the ultimate money making guide within Hogwarts legacy. Now if you're a brand new player or an existing player looking for that gold that galleon that money this video will have you covered within all bases. But now I have your attention people if you do enjoy this video leaving a like really helps out and if you like what you see and want to see more be sure to subscribe.  Okay so we're going to start with the basics and I know people are going to say this anyway that is just simply play the game. Now yes just simply playing the game running through the story the quests this and the other you will make that money but let me tell you for an absolute fact you will not make enough I've put 70 hours into this game people and if it weren't for other means I'd be one broke ass you need certain methods to earn that money otherwise you're going to find yourself short.  Okay so let's start for the brand new players and let me tell you for an absolute fact Ruvillio is your best friend spam this button out guys it is left on your d-pad but if you have one of those brand new ps controllers or an xbox elite you can assign it to a different button maybe one on the back so you can just spam it out wherever you are. This is absolutely beautiful in revealing hidden chests gold and many other things in close proximity to the player so spamming out that Ruvillio will reveal chests for you which will reward you gold two times out of three and will earn you a quick little buck so yes spamming that Ruvillio is a great way to earn not masses amounts of money but money early on another thing I can't get across enough and this is definitely for new players too and that is don't dismantle your gear only unless you have to and I say this because you can sell gear as soon as you get to Hogsmeade which isn't late on so all those chests you will be spamming that Ruvillio on finding that gear when you don't find that gold keep said gear doesn't matter what level it is obviously apply the highest level gear you get but keep the rest don't dismantle it like I said until you absolute have to that's if your inventory is full because again gear can sell for actual decent money especially that higher tier gear like that legendary and those epics that orange and purple so yes guys do not dismantle gear sell it instead to one of the many Hogsmeade another great method in earning money although this is semi-limited is to use that disillusionment spell which makes you go invisible and open those chests with those eyes now these are scattered all over Hogsmeade and all over the castle and all he uses is that disillusionment go invisible walk up to these chests and then open them again if you haven't got this spell the eyeballs will spot you and you won't be able to open the chests so go invisible open them and from every chest guys you get 500 gold in Hogsmeade alone that's for 5k easily just walk around Hogsmeade spamming that Ruvillio and you will find these chests all over the place so if you need a quick book fast this is a great way in doing so now the best method in this game without a shadow of a doubt is capturing those beasts and then selling them to the brood and peck vendor within Hogsmeade each beast you do catch will give you 120 gold and well there's an easy farm to do this which just makes life so much easier this is by far the quickest method in the game ignoring that gold there's no to which way is a ballot but you all need to get to a stage in a game where you can actually capture these that means you need the knapsack a knapsack is rewarded to you from a deak quest line called the elf the knapsack and the loom this isn't a late on mission i mean it's probably one of the earlier missions you'll get a mission for professor weasley called the room of requirement upon you doing this quest you'll then start a quest line for deak where the first one is actually called the elf the knapsack and loom where your goals are and he teaches you about capturing beasts and bringing them back to your vivarium finish this quest and you get your knapsack then from here guys you are free to farm those beasts now when you first get your knapsack you are tied to i think it's just 20 or 21 slots within your beast inventory menu so you can only catch 20 at a time and then sell these but that's still 2400 and the farm i'm going to show you guys means you can more or less do this in probably five minutes which is great in regards to efficiency now your beast inventory slots will open up but you do need to progress deak's quest lines even further as well as the main quest line because you will need to get to a stage of doing the high keep where you rescue your hippogriff this will give you 15 extra slots you then need to do deak's final quest called the phoenix rising quest where you rescue that phoenix that legendary bird you'll get an extra 10 slots for this and then guys progress to sandbaker's trial which is one of the last missions in the game within this mission you'll come across the lord of the shore this is the grappon upon you basically working with a grappon i ain't going to spoil it for anybody the grappon then becomes your mount and you are given another 10 slots so in total guys you can have 50 plus beast inventory slots meaning guys you can farm 6000 worth of gold at a time so keep that in mind guys but even still if you've just got your nab sack you can still take advantage and earn fast gold and to do this guys you'll want to come to this point on a map right here because right above this guys is the best den to farm these beasts this puff skin den right here is utterly incredible you can capture all of these beasts i believe there's between six and eight here in a matter of a minute if that's and once you've done this people once you've caught all the beasts from in this den simply jump out on your broom go to the point i go to right here on the map skip time just once once you've done this go back to the den and all those little critters will ever respond and you can rinse repeat these guys until your beast inventory is full now what i will say is make sure you capture all of the beasts within side of this den i mean if you leave one and try and reset it sometimes it can mess up so make sure you capture all of these beasts before you do that reset to make the little bastard's respawn yeah this is a great great farm for these little beasts meaning you can then go to the brood and pecker a vendor within hogsmead and sell everyone you've caught for 120 each and in maximum money real real quick now lastly guys isn't the quickest method in the game but it is a great way to earn that money afk and to do these people you need to have your vivarium open and have the ability to breed those beasts now the ability to breed beasts and where you learn about this is another deep quest which you will have done if you've done the phoenix rising quest this deep quest is called the foul of the dead this is where it teaches you about breeding insist on you going out and capturing two festivals then buying the breeding pen from that vendor within hogsmead and then it teaches you about breeding now whether you have one vivarium open or the maximum of four you can still take advantage of this now you can have four breeding pens within one vivarium if you've got four vivariums that's 16 breeding pens in total then all you need guys is 16 sets of parents doesn't matter what beasts they are they can even be puff skins go to that puff skin then capture 16 sets of parents one male one female eight of each and then guys apply those breeding pens to your vivariums and simply breed away and after 30 minutes you will have 16 babies these 16 babies you can then sell within hogsmead for 1920 gold you can do this while you do other things complete other quests do other challenges just breed away just leave them to breed and come back for those trophies and you can do this as much as you like you can put your controller down do other things in real life come back after half an hour sell the babies simple as that and it is a real easy way of earning that money again it's not the most efficient to actually play the game the previous beast farming method is way quicker but again if you're doing other things the afk if you got to do schoolwork college work work in general this is a great way to earn money where you don't even actually play the game so keep that in mind guys and there we have it five plus ways to earn easy money in hogwarts legacy guys if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really helps out if you like what you see and want to see more hogwarts be sure to subscribe and hopefully guys i will see you on that next one


to your host, Ms. Susan Barker. Hi, Mike, and hi, everyone. We'll get started today. This should be pretty interesting. I'll go through my slides here. Remember, during the webinar, if you have a question, please post it in the questions comments box. And I will make you catch it so that it can be answered by Tara at the end. And so you'll have plenty of time to answer all your questions and answers from her, and I'll post them along. So the very best way to keep informed about connecting to collections care is to sign up for the announcements. And Mike is telling me that this thing can help. Is that better? And you can also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. If you need help during a disaster, you can contact the National Heritage Responders. And this is their number. It's available 24-7. And Tara is one of those responders. And then you can also, if you have a question, you can post it on the forum and you get an answer. And you can contact me anytime. This is my email address, so I'm happy to hear from you. And coming up, we're going to do a Twitter chat with ARCs on May 1st about preventive conservation. So you can check that out to use hashtag ARCS chat and you get 8 o'clock Eastern Day like time on May 1st. And then our next webinar for May 1st is hearing for his story about what's coming up. And we'll look forward to seeing you now. I'm going to turn this over to Tara Kennedy. Tara is a preservation services librarian at Yale. And she's a member of the National Heritage Responders Working Group. And she is also not only a conservator, but she's also trying to surprise us. So I'm going to turn this over to Tara and we'll get going. