 If the recent slide and the price of Bitcoin has sent many speculators scrambling back to fiat currency, it's done nothing to cool the fervor of Robert Breedlove, a self-styled freedom maximalist whose Twitter feed is filled with encomia to the inflation-proof monetary system with a supply fixed via the consensus of a decentralized global software network. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, he writes, Bitcoin cannot be amended. That's why incorruptible money is a greater instrument of freedom than the U.S. Constitution. Bitcoin, he predicts, will prove to be history's ultimate example of the old adage, when you can't beat them, join them. The 36-year-old accountant by training and former hedge fund manager is a leading thinker and writer in the Bitcoin space, where he publishes the Freedom Analects and hosts the What Is Money podcast and video series. Reason talked with Breedlove at the Bitcoin Miami Conference in April about why Bitcoin is the best hedge against hyperinflation, how Austrian economics informs his worldview, and why he believes that Bitcoin will inevitably become the basis of the global economy. No one's figured out how to stop Bitcoin, basically, meaning turn it off. And so if you can't turn it off, it effectively operates as this vortex of incentives. It's just incentivizing people to interact with it, to hold it, to save in it, build businesses on it. Robert Breedlove, thanks for talking to me. I'm glad to be here. So you define yourself as a freedom maximalist. What do you mean by that? Well, I think freedom is practically and morally the most important value in the world. I don't think humans can have happiness without freedom. And I think that Western civilization really is built on the pillars of life, liberty and property, which I define as the three temporal aspects of freedom. So to lose your life is to lose your future freedom, to lose your liberty, to lose your present freedom, and to lose your property would be to lose the fruits of your past freedom. And I think by just optimizing or maximizing freedom, and I say maximizing because this means to increase a metric at the exclusion of all of the metrics. And I've had arguments with people like Bellagio about these, like you can't be a maximalist, you have to be an optimalist. But freedom, in my opinion, has a limiting principle built into it. So if we all maximize our own freedom, our own wealth, our own optionality, our own happiness within the boundary or limiting principle of other people's private property, then that is the ideal world in my view. So I think freedom, maximalism is the way we achieve the greatest happiness, the greatest wealth, and the most satisfaction of human wants in the world. Does that map more onto a kind of libertarian perspective or an anarchist perspective, or are those not really operative? No, it is. It is somewhat of a synthesis. I tried to pull a term that was very clear. It was not muddied with politics. Like if you say you're a libertarian today, that means you try it. A lot of people would perceive that as a political party, so that you're running for election inside of a political apparatus. Freedom, maximalism will be much more like anarcho-capitalism. So like low to no government. There's also a term called agorism, which is all human interrelations should be based on mutual consent. And we know this, right? The difference between a job and slavery is consent. The difference between a transaction and theft is consent. I think that mutual volition is the only sustainable binding for socioeconomics. So this is kind of like libertarianism in this reading is the ultimate consent culture. Mutual consent everywhere. No imposition, no coercion, no compulsion, no violence. Talk about how that then, why is Bitcoin the difference maker in all of this? For the first time in human history, we have a money that cannot be corrupted through imposition or fiat, as we might say. And it's something that you engage with purely voluntarily. There is, you can't even implement a coercive element into Bitcoin. It doesn't work. So it's quite the rabbit hole. It seems like for the first time, man has created something that man himself cannot corrupt. And it's fascinating to me that, you know, we've written things into software in the world that have in turn shined back into us and rewritten our own software. I would include things like the Magna Carta or the American constitution in this category. We wrote these laws, rules, principles to abide by. And that actually changed the way we treat one another. It changed culture. It changed the world, frankly. We've done that again with Bitcoin. We've taken this life, liberty and property triumvirate, if you will, and we've perfected it in unbreakable code. And that is because Bitcoin is governed by a series of rules by code. So there can't be more of it. Well, in a way, there can be less of it, right? Because estimates are that maybe 20% has gone missing and it's probably not going to be found again. Right. And every time you could also send your Bitcoin to a burner address, as they call it, would be an irrec, you cannot recover from the address, it effectively takes it out of the floating supply. That acts as just an anti-dilutive contribution to everyone. Right. It's like burning tokens. But the critical thing is it cannot be inflated. Right. And as I touch on a lot of my work, inflation is theft. We know this. If you own stock in a company, you wouldn't give one guy the ability to increase his own share count and dilute others. That's nonsensical. And by the end of this conversation, however long or short it is, we will have less freedom than we did at the start. We're all being robbed right now. I have dollars in my pocket. I'm being robbed right now. How old are you? 36. So you don't really remember the last big inflationary period, right? The 70s. While I've studied it, I don't remember it