Will Bitcoin enable the Sovereign Individual thesis to play out? Or will the state successfully find some counter to retain the level of taxation, surveillance and control that they currently enjoy? Robert Breedlove and Jesse Lawler join me on the show to debate. 

Links:

• Twitter: @breedlove22 
• Parallax Digital: Parallax Digital
• Twitter: @lawlerpalooza

Sponsors:

• Swan Bitcoin
• Knox Custody
• Bitcoin Black Friday
• CypherSafe (code LIVERA)
• Unchained Capital (code LIVERA)

Stephan Livera links:

• Show notes and website
• Follow me on twitter @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast
• Patreon @stephanlivera

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera:

Robert and Jesse, welcome to the show.

Jesse Lawler:

Thank you.

Robert Breedlove:

Hey Stephan. Glad to be here.

Stephan Livera:

Maybe just take a minute to introduce yourselves just for the listeners. Let’s start with you, Robert.

Robert Breedlove:

Yeah. My name is Robert Breedlove. I’m a founder, CEO and CIO of Parallax Digital Freedom maximalist and Bitcoin advocate.

Stephan Livera:

And Jesse.

Jesse Lawler:

I’m Jesse Lawler, a I guess I’m still on my first Bitcoin four year cycle. So I’m looking forward to completing the turn sometime in 2021, but I’ve been paying attention to the space pretty closely for the last couple of years. I’m a long time technology guy and yeah, I guess sort of a long time listener, first time caller, as far as you know, dipping my toe into the Bitcoin podcast world. But yeah, really familiar with both of your work and yeah, looking forward to this discussion.

Stephan Livera:

Fantastic. So today we are going to chat about this topic of will Bitcoin and dissident tech splinter governments. And I guess another way to also think of this is it going to massively multiply the number of governments that we have around the world? And so it’s going to be a bit of a friendly, informal debate. And so Robert is going to take the affirmative and Jesse is going to take the negative on this. So let’s have, say a five minutes intro from each side opening arguments. So Robert, do you want to kick us off here?

Robert Breedlove:

Sure thing. So I’d like to first say that this argument is premised on the book that’s very popular in Bitcoin circles called The Sovereign Individual. And the general thesis of that book is that microprocessing technology or digital technologies will actually subvert and destroy the nation state as an organizational model for humanity. And this is, it has a lot to do as the authors argue with the logic of violence and how it is employed, how it has been employed throughout history and how digital text sort of shapes the returns to violence, the actual economic benefit to violence. And in this domain, Bitcoin plays a very, very large role. So information societies, they actually, as we move into the digital age, the great promise is to dramatically reduce the returns to violence largely because in the digital age we can transcend locality. Which means that you don’t need, you know, compared to the 20th century, you don’t need to be in any single location to work and reap economic benefit.

Robert Breedlove:

You can actually take your work into the digital domain and be anywhere. So this drastically reduces the ability of governments to project dominion over you, because you’re not local right. You’re not tethered to any particular territory. And what this means is the grand shift. This is a shift away from power being the primary driver of social organization towards something more like efficiency and to get into how Bitcoin there’s a lot of technology shapes this a lot going into the 21st century. But Bitcoin is very important for this specifically. And the reason being, because the nation state’s revenue model is built off two things. One is nonconsensual taxation. So they set a tax rate that you’re forced to pay. And two is inflation. And just to look at the U.S. Government, for instance, this year they generated about five and a half trillion dollars in tax receipts.

Robert Breedlove:

So those are explicit nonconsensual taxes that they farm from their citizens. And they’ve also printed so far in 2020, about $3.6 trillion. So that would be inflation revenues which is also a form of theft. So we’re looking for 2020, at least in the US we’ve got about a 60% explicit tax revenue for government, and we’ve got a 40% implicit tax revenue for government. And in that lens, you can think of Bitcoin as kind of like the ultimate offshore jurisdiction and see its promise is to be the ultimate tax Haven. And that you can put capital on a place that’s totally resistant to both inflation. And in the long run, we think explicit taxation as well. And so the thesis here is that Bitcoin acts as kind of like a Swiss bank account in your pocket, your brain, or even in your circle of trust and the taxing authorities that have grown accustomed to treating their taxpayers like, like a farmer treats his cows you know, keeping them in a field ready to be milked that in the 20th century, Bitcoin and other dissident or digital tech actually gives those cows the ability to grow wings.

Robert Breedlove:

So we think, you know, the thesis of the book here is that the 20th century nation state will starve to death as its tax revenues and inflation revenues decline. And we’ve seen this happen before. There’s a lot of instances of this throughout history when the actual logic of violence changes that these social institutions making up that society shift as well, but there is a lag, right. Rome started to fall and was falling for a long time while its social institutions remained in place. It took, you know, centuries before they, they finally collapsed. So there’s a lot of inertia to social organization. And I would argue that we’re kind of in the death throes of the nation state today. And when that collapse occurs, I think you could point to what happened in Soviet Russia as something somewhat similar, the large state fragments into many smaller States.

Robert Breedlove:

The projection of violence and dominion becomes much more localized because the cost of maintaining far-flung borders is no longer supported by the underlying economy, right? The economy again is, is less vulnerable to parasitic taxation and inflation. So Bitcoin for the first time, it’s forcing governments which have grown accustomed to enjoying this monopoly of recurrency that they can just appreciate it well to milk everyone. It’s going to force them to compete. So we’re moving away from a world in which citizens are treated like cattle and into a world in which citizens are treated like customers. And, you know, Bitcoin closes the window of inflation as a revenue option and gives people the ability to opt into an optimal monetary policy, which is a 0% terminal inflation rate or said differently 0% unexpected inflation, which renders that statement outlined on the printing press and less relevant by the day as people wake up to this truth. So I think that that was kind of a five minute intro. There’s several other points in this book. We’ll try to hit as many as we can today, but the general thesis is that by starving the state of taxation and inflation, it causes it to shrink necessarily. And it draws on several examples throughout history. When similar changes in the logic of violence and extortion have changed the shape of the state.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent.Thank you very much, Robert. So Jesse, let’s hear it from you. Take five minutes and let’s hear you lay out your thesis.

Jesse Lawler:

Yeah, well, I guess first of all, I, should I tip my hat a little bit too to Bitcoin and let everybody know that my, I love Bitcoin credentials are hopefully not too diminished by my, I am an unapologetic statist credentials. Also. I know that that’s probably going to, you know, raise some hackles in the audience, but you know, all of us are looking forward to hyperbitcoinization. And when we think about what a hyperbitcoinised world might look like, one of the things that people say is, well, when that happens, we won’t call Bitcoin, Bitcoin anymore. We’ll just call it money. And that’s true because one of the things that we know about successful technologies that do gain mass adoption is that they become so embedded in everyday culture by virtue of their own success that they’re thereafter totally invisible, or unless you really go out of your way to think about them, they’re unremarkable in the classic sense of that word.