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Today I'm going to be talking about working with disaster recovery vendors. And I kind of called the title of the presentation of Winning Ambulance Chasers, because I often feel like in these sort of disaster moments when you are probably the most vulnerable, a lot of companies take these opportunities to take advantage of people in their situations. And I'm not saying all of them are out to get you per se, but I think it's really important for people to be prepared and to be aware of the pitfalls and knowing what questions to ask and knowing what to look for so that you don't get taken for a ride on the ambulance. So without further ado, I will start the presentation. So you're probably familiar with the emergency management cycle picture here that I'm showing here. So emergency management in general aims to reduce or avoid, if possible, potential losses from hazards, assure prompt and appropriate assistance to damaged materials, and to achieve rapid and effective recovery. And this emergency management cycle illustrates that ongoing process which all organizations should plan for and reduce the impact of disasters. Plan for it to reduce the impact of disasters. Be able to react and immediately following a disaster and take steps to recover after a disaster has occurred. And since it's shown in a cyclical process like this because it's never over, even recovery, even after the smallest incident, can still inform people about prevention and mitigation. So the four steps, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery are all part of this cycle. The mitigation or activities designed to alleviate the effects of a major disaster and emergency or long-term activities minimizing the potential adverse effects of future disasters in affected areas. Preparedness, that's activities, programs, systems that exist prior to an emergency that are used to support and enhance response to an emergency or disaster. Response, activities or programs designed to address the immediate and short-term effects of the onset of an emergency or disaster. And then finally, recovery. The long-term or it can be short-term activities and programs beyond the initial crisis period of an emergency or disaster designed to return all systems to normal status or to reconstitute these systems into a new, less vulnerable condition. So when I'm talking about working with emergency recovery vendors, you could be technically working in any part of the cycle because that actually could be covered in any one of these four. But I'd be focusing primarily on the response and recovery portion of working with vendors. So that'll be the context of today's presentation. So what will I be covering today? So I'm going to talk about the services that are offered by disaster recovery vendors. What to ask disaster recovery vendors before the work begins. Appropriate questions, answers to those questions and which questions they may ask you. And how to know if the vendor is doing quote-unquote the right thing. Are they doing right by you as an institution and customer? And how you can prepare with a disaster recovery vendor before the disaster happens. So I will be primarily talking about disaster recovery vendors in the context of collections recovery. Now any recovery company in theory can try a floor, but not every disaster recovery vendor can try a collection of materials or be able to find the resources to do that type of work. So that's why, because, well hi, this is also called connecting to collections care. So that's one reason why I'll be focusing on collection materials, but also it's kind of the rare animal of the kinds of disaster recovery vendors, so to speak. Well the first thing I'll tell you, and anybody will tell you is in preservation or in emergency management, is to prepare in advance as much as you can. Number one, I think it's just really important if you can is have freezing facilities available, and that should be part of your emergency plan. Securing facilities that would be willing to freeze collections is really helpful, because freezing materials buys you a lot of time to make decisions, like choosing the right recovery vendor. Even a simple chest freezer that does not have an auto frost function can be sufficient for even just a few objects in an emergency situation. So that can be really helpful. Emergency supplies, including replacement housing. So having supplies on hand, including rehousing materials to replace wet damaged housings, like the ones I'm showing in this picture from a disaster that happened at the Yale campus, literally last week, that will help you to recover in the interim while waiting to get help from the vendor. And of course with every disaster themed topic, webinar or presentation, we're all gonna say having your emergency plan up to date is key. And having all the information current will make response that much easier and faster. And actually I forgot, I have a poll for you all, and I'm not sure if I can drag that over. Let me see. It looks like I can. So, poll number one. So I'm just curious to see how many of you have actually worked with a disaster recovery vendor before. This is why I didn't know if this would be sort of old information for you guys, or if this is gonna be something that would be, I need more information and want to know more about it. Okay, so the majority of you all have not worked with a disaster recovery vendor tool. So hopefully I'll have a lot that I can inform you all about concerning that. Thank you. The big question, which company do I choose? So we've heard all sorts of advertisements on TV, different vendors. The one that comes to mind living in Connecticut is the one, I think it's called Serve Pro. I should say, oh, okay, somebody wrote me a note that I can ignore, okay. So you can see advertisements on TV for a lot of these disaster recovery vendors. The one that comes to mind for me is Serve Pro, and it's the theme or their catch line, like it never happened. I think Service Master is another one that's fairly popular. But can they do the kind of work that you need? And especially when you're talking about your collections or precious family possessions, when these things are involved, this is not exactly going to be necessarily the right company for you. Larger companies like Bell4, BNS Cat, and Polygon, which used to be called Munters, I believe, are international companies, and they have a lot more resources. But still, just because they're international companies and large, you still have to do a little bit of vetting to ensure that you're gonna get the quality of service you need. And that quality of service will vary in terms of the independent franchise you're working with. So if one company carries a name, one franchise branch carries a name of a company, it does not mean that every branch of that company is gonna be of the same quality. So if you've worked with a vendor in Connecticut under Bell4 and you moved to a facility in Kansas, you would still want to vet the company under the name Bell4 in Kansas because they may not be of the same quality as the people in Connecticut or right first up. And do you need a full service vendor? I mean, what services do these companies offer and which ones do you need? I mean, do you need a full service vendor? Usually large international companies that fall into this category, like the ones I mentioned, they can do it all. They can clean up a facility. They can rebuild drywall and they can also coordinate document recovery. And often what they'll do is contact out to other vendors to work for them. And that can be helpful in a very large disaster situation where you have all vendors that work under one umbrella, so to speak, so you have one point of contact. Or do you need only a specialty vendor? For example, some vendors will specialize in audiovisual recovery, for example. So it may be a situation where you yourself have to coordinate the work of several specialty vendors and it will just completely depend on your collections that you have and the type of emergency. And vetting the company thoroughly, I'm gonna say this like 95,000 times, like during this presentation. So you need to ask for references from a similar institution or places that have had similar work done. And if they can't give you any names, you wanna move on to the next company. So I have another poll for those of you who have worked with a disaster recovery company. Who have you used? Got a whole bunch of names there. And yes, if you've never used one before, click that one, because I know the majority of you have not.  Cool, awesome, thank you, wide variety. What questions do you wanna answer that ask the vendor? So there are five ones I'm gonna talk about to start here and there are additional ones I'll have further on. So what document recovery techniques do you use? How long have you been in the business? Who will be my point of contact? As I mentioned earlier, can you give me at least three references? And what document security measures do you use? It is expected that the vendor will have a representative to come out to the site to see the situation so they know what type of situation they're dealing with. So you can have vendors come out to do an initial walkthrough or onsite visit and account setup and usually those they don't charge when they do that. And fees are agreed upon once the contract is set up. This is an FYI. Which document recovery techniques do you use? So the four I'm going to mention here are ones that are most often used. Vacuum freeze drying, desiccant air drying, cleaning and sterilization and digital imaging slash photocopying. So the best recovery companies are gonna use a variety of techniques to salvage wet documents because a method that is beneficial to one type of document could actually damage another. And you wanna ask the vendors for written documentation outlining their recovery techniques and describing their processes. Which I'm going to describe some of them for you here but it's good for them to also document, to give you documents that document their these techniques as well. So you have it in writing. So vacuum freeze drying is a great technique for recovering paper documents. It works using volumes using sublimation. So the objects go into these chamber like in this picture shown here frozen and then they are placed into this chamber which is freezing and a negative vacuum is pulled inside the chamber. And so the frozen water turns straight into vapor. So it's phase changing. They where we just skip the liquid phase of water. It's super awesome. It's great because it reduces distortion in paper while it's drying and it's really effective on coated papers like those found in magazines or in art books. If you catch it early enough it prevents the pages from sticking together like we find with some of the shiny papers that stick together. And you wanna be sure to ask for vacuum freeze drying only, not thermal vacuum freeze drying