yet. What's your big fear of what might go wrong in the current moment? Because we're governed by people who, many of them were in power in the 70s. Somebody like Joe Biden was in the Senate. What is your biggest fear about the current moment where we're seeing inflation really kick into high gear? So in my studies of monetary history, I think inflation and ultimately hyperinflation, these are some of the worst events human beings can go through. The total collapse in trust in society. And you could know this intuitively if you just take a 24-hour window in your life and mentally list how many times you think about money, you think through money, you deal in money, you transact. We're so immersed in it, we forget to see how ubiquitous it is. But if you actually take note of it and then imagine if money failed, how many people could you actually cooperate with? It becomes a very small circle of trust, right? Even with inflation, there's the kind of Weimar Republic style stuff of hyperinflation, but even if at the end of every day, you start with $10 and you end up with $8 at the end of the day. Well, the Weimar Republic hyperinflation is just the crescendo. It's this long song of the basement that just culminates in hyperinflation when things get really ugly. People get extremely desperate or reduced to barbarity effectively. And in my studies of monetary history, I think inflation is this almost like a spiritual cancer actually. Like it rips society apart. It divides people. It induces bad behavior, right? When you're trying to outpace inflation, just trying to hold money be a saver. You can't even be prudent. You can't be conservative. You have to now take additional risk to outperform the implicit theft in your money. So it gives people a proclivity to gamble, to deceive, to rent the seek, all these negative coercive behaviors that freedom maximalism stands against. In your reading, what's the basic cause of inflation? The basic cause. Well, now I need to clearly define this because a lot of people say, oh, what do you mean? Netflix is $7 and it's not going up in price. People tend to think price inflation or worse yet CPI or consumer price inflation, which the government says is the number. First of all, if you study economics, you'll know that you cannot have a universal metric for inflation. It's as subjective as value itself actually. What are the things you're trying to buy? You're trying to buy real estate and Hamptons. Your inflation rate is 50% the past two years. If you're trying to buy Doritos, it's 2%. So I define inflation as any arbitrary expansion of a fiat currency supply within the aegis of a legal monopoly, specific essential bank. So when there's one group of people that can arbitrarily control P, increase the money supply, they can use that to confiscate wealth from all of those that cannot, that are depending on the dollar or fiat currency to hold its value. So it's purely and simply a mechanism for wealth transfer that's involuntarily imposed on people. In other words, theft. So Bitcoin, one of the great attractions of Bitcoin is obviously that it's outside the reach of central banks and it can't be inflated or deflated in the way that the Fed can do stuff to our supply. What do you say about the action of Bitcoin over the price levels over the past couple of years where one would have assumed that as inflation ramps up, that Bitcoin would become more valuable. And it kind of has, but also it's down from its highs and it seems to be tracking the stock market more broadly. Can you talk a little bit about how you read that? Yeah, so Bitcoin drew down to $4,000 in March 2020, which was the global liquidity to sell off subsequent to the COVID whatever you want to call it, pandemic or pandemic. Bitcoin today is trading at $47,000. So it's the best performing asset in the world over the past two years. I think it's doing exactly what it needs to do. Now, if you, people that get super zeroed in on the price, right, could have bought at what 69,000 was the local high. I believe so. Yeah. It's the wrong mentality. Bitcoin's a long-term saving technology. I think the best strategy to deal with it is to put long-term wealth into Bitcoin, just continue to accumulate a position. I don't advocate for using leverage. A lot of people do, but I think it's just very simply the best savings technology in the world. So if you're too concerned about these local price movements, then you're probably overallocated. Like I'm putting money into it that I don't ever intend to sell. I don't ever need to think about. This isn't current expense. I'm not putting money in there and trying to take it back out and time the market and all that. People that do that get burned in my opinion. What about the relationship between Bitcoin and gold, which in an earlier century or whatever, gold kind of occupied a roughly analogous situation to Bitcoin, not fully. But what's your sense of gold and why is Bitcoin an improvement over gold? I view Bitcoin as disrupted to gold, actually. And that's why I think it's so hard for us to get our head around it. I don't think it happens fast necessarily. Gold is still geopolitical prime money, nation states accumulate gold. If they go to war, they will confiscate one another's gold. They'll demand tribute payments in gold. So although we don't use it in our day-to-day affairs, we've all been excluded via the legal monopoly post 1971. Gold still really, really matters. And I think for the first time in history, we've been using gold for 5,000 plus years as money. We now have a 13-year-old digital upstart that is out competing gold, if you will. And the implications of that are just profound. But again, I don't think it happens fast. We've been using gold for 5,000 years. I think gold maintains a monetary premium for hundreds of years, potentially. But I think Bitcoin eats most of that in the distant long run. Let's talk a bit about how we get