Economists Uncut

Trump’s Sh*tcoin vs. Bitcoin (Uncut) 01-22-2025

Trump’s Sh*tcoin vs. Bitcoin: Literature, Family, and Politics with Robert Breedlove (WiM547)

What are your thoughts on people launching crypto projects like Trump’s World Liberty Financial? Every non-Bitcoin crypto asset is a s**t coin. People talk about evolution. The last 100 years, it’s like we’re devolving as a society.

 

When you take out GOD, GOV fills the vacuum. The state is striving to become a secular religion. How did our world go from Milton to Mein Kampf 300 years later? When you print money, you are violating private property.

 

Tax a citizenry, you are violating private property. But you need spiritual freedom, you need economic freedom, you need educational freedom. One of my favorite definitions of evil, evil is the force which believes its knowledge is complete.

 

And when you think you have done that, you should really check yourself. I’m Josh Zielinski, the financial quarterback. We’re being joined by Robert Breedlove.

 

We’re talking about everything, his journey into Bitcoin, freedom maximalism. So Robert, you are a freedom maximalist. Have you trademarked that term? Because I think you’re the only one I’ve heard who uses that.

 

I like it. As a freedom maximalist, I would not agree with the concept of IP. So trademarks would be out of the question.

 

Oh, really? Why is that? Ideas are not scarce. They’re non-rivalrous, right? Once you have an idea, you can use the idea without preventing me from deriving any benefit from the idea, which is not the same for, you know, a physical asset, right? If I have a car, for me to enjoy the benefits of the car, I have to deprive you of the benefits of using the car at the same place in the same time. So actually, IP is communistic or socialistic or a scam and inconsistent with freedom maximalism.

 

So I don’t know if I coined it or not. There’s obviously Bitcoin maximalism became a term in the wake of, I think, Vitalik Buterin making fun of people that were focused solely on Bitcoin, calling them maximalists. And then Bitcoiners kind of absorbed that as their namesake.

 

And I just basically made a play on that because even Bitcoin, as great as it is, I still consider it to be a means to an end. And that end is human freedom. Um, so that’s what I’m really focused on trying to maximize human freedom for myself and fellow humans.

 

You know, Robert, he is the, I guess, creator of the what is money podcast. What is money is the rabbit that leads us down the proverbial rabbit hole. It is what Robert terms as the foundational question.

 

What is money? It is the most important question for finding truth in the world. What’s going to throw out philosophy. I have to pick 16 books for my junior to read.

 

So we homeschool. So I’m going to ask you this quiz. It’s a good question to start out, Robert, because you’re a philosopher.

 

What would be the 16 books, eight novels, eight nonfiction that you would have my oldest daughter read this year for school? Just a little lightweight question to get started. Huh? I know. Right.

 

It’s hilarious. Um, I’ll start with your junior and 16 years old. Yeah.

 

16 years old. Okay. Well, I’m going to start with the creature from Jekyll Island because I think if you want to understand the real game that’s being played, uh, and the most dangerous cartel in the world and how it actually functions and the consequences that it produces, I don’t think there’s a better place to start than that.

 

Um, obviously it’s a book about central banking, the nature of money and specifically the inception of the federal reserve. It reads like a detective novel, but it is nonfiction. Uh, GR Griffin’s an excellent author, excellent writer.

 

He’s been on the show. Uh, but that book can maybe leave you feeling a little bit dark, maybe a little hopeless. So I know it left me feeling a little bit hopeless when I read it before Bitcoin was invented, uh, being that I felt like I had discovered the most significant problem in the world yet there was no apparent solution.

 

And so maybe after he reads that he or she reads that, uh, they could jump over to a book like honest money by Gary North. Uh, Gary North is a famous libertarian, Christian thinker, philosopher, writer. Uh, and I think his book honest money is just, he intentionally writes it with a very simple prose, you know, very short sentences, not a lot of complex, uh, run on sentences and things.

 

It’s a very approachable, accessible book. Um, and he approaches economics and money and banking from real first principles, a very elemental approach to the thing. So for instance, you learn to understand concepts like income in a non-monetary way, right? It’s actually the benefit being derived from an asset and the fact that, you know, things like profit, which we typically consider to be purely a financial phenomenon, uh, North will tell you is actually a psychological phenomenon because the matter of satisfaction.

 

And so he explains the principles of economics and money and banking through a Christian, a simple, accessible Christian slash philosophical lens. And it’s a really good book from there. I would go into the ethics of money production by Guido Holtzman.

 

Uh, this makes a really strong ethical argument against central banking against the monopolization of money, uh, and for free markets, you could then go a level deeper and read the theory of money and credit by Mises. That one’s hard. He’s writing as hard, but it gives you a very, uh, intricate understanding, let’s say of the, of how money and banking and how it actually works.

 

It would kind of be opposite in many ways to honest money. It’s much more of a sophisticated, uh, you know, you, you feel your brain growing with each page, let’s put it that way, or at least struggling to grow with each page. And then the last one I would recommend, uh, which is the classic on the, the theory of how money actually emerges that’s embraced by most Austrian economists, which is on the origins of money by Karl Minger.

 

And he just presents kind of a, uh, economic anthropological theory for how money emerged. And it’s, uh, you know, could be summed up by saying that as goal directed actors, people try to take the shortest path between what they have and what they want. And as it turns out, money is a very efficient, emergent way to close the gap between where people are and where they want to be in terms of goal seeking behavior.

