The Government’s Biggest Scam? Inflation & Money Printing EXPLAINED | Robert Breedlove PT 1

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: The Government’s Biggest Scam? Inflation & Money Printing EXPLAINED | Robert Breedlove PT 1

Date: February 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tom Bilyeu dives into the often-misunderstood mechanics of inflation, government money printing, and the economic narratives that shape public perception. He is joined by Robert Breedlove, a leading thinker on monetary philosophy and Bitcoin, to dissect how central banks, economic statistics, and policies influence everything from the wealth gap to personal freedoms. The conversation challenges mainstream beliefs about capitalism, explores the moral dimensions of government intervention, and advocates for the adoption of decentralized monetary systems like Bitcoin as a safeguard against systemic abuses.

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Key Discussion Topics & Insights

1. Government Economic Metrics & Manipulation

• Manipulation of CPI and Unemployment:

  • Breedlove explains that government-released metrics like CPI (Consumer Price Index) and unemployment stats are often manipulated to fit political narratives rather than reflect reality ([01:35-03:22]).
    • Notable Quote:
      “A metric that is designed to measure price changes, the government actually decides to exclude anything… whose price changes too quickly. So if food or energy changes too quickly... they exclude [it] to manage that number.”
      — Robert Breedlove [01:50]

• Narrative Control & Social Stability:

  • The purpose of such manipulations is to avoid social unrest by making economic conditions seem better than they are ([03:38-04:36]).
    • “What you don’t want is social revolt... People are going to feel the pain, but then all of a sudden you’re also telling them, ‘Oh, inflation’s 3% or 4%, everything’s fine.’”
      — Robert Breedlove [04:04]

• Economic 'Management' is a Myth:

  • Breedlove criticizes the metaphor of the economy as a machine with levers and buttons, arguing that no one can predict or control human action at scale ([04:36-07:16]).
    • “Trying to manage an economy is as hubristic and silly as a meteorologist trying to control the weather.”
      — Robert Breedlove [05:46]

2. Price Controls & Historical Failures

• Why Price Controls Fail:

  • Breedlove elaborates on how price controls distort economic signals and create surpluses or shortages, referencing Soviet Russia’s failures ([11:24-16:58]).
    • “Prices are data packets about consumer preference... To try and regulate prices is like trying to regulate consumer preference. You can’t pass a law to tell people what they want.”
      — Robert Breedlove [08:40]
    • “It wasn’t even an economy anymore. It was a dis-economy. They brought in $90B of inputs annually and had $30B of outputs... As the saying went, ‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.’”
      — Robert Breedlove [15:39]

• Reality Check from Immigrant Communities:

  • Observations from Miami’s immigrant communities highlight lived experiences of socialist failures and a general societal ‘bullshit detector’ for bad policy ([16:30]).

3. Capitalism, Central Banking & The Wealth Gap

• True Capitalism Rarely Exists:

  • Breedlove asserts that any country with central banking is not fully capitalist, as monetary control by the state (central banking) is a Marxist principle ([18:43-21:56]).
    • “Anywhere you’ve got a central bank, you are at best 50% capitalist and 50% Marxist or communist, because money is one half of every transaction… money under a central banking paradigm is centrally planned.”
      — Robert Breedlove [18:43]

• The Wealth Gap & 'Shadow Tax':

  • The real reason the rich get richer is not capitalism per se, but the shadow tax of inflation—the erosion of purchasing power rests hardest on savers and non-asset-holders ([24:00–27:00]).
    • Tom Bilyeu: “If the average person has to be a degenerate gambler to stay ahead of inflation... their life does not feel the way the government describes. It becomes gaslighting.” [23:31]
    • “Inflating money is evil... It is a violation of private property rights.”
      — Robert Breedlove [27:00]

4. Inflation as a “Shadow Tax” & Moral Implications

• Why Inflation is Evil:
  • Inflation stealthily steals purchasing power from savers and incentivizes debt over savings, fundamentally breaching the social contract of labor for value ([26:23–32:14]).
    • “If someone rightfully owns something, they worked to acquire it... who else has the right to come and take your table? I think it’s a pretty hard sell, at least from a moral angle.”
      — Robert Breedlove [31:24]

5. The Role and Ideal Size of Government

• Small, Local Government Ideal:
  • Breedlove endorses minimal government focused only on protecting life, liberty, and property, with law evolving from real disputes rather than top-down decrees ([32:33–36:09]).
    • “The government that governs least, governs best.”
      — Robert Breedlove [32:33]

6. Bitcoin: An Incorruptible Monetary System

• Bitcoin as the Solution:
  • Only Bitcoin, due to its decentralized and fixed supply, provides an incorruptible standard immune to both inflation and political manipulation ([36:09–41:26]).
    • “Bitcoin’s the only game human beings cannot game... a social institution humans cannot corrupt.”
      — Robert Breedlove [36:09]
    • “Bitcoin is not just inflation-resistant—it's inflation-immune.”
      — Robert Breedlove [37:33]
• Digital Bearer Asset & Trust Minimization:
  • Unlike gold, Bitcoin can be self-custodied, split among trustees, and moved globally—inhibiting both government and institutional overreach ([41:26–51:25]).

7. The Systemic Heart of Inequality

• Money Printing & Asset Inflation:
  • Tom summarizes the “speedrun” of how money printing directly benefits asset-holders and punishes savers—widening the wealth gap and making saving in cash a losing proposition ([41:26–45:32]).
    • “When they put the money into the system, when they counterfeit it, what they end up doing is buying assets from people that already hold them... So now the average person, the money that they're socking away, is going to be worth nothing.”
      — Tom Bilyeu [43:30]

8. Gold vs. Bitcoin

• Gold’s Limitations & Bitcoin's Advantage:
  • Gold is still reliant on trust in custodians and vulnerable to government seizure—unlike Bitcoin, which eliminates counterparty risk ([45:32-51:25]).
    • “You can only scale gold with the promises of others. Bitcoin fixes that.”
      — Robert Breedlove [45:41]
    • “Not your keys, not your cheese.”
      — Robert Breedlove [48:33]

9. Compassion, Private Property & Social Responsibility

• Is Government-Forced Charity Moral?
  • The pair debate if society has a moral obligation to help the less fortunate through government ([51:25–61:30]).
    • “I truly believe in human freedom. If I’m going to put a gun to your head and say you need to go and take care of the needy, that sort of defeats the purpose.”
      — Robert Breedlove [52:14]
• Division of Labor Enables Compassion:
  • Breedlove argues that strong private property rights (not forced redistribution) create the abundance that allows for natural compassion ([58:12–61:30]).

