← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
This Is the Biggest Scam in Human History — And It’s Happening Right Now | Robert Breedlove
00:42:28
Tom Bilyeu and Robert Breedlove break down the dangers of socialism, the scam of central banking, and why Bitcoin could be humanity’s most powerful tool for freedom and innovation.
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- [00:01]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Time.
- [00:02]
Patrick Bet-David
It's always vanishing. The commute, the errands, the work functions, the meetings.
- [00:06]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Selling your car.
- [00:08]
Patrick Bet-David
Unless you sell your car with Carvana. Get a real offer in minutes. Get it picked up from your door. Get paid on the spot so fast you'll wonder what the catch is. There isn't one. We just respect you and your time.
- [00:20]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Oh, you're still here.
- [00:22]
Patrick Bet-David
Move along now. Enjoy your day. Sell your car today.
- [00:26]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Carvana.
- [00:27]
Patrick Bet-David
Pick up. Fees may apply. Black Friday savings are here at the Home Depot, which means it's time to add new cordless power to your collection. Right now, when you buy a select battery kit from one of our top brands like Ryobi or Milwaukee, you'll get a select tool from that same brand for free. Click into one of our best deals of the season and stock up on tools for all your upcoming projects. Get Black Friday savings happening now at the Home Depot. Limit 1 per transaction exclusions apply. Full eligible tool list in store and online. Welcome back to part two of this incredible conversation. Without further ado, here we go. There's a reason very open to what that is, but there's a reason that gold functions the way that it does, which is in times of inflation, people are going to flee to gold. In times of government uncertainty whether they'll pay back their debts, people are going to flee to gold. They don't expect a big return, they just expect safety.
- [01:28]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
That's right.
- [01:28]
Patrick Bet-David
Bitcoin does not function like that yet. Maybe it will one day or maybe it's something that people think of in a totally different way and I'm just like, I have a take. I think I know why it is, but I could be wrong. And so I'm just curious what you think the answer is. So far it sounds like you're saying it's just new. And so as it grows, it will probably function more like gold in that its volatility will go down because the it's just raw size will go up, up. But I was just curious if you think that people mentally map it differently now. If they see it as a sexy thing, that is sexy precisely because it's high volatility and so they want in. They're going to ride that volatility, they're going to day trade against it, they're going to do all the fun things that people wouldn't do with gold. And then if that's correct, if you think that it's inevitable that that changes but it remains a gold like thing, or if it stops being the cool new thing and we move On Mm.
- [02:31]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Yeah. Well, people buy assets for all kinds of reason, right? Like how people arrive at their conclusions is often beyond me. But I will. This is where I think it's very important to be a fundamental investor or at least take it a perspective on fundamentals of the asset. One of the most important answers to the question what is money? In my opinion, for me, at least in my journey, was when I arrived at the properties of money. Like what are the actual. To use language. This was language popularized in the 1960s by a guy named Gibson. He wrote a book, An Ecological approach to Visual Perception. And he talked about affordances, that organisms actually perceive affordances which are opportunities for real action. Right. And he, you know, it's very, it's kind of an interesting thing. He makes the point often that they're neither subjective nor objective. It's about a fitness relationship between the subject and the objective world. And so we could either call these the properties of money or we could call these the affordances of money. Right. Obviously there's a monetary metaphor built into that word, affordable affordance. I and people narrow this down to a different number of categories, but I've always narrowed it down to five. And it's divisibility, durability, recognizability, port, portability, scarcity. Right. So when we evaluate gold through that lens, it's very divisible, it's very durable, it's not very portable, as we said earlier. That's why we needed currency. Right. It's somewhat recognizable. We have to do tests on it. That's what. So we get the term sound money. You would drop a coin from a certain height and it would make a certain sound. And that was a heuristic for its authenticity. And then importantly, gold is relatively scarce. It has an inflexible supply which lets it hold purchasing power across time. Well, okay, so as a money, it excels in all of the affordances or properties of money except portability. That's why we needed currency. Right. And then we get into the whole money warehousing thing and the fractional reserve banking scam. Now evaluate Bitcoin through that same lens. It is basically perfected all the properties of money. It's infinitely divisible. It's divisible right now to 100 million subunits called SATs. You can increase that divisibility via a soft fork which is a backwards compatible software upgrade. So there's like, it's like a non contentious change, basically, so effectively has infinite divisibility. Its durability is also infinite. This is where it's good to think, as we talked earlier about the idea of a concept versus the thing. The example I often like to cite is the Bible, right? You could go out into the world and go on a Bible burning campaign, but no amount of Bible burning would ever destroy the