Jesse Lawler:

So like when you have guests over to your house nowadays, you don’t like show them your light switches and flip your lights on and off and try to impress them because you know, you know that they’ve got electricity too, and likely they’ve had electricity for either decades or generations, depending on what part of the world they in. So here’s the thing with Bitcoin is, or rather with technologies like that, is we’re looking forward to Bitcoin and making that jump into being a ubiquitous it’s there everywhere, it’s part of everyone’s life technology, but there are lots of technologies that have already made that jump and a technology that I’d like to talk about a little today is one that is already there, that we’re all participating in right now. And that it’s in that category of being so successful that it’s invisible. And that is the city.

Jesse Lawler:

Now I could say civilization rather than the city, but I wanted to go with city because it’s easier to kind of step back and think of the city as a technology. You can think of aerial photographs, where you see freeways and on-ramps and traffic flows. And it looks like, you know, the gears of an old watch, or maybe like the biological parts of a living cell. And if you just say, you know, society or civilization, it’s less concrete and it’s harder to see the machine that’s there, but a city is essentially a machine for increasing human population density. I mean, I say that again to underscore the point a city is a machine for increasing human population density. Now, why the hell would you want that? Why would you want to have higher population density? Often times we think of that as a bad thing, but as sure Robert’s actually going to agree with this.The good thing about increased population density is you get more and more humans interacting more frequently leads to enhanced trade and not just trade in goods and services, although that’s a big part of it, but also trade in ideas and cities for all the bad things that you might be able to say about them.

Jesse Lawler:

They’re an accelerant of civilization because of that increased trade and ideas. Now probably most listeners to this podcast are going to be familiar with the idea of the Lindy effect, either from Bitcoin reading or Nassim Taleb. But you know, that idea that the longer something’s been around the longer that it’s likely to stick around. And if you want a long-term trend that you can feel pretty safe betting on, which is basically, this is the crux of my argument is that the history of humanity is the story of incremental progress on you know, there’s local backslides, but a clear long-term trend of packing more and more human minds, closer together with an accelerated trade of ideas. And one of those ideas that have always occurred to people and always will is, Hey, you know, I could kill it and steal your girl and take your stuff. And because that idea constantly is going to occur to people.

Jesse Lawler:

The story of humanity is also a story of increasingly sophisticated sets of rules that we call laws or even governments. And that is a story that has continued since 6,000 years ago, up until the present day with no significant deviations, the styles of governments have changed, but governments consolidating getting more powerful, getting more elaborate is upward trajectory to where we are today, which is arguably the biggest, most powerful you know, extended governments, even beyond nation States into, you know, groups of nations working together that we’ve ever seen. And I’m not going to make an argument, whether that’s, you know, a morally good thing or a morally bad thing, but just that it’s a historically true thing. So when Robert says, this was sort of where our argument on Twitter started, that Bitcoin is going to massively multiply the world’s number of sovereign governments.

Jesse Lawler:

And for the purposes of arguing on Twitter, we said, massively multiply being over like a hundred times what they are today, which would be, I think, somewhere in the like 19,000 governments or something is what that would be just based on the number of governments in the world today that claim sovereignty. Basically what he’s saying there is that the 6,000 year Lindy trajectory of people living closer and closer together with strangers in ever larger groups with increasingly sophisticated sets of rules is going to stop. It’s going to turn on its heel and it’s going to reverse course by multiple orders of magnitude. And frankly, I just don’t think that’s realistic.

Stephan Livera:

All right. Well, I think that’s a really interesting thesis you’ve laid out there. So I think let’s have an opening round of rebuttals from each side. So Robert let’s hear it from you.

Robert Breedlove:

Sure thing. So I’d like to specify first, and this might be the crux of our argument in some ways is that I think the tweet or mention, as I said, we’re moving from a world with 200 countries to one with more like 20,000. Now I’m not sitting on that number saying we are going to have 20,000 countries in this sovereign individual future. But the point that I am making is that the state will be starved. It will shrink, it will fragment. So we will have more than we have today. And in the long run Bitcoinized future, I think it’s much more likely, you know, as we revert back to this free market paradigm, that we’re more likely to see small free private cities or citadels as they’re popularly called. Because again, it’s just an economics equation. It’s an equation of power and economics that you can’t possibly govern that large of a territory when you cannot extract revenues surreptitiously at scale, right?

Robert Breedlove:

You can’t project power as easily. So I would say one another way. The analogy that’s used in the book is that they compare actually the digital domain to the high seas, and that there’s a reason we have international waters around the world. And that’s because the territory of the ocean is economically infeasible to project dominion over, right. We just can’t patrol it. We can’t police it. There’s no economic benefit for a government trying to enforce laws on the high seas. So when you go on to international waters, under cruise ship, you can gamble and do all these other things. Digital space is similar in that it’s impenetrable space through what you can’t easily project jurisdictional dominion. And the other argument there is that the tax rates themselves, right? Like we were like a 40% marginal tax rate in the US that if you compound these numbers over an average lifetime of earnings, you get into the tens of millions of dollars for even just kind of your general high-income wage earner.

Robert Breedlove:

And there’s this huge incentive for people to move into Bitcoin and move their capital positions into Bitcoin that really does starve the state. So again, just look at you know, if we just assume you inflation number alone, right? 40% of government revenues in the US would just go away, what would happen to the US government, right? All of a sudden they’re more accountable to their P and L all of a sudden they can’t just implement these quote unquote temporary government solutions, which as we all know, tend to be more permanent than anything else. And just by a function of economics, the organization we call the US government necessarily shrinks. And is this happens more and more, you see a grass roots growth, right? Where democracy and free market paradigm becomes more of a governing feature of society than does top-down command and control systems like we are under today.

Robert Breedlove:

And so I think, you know to hit Jesse’s example of the city, I would argue the city itself is more like composite of technologies and socio-economic systems. And I actually think the digital age reduces the benefits of population density in a lot of ways, right? Because historically we needed to be in close community with one another to trade goods and services achieved the division of labor and knowledge specialization and all of this, but that has at least been somewhat mitigated through digital tech, as we’re proving on this podcast today, we’re all three in different territories right. So in that way, I actually think you can look at digital space if you will, as kind of the celestial city and to which at least at first, the cognitive elite are moving, right. Everyone’s realizing and waking up to this huge change that, Hey, I can move my business and my capital into digital space where it’s untouchable.