 

And so he describes how, how money emerges in that way. Uh, you said 16 books, no 12. I mean, you can give me, uh, however many you want.

 

Okay. Uh, let’s go into the philosophy domain if we may next. So those were my five on money.

 

I mean, I, this is like one of these questions, you know, you could really have a hundred books. So what we’re doing with our kids. So freshman year, freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, well, what we, we sort of have different eras last, uh, sophomore year was, was ancient history.

 

So we did some Aristotle. We did some Plato. We did Jesus Paul.

 

We did, uh, Hebrew Bible. We did, who else did we do? We did a lot of stuff. We did a little Kant, but long story.

 

Kant is not, um, really ancient, but kind of as a parallel to Plato and kind of look at the compare and contrast. Yeah. And it was very heavy philosophical focus last year.

 

Got into a lot of like deep questions of like, uh, uh, what, what is it called? I forget it. I have, I blocked it from my mind. It was traumatic rationalism versus empiricism and kind of went down some rabbit holes.

 

So, so one year we’re going to do ancient history and philosophy and literature kind of as like a module this year. It’s modern only because she’s a debater and the debate question deals with modernity. Her she’s in this, uh, really cool.

 

It’s national Christian forensics associates, something like that. They have them all over. These kids are, you know, bright spots in the world gone mad.

 

And the, their debate topic this year has to do with something about AI and war. And I forget what the resolution is, but is it a good thing that robots are going to be able to now bomb people? Hmm. And so the era that we’re going to study is modernity from paradise lost Milton to brave new world.

 

We’re going to do a little 1984. We’re going to do a little, we’re going to add some, so we’re going to go kind of modern. So we’re going to do a little communist manifesto.

 

We’re going to do a little, we’re going to read, read, read how dark the last hundred years have been. And so the theme will be paradise law. So if you, if you read Milton, it’s a very biblical Christian worldview.

 

How did our world go from Milton to Mein Kampf, you know, 300 years later. So we’re going to kind of study that and kind of read the best thinkers. We’re going to read Darwin.

 

We’re going to read, uh, people who were very profound, but it’s a very depressing period. So I’m going to put like, when I do it, I’m going to do eight depressing books and eight positive books. So we’re going to read some CS Lewis.

 

We’re going to read some others. Maybe, maybe I’ll throw in some of yours. So, so that this why I’m, so my wife’s like, you have to pick the books by Monday.

 

Like you can’t. So, so a little bit, it’s a little bit of a selfish question, but it’s a good one. Cause okay, no, this is, I appreciate the context.

 

Cause that’s helpful with my answers. Because like 1984, my wife didn’t want to read because she was like, some of the themes were too adult. So I’m probably dropping 1984 and adding brave new world.

 

I don’t think that was that adult. Yeah. I don’t remember it being as well is more apt probably for where we are as well because the whole idea of, you know, the, the ultimate prison is the one that the prisoners don’t realize is a prison, which is what brave new world is kind of all about.

 

It’s where we’re living today. Right. Yeah.

 

You know, bread and circuses and don’t worry about anything else. Right. Um, so you brought up paradise lost a couple of times as I was kind of gathering these books, I was putting them on a timeline and part of me wanted to start out with like Darwin or something or Nietzsche or the 1800s.

 

But then I wanted to show, I’ve always wanted to read paradise lost. I’ve never read it. I’ve heard, I’ve read about it.

 

CS Lewis did a great commentary on it. So I said, you know what? Now let’s do paradise lost. You know? So how do we get from that right worldview? Yeah.

 

That, that worldview kind of birthed the U S experiment to Marx, Hitler, Nietzsche. Yeah. And I know you’re a big study of ideas guy.

 

So I thought that would be an interesting thing to explore. I too have not read paradise loss. So maybe you could let me know when you guys are reading that and I’ll try to read it at the same time.

 

I do really want to read it though, because I’ve drawn it often. I’ve read parts of it and I’ve read about it. Like you said, um, one of my favorite definitions of evil actually comes from that book.

 

Evil is the force which believes its knowledge is complete, uh, which is the tote that is totalized, totalized knowledge or totalizing knowledge or the belief that one’s idea or representation of the world is as complete as the world itself. And fundamentally, this is a totalitarian attitude towards the nature of existence, right? If I actually believe that my idea about the world is the most accurate idea there is, then all of the sudden I am justified morally, ethically, by any means necessary to bludgeon you over the head and get you to adopt my totalitarian vision, my utopian dream, my central plan to end all central plans. And so I think this caution that we’re often given in wisdom traditions and in great literature like paradise lost is that knowledge is inherently provisional, right? It can never contain, you cannot contain the totality of reality in linguistic propositions.

 

And when you think you have done that, you should really check yourself. Because it introduces an ethical orientation that is typically horrible, right? It’s, again, you could look at all the great atrocities across human history and it’s usually perpetrated under the guise of the greater good because we have discovered the ultimate utopian, typically technocratic utopian vision. And so also in that book, which may help answer the question of how we got from paradise lost to Mein Kampf, in paradise lost, the bad guy, one of the bad guys, Mephistopheles, I believe is his name, who’s obviously a representation of the devil, often shortened to Mephisto.

 

He actually encourages or tricks, this is where I need to read the book to get the specifics, but he is the one that instigates the counterfeiting of currency. So he counterfeited currency in paradise lost? I didn’t know that. He instigates the counterfeiting of currency in part of that book.

