The Right To Privacy And Encryption

Market Disruptors podcast. Today, I'm sitting down with Rob Biglione, co founder and CEO of zen Labs, and we are talking about their Privacy coin, privacy platform, and privacy overall, the need for privacy. We're talking about what the US government is talking about encryption, putting in backdoors, why privacy is important, what that fight of encryption looks like, and then we get into some other topics. Rob is a pH d in economics, so we get into economics, Austrian economics,

and so much more. It's a great conversation with Rob, and just go ahead and jump right into it. Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Market Disruptors Podcast. Today, I am joined by Rob Biglione. He is the CEO, co founder of zen Labs, Horizon Cryptocurrency, and he's got a very good background before that as well. It's very interesting. We're gonna dive into UM but let's get into it. Welcome Rob Hey, thanks for having me appreciate it. Yes,

we've got a couple of conversations in the past. It's always a pleasure to talk. So thanks. Thanks for coming back on UM. So I've got to know you pretty good over the past. But for people that are listening for the first time, why don't you give us your background, which I think is very interesting in kind of your path into cryptocurrencies and what you're working on right now.

Totally So at my background, Actually, I started my career as a physicist and mathematician working UH with the military. So I was an Air Force officer, worked in Air Force Space commander, working on satellites and intelligence systems and rockets that launch them up. And from there I went into the more of the operational side of the intelligence world and actually parked myself in Afghanistan for a couple of years doing initially a counter i E ed mission.

It was really quant a quant intel work, and then started working with a bunch of different parts of the military and a bunch of different missions over there UH, and then from there I got lucky enough to have the opportunity to go back to academia, so I left that world, went back to from my PhD in financial economics, and I had a very good departments that allowed me to study bitcoin. I was studying asset pricing specifically, and then they allowed me to actually look at bitcoin asset pricing,

so that was fun. Um. They hired me back as an adjunct faculty member to teach bitcoin in boxing applications and finance, and then I launched zen cash back into the seventeen with my cocount row first Loose and we ran that as an open um, you know, public boxing system for a couple of years, and just recently in this January, we launched an off shoot, basically a commercial offshoot called Horizon Labs, which is really taking the base protocol technology that we've created there and we can talk

about that, but bringing that to the commercial domain and really just trying to get that next level exposure for the tech and then the real economic use cases. So um Horizons in which used to be zen cash, now Horizon is a is a privacy coin right forked off of z cash and z classic, etcetera. But you have your privacy coin, and then you went on to become more of a privacy protocol where you could build privacy

applications such as private messenger, private storage, etcetera. So it's not what you're talking about taking that layer and putting that out of Rising Labs. That's exactly right. So actually, to be specific, we're we're a few months away now from releasing an alpha of our side chain protocol. So the way that we're looking at this, and really the that pivot from a privacy coin to a platform is

via side chain. So the way we look at it is we want to create a hub and spoke sort of model where you have a very stable, secure main chain and then you have all the applications of the logic and business logic and anything that you want to do bespoke, um, you can do on a side chain, and you can have your own side chains. You can have any number of side chains. Really that that part is not really bounded um and then it doesn't the stuff that happens on the sessions doesn't necessarily clog up

the main chain. All that goes to the main chain is basically the security feature. In the fact that's consensus on the side chains the met So this is our our solution for skillability basically and really where I think we will be industry leaders once we're release this because it's a truly unfederated side chain system. And when we talk about philosophy and you know, what we're doing later in the show, we can talk about that, but I

think it's really important to be truly decentralized. And the side chaine systems on the market to date have been centralized, so those where you have to rely on trusted nodes or trusted certifiers. Ours is truly decentralized, one where the main chain doesn't even have to know what happens in the side chain. No one approves or you know, authorizes

of the side chain to exist. It's just any aptive offering and take our toolkit, launce there on blockchain is the horizon side chain, and do whatever they want on that chain and still retain the security properties of you know, our public architecture. Interesting, so a lot of times we'll see, like with Lightning for example, as a side chain of Bitcoin, Lightning is more centralized and solutely yeah less, it's less

it's you know, it's less secure than the decentralized main chain. Um. So typically I think of side chains is less less secure, right, Uh, but you're saying there's a way that you guys can keep a side chain but still keep its security or decentralization. There absolutely like massively secure. So we're actually using an interesting recursive snark technique for security and leveraging our thirty thousand nodes basically are are super and secure notes system.