Bible. Like the concept of the Bible has so thoroughly permeated consciousness that it will exist forever. Bitcoin runs on the same principles, right? It's everywhere and nowhere, as bitcoiners say. So every node has the full history of what bitcoin is. So the durability of it is effectively perfected. Portability, because it's just information, it can move at the speed of light, can't get much faster than that. So portability is perfected. Recognizability, which again is the ability to authenticate or verify the money is what it says it is, right? It's this is a real gold coin, not a lead piece of lead plated with gold, right? Like, you have to verify what it is. You can audit the total bitcoin supply. In fact, this is what bitcoin does. Every node on the network is auditing the work of every other node, mining or otherwise, every 10 minutes. So the entire system is like 100% verification and 0% trust, right? You don't need to trust. No trust me, bros, if you will. And then finally, Bitcoin is the only fixed supply asset in the history of the human race. So it's perfected that relatively inflexible supply that gold had that gave it a really good ability to store purchasing power into the future. Bitcoin has perfected, we have a fixed supply asset so that your purchasing power will not be debased at all. Not 2%, not 5%, nothing. Zero, right? When you look at Bitcoin on a fully diluted basis, there's only 21 million that can ever possibly exist. The number can only go down from there. That's why I think bitcoin is like, you're asking me what it is today. It trades as a very significant risk on asset, right? Which means people are speculating on it, people are leveraging, whatever, right? It's high volatility, right? So it tends to be in the risk portion of people's portfolio. But it's fundamentals what it is. It's digital gold or Internet and gold had a baby. You mentioned gold is the ultimate risk off asset right now in the current world, right? Bitcoin's better than gold fundamentally on those same properties that make gold a good risk off asset make bitcoin the perfect risk off asset. So we are at a unique time in history where the world perceives Bitcoin as the ultimate risk on asset. Speculative, volatile, dangerous, whatever. And the reality is it is the safest, most perfect form of private property available to the human race. And so that recognition will dawn on people through the market process. And it's just up to you to study Bitcoin, do the work and decide for yourself. But that's my view.
- [08:08]
Patrick Bet-David
Okay, so we've got this perfect risk off asset. Plus we have gold which is withstood the test of time. And we have a currency in the US dollar that is inflating like crazy. We're at 122% debt to GDP and rising. There's a magic line at 130% where essentially you're guaranteed to be an open conflict within your country. Often revolution, often turning the tables over, defaulting on the debt. Just absolute economic catastrophe. We're racing towards that. So given that we have a problem that I'll peg, I'm not trying to put these words in your mouth, but I'll say somewhere between eight to 10 years you cross that line of the 130%.
- [08:52]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Yep.
- [08:52]
Patrick Bet-David
And you I hope people can already feel that we're already heading towards the open violence. It's already begun. And so it's not like a binary switch that we get there and then it clicks over. It will just get worse from here. And we have an exit ramp, whether that's gold, whether that is bitcoin. So how do you see this playing out? Do you think I'm crazy and that it's never going to end, Party's just going to keep going, we're all going to be fine. Or is it going to be people start taking that off ramp which then further craters the dollar because there's no appetite for treasuries. Which not to lose anybody new to the conversation, but just know if there's no appetite for treasuries, your country goes broke.
- [09:34]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Mm.
- [09:35]
Patrick Bet-David
The appetite for the treasuries is entirely based on confidence and.
- [09:40]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
And money printing.
- [09:41]
Patrick Bet-David
Yes. Money printing is what will drive the lack of confidence.
- [09:45]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
So I'm saying money printing is used to buy those treasuries too. So it increase.
- [09:49]
Patrick Bet-David
That's why it's the confidence.
- [09:51]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Exactly. This is why fiat currency is an oxymoron. Okay. Another definition of money, the final extinguisher of debt. What is fiat currency? A debt based money. It doesn't make any sense. It's a can't. Like the dollar. You have in your pocket or your bank account you think is an asset, but in fact there's a liability attached to it. So in accounting we have an equation. Assets equals liabilities plus equity, right? If I own a piece of gold or I own Bitcoin, I have an asset that's 0% liability because it's a bearer asset. And 100% equity, I have 100 equity in the assets. All the value is mine, right? You would think the same thing about a dollar. Oh, if I have a dollar, it's a bearer asset, it's mine. But what you don't see is that invisible liability sewn into it, right? You could stuff all the dollars under your mattress you want. That doesn't stop the Fed from counterfeiting it by the trillion and stealing your purchasing power. So it's. You can't even own it, right? Because it's not property, it's not private and it's not property. Right? Just like they joke about the Federal Reserve. It says Federal Federal Express and it has no reserves, right? The entire thing is a fucking scam. And I'm sorry like to put it that way, but this. I share your frustration. It's like I've done my best to point to the books. I try to make it as accessible as possible. I know I may have talk tendency to talk a little bit heady sometimes.
