The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast — Robert Breedlove: Bitcoin, the Tyranny of Time Scarcity & the Masters & Slaves of Mone‪y

Link to the Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bitcoin-matrix/id1534519469?i=1000506563929

Cedric Youngelman: Robert Breedlove is the founder and CEO of Parallax Digital, and the author of several seminal works on Bitcoin, including Money, Bitcoin and Time, an Open Letter to Ray Dalio regarding Bitcoin, Bitcoin and the Tyranny of Time Scarcity, The Number Zero and Bitcoin, Masters and Slaves of Money, Our Most Brilliant Idea, Bitcoin is Hope, the recent book, Thank God for Bitcoin: Creation, Corruption, and Redemption of Money, and the new smash podcast and YouTube channel What is Money?, including the Saylor Series. And in my opinion he’s the most important voice to come out of the Bitcoin class of 2017. Welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix Podcast, Robert! How are you?

Robert Breedlove: I’m great! Thank you for having me! And thank you for that lengthy introduction — I forgot how much work I’ve done!

Cedric Youngelman: That’s interesting! When I went to prep for the show I started from the beginning, and I’d almost forgotten how much I had digested of your work, how important it was to me! And I say that sensitively in the terms of like, when I was reading your work in 2019 I wasn’t podcasting, I was just consuming writing about Bitcoin, it wasn’t important to me necessarily who wrote it or the consistency of the voice from piece to piece. So if I had visited you in March of 2019 and came back in December of 2019, I was linking some of it but I had read a tremendous amount of stuff in between, maybe I had caught you in a podcast or two — or ten — in between. But I was just digesting for the sake of taking it in! And the pieces I do want to focus on which are Money, Bitcoin, and Time, the Tyranny of Time Scarcity, and Masters and Slaves of Money, those pieces are really important to me because Money, Bitcoin, and Time is a piece that stands with I think The Bitcoin Standard and Vijay’s The Bullish Case For Bitcoin. It takes a lot of those same principles and distills them, and I think in a very complex yet simple to digest way! And when I revisited your work though, I really started to get bigger themes than I had picked up the first time. [02:57] Not only was I like, You’ve got a mountain of work! I have it all here all printed out! And I’m going through it and I’m like, Wow this is a mountain of work! And I still had to read it again maybe two more times, but I’m like, I remember this! This is all coming back to me! These are the stories I tell when I try to explain Bitcoin! I just didn’t necessarily remember the author per se! So they’re very important pieces to me. So just thinking about Bitcoin and time and money: how is money a story told by humans?

Robert Breedlove [03:33]: Yeah I’m glad you zeroed in on the Money, Bitcoin, and Time piece. It was actually the first thing that I wrote about Bitcoin, and similar to you I was just digesting for a number of years — about two years before I wrote that piece. I guess I published that at the end of 2018? January 2019. So I had been going down the rabbit hole since the end of 2016, so a little over two years of studying nonstop like you had just described. And that was pretty much a synthesis of everything I had learned up until that point. So actually it drew heavily from The Bitcoin Standard, it drew heavily from Vijay’s work, and the work of many others. And I tried to just weave it into a case for Bitcoin from first principles. And the first principles being that money is this story told by mankind. You could also call it a social construct, it’s like a social technology. And something like the calendar, right? A calendar is a social technology related to that which has an interesting connection to time. Probably many of the listeners have read the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. Harari calls these the imaginary constructs that humanity is able to generate these abstractions or useful fictions around which we can orient and concert human action. So these include money, the nation state, human rights, various abstractions. And this ability to generate imagined orders and fight and die for a symbol, basically, is what makes humanity the dominant species in the world. A gorilla troop can mobilize 150 gorillas or whatever to go to battle, but humanity can unite tens of thousands of soldiers under a flag! So we gain this ability to allocate human energy and socioeconomic across space and time in a more precise, directed, and concerted fashion by using symbols or stories than any other animal in the world. Ergo, we dominate the world! [06:15] So in that sense, money is probably the most important story mankind has ever told! It is the original social construct. And that piece attempts to go through the evolution of money, how it’s changed over time, and how it’s actually a tool for storing and transacting time, and you could say time or energy — because everything mankind produces requires time or energy. And another way to think about money is as the most tradable asset in an economy and the most liquid asset, so it represents a claim on everything else. It can be traded for anything else man’s time or energy can produce. So it is this timeless story or timeless social construct, but it also reflects the storage of mankind’s time and energy in a tradable form.

Cedric Youngelman [07:17]: Right! And would you say that — you know I think a lot about what Michael Saylor talked about with networks. Are humans networks? And hardwired for exchange? And why would that be? And what is that network?

Robert Breedlove [07:31]: Yeah! I think Naval has described humanity as the networked species. And the simple case that humanity is more productive under a cooperative division of labor — meaning that there’s this kernel to economics called the comparative advantage, which is: you make hats faster than I make boots—you and I both benefit by specializing in hats and boots respectively and trading with one another. We increase output per man-hour of hats and boots by specializing and trading. And we need one another. We are more productive functioning inter-dependently than we are in isolation. That’s the thing! You could almost think of us as a collective organism in a way. We can satisfy more individual wants cooperating than we can living in isolation. And you can’t avoid that! It’s math, right? All the luxuries that we enjoy today, no man could singularly produce them. Another great book that goes into this is The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. And he talks about a computer mouse in the first chapter. And he says that there is no individual on Earth that knows how to make a computer mouse! No one! No one can do it! It’s this complex configuration of trade networks and specialization and learning and heuristics and tools and resources and technologies that all inter-connect in this network that output the computer mouse. But you cannot pluck any human on Earth off the Earth and put him on a desert island and say, Build a computer mouse! There’s no one that could do it! So we need one another! Social cooperation is the advantage by which we become more productive and wealthy.

Cedric Youngelman [09:28]: Yeah. Through social cooperation we’ve become more productive and wealthy. That speaks to prosperity. And I think the key lesson from your writings is time preference and it really helped me understand that. And maybe you could talk about how individuals can build prosperity through generations. Maybe talking about Harold and Louis and the fishing pole. And I just thought that was remarkable where first we had the micro, and I think that was where I was in 2019, just to kind of lead the story a little bit of where they’re kind of figuring out where they’re gonna specialize or spend their time. And when I revisited it or think about it more deeper it’s really the macro over generations!