They have close to a third about thirty thousand nodes right now like full nodes operating in the network, and they will be basically a competitive marketplace for them to be certifying nodes. So you'll have a massive note network where basically, um, you know, all of these notes will have the opportunity to act certifiers or forgers on on the side chains and also actively hunting and sent to byst the hunt for fraud uh and uncover fraud. So

it's actually extremely secure system. That's that's nice hybrid public private architecture. Yeah. I remember you guys had suffered an attack, um that you caught pretty quickly and you got really in front of which I really thought that the way you handled that was good, um, and you made some updates to the system, so um, I believe if incorrect,

me if I'm wrong. But after that you had updated system and even changed the way maybe the consensus work so that even though um, your chain might be, let's have less value than the Bitcoin main chain, it doesn't make it easier to attack. That's exactly right. Yeah, So

what we did was we modified the macomotive consensus. So instead of just being um, you know, I'll say, naively, just the longest chain role you know, the most the most proof of work, um, you know, dictating which which branch of a chain gets to be the valid one, we added a second check which basically provides a delayed

block penalty. So that so the attack vector for this fift one percent attack thing is basically you would have a neferious actor mining privately and then all of a sudden dumping all of these box of devine privately into the network and scooping the network into thinking that it has the most accumulated pro for work, and then they

can execute double spends. And this happened to us. We had a few double spends that were executed or basically, um, you know, a hacker or whatever you wanna call this type of criminal stole a few hundred thous dollars from an exchange it lists that. Um. So it was a terrible event, but not catastrophic. What it did was it really kicked us into gear to try to solve this problem for the industry and for us of course, so we added this second check. So it's really a two

checks type of consensus. Now it makes us much more robust. If you know, without it, then we are without it. Um. Now. Not not to say like bitcoin is massively secure because it has a ridiculous amount of per for work on there. We have a miniscule amount of work, but our penalty function, we can actually modulate that to be as escalated quickly be on it to be and right now it's you know, it seems to be more than sufficient to protect us.

Yeah that's good now. UM. I know, with new technologies we can't really envision the future because they give us new platforms to build new things off of. We can't imagine, but um, as best as we can. What do you see being done on these side changes at least now or in the near future. Yeah, I mean, so there there's a ton and actually are we we have a go to market strategy we have a great strategy marketing bad team, and they've already been carving out projects with

select design partners. So basically, right out of the gate, once our alpha's released, you're gonna hear an announcement for some key companies and projects that we're working on. Two showcase the technology. So for instance, one of them is a large digital invoicing company in Latin America looking at um integrating cryptocurrency payments, looking to do things like factoring marketplaces.

So if their clients have receivables or payables these notes, they can actually digitize them, you know, standardize them, make them transparent, and put them into an auction marketplace environment. So that's something we're looking at. By by doing that side chain, they have their own token exactly, so they have the token their own system. So basically, if if their system becomes massively popular, it's theirs. They control it.

And then importantly, we provide our software developer toolkit provides a basically a reference blockchain model and a whole bunch of tools, but they can modify the consensus and at any type of transaction type they want from there to really make it very bespoken configurable to their needs. Okay, yeah,

so so that that's one of them. Um. So also there's another projects looking at a factory marketplace seems to be a pretty hot topic, and another auction environment looking at a tokenization platform, looking at working with one of the main maintainers for a version of hyper Ledger that has an e v M UH and seeing if maybe we can put in UH an e v M variant

of hyper Ledger running as a Horizon side chain. So it just shows you the generalizability of it as long as UM an a v M an Ethereum virtual machine, so exactly right, So an Etherium virtual machine as a side chain on the Horizon main chain exactly. And in that sense, it means that any smart contract that was written on Ethereum would be compatible to basically just kind

of ported over to work with US. Now wouldn't interact with the you know, the Ethereum chain, but you're basically replicating the same type of you know, infrastructure that then they can build on us as an alternative. Okay, yeah, okay. Interesting. Um So you know when we talk about like bass layers and then we add chains and layers and side chains and all these different things on there, Um I