- [11:10]
Patrick Bet-David
But do you see us as on a timeline or do you think that this is.
- [11:14]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
I mean, of course I think statism always degenerates and I just don't. What is the opening line to that Police song says? Don't stand so close, have no faith in constitution. There is no bloody revolution. I'm forgetting the words now, but the I. The point is this, like you can't violently, you can't socially organize people with violence and coercion. It's not sustainable. It's not sustainable, right? If you're just going to scare people and steal from them, they're gonna look to get out of that system and betray you and backstab you every chance they get or overthrow you. Right? And if they overthrow you, then they install their new course of government and the process repeats. You know, what did you say earlier? The two things you wanted people to understand? Something like money printing bad, right?
- [12:08]
Patrick Bet-David
So far so good.
- [12:09]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
What was the second one?
- [12:10]
Patrick Bet-David
That your government. If it's deficit spending, they are stealing.
- [12:13]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
From you, they're stealing from you, which. All deficit spending is funded by money printing. So those go hand in hand. I would hope you would add a third or consider adding a Third, and that is taxation is theft. Taxation is theft. The whole thing stealing from you, the inflation steals from you, the deficit spending steals from you, and the taxation steals from you. So what we need to do as a species is evolve past the idea of legalized theft as a necessary ingredient of social coherence, because it introduces the opposite. It's just like fiat currency, the debt based money. The idea that we're going to coerce ourselves into unity doesn't work. What do we need? We need really strong private property, really good incentives, and diminished profitability of coercion and violence. And I think that's where Bitcoin, that's probably one of the deepest perspectives to take on it. That idea that, okay, it can't be printed as money, so that defunds the war machine. It's also really hard to steal as money.
- [13:13]
Patrick Bet-David
And you're saying it defends a war machine because we can't possibly tax enough to pay for it.
- [13:18]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
So you could check my numbers on this. I think it was, I think it was $8 trillion the United States spent on the war on terror. My numbers might be wrong, but the point will stand. Say it was $8 trillion we spent on the quote, unquote, war on terror. Giant air quotes here, because it's really just genocide and imperialism. US spent $8 trillion in a 20 year period. The Federal Reserve printed like $8.5 trillion during that same time period. Okay, whatever it worked out to be, it was something like the cost of that was $80,000 per US household. So had the money printer not been available to fund the war on terror, every American household would have been sent a bill for $80,000 saying, hey, here, you know, pay your fair share of us.
- [14:06]
Patrick Bet-David
They were sent a bill for $80,000. They just don't realize it.
- [14:10]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
That's right, exactly. So the plausible deniability by elimination of the money printer, you're eliminating the plausible deniability of the state where they, they can't print the money to go to war, so they have to send you that bill. And then people resist, right? It's become visible, it's become legible. People see it all right?
- [14:28]
Patrick Bet-David
So those are the things that we need.
- [14:29]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
And then finally, because bitcoin's hard to steal, like you go back to the example of like when Germany invaded Poland, right? The first, once they've conquered Poland, what do they do? They go to the central bank and they seize the gold, Right. Why? Because war is expensive and I need the money to go and do more warring. Okay, if that were magically, on a bitcoin standard and Poland had their bitcoin in a multi key, well, Germany would have conquered this country and then it got no payoff. So the incentives to violence and coercion, even at scale, go down by virtue of the existence of bitcoin. This is what I think changes and tilts us toward like an evolution in human consciousness, even perhaps. Like what? Maybe we don't understand how responsive to incentives we really are and that by virtue of tra changing the incentive landscape so fundamentally.
- [15:16]
Patrick Bet-David
So wait, are you saying that as we move towards bitcoin, we are less likely to go to war?
- [15:22]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Yes, I think war is less possible. It has to be paid for with explicit taxation, which people are more likely to resist. I also think that should war ensue, triumphant countries will not be able to seize the assets of losing countries so easily. In a bitcoinized world, Bitcoin is very difficult slash impossible to steal if custodied properly. So it change. It's like we have changed the fundamental grammar of the entire game of being human. And so now we have to reevaluate all of our social institutions layer by layer and reimagine it in a bitcoinized world. Of course, it's not just bitcoin, right? We also have the Internet. Encrypted communications, decentralized Internet provisioning, energy production, flying car. Like there's a lot of things that are giving more power to the individual and reducing the power of collectives over the individual.