Robert Breedlove [10:20]: Yeah it’s a cumulative effect, right? So we’re building — as we trade and specialize, each of the trading partners then gets additional free time. They get the same level output in the same time, therefore they have basically discovered this new amount of time in their day, and they can spend that time producing further or they could spend it in leisure. But if you produce further, then you create more time savings, and there’s a compounding effect. And it builds itself in layers throughout history. So the simple example of that which is in Money, Bitcoin, and Time, and this is one that came out of The Bitcoin Standard, is — I gave the example of two primitive trading partners, Harold and Louis. Actually it was named H and L to signify Harold, with a high time preference — meaning he’s more short-term oriented — and then Louis, with a low time preference — which means he’s more long-term oriented. And both Harold and Louis are alone on an island. They subsist by eating fish. They both start just catching fish with their bare hands. And they can basically spend eight hours a day catching fish with their bare hands — enough to fill their belly for the day. So it’s a full days work for a full days food, essentially. Louis, having the lower time preference, thinking out into the future of how he can bootstrap himself out of this primitive situation, decides that he can forego eating — he can go a little bit hungry a few days a week — maybe he could only fish six hours a day and have a little extra two hours of fasting at the end of every day, and spend those two hours constructing a fishing rod! And I think the example is, at the end of two weeks, Louis has successfully constructed a fishing rod that now allows him to collect a full days worth of fish in say three hours. Whereas Harold, with a high time preference, is still spending eight hours a day just to eat! So now all of a sudden Louis is saying, Alright, I’m catching as many fish as Harold in just three hours of work using this fishing rod. I’m full, I’ve got enough food for the day, I’ve now got this five additional hours that I could spend doing whatever I want. So he could just take that and be lazy! But again, he’s Louis! He’s got a low time preference — he’s thinking about the future! So he’s like, I figure I’m gonna go out and build a net, or construct a boat, or all these other tools that help you catch more fish per man-hour. This process feeds back on itself, and then before you know it, it’s Harold sitting by the river bank spending eight hours a day subsisting on fish. Louis is out to sea in his boat with his net, his spear, his harpoon — everything he’s developed — and he’s catching not only more fish per man-hour, but fish in the deeper sea so he’s catching higher quality fish! He’s improving his quality of life! And then if he passes these lessons on to the next generation, and the next generation is born with all the advantages — all the capital and learnings that he’s accumulated over his lifetime — then they can start that process again from the boat! And then this process builds throughout history until you have these giant fishing ships we have that go into the deep sea and lay trawls of net for miles and miles, and bring back millions of fish they sell on the market. So this is the compounding effect that a lower time preference gives you. And this points to the kernel of all economics, which is delayed gratification. You’re consuming less today to create savings for tomorrow. Or to innovate to create more savings for tomorrow. And it’s these layers of savings that civilization is built on!

Cedric Youngelman [14:53]: Yeah and I even think you say paradoxically a world that consistently defers consumption will actually end up consuming more in the long run as its increased savings would increase the investment and productivity thus making its citizens wealthier in the future. When I read that piece I was very inspired by Louis! And I felt like I was Louis embarking on Bitcoin at that time. Now I feel like I’m in the middle. At the beginning of 2021 I feel like I’m in the middle of that longer cycle where I’m the seventh generation of Harold, maybe. And we’re stuck in this fiat world! The beginning and the after — the beginning’s out of my control — and in 2019 I really felt like I was embarking on a much more — I saw a lot more light! I do want to turn to some more of the macro of price signals. We’ve talked a little about time preference and the micro, but the price signals — why are those so important in terms of like a unit of account?

Robert Breedlove [16:01]: Yeah there’s actually a number of ways to look at this. First of all I have to define what a price is. And I like to relate this to language, actually. It’s kind of like the price signal, you can think of as an economic telecommunications network! So the price is just saying that everything’s trading in the world, and so everything trades at some ratio of everything else. A house may be worth eleven cars, or a car might be worth ten hot dogs. Everything trades at a ratio of everything else. These exchange ratios clearly would be very complicated if that’s how we traded. We’d always have these barter exchange ratios! So what happens in an economy is — again that most tradable asset which is by definition money — everything gets priced in terms of money. And this simplifies trading in terms of calculation, execution, negotiation, and so what you have there is a mechanism of comparison, and this is similar to language in that words have sense in relation to one another. There’s an argument that you can trace it all the way back to where someone is holding up a rock and saying, Rock, and that word doesn’t have meaning in relation to words, it has meaning to the rock. And that’s true, but once you further out into the linguistic sphere, you have context and grammar and syntax — all these things are relational. So we’re deriving meaning from language, based on the relationship and configuration of words. The same is true in our economy: we derive meaning from human action based on the configuration of prices. So people are going into the world staking their time, energy, capital, in an attempt to solve problems or satisfy wants for others, and the game is to generate more outputs than you made inputs. So I put in X time, energy, capital, that has a certain market value. I want to create a product or a service or a piece of knowledge that earns me more time, money, and capital in the end. But all those decisions are guided by the decisions of others. Everyone is competing to satisfy wants for one another over time, so the price is the informational bearer on how much things cost! How much are inputs and outputs worth! So this entire system is what coordinates entrepreneurial action. So this game we’re all playing where we’re trying to figure out, How to better satisfy the wants of people? How do I improve human productivity? How do I render value to people? We just define value as whatever people want! So there’s a lot of wants out there, and you go out and satisfy them profitably. That is the game of economics, and that game is governed by prices. So that is the informational signal that is propagating throughout the economy. What’s incredible about it is that it adds so much efficiency to decision-making! And the simple example there was, if there was an earthquake in Chile that disrupted the flow of copper, all the market actors in the world — no one needs to know the why, no one needs to know about the earthquake, no one needs to know about the destruction — they just need to see that the price of copper went up! By that occurring, you’ve changed the incentive structure for all users of copper. So people buying copper will either buy less or they’ll seek substitutes, and all the producers of copper will produce more, because the market’s bearing a higher price for it! So this market signal is how economic systems coordinate themselves and correct disruptions. So this disruption in the flow of copper into the world economy would be self-regulated or self-corrected through the price signal! And all done in a way that you don’t need to sit down with a simple planning committee and say, Hey! There was a disruption to the flow of copper, we need to decide how much we’re gonna send here and there. The other way to think about this is, the free market is the ultimate distributed computing network! We’re all inter-connected by the price signal. Each individual node — which is each individual human or entrepreneur — they have maximal knowledge of their localized situation, right? You know, whatever business you’re in, you know that business better than anyone else, and you’re communicating information about that business into your market through your buying and selling decisions. That’s constantly reshaping the price signal for others, and the same thing’s happening from all other nodes, so you’re getting information back to the price signal. So it’s a self-organizing economic network communicated through the price signal. So it’s like the nerve signal of the world economy, is another way to think about it.