mean that's kind of how things scale. Um, what about like, um using like side chain or some sort of like horizon side chain to like add like a a privacy layer on top of a bitcoin, like a side chain of bitcoin. There's some sort of like interoperability like that. That's interesting. That's a really interesting question. We honestly have not thought about that. So that's that's something to consider. Yeah, I mean it's you know, there's a whole bunch of

other stuff. What I like about the side chain model is you can experiment with any type of system as a side chain, and rather than the launster room blockchain and figure out how you do this big big launching and convince people to run your software, you can just do it a small experiment on the side chain. Modify the you know, the privacy features, modify the applications you running their, modify consensus. Uh. It's an excellent experimental environment. Yeah.

You could almost like, uh, you know, I don't know, maybe wrap wrap the wrap the bitcoin with us in privacy coin and then uh and then add like a privacy layer on top of the bitcoin network or something like that. UM, I don't know, I've I often just thought about like you know, obviously bitcoin is missing a huge piece of that of privacy. It's a it's a it's a big glaring hole that maybe they'll get to

at some point. But then there's a good solutions like like uh like Horizon and I just wondered about that, But I'm not I'm not the guy to figure that out by any means. Uh, But I definitely understand that the need for privacy. You know, from your background, you were in the military, and I think you were working on some sort of like encryption stuff there or some sort of reconnaissance intelligence or something. Yeah, I mean definitely

encrypted systems, but really from the intelligence satellite perspective. Okay, So but encryption, and so you understand you understand kind of the need for that. Um, what do you think about the need for privacy and the maybe the war

on privacy that we have today. I think maybe specifically about um, you know, them calling for an end to encryption, right, I mean, so trying to stay above the line with the thinking is I I I've seen you know, the downsides of um, you know, or I guess said, there's a downside to people being able to hide and obfuscate, you know, bad behavior, right, we all know that no

one's trying to argue against that. I think you would be a big shame though, if regulators, um didn't I take the time to understand what we're doing and all of the social and economic good and value that comes with actually allowing people, uh, you know, privacy, which is kind of a shame or philosophically weird to say, allow people to have privacy, because I think we have a right to it to begin with, right, Um, So I guess my my persecative is there are bad people out there,

and bad people can do bad things. We all know this, and it would suck if they use their technology to do it. They use cell phones, they use dollars, right, they use all the tools that are currently exist. Uh. And yet we know that cell phones, you know, and encryption on cell phones is absolutely critical, and the abilities for people to communicate with each other has unleashed quite

trillions of dollars with economic value and social good. So I really hope regulators take their time to do their due diligence and don't overreact and take you know, these kind of like strong man examples of terrible scenarios and try to destroy the intern industry would just be a disaster.

I think when they get into those hyped up examples like you said, you know, like uh, I think it was Obama you said, you know, if we can save one life, really so we're going to destroy the entire constitution and and and and start a civil war to save one life, and then how many lives get destroyed after weigh the good and the bad and and uh and and it's almost like, um, you know, I could whisper a secret to you, and how are they going

to regulate that? But because now I want to share a secret with you over communication, now said it has to be listened to, right exactly? You know, yeah, I wouldna say. The argumentative technique is to come up with that. You know that that micro example that just you know is in your face. Look at this kid that was killed from this you know, predator who used encryption somehow. It's a horrible example and it just it listed at

list it's emotions. And then on the other hand, you said, hey, Constitution, Bill of Rights, you can't do that, and this kind of like abstract argument, and people just naturally flow towards that emotional argument, and it's easy to forget you know that. Well, if you violate human rights, and you violate the Constitution and Bill of Rights, you can have a whole lot

more destruction that happens. I think, I think we can see all the hot button issues, uh that that are discussed politically have gone from um, logical arguments to emotional arguments. So most of these things, uh, you know, I don't even want to say, but you know, whether it be guns or vaccines or whatever, Um, you can't have a logical conversation, even climate change, you can't have a logical conversation.