- [16:16]
Patrick Bet-David
Hold tight. We're going to take a quick break. We'll get back to the show in a moment. But first, let's talk about the most expensive mistake you can make in business. Most business owners waste weeks posting jobs, drowning in unqualified resumes, hoping someone somewhere decent applies. But that's backwards. You do not wait for talent. You hunt it. LinkedIn jobs change the game with their new AI assistant. It filters candidates based on your exact criteria. No junk, no time wasted, just qualified matches. Then it suggests 25 top candidates daily. People already on LinkedIn who fit your role. You invite them directly. No waiting, no hoping. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30% more likely to stay for at least a year compared to the leading competitors competitor. That is a huge deal. When every hire counts, that means everything. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com impact theory. Then promote it to use LinkedIn jobs new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com impact theory. To post your job for free, terms and conditions apply. Let's talk about the one advantage that beats everything else in business. The market does not reward perfection, it rewards speed. Your competitor with the mediocre product who launches today is going to be your perfect product that launches in six months. Be the one who launches first with Shopify. Start with hundreds of ready to use templates that build a beautiful online store matching your brand style. Shopify's AI tools write product descriptions, page headlines and enhance your product photography instantly create email and social media campaigns like you have a marketing team behind you. Shopify's world class enterprise handles it automatically. No integration headaches. Just start selling. Turn your big business idea into reality with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/go to shopify.com/again shopify.com impact thanks to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode. Here in Southern California, we've been hammered with rain recently. When weather changes fast, your home gets tested. The problem is, most people think their homeowners insurance has them covered. But it doesn't. Last time we had a leak, I wish I had home served to get someone to help fix it immediately. HomeServe is like a subscription to your home. For as little as $4.99 a month, HomeServe manages repair plans that cover the critical systems insurance leaves out when a repair hits. You're not scrambling to find a contractor in a panic. You call HomeServ's 24. 7 hotline and they connect you with their trusted national network of 2,600 local contractors. Help protect your home systems and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs, plans start at just 499amonth. Go to HomeServe.com to find the plan that's right for you. Again, that's HomeServe.com not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month. Your first year terms apply on covered repairs. We're back. Let's dive right in. I know you don't pay a lot of attention to politics, but are you watching closely enough to be encouraged or discouraged by the change in policy around crypto?
- [20:03]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
I don't give a tick tock. Next block. Bitcoiners do not. I mean, I'm sorry, I don't want to generalize I as a bitcoiner, right, do not give a flying fucking about what regulations you're passing or not passing or doing or it doesn't matter. It's like you can also ban gravity, but gravity is not going anywhere. Okay, so there are things that government cannot do anything about, and bitcoin is one of them.
- [20:28]
Patrick Bet-David
That's so interesting. This might be where I start. It's so funny because I'm so pro bitcoin, but I think that that mentality coming off the bitcoin community is so detached from reality that I'm always very confused. So the world has a structure. There's nowhere that you're going to go that you're going to escape the fact that there are governments. I know that Balaji believes strongly in the network state. Hey, Lord knows, if I'm wrong, I'll be the first to congratulate Balaji. But the fact is that if Hitler rolled up and you've got bitcoin, Hitler's going to smash 30,000 of you in the head. And the 30,001 person is going to hand over their keys. If you kill enough people in the country, you just take everything else like you, money, print, you do whatever. And violence is the ultimate trump card. And I've always had a very jarring ring. When people are like, they can't confiscate your bitcoin, it's like, yes, they can't. Maybe they can't confiscate yours. Like, maybe you really will take the bullet to the head and just be like, I'd rather be dead than you get my money. But the vast majority of people will not be like that. They'll try to lie and all of that, but the. The real thing, and I think this is maybe the crusade I'm on. I need people to understand the nature of the government itself. And the nature of that government is that it wears a mask. And we are finally living in the age of rapid information. There is such volume and velocity of information that we can finally see things for what they are. And maybe you're helping me map why this moment for me is so bothersome as I see people embrace socialism and vote for a candidate who's very charismatic and very smiley, but at the same time, he represents a sinister ideology. And I need people to understand it's not sinister because I feel some kind of way about it. It's sinister because I believe that starving people to death is evil. I believe that taking the things that are theirs is evil. And it's knowable that it will have to do that because it isn't efficient at coming up with pricing. Right. You already said that at the beginning that, hey, something as mundane is like, how much should this cost is going to be born of decentralizing that answer that humans that trust themselves too much become a murderous menace to the world. And so when I hear the wef get together and say you're going to own nothing and you're going to be happy, or God bless Bill Gates, even if he has good intentions, just trying to like solve all these problems by himself, rather than letting things be more of these bottom up solutions and creating incentive structures for a whole bunch of people to compete to like become that. That's where I'm just like, oh man, this is, this is people that trust themselves too much. They will end up saying something akin to, you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Which means I've got to kill, you know, a couple hundred million of you. Is it really that big of a deal? Like it's so wild and so getting people to understand that the founding fathers really had it right. They were super paranoid about themselves, that they understood that we tend towards tyranny, that whatever system you have has got to plan for the fact that it tend towards tends toward tyranny. There is a reason that Jefferson said that you have to like wash in the blood of tyrants and patriots alike or something like that.