closer to a Bitcoin standard. What are the actual steps? When you talk about it, it's a long time kind of, it becomes the long-time basis for everything. What needs to be happening? And can we speed that up? Can we slow it down? You know, it's kind of ironic about all of this. I'm in Bitcoin education. So I'm trying to teach people what is property, what is money, what are these fundamental questions that we just take for granted often. That's like my main aim. However, my efforts cannot hold a candle to the pain that governments induce on people. So when they actually violate private property rights via inflation, or actually seize Canadian trucker bank accounts, or actually seize Russian foreign central bank reserves to the tune of $600 billion, the billboards that creates for unseasable, untouchable, unstoppable money is much louder than anything anyone like myself can do. So to accelerate it, I guess you can be engaged in education. But ultimately, I think people learn through pain, right? Pain is information. Yeah. Do you think we're going through a, is this going to be an extended kind of lesson in pain? Because, you know, just the thing that you mentioned, and then you throw in a number of other kind of geopolitical hotspots or the coming, you know, entitlement crises and budget issues. And the Weimar Republic, the 1920s hyperinflation we talked about earlier, people literally thought they were getting insanely rich right up until the very end, because you're thinking through this money, right? You're denominating yourself in dollars, you're net worth, the value of your home, your stock portfolio. When you diminish that unit of economic perception, this thing's going up in nominal value. So you think, well, I have more dollars today than I did yesterday. My brother bought a house, he's texting me, he's like, oh, my house is up 20% in six months. This is so great. I'm like, dude, do you read anything that I fucking write or talk about? He's your brother, of course not, right? Especially if you're his younger brother. What is, you know, it is partly an education thing. Can you talk about the adoption rate of Bitcoin or maybe not the adoption rate per se, but like kind of it's expanding. People compared to, you know, 13 years ago, certainly more people know about Bitcoin compared to five years ago do, but like what's the level of general awareness, if not actual holding needs to happen? I don't know. I was told by one of my guests the other day that US Bitcoin ownership is now at 25% of the population, which would be ballpark 75 million that was much higher than I thought it was. You have to check my number. The question is, what does it need to be? When does it reach, is there a kind of tipping point? Or maybe we've already reached that. I mean, one of the things we were both at this conference last year, and you know, I think one of the takeaways from that was that Bitcoin is here to stay. It's not, you know, for in its early history, people would be like this little flash in the pan, this is like flues or other old cyber currencies that didn't last. You can't say that anymore. No, you cannot say that. No one's figured out how to stop Bitcoin, basically. I mean, turn it off. And so if you can't turn it off, it effectively operates as this vortex of incentives. It's just incentivizing people to interact with it, to hold it, to save in it, build businesses on it. Whereas fiat currency is doing the opposite, right? It's disincentivizing you from using it, holding it, all of these things. So there's this transfer of wealth or monetary energy from the network that is oppressing you to the network that benefits you. I think the tipping point and this my thinking here is based on a concept called the minority rule. You can read about this. Authors like Nasim Nicholas Taleb have written about this. When certain networks get to say a 4% of an intolerant minority, they can actually impose the preferences on the majority. Right. And his examples are things like how many products are kosher. Kosher is a great example. Even though it's a small number of people, but people who eat kosher won't eat anything else. The market ends up kind of catering to an intolerant minority. Exactly. And then even something like the body of scientific knowledge, we think that's really what's, whatever has been disproven, has been discarded. Whatever is left over is basically science. So there's this whole interesting dynamic with this minority rule across different categories that makes it, gives it this degree of conciliance. And I think if we apply that to Bitcoin, I would, I think that it's not number of people. I think this would be more based on actual relative capital value or market capitalization that if it gets to 4% of its total addressable market that it starts, it has this absolute rigidity of rules, right? Bitcoin rules don't change. So that would be the highest form of obstinate preference you could imagine, right? It has unbending rules. So I think, depending on your total addressable market number for Bitcoin, 100 to 200 trillion, if it gets to 4% of that number, I think things start to get weird. So that's a four to eight trillion dollar market cap. And it's a little bit below one trillion. It's around one trillion today. And for reference, gold's about 10 trillion. Now we think gold, I think gold is also heavily suppressed by governments in the paper market. So I think the real market cap of gold is something like five to 10x what it is. So we'll see. What are the technological innovations surrounding Bitcoin that you think need to mature to kind of make it more present and accessible to people? So, you know, are you a fan of something like the Lightning Network, or do you think that that needs to really be brought fully online as opposed to kind of being talked about? Yeah, the Lightning Network solves a number of issues, right? In theory, I think is the network