Robert Breedlove:

I can do business at, near zero cost of reproduction. I have very, very high returns on, on my fixed costs. And I store my savings in Bitcoin, which is the base money for this global digital non-state economy. And, something that can’t be seized or touched. So I think that we, we can look at it more like that, like the digital domain, if you will, as a competing city, it’s a city that’s out competing. Our growingly anachronistic notion of the localized city where you have, I can only do business in Los Angeles or New York, right. It enables a true globalized society. And it offers us a, you know, a money that’s just radically new and almost totally beyond misappropriation.

Stephan Livera:

So, Jesse, how would you respond to that argument around the declining tax revenues and the components around the city?

Jesse Lawler:

Yeah, I think it’s a great point that governments will be forced to change. However, I think one of the mistakes that a lot I guess, sort of Bitcoin utopianism is, drowning in these days is the idea that like Bitcoin is going to be the last disruption that there’s some sort of like end of history, finality that now that Bitcoin exists in the world, that the rest of the, you know, complex adaptive systems in the world, aren’t going to find ways to respond. Now, basically, I’m going to agree carte blanche with everything that Robert said about Bitcoin being more difficult to tax, about digital space being more difficult to control human behavior and all those things are true. But again, that’s based on what today’s technology has, and we have no idea what’s going to be invented next year, next week, next decade.

Jesse Lawler:

Every decade, you know, looking back on our history, you know, certainly for the last few hundred years since technology has really accelerated, has been filled with disruptive events. And I think it’s naive to think that because you know, basically the good guys, you know, what we all consider sort of the you know, the Bitcoin freedom fighter types as the good guys came up with this great new tool in our arsenal doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be countermoves and it might be that the, you know, okay, so let me also call attention to something that in Robert’s opening statement he kept bringing up the word nation state not just state, but nation state, and that’s really important for his side of this argument because the nation state kind of the idea of a geographically determinate state is something that we’ve had is dominant thing in the world for the last couple of hundred years.

Jesse Lawler:

And I fully agree that’s on the way out Nation States, but that doesn’t mean that state as in like a governmental system of telling people what they can and can’t do. And you know, what sort of the rules of behavior are, I don’t think States are going anywhere. I think nation States have a lot of problems ahead of them, and certainly the revenue model is going to need work, but saying that something is going to need work and innovation. Isn’t the same as saying that it’s on its last legs and it’s going to die. You know, I think that we should probably think of Nation States as kind of being like you know, almost like the Cop of Terminator and Terminator 2 when he got frozen and then shot with a gun and he shattered, but then reformed, I think that in the wake of something like hyperbitcoinization, we will get governments that will certainly need to radically adapt and might wind up looking very different than the government structures that we’re used to now. But that doesn’t mean that there’s going to be more of them. And it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be less powerful.

Stephan Livera:

That’s an interesting idea. And I think perhaps I might contrast that with what we’re calling the nation state, and it may be more like we see many more smaller city States, right? Singapore, Hong Kong,Monaco, kind of smaller areas. I guess Monaco is probably a special example, but maybe like Lichtenstein, Singapore, Hong Kong are probably examples there. Robert, how would you think of that idea? Are you thinking of it? Like, we’re just going to see a lot more of those city state type arrangements?

Robert Breedlove:

Yeah. So let’s try to just clear up the terminology, or I think I forget who said that most arguments are just two people having two different definitions for the same word, a term. So sort of clear that up. I would say firstly, the Bitcoin undoubtedly is an accelerant to innovation and disruption. So I’m not at all advocating for Bitcoin being any kind of final disruption. I do think it is perhaps the final disruption to base money, which is a huge tool, huge innovation, but it does not mean that other distributed technologies and digital innovations that we can’t even imagine at this point, won’t be enabled by the free market paradigm that Bitcoin reinvigorates. And I do also agree that there will be nation state, counter strokes. I think central bank digital currencies are a clear counter stroke to Bitcoin, right? No, central bank was talking about a digital currency 10 years ago.

Robert Breedlove:

This is clearly them trying to buy to hold onto their existing territory. And then I would say that nation, whether we call them Nation States or States, what I am saying is that governments themselves will now be forced to function more like private enterprises, which means they will be accountable to their PNL which means they will not be able to swell with useless bureaucracy, right? Like I love the example that Saifedean gives about the Lebanon train authority. Like it still exists today, but there hasn’t been track of railroad in Lebanon in like 50 years or something like that. Like, and that the quote, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government implementation. Like that’s the problem with the government is it’s just a wasteful parasitic body essentially, right? It has no accountability to its PNL like the rest of us, like everyone else in the world.

Robert Breedlove:

And that’s the big change here is that it’s, we’re moving away from a world where these monopolies are sustainable into one in which they’re forced to compete. And so I think what’s interesting here is that government’s entire ability to tax. It ultimately depends on the same vulnerabilities that people have that gets shaken down by the mob or extorted by the mob, right? There has to be this either explicit or implicit threat of violence for someone to willingly give up value in a nonconsensual transaction, right? Otherwise it’s a market-based transaction. You come to an agreement, you reach a rate and you make an exchange. That’s the difference between a monopoly and a free market. And this, that asymmetry right between a government being able to shake you down or extort you with violence is being disrupted by the asymmetry intrinsic to mathematics, which is frankly, just that it’s easier to multiply and divide so we can multiply prime numbers very simply, right.

Robert Breedlove:

But to dis-aggregate those prime numbers and decompose the product of large prime numbers is all but possible. And that fundamental asymmetry is the core premise of cryptography, right? That’s why it’s so easy to verify Bitcoin, but impossible to hack someone’s private key, for instance, and that is going to facilitate the emergence of an economy that’s more true to a spontaneous adaptive system, which is the free market, right? The free market is the social expression of a complex adaptive system. And the decision making in that space is going to be driven not by bureaucracy, but rather by incentives, right? So we’re moving into a world where incentives are gonna drive socioeconomic action, much more than a top-down command and control if you will. And I just think that’s interesting too, that like what governments are intending to do, they’re not creating really any value, right?

Robert Breedlove:

They’re protecting the property rights of those that do create value, right? That the underlying economy that goes into the world and works and produces the governments and political sphere, they’re just extracting value off of this economic host, if you will to fund themselves. And when you and dividing the spoils, like just like with mathematics, it can never be anything but primitive since by the laws of math, it doesn’t scale efficiently. So I just think that there’s something there’s a really fundamental change here, and that we are recreating a society, founded more on mathematics and less on primitive force, if you will. And that’s the big change. That’s what we it’s almost like you you’ve changed the asymmetry of violence back to the Hunter gatherer stage where everyone was armed. Everyone had more or less equal combat skills. So there was no world government or a government over hundreds of millions of people.