- [24:08]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Like basically the tree of liberty must occasionally be reflect refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots.
- [24:15]
Patrick Bet-David
Yes. So it's like, yeah, kids, like they're trying to point out this is the nature of the system. And so living at this part where I've gotten the taste both like, hey, when this is going well and people are disciplined and we're not deficit spending and we actually have a surplus, like those times are pretty rad. And so. But getting people to understand this is all downstream of culture. And what you teach your kids matters tremendously. And we are not teaching people a story about hard work, discipline, that you should want to save your money, work in the summer to be ready for the winter. Like there's just like old school fable type morals that we've got to get across to people. Otherwise things get very, very bad very fast. And it is wild. And I do, I really appreciate the people in my community that remind me I'm not screaming into the void. There are some people that are listening, but it is. This all started for me in Covid when I realized, oh, these people that used to work for me, they grew up in the hood, they're all gonna get eaten alive, they're all gonna lose their jobs, it's gonna suck. Let me make some financial content for them about how to save their money. And then I realized I actually don't like, I'm good at making money, I'm not good at investing money. So, oh, damn, I gotta kind of learn about this. And then you start pulling all these threads and all of a sudden you're like, wait, the government's stealing all your money? It was. It has been such a wild bitcoin rabbit hole awakening. It's partly bitcoin. And I, whenever somebody throws a flag and is like, well, bitcoin just solves all your problems. I'm like, you understand the vast majority of people just are never going to understand it. So it's like the vast majority of people, they do not want a high volatile asset. It's too scary. It's too confusing. I think governments have a moral obligation to allow people to do that. I think that the current administration's change on crypto and being pro crypto is the right answer. It is. It is good things from an administration that is still stealing your money. And so it's a bit of a mixed bag.
- [26:29]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
It's a lot, I think. Well, I think you're doing good work and I think I largely agree with you.
- [26:37]
Patrick Bet-David
Zoom in on the part that you don't agree with.
- [26:41]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
I mean, I view this as the invention of the printing press under the reign of the medieval church type of innovation. Right.
- [26:50]
Patrick Bet-David
So where we go to 30 years of war kill millions across Europe, possibly.
- [26:54]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
But it calls into.
- [26:56]
Patrick Bet-David
Do you really think that.
- [26:58]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Well, I think that the relevance of the dominant institutional paradigm today, which is the nation state, is going to be seriously called into question by the emergence of Bitcoin. In the same way the dominant institutional paradigm of the medieval church was called into question with the invention of the printing press.
- [27:16]
Patrick Bet-David
And what replaces it? Network states or something else?
- [27:19]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Well, a more peaceful, productive and innovative world. Now, what does that actually look like from a political slash social organization standpoint? I don't know. Right. I think what we need is more experimentation. So we have 200 nation states today. You know, I'd like to see us move towards a world with like 20,000 free city states now. And you could run experiments and you, if you want to be a socialist, great fucking. There's socialist Ville over here. Go live there. Do your own thing. You know, when it fails, then it'll become capitalistville, you know, that type of. Of paradigm. So it's bitcoin. You know, it's easy. There's a saying too, that science advances from funeral to funeral.
- [28:05]
Patrick Bet-David
Yeah.
- [28:06]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Right. So it's easy to say, oh, people are scared of the volatility. No one understands it, no one's ever going to adopt it. It's like you're taking a very static view of the human race. What are people actually doing is that they're individually pursuing their self interest. They're looking for the best tool for the job. And over time, as money printing, government intervention, coercion, crime creates more of these problems that Bitcoin solves, you're going to create more demand for Bitcoin, right? We, like adults today might not understand it, but kids that grow up with Bitcoin as part of their, their milieu will understand it. You know, if not intellectually, then by necessity.
- [28:53]
Patrick Bet-David
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- [31:15]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
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- [31:45]
Patrick Bet-David
All right, thanks for sticking with us. Let's jump right back in. How many people own gold?