because that incorporates high heat into the process which you do not want. It's not necessary and can cause problems with your collection. So when people talk about vacuum freeze drying make sure that they're talking only about vacuum freeze drying and not thermal vacuum freeze drying. And it's highly effective like I said but not for all materials. A lot of the techniques I'm gonna talk about are safe when mostly talking about documents. Things like composite materials like photographic materials. It's not going to be appropriate for them. What will be? It's probably something more like this, desiccant air drying. So what that involves is usually working in place, working in situ. You seal off the space and you're bringing in extremely large dehumidifiers that dry the space quickly and efficiently. This is good if you have the space to do the work and you have a lot, I mean tons of material that need to be dried fairly quickly. When I was an intern at the National Archives, one of their storage facilities there was a large fire that occurred. And it was, it just seems like linear feet beyond the eye could see in terms of damage. So the techniques they chose to use was to put all of the documents in a space taking out a lot of them out of their boxes, placing them spaced out on shelving and they brought in these giant dehumidifiers that were essentially trucks that dried the space completely so that everything dried somewhat quickly but not so much that it would damage materials. And the reason why they had to do that because the volume of archives was so high as I say. And also there was a lot of mixed media. There was a lot of paper but there also was photographic material and it was hard to be able to separate the two out. So vacuum freeze drying really wasn't an option because of those two things. So we ended up doing the desiccant air drying. And one of the disadvantages of this desiccant air drying is that it does tend to cause distortion as you see in the picture here. So it's also not great for coated papers because it doesn't dry quickly enough. But in some cases, as in the case was for the National Archives, it was the best choice given the collection size and scope. So cleaning and sterilization, sterilization. I usually try to steer folks away from anything that's involving sterilization of collections. A lot of the recovery vendors are big on trying to apply whether it be deodorizers, ozone. A new one I heard was hydroxyl. Some sort of technique was hydroxyl and I hadn't even time to figure out what that was. And gamma irradiation, which is another method that people talk about for sterilization. I really recommend that folks not use these types of things but vacuuming with a HEPA filter vacuuming is really the best, safe, effective method of removing any dust, dirt, or mold spores on things once they've dried. These other techniques that quote unquote sterilize the documents and other materials. How they work is by breaking up or destroying bacteria, fungi, and viruses and they're all organic materials, but so is paper. So while it's breaking down the bad stuff that they're talking about bacteria and fungi and viruses and those sorts of things, it is also breaking down the objects that you're trying to save at the same time. So you're best off just doing the vacuuming. And asking them to skip all of the other extras that they're trying to sell you. So that is something I really emphasize talking to your vendors about because they will do it without asking oftentimes. And sometimes you find out after the fact that they've applied chemicals or have applied some of these techniques to your materials when you didn't want it to happen. So it's very important that you make sure that they do not do that kind of work if you're talking about materials that are going to be that you're gonna keep for the long term. Now for things that you don't need to keep for the long term, this is a digital imaging or photocopying is actually a pretty good method to utilize. So your materials have been that have been damaged were in flood waters that have been contaminated or extremely moldy and heavily damaged. And these are materials that don't have artificial value but actually have the value in them is within the text in the paper. This is a really good option. And there are vendors that will do this work for you. We had an archive here at Yale that we had acquired and there was one section where the paper was heavily damaged by mold. And there was no artificial value in the actual section of papers that we were talking about, but the information within the papers was super important. So we had a vendor do photocopies on archival paper to replace the original and the document recovery company destroyed the originals and we kept the copies, which would be safe for any patron to use. So like I said, it's a great option if you don't need to keep the physical materials and need only the information contained within them. Second question, it's a big question. A good question to ask is how long have you been in the business? So the best contractors in terms of their branches will have an established reputation. So you wanna find a vendor that has had at least five years of experience, as well as any industry certifications and ones that are members of professional associations associated with this kind of work. The employees that a contractor hires should be also receiving ongoing training and be up to date with the latest best practices. You also might wanna ask if they use temporary or full-time employees on site. Depending on the type of collections you have, for example, if you have rare books and manuscripts and you're gonna have people working on site, you should ask the company about their background check processes for permanent and temporary staff. Another important thing to know is who will be my point of contact. A good vendor will have a project manager assigned to you from the moment it starts and they should serve as your point of contact throughout the entire recovery process. And they will guide you through the process and assist with deciding what kind of work is needed for your institution and collections. And they will also help with logistics and keep you up to date on a project's status. One of the things about this industry is there's a lot of high turnover because it's heavy intense work. So people tend to get burned out so it's important to check in with your go-to emergency response vendor to ask about any personnel changes. Another really important thing that I've mentioned several times during this presentation is getting references. And as I said before, if you get any pushback from the vendor about them supplying you with at least three references, get assistance elsewhere. If the company represents you to do any kind of grief, that is a big red flag. You definitely should be seeking a different contractor if anybody is giving you any sort of grief or saying that the request is some sort of inconvenience. Checking online reviews as nowadays is actually a really good place to check as well. In particular, checking with the Better Business Bureau to see if anyone has filed a complaint against the company. And if there are complaints, the Better Business Bureau will list the actions that the company took to remedy the problems. And you can also check with peer or nearby institutions for recommendations if they've had similar events happen. And the references you asked for should be from institutions that are similar to yours. And you can get their point of contact, phone number and email. So if you have email, you can just send a list of questions and sometimes that's easier. But then you could also wanna have the phone number if you need to talk to somebody right away if time is of the essence. And you wanna have a list of questions that you wanna ask your references. Examples of what you might ask include how well did the vendor communicate with you? How clearly and frequently? Did you have any problems when dealing with the vendor? And if so, how were they resolved? What most impressed you about the vendor and its work? And of course, the biggest question is would you hire them again for a similar project? And finally, another big question to ask is what security measures do you use? Whether it's financial records, private donor information or an archival collection with restricted access, there's a good chance that your damaged documents could have sensitive information. So the company should have security protocols in place to protect your documents in terms of access regardless of where they're being processed. And these protocols include regular employee background screenings, using secure vehicles to transport items to different from your facility to theirs, clear chains of custody and defined security practices. And you can ask for these security practices in writing. The contractor should provide a secure environment during the recovery process and limit access to your documents to only necessary personnel handle them. And speaking of chain of custody of materials, tracking methods while items are at particular facilities is a really good thing to ask about. Do they use barcodes on boxes? Do they have paper lists? And this is also, as an aside, why it is extremely important to have your collection items at least inventoryed, even better cataloged so that you're able to provide a list of materials at the ready to track what goes out. The disaster we just had last week at our rare books and manuscript library, we were able to provide a list of the materials that went out fairly quickly because we had everything cataloged in our online system. So our head of access services was able to create a list and give it to the vendor and they could check it off as they went, as they pack the materials to go. And you do wanna ask us about storage security and environment, it's important to ensure the collections are stored safely and securely. And you can also ask to visit the facilities where the collections will be processed and where they'll be stored. So some other questions you might wanna ask the vendor. Can the work be done on-site or does it have to go off-site? Sometimes the work can be done with the collections in place. Sometimes it will need to be inventoryed, packed and spent off-site with the vendor. Molder mediation, for example, it can be contained within a storage space and treated in-house. It also can be boxed up and sent out to the vendor for cleaning depending on your institution's needs and the volume and other factors that may come into play when you ask that question. Do they own or lease their equipment? Ownership of equipment