It's always an emotional one. And then you you can't can't reason with with emotion, right, Yeah, exactly, No, I completely agree, and and that's really a shame and it's insulting. Yeah, it's insulting. Curious though, UM, what you think about this attack on privacy, not from a philosophical level but from being a US based company? H what does that look like? Do you think? I mean, I'll just have you out this with, Hey, we're US based companies, so we have

to comply with US law. We have no intention of not doing that. But sometimes I don't I'm optimistic on it. I don't think that these strawman arguments and kind of doomsday scenarios that get pulled out out for you know, pr opportunities. I don't think that they're gonna carry the

day and we're going to see destruction of privacy. I don't think we'll ever see a backdoor on you know, iPhones, or at least one is legislated, And of course there's all those agencies that can do that with you know, illegally without us knowing, and then hopefully we catch them. M But you know, so I'm optimistic. I think that it's pretty it's pretty well established that code is sort of a kind of a freedom of speech element, and you can't repress code, you can't try to violate the

mathematics of encryption. Sorry, just doesn't happen, right, So I I I don't think we're gonna have this dystopian um outcome. I really hope not. Yeah, I I would agree. I mean, they're gonna basically have to blow up the Constitution, right, I mean, yeah, exactly that that the argument will come back down to the right to freedom of speech, and and that's gonna be a very tough one for people to swallow. Although it's been interesting to see what's happened

on the digital Uh like the three D printed gun front. Yeah, trying to claim that freedom of speech as well. Yep, but what about um, I mean that would be affecting I guess US companies. But there's plenty of blockchain, cryptocurrency encryption stuff going overseas then, right right, yeah, yeah, absolutely so.

In fact, what I view as an imperative for US as a project and horizon and for the entire industry is we have to decentralize, and we have to decentralize fast, because you don't want single points of failure where it's the US government says, hey, Rob, we're shutting you guys down. Stop doing what you're doing, right, um, freeze money. I mean if if you have points of failure and you have humans in the loop, of course, um. You know,

let's not be cavalier about this. And too many people in the industry have been cavalier about the government's ability to, you know, stop these systems. And we can say, okay, technically you can't ever stop bitcoin, right it's it's it could be replicated by anyone with a computer, so you can't technically stop it. But they can make our lives hell and destroy a lot of lives, So we shouldn't be cavalier, um, you know, and I really hope that

never comes down to that. Now, we are an international organization and we are decentralizing, say our treasury, we want to decentralized decision making with the voting system, right, decentralize our note network from the tracking to the payments of it. We want to just decentralize everything so we don't have those constail here. And you know, I would love to be able to just be one of many participants in

this UM ecosystem. We see the we can see the contrast today now because of Facebook, right, Uh, they're being brought before the US government to testify, but there's no one from Bitcoin going to testify exactly. There's a glaring difference that, uh that has become very obvious you know. So, um, is that something that's in the roadmap for Horizon Labs or absolutely? Yeah. Yeah, So with the whole side chain thing, so we're going live within alpha in the end of

Q three slash early key four. We'll see how that goes, uh, And the whole point of where one of the big things that that allows us to do is we're building a voting system on a side chain, so basically where our treasury pool, we're democratizing and we'll have a way for people to vote on how the resources are used and how this what kinds of decisions are made as an organization. And then we're also gonna have another side chain that does our our no tracking payments and automating

all that. That's just the start. So we have to decentralize fast because we know that you know, whether it's in the US, and I don't think it will be in the US, but the leg parts of the world where what we're doing will be considered illegal, which is insane, right. I mean, we're we're building technology, we're united people around the world, We're giving people opportunity, and we're basically innovating, you know, economically, technologically, socially, and I can see some

systems that are more repressive trying to stop that. And you know, I don't want us to have points of failure where they can go after this points of failure. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean that's the problem with the financial

system as we know today is that it's permissioned. So you have to have permission to join at and a lot of people aren't aren't able to receive permission and two billion adults on banked and so there's this this exclusion and then of course there's a gap of equality because people can't even get into the system and uh through cryptocurrencies, whether that be stable coins or bitcoin or

whatever method they choose. Um, it's permission lists, but um, definitely they don't want that and exactly, yeah, it's shocking. But you know what I do think that what I love about this technology and other things that that I participate in, like C setting, is we have to make governments compete with each other and view us as as