Cedric Youngelman [21:39]: Right. So we laid out a little bit about the economic gamification of money and how we’re networked. But now we need a kind of way to keep score, so you need a ledger! Before we get to Bitcoin, we’ve actually had an example of a transparent ledger before on a very small scale on the Yap Islands. If you would maybe talk a little bit about how they kept track of money through the Rai stones in a transparent way?

Robert Breedlove [22:08]: Yeah! So that was a super interesting ancient monetary system because it most closely resembled what we see with the Bitcoin open source ledger, basically! Rai stones were giant stones, like you couldn’t move them by hand, it took dozens of guys to retrieve these things — I think from quarries. And they had a very particular shape. There was a significant amount of work necessary to procure them, which we could think of as akin to the Proof-of-Work that limited their supply. So you couldn’t just print Rai stones — that was very important! So they had scarcity in the marketplace. But they lacked some other monetary properties like divisibility and portability. You couldn’t move them easily — these are giant, multi-ton rocks. You couldn’t divide them easily. So the Yap Islanders kept track of it with an open source ledger, effectively! Everyone on the marketplace would trade, and then when they would decide that part of the stone had been traded for some other good or service, they would announce this — literally verbally announce this to the marketplace — everyone had their own individual ledger, and they would record the trades. So that was a distributed ledger, effectively, that truth was established by consensus, and then no one could go and change their individual ledger and say, Oh this trade didn’t happen! Because then it wouldn’t reconcile to the others. So it’s very similar to what Bitcoin does, in that — that’s what every node and miner in the world was doing — it’s checking the work of every other node and miner. Consensus is reached in a distributed fashion! Was that the original question?

Cedric Youngelman [23:58]: Yeah. To continue that thought, that was hard money at first! Hard in the sense that it was hard to produce, hard to forge, not hard in the sense that it was a rock, but hard in the sense that it was hard to procure, until David O’Keefe arrived, and turned hard money into what we would call soft money today.

Robert Breedlove [24:19]: That’s right! And we’ve seen this a number of times throughout history. Another example are the glass beads in Africa. But historically, markets have tried to zero on the asset that best satisfies the properties of money. And we can think about this as the services money renders! We want money that can be divisible, durable, recognizable, portable, and scarce. In the case of the Yap Islanders, they had figured out a system that satisfied those five properties, that provided those five services. However, once O’Keefe arrived, he basically technologically disrupted this monetary system, because he had dynamite, he had boats, he could go out and quarry these rocks much more cheaply, so therefore he could compromise the scarcity of the money, and use it to acquire things in the market and diminish the value of the money. And that’s exactly what happened! I think it was coconut oil that he was trying to procure from them? And he saw that they were using these stones as money. He realized that he could go back and get some dynamite, come here, mine huge quantities of these stones very easily, and then use it to acquire a ton of coconuts and then you could go sell these back in a different market. And glossing over some of the detail, that’s more or less what happened. The Yap Islanders tried to resist initially, but he was able to get through to a few of them. And then the entire monetary system collapsed! So the lesson there is: if someone can produce a money more cheaply than others, they essentially control the monetary system, or they can disrupt it down to the point of the cost of production of that money. And we see a similar dynamic with central banking today. Where they’re producing money at zero cost, confiscating wealth from all users of the money, and driving it into the ground, frankly, over time!

Cedric Youngelman [26:15]: This is for me the hinge of the work that we’re gonna explore today, and the hinge of money in a lot of ways! And before we dive a little bit deeper into that hinge on a more specific micro-level — I’m curious on your thoughts on how China and India dealt with gold and silver? And moving towards what the world considered to be the standard, and how that might have affected their societies from a wealth preservation perspective?

Robert Breedlove [26:45]: Yeah. So they’re good canaries in the coal mine, I think historically, for what we will see for countries and groups that resist Bitcoin going forward. As Saifedean brilliantly says — and I’m gonna paraphrase it — history shows that it is impossible to ignore the consequences of someone else holding a money that is harder than yours! So this inflation-resistant quality of money, it is a game that imposes itself! You can’t just isolate yourself or your economy or your nation from someone else holding a harder money than you, because what will effectively happen is that there’s more demand from a money that holds its value across time, so capital will be absorbed by a hard money economy, making them wealthier relative to the softer money economy, giving the hard money economy the advantage over the soft money economy. And the example there was China and India obstinately holding out on the silver standard while the world was moving to a gold standard, and it just kept playing out! England was I think the first to move to the gold standard, and then the game theory kept playing itself out that other countries realized that they had to adopt a gold standard to remain competitive, and then eventually it was China and India were the two players remaining on the silver standard. And that’s why England was able to colonize much of India! It basically became an English commonwealth, because you had English people on a gold standard able to go in and buy vast amounts of Indian capital and land and resources. And then control it for many generations! Similar thing played out in China, but I believe that led to the Maoist revolution, actually. That there was such a breakdown on wealth that they eventually had a revolution. I might be mixing the chronology up there but the moral of the story is: China was economically plundered by remaining on the silver standard relative to countries that moved on to the gold standard. So in a Bitcoin lens it’s similar — the game theory is: it cannot be ignored or argued away! It’s: whoever holds the hardest money is going to accumulate the most economic value.

Cedric Youngelman [29:24]: Yeah. How much do you think it set back those civilizations till today? If they had maybe gone to gold sooner? I mean dealing with colonization and just the wealth of the society within the society? Do you think they would be very different places today if they had moved to a gold standard earlier? Do you think there would be more peace there or something?

Robert Breedlove [29:49]: Oh of course. I mean, had they adopted the gold standard much earlier I think it would have changed their entire history! They would have been much more powerful and wealthier today. There would have been a lot less suffering between then and now, but as good as gold was, the Achilles’ heel is that it still introduced the need to trust the custodians. Trust the banks. And the economies of scale associated with transacting — meaning that it’s very heavy and difficult to move around — so there’s a big cost associated with transacting with gold. So this led to the centralization of custody. And then governments — which have the monopoly on violence — they inevitably co-opt the gold supply such that it can become a revenue stream for the treasury. They can just borrow whatever they need! And that’s why the gold standard always breaks down and ends up in fiat, in my opinion. Because these custodians — it’s absolute power corrupts absolutely! You give a custodian absolute power over the gold supply, they inevitably issue more bank notes or warehouse receipts than the gold reserves can justify, and the entire standard becomes compromised over time! Again it compromises scarcity of money by abstracting it in a paper currency. So as good as good was as a force for civilization, this Achilles’ heel always led to its ultimate abuse and breakdown.