 

And you combine that with the other part of your question, you said, how did we get to Mein Kampf? And you consider that, you know, Hitler was, he rose from the ashes of the Weimar hyperinflation, right? It’s that that society was utterly destroyed in terms of its socioeconomic fabric. And in those conditions of total destruction, a strong man rose, right? A very vile strong man, as it proved to be, but nonetheless, a philosophy that was very, very anti-human, right? In the extremes. You know, I don’t know, I always end up back on this principle of private property.

 

And if you, you know, really dig into the earlier money books that I suggested, you’ll come to appreciate how the primary, if not the sole organizing principle of civilization really is private property. The reason we are all grouping ourselves together, and I know there’s all these intangibles, right? Like we love and dating and socializing and all of these things, but at the core of it is an economic reason. And that is the division of labor, right? That we have social cooperation under the division of labor, which means that we actually all gain by participating in a social division of labor, meaning that if I do what I’m best at, and you do what you’re best at, and we trade, then we both get more output per unit of input, and we get higher quality and quantity of goods.

 

So that is the reason, you know, it’s a very pragmatic reason that humans come together into societies. And the only way the division of labor works is when the individuals who do the work that others find valuable get to keep the value of their work and only relinquish it or trade it consensually with other people, other property owners, right? When you start to violate that principle through coercion, through violence, through statism, you dissolve the unifying principle of civilization itself. You could think of private property as like the glue that holds this whole thing together, right? As long as we can own stuff and we can trade freely with one another and we can innovate and we don’t face the threat of uninitiated violence, then we can live prosperously and morally, frankly, right? The reason we have the luxury of morals and ethics is because we can accumulate capital under this structure.

 

There’s that old saying, eat first, then ethics, right? So like the fact that we can accumulate goods and have the luxury of leisure and reflection is what has allowed us to discover these moral principles that allow us to elevate our humanity and hopefully move a bit away from our animality. And so when you print money, you are violating private property. When you tax a citizenry, you are violating private property.

 

When you regulate people’s ability to use their private property under threat of force, right? I call this regulation by fiat, which is not what we have in English common law, where the laws are discovered, right? Where we observe people interacting over long periods of time, we see how they resolve their disputes. And then we codify those dispute resolution processes. That’s like a legal discovery process that we have in English common law.

 

That’s ideal. But there’s another form of regulation, which is fiat regulation. And that’s just some guy in political power signed a document that said you can do this or you can’t do this.

 

And so that too is a violation of private property. So all of these things, inflation, taxation, fiat regulation, these are glue dissolver, I guess, for civilization, right? Like if private property is the glue that’s holding us all together, these outside forces are actually dissolving it. And so this is why I think we’ve seen society’s boom and bust.

 

And Mises had this whole theory, the Austrian business cycle theory that the printing of money, which again is the violation of private property, leads to the amplification of the business cycle. So bigger credit booms, bigger credit bust. I think that same principle applies to civilization more broadly, that when we engage in the violation of private property, you’re going to get booming civilizations for a while while they’ve got it figured out.

 

And when you’re printing money, you’re giving this kind of like false stimulus into the economy, right? You’re signaling to entrepreneurs that there’s more capital available than there actually is. But then, of course, they inevitably, the road runs out, right? The tide pulls out and you see who’s swimming naked, as Warren Buffett would say. And then the whole thing crashes and it crashes catastrophically.

 

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A4 had a question, I think, on the new Trump coin. So we’re going from, you know, nice philosophical talk to coins. More of what’s going on now.

 

Go ahead. Awesome, thanks. Robert, so I guess this is more of a free market question just to get your insight, but considering the power of network effects in the digital economy, like what are your thoughts on, you know, people launching crypto projects like Trump’s World Liberty Financial? Like what does a world like that look like in your mind? Every non-Bitcoin crypto asset is not decentralized and therefore is not money and therefore is a **** coin.

 

So I would recommend people avoid them. I mean, ultimately, like my ultimate value is freedom. Do whatever you want.

 

But if you’re going to put, if you’re going to ask for my advice, I would not suggest holding an asset that another counterparty can print or change the rules on, because then you’re not holding your purchasing power in something that is risk mitigated. It’s not surprising to me that we see anyone and everyone that’s not a Bitcoin maximalist with any degree of influence in the world whatsoever trying to cash in on these crypto scams because, well, they’re like little money cults, basically. You can just start your own coin, right? And you convince enough people that it’s a thing, then it might be a thing for a little while, long enough for you to sell into the retail pump, and then long enough for you to get out before the dump.

 

But ultimately, that’s what these things are. They’re pump and dump schemes. And what differentiates Bitcoin is that it is truly decentralized.

 

There is no individual or entity that can control its rules. There is, and it’s not, this isn’t something that really was created by even Satoshi, let’s say, like Satoshi created Bitcoin, but it took this path of Bitcoin’s emergence to cement its decentralization over time. So you could read a book like the Block Size Wars of 2017, where there was the fork wars between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

 

And while Bitcoin ultimately won, Bitcoin Cash is, you know, it’s down 99% in terms of Bitcoin since then. That battle has been had. There were a lot of well-heeled and influential Bitcoiners on the side of Bitcoin Cash, but they could not deviate the social consensus of 10-minute blocks of a certain block size and a 21 million hard cap.