- [31:53]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
I don't know the answer to that question.
- [31:54]
Patrick Bet-David
Basically nobody. It's been around for thousands of years. I'm just telling you, the average person just, they're never going to do it. Like, the only punchline is people must become aware of the nature of government and hold their government accountable. Like, and maybe that's also never going to happen.
- [32:11]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
I think there's a lot of people that own gold. The American culture is not a goal.
- [32:14]
Patrick Bet-David
Owning culture, but 10% of Americans own 93 of the assets. So I'm just telling you, in, In America alone, 90 of people own all for assets. Yeah, that includes gold. So it just, it doesn't happen. Most people are so caught up in their day to day lives trying to make ends meet that they don't think to invest in anything.
- [32:34]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
That's my key point though is that the trying to make ends meet over time will become more and more of a requirement to have bitcoin to make those ends meet.
- [32:45]
Patrick Bet-David
Well, so if you're trying to save.
- [32:47]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Hyperinflation or you're trying to escape capital controls, or you're trying to escape outright seizure. Right. Whether you're a broke or you're a billionaire, wealth redistribution or whatever the thing is like you will need recourse to non state digital cash to do that.
- [33:01]
Patrick Bet-David
Yeah, but it's been available forever and people don't do it.
- [33:04]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
It's been available for 17 years.
- [33:06]
Patrick Bet-David
No, no, no, you're thinking of bitcoin. It's been.
- [33:08]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Gold's not. Gold and bitcoin are not the same. Yes, but you cannot put a hundred million dollars of gold up your ass. We already talked about this.
- [33:15]
Patrick Bet-David
Yeah, but nobody cares about that. Like, look, I do care about that. No, they really don't, man. They don't really.
- [33:20]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
People care about fleeing with their purchasing power intact.
- [33:23]
Patrick Bet-David
I don't.
- [33:23]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
If you have the option, someone's invading you and you're like, oh, we gotta leave.
- [33:28]
Patrick Bet-David
Yes.
- [33:28]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Do we want to leave with all of our money or none of our money?
- [33:31]
Patrick Bet-David
In that moment, people would suddenly care. But the vast majority of people just are not thinking about that. It's like literally in, in this interview alone, the number of times that I've thought. Because you're so smart, I don't think you make contact with the people that like, for them, this is just like, what. They have no idea what you're talking about. The. The lack of fear for you is because you know how to navigate the world. So your fear is proportionate to the amount of things that you think will catch you off guard. And you think very few things are going to catch you off guard. And that's probably true because you have an intellect. The bad news is half of people are dumber than the average person. So I'm just saying you just have to look at the numbers. Like, there are a few numbers that are just like, oh, 90% of the. 90% of people in America just don't have assets. Like, that's wild. So we are in a situation where if the government is abusing you, it's game over. And I'm just saying the government doesn't have to abuse you, but it is currently because people don't understand how to deal with that. So listen, I'm hardcore bitcoin. I don't want anybody to be confused. I'm just saying bitcoin does not solve the problem I'm trying to solve, which is how do we make sure that the average person is not being just absolutely, economically raped? And then they wonder, like, what the hell is going on? I can't make ends meet. This is crazy.
- [34:58]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
It's.
- [34:59]
Patrick Bet-David
If you say bitcoin is the solution, it's like saying garbledygook, like, yeah, no.
- [35:05]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Look, I mean, I. I don't know. I feel like I agree and disagree with this. So it's. Bitcoin can prevent people from being economically predated upon. Right. Or economically taken advantage of. Right? For sure.
- [35:17]
Patrick Bet-David
It does definitely get people to hold bitcoin.
- [35:19]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
You have to understand it, right? So this is why, like, a lot of bitcoiners just say, just study bitcoin, like, you have nothing to lose now. But the. I think maybe the deeper point of disagreement is you have. You seem to be having this pessimism on kind of the intellectual capacity of the human race. And I would agree, like, you look out in the world today, there's a lot of idiots and there's people voting socialists into office and like, yeah, okay, there's a lot of dumb shit going on. But when I look across human history, like, how far we've come, where I really think we're very adaptive and we have developed cultural norms and intellectual norms and mental math and spoken language. Like we've developed a lot of things that we didn't have a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand years ago. Yes. So I think our capacity to evolve makes me very optimistic about the more distant future. Now the point of transition could be choppy, could be dicey, could be the collapse of the medieval church in the 21st century type of thing, like, who knows? But I'm optimistic about the tech, digital technology enabled future. And I think that we are engaging in like a reciprocal reconstruction with these machines. Right. That I. When the incentives to violence go down, I think people will become less violent.
