 Alright, hello. This is Stefan Kinsella again. I'm doing a Kinsella on Liberty. I don't know which number it is we'll figure that out later but a friend on the internet asked me to do a discussion about some topics and so we decided to do it and Bruno why don't you introduce yourself and explain what what topics you wanted to cover today. So, my name is Bruno. Thanks, Stefan for the meeting here. I wasn't expecting to be part of your podcast. So my name is Bruno Pierce. I'm just like a physical trainer. I don't have any background in law or economics, but I came to get interested in Austrian economics. And of course I got to know about Sella's work and everybody in the Music Institute. So chatting with Stefan Sella on Facebook. We decided to maybe try to have a conversation about many topics, mainly about, I don't know, mathematician ethics, about a little bit about his book, and maybe something about money as well later. And Bruno, where do you live? I'm from Brazil. I live in South Brazil. You're from New Zealand? No, no, Brazil. You're from Brazil and you live in Brazil? Yeah. South Brazil, that's what I said. Are you affiliated with like the Mises groups there like in Sao Paulo or anything like that? Mises, Brazil or anything? Not really. Like, I know those guys exist, but I don't know, like, to me, like this is something I was thinking about, maybe we were not yet to talk about this, but how I became interested with this. So I was in Australia in 2013 and trying to follow the political things that were going on in Brazil and United States as well, a little bit in Europe. And so 2013 was a critical year in Brazil. A lot of riots going on and United States was kind of crazy as well. Like, I think Trump was starting to show some political interest there then. And I was following this on YouTube and then YouTube suggested me a video which had the thumbnail of the White House, but it was like really dark and some lightning, like a stormy day, I mean, night. And it was the audio book for Anatomy of the State book. So I was intrigued by that thumbnail. I clicked on it and started listening to it. It was the book Anatomy of the State. So I listened to that and later I found out about the Mises Institute. And then I found out that there was a Mises Institute in Brazil as well, but ironically, as far as I know, the Mises Institute in Brazil. The same thing that happened between the Mises Institute and the Cato Institute happened here as well. So the Mises Institute in Brazil is more like the Cato Institute, instead of the Mises Institute. Oh, that's right. You have now you have the Rothbard Institute and the Mises Institute there, right? Yeah, I think we have more than two, like I think there's like the Hoppa Institute. But I mean, there was a split wasn't there, like there was Mises Brazil and Helio Del Trao and then the Chioca brothers formed the Rothbard Institute or something like that. I remember all that. The same thing that happened over there, like Cato wanted to be influencing political things and Rothbard wanted to keep the intellectual stuff so they broke up. And the rich guys took the Cato Institute, the Hayekin way, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And here and Rothbard kept the Mises Institute online. Here's the same thing, like what is called the Mises Institute here is actually like more like Cato than Mises. And these other guys, the Rothbard Institute and the Hoppa Institute. I don't don't check them too much, but they are trying to not be so Cato Institute like the Mises Brazil is. Well, you would know more than me, but I mean I was invited to Brazil from Mises Brazil and met Helio years ago and yeah, it was great. And, you know, because their name Mises I think that they're probably less Hayekin than the Cato groups are but I don't I don't know. But to be honest, I don't like, I don't super follow these guys like I check one thing or two, you know there I, I try to focus more on what you guys do over there because I think over here they most translate stuff that you do there. There's a lot and I was going to say that I think Mises Brazil translated a lot of the Rothbardian stuff from over here so maybe that Hayekin but and the Rothbard Institute has as well so if I'm not mistaken but yeah I know a lot of the work and I think my impression has been for years that Brazil may be the biggest hub of libertarianism in the world and maybe next to the US but there's so much libertarian activity it seems like they're an Austrian economic interest. I can't think of any other country that has more except maybe the US. Yeah, like, but here I think, for example, a lot of libertarians or and caps who earlier said that oh I would never get involved with politics, right if I ever, if I ever run for office should you know the head. Yeah, you can find videos of these guys talking things like this and now they're all running for office so right. Yeah, it's so there's there's one guy that if you allow me I would I would like to make it like an honorary mention is for it. Maybe you spoke to him on Twitter. Sounds familiar. How do you spell it. It's F H O E R. Oh yeah yeah that sounds that's yeah that's like this guy, in my opinion, is the most like. Like, like, kept the roots, you know, the more. How can I say that like, is more in line with the Mises Rothbard and hop in line, you know. Well apparently those guys can win office look at melee. Oh yeah. Are you following that like what do you think I'm trying to you know, in Turkey, I go to Turkey every year in September for the annual property and society conference and there are two talks scheduled to talk about melee. Like, it's going to be like an evaluation of how well he's done so I think it's a good time because this is September and he got elected what this December last year. So we'll have about, you know, 9 or 10 months of his track record to take a look at and see whether he's a big disappointment. Or whether he got anything good done. So, in September, I think we're just waiting. Let's give him a little time but in September. We'll kind of have an evaluation and see what we think. And who's going to do the stock you are somewhere else. No, no, no, no, not me there's a, I'll tell you it's on the PFS website it's property and freedom.org for anyone interested for the list of the speeches we have planned for the. And we put all these we it's a private meeting but we record them and put them all online. Let's see here. Okay, Anthony Muller from Germany and Brazil so I assume he's a German who lives in Brazil. Anthony Muller and he's going to be called me lay after nine months of critical appraisal. And the other one is. Oh, David Durr from Switzerland he's going to say, if I woke up and found myself president elective Argentina dot dot dot like what would I do. I don't think it's going to really be about Malay it's going to be about. What could you do, even as a pure integral capitalist which I'm not sure Malay really is, but even if you were. And you're the head of the state of a modern democratic state. What could you really do practically without being sabotaged by the system. So, but there will be two talks about that but Muller Muller's I'm really curious to see what he says, but yeah so I'm we're all watching it from afar and we're interested in it. I'm just watching a video on YouTube, or Twitter, where me lay was asked. Oh, I think it was asked by Ben Shapiro, who are your favorite like thinkers or economists and he listed Rothbard and Walter blog and hoppa and iron Rand and Robert Nozick and Mises and Hayek. So, you know it's not bad so far, but that's just talk, we can all talk. I remember seeing something. The professor, Jesus where to the sort of was there with him on the inauguration or something. Oh really I didn't know that no I didn't. There's a picture of them somewhere but I don't know if his is what the sort of went to Argentina, or if me lay was in Europe somewhere and then they meet. He's been traveling a lot he went to the he went to the what World Economic Forum in Davos and he he's met with Elon Musk. So I don't know where he is but he's, he's there, there are photo ops and he's meeting with people. I do know that some libertarians who are sort of anti war and anti against the, you know, what Israel is doing in Gaza were disappointed already with his, his pro Israel statements like he didn't need to do that. There's some things he's being blamed for which I don't know, or, or his fault, like some people said, oh, I don't have to do Bitcoin or whatever but there were some policy of the of the Argentinian government the other day and it was definitely. I know, but what was it do you remember what it was. Yeah. So like, he pretty much like lifted like anything can be used as currency something like this. Yeah. So he did what he did what he lifted what. Yeah like for example, like is not the legal tender. It's the only legal tender, like you can trade with anything like anything anything can be accepted something like that and then the bankers started writing because they didn't like it because it took a little bit of power from them. At least I heard something like that. All I remember is there was some complaint by libertarian saying me lay screwing this up too, but I wasn't clear that it was me lays fault I mean he's not a dictator. I'm not saying he's a dictator like I'm saying that he pretty much lifted any, like, like, for example, you could trade with anything. And he removed that. So he made it more difficult to trade in Bitcoin. Opposite. Oh, okay, I know we're talking about so before there's something different it was it was some it was some control that we didn't like. And everything they were saying me lays failing already and I said well first of all, you don't know if he did this, because he's not, he's not a dictator so he can't stop the government from doing certain things because he doesn't have absolute power. So this, it may be premature to blame him for this. I remember now so I think right now, he made kind of, I don't know if he did it either but for some reason now. The centralized exchanges there have to report to the government and they like that was something like this. Before that, the reason why bankers were rioting was because he kind of let everyone trade with anything, you know, like