density increases, the transaction throughput can scale to theoretically infinite, which is really interesting, right? Anything like that before. It also adds a high degree of anonymity to Bitcoin transactions that we simply don't have at the base layer. There's a trade-off made at the base layer to optimize for 21 million. Really hard to have privacy and anonymity plus high degree of assurance of supply cap. So Satoshi made the trade-off for supply cap. I do think to have Bitcoin functioning as a medium of exchange, you need something like Lightning Network working. However, you don't necessarily need Bitcoin functioning as a medium of exchange for it to succeed. It can just be the savings technology and eat a lot of wealth in the world, right? Just giving people a mechanism to preserve economic energy across time is the primary use case. One of the differences between last year and this year is that Bitcoin regulation is being talked about everywhere. China, which had banned, the use of Bitcoin years ago, they banned Bitcoin miners. The United States government and everywhere else is talking about regulating Bitcoin. What are the types of regulations you worry about and what would a good regulatory system for Bitcoin look like? I think the best regulatory system is no regulatory system actually. The very concept of regulation is a contradiction to freedom. It's this idea of imposing one aggregate group, groups will power onto another group. So I disagree with that philosophically even. Although is it because something like Bitcoin is actually self-regulating the way that it's structured is why the people would enact in a kind of freedom maximum list viewpoint. There's regulation. It's just not coming from outside on high. Well, it is. You're touching on a beautiful point of Bitcoin here. It is so self-regulated that no one can do anything about it at this point. No one can change it. It's as regulated as the rising sun effectively. We've created a social institution or technology that we ourselves cannot change. That has profound implications because what we have in the world today are these nation states at war with one another who gets the most money, gets to decide the rules that can be imposed on others. But Bitcoin, and as you alluded to earlier, gold was kind of that neutral settlement network, that neutral rule layer, which it still is, whatever has the most gold is the most geopolitically powerful nation in the world, that no one could change. So that's why it became the global shelling point for money. And that's why we think Bitcoin is disruptive to gold. It's superior to gold and across all properties of money, but it's even more resistant to counterfeit than gold. Technically, we can make gold in a lab today. We can't do it profitably yet, but who knows? Mining the ocean floor, alchemy, mining an asteroid, who knows? It's subject to technological disruption. And that could just destroy gold as money at any time. Bitcoin's resistant to all of that, no matter how hard we try to mine it. And nothing's perfect. This just has the highest probability of being resistant to counterfeit. So what are the types of regulations that are either in the pipeline or you've heard talked about that you worry about? I don't worry about them. Honestly, I think Bitcoin gives a high degree of optionality to the individual. So if you're not being treated right in a certain jurisdiction, you can move yourself in your capital. One of my favorite ideas about that is that if you kept your Bitcoin codes in your head, you can walk across any border anywhere and just be as wealthy as you were in whatever country. That's a wonderful thought experiment. That's beautiful. The custodied properly in Bitcoin's the most unceasable property we've ever had. We've had this ideal that I've written about, inviolable property they've been writing about since at least the year 1215. It's in the Magna Carta. Governments were aiming at this or at least the constitutional documents of governments were aiming at this concept that we couldn't make a technological reality, but we're trying to make a socio-cultural reality. Let's just agree to all have really strong property. Now the reality of that situation is people are people. If they can do a thing, they'll do a thing. We needed to create something like Bitcoin that could actually instantiate that. One regulation I think is just stupid that I hear talked about is this idea of taxing unrealized capital gains. Basically, you buy a thing. It goes up in nominal price and you haven't sold the things. You haven't realized any gain at all. They want to tax that unrealized gain. Now if you think about this, combining that tax on unrealized gains with inflation is accelerated confiscation because they're just printing money, pumping your house price. You now owe me money on that depreciated nominal value increase. I know every time I try to spend my unrealized gains, nobody will talk to me. It seems bad on the other side. A lot of your work, you mentioned in a lot of your interviews and a lot of your writing and podcasts, the sovereign individual, which is a book that came out in the late 90s, which is pretty fascinating. Can you summarize it and talk about why it's so important to your larger world view? Yeah, it's quite the rabbit hole, but written in 1997, it made a number of prescient predictions that have come true, social media, anonymous digital cyber cash, the use of a pandemic to reinforce the validity of nation-state borders and control. I guess the thesis of the book, Mark Andreessen has this now very popular phrase, software is eating the world, which I think he said 10 or 15 years ago, also proved to be very prescient. Well, that is very true. I think you could expand that to say software is also eating the state. The technological realities we inhabit determine our political realities. So in a way, society comes to reflect the technologies