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [00:42] Setting the stage: Why the system seems broken
• [01:35] Manipulation of economic reports (CPI, unemployment)
• [03:47] Theatrics in fiat statism; reality vs. perception
• [08:40] Price controls and economic signal distortion
• [11:24] Soviet case study: centralization’s failures
• [17:22] The myth that we live in true capitalism
• [26:23] Inflation as the ultimate violation of property rights
• [32:33] Ideal government: local, restrained, focused on property rights
• [36:09] Bitcoin: The ungameable, incorruptible standard
• [41:26] Tom’s “speedrun”: why money printing is the true scam
• [45:32] The limitations of gold as money in a digital era
• [51:52] Morality of government-enforced charity and welfare
• [58:12] Wealth, abundance, and evolving capacities for compassion

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “A metric that is designed to measure price changes, the government actually decides to exclude anything … whose price changes too quickly.”
  — Robert Breedlove [01:50]

• “Trying to manage an economy is as hubristic and silly as a meteorologist trying to control the weather.”
  — Robert Breedlove [05:46]

• “It wasn’t even an economy anymore. It was a dis-economy. They brought in $90B of inputs and had $30B of outputs… As the saying went, ‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.’”
  — Robert Breedlove [15:39]

• “Inflating money is evil... It is a violation of private property rights.”
  — Robert Breedlove [27:00]

• “The government that governs least, governs best.”
  — Robert Breedlove [32:33]

• “Bitcoin's the only game that human beings have ever invented that they themselves cannot game.”
  — Robert Breedlove [36:09]

• “When they put the money into the system... what they end up doing is buying assets from people that already hold them... So now the average person, the money that they're socking away, is going to be worth nothing.”
  — Tom Bilyeu [43:30]

• “You can only scale gold with the promises of others. Bitcoin fixes that.”
  — Robert Breedlove [45:41]

• “If I’m going to put a gun to your head and say you need to go and take care of the needy, that sort of defeats the purpose.”
  — Robert Breedlove [52:14]

• “Compassion is a bit of a luxury... you need an economy producing that [abundance] to make compassion actionable.”
  — Robert Breedlove [59:14]

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Tone

• Intellectual, probing, fiercely critical of political and economic orthodoxy
• Conversational and occasionally irreverent, especially when referencing memes or historical anecdotes
• Moral urgency in questioning the justice of existing systems
• Evaluative and comparative—Bitcoin vs. gold, capitalism vs. statism

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Final Thoughts

The episode offers a comprehensive critique of the modern monetary system, exposing how information is engineered to support the interests of those in power and highlighting the invisible tax of inflation. Breedlove and Bilyeu interrogate not only the mechanics but also the morality of the existing order, presenting Bitcoin as a revolutionary safeguard for individual freedom and economic integrity. Listeners are left with a greater understanding of why economic pain persists, how metrics can deceive, and what practical steps can be taken to resist systemic overreach.

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To be continued in Part 2: Bitcoin’s global impact, the mechanics of the growing wealth gap, and actionable steps for individual financial sovereignty.

Transcript

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Shopify.com setup I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. The economy feels broken. Governments are printing money at insane rates. Central banks are rolling out digital currencies, and the gap between rich and everybody else just keeps getting bigger. And here's the truth. The system isn't broken. It was actually designed this way. That's why I wanted to talk to Robert Breedlove right now. Robert isn't just another guy talking about bitcoin. He's one of the most respected thinkers on what money actually is and how it works, why and how it's being used to control you. So we're going to break it all down. What's happening behind the scenes, why your financial future depends on understanding it and what you can actually do to get ahead. Without further ado, here is Robert Breedlove. How is it that all the economic reports make it seem like the economy is red hot and yet people feel like they're in a recession? What's going on?

[Robert Breedlove]

Well, all those metrics are baked. You know, they reverse engineer all of them. We've talked about the inflation metric before, cpi, the consumer Price Index. This is a basket of goods that change in price over time. This metric has been revised, I think I want to say, three to four times in the past 30 or 40 years. And a metric that is designed to measure price changes, the government actually decides to exclude anything, any particular commodity that's in that basket whose price changes too quickly. So if food or energy changes too quickly and causes inflation rate to appear too high, they exclude food or energy to manage that number toward what they want it to be. So it's basically. Basically a metric, if I may be so frank. You may. I think the unemployment numbers are similar. I'm not as familiar with them, but as I understand it, they've been revised like 12 months after the fact. So they'll issue a certain number a month later and say, you know, oh, unemployment was 8% last month. And then 12 months later they will say, oh, actually our numbers were wrong, we need to revise this upward to 12% or whatever. Of course it makes headlines and has an impact when it's released in a timely manner. But when you mention the, the amendment 12 months later, it doesn't make quite so much of a splash. Also with the unemployment numbers, we have this thing called labor workforce participation rate. Well, now there's people that just at a certain point of not looking for a job, they just exclude them from the calculation. So it's people that are actively looking for a job are considered in that calculation of unemployment and of certain, you know, if you haven't had a job in six months, someone could fact check me on the exact amount. They just exclude that, those individuals from the calculation itself. So that's another way of managing the unemployment numbers to suit the narrative that any particular administration is trying to push. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why do they manipulate cpi? Why do you think the government wants to make a narrative when people are still encountering reality?

[Robert Breedlove]

Hmm. Well, I think there's a lot of theatricality that occurs inside of fiat statism. Right. It's the whole like the meme where the dog is sitting in the room and everything's burning down and he just says, this is fine, this is fine, this is fine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think they're just trying to control the perception?

[Robert Breedlove]