 

Bitcoin Cash actually only wanted to increase the block size. So it didn’t attack those other points, but that’s kind of besides the point. Bitcoin has this battle-proven, battle-hardened record, if you will, right, track record of being resistant to asymmetric attacks on its consensus protocol.

 

Nothing else has that. So only Bitcoin has decentralized every other crypto project. And look, you don’t have to take my word for it.

 

Do your own research. I’m just telling you the conclusion that I’ve arrived at and many other Bitcoin maximalists have also arrived at after doing hundreds to thousands of hours of research on this asset class is that only Bitcoin is truly decentralized. And this is why the metaphor of Bitcoin as the internet of money is probably the best metaphor we’ve got.

 

I also really like digital gold because to understand gold and the properties of gold and what makes it good money is very useful in understanding Bitcoin. But the internet is ultimately just this stack of open source protocols for moving information around without asking anyone permission. And Bitcoin is basically that exact concept except for money.

 

You’re moving purchasing power around without asking permission. And you’re doing it in a way that no one can stop, censor, freeze, reverse, confiscate, etc. That means Bitcoin is not a company, right? It’s a protocol.

 

It’s a commodity, whatever term you want to use. All the other crypto projects are companies. Someone made them up.

 

Someone controls them. Someone can manipulate them. They can change the rules, etc., etc.

 

So I hope that helped answer your question to some extent. Yes, I agree with you 100 percent. I just thought it was an important question to ask and have you talk about.

 

Thank you so much. And thank you, Josh, for letting me up. Thank you so much.

 

We have to be mindful too that the, you know, the trumps, whether you agree with this or not, I don’t, they might be just doing the normal evolution of people as they kind of get into this space learning. And frankly, it’s probably not even him. It’s probably, you know, his son or some advisor.

 

Hey, you got to do this. But yeah, I think, I think it, I think it will, history will not treat the project too kindly. But it will be forgotten without a doubt.

 

And you’re right, by the way, the Bitcoin maximalists are forged in those fires, typically. It’s not like they’re just the good guys that figured out how it’s all, how it works and how it is. Like, no, typically they lost their ass doing whatever **** coin gambling project.

 

And then through that pain, you learn that Bitcoin’s the only thing that actually sticks around and, and ultimately matters in this entire wave of innovation. Yeah. I mean, with me, it was just, I had so many friends that lost their shirt in so many ways.

 

I was, I sort of became, I don’t know what you would say, Bitcoin maxi, Bitcoin foundationalist is probably better. I don’t know what term. I’ve heard Bitcoin essentialist before.

 

Yeah. Whatever that term is, I would be that, but in, in terms of my experience through observing clients, friends, family, just, you know, early Bitcoiners just do strange things that, you know, one of my buddies, he just, he had so much that he gave away and pissed away. And, you know, he just held on to what he had early be, he’d be way better off.

 

So it was more of just me observing what not to do than losing my shirt. But that’s the thing with Bitcoin. I mean, he’s sometimes very judgmental on people, just like you have a life, you have a spiritual journey, you have a monetary journey, you have a health journey.

 

You sort of have all these journeys that people, people kind of go the way they’re supposed to go. And it’s not just a progression of, Oh, somebody arrives and they’re a Bitcoin maximalist. You have to be patient with people.

 

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This guide is packed with useful insights and is free for you at NetSuite.com slash whatismoney. Again, that’s NetSuite.com slash whatismoney. So you were talking about how bleak everything is a little bit, and then how do we change that? How do we change the dissolution of private property, right? We are living in an era where it is the default impulse, just if we’re sort of US-centric, to trash others’ private property rights, whether it’s litigation, regulation.

 

Taxation, inflation. How people deal with relationships, how people deal with the church, family. People are just trashing each other.

 

They don’t have even a sense of privacy. Even if you listen to the debate this week, I don’t want to take a side, but it’s like Trump says, oh, I want to give you more of your wages when you work overtime. And Kamala wants to tax your wages now if they’re unrealized.

 

So it’s like we’re not having debates of freedom versus tyranny. It’s shades of tyranny. One is less free than the other, but it’s still within the paradigm of there is no private property right.

 

That’s a great point. And that’s a point that Rothbard made that he said it was so difficult. Obviously Murray Rothbard, one of the greatest libertarian authors of all time, talking about how difficult it was to have a rational conversation with other people about these topics because we live under the paradigm of statism.

 

When you say something like the perfection of private property, the flip side of that is you’re saying 0% taxation, 0% inflation, 0% regulation by fiat. And people find that unimaginable because, well, where can you find that in the world? It doesn’t really exist. I mean, you could maybe say that when you get to that, well, I hate this term, but people often use it, the elites, the global technocrats, the WEF crowd, whatever.

 

When you get to that level, that’s sort of what you’re angling for, right? You’re trying to be above the rules, rules for the not for me type of dynamic. And in that situation, well, taxation typically doesn’t apply to those guys. Neither does inflation.

 

I mean, I guess inflation always applies to some extent, but if you’re just the one printing the money, you’re on the receiving side. Well, they benefit from it, right? They’re going to buy the house that inflates. And they’re going to probably directly receive either the dividend issued by the central bank that they’re a partial holder in, or they’re otherwise going to indirectly benefit from the money printing itself, right? It’s called the Cantillon effect.