means that they have what they need already on hand rather than having to wait and get what they need from another party. So ask which equipment they have readily available such as dehumidifiers, freezer trucks, et cetera. And if they're a large enough company, they should have their own equipment. Third-party involvement, ask if they send your collections to other parties for treating particular objects. You may need to ask questions about those third parties as well. You'll want to ask for qualifications of these other parties, especially those who are calling themselves conservators or restorers. Conservators that are members of the American Institute for Conservation or AIC, let's follow a code of ethics, which includes properly documenting work performed. So it's really important that the vendors are working, if they are working with people who say they're our conservators, that they at least see members of AIC, professional associate members would be even better or fellows. And I've mentioned also permanent or temporary staff. Primary staff are preferable to temporary staff in terms of working, especially working on site if you're working in the stacks cleaning mold, for example. Temporary staff tend to be hired by the vendor per contract, and it may require additional security vetting, either by the vendor, you can require them to do that, or it may have to be done by your institution depending on the situation. But if you're creating a contract or an agreement with the vendor, you can actually specify that they have this particular type of screening done if they're going to use temporary or even permanent staff. And of course, the vendors will have questions for you. Their main question should be if we're talking about collections recovery is what type of collections are affected. The vendor will want to know whether you have unusual formats, like audio-visual materials that will require special handling or treatment. And they'll also want to know about materials that might require special security or have sensitive information. And do you have a priority list for your collections? If you don't, now would be a good time to make one. So if you go to the link that I have listed here, you will see a collections prioritization tool that I created to use at the Yale Libraries to help you prioritize your collection. It helps you and your staff prioritize collections in case of an emergency in an unbiased way by asking a series of yes or no questions which creates scores that create the priority. It's a painless way to create lists that has worked pretty effectively here at Yale. So I highly recommend people trying it and feedback is welcome. Facility amenities. The vendor will want to know about your facility. Do you have adequate parking? Enough electrical outlets. Is there an elevator if needed? Is it large enough for the equipment need to get to whatever floor this emergency is happening on? Is there a loading dock? I mean, basically they'll want to know the outline of your facilities that's affected. So floor plans are especially helpful for this purpose and having those readily available is important. And having those specific things marked out would be a great thing to have on hand. And insurance coverage is another big question. They'll want to know if you are insured through a company or if you are self-insured. Are your buildings and collections covered? Are they both covered? Are they on the same policy? Will your policy cover the collections if they're taken off site? As an aside, you will also want copies of the vendor's insurance coverage on file as especially if the vendor will be working at your facility. So how do we know if the vendor's doing the right thing? I cannot stress this enough. You need to agree on expectations up front. Before the work even starts, it is crucial that you and the vendor mutually agree and understand expectations on the work to be completed. Recovery vendors, they can do a lot, but they can't necessarily work miracles. So a memorandum of understanding, a scope of work document, project plan, whatever you want to call it. They're all potentially helpful documents for this to avoid this pitfall as it will outline the work to be completed and how it will be conducted. It's really, really important to have this because that is your go-to document if anything goes wrong. You said that you would do this. It says here, but you did something else. Here is the writing, what you're gonna do about it. So that's extremely important. And better yet, take that scope of work document, project plan, MOU, and put it as a contractual agreement. Putting those expectations in writing so that each party is held accountable. And I have included a sample contract for a disaster recovery vendor. It's part of the presentation. There's a link in the ambulance basers handout that you can download in the lower left corner of your screen. And it's really important to have an internal project manager having one staff member at your institution who is checking in with the vendor frequently and basically keeping all the balls in the air. Usually that's me here at Yale. So I can tell you how important it is to have that happen. In the disaster we had last week, we had a flood and the facilities manager and the second in command facilities manager for the building both were on vacation at the same time. So I had to manage the facilities, the collections. I had help of course from the conservation lab here at the library. But I had to kind of manage all these things and make sure that I kept communicating with the recovery vendor as well as upper level management. So having one person kind of filter all of this and keep all of that information getting to the right places is super important. I also recommend if you have the vendor working in-house if it's a long-term project, they mold remediation. Doing surprise drop-bys is always a fun time when they least expect you to show up just to make sure they're still following the rules that you set for us in the beginning of the project. And finally, it can be helpful to consult with a conservator before agreeing to anything. If you have anything that kind of raises an eyebrow for you or you're just not sure or comfortable with certain things that a vendor is proposing, you could always call the National Heritage Responders hotline and speak with someone who can help assess whether or not that is a good idea to do whatever the proposed treatment or process is. If the person you're speaking to on the phone can't answer the question, they have a whole slew of people that they can ask that they should be able to answer your question. So don't be afraid to use that phone number. It's not for just radical emergencies that it can also be for less urgent emergency questions. I mentioned some of this already too about preparing before the disaster strikes. You can vet local companies ahead of time and secure a company via the Request for Proposals or RSP process. So if you do an RSP to have a vendor on call before something happens, then you lose almost no time getting started. Plus you have the luxury of time to vet vendors ahead of time so you get the kind of service you want and need. And I included a copy of the RSP that I did for Gail to choose our disaster recovery vendor that we have on retention. It's in the bottom left corner of your screen, I believe. If not, I will get it to Susan. I'm pretty sure I put it there though. So like I said, they came in last week to assist with a flood in our rare book and manuscript library and they were able to come in, clean up much of the standing water and take some of the materials to be vacuum freeze dried. And we didn't lose a lot of vital time in the process. There are also many companies that have what they call their Preserved Customer Program. You can pay some of the money, it depends on the company. So you can be in the front of the line, so to speak, to be on their preferred customer list. But if you can't afford it and you tend to have a lot of emergencies too to poor building up keep, et cetera, it might be worth spending a little bit of extra money to have a vendor on retainer like that because they have to keep coming. It's worth having them on call. And another option, and I'm sad to say the list that I have isn't complete. Some states have contracts with recovery vendors that state agencies can use. So I have a few links to a couple of states that I could locate, but do look around the internet to see if such contracts exist for your state. The only ones I found were Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and New York. But I'm sure there are other ones as well. So that's in your handout. That's come to the end of my presentation. There's a lot of general information I provided, but I'm also happy to answer any specific questions that people have. And if I can't answer them right away, I'm happy to research questions and get back to you. And like I said, there are links and templates and other additional information that should be helpful to you that's available as a handout along with the contents of the webinar. So thank you. Thank you for your question. Okay, let's go through these questions here. And can you hear me? Let's see, Mike's trying to... Yes. Okay. Let me try to fix the sound a bit. Okay. Mike, is that better? Okay, good. All right. Okay, so Olivia Primanis said, from Austin said, with air drying, you usually end up handling the material more than with vacuum freeze drying. And that was more of a comment, but you can comment on that. You can. That's true. And it's depending on, I mean, of course, there's air drying where you're handling each object and doing interleaving and that sort of thing. For the, I'm thinking about these large term, these large disasters that it's the ones that I was thinking of, like the one at the archives, they did have to take the items out of boxes and space them out on shelving. So, yeah. And Rose Smart said, do you know of any instances where institutions in more remote areas have worked with a new recovery companies to establish or agree on protocols? And in connection with that, Sarah Hockey in St. Paul said, I have Bob Hirschowitz here. And here is what he said, we think that establishing or agreeing on protocols with every company is necessary. So, do you have any? I agree. Do you have any advice on what kind of protocols you need to establish for new people? I think I said a number of these things. Well, the contact outline that I provided as one of the handouts actually goes through very thoroughly. It's from the Library of Congress. It actually does outline a lot of the steps and protocols