customers instead of subjects. And then as soon as they start viewing their role as providing useful services, uh, and that we have many options, then I think that you know, they'll start competing with each other to do better a better job. And you see this in a way like jurisdictions. Think, think about that that that you just said, because I know you're I know you're deep into the libertarian philosophy,

so you can get this. But think about what you just said where they should look at us as customers instead of subjects. Yeah, yeah, there's deep it but but but but the government is servants of the people. It was supposed to be. But feel that way, right, right, But so we're going from wishing that their subjects or servants, but to now at least just at least treat us as customers. Yeah. No, that's that's just lip service. I mean, go into a government agency and try to get something done,

and then are you really their boss? Of course not No, no, I don't it's not yeah exactly, but no. But this is the line that's used, which is very misleading, is we don't control government. There is a very small subset of people, say a few hundred, you know, at the first level of control, and then you have thousands at the next level of control, and there are our bosses. Right, So it's not the other way around. No matter what can of rhetoric there is. I think it should flip

back around, right, Yeah, exactly. I was. I was in l A with Max Kaiser and he was he was he was talking to a small group and they were talking about these increasing regulations and whatnot, and he just basically the same converse station and he just said, look, the Second Amendment was put into place to protect against tyranny and if you don't think your government is representing you is a tyrannical and then maybe you should think

about that. And he just kind of left it like that, you know, not advocating for anything obviously, but just something to think about, you know. But we should have the right to change the government. But now we'd like it

if they could just look at as customers. UM. But I think that actually goes into something that we talked about before we started recording, where you would you would you had said you had gone from New York to California to Texas, and I'm in California and and those two states are the highest tax states in in the nation. I'm stuck in one of them. But you left to go to a lower tech state. We were talking about going to Puerto Rico, which is a behaven because it

can bring taxes down very, very low. And just the fact that UM, as a customer, we would go where we're treated best, exactly. Yeah, And there's a reason why so with Horizon Labs. In January, we lost Horizon Labs. And there's a reason why we chose Austin, Texas as our headquarters because they don't have repressive taxation. You know, it's it's a botching hub. It's emerging as a blotching hub.

You have key talent there, but people are moving there and relocating from you know, Silicon Valley traditional areas to Austin and to other parts of Texas and in states like that that are actually trying to attract people instead of you know, repel them. So it's it's that concept, like do we see it within the United States? You have states competing with each other. You see it with you know, internationally, countries start competing with each other, right, Um,

so I want to see more of that. I just want to see competition. You know. I'm not a fan of you know, uh, you know, replacing governments or rebellions and stuff like that, because you know, the reality is you and I may disagree with a government, and you know, the rest of the population doesn't disagree with them. They actually like that government, and then what what percentage you gets to impose its will on the other percentage? Right?

I just don't like scenarios like that. They seem to be like win lose, which is why, which is why the answer is less government, right, yeah, exactly, and everment Ever, men should be out of everyday decision. So, um, then instead of fifty fifty split, it should be like the majority of people don't have a problem with government because they're not really affecting my life that much, right Exactly.

I'm a big believer in, you know, the set of things the government does being as small as possible, because then you have the least ability for to violate people's rights and then to basically cause such discontent. So it's it's a different scenario because people that have discontent with the small government just wants to get something from government,

you know, whether it's for themselves or for others. Maybe they feel like they're being philanthropic by taking your money and giving it to someone else, but that's not real,

you know, philanthropy. So I can't said the word. Yeah, I'm curious how you came to have that viewpoint being a PhD in economics financial economics, because it seems like, and I'm not I'm not a PhD in economics, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, But it seems like from all the people that I know that are masters or whatnot in economics, Um, really teach in the school system is kind of exact opposite of what we're talking here, right, So they teach that, um, we should

be able to control the market, and we should have centrally planned uh policies to control the market versus personal um, you know, responsibility. So yeah, I think there's there's a couple of biases or behavioral biases that that play themselves

out in academia. One is, uh, academics really like to feel smart, right, you know, like basically we go through out our lives is like the top of our classes that are high school and college and all that, and we go into academia because we're good at it and we're always we've always been told our whole lives, you're so smart, right, And they kind of get off on that, and then it manifests such that we tend to gravitate

towards theories that have tractable solutions, like tractable but also complex, because it's it's a nice feeling to be able to solve like a second order differential equation and have attractable results. And not everyone in the world can do this kind of stuff, but you can and you have attractable result there.