Well, I think you, what you don't want is social revolt. I mean, that's the, you know, people are going to feel the pain, but then all of a sudden you're also telling them, oh, you know, your feelings are valid. And inflation is running at 15% as measured in 1980 terms. So you're getting milked at 15% a year, which means your purchasing power is getting cut in half every seven years. That's a bit more painful, I guess, for people. Whereas if you just do the same thing to them, but tell them inflation's 3% or 4%, everything's fine. You're just pretending, basically. And I guess that does have kind of an analgesic effect on people. Just the belief that maybe things aren't quite so bad. Sort of reminds me of censorship a little bit where, you know, if enough people get censored, individuals start to self censor. So creating this illusion that you know, things are okay, then you, if you're feeling the pain, you might be more hesitant to speak up if the guy on TV is telling you, oh, no, inflation's low and numbers are up. You might be like, well, what's wrong with me? I can't find the job. I can't get ahead. I can't make ends meet, rather than standing in unity with people saying, hey, this is actually a broken social system or social contract and we need to do something about it. So that would be. I mean, that's my hypothesis. But in general, really, the entire idea of trying to manage an economy is just a bunk metaphor. It does not work. Right? An economy is a complex adaptive system. Central banks often refer to their policy tools as levers, right? Like, oh, if unemployment is up, what is it they try to do here? If inflation is high, then they will increase unemployment to reduce inflation, I think, is the one that they use. And so they act as if this complex adaptive system, they metaphorize it as if, if it is a machine that they can simply press buttons and pull levers and cause inflation rates to change and unemployment rates to change. And I think that is ultimately as hubristic and silly as a meteorologist trying to control the weather. Right? We, we don't understand what an individual human being will do. You can't say with certainty what an individual human being will do from moment to moment, across time, right. Without getting into the argument about free will. It's not predictable, at least, right? No one can predict on this earth what words you're about to say next. That's up to you and your own psychology. What in the world makes us think, if we can't predict one human psychology, what they're going to do moment to moment? Why could we possibly predict what 8.5 billion human psychologies interconnected in a global marketplace, competing and cooperating, innovating. Why do we think anyone could predict the outcome of that complex adaptive system? And yet that's what central banks do when they try to manage or steer the economy. It's just, it's silly. It's an antiquated, outdated, Industrial age mentality, and it doesn't apply to the reality of complex adaptive systems.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you said that part of the reason they do this is they want to avoid social revolt. Do you think that Trump getting elected is that tame version of a social revolt?

[Robert Breedlove]

You know, it seems like it's a populist movement to some extent, right? People are feeling the pain. And look, I'm the worst guy to talk to about politics in general, but just as an observer, it seems as though the Democratic Party was really trying to overplay the race card. And you know, everyone needs to vote based on race. And people just started to wise up to that and say, you know what, that doesn't actually make sense. For it appears to me it's always, it's not red versus blue, it's the state versus you, basically. And so the Democrats overplaying this divisiveness card while at the same time, you know, we expanded the money supply 40% in four years. Right? So all of that pri. That monetary inflation created price inflation that was dumped on people, that was a tax, basically the invisible shadow tax of inflation that we've talked about a lot. People have been coping with that pain and suffering with that pain, while at the same time you had, you know, Joe Biden was going on the super bowl doing a commercial saying, oh, I love ice cream. And you know, shame on ice cream producers for increasing the prices of ice cream. We're going to make sure that these greedy capitalist ice cream producers don't increase the price of ice cream anymore. You also heard Kamala flirting with the idea of price controls. Like, how insane is that? This is Soviet style statism, basically. Right? And just to be real clear on this, prices are data packets about consumer preference. To try and regulate prices is like trying to regulate consumer preference. You can't pass a law to tell people what they want. Right. A price is the economic expression of what people want. So to try and regulate prices, it only does one of two things. It creates surpluses or shortages. Right. The market does not clear where supply and demand meet as an honest pricing system does. And it creates distortions that ultimately harm people. Right. This is why millions of people starved in Soviet Russia, etc. So I think all of that nonsense was basically dawning on people. Like, I think people have a good detector even if they don't understand the complexities of how a price system works and money printing manipulates the price signal and all of that. I think people just start to see through the bullshit a little bit. And look, I'm no fan of any politician, frankly. I'll be very interested to see how many promises Trump has made actually get kept. However, at least in his rhetoric, he was much more honest seeming, right? That he was talking about actual pain and actual problems that people were feeling. Whereas the Democratic Party was taking this approach of everything's fine and what's, whatever is broken will regulate prices and. And crazy like that. So I think at the end of the day, Team Red was just a little bit more in touch with truth and that's why they won.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's Interesting. So the concept of price gouging, I think feels relatively intuitive to people that, yeah, somebody should control that. There should be an upper limit. People were very happy when Scarelli, I forget his name, but the guy that bought the drug and then raised the price like a gazillion percent ends up going to prison. People, I think, feel like, yeah, there should be some sort of cap on some of these things. Yet the Democrats got voted out of power. And even here in California there was a referendum for rent control and that failed. Yeah. So somebody somewhere is getting the message. Why? Why didn't the Soviet system work? Like, why don't price controls simply calm businesses down from price gouging?

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. So basically you think about capitalism as like a decentralized computing system, right? Where people are making decisions about how best to allocate capital to satisfy customer wants. Better, faster, cheaper. But all of that computing system is based on the data input of the price, Right? It's what other people are doing where supply and demand are meeting in every market. It's telling entrepreneurs what to do. Basically, it's signaling to them how much consumers want something and how much what supplies are available. So for instance, if there's an earthquake in Chile, I've probably used this example before, but it's a pretty simple one. And a copper mine collapses, right? And let's say the flow of copper to the market now from that mine ceases. All the people interacting with copper in the world, right? Whether you're a consumer or a producer, they don't need to even know about the copper mine collapsing. They don't need to know the story. They don't need to know the background, the history, nothing. All they need to see is, okay, supply of copper coming to market slowed down. So therefore price went up. All they need to see is the price of copper went up. As a producer of copper, I'm now incentivized to produce more. And because the price is higher, maybe there's new methods of production that weren't economically feasible before, that all of a sudden are, right? So I'm incentivized to alleviate that shortage by producing more copper and bringing it to market. And on the other side, consumers, in the face of that price increase, are incentivized to consume less or use substitutes or delay consumption, right? So consumers are incentivized to buy less. Producers are incentivized to produce more. This is how markets rectify problems, basically. And so it's that complex adaptive computational system that is only possible with the individual ownership of the means of production, which is to say individual private property rights. Socialism violates private property rights, right? It steals from people and allocates capital arbitrarily according to bureaucratic whim. And so in Soviet Russia they had pricing czars, right? They were making like 10,000 pricing decisions a day, right? A guy sitting in a tower deciding what a nail cost. But he's not. The nature of knowledge itself is he has no knowledge about what entrepreneurs actually need, right? He doesn't know the supply of nails at any given point. He doesn't know the demand for them. He's just really taking a shot in the dark. And actually a lot of those pricing are a lot. There's a strong argument to be made that it only lasted as long as it did because they were able to copy prices from the free markets in the US right? They could peg to what the free market data was generating on certain goods. So it's just a matter of decentralized compute versus centralized compute. And if you consider that each person has a finite bandwidth, their awareness, their attention span, like only so much data can flow through your eyes and ears and head at any one time. You're talking about in a decentralized competitive free market, you have the bandwidth of everyone, right? Feeding that system. So it's whatever the data throughput of an individual market participant is times all market actors. That's your total data throughput for that decentralized computing system. In a centralized computing system, you only have the throughput of the bureaucrats, the pricing czars, whoever's making the decisions. Everyone else is just following the orders. Not to mention all the data has to go be passed up from the market actors into the central bureaucracy. The decision has to be made, then it has to be passed back out into the productive actors. And then they have to execute against that plan. And that has to be enforced because none of these people are following their self interest. So the entire thing is just very inefficient. It leads to the misallocation of capital, which basically means capital that's being allocated inconsistently with the wishes of consumers that have the power and wherewithal to buy something. So it, it distorts reality, basically, and it destroys civilizations. And what happened by the end of Soviet Russia, it wasn't even an economy anymore. It was a dis economy. You'd have to check the exact numbers. But I want to say they brought in like, you know, $90 billion of inputs annually and they had $30 billion of outputs. It was a dis economy, right? An economy is when more, less inputs come in than outputs go out, you're increasing the value of things. And Soviet Russia was, was the opposite. You know, most people were employed as narcs on one another. They were telling on each other. You get all of these non productive paper pushing jobs inside of the state bureaucracy. And as the old saying went, you know, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. That's what the Soviets said towards the end of that whole sham. So I hope there's enough learning from this across history that people in the United States have said no. Basically. I know living in Miami, there's a lot of people from Cuba and other places in South America that have had different issues with communism and socialism. And there were signs on all kinds of people's yards saying, you know, no, no, Kamala, communism and whatnot. So I think it had something to do with that. Right? People do learn from history to some extent. And you combine that with a good bullshit detector and I guess that's the result that we got.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why do you think then, given we just dodged that bullet, why are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Because as much as I love capitalism, it has not in its current iteration, yielded results that are sustainable.