a competition in money, like, whatever, whatever the market decide is going to be the, it's not going to be the peso necessarily. Okay, like the peso is still legal tender and all this but you could you can use whatever you want. Yeah, and then the bankers didn't like it and they riot it and everything. Well anyway, the timeline is different. Well why don't we get to a few topics you want to you wanted to discuss and let's just go from there. Whatever you want to go. Let's take it for every interest, whatever you're interested in. Yeah, like we started, we started talking about this because I found out about a guy who is kind of young, right younger than us, for sure. And he was talking about like logic. So he was teaching logic fundamentals on Instagram and his he has a bit of a follower following I'm sorry, like over 30 K followers on Instagram so he was teaching like logical fallacies stuff like that. And then I sent him some hopper stuff like our ethics, argumentation ethics and he had never heard of any of this and he loved it like he told me that he listened to the property and freedom society. He had a lecture on argumentation ethics by hopper like three times in a week. He downloaded it to his phone and he was obsessed with it so he really liked it he even made a video on which he cites hopper and talks about. So Karl Popper didn't admit that philosophy had a starting point, but by saying that he was contradicting by arguing and using a common language and all this. Yeah, and of course, Mises himself made that point. A long time ago that he explicitly I think in epistemological problems of economics that that the, the, the assumption behind the method behind the idea of logical positivism is itself is self contradictory because if you say that only this type of statement is meaningful. That's empirically verifiable. Well, what about that statement itself. That's not empirically verifiable. And if it is it would still be like a circular or infinite regress or tautology or something. There's an a priori aspect at the foundations of all the sciences which even hopper points out and some of the German philosophers point out is true even for physics they call this proto physics. So they do give so the Austrians and the Contians, the realistic Contians I should say, not the idealistic ones, but the realistic ones. Usually Europeans. I respect the role the role in the role of the natural sciences I mean that the scientific method has a role. But it's not the only thing number one, and it's also in a sense secondary because it's based upon our priori assumptions it has to be just like logical logical positivism itself is, except the problem is logical and then contradictory so, but the, you know, physics is not contradictory, but it does rely upon some a priori postulates about how we understand, you know, the three dimensions and space and time and what action is and what knowledge is and things like this I mean they're the basic orientation we have to have to do these investigations and you could never investigate the basis of the method that you're investigating it makes no sense. So that stuff's fascinating and that's in pro pro physics which hopper writes about a little bit in his economic science and the Austrian method. If your friend is interested in the argumentation well he should look at the proto physics stuff which I mentioned there's some links in my book. And the book we're talking about is my recent book legal foundations of our free society, but you know I discussed in pretty a lot of detail hoppers argumentation ethics in chapter six. And also, and other chapters like the one defending we see chapter chapter 22 of the book so anyone interested in that. And in those in those chapters I give a good overview, but I also have links to little mini articles I wrote on my site where I have lists of like all the key contributions of hopper and other commentators on these topics for anyone who wants to get into this deeply. Yeah, like I remember reading something hopper wrote about, for example, for anything empirical you need measurement instruments. But before you can even have measurement instruments, you need to establish like cause and consequence relationship between the moons to even get to the measurement instrument and then you can make your observations. Yes, you have to presuppose causality and causation. But presupposing it in a self contradictory to deny this, but that's an a priori type of proof it's not an empirical proof. And it's at the basis of all this physics. The whole physics superstructure. The way I got into it I was just in law school and 1988 and I just read there was a Liberty magazine article and Hans hopper was new to the libertarian world that this time he had just moved out of grad school to the United States to study with an under Rothbard, which was over 10 years until Rothbard died in 95. But he published this. That's the first I'd ever heard his name so there was this symposium in Liberty magazine, which at the time was sort of like reason magazine but it was a little bit more intellectual and philosophical and it was blown away by it I just found it fascinating and quickly for the listeners who are not familiar with it in Liberty in libertarianism and in political philosophy. There are many different understandings of what rights are like which kinds of rights we have and what they actually are in principle. So like what is a right and then what rights do we have those are two different questions. So legal philosophers might have disputes about what what rights are are they claims. Are they entitlements or you know different formulations and then what rights do we have is it are they're negative rights are they positive rights are their welfare rights, you know they're different types of rights and then how do you justify and figure out which rights we have and then you have natural law, utilitarianism, etc. So Hans and like Rothbard and a lot of the early Austrians and like I ran were more Aristotelian or more kind of natural natural rights based, like thinking the native the natural nature of human human society and the way the world is has certain normative or ethical implications which once you understand what human nature is and what the nature of human society is and the nature of the world, you can then say you can conclude or deduce what what's right and wrong and what rights we have like that's the kind of natural law approach and that was sort of rock bars approach to roughly borrowing from the tradition of Locke and Rand and Aristotle that kind of stuff right. And also with a smattering of economic insight which has a slightly consequentialist utilitarian aspect to it so all these kind of things combined, but then hoppe came along as sort of a realistic content influenced by Mises but also influenced by rock barge radical libertarianism and radical understanding of politics and capitalism. And his argument was and and also influenced by his PhD advisor Jürgen Habermas who's a famous, like democratic socialist but extremely smart and influential European philosopher, who came up with this theory called discourse ethics, also propounded by another German named Carl Otto appell. And so hoppe. When he started learning about Mises and Austrian economics and rock party and as I'm after grad school after Habermas. He remembered the stuff from Habermas about argumentation ethics or discourse ethics and he had this epiphany that, oh I can use the insights that Habermas had, which Habermas took them in a sort of democratic socialist direction but the core insight was that we can we can figure out or justify the basis of political norms which is laws and rights, like which which laws are good or bad which laws are justified or not by realizing that the only way to figure this out is by argumentative discourse between people trying to figure this out. And that always has to happen in a real world context where physical human beings are using scarce resources in the world are meeting together and having a peaceful conversation about it. And during that peaceful conversation. Again, it's peaceful because if it's not peaceful it's not a real argument you're just coercing the other guy. So people are willing to listen to each other and to follow the dictates of reason, instead of coercion and forcing the other guy to accept their conclusion. So, the simple insight there is that there are some normative presuppositions of all discourse of all justification of all discourse. It's about which norms are justified every time you do that it's always in that context, which means that you could never propose a norm, you could never justify a norm that you would propose in the argument that has a primary to the presuppositions you have as part of the discourse. In other words, you can't have a peaceful argument with someone and say that I'm going to propose the rule that we should kill each other. It's like, well, but the purpose of we're both agreeing that peace is a good thing because we're having to adopt peace, just to talk. So, if you really wanted to kill me just pull your gun out and kill me but if you want to talk, you're adopting this peaceful framework. And it's sort of like a filter that filters out certain propositions you could ever possibly justify. And so, using Austrian economic insights and analysis and the nature knowledge about the nature of scarcity and the way politics works. Papa simply says, well, if you know a little bit about economics and you recognize that there are these core basic normative presuppositions of discourse, then every social every every ethic that someone would propose that's a socialist ethic is going to be contrary. It's going to be self contradictory. It's a filtering process he simply says, the only norm that could survive the only political norm that could survive the test is basically the libertarian one because that one is the only one that's compatible with the peaceful and pro property rights presuppositions and so the people who disagree with this. I think they don't realize this but their core disagreement has to be that they disagree with the idea that there are normative presuppositions of discourse. Now, and again, I think that's enough detail but the point is let them try it. Let them try to have an argument with