which dominate its day. So in the large-scale industrial age, we had large-scale nation-states. Well, now the world's very different. Most of our attention is being channeled through digital devices. The microprocessors, they call them in book, what I just called digital technology, has proven to be disruptive across the board. I don't think there's a business in the world now that's not been affected by digital. So I think Bitcoin is just an extension of that thesis, that software is eating even our most fundamental organizational realities, like our nation-state. We identify, it's part of our identity to say, I'm American on this and that, but all of these things are now called into question in this new technological reality. And that book is particularly interesting to think about it. After the Cold War ends, and maybe there's a 500-year kind of push towards more and more centralized control, centralized identities, things like that, culminates maybe in the Soviet Union, which then disappears. And there's this relaxing and people spread out globalization, people start talking about individualism again, rather than collectivism. Do you think that's still on, and it's all enabled by technology, by the internet and then the web late on top of that and all of the devices you're talking about. And that was written 10 years before the smartphone came out, which then accelerates the ability of people to have something like peer-to-peer communication. Do you feel like that's still preceding a pace? Because a lot of people talk about how in the West, broadly speaking, since then we had the global war on terror, which where the state kind of reasserted itself in surveillance powers. You look at something like China right now where they're building out or trying to build out a kind of social credit system where the government has massive amounts of data and they're sifting through it and predicting how people are going to act and punishing or rewarding for them. Are we still in an era where the individual is sovereign? What are the challenges to that? Well, ultimately, I think through the scope of natural law, the individuals always sovereign because you always have a choice. Now, you can be tortured and robbed of your power and manipulated in court and all these things, but there's always a choice. The great book on this is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. There's a final human freedom. We all get to choose how to respond no matter what the situation is. And this is Camus saying suicide is always an option. That's kind of like you only get to do that once, but you've got that. You get one exit option. I do think we're moving closer to the sovereign individual thesis in the long run, but the middle game is very uncertain. And so China has done a great job of perfecting this digital dystopia that you've described. And I think what's happening now is that model, China tends to lead the rest of the world technologically, that model is being exported into the West. I think COVID was basically step one of that. The business model of statism that faces disruption by things like Bitcoin and adjacent technologies is now going to fight for its own survival. So that mid game is very uncertain to me. And I think those that make themselves expensive to tyranny will be the ones that ultimately emerge wealthy, healthy, and to rebuild the decentralized world of the future. So you have a couple of different platforms that you use to talk about this and kind of hearts of minds over to let's speed up the decentralization of things. Talk a bit about them like your what is money podcast, your sub stack. What are you hoping to accomplish with these? Yeah, it's really just education focused. And I think in this new world where digital technology so fundamentally disrupted our imagined orders, right? We're talking about, again, the nation state is just an imaginary construct, but it's something very fundamental to our world. And many people don't stop to think about this, but the human imagination is what makes us dominant in the world. The fact that we can tell and believe stories and coordinate, collaborate, and compete at a scale that no other animal can is the reason we're the top of the food chain. So now it's people fight over who gets to control those narratives basically. And I think that's what's going on in all this political level state effort. My work is to just hopefully getting people to ask and answer fundamental questions for themselves so they can establish deep and meaningful philosophical anchor points to the world. So you can see through the bullshit. There's another way. In preparing for this interview, I read about you and around you and I have some sense of your biography, but not a great one. I know that you were from Tennessee and you went to the University of Tennessee, you have a BA and an MA in accounting there. Talk a little bit about your childhood and was there a moment where you got switched on to saying like, okay, you know what, I don't want to accept received narratives. I want to start building one of my own. Yeah. So I grew up in Tennessee, very traditional values. With a Baptist background? Southern Baptist Church. Not a diehard religious family, but we went to church. Were you like born again or saved? Were you in the evangelical world? No, not really. I attended church in sort of a casual way, but later on in my teenage years, I did, I really enjoyed it for the social aspects, but I had started reading astrophysics when I was like 12 or 13 and I was just always a curious kid. And so when I started reading really deep into the science rabbit hole, I became pretty atheistic in my worldview. I thought it was a fairy tale. It's nice. It's wonderful. Makes everyone feel good. My views have changed on that since, but so that's how I started. I was also an athlete when I was young. So what sports did you play? I did football at