[Robert Breedlove]

I mean, we've talked about this, right? It's not capitalism.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Quick break, but when we're back, Robert breaks down why saving cash might actually be cost you money.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

We're back. Let's dive right in. Because as much as I love capitalism, it has not in its current iteration, yielded results that are sustainable.

[Robert Breedlove]

I mean, we've talked about this, right? It's not Capitalism anywhere you've got a central bank. You, you are at best 50% capitalist, and you are 50% Marxist or communist, because money is one half of every transaction. And money under a central banking paradigm is centrally planned. Central banking is the central planning of money. This comes from measure number five in Marx's 1848 manifesto to the Communist Party that the state has to have central control of cash and credit. For communism to work. The printing of money is the violation of private property. Right? Marx said you could sum up communism in one sentence, which is the abolition of private property. So at one end of the spectrum, there's, and we've talked about this communism, the institutionalized abolition of private property. The opposite of communism would be capitalism, the institutionalized perfection of private property and the transfer of private property through consensual contracts. Right? We can agree to trade things only by consent, not by coercion. The spectrum in between is effectively socialism in all its different forms. It's an institutionalized policy of aggression against private property. So whatever the average tax rate is of a particular country, that is basically what percentage it is socialist. And to get that tax rate, you really need to know not only what is the explicit tax rate of, say, the average taxpayer, but you also need to know how much savers are being debased through currency counterfeiting. Right? The shadow tax of inflation also goes into this equation. So we don't have capitalism anywhere in the world, nor have we ever had it anywhere in the world. We've had different iter, you know, different intensities of it. But. And the United States would be a great example of when we were founded as a constitutional republic, we did not have a central bank. We had no income tax. There were very low and predictable and oftentimes no state taxes. Largely we were funded through tariffs, and rule of law was, you know, pretty much minimal and centered on the preservation of life, liberty and property. And what did we get? We got a massive economic boom. One of the most successful economic stories in human history. You could also look at places like Hong Kong that had a similar beginning, right, where they had very stable rule of law, very low taxes, and a lot of capitalism. Places like the UAE today, they're doing this right, Very low taxes. Do they have a fed, do they have a central bank? I believe they do, but I would say that they are not engaging in currency counterfeiting at the same rate as the US Someone could check me on that as well. But I know their explicit tax rate is much smaller than what we have in the US So, so basically you let entrepreneurs keep the fruits of their labor and leave them alone and you tend to get successful economic stories. But the, and that's capitalism. But the extent to which you start to progress along that spectrum of socialism towards communism, you, you slide closer to that Soviet style diseconomy we just talked about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do we need any breaks on capitalism? Like if you had your druthers, I know you don't vote. You said earlier you're the worst person to talk to about politics. So do you one, do you consider yourself completely removed from politics because it's just a protest vote? This is so corrupt. You can't engage.

[Robert Breedlove]