So it's a nice thing because then then the next thing is the biases they like to everyone likes to feel important, right, and it basically lass hundred years, probably since Kan's and maybe a little bit before that, UM economists and academics started getting more influencing government because the things that they were telling government, we can control this, we can you know, overcome these problems that they kind of self identify in the market, UM by giving you

more power. Of course, politicians are gonna love that. Yeah, give me the theory that justifies that I have more power, of course. But true science though, and you know, so I know in the libertarian world and anarcho capitalists where all that that kind of you know I live in

you probably live in is um. There's this big academic dashing that goes on, and I think it's gone too far, like very very much too far by people that don't really understand what goes on in academia and true academics is true science where we do have a scientific method and we have Dad and his processes and techniques to

evaluate hypotheses. Now, there's too many, too many academics that violate these fundamental premises and they impose their opinions under the guys of academic credibility, like Paul Krug for instance, he's not an economist anymore. He was an economist and now he's just basically a social commentator on the left. But he's using his creditis that's when you reach the top, right, yeah, right, so, and that's a shame, and I think that that does

a big disservice to the world of science. Right but true, like true, academia should be just based science. Uh. And it's just really unfortunate. But there are amazing guys that you know, like John Cochrane for instance, my my favorite economist, finance professor out of University of Chicago. Now I think he's at the Hoover Institute. But the guy, the guy's brilliant. He wrote all the you know, or some phenomenal books and that surpricing. But he's a real scientist and he's

the kind of example that I look up to. But it isn't science is a science is not like fact. Science is some thing that's an evolving learning stage. Right. We're constantly testing and learning exactly. It's a process. And so you want to talk about economics as a science, but we don't have controlled studies, no, no, no, Yeah, the studies are are very very very much uncontrolled. I think there are some control studies or not, but they're very limited because the range of what you you should

extrapolate the results to be is very narrow. Um. But yeah, I agree, especially in social systems, their complex systems, So we shouldn't be so arrogant. I think that we really understand human behavior so thoroughly that we can predict everything. Uh and then and have you have you dived into the Austrian economics, then you've I'm a huge fan. That's where I came from. Actually, so that was you know that, that was where I came from before I went into academia.

And I still very much love love and you know the premises. I think Austrian economics to me is more of a philosophy than it is necessarily economic science. It provides a great um framework, but it is like a hundred year old you know, economic tool tool set, and there are there are more modern tools as well. Would

you say though? The big difference is that with Austrian it's more about human incentives, like personal incentives versus um traditional economics or kinsing economics being more like master planned and controlled totally totally. Yeah, So Austrians probably more micro and Kaanging is more macro, and I definitely think macro is more voodoo science because it treats it treats economics like physics and it's not. Uh, you know, so I'm much more of a believer in at the human level. Now.

One thing that Austrian economics doesn't have, although maybe there's a huge overlap, is the behavioral economics stuff that came about basically from uh, you know, from the economen in

diversity experiments that they started doing the sixties and seventies. Uh, and then some of those papers really blew open this whole you know, sub field of economics that I think maps in a way back to Austrian school of thought where we're actually looking at human humans as non standard economic agents, you know, because you know, if you want tractable you know, second order differential equation solutions, you need

uniform economic agents, and we're not all uniform. We don't have all the same utility functions that are easily mappable and tractable. Right. So I'm a big fan of where economics is going. Although the problem, there's a downside to that is you have some some academics that use this as like a toolkit to advocate for more control from government, which I think is the exact wrong outcome from it.