that you need to go through. So, that may be a good place to start. And it can also sort of inform, also the RFP is another one that that document I provided also was kind of the protocols you would need to go through. So, either one of those documents would be a good starting place for a brand new disaster recovery company. And just that will also kind of give you an idea. So, that document rose is down below in the handouts. And I'm not sure which one it is, but there's establishing a relationship with a disaster company and emergency response services for collections. Those are down there for you to download. But, Tara, what do you think are the most important protocols that you should get in line especially someone who hasn't done this before? Could you hear me? Oh, okay. Yes, I can hear you, I'm thinking. And you can't see, you can't see the thought bubble above my head, so yeah. Well, I think in terms of collections recovery, I would want them to be able to dictate how they think they would be handling the collection in terms of security, in terms of packing protocols. I would want to know what kind of methodologies they would be using to try to recover the material. I would want to, I mean, it's kind of like, I think you could ask all of these questions that I've already listed and get the information you need in combination with the RSP example and the contact in the Library of Congress. And Rose says again, in our area, operators are fairly new on the scene and use limited private conservator population for private art collections for volume. I don't think that they're up to speed and I'm not sure if it's worth it to pursue, worth pursuing as something that can be improved. So she's in St. John's in Canada. In our area, operators are fairly new on the scene and use limited private conservator population for private art collections for volume. I don't think they are up to speed and I'm not sure that it's worth to see and what something like can be improved. So part of what she's saying is that private art collection is really different from an institution, not collection. Yes. And if she has specific questions about a specific situation she's in, she may want to contact me after the webinar and because it sounds like she may be in a specific situation. She's writing something now, so we'll wait and see what she says, but we'll go on. Michael Nagy says response time is... What's the typical number of hours between discovery of disaster and items packed and out the door? And Sharon, Susan Duel said, Michael, this depends on the type and severity of the disaster. For example, if it is inside the institution or regional, it is also often dependent on having a pre-existing contract with a vendor. Yeah. That's it? That's it? So Rose says, where the market for the recovery of cultural materials is small so that the capacity might not be worth their while, the main market is domestic flooded house, for example. Yeah, I'm really not sure how to answer her predicament, so it might be something where we have conversation offline and she can give me more information about her situation. She says, sure, she'll do that. I think that would help. Kylie Maher in Honolulu says, wondering about case litigation examples that you could share that were in favor of the collection and then ruled in favor of the vendor and what happened to the collection or institution?  That might be a question for our National Heritage Responders list. I might ask them to see if anybody has any cases. Yeah, Jess, younger is online. Jess, do you have any resources on that that you could post? And while we're waiting for her to instantly respond, which she always does. Yeah, she says, yes, let me look into that. Okay, and if Jess sends anything, I will post it along with the recording, the resources and all of that. And I note that there's one resource that is not in the handout and I will add that before I post it with the recording. Katherine Owen says, if your state has a contract with a vendor, make sure it's good for your agency. We recently got a grant for conduct shelving which Missouri has a contract for, but when it came down to it, our agency wasn't covered and it caused a delay in going forward with the project. Yes, absolutely. So any of those links where I've provided that information, absolutely make sure that you actually can qualify to use the contract. Absolutely. Yeah, particularly if you're in it in a larger institution. Yeah. Yeah. I saw someone talking about West Pass and their training for this kind of stuff is great. And also I wanted to point out that disaster to recovery companies can be used for other things than disasters. I was working with a small museum that had its collections in a huge warehouse that had no dust control, no control of anything.   And it was like this Promethean task to clean up the warehouse and the collections. So I suggested that they hire a disaster recovery team. And once they got over, being annoyed with me for not giving them a bid for how much it would cost to have me do it, they actually had, I think Belford come in and clean up the place. It took them four days. It was so much cheaper and much more efficient. So that's something to think about too. Yeah. Wow. Absolutely. Great example. Jess is adding something here. Oh yeah, Jess was looking, because I clearly, or Kylie was asking for one where I went in different litigation examples. One was in favor of the collection and one was in favor of the vendor and what happened to the collection institution so this is if there's a problem with the recovery so that someone's bringing suit at the end. Yeah. Okay, well, if anybody comes up with examples, I'll post them. And are there any more questions? If they're not, I just wanna let you know that in June we're gonna do a webinar with Priscilla Anderson from Harvard about going over your disaster plan, reevaluating it after a disaster to make sure that it's gonna go. So it's about reiterating your disaster plans which is really important to do after a disaster. So look forward to that. Remember the Twitter chat on preventive conservation on May 1st. Next week on the Society of American Archivists is having a Twitter conference on preventive conservation and you can join in on that. I put that into the calendar on the website. And for all of those, all of you that qualify, remember that the preservation assistance grants are due on May 1st and you can get that information at neh.gov. And let me see, William Bennett says, asking a vendor what quality assurance methods they use to evaluate completeness of recovery, drawing or sterilization can help to avoid a hidden problem that could evolve later. And not, Jess also said the SAA Twitter conferences this week, Thursday, the 26th. Oh, it's in a couple of days. Yeah, so tune in for that. We're all learning about this new world at Twitter. So if there are no more questions, I think that's it. And we'll see you next month for this really interesting webinar on care of globes. We get questions about them from time to time and we have some really wonderful examples and people who really know what they're talking about for taking care of globes. So let's see. Okay, so thank you very much. Thank you, Tara. And I will make some amendments to the handout and the webinar recording, the slides, and the handouts will be posted in a few days. And you will know that they've been posted because the ad for this will no longer be on our homepage. That's always my sign that everything is posted. So thank you very much. And we look forward to seeing you in May. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you.


If the recent slide and the price of Bitcoin has sent many speculators scrambling back to fiat currency, it's done nothing to cool the fervor of Robert Breedlove, a self-styled freedom maximalist whose Twitter feed is filled with encomia to the inflation-proof monetary system with a supply fixed via the consensus of a decentralized global software network. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, he writes, Bitcoin cannot be amended. That's why incorruptible money is a greater instrument of freedom than the U.S. Constitution. Bitcoin, he predicts, will prove to be history's ultimate example of the old adage, when you can't beat them, join them. The 36-year-old accountant by training and former hedge fund manager is a leading thinker and writer in the Bitcoin space, where he publishes the Freedom Analects and hosts the What Is Money podcast and video series. Reason talked with Breedlove at the Bitcoin Miami Conference in April about why Bitcoin is the best hedge against hyperinflation, how Austrian economics informs his worldview, and why he believes that Bitcoin will inevitably become the basis of the global economy. No one's figured out how to stop Bitcoin, basically, meaning turn it off. And so if you can't turn it off, it effectively operates as this vortex of incentives. It's just incentivizing people to interact with it, to hold it, to save in it, build businesses on it. Robert Breedlove, thanks for talking to me. I'm glad to be here. So you define yourself as a freedom maximalist. What do you mean by that? Well, I think freedom is practically and morally the most important value in the world. I don't think humans can have happiness without freedom. And I think that Western civilization really is built on the pillars of life, liberty and property, which I define as the three temporal aspects of freedom. So to lose your life is to lose your future freedom, to lose your liberty, to lose your present freedom, and to lose your property would be to lose the fruits of your past freedom. And I think by just optimizing or maximizing freedom, and I say maximizing because this means to increase a metric at the exclusion of all of the metrics.  But freedom, in my opinion, has a limiting principle built into it. So if we all maximize our own freedom, our own wealth, our own optionality, our own happiness within the boundary or limiting principle of other people's private property, then that is the ideal world in my view. So I think freedom, maximalism is the way we achieve the greatest happiness, the greatest wealth, and the most satisfaction of human wants in the world. Does that map more onto a kind of libertarian perspective or an anarchist perspective, or are those not really operative? No, it is. It is somewhat of a synthesis. I tried to pull a term that was very clear. It was not muddied with politics.  