You know, I think the most powerful vote you can cast is the way you save and spend your money ultimately. So I consider holding purchasing power in bitcoin or physical gold, which is outside of the fiat system. Right. They can't print money to steal your purchasing power. If you're holding your savings in gold or Bitcoin so you're protected from inflation and then, you know, obviously optimizing yourself from a tax standpoint, this is the most effective vote you can cast against the apparatus of coercion that is the state, because you're actually taking your energy out of it. Right. You're not participating in a popularity contest and hoping that the guy that you elect will represent your interest and make things better.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Is that, that's very soft, right? Sure. Does it help? More so at a grassroots level, I think, but when you get into large centralized bureaucracies, I don't think it helps that much or as much. What really helps is actually removing your energy from the system. And so that's what I look at it as is like I actually try to boycott the system by holding my purchasing power outside of it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. My take would be that right now we're living through a very interesting moment where who you vote for matters based on their worldview. And we are ultimately in a moment where we as a people are deciding whether we want that top down authoritarian control, whether we want freedom of speech or not. And it felt pretty consequential. This is the first time where I really felt like, yo, people need to get out and vote now I'm cool whatever way people want to vote. Think I have a monopoly on the truth, but I do have a very strong take on what I think. And to me this really felt like a referendum of a revenge of the working class. I forget who said that, but I think it's an absolutely brilliant assessment of what just happened. And going back to my initial Question. I think really what just played out is you can put out all the reports in the world that say everything is going well, but if the average person has to be a degenerate gambler to stay ahead of inflation, if they go to the grocery store and everything is going up, up, up in price, real wages are flat, you're making less in your 20s than your parents did. You're looking at what's going to happen to your kids. You don't not feeling super optimistic. The deaths of despair for young men are skyrocketing to the point where it's bringing the overall average age, the average life expectancy down in America, which is absolute insanity. And so people are just like, say what you will, dear politician, but the reality is that my life does not feel the way that you're describing. And so it really does it. It becomes gaslighting that is so blatant that you, even if you want to reconcile with it, you're not going to be able to, which is pretty fascinating. So anyway, I get what you mean about you can cast, you're going to cast a potentially even more important vote by what you do with your money. But I think for the average person, they don't want to think about where to put their money. They want the system that they live inside of Capital T, Capital S to be moral, to use my own words. And so going back to what you said about cpi, glad you brought that up. So if people understood why the government manipulates the CPI specifically, part of it is because your entitlements as you age are based on the cpi. And if the CPI goes up, they have to pay you more, which they can't afford to do because they'd have to print more money and we get on and on into debt, which I'm sure we'll, we'll talk about. But so the w. The way I look at the government is the government has a tendency to become evil and inflating money is evil. Now I have a feeling you agree with that. If you would give people that quick primer for why is inflation evil? Because for basically my entire life till about five years ago, I thought it was a natural law of nature that money inflated by 2%.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, I realized too, I didn't answer your question that like, do we need any breaks on capitalism? And so I'll try to wrap both of those answers together. If you mean by capitalism, the right of individuals to own property and trade it by consent only, right. And if there are any violations of that ownership, people can seek retribution through the rule of law, right? If you steal my car, then I can go to the police and file a police report and seek to have that retribution enforced by the force of law. This is the purpose of the rule of law, actually, is to preserve private property. I don't think you need any breaks on that, right? That's just really saying, do we need any breaks on individual human freedom? I mean, I think the breaks are almost built into it. You know, we talked about in episodes prior, Life, Liberty and Inviolable private property. This is what was in the Magna Carta in 1215 when King John signed it. I think this is the entire purpose of government, right? It needs to use a legal monopoly on force to defend life, liberty and property. That is it. That is the entire philosophical purpose and scope of government. It doesn't need to do anything beyond that. Anything it does beyond that, I would consider to be in that domain of government being evil. So the second part of your question, why is inflation evil? Because it is a violation of private property rights. If you are a saver and you're holding money in a bank account, right? That means you have gone into the marketplace, you have provided labor, or you've rendered favors to the marketplace to other people, right? You go to work, you add to the productive output of society by producing goods and services for other people. You are paid in money. Those are tokens that basically say, hey, you rendered other people a useful favor. You did something that other people deemed to be useful as signaled by the money that you were paid. And this receipt is something you can use to take back into the market later and redeem similar favors from other people for them to produce goods and services for you. That is the social contract of money if you're whole. So basically, if you have savings in a bank account and you inquired it consensually, that means you've added to the productive output of the species and not yet subtracted from it, right? So you've added to human productivity, you've solved problems for people, but you haven't been paid or compensated in return until you go into the market and spend that money. So what happens when you're holding savings in a bank account and a central bank will counterfeit that currency is they are debasing or diluting your purchasing power. All right, so the favors that you rendered into the market that you saved up for yourself for future use, or you've delayed gratification, well, they start to steal that energy. That purchasing power is what economists call it, right? And this is basically what that money is capable of purchasing, right? It goes down as prices go up, basically, right? So if you've got a million dollars in the bank and steak is, you know, $10 a pound, then you can get a hundred thousand pounds of steak. But if the price of state goes up to $20 a pound, then you can only get £50,000 of steak, right? It goes down as, as prices go up, purchasing power goes down. Basically, it's an inverse relationship that then means the person who was prudent and diligent and provided favors for other people and saved for future consumption is now being disincentivized from doing so. You're now incentivized. Well, my money's not going to hold purchasing power. I might as well spend it on something now. Better yet, I might as well spend all of it and just borrow more. Because if I borrow dollars today that are going to get weaker over time, then I can borrow strong dollars today and pay back weaker dollars over time. And indeed, this is because currency is being inflated in this way. It pushes everyone, it's incentivizing everyone to take on more and more debt. So the evil component of it, and obviously when you take on more and more debt, you become beholden to creditors. You get in the whole, that whole game, right, where once you are indebted, you're also paying interest to creditors. And that can be a downward spiral for a lot of people that don't know how to manage debt intelligently. So it, it sort of increases the, the pressure of that trap. And the evil part of it really is just that, I mean, if you consider theft to be evil, right? If someone rightfully owns something, they worked to acquire it. They work. You know, you worked to make money to buy this table, right, that someone built, and you consensually traded the money you had with them for this table. Who else has the right to come and take your table, right? You worked for the money. The guy built the table. You guys had a consensual trade. Does anyone in the world have a moral or just right to come and coercively take your table? I mean, I think it's a pretty hard sell, at least from a moral angle right now. People could get into, oh, well, if there's an emergency and someone really needs it and all of that. But if you give, what's the saying that if you give governments more power in times of emergency than governments will create an emergency to take more power? So you give that little chink in the armor to give them that inch that they take A mile. And I just don't think it can be justified.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So do you think there's any amount of government that's good? Short pause. But when we return, Robert explains why inflation is not going away anytime soon and what that means for your future. And we're back. Let's pick up right where we left off. Do you think there's any amount of government that's good?

[Robert Breedlove]

You know, the government that governs best, governs least, governs best. I think, as has.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is that you just putting up with the fact that you doubt you can get it to zero. Like in your ideal world, would it be zero?

[Robert Breedlove]

You need. There is a reality of physical force in this world. So we have to have a way. And there's the reality of people violating private property. Right? People can take your stuff if someone takes your stuff. And you, you know, short of taking the law into your own hands, it is useful to have recourse to a legal structure that has, you know, the force of law behind it to fix, to right that wrong, so to speak. And so, yeah, I think a government that's ideally local, not very centralized, and that really focuses solely on the preservation of life, liberty and property, preferably one that uses like an English common law tradition. This is where, you know, disputes that have occurred over time and the ways they were resolved, these become discovered laws that get codified and say, okay, this is how people have resolved law or disputes over time and that becomes ossified as law. So it's like a legal discovery process rather than a legal. A fiat legal process where some guy is elected into power and he just signs a piece of paper saying, this is the way we do things now. All right? Then you're at the whims of whoever's in power. That is much. The outcomes of that tend to be much worse, right? The individual in power will use the law to serve their own interests. We've heard this law, this term lawfare, come up recently where it's that very thing, right? The law is not the ideal of the law. Was equality in the eyes of the law. That we have one fixed rule set that is evenly applicable to everyone, whether you're a president or a pauper, right? Everyone in between. We're all beholden to the law to the same extent, in the same way. Just like we're all beholden to the laws of physics to the same extent, in the same way. But when you start to unevenly apply the law or, you know, Ms. Bend a rule or, you know, bribe a judge, this is where we get the term corruption, by the way, right? Which has its, has an etymological root in the word, shares one with the word rupture. So this evenly applied rule set all of a sudden has a rupture in it and you get rules for the not for me type of situation. And that is where government really falls apart. So to the extent government applies the rule of law evenly and the rule of law is developed organically through a legal discovery process and it's truly restricted to the preservation of life, liberty and property, I think this is the libertarian ideal and kind of a high level. And I know this. You know, people may say, oh, that all sounds good in theory, but like, where does the rubber meet the road? You could read a book like the Ethics of Liberty by Rothbard. He goes through a lot of these legal aspects. I'm talking about boycotting and bribery and all these specific edge cases in the law and how it would be in a libertarian world. Is it perfect? Probably not, but I think it's a lot better than what we have. And once you create the situation where people can game the system, right, they can bend the rules to benefit themselves and exclude or harm others, that's a really nasty game, right? Because it's all about hard pressed to

[Tom Bilyeu]

find a system that can't be gamed, full stop.