They basically say it's like a market for lemons. As as an example, you see this, you know, okay, nice theory that says that you should never have a secondary marketplace basically for used cars. No one should ever buy a used car because the previous owner or the current owner knows more about the car's condition than you. There's an information asymmetry, and therefore you guys can't agree on a price. This is the academic arguments, a famous art

you know, a journal article. Obviously false. We have secondary markets for everything, right, so obviously false. But if you were to just take this theory in blind apply it without context, I think you'd be completely wrong. And I think this is where unfortunately, a lot of policy guidance has gone well. It seems like in that analogy, but also the other policies that I hear, it always leaves out the human incentive part. And I think humans have

this innate ability. I have little kids and I see them on the playground and they're already change trading their bologna sandwich for the chips, like we have this, we have this like innate ability or desire to trade and to uh and do property and and uh. You know, everybody wants to preach equality, but at the end of the day, some people just are more motivated than other.

Some people want to work harder than other something and and uh and there's incentive there and so um when these these macroeconomic policies don't take that into consideration, and they they almost work against a lot of that incentives from from my from my standpoint. And even that car example, as you say, um, I may have an incentive to save money, and I may have an incentive to save money because I know more about cars than you do and I have an edge, right, and so you just

you just you can't that away from people. Yeah, and you know one other things that they're out there is there's uh utility to freedom, all right. I value freedom. So even if you were to just mathematically proved to me that you know, eating sugars that actually don't eat a lot of sugar, but say like eating eating fat is bad, you you go and prove it. You have

some theory us evidence. If you take away my right to eat a cheeseburger, I'll be pissed even if I know that it's not necessarily bad, but it's completely disproproportionate because maybe it gives me some value right now. And I know I'm not gonna eat a hamburger every meal for the rest of my life, which would be a short life, right, But freedom has value, and to just impose people on people, you know, the will of the I don't know. The Ivory Tower is a terrible idea.

Even if they're right, which I don't think they are, so well, they can't. They can't be They can't be right for everybody. I might be okay dying at forty years old if I can eat a cheeseburger every day, and that's my right exactly. I love cheeseburgers that much, and I don't need to live to eighties, So I'm gonna eat an every day and and to forty, And

who are you to tell me that I can't. I think I think it's a philosophical argument that, um, you can't make somebody's life better by taking away their choices or forcing them to do things they don't want to do, right, right, I'm very much opposed to that absolutely. I would love for them to say, hey, we can help you. Here, here's the plan, here's why it's bad, and try to reason with me education exactly. But you know, I think it goes. I think it just goes from a win

win into a win lose deal. But I think there's also a stark difference in you know, Austrians believe in saving and deploying that capital versus Austin traditional economics believes and spending for capital. Right, and so that's a big difference totally. And I think the reason why that's important to understand right now is I believe what bitcoin is doing is it's changing that narrative because we've never really

had a deflationary currency before. And I know this personally because I own bitcoin, and I know because I talked to other people a bitcoin. But it changes the way I think about spending. So might dollars. I have no problem spending my dollars yep, Oh, two thousand bucks last week and went to Texas with my daughter. Sure dropped too grand we on a trip together. No big deal. Those are my dollars. They're worth less next month. Anyway.

My bitcoin, I'm not selling that for anything, right, and so, um, and that's where we should be, right, we should be in that saving mindset deploying capital. And so that's a big difference, right, I completely agree with you on that. I really don't know where the nonsense of you know, perpetual deficits and perpetual inflation came from. I think it's just insanity. Um. Now you can see why it's supplied because it's really useful for politicians. Why would they ever

want to live within a budget? Politicians are too creative to live within a budget. They want obviously they want to spend more than they have right now because they're not responsible for paying it. So of course they're gonna gravitate to any theory that tries to pseudo justify that that nonsense. But it's not sustainable. No, But it's human nature. Yeah, human nature is always gonna want to push it as long as you can push it until you can't push

it anymore. Exactly. So, Um, you're not an economist, but you are a PhD in economics. Uh. But so, I mean, right now, we have this system where we have uh, we have this system that whatever you want to call it kenzie in or modern whatever, where we're building debt. We're spending money we don't have. In the next couple of years, we wont be able to cover the debt the interest on the debt um And now we have

this other system that's creating this deflationary currency. Uh, and we're starting to see the this, you know, the stink differences of that. All the developed world, not just the United States but the whole West at least, but most of the world is in the same economic situation where we're spending spending spending. Is there a way out? I mean, once they've gone down this path, there's really no way, Like you have to continue down the path, right, there's