- [36:31]
Patrick Bet-David
What do you think about AI?
- [36:35]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Very mysterious, but a massive productivity enhancer. So anything that increases productivity is going to increase the purchasing power of money. And I also think AIs, if they're going to interact and engage in any economic activity between themselves, will have to make use of Bitcoin.
- [36:55]
Patrick Bet-David
Do you think that we become post economic?
- [36:57]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
No.
- [36:58]
Patrick Bet-David
Say more. You're the first person I've heard say no to that.
- [37:00]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Space and time will always be scarce and the wants of the human heart will always be larger than, you know, whatever is available, no matter how much is available, people will always, what is a man's reach always exceeds his grasp. We always want more. So that is the definition of scarcity. Wherever demand exceeds supply, there is scarcity. Okay, So I don't think demand can ever be fully satiated.
- [37:24]
Patrick Bet-David
But what do you do in a world where there is an entity that's better than you at everything?
- [37:29]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Oh, you do what? Well, first of all, if it's better than you at everything and it solved like a lot of the economics problems, well then you don't have to really work for a living, right? You have all the food and luxuries you could possibly want at the snap of a finger. In theory. What do people do? I don't know. Do they, you know, go on busying themselves with the furtherance of the human race? Do they do some artistic things? Do they go explore the stars? Like what? I don't know. We're explorers. Who am I to say what we will do? But I don't think scarcity, understood in the proper economic sense, is even possible to be eliminated. The closest thing we could get to is if we broke thermodynamics and developed free energy, right? Or zero point energy as, as Friston's called it. And then you would really have like anything you wanted at the snap of a finger. Be pretty close to post economic. But you still can't occupy the same Space. At the same time, you're still immortal. Like there's still scarcity. Even in the. Even in that like kind of heaven on earth scenario, you still have scarcity.
- [38:32]
Patrick Bet-David
So you think there'll be some sort of competition for Malibu real estate as an example?
- [38:39]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Well, I don't know about that per se. I'm saying demand will always exceed supply in at least some categories. Right. Like not every category. Air is a good example. Right. We don't price air because the supply is so super abundant. Even though it's very essential to life, our demand is less than the supply. So it's not scarce. So we don't price it, we don't fight over it. Right. But other goods, gold, food, water, etc. We do price and fight over those things. So I don't know which specific asset categories would be, you know, possibly become non scarce. But I don't think all could become non scarce because again, space and time. How are you going to make space and time non scarce? I mean, maybe you solve death and make people immortal, it's okay. I don't believe in that either. But how do you solve space?
- [39:30]
Patrick Bet-David
How do you solve space? Meaning that. Yeah. So going back to the Malibu real estate thing. So that is an interesting question. I'll get to that. But let me speedrun what I think happens. Given that there's essentially nobody anymore that says that compute will asymptote. So it's just going to go on forever. The gap between a definitional moron and Einstein is only 2.4x.
- [39:59]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
What does that mean?
- [40:00]
Patrick Bet-David
That Einstein was only 2.4 times smarter than a. Who's at like a 70 IQ? Okay, so yeah, has a definition. I think it's 70 IQ roughly. So I ran the math once. Einstein was 2.4x in IQ. That. So that's the difference between. The US government won't even use you as cannon fodder in the military because you'll cause more problems on the way to getting shot and being able to intuit the physics of the universe. So that's 2.4x. Now imagine something that's a thousand x.
- [40:37]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Right.
- [40:37]
Patrick Bet-David
So you get into the point where energy cost will be zero. Once energy costs are zero.
- [40:44]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Actually zero or near zero.
- [40:46]
Patrick Bet-David
I mean, actually.
- [40:46]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
So you think we're going to break thermodynamics?
- [40:49]
Patrick Bet-David
No, I think that robotics and material science will get to the point where you can capture more energy from the sun than everybody, using everything at all times during the day, no matter how much whatever they're doing, like they just will never be able to reach the amount of energy that is being kicked off by the sun.
- [41:07]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Okay.
- [41:08]
Patrick Bet-David
And given that we'll be able to get that level of energy and the first wave of robots will cost money. But Optimus is already all ready today as of the recording of this podcast. Coming off the line at 20k there. I am going to be getting a thousand dollar robot for my house. One for each floor. I'm not kidding. To run security. Those are all ready for sale at $1,000. So labor's gonna drop to nothing. When energy drops to nothing, that certainly happens in the next 30 years. Probably a lot faster, but let's just say 30 years. So 30 years from now, energy cost is zero, labor is zero. Now it's, we're post scarcity at that point, except for there'll be occasional things like we can't occupy the same space and people will fight over that for sure.