someone. Like go to someone's house and say, Oh, I enjoy your house and in a couple minutes I'm going to light a fire and burn it down because I don't respect property rights and I'm going to treat it as my own. Okay, at that point in time you're no longer, you're no longer friendly neighbors. Now he's an enemy and you have to treat him like just a technical problem or a danger to be dealt with but you're outside the realm of argument at that point. And he says, Okay, I'm in your house it's your house. I'm not going to hit you I want to persuade you of socialism or whatever. He's, when he does that stance he's he's respecting your property rights and so you can say well, you're just, you're inherently respecting my property rights by having a civilized discussion with me. At the same time you're saying it's okay for the government to tax me to take it and steal it from me. So you got to choose one or the other and if you if you, you know, so that's that's sort of the way argumentation ethics goes and then. So, and I think it's a brilliant insight it blew my mind too so I can see why your friend was stunned by it and luckily for him I mean when I read it that was the only thing. Papa, first thing, and then 15 libertarians, all disagreeing with him and attacking him except for Rothbard basically. But in the meantime there's a there's a ton of expansion and development and literature on this that anyone interested in this can can follow up on. And I say just something like the one example I like to use I like to use two examples, when I try to explain this to people. The first one is like for example let's say I, I say, there is no right to breathe. But wait a minute to be able to say that in the first place, you, you have to breathe. Right, so the content of your proposition is incompatible to the prerequisites, you need to say that in the first place so. And that that gets to another nuance of the of Hoppe's argument is that what he points out is that using sort of a Kantian framework about about the universalizability of norms, which I think Habermas and then Hoppe and Appel also used to some degree. What he points out is that. So, so that kind of context that you just mentioned, you would have one person saying there's no right to breathe, but they don't mean it for themselves because obviously they're breathing to do this. What they mean is, you don't have a right to breathe, but I do. So that's what would criticize as a particularizable claim as opposed to universalizable and, but, and here's what I haven't read any of them put it this way I've written it, I've written on this this way, the way I understand it is the problem with particularizable ethics, as opposed to universalizable ethics now universalizable ethic is, is the is the maximum or the rule of conduct that you're inherently are explicitly saying is the right rule. But it has to be a rule, which is not just a concrete instance, but a rule applies to everything that it would cover. So, but particularizable in a simple form would be something like you're my slave, and I get to hit you but you don't get to hit me. And that is the mentality of a criminal or a slave owner or a tyrant. That's not a persuasive argument because in a peaceful argument of context, you could never justify it, because to justify something you have to. Number one, not contradict the presuppositions of the discourse, which is peace and property rights or property rights. And you also have to come up with an argument that is based in the objective nature of reality that you can appeal to. So for example, if you want to say, I can treat you differently than me, you have to have a reason. If you just say, I can treat you differently than me because I'm me and you're you. That's literally not giving a reason. So it's just the same as the war of all against all or a dog eat dog society. You have to have an argument. So you have to appeal to common reason and to intersubjectively verifiable or or objective facts. Right. And so for example, if I this is one rebuttal to one of the criticisms against argumentation ethics, some people will say, well, Hoppe says that you can't deny the ownership of the other person during an argument. And yet it's possible for a slave owner to sit down with his slave for an hour and have a discussion. Right. Yeah, but the point is he can't come up with an argument to justify his enslavement of the guy. But then people say, well, you believe in jailing people for real crimes. But the thing is there is that in those cases, you could come up with, there is a difference. So for two equally situated people. If I'm claiming ownership of myself, it's got to be for some reason and it's because I'm not saying it's because I'm a human actor. Well, I can't deny that you're also human actor because I'm having a conversation with a similarly situated human. So I'm implicitly appealing to my nature as a rational human actor, as the basis for the rights that I claim for myself. I can't deny that you have them too, because we're we're we're similarly situated. I would have to find a difference. And so back in the days of racism, you say, well, it's because I'm white and you're black. But that's not a relevant difference. Like there's no rights don't come from color. They come from, say, your rational faculty as an actor, or as a moral agent, or as I don't know, a child of God or something, whatever. But you would have to have an objective argument distinguishing the people. And of course, in most situations of aggression or domination, you can't do that. So if you claim rights for yourself and you deny them to the other person who's very similar, then it's just contradictory because it makes no sense. It's not an argument. It's particularizable. However, let's suppose a guy murders my family and I catch him and I put him in a cage until the authorities get there or until I decide to kill him or whatever. There is an asymmetrical relationship now. I am literally coercing this criminal, this prisoner of mine. And I could have a discussion with him for an hour and he could try to persuade me to release him. But on what grounds he could say, hey, can sell it's contradictory for you to say you're a self owner, but I'm not. And I'll say no, but here's a difference with the first situation. You committed aggression and I did not. So there is a difference. But in a normal situation where there's no aggression, there's no relevant difference between the people. You can find differences. You can say I'm white in your black. But then you have to have a reason why that's a relevant difference. And unless your argument that is that rights flow from color or from race, which by the way, some people implicitly make that mistake partly to a degree when they argue for they argue against abortion, for example, they'll say that they'll say that well if you believe in human rights, then you have to be opposed to abortion, because the fetus is a human. Right. So what they're implicitly assuming is that because we make the linguistic convenience of calling rights human rights that rights come from human nests from being human. Which biologically means having certain genes, right? Hold on a second. Let me close my door. Yeah, I should do that too. Leaning ladies just came I need to. So I mean there's you see so so but but the thing is that's just a rice don't come from being human. They come from certain other characteristics like being rational and humans happen to have that capacity. But only, I mean, most people would recognize that if if a space alien race from from, you know, from from another solar from another star system showed up tomorrow, and they were rational and could communicate with us. They would have rights. So human this is not the basis of rights is something some other capacity that humans happen to have. And most people think it's rationality or some people think it's a soul from God, but the point is it's not your skin color. Right. And if you think it is then you're setting up a war between two races and then they're not going to have rational communication they're going to have to have war against each other and domination but anyway that's just some new some some ways to look at some of this. It cannot be subjective right and color today is more subjective than ever right you can identify as a caller so it's super subjective. I mean, not only not only that you cannot what they think they can right that's right. Well not only that it's not relevant I mean I have a white dog, a white poodle. He has rights and I have the black poodle that I have doesn't have no one thinks rights come from color or even from race in the in the in the human interracial sense. It comes from the capacities that humans have that that most animals that all other animals as far as we know do not have. So it's rationality or something did something about consciousness rationality. I mean, or even a soul I don't believe in that stuff but again that would be a distinction between that would be the core for rights. But it's all I'm saying is that during an argument to have an argument that succeeds in justifying a certain claim. You have to appeal to certain objective facts in the world that are not, and that are also relevant has to be relevant. But again, that's what that's again if it's not relevant, then you're actually not making an argument. It's basically a particularizable claim you're saying, I get to rape you because I'm me, and you're you. Who, who, how would the victim accept that rule, like it's not even an argument. And that's essentially what socialism is, I get to hit you but you don't get to hit me. That's what statism is right. I agree that we can't commit torts and crimes and theft and rape and robbery and murder of each other, but the state can do it. So they make an exception to the state, it's it's again that's particularizable like I can do it but you can't. Yeah, and that kind of rule could never be accepted as fair by a community because it's not fair, and it's not appealing to objective facts. As Hoppe points out, this is why property rules arise as they do to homestead or appropriate unknown resources in the world, you got to do something physical and real with it that establishes a visible public link between you and the thing like you transform it with by mixing your