Cedric Youngelman [31:31]: Turning to Masters and Slaves of Money, and I think drawing out bigger macro conclusions here about how money is used. And something Michael Saylor said I think in the first episode of the Saylor Series was something along the lines of, There’s no fair fight in nature! You’re never gonna take on a fair fight in the real wild. And is some of this interplay between countries and fiat and money just part of nature? And I ask that from a — obviously we would get more if we collaborated, and I do think reciprocity is a big part of our internal nature! But maybe not within the most ambitious or politically connected or powerful people — I’m not sure. But within the competition of groups, is something like when Nixon, or America, went off the gold standard, is that just America taking the world down in an unfair fight?

Robert Breedlove [32:47]: So money is very closely related to biological nature, and I’m gonna write some of this in my upcoming book. I’m tempted to just cover it at a high level here. So in nature — and this is all organisms — one of the most deeply rooted primordial organic impulses is the territorial imperative. So animals want to take territory, protect territory, and so you could say they seek to expand their dominion over space, but I argue too that — again, as Einstein taught us, space and time are the same thing — it also applies to time. So animals seek to increase their genetic dominion over time, which is reproduction. We’re all trying to reproduce and spread genes as far and wide as possible. The territorial imperative of biology is expressed in man as property rights. This is how we determine who owns what in the world. Who owns what space, who owns command over other peoples’ time. This is all embodied in what property rights you have accumulated for yourself. The highest property right in an economy is money. It is the meta-property right that holds claim to all other property rights. So that is the deep connection I think here. And that’s why people are crazy about money, by the way. If you’ve ever who’s lost money, or money can also make people crazy, it’s getting to the deep circuitry of who we are! And to that end I do think that our modes of social organization, they can exhibit these predator and prey dynamics, where you’ll see — again it’s all about inputs and outputs at the end of the day. We think individually and individually we are compassionate, by the way, with our local group, and what people do well — we want to have reciprocal altruism in all of these things. However that compassion does not scale! Again, back to the Dunbar number that’s kind of the limit of what organic societies can mobilize with apps and collective imagined order like we described earlier. You can’t really scale biologically beyond that Dunbar number of 150 or so odd people. So if you look at nations or some larger groups, it would be a lot more cutthroat! So if there’s a way that the collective can earn more outputs from — if there’s a way for individuals operating a collective like state governors or military officials, they can input less energy than they can get in output. So they can enforce a monopoly on violence and impose taxation that costs them X, and then they get tax revenue that equals X + 1, they will do that, right? It’s an economics game! It’s not how you feel about the people, it’s very ruthless in that way. So in that way that’s what I think you see happen throughout history with this disruption of monetary orders, economics game. And that’s what drives the market by the way! To zero in on the money that is most resistant to theft, supply manipulation, because at the end of the day, people have learned through these countless market iterations that, I need to store my wealth — this accumulation of time and energy savings, the fruits of my labor — I need to store it in a form of money that can’t be inflated, confiscated, deauthorized, and that money was gold! It was trust-minimized money is another way to say it. So that’s what made gold, gold. But again the drawback was the custody and portability issue. Gold was an insufficient [inaudible 37:13] so we couldn’t move it easily, we couldn’t beam it over telecommunication channels, so it did not keep up. It forced us to need to trust custodians to warehouse that gold and maintain that currency peg 1:1, that trust is always abused until it falters. To get to why the US had established itself as the gold standard is again about gold. In World War II, every time Nazi Germany would invade a country, the first place they would go is straight to that country’s central bank and hoard their gold reserves. They did this in Poland, they did this with a few others. And very quickly many European countries wised up to this and said, We need to ship our gold out and store it somewhere that Nazis can’t plunder, and it just so happened by geographic happenstance that North America became that safe haven! So as a result of World War II, a lot of gold — most of the world’s [gold] — ends up in North America, and then surprise, surprise, end of the war, US steps in, [passes] the remaining opponents that are all war-weary, they’ve been fighting, they’re resources are diminished, and US is holding all the gold, so we sent out people in, we finished the job, we then hold a peace conference to rewrite the banking system rules to our own favor. So we say that the US dollar will be pegged to gold, all other national currencies will be pegged to the US dollar, so we’re on this gold standard, but it’s a gold standard that the US controls, because now the world is trusting the US to be the gold custodian effectively in this model. And that was 1944. 30 years later, the world sees that the US is producing way too many dollars than its gold reserves can justify, countries start demanding settlement in gold. They want to sell their dollars and repatriate gold. And eventually it gets to a point where the US says, We’ve had enough of this! And they stop, they close the gold window in the infamous 1971 Nixon shock. I think it was Germany that tried to repatriate their gold when the US decided that they didn’t have enough. And that moved the world into this totally uncharted territory of a global fiat standard. And if you just look at the socioeconomic data ever since, things have gotten really bad in a lot of ways.

Cedric Youngelman [39:47]: Yeah. WTF Happened in 1971? Yeah we had those boys on, that was great! I would like to take this lens that you’ve been delving into, and in your words, you’ve spoken about how money is frozen time. And if you can pilfer or take someone’s time, that can be staff, you could be stealing — that’s powerful! Let’s take that lens and turn it now back a little bit towards the aggry beads in Africa and what happened there. Before we get back to the power that the central banks have now, that we’ve broken the peg and we’re no longer pegged to gold. So we can understand and benchmark how much time was stolen over history, in this one example, and then what is going on now? And this is the thing that really blew my mind when I came back to this article. This piece of yours! Because the first time when I read it, I was a little, Yeah yeah Robert, Okay! Meaning, this is really big heavy stuff that is not maybe affecting me in modern times! And now revisiting it 18 months later it read very differently. It read much more clearly that this is happening! So I just want to illuminate what has happened in that prior example before we dive into what’s going on now.

Robert Breedlove [41:28]: Yeah so I assume you’re saying [you’re reading it] pre-COVID, post-COVID.

Cedric Youngelman: Yeah that is the hinge and the perspective change is really powerful post-COVID, and pre-COVID I felt like, Hey, I’m king of the ship! I’m accumulating Bitcoin, everything is gonna take care of itself! In 2021, I’m like, Well maybe stacking satoshis is not really gonna solve all of my problems, but this is a key and a lens into solving a lot of my problems. It’s not everything but it’s a big part of my life, and the biggest part outside of my family and friends. But things are getting bigger outside of my control. I’m feeling differently about externalities.