A lot of people would perceive that as a political party, so that you're running for election inside of a political apparatus. Freedom, maximalism will be much more like anarcho-capitalism. So like low to no government. There's also a term called agorism, which is all human interrelations should be based on mutual consent. And we know this, right? The difference between a job and slavery is consent. The difference between a transaction and theft is consent. I think that mutual volition is the only sustainable binding for socioeconomics. So this is kind of like libertarianism in this reading is the ultimate consent culture. Mutual consent everywhere. No imposition, no coercion, no compulsion, no violence. Talk about how that then, why is Bitcoin the difference maker in all of this? For the first time in human history, we have a money that cannot be corrupted through imposition or fiat, as we might say.  There is, you can't even implement a coercive element into Bitcoin. It doesn't work. So it's quite the rabbit hole. It seems like for the first time, man has created something that man himself cannot corrupt. And it's fascinating to me that, you know, we've written things into software in the world that have in turn shined back into us and rewritten our own software. I would include things like the Magna Carta or the American constitution in this category. We wrote these laws, rules, principles to abide by. And that actually changed the way we treat one another. It changed culture. It changed the world, frankly. We've done that again with Bitcoin. We've taken this life, liberty and property triumvirate, if you will, and we've perfected it in unbreakable code. And that is because Bitcoin is governed by a series of rules by code. So there can't be more of it. Well, in a way, there can be less of it, right? Because estimates are that maybe 20% has gone missing and it's probably not going to be found again. Right. And every time you could also send your Bitcoin to a burner address, as they call it, would be an irrec, you cannot recover from the address, it effectively takes it out of the floating supply. That acts as just an anti-dilutive contribution to everyone. Right. It's like burning tokens. But the critical thing is it cannot be inflated. Right. And as I touch on a lot of my work, inflation is theft. We know this. If you own stock in a company, you wouldn't give one guy the ability to increase his own share count and dilute others. That's nonsensical. And by the end of this conversation, however long or short it is, we will have less freedom than we did at the start. We're all being robbed right now. I have dollars in my pocket. I'm being robbed right now. How old are you? 36. So you don't really remember the last big inflationary period, right? The 70s. While I've studied it, I don't remember it yet. What's your big fear of what might go wrong in the current moment? Because we're governed by people who, many of them were in power in the 70s. Somebody like Joe Biden was in the Senate. What is your biggest fear about the current moment where we're seeing inflation really kick into high gear? So in my studies of monetary history, I think inflation and ultimately hyperinflation, these are some of the worst events human beings can go through. The total collapse in trust in society.  We're so immersed in it, we forget to see how ubiquitous it is. But if you actually take note of it and then imagine if money failed, how many people could you actually cooperate with? It becomes a very small circle of trust, right? Even with inflation, there's the kind of Weimar Republic style stuff of hyperinflation, but even if at the end of every day, you start with $10 and you end up with $8 at the end of the day. Well, the Weimar Republic hyperinflation is just the crescendo. It's this long song of the basement that just culminates in hyperinflation when things get really ugly. People get extremely desperate or reduced to barbarity effectively. And in my studies of monetary history, I think inflation is this almost like a spiritual cancer actually. Like it rips society apart. It divides people. It induces bad behavior, right? When you're trying to outpace inflation, just trying to hold money be a saver. You can't even be prudent. You can't be conservative. You have to now take additional risk to outperform the implicit theft in your money. So it gives people a proclivity to gamble, to deceive, to rent the seek, all these negative coercive behaviors that freedom maximalism stands against. In your reading, what's the basic cause of inflation? The basic cause. Well, now I need to clearly define this because a lot of people say, oh, what do you mean? Netflix is $7 and it's not going up in price. People tend to think price inflation or worse yet CPI or consumer price inflation, which the government says is the number. First of all, if you study economics, you'll know that you cannot have a universal metric for inflation. It's as subjective as value itself actually. What are the things you're trying to buy? You're trying to buy real estate and Hamptons. Your inflation rate is 50% the past two years. If you're trying to buy Doritos, it's 2%. So I define inflation as any arbitrary expansion of a fiat currency supply within the aegis of a legal monopoly, specific essential bank. So when there's one group of people that can arbitrarily control P, increase the money supply, they can use that to confiscate wealth from all of those that cannot, that are depending on the dollar or fiat currency to hold its value. So it's purely and simply a mechanism for wealth transfer that's involuntarily imposed on people. In other words, theft. So Bitcoin, one of the great attractions of Bitcoin is obviously that it's outside the reach of central banks and it can't be inflated or deflated in the way that the Fed can do stuff to our supply. What do you say about the action of Bitcoin over the price levels over the past couple of years where one would have assumed that as inflation ramps up, that Bitcoin would become more valuable. And it kind of has, but also it's down from its highs and it seems to be tracking the stock market more broadly. Can you talk a little bit about how you read that? Yeah, so Bitcoin drew down to $4,000 in March 2020, which was the global liquidity to sell off subsequent to the COVID whatever you want to call it, pandemic or pandemic. Bitcoin today is trading at $47,000. So it's the best performing asset in the world over the past two years. I think it's doing exactly what it needs to do. Now, if you, people that get super zeroed in on the price, right, could have bought at what 69,000 was the local high. I believe so. Yeah. It's the wrong mentality. Bitcoin's a long-term saving technology. I think the best strategy to deal with it is to put long-term wealth into Bitcoin, just continue to accumulate a position. I don't advocate for using leverage. A lot of people do, but I think it's just very simply the best savings technology in the world. So if you're too concerned about these local price movements, then you're probably overallocated. Like I'm putting money into it that I don't ever intend to sell. I don't ever need to think about. This isn't current expense. I'm not putting money in there and trying to take it back out and time the market and all that. People that do that get burned in my opinion. What about the relationship between Bitcoin and gold, which in an earlier century or whatever, gold kind of occupied a roughly analogous situation to Bitcoin, not fully. But what's your sense of gold and why is Bitcoin an improvement over gold? I view Bitcoin as disrupted to gold, actually. And that's why I think it's so hard for us to get our head around it. I don't think it happens fast necessarily. Gold is still geopolitical prime money, nation states accumulate gold. If they go to war, they will confiscate one another's gold. They'll demand tribute payments in gold. So although we don't use it in our day-to-day affairs, we've all been excluded via the legal monopoly post 1971. Gold still really, really matters. And I think for the first time in history, we've been using gold for 5,000 plus years as money. We now have a 13-year-old digital upstart that is out competing gold, if you will. And the implications of that are just profound. But again, I don't think it happens fast. We've been using gold for 5,000 years. I think gold maintains a monetary premium for hundreds of years, potentially. But I think Bitcoin eats most of that in the distant long run. Let's talk a bit about how we get closer to a Bitcoin standard. What are the actual steps? When you talk about it, it's a long time kind of, it becomes the long-time basis for everything. What needs to be happening? And can we speed that up? Can we slow it down? You know, it's kind of ironic about all of this. I'm in Bitcoin education. So I'm trying to teach people what is property, what is money, what are these fundamental questions that we just take for granted often. That's like my main aim. However, my efforts cannot hold a candle to the pain that governments induce on people. So when they actually violate private property rights via inflation, or actually seize Canadian trucker bank accounts, or actually seize Russian foreign central bank reserves to the tune of $600 billion, the billboards that creates for unseasable, untouchable, unstoppable money is much louder than anything anyone like myself can do. So to accelerate it, I guess you can be engaged in education. But ultimately, I think people learn through pain, right? Pain is information. Yeah. Do you think we're going through a, is this going to be an extended kind of lesson in pain?  And the Weimar Republic, the 1920s hyperinflation we talked about earlier, people literally thought they were getting insanely rich right up until the very end, because you're thinking through this money, right?  When you diminish that unit of economic perception, this thing's going up in nominal value. So you think, well, I have more dollars today than I did yesterday. My brother bought a house, he's texting me, he's like, oh, my house is up 20% in six months. This is so great.  He's your brother, of course not, right? Especially if you're his younger brother. What is, you know, it is partly an education thing. Can you talk about the adoption rate of Bitcoin or maybe not the adoption rate per se, but like kind of it's expanding. People compared to, you know, 13 years ago, certainly more people know about Bitcoin compared to five years ago do, but like what's the level of general awareness, if not actual holding needs to happen? I don't know. I was told by one of my guests the other day that US Bitcoin ownership is now at 25% of the population, which would be ballpark 75 million that was much higher than I thought it was. You have to check my number. The question is, what does it need to be? When does it reach, is there a kind of tipping point? Or maybe we've already reached that. I mean, one of the things we were both at this conference last year, and you know, I think one of the takeaways from that was that Bitcoin is here to stay. It's not, you know, for in its early history, people would be like this little flash in the pan, this is like flues or other old cyber currencies that didn't last. You can't say that anymore. No, you cannot say that. No one's figured out how to stop Bitcoin, basically.  