Robert Breedlove:

There were small tribes, right? Everyone was equally equipped with offensive and defensive technologies. Whereas if you look at the feudal age, you’d may have one armed Knight, right? Heavily armed Knight on horseback who could kill hundreds of peasants, right. There’s a big asymmetry there and government centralized moving into the digital age. Again, we’re all gonna be more or less equipped with both the digital tools and then through things like 3D printing and whatnot with offensive kinetic tools as well. So that’s my general thesis that we’re moving back to a more symmetric society.

Stephan Livera:

So Jesse, how would you respond there to Robert’s point around the asymmetry that basically Bitcoin pushes more in the direction of, you know in the individual, as opposed to the state?

Jesse Lawler:

I agree that the state will need to respond. I don’t have any doubt that, you know the many humans that make up things like governments will be thinking about ways to respond and, you know, there’s a lot of brainpower that’s going to go to making governments and society’s response robust. I think that the idea that we want asymmetry of violence is laughable and absurd. Cause really we he’s right in that, like in Hunter gatherer days, we did have a asymmetry of violence between individuals. I mean, basically the strength of your arm or whether your rock was sharper than the next person’s rock. You know was basically all that divided, you know, the winners from the losers in a battle and to live during those times was to have a very high likelihood of being murdered by another human rather than dying of old age or something as we do now.

Jesse Lawler:

If you look at the statistics on the types of society and the you know, relative abundance of death by murder, it is absolutely absolutely per capita, just shocking how violent things used to be if you lived you know, a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago, 10,000 years ago just it’s off the charts, you know, a thousand fold, more deaths by violence than we see in today’s cultures. And people say, well, you know, what about, you know, the second world war killed 50 million people. Yeah. It killed 50 million people, but the population of that world, the world at that time was so much larger that your chances of dying as a combatant or a civilian in the second world war versus your chances of, you know, just being killed by a guy with a rock, if you lived 10,000 years ago were absolutely minuscule. So asymmetry of violence is just an absurd notion to actually be rooting for.

Robert Breedlove:

Yeah, I would deeply fundamentally, completely disagree symmetry in any society between any group of people across any domain is preferable to an asymmetry. Why would you ever advocate one group of people having anything access to when you think that another group does not necessarily like granted, we’re all born with a natural diversity of skills know how experience. That’s what serves the economy, right? That we can each specialize in our area of expertise and trade with one another with sound private property rights. We can resolve those disputes with one another with sound rule of law so we can handle it. Non-violently that’s what creates abundance. That’s what creates the division of labor. But symmetry of access to goods services knowledge is what fosters a healthy social economic world to advocate for having one group that has control over violence. And everyone else is forcibly disarmed is the pathway to totalitarianism. Right?

Jesse Lawler:

Well, let’s not put any words in my mouth. I understand where you’re going for it, but that’s not exactly what I said.

Robert Breedlove:

Let me finish. So Bitcoin there and digital type in general, again, 3d printing it’s it is leveling the playing field across the board for people to have access to the things that they need, whether those things are guns, whether those things are unconfiscatable capital, whether those things are even food trade it enables free exchange and free exchange is the wellspring of economic abundance, right? The state does not add anything to that. The state is the local monopoly on violence to preserve private property rights with nonviolent dispute resolution, but digital tech. We have something that incentive disincentivizes violence. So it mitigates the need for the state, which is the general argument here. And to get into the world war thing, like death per capita and warfare quadrupled in the 20th century, it is no coincidence that the century of total war was also the century of central banking, right? And Bitcoin, this is the most important promise of Bitcoin is that it’s disruptive to gold, which is that the foundation of central banking, which is at the foundation of government, which is at the foundation of global warfare. So I would argue vociferously that symmetric symmetry of access to things, including armaments is good for society

Stephan Livera:

So Jesse do you want to just clarify on that point?

Jesse Lawler:

Yeah. I’d like to comment on the death in warfare thing, which I’m sure that’s true that death in warfare did grow during the 20th century, but I wasn’t talking about death in warfare. I was talking about death in person, on person violence, somebody killing another person. Now that could be me, you know, murdering my neighbor cause I have a property line dispute with him or death in a war. And really if we only count death in warfare me killing my neighbor for a property, right. Dispute completely disappears. If you look at total person on person violence during the 20th century, it was less than it had been in the proceeding century and less than it had been in the century prior to that and less than it had been in the century prior to that, and you basically see an Aston product slope going upwards into our primeval past where things have gotten less and less violent as time has gone on. Even though we’ve got these huge outbreaks of Wars that have big absolute numbers, but per capita, we live in the, by far, the most peaceful time in all human experience. And that trend has been absolutely continuing and, you know, conflating only deaths in nation state combat with your actual chance of some dude killing you is just, it misrepresents the facts.

Robert Breedlove:

Well, I would say that the progression to a more peaceful society has not been driven by the state that also misrepresents the facts. The civilizational advance is premised on what I just said. The division of labor, the creation of economic abundance means there are less incentives to fight. There are more, more wants, are being satisfied. So there we have reduced the scarcity of resources. So we have less incentive to fight that is created by the productive economy. The productive economy is the host organism of the parasitic government and less transactions are conducted at consensual exchange rates than no value is being created by the one imposing the exchange rate. And that’s what the government does today. So I’m not saying that government goes away, but I am saying that we move into a world with less government overreach, no government overreach, frankly, it’ll just be consensual transactions between citizen and government.

Robert Breedlove:

And that the incentives to violence will be reduced because money will not, no longer be confiscatable, right? Because by the way, when you go to war, the war is about the money, right? Every time Germany invades a European country, what’s the first place they go. They go straight to the central bank to raid their gold hordes because war is very expensive. And if you can’t, if you don’t have an economic reward at the end of that effort, then it is not justifiable. It is not sustainable. So by having unconfiscatable money, I think we reduce the proclivity for world war and violence in general. And I think we also reduce the impediments to free trade, which enhances the abundance created by the free market, which further reduces the incentives to violence.

Stephan Livera:

So look, I think those are some great points guys. I’d like to just bring up another point to get your thoughts on this Robert. Now I agree with you, but in the spirit of being a fair moderator, I need to challenge you a little bit here as well. I could say as an example, this increasing use of technology might actually enable techno-statism and technocracy, so we might see additional surveillance and additional financial surveillance. So we might see just the fact that, you know, maybe digitally, we have some freedom, but our bodies are physical and that States can leverage that vector to control us. What would you say to that?