[Robert Breedlove]

I know one. Say more. Bitcoin. Bitcoin's the only game that human beings have ever invented that they themselves cannot game. It is inviolable private property. No, it's an incorruptible monetary system. And so, and considering that money is superordinate to law, right, as Rothschild said, give me the power to issue a nation's currency, I care not who makes its laws, because if you can issue the currency, you can rewrite the laws. Trust me, that's what lobbying is basically, right? It's private money rewriting the laws to benefit its interest, having an incorruptible monetary layer. A game that humans cannot game themselves. A social institution, the only social institution, so far as I can tell, that human beings cannot corrupt. That's really important, that is equality in the eyes of the law and an actual implemented system, not just written onto a constitutional document under the hopes that all future politicians will adhere to that code. We have an actual economic incentive system that causes, causes, induces or encourages people to follow it rather than just hope. Basically, that will follow the US Constitution for all time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is the sum total of what makes Bitcoin amazing that it can't be inflated?

[Robert Breedlove]

Well, no, the fact that Bitcoin and to be very specific, we're talking about monetary inflation. So the actual arbitrary increase of a money supply over time. Bitcoin has 0% arbitrary inflation, or you could say 0% unexpected inflation. Right? It's the only fixed supply money and fixed supply asset for that matter in human history. I also think it's the only one that will ever exist. Now there are 50,000 shitcoins out there. And you know, there are a few hundred of them that will tell you they too have a fixed supply, or they have a diminishing supply, or they have whatever. But none of those crypto assets are decentralized. So all of those are based on promises. You're trusting some individual or group of individuals to keep their promise. Only Bitcoin is the battle hardened, proven provably or highly credibly decentralized crypto asset. And for more on that, you could read a book like the Block size wars of 2017. Decentralization is not something Satoshi created in a lab. Bitcoin started out centralized too, right? It's just in the mind of one guy. But the way it was released, the, the organic path of its development, the idiosyncrasies associated with its proliferation, all of the attacks on it and the attacks that it has survived, this is what has grown. It's grown into a battle hardened decentralized monetary network. That's not something you just recreate in a lab. So Bitcoin, Yes, Inflation, not even resistance, inflation, immunity. Basically there's 0% unexpected inflation in Bitcoin. That's a really big deal. It's a huge idea. But it's also a digital bearer asset, right? So to hold a bearer asset is if I have physical possession of it, I'm assumed to be the rightful owner. So if I have a gold bar in my hand, I don't need a contract that says I'm the owner of that gold bar. Possession is ownership. Basically Bitcoin is the same, but it's the first digital bearer asset. So it's to just possess information which is the private key is to own the bitcoin. And now this gives you a number of very unique advantages. One, you can secure that in a multi key setup. So you don't, you don't have to just hold one key. You could break that key into three, three pieces or five pieces and have a quorum, right? So you need two of three to spend funds or three of five. And that type of security model is much more robust. Right? You don't have single point of failure. You have Redundancy, but you still have full control over the asset. This is also very similar to how we secure nuclear codes, by the way. There's not just one guy with his finger on the trigger. There is a group of guys that need to do very certain steps at a very certain way and a very certain timing before anyone can press that button and hit launch. You know, it's a multi key setup effectively, so you get nuclear code like security models with Bitcoin, because it's a digital private key. You also get extremely high portability. Right. Gold does not move over a telephone wire. We can only move promises to gold over telephone wires, but we can't move physical gold. So, you know, Saylor would say something like, gold has very low frequency final settlement. But bitcoin has very high frequency final settlement. I can send you bitcoin over a telephone line and we can settle with finality in an hour on the other side of the planet. Right. I sent you gold, effectively a bearer asset, physical Bitcoin, if you will, through telecommunications around the world. No problem. Try doing that with gold. Not possible. Right. You need trains, planes, boats, armies, whatever to secure that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Still feels like it's nice. I'm glad that that's true. But when I really try to boil down why I think the current system, it breaks. Let me walk you through a speedrun of what I think is wrong and why I think the fact that it can't be inflated makes it a solve for what I think needs to be solved for. I, I don't want to seem like I'm overhyping bitcoin, whatever it is. I just need something that can't inflate. So here's my speedrun. The reason that the economy is what it is and goes in Ray Dalio's six step loop is because of the ability to print money. So whenever I say inflate, anybody listening right now, if you can hear my voice, I mean print money. So print money, inflation, same thing. Counterfeiting, same thing, yes. So printing money is counterfe. Counterfeiting inflation.

[Robert Breedlove]