- [41:58]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
And bitcoin.
- [41:59]
Patrick Bet-David
So the question becomes like, what do we doing about that? It's just bitcoin becomes a question of is there some small number of things? And we say bitcoin is the thing. And whoever has the most like, that's who gets that. Maybe that could very well be true. But the real thing for me is when that happens, meaning and purpose is gone. And that's where I think this all changes.
- [42:21]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Why does meaning and purpose have to be gone when we're in conditions of super abundance and freedom?
- [42:27]
Patrick Bet-David
Because of the way the human mind works. So evolution, we need to be load.
- [42:31]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Bearing or challenged to have meaning.
- [42:33]
Patrick Bet-David
Yes.
- [42:34]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Okay, so you fear that with no challenge, no load to bear, we're just going to be aimless?
- [42:39]
Patrick Bet-David
That is correct.
- [42:39]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Hedonistic.
- [42:41]
Patrick Bet-David
That's one of the four paths. So I see there's four paths before us. Path number one is you go to Mars and you play a survival crafting, open world game on hardcore mode. Option number two is new Amish. So you reject technology. You go live on a field like a Mennonite. Option number three is a brave new world. What you're talking about drugs and sex. And then option number four is Neo in the Matrix. So you live inside of a virtual world, but you're awake. And so you're essentially eternally playing a video game where you can optimize the challenge perfectly, have real relationships inside of it. That's the future. Like that to me is exciting. But it is a very different world. A very different world.
- [43:26]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Yeah, it's. I mean, I hear you. I find it to be optimistic though. I mean, when I see productivity Optionality, freedom, purchasing power, all these things going up and the incentives for people to, you know, violently accord themselves with one another going down. These all seem like arrows pointing in the right direction for me now. Loss of meaning. Sure, we're in a meaning crisis. I don't know if you've talked to John Verveck. He's my favorite guy to listen to. So many. So many levels of brilliant articulation of the problem and, like, tracing it all the way back. Like, it's amazing. I'm not saying bitcoin is going to fix the meaning crisis, but we definitely have a big issue as far as engineering problems we can solve for immediately. Like, this one's just obvious. It's like your entire global economy runs on a scam. How about we just stop that first? Then we can start dealing with the meaning crisis and all these other things. So I am not a pessimist about innovation. I think that it is what makes us human. The fact that we make tools, the fact that we create things that then again, reciprocally enhance us in a way. Like, we're in this. We're kind of like co captains in our own evolutionary process. And so I'm excited about these things. Of course they bring new challenges, but I don't subscribe to a worldview in which, man, we've solved scarcity or almost solved scarcity. And now everyone's like, man, life sucks. There's nothing to do. It's like, what are you talking about? Like, if we. I don't know, I would think we'd be exploring the stars. Or maybe we invent teleportation, or maybe we're going to other dimensions, or maybe there's a psychedelic revolution or a religious awakening. Like, I think people will find something to do. And the difficulty of all of this is that we are living in the status paradigm, so that anything we say, any speculation we make about the future, we're sort of interpreting it through that lens, you know, oh, people are dumb today. Oh, people don't have meaning. It's like, that's why it's important to look backwards. Right? They say if you don't know where you come from, then you don't know where you're going. And so looking at the progression humanity has made across history, I think gives me a lot of optimism about our future trajectory.
- [45:46]
Patrick Bet-David
I love it. All right. I would stay in chat forever, but I got to get to the airport. Where can people follow you on your journey to do all that amazing stuff?
- [45:55]
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Yeah. Thank you for coming to Miami and doing this always fun. I'm at breedlove22 on X and then whatismoneypodcast.com I love it.
- [46:06]
Patrick Bet-David
All right everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Most healthy habits are hard. Meal prep takes hours. Gym routines get derailed all the time. Complicated supplement regimens fall apart, often within weeks. But AG1 Next Gen is different. AG1 Next Gen delivers what your body actually needs. 75 plus vitamins and minerals, 5 clinically studied probiotic strains plus prebiotics and superfoods. It replaces your multivitamin probiotics and more in one simple daily drink. AG1 Next Gen comes in three new flavors, Tropical Citrus and Berry. All plant based flavoring with 0 added sugar, 0 artificial sweeteners, 0 erythritol. Every flavor maintains NSF certification for sport, so you know you're getting the strictest quality standards. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1 and if you use my link, you'll also get a free bottle of AG D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and five of the upgraded travel packs. With your first order, click the link in the show notes or just head to drinkag1.comimpact to get started again. That's drinkag1.com impact.