Robert Breedlove [42:25]: It’s definitely the COVID situation has been an accelerant to all of our thinking and perspective on the world and it’s just incredible how fast things change! It blew me away! And I’m a guy that’s been staring at this and just to see it happen I was completely floored! So I can only imagine what it’s like for others, it’s gotta be similar at least. We see another dynamic similar to the Yap Islanders in that aggry beads were small decorative glass beads that were used as money for centuries in Western Africa. This is around the 16th century that Europeans begin landing on African shores. They’re doing expeditions both exploratory and trading expeditions. And shrewd Europeans discern that, Hey! These Africans are using these small glass beads as money! There’s glass-making facilities back in Europe that I can mass-produce these things. I can counterfeit these things en masse and I can bring these things into the market and acquire all of these goods and services that the African economy can offer, basically at a discount. So just like O’Keefe collapsing the production cost of Rai stones with the Yap Islanders, Europeans are able to collapse the production cost of aggry beads in Western Africa and thereby use it as a mechanism for confiscating their wealth. To your point earlier, if wealth is just this accumulation of time saved or it’s frozen time, we could say both money and capital are both a form of frozen time or energy, and time and energy has to be invested to create them. And then capital and money — money could be used to claim time from other people, capital can be used to improve your productivity which is to say to increase your returns on time spent. You can dig a hole faster per man hour with a shovel than you can with bare hands, you can catch more fish per hour with a fishing rod than you can with your bare hands, etc. So what happened was a surreptitious confiscation of African wealth over time, that these expeditions kept coming in. Africans actually could discern a little bit that some of these beads were counterfeit and there was a little bit of resistance at times, but that just fed back into better counterfeiting, and before you know it it became all mixed up of capital from Africa into the hands of Europeans was just tremendous over time! But this was a little more painful because it was slow and surreptitious. Versus the Yap Islander situation that was small and quick so that it was able to sort itself out. This one was much more of a parasitic long term relationship where it wasn’t evident to African traders what was happening! They were just getting impoverished slowly over time as a result of this relationship. And the net outcome of that was impoverished Africans. Slavery was already practiced in Africa, so eventually they started selling slaves to Europeans, they started selling one another, family members, everything. And this catalyzed the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So the point here is that it’s not just a metaphor to say that stealing money is stealing human time. It’s not just a metaphor! It directly contributes in this instance—the stealing of human time through compromising the money supply directly contributed to the direct theft of human time in the form of slavery. And the trans-Atlantic slave trade was just an atrocious thing! It was 365 years, 12.5 million lives stolen directly from African shores shipped to Europe and the America, 2 million of those died in transit in the infamous Middle Passage. It still has effects in the United States and Europe today. Not only were those lives stolen directly, but their children were born into slavery, this led to the Civil Rights movement in the 60’s, all of these cascading socioeconomic consequences were rooted in [inaudible 47:13]. So the big argument there is an exclusive privilege to produce money without accountability to market forces is an apparatus of enslavement, and that’s exactly what central banking is. They are counterfeiting currency to the benefit of their own shareholders at the expense of everyone else. So my argument there is central banking is the black corps in the world today that leads us towards more totalitarian government, and ultimately we’ll see situations like we saw in Soviet Russia at some point if it goes unchecked! So humanity has to wake up to this truth! We cannot keep enslaving one another and counterfeiting currency which leads to enslavement, and hope to build a sustainable civilization — it’s just not possible!

Cedric Youngelman [48:06]: Right. I’d like to stack some numbers up side by side. You touched on it a little bit before, but it’s like, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade — and I hate to break down these calculations into time and economics, but I think it’s important to benchmark things — 6.8 billion hours of human time per year was stolen over 365 years. You’re talking about 2.5 trillion hours of time stolen! Not even including the progeny, the people that died. And you think about Harold and Louis, and each one of those individuals could have been a Louis, and could have been part of building a dynasty or some sort of citadel for their family or foundation or prosperity. And that was taken away. And then you see even more egregious scenarios where you have these unfair fights where now you move from aggry beads to cloth strips. I think it’s Portugal, is fabricating and counterfeiting cloth strips which are money in parts of Africa, they’re buying slaves with the fabricated cloth strips — some of these slaves happened to be weavers of cloth strips! Now indentured slaves are brought to Portugal, where they’re now building an economy around taking indentured slaves and having them produce the counterfeit goods that are then enslaving their own people. And it just cycles through! I’d be curious to hear how that benchmarks against 40 years of being off of the gold standard? And I think that these are really big connections! You said something earlier before where — and I slightly disagree with you in terms of like, People are listening or learning — I’m not convinced that this is getting through to the masses — all of these examples! That’s why I really beat them! I want to highlight them! Because they’re not taught in school, they’re not even taught in higher education and universities — the history of money and how we chose gold, and what makes good money. It’s interesting though because you can see signs that people understand this over time. You have music like in 1971 you have Marvin Gaye, Inner City Blues, talking about inflation, but it doesn’t mean that it’s getting through or that this kind of ethos is really connecting with people! Even now Bitcoin is accelerating and more people are asking me about it in a positive light, but I don’t think they’re connecting aggry beads and fiat! But if we could just benchmark a little bit of how you see the time theft through fiat money printing. And the lenses there is that, if you can make glass beads for essentially free, if you can make cloth for free, and if you could make money for free, what does that mean? And then just kind of benchmark it.

