a tool for trading human time. If you have one social institution that has irrigated itself, the legal monopoly privilege that it preserves via deception and violence that can issue new units of money while no one else is allowed to. That institution is a systemized method of time theft. It is stealing time from productive market actors. And I wrote about this in my essay, Masters and Slaves of Money. You can do a very simple proxy metric and you can take the average hourly rate say in the united states and then you can take the expansion of the money supply through currency counterfeiting by the central bank

in the united states in a year and you can divide the expansion in the money supply by the average hourly rate and you will get a proxy for the number of human hours stolen via the counterfeiting of currency give us the figure and the numbers are staggering um when i wrote that when i wrote that piece this is three years ago now the numbers were 23.4 billion human hours stolen per year between 1980 and 2020 i believe uh which was almost a trillion human hours over a 40-year period and if you divided that by you know the average person's working 2 000 hours a year it came out to like enslaving a population of over 11 million people for 40 years straight like this is this is no joke like it's spread amongst a lot of people so everyone kind of bears the weight

a little more equally that you don't have just 11 million people you know in chains that they're being enslaved. You've got 330 million people in the U.S. plus four and a half billion dollar users worldwide. Inflation is being imported or exported to all of them. But the amount of labor value stolen is real. Central Bank is printing this new money. They can take that money to market and spend it while it's worth something before its value is diluted via inflation. So in terms of criminality, I don't think there's anything that is more severe than the central bank. And, you know, further, when you consider what those proceeds go toward, as we touched on earlier, warfare goes toward things like wokeism, right? These state-funded psyops goes toward

controlling mainstream media ideological control structures so really just towing the party line whatever that is telling people what to think about actually imposing propaganda um esg towards esg like this is why this is why we say and this is the the theme that's deeply explored on the show and elsewhere by bitcoiners is to what extent is the corruption of money the corruption of the soul of humanity like it expands systematic killing through warfare it expands systematic theft through inflation and taxation it expands systematic bullshit and deception through controlling mainstream media and perpetrating propagating psyops like it literally destroys us inside and out and so the the mantra in bitcoin is fix the money fix the world

wow beautifully explained it's and one of the things that came up for me as you were speaking is that um i think fiat is the one of the most brilliant genius rebranding processes that i've seen for slavery oh yeah that you will not notice that you are a slave because it's all so modern and western and and um adapted to today's life but it is just a continuation of the same slavery system yeah if we go back to the communism socialism capitalism spectrum because i yes i hence the title of the piece masters and slaves of money i argued that this institution of systemized time theft was akin to slavery

you would define a slave as someone that has a 100% effective tax rate so that all the products of their labor go to a taxing authority that's what a slave is by definition so although this is a little bit different right

most of the individuals carrying this burden don't have a 100% effective tax rate they have some effective tax rate plus the inflation that they're subject to depending on what currency regime they occupy. But there's got to be a word for it, right? Again, maybe if a slave is someone with 100% effective tax rate, then you could say that people are 30, 40, 50% slaves. You could call at financial serfdom, financial oppression, you know, but it is, it is fundamentally a violation of the basic, most basic human right, which is individual self-ownership, right? And the right

to life. Ayn Rand said that, Ayn Rand said the only human right is the right to life. And the only proper implementation for the right to life is private property rights. Because if a man cannot control the products of his own labor, which are the means to subsisting in life, then he cannot live and he is a slave, right? So we're talking about, this is an attack on humanity, what it means to be a human being, a rational human being that owns, that is capable of critical thought and has the inalienable right of self-ownership, right? Only we can move our bodies and think our thoughts and move through the world, et cetera, et cetera. When the state imposes taxation and inflation, it is presuming that it has a higher claim on your body and your time than you

do individually. So this is why I think central banking is a massive con and a crime against humanity. Which leads me naturally to chatting about Bitcoin with you. You know, this is a perfect transition. I've been diving deeper and deeper into Bitcoin since I started about two years ago. And I'm fascinated with how it changes the rules of the game. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that i spend less time looking at the technology behind it i can understand i was a computer programmer in the past i can understand all the bits and bytes behind it but it's less what i care about i care about the principles and the and and the kind of future that it that it allows for if only we took it if only we exercised into that future and i feel it's a true