 

Those closest to the money spigot benefit at the expense of those furthest. So it’s the literal super rich stealing from the middle class and the poor through the printing of money. What can we do about all of this? This is the, again, that’s why the Creature from Jekyll Island was so depressing because you read that book, it lays all of this stuff out in excruciating and entertaining detail, but it leaves you with no solution.

 

There’s no viable solution. And so I’ve read that book in probably the year 2004, 2005. It’s a young man, 18, 19 years old.

 

Remember, actually bought a abridged version of the book called Dishonest Money and gave it to some of my friends and family for Christmas. And I was like, oh, this is like, this is it guys. Like we’re going to go, we’re going to fix the world.

 

Everyone read this book. And then we’re going to see the problems and we’re all going to go out and fix it. And so… That was me too, 2005, 2004.

 

Some people read it and they came back to me and they’re like, okay, very interesting book. Very, you know, good arguments. I see that this is a problem, but what are we actually going to do about it? I just tripped over the stumbling block.

 

I’m like, I had no good answer. Like you’re right. I don’t know.

 

I thought we were just going to all, you know, have this collective awakening and this thing would somehow resolve itself. From a more practical standpoint, there was simply no tool or technology in existence at that time that could release the stranglehold of the central bank on the world, right? You have to operate inside the banking system, right? You can say, okay, maybe physical gold. I can take all my purchasing power out of the system and put it in physical gold.

 

And I can try and drive all over town or fly all over the world with bags of gold coins and just deal that way, but that’s super impractical, right? And it’s also super high risk, right? Someone finds where you buried the gold in your backyard or they, you know, whatever, it subjects you to a lot of potential coercion. So prior to Bitcoin, there simply was no way to take your purchasing power out of the system and to continue to conduct your life practically. To stop the rampant and increasingly normalized violation of private property, people need recourse to a form of private property that is extremely difficult to violate.

 

So if you are living in a regime that is taxing you too much and or printing too much money, and or regulating you too much by fiat, your vote of no confidence on that regime would be to sell all of your assets and move your purchasing power into Bitcoin and take yourself elsewhere, right? Bitcoin energizes and makes the voting with your feet process much more effective. Co-founder of a Bitcoin exchange I’m a shareholder in called Swan, he often tells the story of when his family left Russia back in I think the 70s or 80s maybe, could have been earlier, I’m not sure. And he said they could only leave the country with $400.

 

You know, the country basically capital controlled you to where you could only exit, physically exit the borders with $400 US, which was, you know, more money than it is today, but still not a lot of money, right? Especially when you’re leaving with your entire family to start a family in a new world. Had something like Bitcoin existed at that time, you, the father or whoever could have memorized 12 words and put whatever amount of purchasing power he had available to himself actually on his brain and walked out of the country circumventing all of those capital controls. And so in that world where people can more emphatically vote with their feet by moving their purchasing power out of and into regimes, out of regimes that mistreat them and into regimes that treat them better, then all of a sudden we are subjecting the state to something more like a free market force, right? The state who’s accustomed to being able to print money ad infinitum and does not be accountable to the P and L, right? They basically will run up deficits forever and then just inflate them away onto their, onto the back of their citizens, right? Inflation is basically this form of slow motion default where you’re making taxpayers pay for the accumulation of government debts.

 

All of a sudden, more difficult to print money because every time you print money, you monetize Bitcoin and every time you monetize Bitcoin, you’re encouraging people to move their purchasing power into this hyper portable, hyper concealable, if you custody it properly, it’s an unseizable asset. So the state is like now in its old practices of, you know, taxing, inflating and regulating, it’s actually destroying itself because it’s pushing people into to adopt Bitcoin, essentially. You could call me too narrow minded about Bitcoin or too focused on the economics as a solution to the larger political problems and cultural problems that we face.

 

And maybe there’s some truth to that, right? Like to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But I do think that if you do the studying and you do the reading of the great libertarian philosophers that precede us, right? The shoulders of the giants upon which we stand, you will come to see how important it is that humans have private property, how integral it is to the unity of civilization and even to our own outlook, right? We can have a lower time preference is the term they use, right? A longer time horizon comes with being able to more certainly store the fruits of our labor into the future. We can think about things in larger and longer terms, literally to the extent that we can control the fruits of our labor and keep them free from coercion.

 

Bitcoin is a tool that radically advances us along that path. I’m not saying it is the solution. There are many other complexities that come with individualism, rationalism, a continuous resistance to establish authorities.

 

But I do think getting the politics out of money, getting the central bank out of the currency counterfeiting business once and for all, that is a giant leap towards the maximization of human freedom. Bitcoin custody is evolving. Both self-custody and single third-party custody come with significant risk and trade-offs.

 

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I think it’s, you know, you have a trinity of the economic right of private property. That’s your social component, you know, sort of the social contract. You need a spiritual component and you need a strong family, you need a strong church, you need strong money, and church doesn’t mean a state church, it doesn’t mean a particular denomination, but you need spiritual freedom, you need economic freedom, you need educational freedom.

 

I think it’s a problem. And I got that too. I was just overwhelmed.

 

Remember I was trying to like work on political campaigns. I like helped the guy who changed Jersey City. So you would think New Jersey, right, would embrace the man who, guy’s name was Mayor Brett Schumler, totally transformed Jersey City from an armpit kind of city to, you know, a city that attracted Pershing and Bank of New York and what’s the other one, TD and Goldman Sachs.

