So to Speak podcast transcript: 'Is money speech?' with Robert Breedlove

Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Nico Perrino: There's the old saying that I'd rather have questions without answers than answers that cannot be questioned. So, we have to understand that existence is an ongoing process of inquiry. We're never going to find the final answer, right? Reality is changing all the time. We're adapting all the time. That necessitates humility and honest inquiry.

You're listening to So to Speak, the free speech podcast brought to you by FIRE, the foundation for individual rights and expression. Hi folks, welcome back to So to Speak. I am your host, Nico Perrino.

There was a recurring debate in the free speech community regarding whether money is speech. A key argument in the debate is that money is often necessary to facilitate speech. We use money to buy things like printing presses, advertising space, poster boards, pens, and megaphones. So, many free speech advocates argue that while money may not be literally speech, it is often a necessary prerequisite to speak, and to allow the government to regulate its use for expressive purposes is to create a back door for the government to restrict speech.

The idea is that the government can no more restrict the purchase of a printing press than it can ban the use of a printing press to share the news. But something about the nature of money and its potential corrupting influence strikes many people as different than speech, even if they concede that money can send a message and is often a prerequisite to speak. So, who's right? How should we think about money's involvement in free speech?

Who better to help us answer those questions than today's guest, Robert Breedlove? He is the host of a popular podcast appropriately called The What Is Money Show. Robert goes further than to simply argue that money can serve expressive ends. He believed that money itself is a language, the language of human action, and that it's use should be free from regulation.

Robert's beliefs are grounded in his support for free markets and Bitcoin. So, yes, to our many listeners who regularly write to me, demanding a podcast that explores the intersection of free speech and Bitcoin, you are finally getting it today.

This is a longer show than normal, a whopping two hours, which by the standards of some podcasters isn't all that long – looking at you, Joe Rogan, and Lex Friedman – but this show is longer than we normally go on So to Speak. The length is due, in part, to Robert's approach to podcasting, which is to take the time to explore definitions and first principles on the path to arriving at insights and conclusions.

And in addition to discussing whether money is speech, Robert and I also explore other related questions, such as whether code is speech, the code underlying Bitcoin, for example; whether the plans for 3D printed guns are speech; and we also discuss protecting the role of anonymous speakers in society, something we've discussed on a lot of recent podcasts: anonymous speakers like Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, for example.

The world still doesn't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. And spoiler alert, we will not reveal the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto on this show. We don't know. And Robert, as you'll hear, doesn't think we'll ever know.

But we do hope to lend some insights in this podcast into the nature of money, what it is, and how it might fit into the free expression conversation. So, now, let's get onto the show. All right, Robert Breedlove, welcome onto the show.

Robert Breedlove: Hey, Nico, thank you for having me.

Nico Perrino: So, you're known as the What Is Money guy, and I guess by way of starting this conversation, I want to know what brought you on that intellectual journey. How did you become the What Is Money guy? Have you always had an interest in money?

Robert Breedlove: No, not always. Certainly not. I've always been a curious human, to the point where when I was a child, I think I was bombarding my mother with so many questions that she finally just said, "You've got to start reading books on your own to answer all these questions." So, she got me into the habit of reading at a very young age. My initial curiosity was the stars. I grew up in the South. We spent a lot of time outdoors. I was always very curious about the cosmos and mother nature in general. So, I read a lot about that initially.

And I guess what got me on the money track, my father was an accountant and an entrepreneur. So, I probably have some of the nature built into me, but my curiosity led me to really trying to understand markets and economies. I was – as a teenager – was kind of mystified by this stock market. I was like, what in the world is this thing? People are just trading imaginary shares of companies. It didn't make sense to me.

So, I started reading The Economist magazine initially. Started reading some economics newsletters. And what really got me on the money track was when I discovered the book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, when I was, I think, 19 years old. And when I read that book, my mind was simply blown.

Nico Perrino: And that's the book on the origins of the Federal Reserve, right?

Robert Breedlove: It's on the origin and inception of the Federal Reserve. It's on the history of central banking more generally, and it also covers the nature of money in depth. I think there's actually a subchapter in that book titled "What Is Money?" And I didn't consciously name the podcast after that, but I think, subconsciously, that's probably where I got it.

And yeah, since going down that path, there's a lot of ways to say it, but money touches almost everything in the field of human experience. I've come to see it as kind of like a metaphor for many things we experience, almost like a metaphor for reality itself. There's a lot of answers to the question, and one of the most valuable answers to the question, what is money, is that money is the language of value or human action. So, I'll stop there, because just to answer your question in general, it was really the book The Creature from Jekyll Island that got me on the track initially.

I would also credit later on – after I discovered Bitcoin, I read the book The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous the weekend it came out. This was like April 2018. And that got me into the Austrian economics rabbit hole. So, Creature from Jekyll Island was central banking, nature of money, history of central banking, but it didn't get too much into Austrian economics. Saifedean's book basically white pilled me on Austrian economics. I started getting into that in 2018, and I've read a lot of Austrian economics in the past six years.

Nico Perrino: Is this the focus of your career now, or do you still very much see this as a hobby? Did you go into anything accounting or money related in college or after college?

Robert Breedlove: Yeah. So, I got a master's degree in accounting and finance. I was a CPA for a number of years, mostly focused on tax strategies for high net worth individuals and businesses. Did not enjoy the linearity of that career path. It's very much like staff, senior staff, manager, senior manager, partner. Very predictable, and somewhat capped in its potential; and not enough, I don't know, excitement for me.

So, I got into industry as a CFO. I worked in a number of industries, but mostly in technology. So, like healthcare, software, hospitality software. And eventually, I basically came to a point where I decided I wanted to work for myself, and I had one CFO consulting client at the time.

And so, I started my own business, was consulting for this one client, and it was a big risk at the time, just sort of going out on my own. But fortunately, it liberated the intellectual bandwidth for me to start studying Bitcoin and crypto assets more generally, and that's what really got me into the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

So, once I got into the Bitcoin rabbit hole, I initially started a hedge fund. It was like a multi-strategy crypto asset fund. And then, throughout that process, writing monthly investor updates and continuing to study Bitcoin, I became more and more narrowly focused on Bitcoin alone. And eventually, I got to another point where I decided our benchmark in the fund was Bitcoin, buy and hold Bitcoin, which is really hard to outperform.

And so, I came to this realization where this is a time when a lot of my writing and tweeting and podcast appearances were becoming popular. And I decided that, and the feedback from the market was like, "More. We want to hear more from you. We want to read more of your writing," et cetera. And I decided that, well, I'm spending all my blood, sweat and tears trying to outperform the best performing asset in human history. I could just hold the thing and not run the fund and try to outperform it. And then, I'd be free to do whatever I want.

And so, that's what I did. And initially, the idea was to jump on the podcast bandwagon, partly inspired by Jordan Peterson, who said that the cost of bandwidth has basically gone to zero, so that we can talk, and that now the spoken word has the reach and permanence of the written word. And so, that really resonated with me. I realized I was wrestling with a lot of big ideas, getting into this Bitcoin slash what-is-money rabbit hole.

And so, I figured if I could have some conversations with some really smart people, and with bandwidth at zero costs, you can basically give the ideas all the room they need to breathe. You just record as long as you want, and chop it into a bunch of episodes. And so, I just decided that would be like the starting point, and I would get more into writing, public speaking, et cetera.

And then, I was really fortunate around that time trying to come up with the title of the podcast, and figure out who my first guest would be. I got a DM from some guy named Michael Saylor. And he was like, "Thanks for your work. We think it's brilliant. We just bought $250 million in Bitcoin." And I'm like, who is this scammer? I thought it was a joke. And obviously read the headline he sent, looked more into it; realized it was serious.

And then, just struck up a conversation with Mike, and invited him on the show. Really had no idea he is the most eloquent man on planet Earth.

Nico Perrino: And who is he, for our listeners who might not be familiar?

Robert Breedlove: He's the CEO of a NASDAQ-listed business intelligence firm called MicroStrategy. He's the founder and CEO. Actually, he's no longer CEO of that company. I think he's just the chairman now. He's the founder and chairman; founded the company almost 30 years ago.

He has a really interesting story, which I won't share here, but basically one of the most brilliant technology entrepreneurs of our time, and he's recently invested a substantial portion of his own personal net worth into Bitcoin, and he's moved his entire company's balance – not his entire company's balance sheet, but the entire company's treasury into Bitcoin. So, they use Bitcoin as their treasury reserve asset. I want to say they've accumulated close to 200,000 Bitcoin on his company's balance sheet, and I think he personally holds in the neighborhood of 20,000 Bitcoin.

So, anyways, that was his first entrance into the Bitcoin market. This is like August 2020. And then, he became my first guest on the show in November 2020. We released nine episodes together, which came out to somewhere in the neighborhood of like 13, 14 hours of content, and it just blew up.

The podcast blew up. I take little credit. I basically just hit record. The guy can practically interview himself. And it's one of the most popular pieces of Bitcoin content on the internet, if not the most popular. So, I was very fortunate to have a breakout success at the beginning of the show.

Nico Perrino: So, you got Michael Saylor to come in and talk about this question, "What is money?"

Robert Breedlove: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: But do you find that it's a question that many people who go into finance – fund managers, CPAs, accountants, bankers – ask themselves, or are they just kind of going into it without a kind of philosophical first-principles understanding of the world they're about to occupy, and to which they're going to devote their lives?

Robert Breedlove: I'm a strong believer in the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule. And I think that 80 percent of people imitate 20 percent of people. And so, this is why the philosophers and the artists and the people that – really the artists get there first, right? They get there before we can even articulate an idea. You just see glimmers of an idea in some artistic medium. And then, the philosophers come in behind them and they start to articulate these things. And then, over time, those ideas permeate the mainstream consciousness.

And no, I don't think most finance people ask themselves this question, because they're just imitating those that have come before them. And when you add in the fact that mainstream university curriculum is not – there's no Austrian economic component to it. It's all based on Keynesian economics. In Keynesian economics, they think, "Oh, every time there's an economic crisis, we'll just print more money to stimulate consumption, which will fix production," and they have the equation exactly backwards.

So, our entire educational paradigm in the sphere of economics is based on this Keynesian nonsense, and there is no discussion whatsoever of the essential nature of money. It basically represents government to be a god or a deity of some kind, like an organization that doesn't suffer any trade-offs or opportunity costs, and can simply issue currency into existence, and take it out of existence at its divine will. And that's just nonsense, right? Government is a business just like every other human organization in the world. It's accountable to its bottom line.