Counterfeiting is criminal inflation. Correct.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if you make that impossible now, all of a sudden people can only spend money that they have when they can only spend money that they have. Now the government is going to ask your permission because there's no way to hide this stuff. There's no way to tax you without you knowing you're being taxed. Inflation is them printing money so that they can spend more money than they have. And everybody is fine with it because you don't realize that there's a problem. If you had $100 in your bank account, you still have $100. Nobody is complaining. The problem is if that $100 only buys half the amount of stuff that it used to, you've lost half your money. But people can feel it. They're getting frustrated, they're upset, but they don't understand what exactly is happening. And so the reason that I say that this is a moral problem is we've created an incredible capital market system that's absolutely amazing. I couldn't love it anymore if I tried. However, it makes the average person have to gamble their money on the stock market or crypto or whatever in order to outpace the inflation that they're experiencing. That if they're anything like me, they just thought happens. They didn't realize that a central bank was in coordination with the government deciding to counterfeit just to keep it nice and clear. What's happening? To constantly counterfeit money to allow the government to spend extra money because. Yeah, and then to get back to the why are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Because when they put the money into the system, when they counterfeit it, what they end up doing is buying assets from people that already hold them. And, and this is the part that I think a lot of people don't understand. So one, if you don't own any of the assets that they buy, your sol, you don't experience any of the joy. You're going to be downstream of that. And then on top of that, there are a bunch of assets out there, your house price being one of them, the stock market being another. Not exclus, some of it goes up because there just is increased value. But a lot of the value of the stock market is simply keeping up with inflation. So the odds that your house is actually going up in value is low. So if you were to price your house against gold or bitcoin, you're going to see, oh, wait a second, it's not changing in the way that I thought it was. It's only when you compare it to the dollar, which is probably going down in value due to inflation. So now the average person, the money that they're socking away, saving is going to be worth nothing. They will have been brutalized and stolen from. And once you start using that language, like, wait a second, my grandpa, who's been a good dude, worked his ass off, blue collar, sleeves rolled up, janitor, working two, three jobs. You know, until his 80th birthday, he had to work to his 80th birthday because all the money that he was saving every month ended up being nothing. Yeah, that's. People need to understand that is the system that they're living in right now. That's the system we have right now, today. And once you have something like Bitcoin or even just a gold backed currency, now all of a sudden it's like, okay, cool, as long as it's not fractional reserve, then I have something where I can save my money.

[Robert Breedlove]

And that's the key though. The, a gold backed currency always depends on the promise of a custodian.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Robert Breedlove]

Not over issue the paper. To not issue more paper than they have gold in reserve. Right. So to speak, from an accounting standpoint, if you are running a, a bank basically, right. A traditional bank where people deposit gold with you and you issue them banknotes or warehouse receipts which are little notes that of paper that they can redeem for gold in the future. Every time someone deposits gold with you, that's an asset on your balance sheet, right? You have gold in your warehouse, that's an asset. Obviously it's a bearer asset. As we touched on the paper you issue to the depositor, it's an iou, right. You owe that gold to a depositor, right. As represented by that banknote. So an honest bank, a non fractional reserve bank, a full reserve bank would be one where assets equals liabilities. Right? Such that if all depositors came to redeem their gold at once, the bank would have no problem satisfying all of those obligations because they have all of the liabilities covered by assets. Right. One to one. A fractional reserve bank is when a bank starts to over issue that paper relative to the gold, so they have more liabilities on their balance sheet than they have assets, which is an insolvent, fraudulent operation. You can't scale gold because it's, it's a physical metal, right. You can't send it over a telephone wire. As I said, you can't scale gold as a transactional transactable money at a global scale without having a gold backed currency. But the gold backed currency depends on the integrity of individual bankers. Right. You need to trust the bank not to over issue the paper. And even if for argument's sake, all the bankers were perfectly trustworthy, they're all saints, none of them ever lie, none of them ever over issue the paper. You still have to deal with the government who might in time of crisis or war, as is typically the case, decide you know what, we need some extra funding, there's a whole lot of gold in that bank over there. Why don't we just go have them loan some of it to us forcibly, right? We can write the laws and have them loan it to us cheaply. Or we could just suspend customer convertibility. We could seize the gold as was done in 1933 by Executive Order 6102, right? It was private. Gold ownership was outlawed under a threat of imprisonment or a fine. Which is crazy, right? Like you can't own gold. What the fuck? What do you mean I can't own gold? Like it's just a thing that I own and hold in my hand. You're telling me I can't own and hold a thing in my hand? That's the problem, right? You, you can only scale gold with the promises of others. You are dependent on trust in human beings. Bitcoin fixes that, right? We can actually have a digital gold that is trivial for individuals to custody themselves or if they want to custody it with an institution. You can break the key into multiple pieces and you can have a collaborative custody schema even among institutions. So you can mitigate the counterparty risk. You can inhibit a government from coming to any one institution and seizing the Bitcoin. Because every institution only has one piece of the key, right? They need to work together to unlock funds. So you, you, you inhibit the government's ability and banks ability to break that promise. Should you choose to, to promise it to them. You can also choose to hold it yourself and promise no one, right? This is the don't trust verify ethos of Bitcoin. Not your keys, not your cheese. This is a big deal. We can now have a monetary, a sound monetary medium that can scale for a global society that does not depend on the promises of fallible, fallen, sinful human beings. This is the essence of trust minimization. And this is why Bitcoin is digital sound money. Gold is non digital sound money. You know, just the way I look at it is we have two rough visions of the future. There's one vision of the future where we have things like electricity, the Internet and artificial intelligence. In that world, Bitcoin is dominant money because we can transact with one another without the need to trust counterparties basically, right? We can minimize counterparty risk and maximize our ability to move purchasing power over time and space, which is the purpose of money. There's another view of the world that's more dystopian, right? For whatever reason, solar weather, global war, whatever. The thing is, we don't have electricity, Internet, AI in that world. I think non digital sound money like gold will be dominant because, well, people are going to be dealing with each other in physical space a lot more than they're going to be dealing with each other in digital space. So you can make that assessment for yourself. Obviously there's a whole gradient in between. And decide, right, there's 90% chance we have a digital future and a 10% chance we have a non digital future. And then allocate your cat the cash balances in your portfolio accordingly. Right. I have 90% Bitcoin, 10% gold. So it's not really Bitcoin versus gold. It's not either. Or just like everything else in the world, it's probabilistic. And if you're going to be a savvy investor, I think you just have to look at the spectrum of possibilities, decide for yourself which way we think, which way you think we are going, and then construct your portfolio accordingly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so I buy into a lot of what you're saying about private property. You want a government that is small. You want to have sound money so that you hobble the government from getting too big because they're going to use money printing to do it. But do you think that we have a moral obligation to take care of those less fortunate than us at the level of government?

[Robert Breedlove]

The question is, do I think that the government has a moral obligation?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do we as individual species, us in a country, do we have a moral obligation to take care of those less fortunate?

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, look, when you say invoke the term moral obligation, I get very hesitant to be that prescriptive about it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. Why the word moral? Why is that the tripwire?

[Robert Breedlove]

Well, I truly believe in human freedom. Right. So if I'm going to put a gun to your head and say you need to go and take care of the needy, that sort of defeats the purpose. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But then doesn't that mean that I don't have the moral obligation to do it? Or does it mean that I have the moral obligation but you don't think that it should be enforced?