 

And, you know, so I was, you know, a little bit of a, you know, idealistic guy. I’m going to help this guy run for governor and the campaign, you know, crashed and burned as his fellow Republicans knifed him in the back. This was a deep thinker, great thing.

 

He would have been amazing. And after a while, Bitcoin, yes, but money, family, building a business, building economic freedom and my family, you know, having kids. I think the only way, and I think Elon and others are right, you know, we have this birth dearth.

 

The only way to change civilization next 20, 30 years is to have a lot of Bitcoin babies and a lot of people that embrace these concepts and teach them to be free thinkers. I mean, so when I started this discussion with, you know, what books you’d recommend my daughter, I don’t agree with half of the people who are going to give her to read, but I want her to understand what was the role of Nietzsche in creating a Hitler, you know, what was the role of 19th century German philosophy, you know, and there was some very good things Nietzsche brought up and some very scary things and, and having that tension of how people can write amazing things and then things that then were used to create such great evil. That’s right.

 

And the 20th century is that, you know, it’s funny people talk about evolution the last hundred years. It’s like we’re devolving as a, as a society. Yeah.

 

And I do think as the darkness sort of is growing larger, the brightness is growing brighter. There was no Bitcoin 20 years ago. That’s right.

 

We would have these talks of, okay, we’re going to do gold. We’re going to, we’re going to put everything in gold. I remember this in my college and it was just not a practical.

 

And so my, my realization was, Hey, I’m just going to do my best. I can. And as a father and raise seven free thinking people who hopefully can change the world one person at a time, because that was, that’s, I think the only way we’re going to do it, you know, Satoshi was one man, right.

 

You know, or whoever he was. And there was some deep spiritual things within Satoshi where he was selfless and Christ-like in a sense, like we don’t know, you know, and he even created something where he wasn’t the central component in it, you know, and he kind of knew that impetus of the, uh, the theological term, I guess would be what the depravity of man, you know, he knew that our impulse was to be a little selfish. So he created this trustless network.

 

So we’re going to go to our listeners. If you have a question for Robert, we’ve got Terrence Terrence, do you have a question? I know you want to come up. Good to see you, Robert and Josh as always.

 

Um, my question is, um, do you feel that there might be an overemphasis on family and traditional values by Bitcoiners that could turn off, you know, for example, um, crazed or uncrazed childless cat ladies in the democratic party, for example, or just people who are center left, more progressive politically, because I feel like, um, some of the things you guys are talking about while I’m sympathetic that I’m not sure the normies I talked to in a socialist Los Angeles would, would find too compelling. But I think I want Howard, I want Robert to answer that, but Terrence, I was going to call you Howard, but, um, but Terrence, but we hang out, you know, you’re a great guy. You know, you, you can be of different, I, that’s why I love Bitcoin.

 

You can be of different philosophical persuasions, political persuasions. And there is this beautiful commonality, whether you’re a childless cat lady or, uh, more of a traditional values type person. I don’t know.

 

I think there’s some transcendent themes that go beyond division. This is one of those things that is so pervasive that we just don’t stop to appreciate it. But even when you say that crazy cat lady in Los Angeles, I guarantee you, if you go and steal that lady’s cat, she’s going to get mad, right? Which means she appreciates the principle of private property, right? You take a three-year-old’s toy away from him.

 

He’s going to get mad because he it’s encoded in us as a territorial species to want to own things, to own things that other people can’t just arbitrarily steal from us. So I would be somewhat sympathetic to your question and saying that, okay, do current Bitcoiners and their excessive emphasis on traditional value systems, does that cause crazy cat lady in Los Angeles to not be interested in that social circle? Perhaps, but I would further say that that would be thinking in a very myopic and short term time horizon. Pascal has a quote that I love on this topic.

 

He says that science advances from funeral to funeral so that it is the best ideas that outcompete worse ideas in the free market of ideas among the minds of us rational animals across space and time that really moves civilization forward. And frankly, crazy cat lady in some horrific communistic 1984 brave new world future probably couldn’t own a cat, right? Or would be otherwise inhibited from doing whatever it is she likes to do. And although she might not appreciate Bitcoin today, I can guarantee you once she has the boots kicking in the door, you will want to be able to put all of your purchasing power on your brain and get away.

 

So it’s a matter of time and pain and it’s unfortunate that humans have to learn this way, but it does seem like we are, many of us, most of us perhaps even, many of us are learners that require a lot of pain for the lesson to really sink in, right? It’s much more cost effective to learn from the mistakes of others through reading books or, you know, otherwise learning about history and the experiences of those who came before us. But unfortunately, most of us don’t do it that way. So I don’t, I wouldn’t, I actually just totally don’t care, right? I don’t care if the focus on traditional values dissuades the cat lady from buying Bitcoin, because in my mind, that’s just natural selection sort of playing itself out.

 

And, you know, if you are the one that’s conserving your purchasing power more effectively across time and you’re making more children and you’re instilling them with good ideologies that help them to be cooperative, moral, prosperous citizens, well, then you’re just seeding the world with people that help humanity flourish in the long run. And if that comes at the cost of someone not adopting that ideology along the way, because they didn’t like the way a family looked or the way the traditional value people presented themselves, well, then, you know, I’ll, I’ll accept that as the cost. My first interaction with Bitcoiners was more atheistic pothead types that were really non-religious.