Robert Breedlove [51:23]: Yeah! One way to think about it is the exchange value of money will converge to its production cost over time. So if it only costs you next to nothing to make a cloth strip or a glass bead, there’s an incentive to spend that money buying goods and services until market exchange value reaches production cost — until you’ve inflated it down to its production cost. And that also explains the incentive scheme behind fiat currency. It’s literally a keystroke in a centralized ledger. We say printing money often, but they don’t even print money as much as they used to! It’s more about a keystroke of entering new reserves into a bank balance is pyramided on top of to increase the money supply. So I quantify the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to benchmark the Fed against just the US central bank — not looking at the other central banks around the world. And you can develop a proxy for the amount of time stolen from the productive economy through quantitative easing, or money printing. And the data I used to do this were the average hourly wage rate per year — this is from the Social Security Administration in the US — I looked at the changes in US M2, which is the money supply year over year in the US. You can then divide that change — that increase in the money supply — divided by the average hourly wage rate. It gives you a proxy for how many hours were stolen. That’s basically: What is the market rate per hour of the average worker? How much money did the government print that year? That’s how many hours were stolen, because when a government prints money, there’s no fair trade there. They’re not adding any productive assets into the economy. They’re not putting any assets in, they’re not adding any human time, no ingenuity — nothing. It’s just a reallocation on the claims of the productive factors in an economy from the hands of one to another. From the hands of society to the hands of the government, or the central bank you could say more specifically. And when you stack this over — I only looked back 40 years, 1981–2020 — the average hours stolen per year by just the US central bank, the Fed, came out to 23.4 billion hours per year stolen for 40 years straight! So this was two and a third as many as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, 6.5 billion hours per year. I guess it’s closer to four times, actually! Three to four times more hours stolen per year than the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. And over the course of 40 years, the total calculus came out to almost 1 trillion human hours stolen by the Fed in 40 years of money printing. And then if you quantify that back to the workforce number, it’s as if the Fed had a slave force of about 11.7 million people for 40 years straight, breaking down the hours to the number of people needed to satisfy those hours. For a long time I took a great deal of reticence to talk about central banking in this way, because it is distinctly different from physical bondage, where there are chains and whips and violence that’s very visceral and real. Inflationary monetary policy driven by central banks is something much less visible than that, much harder to identify, but because of that invisibility, the tradeoff is that it’s done at a much larger scale! It’s three to four times as much as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, looking at just one central bank! So it’s bad! What else can you call systemic time theft other than slavery? When you look at it through this lens I think it gives you a frame of reference on what’s truly wrong in the world today! We have theft at a minimum, slavery at a maximum, integrated directly into the prevailing economic order. And it may sound crazy, it may sound tinfoil hat, but just a quick study of the history of humanity — we’ve always had systems of slavery, always! — every civilization has enslaved someone else. It’s been the norm — the vast majority have used slaves. We’ve just figured out a way to really scale it and hide it in a more sophisticated way than we’ve ever done before, in the institution of central banking.

Cedric Youngelman [56:46]: Yeah. I agree with everything you’ve just said, and I really agree with what you said about, When you come to this idea at first it’s really hard to grok. It’s really hard to accept. And I think part of that to be honest is, one of your quotes — I think you maybe said it on Stephan Livera — Acquire human labor on the market at an unfair price. That’s a really interesting way to put it! I think what makes that really hard to grok is that, one, what make it really hard to grok at first in 2019 was, I’m a huge benefactor I believe of this sin or this scam or this heist! And I’m not incentivized — I wasn’t incentivized in 2019 in my mind to do anything about it! I was a big beneficiary of it. I don’t philosophically. I don’t mean from justice. I wasn’t for it, but it wasn’t really in my best interest to find this as a truth! And it was shocking! And in the two years since, I now feel like what used to be an exported heist is now turned inward. Because we can no longer take advantage of what’s going on outside of our borders to the degree that we have, both through physical force and through fiat central banking human ranching or farming. Now I feel that it’s turned inward, and that’s where I think it really started to click at a deeper level. One of the things you say is, More accurately, money, along with its precursors, action and speech, are the root of all sovereignty. So do you think we’re fully sovereign in the US?

Robert Breedlove [58:49]: No, of course not! I mean, if you were sovereign you’d be free to choose your own money!

Cedric Youngelman [58:55]: Well to some extent we are!

Robert Breedlove [58:58]: No you can’t! Try to go launch a competing business to the US dollar and see what happens!

Cedric Youngelman: Fair enough! So it’s not a free market.

Robert Breedlove: And it goes further than that! What about your tax rate? Do you feel like the services you’re being rendered for the taxes you pay are satisfactory? Can you negotiate that tax rate?

Cedric Youngelman [59:20]: Yeah. And this is where it’s not an opt-in voluntary system. I didn’t agree to any of this! That’s another one where it’s really been an arc for me where I’ve looked at taxes very differently over coming into Bitcoin and now where I stand. But like going to the dock and trying to launch my boat — I don’t have a boat but as an example — that costs a fee. And you get into the discussion of, This is public land, the people’s land, the public property. Why does it cost me something to do everything? But they felt more benign than insidious. Or I just didn’t feel them as much, I didn’t think about it as much. Now, with even more restrictions, and I have more time to think about these things, I don’t think people are really — I don’t see money still being a big part of this conversation in 2020!

Robert Breedlove [1:00:29]: Well, I agree that the political puppetry is still being executed successfully, right? They’re distracting people, people are still caught up in this hallucination that it’s red versus blue, conservative versus liberal, when in fact they all serve the central bank master! But I would argue that I’m less concerned about — I mean clearly it would be great to wake people up immediately, but these things take time. So the way I see things playing out is: the more money is printed, the more abusive the system becomes, the more demand will be driven for encryption technologies, self-sovereign solutions, Bitcoin, frankly — people want to store their wealth in a place it cannot be confiscated, manipulated, abused, inflated. And the experience that I’ve gone through falling into the Bitcoin rabbit hole: where your money goes your mind follows — as with the experience you’ve gone through — it changes people over time. So my longer term vision and bet is that over the next 10, 20, 30 years, you’re gonna have a massive awakening that the state is just a giant scam! It’s a huge fraudulent organization. It abuses people. And now people have this ability to fight back in an unprecedented way with digital technologies: they can self-organize, you can move your capital in a system parallel to a legacy financial system, you can escape capital controls, you can do all — so that gets into the whole Sovereign Individual thesis, which I always mention this book. I’m writing an essay series on it now, it’s gonna be a 12-part series more or less covering one part per chapter in the book, plus one extra part covering Bitcoin specifically. I’m arguing that we’re transcending this false statist dichotomy between capitalism and communism, and that Bitcoin enables a new mode of socioeconomic organization I’m calling Sovereignism. And that encryption technology — which is at the heart of the Internet, Bitcoin, and other tools that I think we’ll see coming down the pipe in the coming years, this is inherently disruptive to the state. It gives people a level of sovereignty that’s never before been possible! We needed a large monopoly on violence to preserve the peace and protect property rights in a trading economy before, but now a lot of these functions that the state was necessary for in the analog stages can be satisfactorily provided by software in the digital age. So we’re in a Renaissance, really. The transition from the agricultural age into the industrial age or the fall of the feudal age — these things in retrospect they’re major transitions, but no one saw them coming! If you’re living in feudal society, you just think this is just the world, and the way it’s just gonna be forever. The printing press is invented—10 million books are printed in a year. [inaudible] These ages are getting shorter and shorter. Agricultural age is much longer than the industrial age, the industrial age is much longer than the information age that we’re moving into. Technology, as its innovation cycles accelerate, our organizational cycles accelerate, because society is a reflection of the technologies used to facilitate it! So we’ve moved from large scale industrial tech, which necessitated a large scale nation state, to small scale microprocessing and digital technology, which will enable small scale self-organization. Who knows where this goes! But I think it’s abundantly clear by this point that digital changes everything! Software is eating the world, and government is not immune to that!