[Robert Breedlove]

So it depends on the moral code you subscribe to, of course. Right. I think this tends to be the domain of the church or religion. Right. Many wisdom traditions teach us to tithe, right to tithe to the church, to take care of the less fortunate, etc. I am a subscriber to that. Does that mean I'm going to impose that subs that prescription on other people? No, I don't think that is something that holds weight for me. However, I think in a world with very strong private property, we naturally accumulate and construct more wealth, right? That is the whole point. And here's a way to think about this, by the way. Every time someone spends time and energy taking an asset from someone else. You've heard me talk about this before. Maybe there's two ways to create wealth in the world, or, I'm sorry, two ways to acquire wealth in the world. Making or taking. Right? I can build the table and, you know, spend my labor to create something of value and trade with other people that are also doing the same thing. That's the path of making. That's the entrepreneurial path. That's the constructive path. Or I can just get the $5 wrench and go and bludgeon the guy over the head that built the table and take his table, right? That's the path of taking. That's the path of criminality, statism, coercion. Every time someone spends time and energy taking rather than making, that is time and energy they could have spent producing something, right? So that is a decrement, a decrease on the productivity of the species because that person's time and energy, the taker, was spent taking rather than making. Further, because they took it from someone that built it and produced it, they have disincentivized that individual from producing in the future because that individual didn't keep to. Did not get to keep the full reward of their labor, which was the fruit of their labor. Right? So if someone's getting 20% of the fruits of their labor stolen every year by an organized criminal syndicate called the government, try 53. 53, okay, then they are 20% disincentivized from producing, right? Like, if I can only keep 80 cents of every dollar that I make, well, then I'm less incentivized or rewarded to produce as much.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I agree with you, and all of that makes sense to me in the abstract, But I think the thing that we end up struggling with, and I'm

[Robert Breedlove]

sorry, this is not even abstract, this is like, axiomatic. If someone is spending time and energy taking rather than making, then our net productivity goes down and the incentives for producing go down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because you live in a world where humans fall on a spectrum from an evolutionary perspective, where even though Trump won by a quote, unquote landslide, it was really, what, three points, four points? I mean, we are basically divided down the middle. I think there's an evolutionary reason for that that you need. When you think about getting a species to work cooperatively together in flexible but large groups, you're going to need some people that are compassionate and Saying basically, just think about it from a caloric standpoint. Let's say that you go out and you hunt. You come back with something. Now, if you're smart, you're going to store the calories that you can't eat right now in my body. And the way that you do that is you give me something, even though I didn't get anything on the hunt, you're going to give me some so that I eat. So when I'm the one that wins, I come back and give you some next time. So in a world without refrigerators, the way that you store fat is on the people around you. Now the catch is that if you do that, I start going, ah, Robert's a great hunter. I don't have to go hunt. He's just going to feed me in the hopes that one day. And so now other people go, no, we, we can't stand for that. We can't have freeloaders. So you get people that they skew compassionate, the left, and you get people that skew personal responsibility, the right. And you need the tension between the two to make sure that we don't get a bunch of freeloaders that turn into parasites that drag the place down. But you also need people that understand, dude, we've had central banks since 1668. The modern world's pretty amazing. So even though I can tell an aggressive story about how evil and sinister and all that stuff that it is, and it really is, the problem is it also gave birth to a pretty amazing world.

[Robert Breedlove]

Did it? Did it though, did it? Can we say we can't attribute, because we have all of these modern marvels and all of this, this standard of living right in the post industrial age, which by the way, like GDP per capita basically for human history is flat forever until we hit the industrial age and then it goes completely vertical, right? Do we attribute that to central banking? Like why? Just because. Do wet streets cause rain? Right. Correlation is not causation. I would argue that the market has succeeded in spite of all of the money printing and the theft and the warfare funded by central banking. What? Take warfare alone, right? The possibility, the scale, scope and severity of World War I and World War II were only possible because of money printing. Typically, a country goes to war when it runs out of money. It signs an armistice, right? It cuts a deal because guess what? It's war chest is empty. But when, when it can hyperinflate the currency, its war chest goes from being its own balance sheet to the balance sheet of everyone using the currency, right? So wars get larger, longer and worse.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wars, people understood war is.

[Robert Breedlove]

This mo is the most diseconomic activity human beings can possibly engage in, right? We mobilize humans and capital to go and destroy humans and capital. It is anti economic activity. It is the antithesis of an economic process. It's a diseconomic process. And so that is enabled and worsened by money printing. I would say that everything that we enjoy in the post industrial age is in spite of central banking. And you were asking about, you know, the moral obligation. The point I was trying to get to is the stronger private property becomes, the more we increase the standard standards of living per capita, or GDP per capita, if you want to use a metric like that. And that in my view actually enables the furtherance of compassion, right? Compassion is a bit of a luxury, right? Like you can have compassion in your heart. But to actually act on that compassion and to be able to give people things, to give people stuff, food, shelter, whatever it is. Well, you need an economy that's producing that, the division of labor. And to have the division of labor, you need private property rights. And so the stronger private property becomes, the more economic abundance we have. The more capable the successful among us are, are of being compassionate to others in a material sense of actually giving to them. The more we violate that principle and say, oh, we need to tax the rich or steal from whoever to fund any. Even if it's a scheme to feed the homeless or whatever compassionate scheme that is cooked up. I think it actually is cutting off the nose to spite the face type of thing, or sawing off the branch on which one rests. You're, you're, you are hamstringing the ability of the market to produce more goods and therefore take care of more people. Even if you're doing it out of the compassion of your heart, right. That we're all voting blue to tax the rich and fix the homeless problem in San Francisco. Right. Or whatever the thing is. And just look at the history of it. Look how incompetent government has been at allocating capital. There's this story, this is not that old. I think in San Francisco they spent like $3 million in 15 years trying to open a public restroom, something like that. There was also talk of, I think this was Biden's electric vehicle charging program. You know, they spent X billion dollars and they had three charging stations or something by the end of it. It's like government is. Mises would argue all government action is a misallocation of capital because it involves the coercive extraction of resources from people through taxation and inflation. And so the there's it's much easier to spend money that you didn't earn, and it's much easier to spend it foolishly. And I think that's what governments make basically do. So what do you take away from that necessary evil? Perhaps because we need to defend life, liberty and property, but when the the institution charged with the preservation of life, liberty and property starts to aggressively violate private property, we get very perverse outcomes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's it for Part one with Robert Breedlove, but trust me, we are just getting started. Make sure you're following the podcast so you do not miss part Part two, where we'll break down how Bitcoin is reshaping the entire global financial system, why the wealth gap keeps growing, and what you can do right now to get ahead. Plus, tomorrow we've got a brand new episode of the Tom Bilyeu show covering the biggest stories of the week. And then we'll be right back here on Thursday with part two of my conversation with Robert. Until then, my friends be legendary.

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