Robert Breedlove:

There’s absolutely still a battle being waged. And I think the verdict is very much out on that. It does seem to be that if we could veer towards a more Orwellian type future or towards something, you know, like we’re describing it’s much more free market and honoring the sovereignty of the individual, let’s say. The difference there is how, in my opinion, how much successful encryption technology actually proliferates, because right now it’s talking about Bitcoin that reduces the asymmetry of government on money, right? But there’s a number of other digital tools that also would need to become self-sovereign for people to reduce their dependency on centralized third parties. This and to this end, I think projects like Elon Musk is putting satellites into space to have globalized internet accessibility, things like that are important. The urbit project, which actually allows people to do self sovereign compute projects like that, I think are important.

Robert Breedlove:

I’ve mentioned 3d printing, and I think this in general will be very important in that it allows us to basically manifest open source software into physical tools and devices that we need, like every you know, everything, screws, locks, keys, components, guns, all these things that people may need access to. So I think, yeah, there’s, there’s very much, a battle line being drawn between centralized monopolistic control of digital certain digital territories, right. Or look at the data monopolies like the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, versus the emergence, which we’re still very early of things that are much more free market and voluntary. So there’s, it’s hard to see which direction it goes. And I think that Bitcoin is enabling the growth of the second category. But you’re absolutely correct. You know, that’s what we’re here to talk about is the importance of being a sovereign individual and supporting the right mode of human organization.

Stephan Livera:

Jesse, any thoughts on that?

Jesse Lawler:

Yeah. I’d like to go back to something that’s come up a couple of times the words wasteful and parasitic describing governments, which is you know, it’s great kind of like, you know, demonizing this whole idea word, but I think it actually really needs some closer looking at there’s this idea in biology called spandrels and it’s actually, this term spandrel comes from architecture, but it’s a spandrel is basically like a kind of useless little leftover that’s there because it’s not worth getting rid of like a great example. All of us are men. All of us have nipples. There’s no reason for our nipples to exist. And if we could, you know, take the perspective of one of the cells in any of our nipples, that cell could say, my whole life is totally worthless. I metabolize, I pump blood. I need to, you know, make all my, you know, little cellular behaviors go on.

Jesse Lawler:

And my life amounts to nothing. And my body makes me be a male nipple when I serve no purpose whatsoever. And yet the human body, you know has these things. We have appendixes, you know that, I guess at some point in prehistory that were useful, but here are plenty of bureaucratic waste things in perfectly functional organisms. And you could say, well, a single celled organism is far more efficient because it doesn’t have the waste of a human nipple or the waste of an appendix that it needs to support. And you’d be absolutely right. You could make that exact same argument and say, there is less waste in this much simpler life form that cannot aspire to the same sorts of things that a human being can. And part of this high level of organization that humans and, you know, higher level organisms are able to do is specifically because we have embedded bureaucratic waste within us.

Jesse Lawler:

It’s not because it’s inherently evil or it’s, you know, trying to be a parasite, but because it’s just simply not worth getting rid of it hasn’t been worth it. Having a male nipple, hasn’t been, it hasn’t cost enough of our ancestors, their lives, that it was worth actually selecting against male nipples, thus male nipples, as wasteful as they are. If you just look at them up close. And I feel like basically all of these, the state is bad. Look at how wasteful it is, are just pointing at male nipples. And sure the States do terrible things. But I think that States, we only allow States to get away with doing the terrible things that I’m sure Robert can give us a list of, you know, as long as his arm, because States also do absolutely wonderful, wonderful things. And like, yes, the history of human progress has been a history of increasing technology, a history of increasing cities, a history of increasing you know, government structures and government you know, control over larger and larger groups of people.

Jesse Lawler:

And all of these things we can’t really say, which is the cause, and which is the effect. They’re all happening at the same time. If you zoom way out in the 10,000 year view of human history, all of these things are on the uphill slope together. And so Robert might be able to say, well, it’s, it’s you know, it’s technology or it’s this, or it’s that that’s leading to the beneficial results in the state is only a drag on that. I personally, I don’t think that there’s anything to support that. I think that there’s every reason to think that these are self-reinforcing structures and just the same way as evolution has said, you know, cities, that’s a pretty good idea that cultures that try cities, you know, they’re going to do well. And those cultures are going to start to dominate the other cultures that don’t do cities. I think that you know, the organizations of our governments into increasingly Baroque and complex things that yes, have bureaucracy yes. Have annoyances yes. Have horrible outcomes sometimes overall it’s still working. If it wasn’t working, it wouldn’t be the dominant organizational force of the world.

Stephan Livera:

So I think the question for me would be around the size, right? So if we’re making this example around nipples, I mean, how much of the body is that taking up versus the state, which easily, I mean, depending on which government which country you’re looking at, it’s, you know, in many countries, okay. GDP is not the best metric, but in many countries, the state represents something like 30 or 40% of the GDP of the economy. Is that a reasonable size for the state to be taking up?

Jesse Lawler:

It’s the best that humans have invented yet? I mean, I don’t think there’s, again, I’m not making a moral argument here. I’m just making a realistic argument. I think if a form of government had been invented that could still manage the lives of tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people and only require, you know, 10% of GDP, I think we’d see those forms and those forms would, out-compete the ones that we have now, nobody’s invented it yet.

Stephan Livera:

Robert, do you have anything to add there in relation to that argument?

Robert Breedlove:

Yes. I don’t know about the biological argument necessarily, and I don’t know very much about nipple biology. But I can say this for certain monopolies are on economic, right? They distort price discovery, they suppress innovation. And in the sphere of money, the monopoly we have today is Fiat currency, right? So we have one group that can unilaterally change the supply of money based on a set of undisclosed decision criteria that benefit a group of shareholders at the expense of everyone else.

Jesse Lawler:

All of us on this call are against central banks.

Robert Breedlove:

Okay. So Fiat currency, which funds the bloated state, the state that would not be as large as it is. Absent central bank operates on a false money called Fiat currency that is a pyramid scheme used to siphon wealth off of the productive economy and reallocate it to the top to those that the banked and it’s politically favored, few arbitrarily select, right. It’s antithetical to the free market, which is again, the wellspring of all economic abundance. It actually constricts the wealth creation of the free market, which elevates social economic tensions and violence. And it uses the proceeds of theft by inflation to fund violence at scale world Wars, right? So I’m making both a pragmatic and a moral argument that when you impede free market forces, especially in the sphere of money, which is the most important market in the world. And then you use those proceeds to fund the most anti economic activity in the world, which is war you’re, mobilizing people and capital to go and destroy people in capital, right?