Cedric Youngelman [1:04:57]: When I think about when your time through money is stolen, it’s in perpetuity on one end, where that life has lost its potential for prosperity, but it’s in perpetuity on the other end, where if I were to steal someone’s time, and then put my child through Harvard or other accredited programs and get them networks and connections, then my progeny can do better in perpetuity forever through that stolen wealth and time. And that really informs a lot of my thinking around fairness and justice and altruism, and how I try to make my decisions and always try to err on the side of being objective and doing what I think is best for myself but without trying to discount how my actions might affect others. And one more example I want to bring up from your early work is the example of the wine maker. And what inflation does to a small business person. And the choices they have to make at that micro-level, in dealing with inflation.

Robert Breedlove [1:06:20]: Yeah this is a really interesting one. One way to think about prices is as an element that determines where attention is warranted. So if the price if something is increasing, that represents an unsatisfied want in the market economy — there is more demand than there is supply for this good or service. And so by extension, Bitcoin is a clear example of this. When a price of something goes up, attention is drawn to is. People pay attention to price changes. And you could say that the element for drawing attention is that the demand is outstripping supply, so there’s an unsatisfied want there. So this draws the attention of producers in the marketplace to go and try to solve that want. The opposite would also be true, that if the price is declining, it’s sort of descending away, it’s getting less attention. It would indicate that a want is being satisfied more efficiently and effectively, and producers or entrepreneurs would pay less than that. Again in terms of the connection between price and attention, Bitcoin’s a great example of that. Every time the price goes up or down, that’s when it gets attention or less attention. So in that way, centralized bodies producing money, they’re inflating the nominal price of assets or goods or everything, right? There’s more dollars. The example that I gave is a wine maker operating in a central banking economy, who essentially faces three courses of action when a central bank prints money. The assumption is that he’s selling his wine for $20 a bottle to begin with, so he knows that, Okay, say the central bank doubled the money supply, just assume inflation is even — it’s not actually even in the world but for simplicity’s sake — assume that his inputs are gonna effectively double in price. He has three choices: He can continue selling his wine for $20 a bottle and eat the loss — his cost of inputs has doubled but he keeps his price the same — he eats the loss due to inflation, he can choose to double the price of his wine to $40 a bottle, which will keep his margin constant — so the cost of inputs has doubled, he doubles his selling price, his margin is constant — or, he could water down his wine, or use cheaper ingredients, a lower quality products but he keeps selling it at $20 a bottle to preserve some of that margin. So faced with those three options, clearly he’s not gonna take the loss. If he increases his price to $40 a bottle which would be the honest thing to do frankly, he is creating more attention, right? He’s increased the price of wine, so he’s drawing more attention from competitors that will look to sell that bottle at a higher price as well, and then those competitors might not be as honest as him! They may choose to sell the wine at a higher price or even a lower price and compromise on quality, so he’s left with kind of this third choice, because even if he’s honest he’s probably gonna lose some business to competitors — because he’s had to increase his price by double—and then his competitors can hide some of that cost through again, cheaper lower quality ingredients. So he’s sort of incentivized to deceive his customers in the short run! Now over time this would work itself out because his reputation — say he would have a reputation for a certain quality of wine — he would then be diminishing that quality which over time his reputation would be diminished as well. But it would take time for this to occur. So the moral of the story is: inflation is forcing producers to be more short term oriented. Again in raising their time preference. Which also encourages them to deceive their customers in the short run. They’re thinking less about their long term reputation, more about their immediate financial profitability. And as a result of theft integrated in the money supply, inflation integrated directly into the money supply, producers of all sorts are forced to weigh their moral and financial [costs] in this way, they’re gonna have to hold each one in each hand and decide, Am I gonna put food on the table and a roof over my head for my family, or am I gonna compromise a little bit [to run a better] business? So it’s that mode by which I argue inflation is a cancer on the socioeconomic and moral fabric of reality. And again if civilization is [characterized] by the lowering of its time preference and the broadening of its time horizons, inflation is causing us to become less civilized, more deceptive, more short term oriented in general. And I think you can see this again back to https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ inflation screws up society really bad!

Cedric Youngelman [1:12:09]: Right. It’s corrosive! And it pits us against each other, instead of having us collaborate for the sake of prosperity for all, as whimsical as that sounds! I’m kind of curious what you think of stacking up — I think it’s Ray Dalio’s how the economy works in 80-year credit cycles, with the Fourth Turning and Brandon Quittem’s take on that, and how those pieces work up against each other?

Robert Breedlove [1:12:38]: Yeah I haven’t read the Fourth Turning but Brandon’s a good friend of mine so I’ve read his piece on it which is really good — highly recommend that. And we’ve had some discussions about it but I think it’s really interesting that humanity is subject to these cycles that are — I mean I don’t know where they come from, they’re just these super-seasons almost, these 70-year turnings. And I don’t know where they come from but I find it very interesting! Dalio’s economic cycles are interesting too, but I would argue that a lot of them are driven by this vulnerability of money to be co-opted, to have its scarcity compromised, which incentivizes people to accumulate debt. If your money is losing money every year, then you’re incentivized to take out debt in current dollars, and let the inflation diminish your real debt burden over time, so again it flips, it inverts the incentives of money, where typically the incentives of money are to create savings. Savings undergird investment, investment improves time preference. So we’re actually thinking longer term, we’re becoming more civilized. Fiat currency inverts that entire situation. And I think most of Dalio’s work is focused on that aspect of money, that it’s been repeatedly abused and pushed to be a more debt-based money over time, and then you get these huge inflationary booms, which is actually just a giant misallocation of capital. People are starting projects that they think they can profitably complete, but it’s all a result of a distorted price signal, and then once reality comes into play, it collapses! So this is the Austrian business cycle theory, that fiat currency distorts price signals and exacerbates the boom and bust business cycle. And I think Dalio’s work really just — without saying it — measures and focuses on that. Saying that fiat currency is disturbing the standard business cycle. Which the standard business cycle would just be, people are always gonna get hyped up, overexuberant about something and it’s gonna get a correction. That’s normal! Growth is inherently unstable. But fiat currency fuels that fire and exacerbates it tremendously!