 

They had nothing to do with, that seems to be a later last five years development as, as Bitcoin is maturing, those atheistic agnostic individuals are kind of growing up and seeing where they’re, they’re reading some of the great thinkers. Heisenberg, the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you. Yeah.

 

I think there’s some truth there. And I would even argue that with your, the whole childless cat lady thing. Well, well, that’s where you come in.

 

Terrence, you can appeal to the childless cat ladies. You know, they’re, everybody has a role to play. No, but, but I also think there’s something Hegelian, the Hegelian dialectic, where we are, we are just conditioned by the state that you can have someone who is a different belief set, but you can have fun with them.

 

You can’t share some common commonalities. You are either this or that. You are either, you know, I don’t know, I’m just using the abortion and you’re, you’re either pro-life without exceptions or you are for abortion up to the, you know, the day someone’s born.

 

Like I personally think that’s the way our educational system has groomed us to be little status that we now need the government to come in and police our differences because we can’t really get along with people of different value system. I agree that the, the existence of political statism causes us to overemphasize the political dimensions of our personality of both ourself and other. We really care like, Oh, what is your position on X or your position on Y? And then if we don’t have the same position or the same perspective, then we need to fight about it.

 

And that’s, I think that’s just kind of a result of the pressure that the democratic process creates, right? Like you’re forcing people to take sides. Literally. It’s like, are you red? Are you blue? Are you this? Are you that? And so it just permeates down all the way into the way we look at ourselves and the way we look at the world around us.

 

And the book, I don’t know if we haven’t talked much about this book, but the book, the sovereign individual, which was written in 1997, but one of the points they make in their book is that, you know, once you get the state out of human affairs a bit through things like Bitcoin and, you know, there’s some other, uh, social media sort of gets the state of the media business to some extent and et cetera, et cetera, that people kind of wake up from this hallucination like, Oh wait, politics and your political opinions actually don’t matter that much because if it’s not serving an economic end, right. If, if, if I’m not voting myself some money or power or influence and all of a sudden I’ll kind of care less about my position on, you know, abortion or this or that, or whatever it may be. Not to say that it goes away completely, but we’re over indexed on it right now.

 

Like it’s too, it makes us too, uh, hyper, um, polarized. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably get it. You get that Bitcoin upends everything that state sponsored schools teach us about money.

 

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Yes. And, and here’s the thing. It’s not that, um, people I’ve had listeners and was, oh, you talk too much about your faith and your values and your, I’m like, well, that’s who I am.

 

It’s my show. I want to, but, but I fundamentally, cause I think they might agree with certain other things of me, but like, that’s, I fundamentally look at, okay, the world’s going to hell. Uh, metaphorically the only way we can heal it is through raising independent thinkers who could, so JD Vance could go out and have a beer with the childless cat lady.

 

You know, you have to have a, for our world to progress where we don’t end up like the French revolution. I mean, if you study history, cultures like ours do not end well, they end up in guillotines and Napoleon. So I’m deeply concerned about where we end up.

 

That’s why I’m talking about it. Even though my economic motive is like, it’s not good business to really talk about these things because you’ll offend 40% of the people listening or whatever, 30% of, but I just view as, Hey, I have a little bit of a platform. And if I can, you know, have, have, you know, you know, I remember Terrence, we had a nice time and you worked for Obama and stuff.

 

We had a good time, you know, talking about your Obama days. And like, I don’t really care if, if we don’t vote the same, we can be friends. And you know, if, if the childless cat lady’s cat dies or gets eaten by the, the, the people, you know, I’m a, I can feel bad for the person who lost their cat.

 

And I can feel bad for the Haitian that’s maybe being mischaracterized. You know, it’s like you, you don’t have to be for one thing or the other. It’s, it’s a real, I think it’s a symptom of the fact that people are not like logical anymore.

 

Like one of the things we teach our kids too, is logic. I remember everyone, if you have a child or even yourself, take one logic course, like one introductory logic course. And you realize our whole world, and I’ll have my kids watch the presidential debate and they’ll, they can’t handle it after like 20 minutes or like, Anyone that criticizes people talking about religion, I think fundamentally misunderstands or misdefines what religion is, right? That we are, it’s almost like by the, by virtue of using language, we have to have these points of social consensus.

 

And these things are all religion-like, right? You know, sometimes people call money a belief system, the English language itself and every word in it, right? It’s where we have these points of agreement, right? That we agree on the definitions of terms and that’s what lets us exchange ideas. I mean, that’s pseudo-religious in a way, right? It’s just a belief system that we’ve all subscribed to. And there’s other ones that compete, you know, there’s Chinese and there’s, there’s all these other languages.

 

And so we are fundamentally religious animals in a way, right? Like we’re the animal that has religion and, and you know, this is a real deep rabbit hole. I’ve really enjoyed the work of Rene Girard recently. And he’s saying that we basically invented religion to contain mimetic violence.

 

And so religion is the origin point of human rationality and all of these other things. But if you take it for granted or take it at face value that man is a religious animal, then all of a sudden it makes a lot more sense that when you take out GOD, GOV fills the vacuum, right? Like the state is striving to become a secular religion. That’s why they do things like have Trans-International Visibility Day on Easter Sunday, right? Like they’re competing.

 

They’re trying to get people to take out one set of software and install a new set of software and in which worldview the state basically is deified. And you know, this is why I appreciate what you’re doing, having a lot of kids and fearlessly talking about what you want to talk about. Because I do think that actually dialogically trying to discover truth continuously is what breaks the illusion and the spell that the state really needs to uphold its existence.