The only difference with government today is that most central governments, to be specific, or centralized states, they have a central bank. So, they can produce economic losses and still continue to exist, because they can print money to paper over those losses. And so, we're starting to get into the darkness that is central banking a little bit, but I'll pause there and see where you want to take it.

Nico Perrino: Well, two concepts, I guess, that I'd like to unpack for our listeners, just so they can follow the conversation. The first is the Pareto principle, which I believe – and correct me if I'm wrong, Robert – is the idea that 20 percent of people in any given industry are responsible for like 80 percent of the effect?

Robert Breedlove: Yeah, it's deeper than that, though. This is a cosmological principle. 20 percent of the stars in the universe have 80 percent of the mass. And it's also exponential. So, if you take 20 percent of the 20 percent, which is four percent, and you take 80 percent of the 80 percent, which is 64 percent, you'll see that pattern reflected again. So, like 4 percent of the stars tend to have 64 percent of the mass, for instance. You also see it in organizations, like four percent of the people tend to do 64 percent of the work, or 20 percent doing 80 percent.

And I think in terms of humans, Aristotle said that man excels all the other animals in his ability to imitate. And there's a great book on that, or really a series of books by Rene Girard. The one that I've read is called Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, but he describes how we transmit culture through imitation. Basically, humans are very imitative. If you have kids, you know this, right? Your kids basically just reflect yourself back to yourself perfectly, good, bad, and ugly.

Nico Perrino: For better or worse.

Robert Breedlove: Yes, exactly. And so, it's a good thing, right? It kind of helps you see yourself more clearly, and maybe get your act together in some respects. But essentially, yeah, that's what I think. The Pareto principle is very deep, and it's mysterious, right? It's almost like the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio. It's something that we observe at every scale of existence, basically.

Nico Perrino: It kind of reminds me of my statistics class in college, which I was never good at math, and I was never really great at statistics, but the principle of the normal curve really kind of blew my mind. It's this idea; it's kind of the bell curve, right? You have the tails, and then you have this big hump in the middle, and then you have the other tail on the other end. I'm trying to just kind of paint it for our audio-only listeners. And that you find that effect in nature everywhere. Most things fall within that big hump, whether it's the circumference of a tree, or the height of a person.

Robert Breedlove: Yes, that's right.

Nico Perrino: Or the ability of a sports player, a football player. And then, you have the people on the extremes or the things on the extremes.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: You have the LeBron James, if you're talking about basketball players, right, at the far end of one tail. And that just like anywhere in nature, you were going to find this; and it had the result of me just looking at people differently, to the extent people's behavior was an aberration. I was like, well, that's just someone at the far end of the tail of the normal curve distribution. Or I found someone annoying: it's like, oh, that's just someone at the far end of the normal distribution. It's just like that effect is just everywhere in nature, and so, you have to find those people there.

Robert Breedlove: Absolutely. And to be clear here, it's not saying there's 20 percent of people are good, 80 percent of people are bad. This is all domain-specific, right? You can be a high performing athlete, low performing student; a high performing executive, low performing parent, all of these things. So, there's bell curves, as you said; distributions and bell curves are basically all types of characteristics and phenomena in nature.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. And then, the other thing I wanted to just unpack before we move on in the conversation is we've talked now or reference the Austrian school a couple of times. I'd love for you to explain that, and how the Keynesian school, which was in opposition to the Austrian school, became so prominent in the centers of power.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah. So, I'm not super well versed on the specific history. I would say definitely have an economic historian on to talk about that.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Robert Breedlove: But the gist of it is: printing money is a very, very powerful tool. If you can print money, what is the old saying, that money is power? Well, you can basically print power, and this can be political power, right? You can buy votes, you can buy influence. It could also be physical power. You can hire soldiers, you can build armies, you can build weapons.

So, if Lord Acton was correct that absolute power corrupts absolutely, I don't think there's any more realistic implementation of absolute power in the world other than the centralization and monopolization of currency production. And so, that's what Keynesian economics justifies, or sets out to justify; and you could say it's a metaphor problem, actually.

They metaphorize the economy to a machine. The central bank has certain levers to manage and steer and drive the economy, when certain economic events happen. Obviously, the economy is not a machine. It's much more like a complex adaptive system, something akin to the weather. We don't have machines or levers to drive or steer the weather. We just live in the weather. We're constantly adapting to it.

And so, if you'd imagine that we can't predict the weather even a few weeks in advance, what in the world would make us think we could predict the consequences of eight billion human minds interconnected via the price signal, engaged in this public psychology, if you will? The market is almost like the externalized mind or the collective mind. And the idea that is a machine that can simply be worked on, and changed, and tweaked, and dialed in?

This reminds me of Taleb's classic example, where he says a lot of these Keynesian economists, they mistake the cat for the washing machine. All right, so, the washing machine is not a complex system. It's complicated, right? You can take out a part and replace a part and get it to work again. You can't do that with a cat, right? It's much more difficult to take a part out of the cat and install a different part and keep the cat operational. So, the economy is much more like a living system, and much less like a mechanical system.

And so, I think those would be the general views of where I think Keynesian economics goes wrong, is it's this temptation for absolute power, and it's, you could say, an industrial age or antiquated metaphor for what the economy actually is.

Nico Perrino: Well, Frederick Hayek once said that the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. In the early part of the 20th century, if I'm recalling my college courses on economics correctly, there was what was called the socialist calculation debate –

Robert Breedlove: Yes.

Nico Perrino: – which was a debate revolving around whether kind of central planners or planned economies can make the economic calculations necessary to achieve whatever outcome they were desiring, whether that was stable prices or the efficient allocation of resources. And Frederick Hayek and Ludwig von Mises essentially said, along the lines of what you just said, which is that you've got, how many people are there in the world now? I don't know. Back then, maybe two billion.

You have two billion people sending signals every day on how they allocate their time and spend their money, and there's no central planner that can bring in all the information through these little signals that each market economy or participant is sending. And that's why you got crazy things in the Soviet Union, for example, like excess matchsticks but no chicken.

And so, in short, their argument was that the free market was a source of information, and that to mess with that information ecosystem is to throw things out of whack, which then kind of gets me to the question and the reason I'm bringing you here. It's because there's this debate in free speech circles around whether money is speech. You often hear about it in the context of campaign finance, which is to say, how we spend money to support political candidates and causes.

But the socialist calculation debate and the sort of argument that money is a source of information would suggest that it goes deeper than that; that if I tell you, Robert, I want this new hoodie, or this new T-shirt, that's protected speech. But if I spend money to buy that hoodie or T-shirt, that's another way to signal what I had just told you verbally, and actually put more skin in the game behind it.

Robert Breedlove: It's a higher signal when you buy it.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. People say they want things all the time that they don't actually want, and they're just trying to please people. But when you put money behind something, there's actual skin in the game. It's a more trustworthy signal, so to speak.

Robert Breedlove: Yes. So, yeah, a lot to unpack there. I would start with, yes, this is an essential component of the Austrian argument, that you have to have private individual, private property rights in order to have price discovery. And you mentioned Hayek; he wrote the seminal essay on this, The Use of Knowledge in Society, which basically says there is knowledge specific to each individual's context or their circumstances, or particular to their time and place.

If that individual had to pass that information into a central planning body and wait for that command and control structure to send the information back, or the action to take based on that information, by the time it came back, it would no longer be as relevant, as actionable. Basically, the knowledge decays very quickly. So, if you don't act upon it on the spot, then there's information loss, right?

Nico Perrino: It also assumes that you can digest the information correctly, right?

Robert Breedlove: Exactly.

Nico Perrino: I mean, there's plenty of us out there who in our day-to-day jobs get access to information, but don't know really what to do with it.

Robert Breedlove: That's exactly right.

Nico Perrino: What's signal and what's noise.

Robert Breedlove: Yes. That reminds me of the quote. This was from the Soviet Union. "It's easy to be a farmer when your pen is a plow, and you're a thousand miles from the nearest agricultural plot." It's very easy to tell farmers what to do and how to produce, and whatever, and write edicts and commands.

But what was the reality? Over 10 million people starved to death in the Soviet Union when they tried to centrally plan agriculture, which by the way, is something we're flirting with again today, as you've probably heard about the war against farmers in the Netherlands and other places. Farmers protesting the government, I think in France and Germany, elsewhere in the world. We're trying to manage or centrally plan agriculture to fix the weather. That's a whole other topic, but humans don't seem to learn our lessons from history too well.

So, the point is, yes, you do need private property, which is necessary for price discovery. The price is a very critical informational signal in coordinating the economy and human action in an economy. It's necessary for the proper allocation of capital. And what this means is creating goods in accordance with the preferences of individuals.

So, just like you said, when you buy the hoodie, you're voting basically for the economy to produce more hoodies, and if you turn around and you go and you sell your car, you're basically voting for the economy to produce less cars. So, you could think of the free market as an actual economic democracy, where how you spend and save money determines what gets produced.

And this is a matter of distributed computing versus centralized computing. If each person is able to take information in on the spot and act upon it, then we have the bandwidth of eight billion – and I'm assuming eight billion people on earth – each able to act on the knowledge particular to their time and place. Whereas if you try to centralize that to any degree, you're going to have an inferior centralized computing system to that distributed computing system. Right?

So, an extreme example of this would be, I think, the Federal Reserve has seven governors, right? I forget the actual numbers for this, but the human attention span has something like – don't quote me on the number – but say it's 100 bits per second is like the actual data throughput of the active human attention span. So, you could quantify that and say, okay, "What is the data throughput of seven Federal Reserve governors?" You know what, throw in their 20,000 employees, as well.

Let's say they're all very coordinated, and able to collaborate efficiently. Call it 20,000 plus humans managing the most important asset in the world, which is the US dollar. Well, you could compare that informational throughput to whatever 8 billion people times a 100 bits per second is, and you can imagine how much more computational power the free market has compared to a centralized institution like the Federal Reserve.

All of this is another way of saying that you have to give individuals private property rights, right? They have to be able to keep what they earn, and be able to put their skin in the game and trade with one another, and compete with one another, so that we can produce goods and capital that are high quality, cost effective, and allocated in accordance with the preferences of the individuals with the wherewithal to buy the things, basically.

Nico Perrino: Well, I think the folks on the other side of the argument would say, "Okay, that's all well and good. What people want supplies producers with information about what to produce. But what if what people want is irrational or dumb, the idea being like what if all people want is just cheap energy, whereas we, the elites in charge think they should want renewable energy, which is going to be a little bit expensive; or they want junk food, as opposed to like nutrient-rich organic food."