And so if you can't turn it off, it effectively operates as this vortex of incentives. It's just incentivizing people to interact with it, to hold it, to save in it, build businesses on it. Whereas fiat currency is doing the opposite, right? It's disincentivizing you from using it, holding it, all of these things. So there's this transfer of wealth or monetary energy from the network that is oppressing you to the network that benefits you. I think the tipping point and this my thinking here is based on a concept called the minority rule. You can read about this. Authors like Nasim Nicholas Taleb have written about this. When certain networks get to say a 4% of an intolerant minority, they can actually impose the preferences on the majority. Right. And his examples are things like how many products are kosher. Kosher is a great example. Even though it's a small number of people, but people who eat kosher won't eat anything else. The market ends up kind of catering to an intolerant minority. Exactly. And then even something like the body of scientific knowledge, we think that's really what's, whatever has been disproven, has been discarded. Whatever is left over is basically science. So there's this whole interesting dynamic with this minority rule across different categories that makes it, gives it this degree of conciliance. And I think if we apply that to Bitcoin, I would, I think that it's not number of people. I think this would be more based on actual relative capital value or market capitalization that if it gets to 4% of its total addressable market that it starts, it has this absolute rigidity of rules, right? Bitcoin rules don't change. So that would be the highest form of obstinate preference you could imagine, right? It has unbending rules. So I think, depending on your total addressable market number for Bitcoin, 100 to 200 trillion, if it gets to 4% of that number, I think things start to get weird. So that's a four to eight trillion dollar market cap. And it's a little bit below one trillion. It's around one trillion today. And for reference, gold's about 10 trillion. Now we think gold, I think gold is also heavily suppressed by governments in the paper market. So I think the real market cap of gold is something like five to 10x what it is. So we'll see. What are the technological innovations surrounding Bitcoin that you think need to mature to kind of make it more present and accessible to people?  Yeah, the Lightning Network solves a number of issues, right? In theory, I think is the network density increases, the transaction throughput can scale to theoretically infinite, which is really interesting, right? Anything like that before. It also adds a high degree of anonymity to Bitcoin transactions that we simply don't have at the base layer. There's a trade-off made at the base layer to optimize for 21 million. Really hard to have privacy and anonymity plus high degree of assurance of supply cap. So Satoshi made the trade-off for supply cap. I do think to have Bitcoin functioning as a medium of exchange, you need something like Lightning Network working. However, you don't necessarily need Bitcoin functioning as a medium of exchange for it to succeed. It can just be the savings technology and eat a lot of wealth in the world, right? Just giving people a mechanism to preserve economic energy across time is the primary use case. One of the differences between last year and this year is that Bitcoin regulation is being talked about everywhere. China, which had banned, the use of Bitcoin years ago, they banned Bitcoin miners. The United States government and everywhere else is talking about regulating Bitcoin. What are the types of regulations you worry about and what would a good regulatory system for Bitcoin look like? I think the best regulatory system is no regulatory system actually. The very concept of regulation is a contradiction to freedom. It's this idea of imposing one aggregate group, groups will power onto another group. So I disagree with that philosophically even. Although is it because something like Bitcoin is actually self-regulating the way that it's structured is why the people would enact in a kind of freedom maximum list viewpoint. There's regulation. It's just not coming from outside on high. Well, it is. You're touching on a beautiful point of Bitcoin here. It is so self-regulated that no one can do anything about it at this point. No one can change it. It's as regulated as the rising sun effectively. We've created a social institution or technology that we ourselves cannot change. That has profound implications because what we have in the world today are these nation states at war with one another who gets the most money, gets to decide the rules that can be imposed on others. But Bitcoin, and as you alluded to earlier, gold was kind of that neutral settlement network, that neutral rule layer, which it still is, whatever has the most gold is the most geopolitically powerful nation in the world, that no one could change. So that's why it became the global shelling point for money. And that's why we think Bitcoin is disruptive to gold. It's superior to gold and across all properties of money, but it's even more resistant to counterfeit than gold. Technically, we can make gold in a lab today. We can't do it profitably yet, but who knows? Mining the ocean floor, alchemy, mining an asteroid, who knows? It's subject to technological disruption. And that could just destroy gold as money at any time. Bitcoin's resistant to all of that, no matter how hard we try to mine it. And nothing's perfect. This just has the highest probability of being resistant to counterfeit. So what are the types of regulations that are either in the pipeline or you've heard talked about that you worry about? I don't worry about them. Honestly, I think Bitcoin gives a high degree of optionality to the individual. So if you're not being treated right in a certain jurisdiction, you can move yourself in your capital. One of my favorite ideas about that is that if you kept your Bitcoin codes in your head, you can walk across any border anywhere and just be as wealthy as you were in whatever country. That's a wonderful thought experiment. That's beautiful. The custodied properly in Bitcoin's the most unceasable property we've ever had. We've had this ideal that I've written about, inviolable property they've been writing about since at least the year 1215. It's in the Magna Carta. Governments were aiming at this or at least the constitutional documents of governments were aiming at this concept that we couldn't make a technological reality, but we're trying to make a socio-cultural reality. Let's just agree to all have really strong property. Now the reality of that situation is people are people. If they can do a thing, they'll do a thing. We needed to create something like Bitcoin that could actually instantiate that.  Basically, you buy a thing. It goes up in nominal price and you haven't sold the things. You haven't realized any gain at all. They want to tax that unrealized gain. Now if you think about this, combining that tax on unrealized gains with inflation is accelerated confiscation because they're just printing money, pumping your house price. You now owe me money on that depreciated nominal value increase. I know every time I try to spend my unrealized gains, nobody will talk to me. It seems bad on the other side. A lot of your work, you mentioned in a lot of your interviews and a lot of your writing and podcasts, the sovereign individual, which is a book that came out in the late 90s, which is pretty fascinating. Can you summarize it and talk about why it's so important to your larger world view? Yeah, it's quite the rabbit hole, but written in 1997, it made a number of prescient predictions that have come true, social media, anonymous digital cyber cash, the use of a pandemic to reinforce the validity of nation-state borders and control. I guess the thesis of the book, Mark Andreessen has this now very popular phrase, software is eating the world, which I think he said 10 or 15 years ago, also proved to be very prescient. Well, that is very true. I think you could expand that to say software is also eating the state. The technological realities we inhabit determine our political realities. So in a way, society comes to reflect the technologies which dominate its day. So in the large-scale industrial age, we had large-scale nation-states. Well, now the world's very different. Most of our attention is being channeled through digital devices. The microprocessors, they call them in book, what I just called digital technology, has proven to be disruptive across the board. I don't think there's a business in the world now that's not been affected by digital. So I think Bitcoin is just an extension of that thesis, that software is eating even our most fundamental organizational realities, like our nation-state. We identify, it's part of our identity to say, I'm American on this and that, but all of these things are now called into question in this new technological reality. And that book is particularly interesting to think about it. After the Cold War ends, and maybe there's a 500-year kind of push towards more and more centralized control, centralized identities, things like that, culminates maybe in the Soviet Union, which then disappears. And there's this relaxing and people spread out globalization, people start talking about individualism again, rather than collectivism. Do you think that's still on, and it's all enabled by technology, by the internet and then the web late on top of that and all of the devices you're talking about. And that was written 10 years before the smartphone came out, which then accelerates the ability of people to have something like peer-to-peer communication. Do you feel like that's still preceding a pace? Because a lot of people talk about how in the West, broadly speaking, since then we had the global war on terror, which where the state kind of reasserted itself in surveillance powers. You look at something like China right now where they're building out or trying to build out a kind of social credit