wrestling and then I got really into Olympic style weightlifting actually. So if you've ever seen CrossFit, they do these explosive overhead lifts. Clean and jerk. Clean and jerk and snatch. That's right. So I did that competitively from the age of 13 to 17. I was competing on the international stage. It was my thing. It's like, all I did. And as far as like when I think the astrophysics reading, it's like, you're just looking at the stars at night. You know, we're outside a lot in Tennessee asking what and why? What is all this? Why is all this? Maybe that just that coupled with my mom, she'd always put an emphasis on education. It's like, you want to solve a problem, learn about it. Just use learning to your advantage. So a lot of reading, a lot of asking questions, I think set me up to always try to inquire into the fundamental nature of things rather than taking something at face value. And when I applied that approach, this is in my, just before my 20s, started to get into economics, reading the Economist magazine a lot. I ended up discovering, I go down a lot of rabbit holes, but I ended up in the central banking rabbit hole. And thanks to authors like G. Edward Griffin and the creature from Jekyll Island, I came to see central banking as like the main problem in the world, that we have an institutionalized system of time theft or property violation in the heart of every modern economy, right? Including the American economy where you say, we're free market capitalist, yet one half of every transaction is fiat currency, which is anti-capitalistic money. So we're nowhere near free market capitalist. We're not even halfway. And this is not an opinion. This is Marx's 1848 manifesto of the Communist Party, measure number five, the central bank. So it's crazy. It's crazy that we think we are, we won against communism. Our money is communism. And it's a real problem. So I think for the same reasons we saw the Soviet Union collapse and not work in the 20th century, we're going to see Soviet money, if you will, collapse in the 21st. Did you, and you kind of stumbled into Austrian, the Austrian school of economics, talk a little bit about that. What's the value that you find from a broad Austrian perspective? That was the piece I was missing in my thinking to understand Bitcoin earlier, I think, because I had encountered Bitcoin around 2014, but I didn't understand that it was the answer to central banking. When I got deeper into the space in 2016, 2017, I started going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And that touches a lot of Austrian economics, actually reading Safedine's book in 2018, when it was released, April of 2018. That was my big light bulb. It's been talked about for a long time. The sly roundabout way, as Hayek said, Bitcoin is effectively that. So I mean, you like things like competing currencies, but your convinced Bitcoin will win the competition, right? Yeah, compete away. I just think that the value of money is the size and depth of its network. So that's why it tends towards one. It's a power law. There's more value and deeper liquidity. That's why we had one gold, ultimately, and why I think we have one digital gold. Is Bitcoin useful or in a broader sense, and I guess if we're talking about Austrian stuff, you know, people like Mises and in his own way, Hayek talked about the subjective theory of value. Is it that Bitcoin, and for lack of a better term, a kind of capitalist society or a laissez-faire society, it's good because it allows people to kind of operationalize their subjective value? Well, I guess that's one way to look at it. I think it would be more... Here's the way to think about it. So there's a concept in economics called the inequality of exchange. So that means you and I come to the table to negotiate a trade. You perceive that whatever I have is of more value to you than what you're giving up. And I perceive the same thing in reverse. What you have is more valuable to me than what I'm giving up. That's why we're making a deal. Right. And once we negotiate and reach a point of mutually voluntary exchange, we both leave that trade with more psychological profit or value. We both believe we're better off, whether or not we actually are on some of the measures, a different thing. But there's a net value creation only through voluntary exchange. If you take out the element of volition, that means I'm basically taking from you. You otherwise, you didn't want to do the deal. So you're leaving the deal worse off. That's value destructive. Bitcoin gets rid of that coercive element. You can't take my Bitcoin. It basically forces transactions. And this is not perfect, but shifts the incentives of the world towards less coercion and more cooperation, so more creation of value. You famously published an open letter to Ray Dalio, the super investor. Describe what was in that letter. And then one thing that's interesting is that Ray Dalio you were addressing that to and the one who exists now has changed his point of view a bit. So talk about that. As we knew he would. I was reading, I was operating a hedge fund raise of the most successful hedge fund manager, I think, ever. So I was reading his book, Principles with My Business Partner. And it's a good book. He's got a lot. It's a very dense book. There's a lot of life and work principles as he divides them up. And I'm reading this book, also going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, also hearing Ray's basically coming out publicly against Bitcoin, for all the wrong reasons. All the counterpoints that have been thoroughly debunked. So you can tell he had not done his homework. I'm reading his book, Principles. And it's like there's so many of these principles that are Bitcoin. They're embodied in Bitcoin, effectively. So I ended up just writing this thing out of frustration. I'm like this guy is not like Ray, you've not done your homework. You've literally