 

And I think the greatest dangers to the state are those things, right? It’s, you know, what you’re doing with your kids. Critical thinking is a great danger to the state. Because once you engage in it, you come to see it for the scam that it is.

 

A unified population, ideally a unified and armed population. This is a great danger to the state, right? They can’t exploit the asymmetry of power projection. If the state is armed and you are not, well, then all of a sudden you are very easy to exploit.

 

But if you are a unified population and you are armed, well, as the old saying goes, an armed society is a polite society. And the third great danger to the state, as far as I can tell, are strong men and women, right? Like strong people that will say no and refuse to put up with whatever the scam is. What I consider to be the near perfection of private property and how that, you know, gives people recourse to something the state can’t stop, etc, etc.

 

We can do exactly what you’re doing, which is try to tell the truth. Try to raise kids that are critical thinkers, freethinkers, teach them about all of these ideas, principles and the history surrounding them and by which we discovered them and make them as strong as we can. I also think people are triggered by religion generally because they had some bad experience with.

 

Yeah, of course. And I think the whole replacing G.O.D. with G.O.V. is so huge. Like it is where we are now, where if you were to be from the 1800s, right? 1850s, like revivalist America, Charles Finney.

 

That’s another great book of history. The autobiography of Charles Finney. When you study a guy who was like a rock star in the time and now you think of like Taylor Swift in how they thought of Charles Finney in his day or Dwight L. Moody or Charles Spurgeon, these great preachers.

 

If you were from the 1850s and you transported in time to today, you would think you were in church if you were at a Taylor Swift concert or a Kamala Harris rally or a Donald Trump rally. And I think when you go fundamentally down to it, like when you talk about, well, I could take any person, the childless cat lady or the most ardent Trump supporter. And the reasons they love their particular candidate or don’t like the other are fundamentally religious categories.

 

Think about it. What don’t people about like dislike about Trump? They dislike his manners, how he treats people, his verbal destruction of people. It’s very religious in a way.

 

Yeah. He’s not loving. He’s not kind.

 

He’s not Christlike. You know, if you want to use that term. And then the same thing with Kamala.

 

She’s not, you know, you know, whether it’s, you know, her beliefs on abortion or beliefs on this or believes in this. So I think we are fundamentally religious. Uh, Kenneth Burke, he’s, he’s in my top 10 books, the rhetoric of motives.

 

You ever read this book? No, this is up there by the way. You would love this. You’d get so into it.

 

He defines man. And the guy was like a socialist or something, but he is a great cultural critic, totally non-religious. You know, I don’t think he believed in anything, but he has a Burkean theory of identification.

 

I think that’s in there. He’s, he’s amazing. He wrote a book called the rhetoric of motives where he defines a man.

 

Man is the symbol using symbol making symbol misusing. So you could exchange symbol with religious or worship categories, animal inventor of the negative or moralized by the negative. The thing about it, 10 commandments, a lot of them are do not this separated from his natural conditions by instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, kind of your linguistic side or moved by a sense of order and rotten with perfection.

 

Wow. Isn’t that a great definition, man? I knew you’d be into him. That’s great.

 

He he’s in one of the top 16 books. So the rhetoric of motives title of the book. Yeah.

 

Okay. I’ll check that out. He was around the um, thirties where he kind of became big and he was, uh, 1966 work language as symbolic action.

 

Exactly. Exactly. That’s how I was when you said symbol making symbol using symbol misusing.

 

He’s the guy who kind of, a lot of people copy him. You went to religion with that, the symbol making using it. I was going to language actually, but again, Renee Gerard would say they’re bound together.

 

Yeah. They’re kind of the same thing. Yeah, exactly.

 

So if you are a language user, you are religious. Like they’re very closely, uh, intertwined to those two things. Parting thoughts, parting thoughts.

 

I don’t know. I would just, I mean, you’re an intensely curious person as a, my, I’ve found the Bitcoin rabbit hole to be a great direction to channel that curiosity. Like it’s almost like the more you’re not learning about just Bitcoin.

 

You’re not learning about just the nature and history of money, but you end up learning about what it is to be human, right? You’re learning about, you know, psychology, sociology, mimetic theory, the origins and history of consciousness. Like it just goes on and on and on. It just really opens up in this labyrinth of, of intellectual philosophical exploration.

 

And I’ve just found it to be extremely fun and rewarding. And frankly, you know, when all the talking is done, you find great value in people like Christ and people like Socrates that actually, they take all of these, the philosophy that they talked about in espoused and they embody it, right? They are, they incarnate their philosophy. You know, Socrates died for the principle of justice.

 

You know, Christ died for our sins, according to Christianity. These are people that did more than just talk the talk. They really truly walked the walk.

 

And even if you don’t believe that either of them exists, existed, and it’s all made up, they still provide exemplary role models for us to try and imitate, to try and be like, to strive toward, right? Even if it was totally fictional. And I’m not saying that it is, but even if it was, you still have this mythology that is almost like an ideal, you know, these are ideal ways of being for humanity and something towards which we can strive. And so I’m just very excited that Bitcoin has led me into all of this stuff.

 

It led me off a darker path and into this journey in life. And I’m really enjoying it. Well, that’s great.

 

Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. A lot of fun.

 

Thank you, Josh. Great to see you. Thank you for watching.

 

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