Robert Breedlove:

It’s the exact opposite of free market is premised on that entire operation is both pragmatically, wasteful and morally destitute. That’s the argument I’m making. And then I would say, this comes down to me of, it really is good versus evil, right? And you could define as Milton sudden paradise laws evil as the knowledge, which believes it is complete, right? So governments are acting today funded by central banks as if they are omnipotent as if they can manage the economy as if any human throughout history had ever managed a complex system successfully without creating a cascade of unintended consequences. And I see in that moral picture of it, that the purpose of evil I think is to test the quality of the good, right. We create good and useful order through our work, through our hands, through our wits, and then inevitably this evil force always kind of pushes back on it to test its, integrity.

Robert Breedlove:

And I think good, the good really tests our potential, right? It’s like, how much can we bring our imaginations into reality and advance civilization, frankly. So maybe government centralised government. I’m not gonna stand against it. So maybe it is the best thing we’ve invented yet. Right. For mobilizing humanity up until this point flawed as it is. Maybe that is the case. However, I know it’s not the best we can do. We’re not, we’re nowhere near a total free market paradigm. And in that sense, I think Bitcoin is this superstate like force that’s going to out-compete legacy government and push us into the next stage of civilization.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. So I very much agree with you, Robert. I think one point that it might be interesting as well to get Jesse’s view on. And Jesse, I suppose you’re familiar with the space and many of us are students of Austrian economics. And one argument that we actually can make I believe is that if we trace out the reasoning, we can actually spell out which things are happening because of capitalism, and which things are happening in spite of, you know and in the same way, we can make an argument. For example, we could say, look, people, people generally do not engage in trade unless they both believe ex-ante that they’re going to be better off afterwards. And, you know, then we also, you can trace out the chain of reasoning and, you know, listeners who are interested in more detail, they can check out some of the books like economic science and the Austrian method by Hans Hermann Hoppe who spells some of this out. And he’s spelling out essentially there that in that sense, government does act on a drag on what voluntary interactions would have implied just economically, like not even entering into the moral component of it, just literally the economics of it. And similar is in a Rothbard’s man, economy and state. And the second section of that called power and market. So Jesse, I’m curious if you’ve grappled with that kind of thing, whether you’ve had exposure to that school of thought?

Jesse Lawler:

I’ve dipped my toe into the readings of Austrian economics enough to I mean enough to have this conversation, but by no means enough to call myself an expert. However, I feel like it quickly sometimes gets into more theoretical than practical knowledge. And I kind of feel, I mean, this is going to sound blasphemous, but in a lot of ways, it reminds me sometimes of the kind of things that Karl Marx said of kind of making these logical extrapolation. You know I’m using logical and scare quotes of, you know, thinking, you know, how history is going to go. And if you did this, then this would happen. If you did this, then this would happen. And I’m kind of pretending like, you know, several steps down the road of how all the second and third and fourth order consequences of society are going to respond to your, what you think is a great idea right now.

Jesse Lawler:

I obviously it didn’t work out so well for Karl Marx . Although I’m sure, you know, probably Karl Marx was a nice enough guy. It’s just, you know, there were some flawed assumptions there that people tried to push past the barrier and like, well, if we just work a little harder, it’ll be okay. And obviously it wasn’t okay. It devolved into totalitarianism, which is awful, is totalitarianism is it’s a proven concept. Like we know that it works historically because we’ve seen it plenty of times, historically the communist utopia that he dreamt of, you know, as far as we can tell that there’s no stable equilibrium there, human beings can’t do that. But human being certainly can totalitarianism and human being certainly can do small group living, where everybody has a you know, asymmetry of violence.

Jesse Lawler:

And I, you know, basically going back to what I said earlier, the only examples that we have of symmetry of violence, government being, you know, micro small, you know, tribe level or smaller all our historical examples of that are rife with person on person violence. And the less violent times in our cultural histories have been under much larger governments. And I just feel like it’s disingenuous to not look at that real asymmetry in the data that we have there, looking back over recorded history and the types of societies that we have to look at and the person on person you know, mortality rates in those societies. And to think that we want to try to vector back towards something where there’s less government and less you know, thou shalt not rules for our fellow man.

Jesse Lawler:

One thing that I’d like to touch on, and I mean, I know we’re coming up on the end of our hour, so this might not be a little bit, we’re going to be able to cover today. I would like to broach the the idea is this idea of a free market of where this actually comes from, because it seems to me that the only reason that we have what we sort of call euphemistically a free market is because there are still some rules in place that are backed up by violence. That allow me to think, well, trading with you is a better idea, even though I probably could, you know, stab you and run off with your money. And, you know, some of that’s, you know, the social expectation that maybe your kinsmen will avenge you or something like that. But basically, you know, all of these rules that make us behave like good little boys and girls in a free market are still based on the threat of violence, ultimately coming from somewhere.

Jesse Lawler:

It’s just a question of where you’re never going to get rid of the threat of violence. It’s just a question of like who is there to inflict that violence? I don’t think it’s fair to say that just because we don’t have nation States or, or, you know, whatever the successor type of government to nation state is that everybody’s going to play well in a free market economy. Cause honestly, I think a free market with a capital F is like Santa Claus. I don’t think there’s such a thing. I think that there’s, you know, either a war of all on all, or there’s some sort of backstop where society is saying, these are the rules we will play within.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a few points I would have in response. Personally, I would say we have to distinguish between, let’s say law and legislation as Hayek said. So there can be law that is kind of agreed on, but that’s not necessarily the same thing as government top-down legislation. And I could also argue that perhaps, you know, it just coincided that, you know, we’ve seen these big nation States and the drop in the interpersonal violence, but really that interpersonal violence has come down because we’re more prosperous and we see it there’s more to lose by fighting and we can gain more by trading kind of thing. That’s a few ideas that come to my mind. But Robert let’s hear from you.

Robert Breedlove:

Yeah. So I think it’s probably, this is a difficult juncture in the argument as well, because we are talking about something that has never existed before. But I’d like to remind the listeners that when the agricultural age began, there was no record of past events from which to draw any perspective of the future. Like we didn’t even have a Western conception of time divided into seconds, minutes, hours to measure out years. Foragers in that time they lived in the eternal present without calendars and without written records at all. It wasn’t until the agricultural age began that all of a sudden we had savings in the form of grain and food, cattle that we actually began to create written records to measure those savings, which actually underpinned the development of written language and tax code. Right. All of these things. So to say that it’s never happened before, so it could never happen is just, I think totally ignorant, frankly and Austrian economics to argue that it was theoretical actually, maybe that is partially true because I think Austrian economics in its totality was mostly theoretical before Bitcoin, because there was no way to maintain free market integrity in money, right?