Robert Breedlove: Yeah, this becomes an ethical problem, right? If your ideas are so good they have to be imposed by coercion, I would say you should question the goodness of your idea. I hold freedom above all. Now, if you have a totalitarian mindset, and you think you might have a better idea of how I should lead my life than I do, that you have to use force to impose that, I think there's a fundamental ethical problem there, that you're actually having to coerce another human into acting as you see fit.

And this idea that… people don't need to be told what to do. People should be free to discover what is a fit for them, right? Who am I to pass a value judgment on anyone and say I like to eat a lot of beef. Does that mean I should go out into the world and impose everyone to eat beef? I mean, it's what I think is healthy. It's what works for me and my metabolism. I can't say that it works for everyone.

So, I don't buy that argument at all, and I think it's a very dangerous idea when you think that – and this is the totalitarian mindset, that you have knowledge that is so totalized that you have to get people to abide by your map of reality. And Hayek said something about this, too. He said even if you had the perfect central plan; you actually were in possession of totalized knowledge at any one point in time, that as soon as you implemented that plan, well, the next second reality changes, right? Reality changes all the time.

Just like we said earlier about the weather, the economy; this complex adaptive system called reality that we inhabit, it changes all the time. That's the only thing that doesn't change, is it changes all the time. So, even if you implemented the perfect central plan, it would be misfit to reality one second after implementation. So, the answer to this, I think, is humility, and a reverence for the limitations of knowledge and ideas, and the realization that if we're really going to contend with the horizon of the future effectively, we don't know what we need, right?

We don't know what fitness we'll need, what tools, what resources, what techniques, what know-how, what type, what forms of goods or capital. So, we need to leave people free to discover what ideas work best in the free market. You could think of the free market as a testing ground, or a battleground for ideas.

Nico Perrino: Well, it reminds me of a quote from John Stuart Mill, who wrote the seminal 1859 book On Liberty, Chapter II being one of the most articulate defenses of freedom of speech ever written; where he said, "To refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility."

Robert Breedlove: That's right.

Nico Perrino: And so, when we get back to that central question I talked about before, is money speech? I mean, that's the sort of thing that motivates the restriction on how money is allocated to political causes, to political candidates. The idea being that one person, through the spending of their money, is going to manipulate the information ecosystem, or send voters in the wrong direction.

You see this as well as like, okay, we have the beef lobby. You mentioned beef earlier. They're going to spend all this money, and people are going to make bad decisions. You see this, as well, in the justifications for regulating things like artificial intelligence, or to go even further back, the radio or the television; the idea that people are too naive or too credulous to be able to navigate this new information ecosystem on their own. They're going to make poor decisions for themselves, so that we need to help them.

Or you go back even further, to discussions around book banning or book burnings. It's like we can't trust the populace with this information. Therefore, we who are so certain that we are right, and we're so certain in our values, are going to just prevent these folks from accessing it in the first place. It reminds me of just one more story.

In college, the evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson came to campus at Indiana University. And he had minority viewpoints, to say the least, on gay rights and a lot of other issues, and a bunch of students on campus protested his appearance and shouted him down. And he said one thing that always struck with me, and I was atheist agnostic at the time, so, I was there to debate him. I was looking forward to it. In fact, Douglas Wilson did a debate tour with Christopher Hitchens in the 2000s that kind of brought me into the world of ideas, and Christopher Hitchens had just died at this time.

And so, this was my opportunity to play Christopher Hitchens. And Douglas Wilson said to the protesters out there, "I always think I'm right, but I don't think I'm always right." I always think I'm right, but I don't think I'm always right. The idea being that he had strong convictions, but that they were loosely held, and he was confront the idea that he was wrong; and therefore, he was not going to shut anyone else up or prevent them from speaking, just in the off chance that he was wrong and he did need to confront the truth.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah, and there's humility built into that position. And again, if you understand the nature of knowledge, the intent and idea of knowledge is that it undermines itself over time. That's how we get a higher resolution depiction of reality. That's how we go to Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics, right? And this is also the fatal conceit of statism, that people are inherently evil and greedy, and therefore must be governed. And of course, they must be governed by people, who are evil and greedy.

So, what's actually happening here is there's just people that desire to have power and control over other people. And then, they wrap that desire in some moralistic camouflage that it's for the greater good. We've seen all of these romantic lies told to justify this. In ancient Egypt, the pharaohs were god kings and they were there to govern their subjects.

In Marxism, it was from each according to their ability to each according to their need; that we didn't need the capitalistic system or price discovery; we could just have this romantic notion of brotherhood to satisfy everyone's wants. More recently in the plan-demic, it was "Nobody is safe until everybody is safe." Totally nonsense. What does that mean? Safe from what? Safe to what degree? There's this implicit imposition of value judgments in all of these statements and philosophies.

And I think if individuals actually had a reverence for humility, that this would not be the case. This is the antidote to totalitarianism. There's the old saying that I'd rather have questions without answers than answers that cannot be questioned. So, we have to understand that existence is an ongoing process of inquiry. We're never going to find the final answer. Reality is changing all the time. We're adapting all the time. That necessitates humility and honest inquiry.

And so, when we look at statism, I'll get more specific with socialism. We said earlier that you need private property, which is necessary for price discovery, which is necessary for the proper allocation of capital, which meant in accordance with the preferences of individuals. Well, statism, and socialism more specifically: socialism is an institutionalized policy of aggression against private property.

Communism, which Marx said you could sum up communism in one phrase, "the abolition of private property." So, this destroys the rational distributed computing system we call the free market. Socialism destroys it by matters of degree; communism destroys it in total. And we've seen what the implementations – so, that's the theory.

The empirical evidence is, well, we've seen what implementations of socialism and communism have done in terms of the actual destruction of real human lives. And so, the question "Is money speech?" Well, I would say that money is a language, without a doubt, meaning – and again, I said this at the beginning of the show – but money is the language of human action.

Just like natural language in a reciprocal metaphor: you could say natural language is the money of human conception. It's the medium through which we exchange our ideas or conceptions, just like money is the medium through which we exchange the consequences of our actions.

Alan Watts has a great quote on this, too. He says, "What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as for example, money; but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth. In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas, and words are, 'coins' for the real things."

So, he has another quote. He said, "The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money bears to wealth." So, money is a symbolic system through which we communicate the value of things. Now, the price system is an appraisal of value. Value itself is inherently subjective. There's no such thing as intrinsic value.

And this is another thing you'll hear from Keynesian economists, and it doesn't make any sense. Even something as essential to life as water is not intrinsically valuable because, well, what use does a drowning man have for water? It's not valuable to him.

So, money is this language through which we communicate our preferences for things, through buying and selling. It's how we communicate our social standing to a large extent, in terms of our net worth. It's also how we communicate our status. People will buy nice purses, nice watches, et cetera, that engage in conspicuous consumption.

And so, it is a language, but I think it's not until Bitcoin that money actually becomes speech proper, because speech, I would define as actual code. Language is a little bit more general. I would say mathematics is a language, money is a language, natural language is a language. But speech tends to be something a bit more specific. Bitcoin is just software code. And so, it sort of equates now mathematics and code and money all into this one interesting instrument.

And I guess one more philosophical point on speech. As you said earlier, people say a lot of things, and we have the metaphor in our culture that talk is cheap, right? And I think this means that preferences are not articulated; preferences are revealed. Preferences are revealed through action, and money is the language of human action.

So, money is the medium through which we reveal and communicate our preferences. Therefore, it's a much higher signal messaging system than anything else in the world. Higher than language, higher than even mathematics.

You could actually say another way to describe money is like it's a mathematizing of this subjective sphere of human action, right? We need to have some objective way to look at the economy, and money gives us this sort of mathematical framework to look at economic interactions and their consequences over time.

Nico Perrino: It's "Talk is cheap," and then, we have the other phrase, "Put your money where your mouth is."

Robert Breedlove: Exactly. So, actions speak louder than words, but capital is the consequence of many, many, many actions over time. So, capital speaks louder than actions, and money is the means to which we communicate the value and the prices of capital.

Nico Perrino: Can money do or express irrational things at any given time? You think about the tulip mania, right, from the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century where people were spending exorbitant sums of money on tulips, right? We look now at that being a mania, that being irrational. Some might say that tulip growers probably shouldn't have been charging what they should have, and it would have been justified for the government to come in, because this would have been fleeting wealth.

Robert Breedlove: So, irrational in hindsight. And this is the key point, that we needed the rationality of money to pop the tulip bubble, right? This is what price discovery is. If I'm a market actor and I see tulips trading at, I don't know the number, $1000 a tulip or whatever it was, and I say, "You know what, that doesn't make any sense. I think the appraisal of tulip value has gone way too high in the marketplace," I'm incentivized to express that thesis by shorting the tulip market, right?

So, this, again, it is still a rational system. You could say in hindsight, "Oh, these speculators engaged in an irrational activity," but you would only know that in hindsight. A lot of people would probably say that about Bitcoin throughout its history, right?

It's always irrational to buy it, yet somehow 15 years after Bitcoin's monetization, it's trading at $50,000 a coin, right? And it's the fastest growing asset in history. So, we have to be careful with that word rationality. I could try to put a definition to it. It comes from the root word "ratio," which is a tool, a mathematical tool. If you've ever seen a ratio, three-fourths as a ratio. You're comparing and contrasting different aspects of a thing.

So, you're looking at the numerator in terms of the denominator in the case of three-fourths. And this comes from the Latin word "ratio" which means a reckoning, an account, a numbering, a calculation; it also means a business affair, course, conduct or procedure, and it's related to reason, reasoning, and judgment, and it's the basis of computation and calculation.

And it gets interesting, too; when you trace behind Latin, actually, go all the way to the Proto- Indo-European root word of ratio, you find these "re" words, which means to think, reason or count. Some of the "re" words we might be familiar with are read, logarithm, rate, riddle, ritual. And Proto-Indo-European is like one language that most languages came from basically. You've probably heard of Sanskrit, which is one form of Proto-Indo-European.

These "re" words are also related to "ar" words in Proto-Indo-European that means "to fit together." We get words like adorn, alarm, armament, armor, art, coordination, disarm, harmony, and primordial, from Proto-Indo-European words in the "ar" category. So, if we're going to define rationality, combining the meaning of those two root words, it's something like the way in which humans reasonably fit together, like how do we actually fit together in a way that's reasonable.

And you could equate reasonable, I think, with nonviolent. If we have a basic respect for, say, standard biblical morality – don't kill, steal, or cheat – if human wellbeing is our metric, then reason would be an alternative to violence. And we use things – and this is one of my favorite definitions of free speech: "Free speech exists so that our ideas can go to battle and die so that our bodies don't have to." And we mentioned private property earlier; that's the same thing, right?