labor with it, put a fence around it or in border it, you do something where everyone can see. You might call that an objective link and then the Confians might call that an intersubjectively ascertainable link but the point is, is something real and tangible, and establishes a connection that everyone can see. If on the other hand, you propose a system that where property rights can come from mere, as Hans calls it, Hoppe calls it, mere verbal decree. So, the whole purpose of property rights is to solve the problem of conflict over these scarce resources, and the, the Lockheed idea of original appropriation does that because the first guy who gets it. There's no conflict because no one actually had the resource before so there's no one there who can complain. Anyone who can complain is pretending to be an owner, but they weren't the first one to use it so they're not an owner so the first owner using it doesn't cause conflict. But if he doesn't get to keep it, there would be conflict. That's why, once you first possess an unowned resource, you're not causing conflict, and also no one can take it from you. Like those two core rules like first owner can use it, and then no one can take it from him. That's the core of all libertarianism right. Those rules satisfy the desire to come up with a system where we can all live together in peace and harmony and cooperation without conflict. But if you proposed a property rule where some some people can own things by mere verbal decree by just claiming it, that would generate conflict because any a million people at once could claim to own the moon or North America or Canada, or this island or whatever, even though they haven't touched it or been there or worked it or put a boundary around it. And those types of rules are implicit in a lot of the socialist policies that we have now. You know, where the government, the state prevents people from accessing the Rocky Mountains in America or Virgin Territory, or parts of Alaska or whatever. They're acting as an owner, even though they're a criminal organization who has the right to own nothing, and they never did anything to use or transform the land. It's just by mere verbal decree. And of course, this is how wars get started, you know, you can have multiple nations all claiming, no, we have a claim on this North American Virgin continent, you know, because our one of our explorers set his foot on Plymouth Rock. So we're claiming the entire continent or something like that. You can't claim things that you haven't actually appropriated. Yeah, like that makes me remember that me session insights about the division of labor that the reason why people cooperate is because they recognize that thanks to the division of labor and the more prosperity that comes out of this. Everyone's life is better off. But I can still like, I think I did something wrong here. Okay, you're back. So like remember that me session insights, like division of labor is the reason in the prosperity that comes out of this is the reason why people cooperate right. But there's no ethical component there is like an utilitarian arguments. Right. Yeah, I think I think me is a more consequentialist I have a blog post I mentioned in my book if you just go to my book and search for the word empathy, empathy. But the thing is like, for example, I remember reading many places that there is like a normative way to solve conflict and if it's impossible, if the person becomes like a irrational person. There is the technical way to solve conflict which is like fight right right well so okay so there's a couple issues here so I think you may be thinking of what I've written about before. I'm just astounding what hopper wrote so hopper, you know hopper pointed out that it is argumentation ethics and related ideas. Just because you could explain to someone. The only justified norms doesn't mean they're going to listen to them because moral laws are or are political laws are legal laws. They are causal laws or physical laws that are self enforcing like it's impossible to violate the law of gravity. That's one type of law, but a moral law says you shouldn't do this, but you can still violate it because it's a should it's a norm. Right. And the same thing with even legal laws and with the things politics and governments and legal systems try to try to corral. What he pointed out was listen, just because we can have a good argument for why we're all better off. According to our own values that we inherently share because of our nature because of our history because of our race. Because of our social nature because of what we naturally presuppose when we get together and civilized discourse and argument. It doesn't mean that someone is everyone's going to follow it. And for those people, they're outside the reach of reason and you have to treat them as a technical problem. I mean, you know, if you live if you live somewhere and there's a raging lion or elephant or gorilla, you cannot solve the conflict with him with reason. You got to treat it as a technical problem and you've got to protect yourself with some some means other than reason. And the same thing with a hurricane or disease, or a famine. Those are technical problems that humans deal with. And so the, the, the simplistic way I look at it is hoppa and others and rock bar they use some simplified scenarios called Robinson age or the Robinson Crusoe economics. And they just imagined Crusoe alone on his island. And he faces the same problems any human faces scarcity, having to act and various economic implications of that action. It's a simplified economy in a sense. Now, if other humans are on the scene, which is almost always the case. As Mises pointed out, we benefit from living with other people because number one, we enjoy not being alone because we're social, we're a social species. We just enjoyed that. It's part of our nature. But we also benefit from it because there's a division and specialization of labor so we can trade. So there's more wealth. But now this comes with the problem. And the problem is that Crusoe on his island can use scarce means to achieve his ends. Although he can't trade with other people and he's going to live a very simple life. There's no other human around who might take his stuff. Right. And if there's animals that might take it he can deal with them in technical ways like put up a fence or use a gun or something like that. Right. But when there's other humans you want to trade with them you want to live among them. But you also would prefer them not take your stuff. Everyone's better off and most people know this that people are not sociopaths. And so, again, there's two ways to deal with other people taking your stuff. One would be treat them as a technical means and treat them like an animal. But because we have reason and empathy with each other because of our social nature, which is where I think Mises's point gets to a normative point. Because we have empathy, we know that most of our fellow men who are not sociopaths have shared core values. So you can appeal to those shared values combined with reason to persuade them to go along with it with a societal system of property norms. And that actually seems to work right we've seen that happen for thousands of years, not perfectly but more or less. So that's where the norms come in from this empathy realization and from the, from the reasoning aspect of man when we can use our reason to realize the benefits of trade. And because we prefer it because most people are not sociopaths. I remember like reading your book at some point, it says that today might makes it makes a right. Right. But that's unjustifiable like that's pretty much what where I was going to get when I brought up the Mises insight about division of labor and people cooperating right. So like even if I understand that thanks to the vision of labor, we can have a higher standard of living. And so that's why I'm not going to punch you on the face or something. Even if I decide to punch you on the face, I cannot justify this. And that brings me to an interesting question that is, for example, we now have like the blockchain. And the blockchain is a technology that made other things obsolete in my opinion banks for instance, but not only banks registries as well. But as we live in an era where might makes right. I can like put some document on the blockchain and say here is cryptographically verified authenticated. And I don't need like a registry to say that this document is valid. So there's going to the same way the banks are going to fight to keep the to try to have like some relevance still, even though they are already obsolete. Thanks to the blockchain registries can, it can be considered obsolete as well because you can verify and authenticate documents. And here in Brazil, there are registries that are using the blockchain. So they are just acting as a middleman to take money from people and present this themselves as this traditional authority, the might that in whatever they say, for example, you can put something on the blockchain. Like some document or something, and it's there is valid is authenticated everything right, but then the registry all but we don't recognize that, and we have the the monopoly on violence. So I think that's going to be an interesting fight and discussion moving on. Okay, well, a couple things anyone who says might makes right doesn't understand the difference between fact and value is an odd. They don't understand what the difference between possession and ownership factual control and the legal right to control they're just different things. If you think might makes right. You're basically a type of monist who doesn't believe in rights at all, like it might makes right there are no rights. So that's a total confusion of as for registry do you mean like title registries for property what do you mean. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm not a huge expert on this but I am my current opinion and I'm willing to be proven wrong on this. I think Bitcoin is but or some cryptocurrency I don't know if it'll be Bitcoin I think it may be but a digital money will be useful if it's decentralized and inflation proof and censorship proof. That will be useful and I think it's inevitable. I don't know how long it'll take it's inevitable, unless we have World War 3 next month which may happen. But I see that's the only function is just to be a better a better money than the fiat money that the government has come up with to screw up the original fairly good commodity money we used to have. So money is a useful thing in society fiat money ruins that part of money because it can be censored and inflated. So a digital money that solves that problem is good. I don't really see the function of such as the technology has having anything to do with data storage registries, proof, etc. Who knows maybe I don't know. I don't offer example. Go ahead. For example, here in Brazil. There is a Bitcoin enthusiast who wrote a book. Back in 2013. Fernando Warsh is his name. I don't know if he's going to listen to this he lives right here in my city. And when his daughter was born. That's way back. I think there was only Bitcoin in Ethereum maybe I don't even know. And he was never. He was like a he's still a Bitcoin maximalist to this day. And he said he put his daughter's birth certificate on the Bitcoin blockchain way back. Yeah. So, it's possible. It's possible. I just don't see what what problem it solves. So, because, you know, he could have had a blog, he got out of blog, a WordPress blog for free or a blog or blog or something and he could have just posted an image of that too. Or he could digitize it and put it on his hard drive at home or I'm sure there's a government registry that keeps these things so I don't money solves the problem of barter. In a barter society. You can't calculate. And you, you have a trade problem where you can't have because the devil coincidence of wants problem. So money solves that problem. Then the government comes along and screws up the money by, by centralizing it. And by inflating it. And so money still forms part of this function of, of exchange and calculation. But the calculation functions degraded when there's always inflation, but it still works as exchange calculation better than a barter society would. But the government has basically ruined money. So the whole purpose of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency is to get back to a money that actually works and solves the original problem money was supposed to work. So a workable cryptocurrency solves a real problem. I don't think that we have a problem in the world of being able to know who owns which piece of property or when people were born. That that a cryptocurrency blockchain would solve it's just not solving a real problem that exists. I think it's more like a geek activist thing you know like in the beginning. More of a maxi in the sense of I do think that for now it's going to have to be increasing in store as a store value kind of thing to avoid inflation. So it's solving the problem that you don't want to store your money in dollars, you can use it for everyday exchanges but you don't want to if you if you're worth a million dollars you don't want to have a million dollars of your wealth in cash because you're going to lose 5% every year or whatever it is you want. So you would keep it in stocks or real estate or or or paintings or maybe gold or maybe Bitcoin you keep it in something that doesn't get inflated. So it's going to solving that problem right now and then later on because it's homogenous and hopefully fungible. It will be it can be used as a currency as well when we when we get to that point that's sort of how I think about it. But there's no big problem society of people not being able to know who owns the house down the street. The system works fine. I mean the government runs it is it's a county records office maybe. But yeah but like instead of, for example, the same way the blockchain broke the bank monopoly on money transfer. The blockchain can also break the monopoly on like, for example, any, for any, for me, for example, if I want to, I go to the title registry down the road, and they have like, oh here you have the stamp blah blah blah. But I don't need this guy to see it and stamp it. I can have the miners to do that for example. And then is it and I know it's just like, yeah, no, I know I know what you're thinking but the thing is, you do need to go to the title office because the legal system we still haven't we don't have anarchy we still have a state. Yeah, I mean but going this direction, you know, it is not. Yeah, but even if you imagine anarchy. I mean I'm fine with just a local physical title office as a private title office they I mean I don't see what advantage you get from putting it on the blockchain but and not only that. I actually think that it's possible that different block I mean, a lot of these blockchains are using like a theorem. I mean if you're a Bitcoin maxi you think eventually there's just going to be one. Like, like what about all these NFTs they rely upon their own little stupid blockchains. And so then where's the data, who's maintaining it because there's no fine. See there's only a financial incentive for miners to mine a blockchain this that's purpose is to produce money. So that's why I kind of think that the only purpose of a blockchain, which is a horribly inefficient spread ledger ledger system, its only purpose is to be the backbone of a digital money. And, you know, if I wanted to store data there's way better ways to do it than putting it on the monetary blockchain. And so what if Bitcoin in works for 30 years, and then in 30 years, Bitcoin number 7.5 comes out and everyone thinks it's way better and we switch over to it. Where's all the data that was on the first Bitcoin ledger. I mean, do we lose all of our records that were on that. Who's maintaining it there's no there's no miners left anymore Bitcoin 1.0 disappeared. So the whole idea of it's not permanent I mean there's got to be other ways to store data permanently. I just don't think of Bitcoin as a solution to data preservation because there's nothing wrong with changing monies I mean you could change from Bitcoin one to Bitcoin seven in in in 30 years. What's wrong with that society might say okay we're going to go to a money that's got some better properties. Doesn't matter what money you have. I wouldn't say data preservation but for example, right now, for hundreds of years, all the data was like on paper right, but then we got a lot of this data that was on paper and make copies of this digital copies of this right and maybe in the future something else is going to happen and then we're going to take it all from from digital and turn into this something else so we're just changing the medium where we are keeping the data so but that's not the problem. The thing that I think is, it changes. It adds to is the, how are we validating what how are we authenticating these this information right you know it and of course not going to be all information maybe. No I hear you, I hear you I'm just saying, I would be happy if we can have a good sound money again. That would satisfy me I'm not trying to add like a Christmas tree with lights 17 other functions on top of the function of blockchain like smart contracts and real estate records and birth certificate records I think it's, I mean, I could be wrong. I'm an old guy. I'm very conservative. I'm very skeptical. I don't believe these things right away when I hear enthusiasts talk about it. Again, there were people in the early days of Bitcoin they thought it was so neat that they could buy a cup of coffee with a Bitcoin, but it was just a stunt, because you can also buy a cup of coffee with a dollar. I mean, it didn't really add anything to your life to be able to do that they were just trying to prove that it was isn't it amazing that we can have decentralized peerless, you know, peer to peer exchanges without any permission and do this. It's a good party stunt, but what does it do you and I think that's what people do they're like oh I can put my birth certificate on the blockchain isn't that neat. But what really in today's world what good does it do I think it's more of a proof that you could possibly do it in the future. But I don't think it's really necessary or realistic right now. Again, I could be wrong about this but and I don't pretend to be an expert on it, but you did mention about banks let's talk about banks really quickly you said that banks are not going to be. I don't necessarily something. So the way I think about it being an Austrian and being a big critic of fractional reserve banking and of course central banking and of course the currency. I think of I think that the state involvement and their inter mixture with the finance and banking industry over the last couple centuries has corrupted everything. And it's muddled and muddied together to separate functions of what we think of as banks, one is storage, just storing people's money like gold originally, but then that became page paper tickets, and then then the state monopolized it and then fraction reserve banking started on top of that and it's not really storing anything, but it became a central clearing house. The second function is credit intermediation, which is basically, I've got some wealth, and I want to make some profit off of it. So I could loan it to someone if I can go find someone who wants to borrow money from me and do a promissory note and I could give him a loan to start their business, but I'm just a regular guy I don't have time to do that I know who. I go to a bank and the bank has other people come to them as borrowers and the bank loans money to them after doing creditworthiness checks, and the bank loans it out of the certain interest rate and then they pay me part of that as a as the as the depository. So they're credit intermediaries. Frankly as a Bitcoin kind of nut I, I suspect that that whole. Okay, so let's talk about the storage function. Do you really need a storage function in a Bitcoin world. I see if you have a bunch of gold you need to put it somewhere so you might put it in the bank. Plus you need to write checks, but in a Bitcoin world, you can store your own stuff on a little thing, and you don't need to write check you can just send money without anyone's permission. That function of banks might disappear. It might not because people some people like custodians like point base, but that's just for convenience. I don't think they need