Robert Breedlove:

Every monopoly on violence, like it went hand in hand, every monopoly on violence always controlled the currency. They always controlled the money because that is the most powerful tool in the world. And we didn’t have this sly roundabout way that Hayek alluded to before Bitcoin. And, you know, to Jesse’s point that there’s this implicit set of rules that prevent people from just stabbing you and running off with your money. I mean, that’s what Bitcoin is, right? Bitcoin makes it impossible to just stab you and run off with your money. You can’t do it. It’s money that cannot be stolen. And we have a society premise on money that can’t be stolen. It creates incentives for hard work, right versus money that’s easily stolen, like Fiat currency actually pushes society towards a kleptocracy. And I think in that sense the divergence here is that Bitcoin is satisfying.

Robert Breedlove:

These rules that are implicit to capitalism work in a lot of ways, right? It’s got a non-violence resolution built into its network. It is a private property, right? That is agnostic of government and cannot be compromised, forcefully. And it is an honest money, right? It is providing all of these features that capitalism was intended to do originally. And in doing so it’s augmenting or even reducing the need for our reliance on governments protecting private property rights and monetary rule sets and things like that. So, and in that sense, I view too, this is not just it’s no longer theoretical, right? The emergence of Bitcoin as the fastest growing asset in human history. I take that as a market signal that Austrian economic theory, quote unquote, the Austrian economic theory of money is out competing the Keynesian quote unquote theory of money in real time.

Robert Breedlove:

Right. And as a student of the market, like, I think it’s very important for everyone to listen to the market. The market is the collective expression of the total intelligence of the world. It’s always smarter than you. So to not listen to it would just be the height of ignorance. And, you know when we talk about comparing Marxism to Austrian economics, I think is completely backwards. The Marxist slogan was from each according to their ability to each according to their need, which is something that sounds great and utopian and whatnot, but he neglected to pay attention to Aristotle’s was from thousands of years ago. That said, when everyone owns everything, no one takes care of anything, right? Without private property rights, individuals have no incentive to take care of anything or to plan for the future. There’s no profit motive to organize society.

Robert Breedlove:

So Austrian economics is the opposite of Marxism. Marxism says we’re just going to place all of our eggs in this basket of nationalistic, faith and devotion. Whereas Austrian economics says we need to maximize individual sovereignty and respect for private property rights, such that each person takes care of the domain that they’re in charge of, right. That the sphere of knowledge and territory that they can control and manipulate that’s how you create a productive, safe, and peaceful society. And one last point that you were saying that totalitarianism works, totalitarianism has never worked, right. It works in the short run, but they always just explodes. It explodes in warfare and collapse. Right. We’ve seen it everywhere that it’s happened Soviet Russia, Germany Cambodia even in China, like they’ve had to augment their authoritarian command with free market principles specifically in the market for food.

Jesse Lawler:

I’m talking about works on these couple of weeks, couple of months.

Robert Breedlove:

Well, the moral of the story,

Stephan Livera:

Well sorry, Robert, just finish off your point there, and then we’ll go to Jesse.

Robert Breedlove:

Yeah. Just saying to argue that totalitarianism works, I think is extremely misleading. It is not a sustainable socio-economic model. The only thing that’s proven to be sustainable and generative of wealth is the free market paradigm.

Stephan Livera:

Okay. Jesse let’s hear from you.

Jesse Lawler:

I think there are obviously lots of different stable forms of government that existed throughout human history. I mean, we know that like Hunter gatherer tribal life is long-term sustainable. I mean, I don’t think there’s any argument that.

Robert Breedlove:

it’s not a government.

Jesse Lawler:

Says who, I don’t think those people have rules about the proper behavior and things that you can do that are approved of, or that would get you kicked out of the driver.

Robert Breedlove:

That maximizes self sovereignty, just like the digital age, we’re moving back into.

Jesse Lawler:

You’re pretending that that’s not a government. I don’t understand

Robert Breedlove:

It’s a government. If you want to use that word that maximizes the sovereignty of the individual through the symmetry of access to tools and knowledge, and that’s the world we’re moving into with digital tech.

Stephan Livera:

I think one thing to clarify here is just around maybe if we were to distinguish between government and governance, right? So we can have private forms of governance that are not necessarily the same as the nation States of today. And it’s also important to clarify here that it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s going to be zero violence. I mean, I think in the capitalist libertarian view, it’s more like defensive violence is acceptable if the other person has initiated aggression. Right. That’s the general kind of idea there. So it’s probably useful just to clarify that point there. So Jesse, what’s your view there on that concept of private governance as opposed to government?

Jesse Lawler:

I guess I just sort of view these things, not as sort of ideas on a continuum. I see, like, you know, the smallest government being like a family unit, like I have, you know, probably governmental authority over my 13 year old daughter right now, just by virtue of being the head of the household. Whereas, you know, the largest governments we have now would, would be, you know, the super nation States, I guess, you know, China or India right now. And there’s obviously a sliding scale to all sorts of types of governments you know, between those two, those two poles. I think we could probably get lost in the weeds for a long time arguing about the difference between governance and government. But I guess like the private government idea I don’t see as being in line with what we know about how humans behave for the simple reason that like for everything to be opt in would essentially mean that everybody in society, whether they like it or not is forced to become a contract attorney.

Jesse Lawler:

And instead of you know, knowing that there’s some consumer protection laws, so my mobile phone company, can’t totally rob me blind and take my money and not give me cell service. I would need to actually read through the 13 pages of a small font print that I get when I sign up a mobile phone deal and things like that, because technically, yeah, I’m opting into that, but nobody reads that stuff and nobody wants to read that stuff. And the reason that we feel comfortable doing it is because we’re kind of pretty sure that there’s some kind of late government backstop. And like, if the company completely ripped me off, I could sue them in court. And like, because of that, like that ease of convenience in my life, I don’t need to be a contract attorney. I don’t need to know all the fine points of each person that I interact with and how they might secretly screw me that I need to work into a contract.

Jesse Lawler:

And that makes my life infinitely more, more available to me time wise to specialize in like one or two things that I really want to get good at, and that I might be able to be of some service to society. I think where the, the kind of, you know, opt in libertarian snake starts eating its own tail is the idea that everybody is self-sovereign. And yet people also still have time to specialize in a way that we know benefits society overall, because a few people can get really, really, really good at some specific things. I see those two things as being completely at odds with one another. If everybody’s got to be a contract attorney, if everybody’s gotta be, you know, making sure that their defensive robot is ready to shoot their neighbor, if their neighbor infringes upon them, then nobody has time to like, get really good at, you know, writing the next book or coming up with the next invention.