We have this social convention where we assume that each person exclusively owns the fruits of their labor and can trade with other individuals, so that we can resolve disputes over scarce resources without violence. So, it's very much like free speech in that way. And when we're talking about rationality, we need to keep that in mind, right? The tulip mania may seem irrational in hindsight, but in reality, there were people trading with one another trying to discover the actual price of tulips.

Did it get bid up way too high and then it popped? Sure. That's happened plenty of times. That's the nature of markets. But to say that's an irrational process? I would say irrationality is more like war, right? When we actually start to be physically violent towards one another, that's what's counterproductive. That's what's destructive to goods and capital. That's what's destructive to culture. That's what leads to the destruction of libraries and history and art. That's what I would qualify as irrational, not any market bubble.

Nico Perrino: Well, when you think about the scientific method, it's the process of falsifying hypotheses, right?

Robert Breedlove: Yes.

Nico Perrino: Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery says, "The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving to be right, for it is not his possession of knowledge of irrefutable truth that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth." So, you could say of the people buying up all these tulips that they were learning the value of tulips in real time, and over time learned that there was not perhaps much value in it.

So, you have this sort of process of discovery, which results in some destruction and some people learning the hard way. You invest your entire net worth in tulips and then the market crashes, you lose it. Or you deliver all these subprime mortgages in the 2000s, which end up being worth nothing, because the people who purchased them shouldn't have been underwritten in the first place.

But then, you lose the kind of creative destructive or kind of lesson from that by propping up the banks that issued them. But the argument on the other side would be, "Well, what would the consequence be if we didn't, right? What would the consequence be of losing all of" –

Robert Breedlove: Which is an unfalsifiable. That's unfalsifiable, right? What would the consequences be if we didn't? Well, we can never falsify that. So, it's an excuse that's inexhaustible.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, it's hard to know the world that doesn't exist because we didn't allow it to exist, but you can draw some parallels. We had on this podcast a month or so ago Michael Malice; he's an anarchist thinker. He's an author of a number of books, a very smart guy. And he thinks that complete access to information or complete access to knowledge for any individual person is unnecessary.

He had this quote on the podcast when it comes to law. He's just speaking on the realm of law here. "What I think is completely irrelevant. I'm going to shut my mouth. It's appropriate for me, in many cases, as a layman, to have no idea what the hell is going on, and be deferential. It's not at all the case that it's useful for everyone to have an understanding of everything." So, is access to perfect information always a good thing? Is it always appropriate?

Robert Breedlove: So, before I answer that question, just to go back to what you were saying earlier on the scientific method: science is a systematic method of questioning, right? As we said earlier, we need this honest ongoing process of inquiry to effectively adapt to reality as it changes. Science is one of our most powerful tools for doing that, because it gives us this very standardized means of questioning of inquiry.

And this also highlights the ridiculous notion you heard during the plan-demic of "Don't question the science." All right. Well, don't question the science. The science is a systematic method of questioning. So, that's like saying don't question the systematic method of questioning. There are people that are representing science to be a final answer rather than a systematic method of questioning. It just highlights how much of an oxymoron it is.

And the other point on market bubbles, I just wanted to mention. It would be ideal that we didn't have them so much, right? You wouldn't have to have so much destruction, speculation, wasted effort, et cetera. But again, it's part of the process of price discovery. This is a real problem with printing money, though, is that printing money actually exacerbates market bubbles and the boom-and-bust business cycle.

I won't go into the detail here unless you want to later, but it's for those that might be interested. This was Mises's crowning achievement, was the development of the Austrian business cycle theory. And he basically said, "Once you start printing money, you create credit bubbles that will either continue until the currency hyperinflates, or if we stop printing money, there's a deflationary collapse back to economic reality."

So, if money is that language of human action, the printing of money is how we start to distort that language and it has much less meaning, and leads us to become more irrational, in the sense that the money doesn't contain as much information, and it leads us closer to conflicts. Because if you want to see people that are actually irrational, look at any country going through a hyperinflation. The money doesn't work. People, they're eating their pets. They're stealing from one another. It's just madness.

Nico Perrino: I just have a question on that. If every currency is hyperinflating, as you kind of get in the United States – or across the world right now; let's put Bitcoin to the side" – and here in the United States, you have $33 trillion in debt. If you're just trying to pick the best option, the United States currency looks good by comparison, because people have the most trust in it, right? It's inflating the least. So, it's not going to go. I guess that's a long way of saying it's probably not going to go anywhere, because every other option is worse. So, it could keep inflating so long as everyone else is doing the same thing.

Robert Breedlove: Not exactly, because you have to keep in mind that the inflation is a real theft of purchasing power. So, people have limits in terms of how much purchasing power they can have stolen from them before you have a social revolt. So, you can't just say, oh, it's the lesser of multiple evils, and we can just keep printing dollars as long as everyone else prints faster than us. That's not true, because what you're doing when you're printing money is you're stealing wealth from users of the currency.

This is what savings is, by the way. We typically think of savings as money in the bank. But what savings actually is, is production that has been performed but not yet consumed, right? Someone has done some work to create a thing, but they haven't yet consumed it. And so, when the actual savings in terms of goods and capital in the marketplace run out, well then, people go into revolt, right? They can't eat; they can't clothe themselves; they can't shelter themselves, et cetera.

So, no, that argument actually doesn't hold. A lot of Keynesians would probably put forth a similar argument that it's okay. They also say things like, "Oh, the debt doesn't matter. We owe it to ourselves," which is another one of these ignorant comments as if we were some indivisible aggregate, where the reality is there are individual debtors and individual creditors. There's no "We owe it to ourselves." That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

So, yes, printing money, although it does create this illusion and distortion of the language, there is a real consequence behind it, right? People are actually being robbed, just as if someone walked into your house and stole your television or your refrigerator. Your actual purchasing power is going down, because the amount of dollars you have in the bank buys you less and less stuff as the dollar is inflated. So, that's a very key point.

And on the question about experts, I think this is essential to economics, right? The beauty of economics is that when we have private property, that we can each operate in this social convention; you could think of this as almost like live action role playing. We're all pretending that we each have the exclusive rights to the fruits of our labor, right? You don't actually have a relationship with all the things of value that you create that no one can violate, right?

Someone can, again, steal your stuff; someone can print your dollar, et cetera. But to the extent that we do play that game, that frees up each of us to specialize in one thing. We can get really good at one thing, and then we can trade that good or service with other people that have also gotten really good at one thing.

So, you could say intrinsic to economics is this difference to the experts. I want to be careful here, though, because again, during the plan-demic, there's this whole thing like, "Oh, everyone just needs to do what the scientists say," and that's dangerous, especially when they're on government payroll.

But obviously, you drive a car; I don't know how to build a car. I don't know how to work on my car. I just know to press the button to turn it on and press the right pedal to accelerate, and the left pedal to decelerate, and know the buttons. The complexity of the machine, or the complicated nature of the machine has been abstracted away. And so, there is no perfect information. I think that's an ideal, and it's an ideal that I think Bitcoin is the closest representation of.

We finally have a money supply and a monetary system that is totally open source and free for anyone to inspect. As we say in Bitcoin, "Don't trust; verify." You don't need to actually trust anyone to manage the money on your behalf, which creates this agency problem that we see so heavily expressed in central banking, where you're trusting one group of people to manage the money supply on your behalf.

Well, when they profit by debasing the integrity of that money supply, which hurts you, they tend to act in their own individual self-interest, and not in the interest of their "customer." Bitcoin fixes this, right? It's a universally-transparent monetary system. You don't need to trust anyone to manage the money. The algorithm manages the money for everyone in a fair way.

So, we'll never have perfect information. That's why we economize and specialize. But in the most important market in the world, which is money, it seems like we really do need something that's as close to perfect information as possible, because people cannot be trusted to manage the money. If it's one thing human history has taught us, the temptation to print money is basically irresistible.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. But you need to have enough knowledge to be able to verify, right? And this kind of speaks to, "Okay, you can outsource your legal defense to the lawyers," but you need to have enough information to know who the good lawyers are.

Robert Breedlove: It's a great point.

Nico Perrino: And now, maybe the cost of that lawyer is a signal as to how good that lawyer is. You need to know enough to make sure you're not getting ripped off by your auto mechanic, and you need to know enough to verify – I wouldn't even know how to verify something with Bitcoin.

Robert Breedlove: That's right.

Nico Perrino: Maybe it's because I'm not a super user of it, but I would need to learn, if I were, so that I could actually perform that verification function.

Robert Breedlove: It's a great point, because even when you're verifying in Bitcoin.... it's different things. You probably can't read the source code, like neither can I. But what I do is I trust an open source development community of people all around the world that do read the source code and they check one another's work, but there's definitely an element of trust there. But there's pure verification on the actual supply of Bitcoin. You can do that as a consumer.

You just run a node, and it will check and make sure that the Bitcoin supply cap is still 21 million – the current issuance is whatever it is today, 19. 5 million – and that there's a block time occurring roughly once every 10 minutes. You, as a consumer, can verify these things.

Try verifying anything about any other monetary system. You can't verify how much gold has been mined, can't verify where it's at, can't verify what address it is. Sure as the hell can't verify how many US dollars are in existence, how many will come into existence, what is the criteria for deciding, who gets to decide, who profits; we know none of these things about any other monetary system.

Nico Perrino: Well, this kind of speaks to the larger ecosystem around Bitcoin, because when you have any of these holders – what was Sam Bankman's Freed's outfit, right? And if you keep your Bitcoin or digital currency with them, you're essentially adding another layer of trust onto the system.

Robert Breedlove: That's right. Not your keys, not your coin.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, and you presumably will need to have more information on your own behalf to know whether that entity is worth trusting. And clearly, in these cases where a lot of these companies have gone out of business or folded, people just didn't have that information as a result, and then they got screwed. They got left holding the bag.

Robert Breedlove: And the market learned though, right? So, when an FTX goes up in flames, people learn the hard way the value of self-custody. Both those individuals that were scammed by Sam Bankman Fraud and those individuals that saw him scam others; you learn the value of self-custody, and you learn either through your own pain or through the pain of others that if you don't have Bitcoin in self-custody, you don't have Bitcoin. You have an IOU.

So, this again is that market process, right? That we have to learn through the pain, through mistakes, through failures, through collapses. And to say that that's irrational, I think, fails to understand how we come to rational ideas. We figure out what works and what doesn't by experimenting in the marketplace. So, the failure of FTX – and by the way, anyone that was listening to Bitcoiners during the FTX saga, you would have known, "Not your keys, not your coin." This is a mantra in Bitcoin.