to do it really just a convenience thing. And they have almost no cost. So they don't have to make up for the cost of the storage fees by loaning some of the money out in a fraudulent way. And which Coinbase doesn't Coinbase is basically a 100% reserve storage bank. Let's call them storage banks. Now the second function credit intermediation I think that could be a valuable function. But it wouldn't really be a bank it would just be someone who helps you find they're like they get a finder sheet for helping you find a borrow for your money. I sometimes wonder if in a future Bitcoin world, the practice of loans and lending and debt would almost disappear. I think we're so used to that because we live in a fiat world and inflationary world and impoverished world where everyone takes out they get they get in debt and they have to get a mortgage to buy a house. I could imagine in a very rich very prosperous sell money world everyone's mentality changes. Yeah, go ahead. There's that thing help us says like you cannot anticipate a future good except at a discount right so maybe you have some Bitcoin or whatever but you don't have enough to do whatever you want to do so you need to borrow it from someone. And what I was what I was envisioning was like say a young a young guy gets out of high school. He starts he starts working he's paid in bitcoins. He's making a really good salary because we live in a free market world now. He just rents an apartment right he just he rents he rents a house or rents an apartment. He saves up money saves up Bitcoin. So he lives he pays rent for five years and five years later, he buys a house for cash, because he has a million dollars worth of bitcoins. So, why would he ever take a mortgage out this whole practice of doing mortgages for things is insane. And not only that, you know, if if if I want to start a business. Instead of taking a loan out from other people, why wouldn't I just ask them to invest. Because lots of people are going to have bitcoins and they're going to not want to keep all their wealth in Bitcoin. They want to make some returns from from from equity investments, like in the stock market, or maybe in their friends, a restaurant or something. Why would you need to do it as alone, just let them become a one 10th owner and they either they're an equity owner. I mean, I'm, I could be totally wrong with this, but I have a suspicion that both functions of banking may disappear in a Bitcoin world. And they won't need them for storage. And if the idea of debt and credit disappears and credit intermediation will be a thing of the past, but in either case, I just think they should be distinguished. Right. And so, if you want someone to custody your stuff use Coinbase or use some little wallet, or whatever, or a side chain for some of it, you know, like lightning network or liquid or something. And if you want to do credit information, you would go to a bank. I just think you would have two types of banks and they should once a credit intermediation. I just think they should call them credit intermediaries, you know, and the other you can call them a custodian Bitcoin custodian service, like just let's let's get rid of the word bank. Anyway, that's that's sort of how I think about this but I, this is one topic you. We brought up that I don't pretend to be a deep expert on. Yeah, like, what do you think about this. The custody thing because I remember Satoshi said that if trusted the parties to need it to prevent double spending. The main benefits are lost something like that. There's something to that. I mean, honestly, I don't, I'm not one of these. I'm not religious so I don't really care what Satoshi said or thought or what his vision was to be honest. So, it's worth looking at her can thinking about but yeah because the purpose was like, get rid of the intermediaries right and, and because you don't need this intermediary to like the distrust model as he calls it to make the payment go through, you can drop the cost tremendously in this, the financial cost of transaction that's what he says like right in the introduction. Right and then if you bring back the intermediary the cost goes back up, and then defeat the purpose of the whole thing the first place. Well, my view is the problem the intermediary is the problem of centralization or and the problem sorry the problem censorship. And the cost as well the cost is higher. Because you have to pay this guy. Yeah, but, but. Okay, what's revolutionary about money is it solves a big problem it solves two big problems of barter. So that's why money emerged and it was good. Okay, and then the state through various things in history has screwed up money and made it made it inflate inflate all the time, which means it cannot be a store value, and it robs people and and it's it's it goes through central channels. So there's their censorship as possible. So that's the main problems right. The promise of a digital cryptocurrency is to solve those things and that's a that would be a big advancement it would be a big problem to solve, just like money solve the big problem of quarter. Right. So, but the, the problem that digital money solves is not that it costs $20 to send a wire to someone, and it's now it's like $2. That's, that's a minor improvement but that's not a fundamental transformation of financial life and human life to have slightly more efficient fees. I don't think that's the promise of a cryptocurrency. Now, it's possible that you can have maybe things like side change which have almost zero fees and that would might enable innovations like micro payments or something like that. Oh, that's funny. Did you see the thumbs up. I did this. Yeah, I thought we were live in someone. No, I thought so too. I think that's a I think that's a new zoom feature. I don't know what else you can do. Anyway, for example, you know, like in very poor countries where people don't even have access to bank accounts stuff like that. They're completely isolated economically so if you really have like a peer to peer low fee like insanely low fee like you can bring all these people in the economy. No, no, no, I agree except. Yeah, I agree with that. I don't think that's like an educate I think like transfer payments and third world stuff is not. Again, it would be great if we can help that situation but let me just really quick tell tell you a personal story like I work at a cruise ship. Out of Fort Lauderdale. And we went to the Caribbean. And we went to places like they're rich islands and poor islands. And I remember I saw this with my own eyes like I saw like a line like a bunch of people waiting and I was like what is this where these people wait for. Oh, this is the line for the money gram or Western Union. Yeah, and these people. They, they, there is like a 20% fee for them to send money back to their family in the poor island. So I think like, no, no, I totally agree. I agree for transfer payments and I think that's one of the only big use cases in terms of use of money today is for transfer payments. I understand that. But on the other hand, it doesn't have to if you're just like a rich American, and you want to send $1,000 of value back to your relative and some third world country. All you got to do is convert your dollars to some crypto. Then there's 20,000 of them right I don't know if it matters which one it is you just convert it. Huh. 30,000 or 30,000 you send it. And then they get it and then they convert it to their local currency. And so it's just a convenient mechanism to get around the state. You could use Bitcoin you can use Bitcoin cash you could use Ethereum I guess I mean because it's a temporary, but that's not the fundamental case, the end case for, I think a crypto currency it needs to be the world's reserve currency. It needs to be something you store a significant chunk of your wealth in without it being deflated. And by the way, so let's say Bitcoin's fees are not just a penny, but they're higher. They're getting closer to the Western Union fees because the size of the block is small. Network ingestion or whatever, however that works, I don't pretend to be an expert on that. I don't see any reason why side chains couldn't emerge. And again, even if they didn't emerge, you can use Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash to do that temporary transfer payment. I just don't think that's the main thing. I think to imagine it ever becoming the dominant world reserve currency where there's no national currencies left anywhere that anyone uses. It's just a one world money standard like it used to be sort of with gold. It would be just Bitcoin or some other currency. I don't know. I'm not stuck on Bitcoin, but let's say it's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a world reserve currency. That's all anyone ever uses. And when they want to make daily transactions with people that are small, like $1 or $0.50 or $5, they might use side chains. They might use side chains. Why not just use a side chain? I'm not compensated that there's any reason to think that in the next 10, 20, 30 years, we're not going to perfect some side chain technology that works with very, very low fees. Were you persuaded by the book? Because I remember. Which one? Roger Bear's book? Yeah. I'm like 2 thirds through it right now. I'm not persuaded by it. It's very well written, I will say. It's very well structured and organized. They did a lot of work carefully collecting details. I think it's a little bit, it's from a perspective that they don't realize that is not the only perspective to have. They have this obsession with Bitcoin being a one block chain system with no side chains that can be used for what can be used. Not really, not really. I remember listening to interviews from Roger Bear and he said in this book, like I listened to the audio book of this. It was quicker. And he was pro Lightning network. And you can even. No, no, no, no. Well, he was pro liquid, I think. But he says that you can build on Bitcoin cash, which he's ever seen. Yeah, yeah. He's not going to use that. He says you could build side chains. But still, they want the base layer to be able to be the cash layer that you can use for cheap transactions. And to enable that, you need eight gigabyte blocks and this kind of stuff in a few years. And I find his hand waving at the, when he says, oh, yeah, that would require 42 terabytes of data for every node runner every year. That's not a big deal. I think 42 terabytes. And it's not just the storage. First of all, that's every year in this cumulative. And it's going to grow exponentially. And there's downloading the block and there's communication. I'm still persuaded by the small blockers. And all this stuff in the book, I think it sounds roughly accurate. He's coloring things a certain way. I still don't see anything nefarious in what the small blockers did. They did what they believed. They have a certain view. And they use their position to do it. I don't see that any rights were violated. I don't believe all these conspiracy shit. Like the CIA was behind that guy, John, I forgot his name. Because he said he works in intelligence. But on his side hobby, he's trying to promote Bitcoin. That doesn't mean the CIA is trying to sabotage Bitcoin. Or because one investor in Blockstream, this French guy, he's a member of the Bilderberg group. Oh, so that means this international conspiracy. This is all just insane. I think it's just crazy conspiracy theorizing. Because they want to tell a narrative that it was sabotaged by the nefarious state powers and the banks. I don't think there's any reason to. I'm a big anti-conspiracy theorist. I don't go in for that. Well, you agree that the layer one should be enough to support any layers too, right? I don't know. Maybe get a five layers. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe layer one supports layer two. Layer two supports layer three. But I remember your question on Twitter or X was this. Like, oh, I read something on this book that got me a little bit concerned. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, that was halfway. It was one-fourth of the book. Then he was talking about the problems that he sees with lightning. Now, I'm sure that lightning proponents might have a different narrative. I haven't heard it yet. But if he's right, well, maybe lightning won't work. Maybe something else will work. Maybe Venmo will work. Maybe Venmo Bitcoin will work. Maybe Visa Bitcoin will work. Or maybe something else will work. And he mentioned offhand something, but he didn't elaborate. Something about a large block side chain. And I thought he was implying that that proposal is you've got Bitcoin as a base layer, and then it's connected to a large block side chain. And then lightning connects to that. Because what he was arguing was that lightning connecting to the Bitcoin layer, there's not enough bandwidth in the block size to accommodate everyone becoming a lightning network user. Like, there wouldn't be enough time to get them on. I don't know the technical details of this. I think maybe eventually the Bitcoin for people will agree to a consensus hard fork and increase the block size a little bit to make side chains more viable. Or maybe you just go base layer, side chain, second side chain. I don't really know, to be honest. I'm not an expert on this kind of stuff. Do you think that for having one developer group, the core, it's kind of centralized in this aspect? I don't know. I see the arguments there makes. I don't know enough about it. But in a sense, because I don't think money is wealth. And I think this is a mistake a lot of people make. Money is not wealth. Money is just an intermediary. I mean, Hoppa and Mises, or at least Rockbar, I don't remember. They call money, it's not a consumer good. It's not a capital good. It's sui generis. It's a good because it's useful, but it's just an intermediate of exchange. And unlike gold, which has a non-monetary use value, a cryptocurrency has zero non-monetary use value. It's purely money, which means that it's just the connection between people exchanging goods of real value, real wealth, which means to me, it doesn't matter what the money is. So I don't care if it's Bitcoin or if it's Monero or if it's Litecoin or Bitcoin God or Bitcoin Hoppa or whatever. I don't care what it is. And I don't really care if we use Bitcoin for 20 years and it works fine and then we realize it's too rickety because it's still better than gold and it's still better than the fiat dollar system. But at a certain point, technology and the usage might get to a point where we need Monero, let's say. And so let's say we switch over. The thing is, I don't care because I don't think wealth is destroyed when you, if all the gold in the world disappeared, we would lose wealth as a human race because it has a non-monetary use value, right? And if it was, especially, even if it wasn't money, but if Bitcoin just like one day crashed and disappeared, yeah, some human beings would lose their fortune because they stupidly put their money into cash. And they put it into a digital cash that could crash. Now they're doing it now because it's a speculative time because they think it might be a phase of adoption. I don't think in the future when a certain cryptocurrency is adopted, I think what would happen is the price goes up and it plateaus at a certain point. Let's say Bitcoin's $70,000 now, let's say it plateaus at $10 million when it's getting close to the representative value of the universal medium of exchange that represents the value of the whole world, basically, something like that, right? At that point, you don't invest in Bitcoin because it's just gonna appreciate in purchasing power every year by roughly the rate of growth of the world's economy. So it's gonna be like an index fund for the world. Okay, so you can put your $3 million of net wealth in Bitcoin if you want, but then there's a chance that it might be replaced someday by another money that's better and then you would lose everything. So I think what my personal view and all my Bitcoin friends don't agree with this, they think the average person should never invest in anything except cash. I said, yeah, well, the problem is cash is not wealth and cash can be the current type of money that is cash can evolve in human society. And so what I envision is, let's say one scenario, Bitcoin keeps going up in value and the more it goes up in value, the more waves of adoption you get, the more FOMO you get, all this kind of stuff. And so in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, eventually it becomes the de facto world reserve currency and it's say 10 million bucks a coin. Of course, it might be more than that if the dollar is hyper-inflating, it might be $17 billion a coin, but I'm talking about in terms of current purchasing power. Like one Bitcoin might be worth in purchasing power in 30 years, what 10 million US dollars can buy you now. That's what I'm saying, right? So in that world, now I'm just a prosperous guy living in a mostly free market because the governments have been denuded of most of their spending power because they don't have fiat banks that anyone buys their bonds anymore. So they have to live on their taxes only, right? So government is smaller, there's more free markets, everyone's richer. Okay, I got 3 million purchasing power, $20, $24 worth of Bitcoins, which probably is like 0.02 Bitcoin, just I don't know what it is, right? So I've got a fraction of a Bitcoin of wealth. Would I keep all of my wealth in Bitcoin? I don't think I would because number one, I wouldn't wanna chase even, I mean, I don't mind getting 6% returns because the world GDP is growing 6% a year, I don't mind that, that's not bad in terms of purchasing power. But hey, my friend tells me if I buy the stock market index, I can make 8%. So I might put some money there, I might buy real estate, or I might think if money changes to another form, I'm screwed. So I wanna put like 80% of my wealth in real things. So that if Bitcoin changes to Bitcoin 7.5, I don't lose everything that I have. So that's how I picture the future of a crypto world. But you see none of this has anything to do with banks or with making micro payments or with storing your birth certificate on the thing. I mean, who knows what's gonna happen, but the fundamental thing to me is to have an inflation hedge and a censorship resistant system. This friend of mine, for this libertarian guy who has a YouTube channel and sometimes talk to you on Twitter, he has a funny argument, like every Bitcoiner who thinks you can only, you should only buy Bitcoin and nothing else. He says like, oh, I'm producing food. So you are basically saving Bitcoin for me when you come to me to buy my food, you know what I'm saying? That's good. I mean, I don't even say people should buy Bitcoin. I mean, being a pro Bitcoin guy is like for my libertarian side, okay? Forget about economics even. The reason I like Bitcoin as a libertarian is because again, it's a way to reduce the states ability to spend money and it's to reduce the state's ability to rob the average person in the poor with inflation and to censor their transactions and to control them. So that to me, that's the promise of a digital money. But because we don't have one yet that's universally adopted and it's really a money yet, if we're ever gonna get there, there's going to be a period of adoption and that period of adoption is between now and sometime in the future. And that means that some cryptocurrency is going to appreciate and value a lot because anything that becomes money has a monetary premium. And so as an investor or as a speculator, that's the reason to invest something in Bitcoin now. It's not to be an activist or to be part of some project or to spend it or to use it. In fact, if you think the price is gonna keep going up because it might be adopted, you'd be stupid to use it, in my view, I mean, using it means spending it or getting rid of it. So I don't ask for points. Yeah, well, for example, Hoppe has this amazing paper. I think it's the Austrian and Marxist class struggle or something like that, class analysis. And he's explaining time preference, the difference between the capitalist and the worker. They have different time preferences. So like, why doesn't the capitalist don't just save all his money because he is a consumer too and cannot help being one? Right? No, I agree with that. But the thing is, if I wanna be a consumer now, I can just use dollars. Dollars work perfectly fine and your local fiat currency, I'm sure works