Cedric Youngelman [1:15:20]: I want to turn a little bit more to Bitcoin. And I want to ask you, do you think Bitcoin is the alchemist’s vision? In terms of creating this indestructible, durable, divisible thing?

Robert Breedlove [1:15:39]: You know I will just say that that is probably the rabbit hole! Alchemy again back to moderns — we think that alchemy is a joke — it’s a bunch of people that thought they could turn lead into gold and it never worked? Not at all what it was! It was basically the precursor to the Scientific Revolution. Carl Jung says that alchemy was the dream from which science was born. You know I’ve only got like five minutes left here so I can’t dive into it completely, but I’ll say that I find it very interesting that the highest aim of alchemy was to develop or discover the incorruptible substance. And this substance was to serve as the antidote to tyranny in general. But we would say that most forms of tyranny are state-based at least in the modern age. And I find it very interesting, this connection! The other thing is people think it was about how to turn lead into gold? That was just the symbol of it, actually. To turn lead into gold was to eliminate impurities, to absolutely eliminate impurities, to uncorrupt matter. And in removing corruption from matter there was also this feedback with the soul, the spirit, the character of man. So it would actually be refining our own morality, character, uncorrupting ourselves as we pursued this decorruption of the world, if you will. Again the highest aim was the Philosopher’s Stone, which the alchemists called the lapis philosophorum, it was the incorruptible substance they were seeking. And I find it very interesting the connection to Bitcoin that 21 million Bitcoin is the first incorruptible thing mankind has ever created! We’ve created something that existed beyond our own reach. No one in the world, no entity, no individual, no government, no central bank, can change — thus far at least, 12 years into Bitcoin’s life , $600 billion in market capitalization—a civil war later, that was Bitcoin Cash it was a Bitcoin fork, there have been a number of attempts to co-opt Bitcoin, to increase supply, increase block size, etc. It’s been hardened through hostility. Thus far it seems as though 21 million Bitcoin is the first incorruptible figure mankind has ever created. And by being incorruptible, the great promise of Bitcoin is to disrupt the greatest institution of tyranny in human history, which is the central bank! So we have an incorruptible substance in Bitcoin, we have an antidote for the corruption of central banking. And if you talk to Bitcoiners that have studied this thing deeply and are active with it intimately, it changes you! Bitcoin changes you! I don’t know how to describe it specifically, everyone has their own flavor of experience of it, but the general theme is that you’re more family focused, you’re more community focused, you’re more purpose driven, more focused on saving, less focused on spending, you’re asking deeper questions, you’re thinking about the world more. It really does have a tremendous impact on the character of those that go down this rabbit hole earnestly. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is: is Bitcoin the Philosopher’s Stone, the lapis philosophorum, who knows? I mean this sounds extra crazy tinfoil hat, but I would just say go do the research yourself! Look into it! Most of my knowledge of alchemy came from Jordan Peterson’s book Maps of Meaning, which is a tremendously difficult book but also a very worthwhile read. And we’re existing in a time where ancient wisdom seems to be resurging in the digital age. We get people doing yoga, meditation, ayurvedic medicine, paleo diets, psychedelics like ayahuasca are becoming more important, Bitcoin you can even argue is a form of ancient wisdom in that it’s Austrian economic money. Austrian economics is the ancient wisdom of economics! Whereas Keynesian economics is central bank propaganda, more or less. So maybe this alchemy thing coming back in the digital age too is part of that! I don’t know, but I find it very fascinating!

Cedric Youngelman [1:20:30]: Yeah. To quote you, Bitcoin is Hope. Our Most Brilliant Idea. Death, Taxes, and 21 million Bitcoin. Was some of the things we can count on in this world. Not that we want to count on death and taxes but we know they’re gonna happen. This has been so incredible I can’t tell you how much I’ve looked forward to this and it’s exceed all my expectations and excitement beforehand. Again I think everyone should check out all your articles, including the ones Bitcoin is Hope, Our Most Brilliant Idea. Your latest book with your co-authors, Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption, and Redemption of Money. I’ll leave it to you for any parting words and please let everyone know where they can find you. We didn’t get into the Saylor Series because it stands on its own and there was no reason for us to cover it just go and watch it! I got through a couple of them already. They’re incredible! For me, I’m looking forward to like a bachelor weekend where I get a whole Sunday and I could watch them on my big screen like the Godfather! I’m gonna sit down with some snacks and just take them in! They’re incredible! I was really just blown away from like the first couple of frames. And they just stand on their own. So definitely check out all of Robert’s work.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah thank you Cedric so much for having me! This has been awesome! It’s been a long time since I got to go through all of my old work and think about it again and talk about it, so I appreciate that! You can find me on Twitter Robert Breedlove. I’ve got a Youtube channel and a podcast, the What Is Money Show. Our first guest was Saylor and the Saylor Series. We’re gonna do similar series like that with the best thinkers in the world, essentially. So my aim is just to sit down with some of the smartest people in the world and talk as long as they want about whatever relevant topic they want. Try to make it something like the intellectual Olympics, something like that, so that they’re very enjoyable to watch. Also on the Twitter page I’ve got a LinkTree that I update frequently which has links to all my work. Thank God For Bitcoin, I co-authored that with seven other co-authors. It’s been very well received! It goes into the moral applications. It’s a moral treatise on Bitcoin told through a Christian lens. It’s not a preachy book. It’s not a super rah-rah Christian book, I think it just makes the moral case for Bitcoin and roots that in some Judeo-Christian mythology. And yeah I feel extremely fortunate to be working in this space! It’s given me purpose. I Tweeted this earlier today: Before Bitcoin I wanted dollars. After Bitcoin I wanted to make a difference. If you let it, Bitcoin will make you more purpose-driven. So I would encourage others to let it! To explore this space deeply and earnestly, and it will make you ask fundamental questions that will transform you!

Cedric Youngelman: Yeah. I can’t tell you how much I’ve appreciated your time, and this has been so dope! Definitely check out Thank God for Bitcoin, I just finished it myself. Robert this has been incredible, I really appreciate it, thank you so much!

Robert Breedlove: Yeah man. Thank you so much! I appreciate you for having me!