So, if you listened to actual Bitcoin maximalists in the run-up to the FTX collapse: well, if you actually listened, you would not have any exposure to that, because you would know Bitcoin in self-custody is real Bitcoin. Bitcoin in centralized custody is an IOU that may or may not materialize.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. My closest friend in college is a Bitcoin evangelist, and when he was trying to get me into Bitcoin, that was the thing that he argued the entire time, was to keep your own wallet. But it's just easier, right, to go to a Coinbase or something, and essentially deal in dollars and cents, like you would with any other bank, rather than have to figure out the whole Bitcoin wallet system.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah, it's easier to eat fast food. It's easier to sleep in. It's easier to not exercise. Our conveniences can kill us, and this case is no different.

Nico Perrino: I want to ask about Satoshi Nakamoto, who is the founder of Bitcoin, or the idea behind Bitcoin. We don't know if that's his or her real name, but rather the name on the paper. We often talk in free speech communities about the importance of protecting anonymous speech and speakers; the idea being that sometimes you need to be anonymous in order to speak truth to power.

People who live in communist China know this, or people who are students at colleges and universities in the United States who are from China know this, because they know the threats of speaking publicly and attaching their name to it. But it also forces folks to engage with the idea, rather than the person who is merely the vessel for expressing that idea.

You think about the founding of America. Federalist and anti-federalist papers were written anonymously: Publius Brutus, Cato. Common Sense, we know today that was Thomas Paine, but at the time it was published by an Englishman. The Declaration of Independence, even. We didn't know that Thomas Jefferson was the lead author of that until something like a decade later.

And as a result – and anyone who's read any press accounts of the era surrounding the founding knows how vicious these folks were in print in attacking one another. The idea that one could speak anonymously almost forces their critics to engage with the idea rather than the speaker. And so, when I'm out there making arguments against Nikki Haley, who wants to put a name to every speaker on social media, or anyone who otherwise would want to restrict the ability of people to speak anonymously, I think about our founding.

But I also think about Satoshi Nakamoto. There are plenty of critics of Bitcoin out there, but they're not criticizing this person or group of people, whoever it happens to be, because they just don't have the vehicle to do so. So, it forces folks to engage with the idea on its merits. Have you thought about that?

Robert Breedlove: Yeah, so, first of all, I would agree that privacy is essential to human freedom, right? The ability to selectively reveal or conceal yourself or information about yourself, that is a choice. That is a choice, and choice is essential to freedom.

So, and as you said, yeah, especially for individuals that are speaking truth to power, right? They're sticking their neck out there, not only putting their skin in the game, but often putting their soul in the game, meaning that they're taking downside risk on behalf of others, not just downside risk on behalf of their own gain.

You see this a lot with investigative journalists; certain ancient philosophers, like you could say Socrates, right, was sort of putting his soul in the game when he went on trial. Anonymity is a very important tool for protecting those individuals that actually serve the greater good. I don't think there's any argument that the existence of Socrates has served the greater good. Obviously, he didn't benefit from anonymity, and hence he was killed basically by the state.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, forced to drink the hemlock, yeah.

Robert Breedlove: Christ also murdered by the state for speaking truth to power. So, anonymity to the extent that it helps individuals speak truth to power without fear of being murdered or coerced or even socially attacked or canceled, that's a very, very useful tool; and again, an indispensable component to human freedom.

Satoshi himself, his disappearance, I think the main value of that is that it cemented Bitcoin's decentralization narrative. This is the one project in the crypto asset universe that has no individual or group to socially attack, to denigrate, or to coerce.

And so, you hear Bitcoiners say things today like, "We are all Satoshi." Well, that wouldn't have made sense if Satoshi were an identified individual. And to really make Bitcoin stick as an actual, neutral, decentralized monetary protocol, I think the founder's disappearance was necessary.

And again, what is he doing there? As you said, it's forcing you through his disappearance to engage with his ideas rather than the individual, because it's very easy to tarnish the individual, or to shoot the messenger, you might say, rather than listen to the message.

And I think it's sort of a forcing function for free speech in that way, that you don't have anything else to identify with the individual other than their communications, right? You can't look at their human fallibility and their personal failings, and use that to tarnish or bring their ideas into disrepute. You actually have to contend with the ideas themselves. So, anonymity is like a forcing function for free speech. And as we said earlier, if you don't have free speech, our only alternative to resolving disputes is violence.

So, anonymity is a safeguard against, let's say, government overreach, or power structures overreaching, that need some truth spoken about them. Anonymity obviously serves that. I would say it also is a forcing function for free speech, and therefore an inhibitor to violence.

And I also think that's the reason every aspiring dictator across history, their first two aims are to take control over the media – all right, they want to control the flow of information and ideas within a society – and then, they want to control the other very important media, the medium of exchange, money. They want to control the primary instrument of power, which is money itself.

So, again, it's back to language, right? That an aspiring dictator, if he's going to control a population and deceive them into believing he is somehow different than them, or divinely assigned to govern them: well, he needs to control the media, the language of information, and he also needs to control the language of human action, which is money. I don't think that's any coincidence.

Nico Perrino: Well, can't anonymous speakers or actors in the market also do harm? This was the allegation against Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road website, which was using Bitcoin as kind of a vehicle – at least the allegations are – and he was convicted for the trafficking of weapons, and murders for hires, and drugs.

So, I think folks would argue in those cases that it's important to attach a name to such consequential – to money, so that you avoid sort of transactions that could result in societal harms. Just trying to steel man the argument on the other side here.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I would disagree. What Ross actually did was to set up an online marketplace. He wasn't selling guns or selling drugs or anything else. He gave people a tool. Well, should we incarcerate the inventor of knives? Should we incarcerate the inventor of hammers? I mean, a hammer can be used to build a house, or bash a skull. The tool itself is amoral. It is the user of the tool that imputes its morality. And I just don't buy that argument.

Again, that's back to this whole idea that people are inherently greedy and evil and need to be governed by other people who are also greedy and evil, right? It's a self-refuting argument. But I'm very radical in my views, here, that I think all taxation, inflation, and fiat regulation – and the difference between fiat regulation and traditional legal systems is: like in English common law, Englich common law was generated by observing how people resolved disputes over large spans of time.

And then, we basically institutionalized the means by which people resolve those disputes. So, it's more like a legal discovery process, right? We're discovering the laws and norms and conventions that work to resolve different types of dispute. Whereas legislation by fiat is some guy writes a law, or signs a bill into law and says, "Do this or else." It's not like there was any social discovery process that took place.

All forms, in my view: taxation, inflation, and regulation by fiat are violations of private property which undermine the market process, price discovery, proper allocation of capital, and the inhibition of violence. And so, that whole argument, I think, is just another fiat statist argument. They're saying, "We shouldn't let people do these things," where in the same breath, that's exactly what states specialize in; the running of arms and guns, and waging war.

Nico Perrino: Would you describe yourself as an anarcho-capitalist?

Robert Breedlove: Yes, I would. I say freedom maximalist, to be very specific. I think life, liberty, and property are the most essential social conventions in the sphere of being human. These are three aspects of freedom, right? If someone takes your life, they've stolen your future freedom. If someone incarcerates you, they've stolen your present freedom to move about. They've stolen your liberty.

And if someone steals your stuff, well, they violated the fruits of your past freedom, which is your property, right? The things you've justly acquired through work and trade. So, and I also think that's the exclusive philosophical scope of government. Government exists only to preserve life, liberty and property, and anything that does beyond that is government overreach. And I also think this is why fiat statism is such an oxymoron, right?

We have the state which funds itself exclusively through the violation of private property via taxation, inflation, and fiat regulation, and that's the institution charged with the preservation of private property. So, it's a bit idealistic, and people will critique; they say libertarians are too idealistic. And I actually would agree somewhat.

The great book on this is The Sovereign Individual, written in 1997. But the main driver, the mega political driver of social organization: the book names four, but I think the primary one is technology. And basically, as coercion and violence becomes less profitable, statism becomes less relevant. And so, that's a whole rabbit hole we could go into, but I really –

Nico Perrino: So, I guess in this case, you would agree with the signers of the Declaration of Independence that governments are created among men to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You would just see it as a much smaller government, narrowly tailored to those specific purposes.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: But then, you consider what is happiness, and that's where things start to balloon. Right?

Robert Breedlove: Yeah, and it was inherited from the Magna Carta, which was life, liberty, and inviolable property. We swapped out property for pursuit of happiness, I think because of some Christian perspectives that were included in the Declaration of Independence that weren't in the Magna Carta. And yeah, I think government should be ideally a local affair, right?

You just want a local protection agency that's preserving life, liberty, and property. The more centralized government becomes, the less personal it is, right? It's much easier to empathize with your neighbor and people that you see locally, but if you're governed from Washington, DC and you're just a row on a spreadsheet, much easier to lack empathy towards your citizens.

Nico Perrino: Do you ever think about prediction markets at all? These markets have become more popular recently, as in essence, gambling has become more legalized across the United States. But the idea that you can bet on certain outcomes outside of sports, which is where we often – prediction markets, that you can predict who's going to become president; you can predict what the weather's going to be like.

And the idea being that these predictions – which are essentially just a kind of an amalgamation of a bunch of people's different beliefs, and they're putting money behind these beliefs – are more accurate than if we just outsourced to one expert, because ideally, the wisdom of the crowd in this case would be incorporating that one expert's belief, but also some other information that expert might not have.

I've always thought it was a little bit strange that we regulated, and in some cases prohibited, these prediction markets, because it could be the best source of information about predicting the future that we have, because of the amount of information that they would pull in.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah. I mean, markets in many ways are prediction markets.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Robert Breedlove: So, it's just a matter of how do you resolve these bets in a trust-minimized way? And there's been some crypto-asset projects on this. But I basically don't think the oracle problem has been resolved. So, you can bet on something that's very dry, like objective data pretty easily, right? Is the price of Apple stock going to be over or under $100 on December 9th, 2024, right? You can basically reference multiple price books and determine who won the bet, basically. That's no problem.

It gets a little more difficult when you talk about predicting other things; predicting the weather. How do you resolve weather bets, and things like that? The concern, I think, as my reading of it, and the reason prediction markets were regulated, was because they were afraid of assassination markets; that you could put an over-under on someone's lifespan, and basically create incentives for people to go out and want to murder or assassinate people.

Nico Perrino: Oh, interesting. I hadn't even heard of that before, but I guess it makes sense.