no way I mean there. I mean, I guess you could wake up tomorrow and just change your mind, but that's likely not going to happen. So the reason that hasn't collapsed yet is because theoretically, they say, hey, growth will catch up and we'll be able to grow ourselves out of our problems, grow ourselves out of the debt. Right so far hasn't happened. We've seen a lot of growth around the world, but that actually incentivizes politicians to

spend even more. So you know, if they just spent less than we're growing, you know, and we got into less that per year, and then we were growing, would eventually be able to theoretically work ourselves out of it. Um, But I just don't see right now. The incentives are not there for politicians, so I wouldn't expect at anytime soon. I think we need more competitive governance, really, and this is why I'm such a fan of things like c setting and cryptocurrencies, because we can vote with our our

our money, now we can vote with our feet. These are really empowering things. There's never been a better time to be alive than today. Yeah, I believe we're in a very transitional period that you know, maybe a hundred years from now they will have this period written about in history books, where, um, what the heck were they thinking? Like, no, I totally agree it was a fifty year they did.

Like what the heck? Have you ever seen that video of like an alien comes to Earth and uh, some some encount terms his first human and the humans said, do you want me to take you to our leader? And the aliens like, what's a what's a leader? Like? Where does they lead? Where do they lead you? You know? And it's just really cool video it's like a cartoon. I highly recommended because it's a huge parody of I think a hundred years from now people will look back

on today. I think we're savages, Like, how can we live this way? How could we let people exploit each other this way? And by exploit, I mean really exploit, not these like weird fantasy terms of unexploiting you because I'm getting I'm making money. No, No, I'm talking about people actually taking you know, taking us and putting us in cages for smoking pot or you know, violating people's human rights, are stealing from people, like systematically through through

unfair taxes and stuff like that. That that's real exploitation. And I think this will be looking back on is barbaric and completely unnecessary. I agree. And to think that we have no um, no standard unit of account for wealth or value or whatever you want to call that, which really I think stems you know, at the at the base of all these problems. But um, yeah, good stuff and interesting. We could we could talk about that forever, but kind of we're kind of running out of time.

But um, I love I love what you're doing, Rob, I love I love the information that you're putting out, um, and I love what Horizon Labs is doing to increase privacy, which I think is uh is a big piece we didn't really get into. But from from a philosophical level, the privacy is such a big piece of an entire society. You can't just maybe tell me in a couple of sentences, why why you think privacy is so important to a society.

I mean, privacy is at the heart of everything. I mean, it's almost so big of a question I don't know how to answer. You know, how do you answer something like that, because, uh, you know, if you don't have privacy, you really don't have the ability to have any kind of freedom. Right. Um. You know, we can say you have freedom, but the second some authority doesn't like what you're doing, it doesn't like what you're saying, uh, doesn't like what you're doing with your money, right, then then

they could do whatever they want to you. So, you know, it's starts if you believe in freedom and you believe that human beings have a right to their own lives. I think you have to believe in privacy. And it's not about having something to hide, It's about having the freedom to have your own thoughts and um to people who think they have nothing to hide. The problem is is that there's someone on both sides of the aisle.

So it doesn't matter what debate you're on, pro life, for a choice, Democrat, Republican, whatever, there's gonna be somebody on the opposite side. And uh, and really it comes and it's more than just the decisions. It's uh, it's the thought and then it's the creativity that comes from that. Ye. So so anyway, I think it's a huge piece and I love it and and and that's why I really like the project and follow along? So where do people follow along? To learn more about Horizon and Horizon Labs

and yourself. So our website, Horizon dot global is the one stop shop for everything. But then please join our join our discord, join our telegram groups, you know, come to our Reddit page, participate, see what's going on, and we're always up there. I definitely encourage our team to be very active with the community so you can reach out to us directly. Please do cool All right, good stuff. Thanks so much for the conversation, Rob, I look forward

to it again sometime. Thank you, Mark, appreciate it. Hey, if you like this, episode of the Market Disruptors Podcast. Please help us take this to the top of the podcast charts. Just please do me a favor and rate, review and subscribe. Taking fifteen seconds to just leave a quick review goes a long way and helping us reach more people and disrupt more markets. I really appreciate you listening and I'll see you next time on the Market Disruptors Podcast.