paradigm shift i'm i'm still looking for the way to explain to people why this is so revolutionary i care to show them the vision for me it's a profound vision that if if bitcoin is ever adopted as a standard for humanity then it has the potential to solve issues like wars and violence right it's changing that incentive structure yes of money and i would love to get your help in explaining that like in articulating maybe a good explanation of why this is so revolutionary and you know i have a couple of quotes i think that these are your quotes you talked before about how you prepare for your podcast so i do the same i read or i i listen and i took a lot of your quotes from stuff that i listened to you said gold and the internet had a baby and its

name is bitcoin and i love that but that's very very like that's very simple to understand and then you said bitcoin is an alternative not just for money but to creating a new more humane free way of life so maybe through that crack we can go into the explanation yeah so um this is a it's a huge topic right i know we don't have all the time to talk i'll do my best to kind to provide some high level stuff here, but the natural first question, right? When you ask what is Bitcoin? Well, the natural extension to that question is what is money? Hence the namesake of the show. And that's actually a very difficult question to answer. There's many, many answers. Money touches a lot of things. It's like asking one of those fundamental questions. What is truth?

what is beauty what is goodness what is justice like it's a very difficult question to answer simply actually so i would encourage people to check out the show but i'll try to provide some color here we mentioned earlier this problem with a two-tier rule system or a two-tier economic system, right? The, the nature of corruption rules for the, not for me. Um, Bitcoin is a universally transparent and immutable rule set. So you could think about it as like the first level playing field for human beings in a, in a monetary system ever. Yeah. Gold was sort of an approximation of this, but the problem with gold is ultimately that it's physical and it can be confiscated by force. And also because it's physical, you need to centralize

the custody of gold to scale it up as a medium of exchange, right? It's very difficult to carry around gold bars and transact in them day to day. You need to put all the gold in a vault and then issue a paper derivative on top of it called a banknote or an electronic representation of a banknote to use gold as a medium of exchange once you do that you centralize the gold in one place you've introduced counterparty risk you now need to trust the custodian to not over issue the paper and if it's one thing you cannot trust people to do it is to not print money like we just no one couldn't do it like even if the banker's honest and he resists well then the government eventually comes in and says you know what we're at war it's time to give us some of those cheap loans or give

us the gold or whatever it is so we have a pandemic yeah yes exactly so although gold may have represented kind of an analog version of bitcoin as a level playing field it inevitably becomes corrupted once it becomes centralized and the centralization is necessary to scale it as money, basically. So Bitcoin doesn't suffer from the physicality of gold. It's like I said, internet and gold had a baby. You've combined the, the natural scarcity of gold, which gave it its ability to hold value across time. You've combined that with the universal engine of permissionless information exchange called the internet, right? The ideas can just fly around the world at the speed of light without asking anyone's permission as we're proving right now right we're just

linked up on zoom trading ideas no problem um you could think of bitcoin as like gold you can put through a telephone wire you know something like that it's it's again by way of analogy um these things are somewhat useful but i think when you consider you're looking at the rule set of Bitcoin. It's very useful. People call it the internet of money. People call it digital gold. I would call it incorruptible money because again, we have this rule set. There's this, there's this ideal in Western civilization we've been striving for for a long time. And that ideal is equality in the eyes of the law. That in theory, the legal system should apply evenly to everyone. No matter how rich you are, how famous you are, you know, who your family

is, like all individuals should be equal in the eyes of the law. Now, the legal system doesn't exactly work like that, as we know, right? It's corrupt too, just like everything else humans have ever created. But with Bitcoin, we have created a game that we are all, that every individual is equal in the eyes of Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't even know we exist, really. It doesn't care, right? It's just, here are the rules. Here's how I operate, adapt or die, you know, and there's not, people can't change it. And basically makes it like kind of a game with incorruptible rules. And so maybe one more way of explaining here will be useful. So one of the useful answers to the question, what is money, is that money is a tool for moving value across