Robert Breedlove: It's an argument that's been written, but in practice – because there have been prediction markets, in practice, my understanding is they've been very limited. I don't think that's happened often, if at all.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. So, you just put a bunch of money on something, and then cook the books for it by actually going out and producing that outcome yourself.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah, you can force the outcome, right? These things are interesting, but I think the oracle problem sort of hampers it. There's still that element of trust. I don't know. I don't know where they will go, but I think the information age will see more of a proliferation of markets for things. Social media is almost like a market for human attention.

We sort of had that before. We had advertising, but now it's much more targeted, much more fine grain. So, you'll see markets, I think, become more efficient. We're already seeing it, but continue to become more efficient in the digital age. And that would include –

Nico Perrino: And why is that? Is it because they're able to collect more information?

Robert Breedlove: The liquidity of ideas and information is higher than it's ever been, right? How fast can an idea travel around the world now compared to, obviously, pre-telecommunications? Way slow. Telegraph, still slow, right? It's more centralized, right? There's a few distribution points; there's translation time and errors, et cetera. You get to TV and radio, things go a little bit faster. You get into the internet, and you've got peer-to-peer communications, podcasting.

We have this resurgence in peer-to-peer dialogue, as we're demonstrating right now by doing this podcast. Our media paradigm has shifted from being one that was much more top down in both the radio and broadcast TV eras, into one that's much more – you could say, instead of a one-to-many model, it's many-to-many. And I think that just allows for more free flowing ideas, knowledge, information; and that leads to more truth discovery, basically.

Nico Perrino: The more we talk about this – and I'm glad I had you on – and we reference things like marketplaces; the more I think about that phrase, the marketplace of ideas, it's popularized in First Amendment jurisprudence, going back to the early part of the 20th century. I don't know how tied into the free-speech, First Amendment community you are, but that idea that free speech is a good because it allows for a marketplace of ideas has kind of fallen out of favor in the past couple of decades.

And the reason for that is because people see or perceive that truth doesn't win out in the marketplace of ideas. And my argument and response has often been, "Yeah, it might not always win out in the short term, but it tends to win out in the long term." There's a lot of noise in the short term, where the truth has a hard time of breaking through, but in the long term, it tends to break through.

And so, FIRE, this comes from our president. He has this theory called "Lab and the Looking Girl [inaudible] [01:24:01]" but other people call it the informational theory of freedom of speech; which is to say that freedom of speech allows us to collect information, and that it's important to know the world as it is, not only when people have bad, retrograde, or false beliefs, but especially so, because that then signals to us where we need to error correct.

But the more you talk about markets, the more I think the marketplace of ideas is like any other marketplace. You're going to have people make wrong decisions. But like science, it's a discovery process. Things are going to lose. People are going to get hurt as a result of that loss. In this case, ideas are going to lose, and people are going to get hurt as a result of the bad ideas having won in the short term.

And you need, then, to have the market – in this case, the marketplace of ideas – correct it, rather than having some sort of elite control or sensor coming in over top, and kind of using their wisdom to control what wins or loses in the marketplace, which might not be the right belief: as we learned in the pandemic, when we're talking about masks or learning loss, for example, not letting the scientific process or the process of discovery play out shortchanged our learning around the pandemic. And that goes for any other marketplace.

So, the idea that bad things happen in the short term while we're trying to figure things out, I don't think eliminates the wisdom of this marketplace of ideas belief.

Robert Breedlove: No, I agree completely. I'll often say on the show that pain is information. It is literally the pain that causes you or incentivizes you to put yourself in a new formation, right? If you touch the hot stove, well, then you put your body in a new formation, which is hand off of the hot stove.

The same is true in the sphere of economics, right? If a price of something is high and rising, all the consumers are incentivized to consume less, or find substitutes, and producers are incentivized to produce more. So, it's that informational signal that's bringing consumers and producers into action in a way that resolves the problem.

Nico Perrino: But any father knows this, right? The best way for my son to learn to not touch the hot stove is for him to touch the hot stove. The best way for my son to learn to be careful on the playground is to let him climb on the playground. But the risk there is that they can break their leg, just like the risk in the marketplace of ideas is that someone believes something totally stupid and who knows, kills someone or shows up at their house with a gun.

So, the critics of the marketplace of ideas would say, well, people are going to do really stupid things in the marketplace of ideas, and there needs to be some guardrails around it. Yeah, and again, the exclusive philosophical scope of government is to preserve life, liberty and property. So, if someone's stupid idea is hurting you, well, then there is retribution that can be exacted on that individual. But if that individual wants to go and drink bleach or something, well so be it, right? That's up to them.

And so, what's that old saying? A lie can run around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. Yeah, the marketplace of ideas means ideas are competing. Rather, we are competing with one another to embody certain ideas or principles to see which one is most effective towards any given end. The people that are successful will be copied. The people that are unsuccessful get sort of naturally selected out of existence.

If they don't actually die, or if the guy that's drinking bleach – if you're running a business that's not profitable, well, you go out of business and nobody copies you. And people learn from that, by the way. When you're an entrepreneur and your business goes up in flames, you're enlightening other entrepreneurs as to what doesn't work, right?

They say, "Oh, this guy opened a British food restaurant in Palo Alto, and no one had came there and they went out of business. I don't think I'll try to do that." So, there's still information propagating into the marketplace even with business failure, with both success and failure.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, that's one of the things you hear about in Silicon Valley all the time. That old Facebook mantra, "Work fast and break things." And the reason that mantra exists is because when you work fast or release product in a marketplace, you collect information more quickly. You learn per unit time more, because you're creating contact with reality more frequently.

Robert Breedlove: That's right.

Nico Perrino: So, I think one of the things –

Robert Breedlove: So, I want to ask, though, because you said this idea that truth somehow doesn't win out in the marketplace of ideas: how are these individuals defining truth? I know three definitions of it. You say an accurate portrayal of reality, which is pretty obvious standard definition of truth. The American pragmatists defined truth as the end of inquiry.

So, as we inquire about the nature of reality and how to contend with it, whatever we discover in that process of inquiry that is most useful is pragmatically true. The map that gets me from A to B, is that because the map is true, or because the map is useful? They're almost indistinguishable. And then, I think it was Heidegger's definition of truth is: truth is disclosure or unconcealedness.

So, again, it's this revealing of preferences, or revealing of which idea works best. So, I think they're almost inseparable, the free market process and truth discovery. They're almost synonymous, or the same thing. So, I don't see how anyone could say, oh, the free market is not leading to the discovery of truth. I don't see where that's the case.

Nico Perrino: Well, in that case, you'd agree with John Milton in his famous treatise, Areopagitica, in which he said, "Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?" Now, people see that and say, "Oh, I see truth losing out to falsehood all the time," but they leave out the second half of that sentence, which is "a free and open encounter."

Robert Breedlove: Bingo.

Nico Perrino: And so, when people are critical of this marketplace of ideas theory from which that – or that theory comes from John Milton, and going back millennia – they forget that you need to have the right conditions for truth to win out.

Robert Breedlove: That's right. And I would argue here, again, if we're talking about an actual free market, and we're using the term properly, a true and pure free market is one where individual private property is universal and inviolable. We don't have that anywhere in the world today. Anywhere there's a central bank that is printing money, they are violating the private property of savers.

The purchasing power that is stolen is then used to fund mainstream media, propaganda narratives, psyops. So, this idea that we have a free and open process – that's what the market is, is a process, as Mises said, to discover truth, to inquire about reality – it's not the case anywhere the violation of private property is occurring.

Nico Perrino: There's this idea – well, I guess it's come up through the courts – that code is speech, right? That you write computer code, and it's protected by the First Amendment. And generally, things that are protected by the First Amendment receive strict scrutiny under law, which is that regulation of it is presumptively invalid unless the government can demonstrate that the law or regulation is necessary to achieve a compelling state interest, and that any regulation that is necessary to achieve that compelling state interest is narrowly drawn.

But there are exceptions to this, or there have been challenges to this. We've seen it with 3D printed guns. You can design or sketch out the design for a skyscraper, but the government's going to regulate and take a microscope to that in a way they wouldn't someone making a kind of political statement on the corner.

Bitcoin is also code, right? But I think people would look at that and say, "Well, it shouldn't be regulated just as the speaker on the corner, because the real world impacts of it are higher." Again, I'm just trying to steel man here. So, we recognize that speech is essentially just information. Information gets communicated, and informs how we make decisions in the world. But there is some information that is just too consequential for it to go unregulated, to receive that sort of strict scrutiny that courts would apply to any regulation of what a lay person would consider pure speech, the expression of ideas.

Now, the courts are split on whether 3D printing guns is protected. I believe it's still kind of in limbo. The Ninth Circuit, there was a three-judge panel that vacated an injunction against the distribution of 3D printed guns back in 2020. I don't know where that case stands right now. But I think the problem that we run into, Robert, is that people might agree that money is a source of information, but that they would just disagree with the idea that it shouldn't be regulated in certain circumstances.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah. I think, again, that's another area where I will strongly disagree. Regulation by fiat: again, we talked about regulation, natural regulation earlier, which is natural law or discovered law. That's okay. That's the institutionalization of the ways we've resolved disputes over time. But this idea of fiat legislation, which is just an executive of a centralized state signs a bill and says, "You will do this or else," that is nonsense.

We talked about it earlier with kids. We regulate our kids, obviously, right? We tell them what to do, what they can do, what they can't do; the consequences. They have chores, they have schedules. We coerce our kids, right? More or less, we control and coerce our kids. Why do we do that? We do that because they're not yet fully developed rational animals, right? We do that with the aim of bringing them to a full development, and releasing them into the world as fully developed rational animals.

You cannot apply that same dynamic to people, adults governing other adults, right? That doesn't make any sense. So, when you hear the term regulation, this is a euphemism. If they're talking about regulation by fiat, the proper word to use there is coercion. There is a threat of force saying, "Do this or else," and the idea that you need the threat of force to regulate the flow of information or an idea is just a non-starter for me.

I cannot imagine any circumstances where you need the threat of force to keep an idea from getting out, or keep an idea from spreading. And this includes the printing of guns. Why would you not want people to be able to print guns? So that individuals could have a symmetry of power projection with the authority, the government authority?

Governments have guns. Why shouldn't individuals have guns? This is the Second Amendment in the United States, something else our founding fathers knew, that we needed a symmetry of power projection between the individual and the state, so that we could protect ourselves from state overreach.

Nico Perrino: Well, someone might say that, okay, sharing 3D printed gun designs is okay, but if you actually take those designs and put it into action, that's where the government comes in.

Robert Breedlove: Why? Whose property have you violated when you print the gun?