written all these principles that are embodied in this technology that you're decrying. So yeah, it's a long letter. I think it's a 100 minute read, 90 pages or something. But I went principle by principle. I actually initially debunked his arguments. He has three counterpoints to Bitcoin. I debunked those. And then I go through the principles he laid out in his book and describe how Bitcoin embodies those principles. Could you summarize that? To summarize, what did he mostly get wrong about Bitcoin? He got everything wrong about Bitcoin. So his main counterarguments, if I can recall them, governments will never allow it, which is where so many people are stuck in the Bitcoin rabbit hole. You start to study it, okay, it is valuable, but then you hit this stumbling block of well, government will never allow it. And then you just stop thinking at that point. And your counter would be that it doesn't really matter if governments allow it or not, because it's going to round around it. The great question is how? The $850 billion question, which is Bitcoin's market cap today, how do you stop it? So I understand they want to stop it. It's the greatest enemy of the state in human history. The question is how? So that was one point. He also thought he had the Facebook MySpace fallacy in his mind. So I had to do a discussion of network effects and protocols and how it's different than an application like Facebook versus MySpace. And I can't recall the other one. So where is he now on Bitcoin? As far as I know, and I haven't looked at it closely, is that he's allocating a small percentage of his portfolio into Bitcoin. He's always been a big gold proponent. That was another aspect. It's like, Ray, you get gold, right? You get the history of money. You know, where I think he stopped though is he would describe gold as having intrinsic value. And that that's an economic fallacy in and of itself. But it's also not enough. You need to know the properties gold was selected for in the free market. And that's why I was beating that drum for a long time. Money needs to be divisible, durable, recognizable, portable, scarce. Gold was the best technology we ever had satisfying those properties. Bitcoin essentially perfects those properties. So if you get your thinking to that layer of why gold was chosen, then you come to understand Bitcoin. So I tried to go through that in a letter as well. You run a company called Parallax Digital in Santa Monica. What do you do there? Yeah, so we had been operating multi-strategy crypto asset funds for a number of years. I got out of that business in late 2020. My epiphany that year, I think a lot of people had a lot of epiphanies, because I was spending all my blood, sweat and tears trying to outperform Bitcoin, which is a pretty high benchmark, literally the best performing asset in human history. So I thought to myself, and all the while my writing and talking is becoming popular, getting a ton of feedback from the market, people like, more, more, more, write more, talk more. So I decided what I could just hold Bitcoin and basically achieve the benchmark, have zero effort effectively, and then I could free myself up to do these things that I want and the markets resonating with. So that's what I did. I started the show. And around that time was when Saylor bought his first tranche of 500 million Bitcoin. This is August 2020, I guess, and he DMed me and was like, Hey, just bought some Bitcoin. Thanks for your work. And I was like, Oh, wow, that's cool. I'm thinking about doing this show, talking in long form about big ideas. Do you want to be my first guest? He agreed. I think we now have 17 episodes and 30 hours of content together. And my most successful series to date by far, I take no credit for that. Michael Saylor's a beast. He can practically interview himself. Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy are apart from, one assumes Satoshi is the biggest holder of Bitcoin. Do you worry that this is something that happens, people try to corner the market in gold or in silver or in whatever? Is that at all a threat in Bitcoin? No, I don't think so. I mean, the biggest risk is the liquidity risk of them dumping it all at once and temporarily impacting price. I don't care about price, honestly. I'm just buying Bitcoin every day. I opportunistically buy more when there's big dips and I have an extra chunk of USD coming in. When you adopt that strategy, you actually almost, you appreciate the downside volatility, right? When Bitcoin contracts on other people's fear, I'm on the other side of that trade. I'm being greedy when they're fearful. So in a situation where someone accumulates an excessive amount of Bitcoin, first of all, and specific to Saylor, I don't think he's ever going to sell. I think he's in it for the right reasons. I believe in the guy. There's a lot of Bitcoiners that have different thoughts, whatever. If though it was somebody that was going to accumulate 250,000 Bitcoin with the intention of dumping it, I'd bring it on. I'll buy it from you all day. What about your view of other cryptocurrency? In your view, is that even worth talking about or is that just a different kind of beast altogether? I can sum it up pretty quickly. I looked at Bitcoin as more akin to the Internet itself, like the Internet's a stack of protocols for information. Bitcoin's the same thing for moving economic value. It's one of a kind, path dependent emergence. It just can be replicated. It's its own animal. And it kind of snaps onto the Internet too. So it really is part of the Internet. Everything else is a control P of Bitcoin's code, trying to do other things. It's liquid venture capital over here. So we have the Internet, like a protocol no one can control, versus companies essentially that people can control. And so they might have some value for various kinds of uses and things like that. Venture capital though with a very low