fine. Sure, but what if dollar goes to zero? If dollar goes to zero, you're gonna spend your Bitcoin because you're a consumer and cannot help being one. Right? Well, if the dollar goes to zero, I mean, Bitcoin's already maximized in plateaued and of course you would spend it then. It would be the universal money, but it wouldn't be going up to 10 million then. It would be already 10 million. I'm just saying that right now when it's in the adoption phase is going from 70,000 to a million or 5 million or 10 million. Why would you get rid of it now? You don't need to do that. And the dollar's not zero. And the Brazilian, what is it? Yes. What is it? Yes. It's not zero. I mean, they work. It's just, you're stupid to keep your savings in it. That's all, it actually works. It's just, but no, I agree. There are some narrow use cases even today with these transfer payments like you're talking about. So it's useful for that. Yeah, but for example, even safe-hitting, he says that for example, oh, don't use your dirty dollars because you're financing wars, blah, blah, blah. So. Really? Yeah. Well, I guess you could make a moral case for it. And there's a guy, a friend of mine named Joel Baumgar. He's a Mississippi businessman, former politician type who's a big, he's on Facebook, I think. And he claims that he like, he uses this Bitcoin credit card and he claims that he makes money off of it because he just puts all of his money into his kind of Coinbase account or whatever it is. And everything he buys, he buys on his Bitcoin credit card. But because there's a time delay and because the price keeps going up, like he might put... Yeah, but this is like BitPay, right? You think you're paying with crypto but you give your crypto to BitPay and BitPay gives its dollar to the vendor. What are you saying? It's a conversion, but it's stored in Bitcoin until you spend it. And so because of the time delay, if the price goes up, then if I put 20,000 in and then in a year, I spend by a $10,000 car, but now my Bitcoin might be worth 40,000. So I actually got a car for free and I have $30,000 of worth left. But of course, sometimes the price goes down and they don't think it works in those times, but I guess you could... But it's a stunt. I mean, no normal person is gonna do this. This is not how we're gonna get adoption, I think, by hectoring people to get a Bitcoin credit card and they're gonna go, why? Why? If we have time for one more question. Yeah, let's do one more then I need to go. I would like to ask, for example, have you get to this part where Roger Vier on his book argues that medium of exchange precedes the store of value and he even cites Mises and Rothbard because like Rothbard has this quote on what government has done to our money that all people think money has all these other functions like union of account, of store of value. It's even in quotes, right? I don't think I've gotten there yet. I've seen him mention other people saying that argument that medium of exchange has to come first because it has to have a use case. Yeah, Rothbard says that... I haven't gotten to the part where he quotes Rothbard and Mises yet, but I'd be curious to get to that part. I'm reading it. I was reading it two this morning, so... Yeah. So what does he say? Well, Rothbard on this book, what has government done to our money says that... So people think money has all these other functions but there are only corollaries of the one function, medium of exchange. I've always... Honestly, I've always thought that because I've never in my life until the Bitcoin stuff happened, I never heard of store of value or a unit of account. I always only heard of medium of exchange and I understood that. But I do think they're all interrelated. I've always also been skeptical of the interpretations most people give of Mises regression theorem. Like some Austrians used it in the beginning to say that Bitcoin can never work because it didn't have a commodity you style you first. And so therefore Mises proved this. I think they're totally misinterpreting the whole point of Mises regression theorem. And anyway, I don't think we can really figure out a brand new phenomenon like this we've never seen before with some kind of 1930s reasoning from the analog age. I mean, we have to be a little bit humble and see what happens. I don't think Bitcoin is money yet. It's not a medium of exchange. I think it will be money when it's a medium of exchange. Well, it is a medium of exchange, but it's not money because money is the most commonly used medium of exchange. Well, so I mean, I think money is not a binary. It's a spectrum, right? There's moneyness and Bitcoin has a very low degree of moneyness at this point. The dollar has a very high degree of moneyness at this point. It's just that the fiat money like the dollar and probably every other fiat currency in the world is not very close to what you imagine being an ideal money because governments can inflate it. That's it. And they can inflate it because they have de-anchored it from the original limited supply commodity of gold and silver, that kind of stuff, right? And so I think that for anything to become money, it has to, and I have heard other accounts like from, I don't know, maybe VJ Boyapatti, maybe Safe Amuse, I can't remember. They sort of reinterpret the Karl Manger, maybe Mises' origin of money idea about, it might not have been an exact historical reconstruction or chronological reconstruction of exactly how money did emerge, there could have been an aspect of when something like gold becomes a money, it did have a value first, just like Bitcoin had a value first as a collectible sort of libertarian thing, you know? Yeah, but then you have to remember the subjectivity of value, right? It's not, nothing is a store of value, right? Correct. I totally agree. Yeah. I totally agree. I'm a little bit skeptical of that metaphor because I'm a subjectivist, but the thing is, let's suppose something, there's a barter society with no money and there's something of value like gold or seashells or whatever. And people start maybe on occasion using them as an indirect medium of exchange and people start recognizing more and more people are doing this. So they start anticipating that this thing might someday become more widely used as a medium of exchange. And then they might recognize that, well, if that happens, it's gonna get even more value like it's gonna get a monetary premium, which means these seashells, I can trade a hundred seashells for a cow right now, but more and more people are starting to use this because they're finding this medium of exchange thing to be useful. Maybe I'm gonna hold on to them because they might be worth 10 times as much in two years. And so it's sort of a process like that. And so people start collecting them in anticipation of its future widespread use as a medium of exchange. I think that's what's going on with Bitcoin right now. The reason it has a value of $70,000 because people think it's going to keep going up in value. Why do they think that? Well, I think they know that its supply is limited so it can't be inflated. And they also know that it's homogenous and fungible. So it potentially could be used as a medium of exchange sometime in the future. So they're sort of anticipating this future time when it will start being used as a medium of exchange. But if it's ever used as a medium of exchange, then its value will be much higher. So right now it's a speculative asset. Yeah. And sometimes people don't even know that, oh, there is a limited supply. Sometimes people buy it just because they heard from somebody else that that's the thing, the hype and they just want to borrow it. Well, the ignorance of people that dabble in it is shocking. I still hear people say like, I wish I could afford a Bitcoin but they're just too expensive now. They don't even understand that you can buy a partial Bitcoin. They don't even understand, they think, oh, it's $70,000. That's too much for me. They don't know you can buy it. They don't know you can buy $100 worth. They don't even understand that. Yeah, you have to explain with me. They're a pound of beef is this but they're not going to buy a pound. You can buy less. Yeah, but the point is you have to explain that and then they might get it but then they're going to wonder why. And you can say, well, it's really not a Bitcoin. It's Satoshi's and there's 100 million per Bitcoin. That's the real unit. So we should probably call it Satoshi coin if we want to be clear. It's like the price of Bitcoin right now is only like $1.17 million of a cent or so. I don't know what it is either. Anyway, you want to, go ahead. Well, if you finish reading this book, I'm curious to see what you think of it. I hope you post something on Twitter and maybe a discussion can carry on from there. I'm trying to give a close and fair read and I appreciate Roger for writing it. And I guess Steve Patterson and his co-author helped him write it. I will say they've done a good job. I'm not an insider, so I don't know how much they've... You were on Steve Patterson's show a while ago talking about the mathematician ethics, right? I think you did his show. Yes, several years ago. Several years ago we did. That's before he started denying infinity and doing all these other things and getting it done. I didn't follow that. He thinks that there's no such thing as infinity. I don't know. Yeah, it's a theory. But he's apparently a good writer and he's smart. And so is Roger. So no, I'm curious to get to the end of it. I'll let you know what I think. But didn't you have a business that you wanted to mention here? Oh yeah, sure. Like for example, I'm big on privacy stuff. You probably know Naomi Brockwell. She's big on privacy as well. And I like this VPN provider, ARIA VPN. ARIA VPN.net. Go check it out. They don't... They have like a zero knowledge architecture so they don't get your information. They don't log your activity and they only accept crypto like Bitcoin Cash Monero and Bitcoin. So check them out, ARIA VPN.net. Have you spelled that? R-E-I? ARIA, it's ARIA is A-R-I-A.net. A-R-I-A.net. A-R-I-A.net, yeah, ARIA, yeah. Okay, VPN, okay, very good. All right, Bruno, I enjoyed it and let's stay in touch and we'll chat later. Sure, thank you very much, man. Brian, pleasure.