Nico Perrino: So, let's use the example of like a building skyscraper. I'm just trying to steal man the arguments here. You draw out your skyscraper. Then, you actually go and build it, and the skyscraper collapses. The argument is, "Well, okay, if you just sketch something on your notepad, that's fine, but if you actually try and put it in action, we're trying to forestall the catastrophe of however many people dying when the building collapsed." Now, one might say that the market is going to bake in the information from that experience. It's going to learn from it. People aren't going to use that architect anymore.

Robert Breedlove: But there is violation. Property has been violated in that case. If there are people in that skyscraper when it collapses, and people die as a result of a faulty design, well, then the designer and the engineer and whoever's responsible has now violated the private property of those individuals that were killed. So, that would be a sphere for state intervention, to the extent that the state is there to preserve life, liberty and property.

But building the skyscraper doesn't violate anyone's property. Assuming it was all done consensually, right? You bought and paid for all the labor and the materials and the land, and you built it, you violated no one's property. The same with printing the gun. Now, if you print the gun and you go out and shoot someone, okay, well then, the individual gunman is the moral agent that's responsible for that act of violence, for that violation of private personal property, not the gun itself, right?

There've been many murders with knives, many murders with hammers, many murders with ice picks. We're not going to ban knives or hammers or ice picks, because the tool is not a moral agent. It's amoral. There's no way that this argument ever works out. It's just a fundamental failure of thinking.

Nico Perrino: So, the idea is in part that when life is violated, that the consequences need to be high enough so that people don't do that.

Robert Breedlove: Yes. It's a disincentive to the violation of life, liberty, and property. That's the purpose of government.

Nico Perrino: And that didn't happen in the 2000s, when these firms, for example, that led to the financial collapse weren't allowed to collapse, in part.

Robert Breedlove: Well, here's the thing. When you say "not allowed to collapse," that means they're funded by taxpayer bailouts and printed money. They're funded by the violation of private property. That you can only have a bailout and a zombie company and a too-big-to-fail paradigm when you can print money and steal from people to create that reality.

So, it's a bitter pill. It's a bitter pill when you start looking at the world through the lens of private property, because you see that the entire world is based on the violation of private property rather than the preservation. That's why there's so much bullshit in the world. That's why the state is so powerful. That's why we're at war. That's why people are confused about their genders. The list goes on and on and on.

Nico Perrino: Do you think economic freedom is more fundamental than freedom of speech? And let me just do a little bit of setup here. When FIRE asks Americans what rights are most important to them, they overwhelmingly say freedom of speech; 33 percent say free speech; another 29 percent say freedom of speech and religion.

Economic freedom doesn't really come up, although six and a half percent say free choice. They might mean economic liberty in that sense. Or do you think that's a false dichotomy? It sounds like from this conversation, perhaps, economic freedom is a form of freedom of speech, to the extent it allows us to live out our values.

Robert Breedlove: So, I'm going to draw on Rothbard here, and first, to clearly define how I interpret economic freedom. And let me know if you mean something different.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Robert Breedlove: But again, we said life, liberty, property; three temporal aspects of freedom. So, in my mind, economic freedom is the universalized protection of life, liberty and property. No one's doing violence against you. No one's restraining you. No one's stealing your shit. That's economic freedom, in my view. The question is what's more important, economic freedom or the freedom of speech.

Well, Rothbard would say that the freedom of speech is actually a derivative of private property. You are not free to come in my home and threaten my wife. I will hurt you, right? If you'll just say a thing, "I'm going to hit your wife," well, I'll hurt you as a result of your speech. So, freedom of speech is a matter of where are you saying it; whose property are you saying it on; who are you saying it towards; what are you saying.

Now, obviously in the commons, we say like the digital commons, the internet, we wanted to be able to let our ideas go to battle, but you also can't go online and just threaten people. If you have a direct incitement to violence against someone, well, then you can bring the force of law against them, because you are indicating that you are about to move out of the sphere of free speech into the sphere of physical violence.

And if you make that indication in a way that's believable and authentic, well, then people have a right to act upon that. And the libertarian argument here is you are indicating to me that you're going to violate my private property, so I can go ahead and believe that what you're saying is true, and I can act upon that.

So, my view is that economic freedom is the most essential form of freedom in the world, in so far as we consider economic freedom to be life, liberty and property; and that means it's superordinate even to the freedom of speech, which I know is radical in a First Amendment society.

Nico Perrino: There are categories or exceptions, categorical exceptions to the First Amendment, like incitement to imminent, lawless action; like true threats. But there are also some exceptions to the First Amendment that a lot of free speech advocates would take issue with; but that don't seem, at least on their face, to be violations of property rights in that case, or at least threats to the violation of one's property, such as obscenity, which tends to deal with lewd and filthy, disgusting images or words, which is in large part kind of a dead letter in the United States now.

But in your kind of conception of free speech, that shouldn't be an exception to the First Amendment, theoretically, then because it doesn't violate any property rights.

Robert Breedlove: That's right. It's not harming anyone. And if now if it's, again, if you're in my house and I have house rules up and they say no profanity, well, you start using profanity, I'm free to kick you out of my house, because you came into my house consenting to the rules. If you violate the rules, then you suffer the consequences.

Nico Perrino: I saw a graph a week or two ago. It was put out by the Cato Institute. They surveyed Americans, and they asked the question, are you worried about losing your job or missing out on job opportunities if your political opinions became known? And we'll put this up for our listeners on YouTube, but let me just describe it for those who are listening and aren't watching.

Twenty-five percent of people with a high school degree or less answered yes, that they are worried about losing their job if their political opinions became known. People with some college, that was 28 percent. People with college degrees, 34 percent. And 44 percent of people with post-grad degrees say they're worried about losing their job or missing out on job opportunities if their political opinions became known.

There's something wrong to me about our information ecosystem if the most educated people in America can't or feel like they can't express themselves because of how the marketplace or how the community will respond. So, that means that we're not getting good information, because people are all self-censoring, either through social pressure – and maybe that is a good thing.

Sometimes social pressure to self-censor might be a good thing. Maybe I don't offend my wife, and I get to live through the evening. But in other cases, it can be bad, because people are saying things they don't believe, and then you get this kind of false consciousness, this emperor has no clothes. Everyone knows the emperor is wearing no clothes, but everyone's afraid to say it.

Robert Breedlove: Yeah. And you notice, obviously, as you said, it's the post-grads. The line goes up, right? If you're high school or less, you're least likely to have this fear. And if you're a post-grad, you're most likely. Again, it's no surprise to me that when you have Marxist money, you end up with Marxist academia. We have this nonsense, like critical race theory, DEI. All of this provable nonsense is becoming institutionalized in universities. Emperor has no clothes.

People know this is bullshit, but they are afraid to speak up, because they're so attached to their job. Why are they so attached to their job? Probably because inflation is destroying their savings, right? They're getting robbed through money printing. And then, that printed money is being used to fund the Marxist ideologies in the institutions. So, it's this vicious cycle.

And this is what I mean. Most of the lying – or you could even say the self-deceit, the self-deception – occurs to justify the stealing. This is, again, Marxism. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." That is a romantic lie told to institutionalize the abolition of private property. The state owns everything, you own nothing. "Nobody is safe until everybody is safe" or "Trust the science."

These romantic lies were to print $8 trillion, basically, and steal from savers, and fund a bunch of government control programs. To the extent – and this is just my metaphysical view on things – when you have institutionalized stealing, we have socialism or Marxism in the money. We have this institutionalized policy of aggression against private property through taxation, inflation, and fiat regulation. You incentivize people to create lies to cover up that stealing. Eric Weinstein has a great quote on this.

He says, "The idealism of every age is the cover story for its greatest thefts." And so, we have spun a lot of narratives to try and justify to ourselves why we need to print money, or why we need to regulate this harder, or why we need to have more fiscal responsibility, which is a euphemism for higher taxes, when in reality we're just creating a lie to justify stealing from one another.

And this reminds me of – I forget who said this quote, but he said – it might've been Hobbes; I can't recall – "The state is the great fiction where one group of people try to live at the expense of another group of people." That's all it is. We've created this monopoly on violence and coercion, and we've authorized it with the legal ability to coerce other people for a profit.

And therefore, people will lie, cheat, and steal to try and get close to that spigot of stolen proceeds. And that's why I think the state is inherently corrupt, especially a state with a central bank, and why I think incorruptible money is a key to fixing so many problems in the world.

Nico Perrino: The concern is that because Bitcoin is so incorruptible, governments will try and regulate access to it. We've seen this with the Chinese Communist Party's effort to regulate Bitcoin mining, right? You might see it, something similar, from the United States government; I don't know, through the IRS or something. You can't cash out. Maybe it doesn't matter, if enough people are using Bitcoin, that it's easy to trade, or to engage in commerce with folks.

But what have you seen from China's effort to regulate Bitcoin, and are you concerned at all about governments seeing Bitcoin's power, and kind of putting the kibosh on it? Is that even possible?

Robert Breedlove: Yeah. So, I guess I'd first… I always like to go to definitions. Let's define corruption. Corruption: when I say corruption, I mean an uneven application of rules. The colloquial way to say this is, "Rules for thee, not for me" kind of thing. There's some form of apartheid, even an economic apartheid, that one group operates under certain principles and another group operates under different principles.

And one group tends to set those laws, change those laws; again, back to regulation by fiat. And that's not an ideal situation, because if you can make the rules, the power to make the rules in any game is the power to win in perpetuity. If we're playing poker, and I can change the ranking of hands every hand, well, then I'm going to win every hand, because I can just say my hand wins this one, and change the rules in the next hand, and so on and so forth.

So, the ideal in Western civilization, the anti-corruption ideal, is equality in the eyes of the law, right? Every human is equal in the eyes of the law, which is where we get the metaphor "Justice is blind." Well, as it turns out, like justice, Bitcoin is blind. All humans are actually equal in the eyes of Bitcoin. It is actually a rule set that treats everyone equally. There's no way to unevenly apply the rules.

It's a universal rule set that's evenly applied, and there are rules that are set based on individual self-interest. So, they can't be unilaterally or arbitrarily changed from the top down. They can only be changed from the bottom up. And presumably, so long as humans remain self-interested individuals, they would only be changed in a way that benefit the individuals that constitute the network, which is unlike any rule set we have in the world.

Now, to the question of China, China's had a very volatile regulatory relationship with Bitcoin over the years. And most recently – I think this was about two years ago – China banned Bitcoin mining. And at the time, about 50 percent of Bitcoin's global hash rate was coming out of China. And today, roughly 25 percent of Bitcoin's global hash rate is still coming out of China.