bar of due diligence. Traditionally, venture capital that we hear about in the world goes through a lot of filters before we see it. You and I can go start Reasoncoin in 15 minutes on Ethereum blockchain. I think it's already crap. Just by announcing it, it's already crap. Put a white paper up, put a web set up, convince a bunch of people to buy our coin, and we're all for running. And that's why there's so much scamminess in this space. Do you, just as a general moment, and I'm thinking broadly when you were talking about the Internet, the Internet kind of emerged in the late 80s as a semi-public format, certainly in the 90s as the web was laid on top of it and became user-friendly, became a mass medium. The 90s was a very optimistic time for technology in general. And since then, we are now in a kind of pessimistic mode. People hate social media, people hate big tech is, you know, somehow Amazon, you know, emerged after delivering everything we wanted for, you know, two years of lockdown. We really hate it more than ever. Are we in a technological, you know, pessimism mode? And what snaps us out of that? Do we hate it? I don't know. Well, this is, let's put it this way, the rhetoric around it is negative, right? Yeah, I mean, obviously we're using this stuff more and more, but so you would go with the revealed preference, is that no, we actually, the stuff we like, we're using more often. And look, I mean, there's a grand sociological experiment taking place here, social media. And really, it's flipped the script on everything. All right, we used to have public discourse on television. And now it's like you watch Twitter to see what they're talking about on TV. And you use your TV to watch YouTube videos. It's always fascinating. The Emmys, or not the Emmys, the Oscars, you know, the only reason anybody watched that was because of a clip that went viral. Right, right, right. So yeah, interesting to think about that, too. Are you? Well, I guess that's a final question. You have children or a child? I have a daughter. Yeah. She's three and a half years old. Okay. So, you know, 20 years from now, do you think she's going to be living in a freer world? A less free world? You know, what do you think? Yeah, I think it emerges unevenly across the world. I actually have a good series with Bellagio about this. He has a thesis on centralized East, decentralized West. I think that's got some coherence to it. I fully intend to help contribute to a freer world. Obviously, I also think, I mean, and that's a drop in the bucket of what's actually happening. And freer equates with decentralized, right? Generally speaking. Yes, you could say that. Less coercion, right? Again, so the stronger your property rights are, the more capacity you have to say no or opt out or move your capital yourself, et cetera. The more optionality the individual has, the freer they are, the better off we all are. We actually create more wealth in that world. So, when the right of exit is maximize people behave better, systems behave better. That's right. You know, just again, if we're sitting down to do a trade and we can't come to terms at any point, you could say no and walk out the door, right? That prevents any value from being destroyed. Like unless we can come to terms and have mutual creation of value, then there's no deal, right? So, you remove the option for coercion or imposition, actually pragmatically create more wealth, capital and satisfaction in the world. Well, you know, so you're 36, you're a millennial then, right? Old millennial. I think the cutoff's 38. So, you know, among millennials when you look at surveys and things like that, millennials tend to be more skeptical of capitalism. However, they define that. Yeah, because they haven't defined it properly. Yeah. So, what do you think's going on? Why do younger Americans seem to have a more negative opinion to things like capitalism, to things like markets, to things like profit? Yeah, they're misattributing the current problems they see in the world. You hear this late sage capitalism, but as I said earlier, we're not even close to capitalism, right? If you have a central bank, you're 50% communist out of the gate. You've also given the government a mechanism to grow excessively. So, things like in the US, healthcare is pretty communist, insurance is pretty communist, like all these industries that are close to the state apparatus, finance, education, right? It's not capitalist whatsoever. So, it's a miseducation, I guess. People don't understand what capitalism means. And I'm also convinced people, like in a fiat world, maybe, and maybe this has to do with the technological distraction or all subject to, but some people are taking the time to think deeply. A lot of people are taking things that face value, a word like socialism just sounds better. Social, right? We all, I like to socialize. I'm a social person. I think people- I have a social disease. I don't know. We can play this either way. I don't know. And social media can have a mixed reputation. My point is this, capitalism is very obscure, kind of nebulous term. People don't necessarily understand what capitalism means, but socialism just sounds friendlier, more comrade. You can hear young people calling each other comrade, but there's so much ignorance behind that. You haven't studied the 20th century at all if you're framing a world like that. Right. And I try to not get trapped in that by just talking about statism and non-statism. I think Bitcoin gets us, helps us transcend statism in all of its modes. Fascism, capitalism, capitalism is actually not a state doctrine, but it's been co-opted by the state, communism, socialism, et cetera. Bitcoin gives us a transcendence of statism that's premised more on cooperation, less on coercion. Okay, we're going to leave it there. Robert Breedlove, thanks for talking to me. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.