Stephan Livera:

But wouldn’t you also say then that now in a democratic socialist world, or in a world where democracy is accepted, then you are expecting that people spend a lot of time following politics or following all these, you know, reams and reams of regulation that have been written in, for example, in the EU, there’s a lot of regulation written that also makes it very difficult for people to do business. So I don’t think that, I wouldn’t really accept that argument. I think it’s not really clear that having a government is somehow going to simplify things for us. In many cases, it actually makes it more complex and more, more friction, more difficult for us to actually produce and be productive. But look, I think we are sort of starting to get to time. I think it’s probably a good point here to have a closing argument or a closing statement from each side. So Robert, did you want to kick us off there?

Robert Breedlove:

Yeah, sure. Just to dovetail on the last point in the Cicero said the more laws, the less justice. When we create a quote unquote market space for appeals and excuses we are likely to get a lot of both. And I think that’s what the world has become in a lot of ways that, you know, the growth of the top down government through the mechanism of Fiat currency has led to a proliferation of legal and tax complexity that has drastically reduced justice, right? We’ve become very litigious, we’ve become softened by the nanny state. I just don’t think that anyone that believes that the government support systems are the source of their individual integrity as a market participant, I think has just been indoctrinated by, government propaganda, frankly. I just completely diametrically disagree with that. And I would say to speak to the difference between the governance system, which would be you know, apparently any mode of human organization, according to Jessie, like your family all the way up to the nation state.

Robert Breedlove:

I think that the core difference for me is, are the rules voluntarily adopted consensually, or are they in voluntarily imposed, right? That’s the core defense. Now in your household with a child, clearly there’s a bit of a little tyranny going on there that sort of slowly becomes more free-market as she grows up. But between consenting adults, I think the best, most pragmatic and moral strategy for human organization is one in which the rules are voluntarily adopted, right? And this gets into the, there’s a great book called exit or voice, or you can basically voice your discontent, with a set of rules. And if you can’t reach a reconciliation, you can exit, right. That’s what we call it, forking in the Bitcoin world. And I don’t, I disagree that you’d have to be a lawyer to deal with these things, because again, you know, say your cellphone contract, because again, a lot of that fine print is driven by the legal complexity inherent to a Fiat economy.

Robert Breedlove:

So as a kind of a closing argument, I’m arguing about this in a lot of my writing that free markets are generators of truth, right? And they’re creating accurate and honest price discovery, they’re encouraging innovation. And then they’re encouraging the, the embodiment of individual virtue, right? Like you can only earn value in a true free market economy by serving your fellow man. Right. There’s there’s again, when I say true free market economy, I mean, Bitcoin enabled economy and one in which you cannot go and steal money from others nearly as easily as you can say the current economy. So that way I think we move back to this world that puts more of an emphasis on truth, on trust, on collaboration, on reputation. And we get out of all of this legal complexity and one that just is more in accordance with natural law, right.

Robert Breedlove:

And we start to operate on a lot of the heuristics and protocols that ancient civilizations use. And yeah, general thesis is that if you haven’t read the sovereign individual, read it’s, they’ve drawn on a lot of historical examples of how society has radically changed based on the shifts and the power equation, or the logic of violence inherent to society based on a number of mega political variables. And if you don’t see by now that the digital age is radically changing our trust models and our systems of human organization, then I think you’ve been living under a rock and there’s no sign that these changes are going to abate any time soon. And it’s very likely we’re moving into a future that’s never before seen. Or I do think the sovereignty of the individual will be maximized and the self arrogated sovereignty of the nation state will be minimized.

Stephan Livera:

Fantastic. Jesse, let’s hear it from you for the closing argument.

Jesse Lawler:

Yeah. I’d like to go back to an idea that I thought that was actually a really interesting one that Robert dropped earlier about the high seas and how they’ve been historically too cost prohibitive basically for governments to get control over and how that is in some ways, similar to what we see now with the digital space similar to the high seas there are other places that it’s been difficult for governments to get control of Intel. You know, the mid part of the 20th century, the planes in the area that is now Phoenix, Arizona was so hot and inhospitable that other than some planes Indians that had an extremely low population density, but did manage to eke it out there. It was basically a no man’s land. And now Phoenix is something like the fifth biggest Metro area in the United States.

Jesse Lawler:

And why is that possible? It’s possible because in the mid 20th century, basically it got cost competitive to have air conditioners in people’s homes. And so now everybody lives in their little air conditioned bubbles, and all of a sudden where, you know, that there’s no way that the state could have had control of Phoenix, Arizona, you know, 150 years ago, you know, other than just, you know, nominally having some Sheriff’s cars drive through and check everything out with a spotlight. Now, the state has full control all because of, you know, the progress of technology. I think that there’s every reason to expect that technology will continue to advance and that what might feel like the high seas or you know, a latter day, Phoenix, Arizona now might wind up feeling a lot more like something that the government is, you know, big G government is going to be able to, you know, get control over as they have with other, you know, former frontiers. Frontiers get encroached upon that’s.

Jesse Lawler:

That’s why we call them frontiers. And there’ll be new frontiers that we were not even aware of yet. But I just think that I’m assuming that Bitcoin is some sort of end of history type event and that it changes everything and that everything else isn’t going to have a countermove is you know, it just flies in the face of everything that we know about the world. I love, I don’t want to come across as an anti Bitcoin guy, and I certainly hate central banks as much as the next Bitcoiner, but I don’t think that central banks are the essential element of the state surviving in the 21st century. I think that States will adapt. And I think that they are wildly and very adaptable will be very adaptable beasts.

Stephan Livera:

Great points there. And I think it’s really been a really fascinating debate. And I think you’ve both made some excellent arguments. So just as we close it out, make sure the listeners know where to find you. So Robert, where can we find you online?

Robert Breedlove:

So you can find me on Twitter, which is my handle is my last name, which is @Breedlove22. You can also check out our website, parallaxdigital.io. And I post most of my writings on medium where I keep my blog and I also just launched a YouTube channel. So you can find the link to that and my Twitter profile.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent. And Jesse?

Jesse Lawler:

You can find me on Twitter @lawlerpalooza. That’s my last name, spelled LAWLER. And Palooza spelled like a, you know, Lollapalooza and yeah, I just want to really thank both of you. I especially want to thank Robert cause I did sort of, you know, troll him a bit on Twitter and for agreeing to you know, debate me in this format, I really appreciate you’re letting a Twitter troll become a you know, a debate combatant. I very much appreciate that. And of course appreciate Stephan for hosting this.

Robert Breedlove:

Yeah, Thanks Jesse. I’m glad actually, we did this. I truly believe that the sovereign individual is one of the most important books people can read in the 21st century. I think I’ve mentioned it on every episode that I’ve been on. So I hope this helps spread awareness about its importance and the world we’re moving into and as always, thank you, Stephan as well.

Stephan Livera:

Thanks guys.