So, what this saga proved to me is that it just reinforced the validity of Bitcoin's decentralization narrative, right? The most powerful, authoritarian, iron-fisted regime in human history just outlawed Bitcoin mining, which is the only physical aspect of Bitcoin, which would be the only aspect that the state can actively interfere with, because the state is a monopoly on physical violence; so, they need a physical footprint to coerce.

The most powerful state in human history just outlawed the only physical aspect of Bitcoin, which is Bitcoin mining. And what happened? Well, Bitcoin miners got boxed up. These are just little shoebox-sized ASIC devices. They got shipped to another location, and they got plugged back in, and they started mining again. So, the hash rate initially came down about 30 or 40 percent after the ban. And here we are two years later: I think hash rates up 500 percent from that low or more.

So, if China can't ban Bitcoin, then who can, right? This is, again, the most powerful, authoritarian regime in human history. And to your further question, okay, well, governments would obviously try to regulate the endpoints, right? The actual exchanges or custodians of Bitcoin; the third parties, the counter parties. Which they can do, right? You can point a gun at a CEO or a CEO's headquarters. You can't point a gun at a math problem.

That's why Bitcoin's so hard to regulate. But if they created a situation where it was difficult to cash out of Bitcoin, this would be very self-defeating, in my opinion, because you would create a situation where it's more difficult to sell Bitcoin into currency or goods; and if you reduce the selling pressure on Bitcoin, then you put upward pressure on its price.

And as price goes up, Bitcoin gets more attention; and as Bitcoin gets more attention, more people seek to obtain it; and as more people seek to obtain it, more and more black markets would pop up. Anyone that's mining Bitcoin directly can sell Bitcoin over the counter to anyone. So, I think it would be a very self-defeating effort if we tried to regulate or prevent Bitcoin exchanges from operating. I think it would blow up in the regulator's face.

Nico Perrino: What do you make of the recent Bitcoin ETFs that were listed?

Robert Breedlove: Just a natural progression of Bitcoin permeating the legacy financial system. There's a lot of people that aren't going to fool with self-custody and hardware wallets, and multi-signature wallets, and all of this. They're old money, let's say. They want to pick up a phone and call their broker and say, "Buy Bitcoin." Well prior to the ETFs, that wasn't really possible. You could buy MicroStrategy as a proxy. You could buy the GBTC, but you're paying like a two-percent management fee.

But now, with these ETFs, I think we had 11 launched. They're very fee-competitive. People can access exposure to Bitcoin at a relatively low cost just by calling a broker. So, it's a massive widening of the channels of capital that will flow into Bitcoin.

Nico Perrino: And you think it's a net positive?

Robert Breedlove: I do. It's a natural progression. Some people would argue there's a threat, because you end up with more Bitcoin ownership concentrated in the hands of centralized custodians. And again, governments can coerce centralized custodians; they can nationalize them, they can seize them, freeze them, et cetera. They also get information on customers, Bitcoin holdings; when it's in a third party's possession rather than in self-custody.

So, there are some tradeoffs, but I think on balance, it's just going to bring more money into Bitcoin. To be more specific, more purchasing power into Bitcoin. And the more purchasing power Bitcoin gains: as we say in Bitcoin, as Bitcoin number go up, state power go down. So, I think it's a net benefit.

Nico Perrino: These last questions here are just kind of rapid-fire things that have always been on my mind about Bitcoin, and I always wanted to just ask an expert about. The next one is: the price of Bitcoin, you would have expected to go up a lot in 2020, 2022, but it went down. In part, you would have expected it to go up just because the government was printing so much money, and inflation was running rampant. But it seemed to have tracked more or less the trajectory of the stock market. What's the reason for that? I'm sure there's a very good one, and I'm just ignorant of it.

Robert Breedlove: Back to Mr. Malice's point, it doesn't matter what I know. It doesn't matter what I think. It's up to the market to discover the appropriate price for every given asset. But I would push back on Bitcoin didn't go up from 2020 to 2022. It bottomed at $3,800 in March, 2020, and it grew to $70,000 two years later. I would challenge anyone –

Nico Perrino: But then it went back down to like $17,000 when the stock market was also tanking.

Robert Breedlove: Yes. And this is – we mentioned it earlier – but Mises's crowning achievement, the Austrian business cycle theory. The more you pump artificial liquidity into markets, the more volatile they become. So, Bitcoin, who knows? The price has been roughly cyclical to the halving cycle, which is every four years; the new supply assurance of Bitcoin goes down by 50 percent. Miners are selling that Bitcoin to cover their operational costs.

So, it reduces the natural selling of Bitcoin by 50 percent every four years. If you hold demand constant, that puts upward pressure on price. We've seen new all-time high Bitcoin prices clock in usually 500 some-odd days after the halving. I think the halving this year is on target for April, roughly like late April, 2024.

So, if you tacked on 500 days to that, whatever that comes out to be, that would be, if history is an indicator when we would expect to see a new all-time high Bitcoin price. But again, this thing is so small and volatile, right? It's a sub $1 trillion, right at $1 trillion asset, competing for a $100 trillion plus marketplace; and market capitalization of any asset is inverse to its volatility, right? You think of it as like a small boat on a big pond, and the bigger it gets, the less those waves affect it.

So, yeah, I think Bitcoin is doing exactly what it's intended to do, which is give people a means of preserving private property in a way that cannot be inflated, and is not easily confiscated. And more and more people are figuring out the importance of that tool. And therefore, you're seeing more and more purchasing power flow into this asset.

As far as these cherry-picking predictions like, "Oh, you would have expected it to go up from this month to that month," you're wasting your time, as far as I'm concerned. This is an accumulation game. The only thing I would say I have a high degree of confidence in based on my study of monetary history is that people are never going to stop printing money. It is an addiction no one has been able to overcome, and we know with back to the point of perfect information earlier, Bitcoin is the closest thing to perfect information we've ever had. We know exactly what its supply is and will be forever.

I think you'll see more and more people flow out of the uncertainty of fiat currency and into the perfect certainty of Bitcoin. And in that situation, the game is to just accumulate as much as possible over time, and aim to never sell it. So, this is why dollar cost averaging is important, this is why self-custody is important, and this is why jurisdictional arbitrage is important.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I think some of the skepticism comes from folks seeing people like Balaji predict that Bitcoin will hit half a million dollars; what was it, in the middle part of last year when he made that prediction?

Robert Breedlove: Anyone who lives by the crystal ball is bound to eat glass.

Nico Perrino: Oh, I like that one. Do you ever think we'll know who Satoshi Nakamoto is?

Robert Breedlove: No.

Nico Perrino: By way of closing here, I see the arc of history as going towards ever more access to information, and there is going to be anarchy associated with that. The printing press introduced millions of people into the conversation, that previously was only accessible to the most learned, and the great religions of the world; and Europe fought wars for hundreds of years over it, right? Social media introduced billions of people, and the internet introduced billions of people into the conversation, giving folks even more access to information, and having to sort ever more noise from the signal.

You could see Bitcoin and other digital currencies as introducing more information into the ecosystem, perfect information system, uncorrupted. If we're going back to that John Milton quote, it's free and open encounter.

Robert Breedlove: More price discovery, basically, which is more sound information.

Nico Perrino: Do you think the world is a better place for folks having vastly more access to information? I guess that gets down to the question, what do you mean by better? Some might say, are people happier? Are they making better decisions? Are outcomes better? But I think one of the things we see in the free speech world is that our critics say you have all this access to information, but the world seems so anarchic. It doesn't seem as peaceful. People don't seem as happy as they once were.

Now, correlation doesn't equal causation, and maybe they're wrong about that, because we have always this kind of pessimism about the current moment, and the last moment always was the golden age. But that's the question that I feel like a lot of us free speech advocates or open-marketplace advocates have to contend with; is like, is the world a better place for this open marketplace of money or ideas? I mean, how do you think about it?

Robert Breedlove: Yeah. So, again, we have to define what we mean by better, obviously. Better to who? Again, economics is the means by which we solve problems, better, faster, cheaper. That's what innovation is. That's what markets are. That's what the accumulation of goods and capital does. Productivity could be our metric, right? Capital per capita, capital accumulated per capita could be our metric. These both roughly equate to human flourishing, right?

If human flourishing is our metric, and peace, productivity, nonviolent dispute resolution: if these are our goals as a civilization, to be civil with one another rather than behave like animals, then knowledge is essential. The accumulation of knowledge is what underpins the accumulation of wealth. Ayn Rand has a great quote in Atlas Shrugged, where she says, "Try to obtain your food by some random, uninformed emotions, and you'll see how knowledge is essential to the acquisition of food."

You need to know where to go, how to grow it, what the grocery store is, how to hunt it, how to prepare it, how to store it, all of these things. This is knowledge- based, and this is true for every good in the marketplace. How do you build a laptop? Great book on this. First chapter of Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley says, "Nobody knows."

He actually uses the example of a computer mouse. He says nobody knows how to build a computer mouse. Only the distributed cognitive domain called the free market knows how to build a computer mouse, because there's so many components and so many different places, so many interconnected processes that no individual can build a computer mouse.

Nico Perrino: And Milton Friedman's pencil, right? It's even something more simple.

Robert Breedlove: Beautiful essay. Wonderful essay. Poetic on this very notion. And so, the idea is human beings engaging in cooperation are vastly more than the sum of our parts. And if we're going to have peaceful cooperation, well, that's what a free market is. Everyone keeps what they earn, and they're free to trade with everyone else. We discover the price of goods. We discover new and useful ideas.

We resolve our disputes nonviolently, because we are rational enough to understand that each of us are rational, and each of us would prefer to have exclusive rights to our individual property and not be coerced. And that is the system which maximally distributes the computational load of wealth generation, and that's what maximizes the discovery of prices and innovations, and therefore maximizes human flourishing.

So, yes, we are information foragers, as Jordan Peterson says. So, the free flow and access to information is key to human flourishing and human abundance, so far as I'm concerned.

Nico Perrino: Well, Robert Breedlove, I think we'll leave it there. I appreciate you coming on So to Speak.

Robert Breedlove: Thank you for having me, Nico.

Nico Perrino: That was Robert Breedlove, the host of the What Is Money Show. I am Nico Perrino, and this podcast is produced by Sam Niederholzer and myself. It's edited by a rotating roster of our FIRE colleagues, including Aaron Reese, Chris Maltby, and Sam. To learn more about So to Speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel. We feature videos of most of our conversations. You can also follow us on Axe or Instagram by searching for the handle Free Speech Talk. We're also on Facebook.

We take feedback. If you have thoughts or guest requests, you can email us at sotospeak@thefire.org. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review on Apple podcasts, Google Play, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Reviews help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, thank you again for listening.