time and space. So with gold, we had a really useful tool for moving value across time. Gold had a very inflexible supply. It's hard to produce. So whatever amount of savings or purchasing power you put into it, you had a reasonable expectation you would take out at least that much later on right it was a very good savings technology which is to say it's good for moving value across time but because of its physicality as we covered earlier not so good at moving value across space right it's expensive to secure and it's heavy and you know you got to put it on trucks or planes or boats if you're transacting at long distance introduces a lot of risk so we we overcame that by centralizing gold and issuing a paper derivative on it right

so we were augmenting gold's functionality it was good for holding value across time but not across space so we introduced the gold backed currency make gold transactable across space and that was good and useful except we introduced counterparty risk and the need to trust human beings, which doesn't work in the sphere of money. So what you end up with is fiat currency, ultimately, right? They issue more paper than, than there are gold reserves. And then eventually you get a zero reserve currency called a fiat currency. A fiat currency is great for moving value across space, sort of like it's actually, there's some exceptions to that. If you try to move it from one country to another country, and country A says, no, you can't do that. Well,

then you probably can't do that. But assuming those countries are kosher, you can send fiat currency across space very easily. But because it's not pegged to gold, it doesn't hold value over time. Now fiat currency gets issued ad infinitum, it inflates away, not smart to hold your savings in fiat currency. So we end up with gold that's good for moving value across time, but not space. We put it all in one place to try and resolve that with a gold-backed currency, but that gives us counterparty risk, which gives us fiat currency. We end up with an instrument that's really good for moving value across space, but not time. And so how does Bitcoin fit into this picture? Bitcoin is money that's optimized to move value across both space and time. It's

just digital information, so you can move it at the speed of light. There's no counterparty involved, like you're just sending, think of it like sending a password to your Bitcoin. It's called a private key. You can send that around the world at the speed of light. You can send Bitcoin to any address, which is basically like emailing money, something like that. And then because Bitcoin has a, it's the first perfectly fixed supply asset has a hard cap of 21 million. It's optimized for holding purchasing power across time you can't arbitrarily debase or inflate the supply so that would be my short answer for why bitcoin is so important it's almost like turn it to a deflationary tool well it depends on how you define deflationary um technically a money that

holds its value over time will cause prices to go down over time. Because as you, as we become better at solving problems, as we become more sophisticated through innovation and capital accumulation, we solve problems better, faster, cheaper. So prices will actually go down in a hard money standard. And you see this, like the prices of things, when you denominate prices in gold, prices tend to go down over time. The only reason we're conditioned to prices going up is because we live in a fiat paradigm where money is printed all the time and we think inflation is normal or even necessary. So I think these are euphemisms ultimately that we use the word inflation because it sounds good. Like, oh, I want things to go up. I want the price of my house to

go up and my labor and whatever but it's actually monetary depreciation and deflation which is prices going down is actually monetary appreciation so yeah i think we we want that right what's what's so bad about the value of your savings going up every year exactly exactly seeing blackrock coming into this game i stay very alert to see what kind of actions they're taking because i do understand that you cannot control bitcoin but can they manipulate it in any way well the price of bitcoin can be manipulated in paper markets but this is why it is imperative to always take possession of your own bitcoin as we say not your keys not your coin um so although the price can be manipulated in the short run the consensus rules that make bitcoin bitcoin cannot and

just hold your own bitcoin and that's the key yep and with that i want to really thank you for your time and your patience and explaining those terms to me and my audience and really for being who you are because your curiosity and the fact that you do so much work in learning and And transmitting that to other people makes a profound difference in the world. So thank you for that. Thank you so much for saying that. I really enjoyed doing it and I will keep doing it. Keep it up.

Yes. Thanks for taking the time. And where can people follow you? Yeah, you can go to whatismoneypodcast.com. That's got links to everything. and then on twitter i am at breed love 22 awesome thank you so much for being with us