system where the government has massive amounts of data and they're sifting through it and predicting how people are going to act and punishing or rewarding for them. Are we still in an era where the individual is sovereign? What are the challenges to that? Well, ultimately, I think through the scope of natural law, the individuals always sovereign because you always have a choice. Now, you can be tortured and robbed of your power and manipulated in court and all these things, but there's always a choice. The great book on this is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. There's a final human freedom. We all get to choose how to respond no matter what the situation is. And this is Camus saying suicide is always an option. That's kind of like you only get to do that once, but you've got that. You get one exit option. I do think we're moving closer to the sovereign individual thesis in the long run, but the middle game is very uncertain. And so China has done a great job of perfecting this digital dystopia that you've described. And I think what's happening now is that model, China tends to lead the rest of the world technologically, that model is being exported into the West. I think COVID was basically step one of that. The business model of statism that faces disruption by things like Bitcoin and adjacent technologies is now going to fight for its own survival. So that mid game is very uncertain to me. And I think those that make themselves expensive to tyranny will be the ones that ultimately emerge wealthy, healthy, and to rebuild the decentralized world of the future. So you have a couple of different platforms that you use to talk about this and kind of hearts of minds over to let's speed up the decentralization of things. Talk a bit about them like your what is money podcast, your sub stack. What are you hoping to accomplish with these? Yeah, it's really just education focused. And I think in this new world where digital technology so fundamentally disrupted our imagined orders, right? We're talking about, again, the nation state is just an imaginary construct, but it's something very fundamental to our world. And many people don't stop to think about this, but the human imagination is what makes us dominant in the world. The fact that we can tell and believe stories and coordinate, collaborate, and compete at a scale that no other animal can is the reason we're the top of the food chain. So now it's people fight over who gets to control those narratives basically. And I think that's what's going on in all this political level state effort. My work is to just hopefully getting people to ask and answer fundamental questions for themselves so they can establish deep and meaningful philosophical anchor points to the world.  There's another way. In preparing for this interview, I read about you and around you and I have some sense of your biography, but not a great one. I know that you were from Tennessee and you went to the University of Tennessee, you have a BA and an MA in accounting there. Talk a little bit about your childhood and was there a moment where you got switched on to saying like, okay, you know what, I don't want to accept received narratives. I want to start building one of my own. Yeah. So I grew up in Tennessee, very traditional values. With a Baptist background? Southern Baptist Church. Not a diehard religious family, but we went to church. Were you like born again or saved? Were you in the evangelical world? No, not really. I attended church in sort of a casual way, but later on in my teenage years, I did, I really enjoyed it for the social aspects, but I had started reading astrophysics when I was like 12 or 13 and I was just always a curious kid. And so when I started reading really deep into the science rabbit hole, I became pretty atheistic in my worldview. I thought it was a fairy tale. It's nice. It's wonderful. Makes everyone feel good. My views have changed on that since, but so that's how I started. I was also an athlete when I was young. So what sports did you play? I did football at wrestling and then I got really into Olympic style weightlifting actually. So if you've ever seen CrossFit, they do these explosive overhead lifts.   That's right. So I did that competitively from the age of 13 to 17. I was competing on the international stage. It was my thing. It's like, all I did. And as far as like when I think the astrophysics reading, it's like, you're just looking at the stars at night. You know, we're outside a lot in Tennessee asking what and why? What is all this? Why is all this? Maybe that just that coupled with my mom, she'd always put an emphasis on education. It's like, you want to solve a problem, learn about it. Just use learning to your advantage. So a lot of reading, a lot of asking questions, I think set me up to always try to inquire into the fundamental nature of things rather than taking something at face value. And when I applied that approach, this is in my, just before my 20s, started to get into economics, reading the Economist magazine a lot. I ended up discovering, I go down a lot of rabbit holes, but I ended up in the central banking rabbit hole. And thanks to authors like G. Edward Griffin and the creature from Jekyll Island, I came to see central banking as like the main problem in the world, that we have an institutionalized system of time theft or property violation in the heart of every modern economy, right? Including the American economy where you say, we're free market capitalist, yet one half of every transaction is fiat currency, which is anti-capitalistic money. So we're nowhere near free market capitalist. We're not even halfway. And this is not an opinion. This is Marx's 1848 manifesto of the Communist Party, measure number five, the central bank. So it's crazy. It's crazy that we think we are, we won against communism. Our money is communism. And it's a real problem. So I think for the same reasons we saw the Soviet Union collapse and not work in the 20th century, we're going to see Soviet money, if you will, collapse in the 21st. Did you, and you kind of stumbled into Austrian, the Austrian school of economics, talk a little bit about that. What's the value that you find from a broad Austrian perspective? That was the piece I was missing in my thinking to understand Bitcoin earlier, I think, because I had encountered Bitcoin around 2014, but I didn't understand that it was the answer to central banking. When I got deeper into the space in 2016, 2017, I started going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And that touches a lot of Austrian economics, actually reading Safedine's book in 2018, when it was released, April of 2018. That was my big light bulb. It's been talked about for a long time. The sly roundabout way, as Hayek said, Bitcoin is effectively that.  Yeah, compete away. I just think that the value of money is the size and depth of its network. So that's why it tends towards one. It's a power law. There's more value and deeper liquidity. That's why we had one gold, ultimately, and why I think we have one digital gold. Is Bitcoin useful or in a broader sense, and I guess if we're talking about Austrian stuff, you know, people like Mises and in his own way, Hayek talked about the subjective theory of value. Is it that Bitcoin, and for lack of a better term, a kind of capitalist society or a laissez-faire society, it's good because it allows people to kind of operationalize their subjective value? Well, I guess that's one way to look at it. I think it would be more... Here's the way to think about it. So there's a concept in economics called the inequality of exchange. So that means you and I come to the table to negotiate a trade. You perceive that whatever I have is of more value to you than what you're giving up. And I perceive the same thing in reverse. What you have is more valuable to me than what I'm giving up. That's why we're making a deal. Right. And once we negotiate and reach a point of mutually voluntary exchange, we both leave that trade with more psychological profit or value. We both believe we're better off, whether or not we actually are on some of the measures, a different thing. But there's a net value creation only through voluntary exchange. If you take out the element of volition, that means I'm basically taking from you. You otherwise, you didn't want to do the deal. So you're leaving the deal worse off. That's value destructive. Bitcoin gets rid of that coercive element. You can't take my Bitcoin. It basically forces transactions. And this is not perfect, but shifts the incentives of the world towards less coercion and more cooperation, so more creation of value. You famously published an open letter to Ray Dalio, the super investor. Describe what was in that letter. And then one thing that's interesting is that Ray Dalio you were addressing that to and the one who exists now has changed his point of view a bit. So talk about that. As we knew he would. I was reading, I was operating a hedge fund raise of the most successful hedge fund manager, I think, ever. So I was reading his book, Principles with My Business Partner. And it's a good book. He's got a lot. It's a very dense book. There's a lot of life and work principles as he divides them up. And I'm reading this book, also going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, also hearing Ray's basically coming out publicly against Bitcoin, for all the wrong reasons. All the counterpoints that have been thoroughly debunked. So you can tell he had not done his homework. I'm reading his book, Principles. And it's like there's so many of these principles that are Bitcoin. They're embodied in Bitcoin, effectively. So I ended up just writing this thing out of frustration.  You've literally written all these principles that are embodied in this technology that you're decrying. So yeah, it's a long letter. I think it's a 100 minute read, 90 pages or something. But I went principle by principle. I actually initially debunked his arguments. He has three counterpoints to Bitcoin. I debunked those. And then I go through the principles he laid out in his book and describe how Bitcoin embodies those principles. Could you summarize that? To summarize, what did he mostly get wrong about Bitcoin? He got everything wrong about Bitcoin. So his main counterarguments, if I can recall them, governments will never allow it, which is where so many people are stuck in the Bitcoin rabbit hole. You start to study it, okay, it is valuable, but then you hit this stumbling block of well, government will never allow it. And then you just stop thinking at that point. And your counter would be that it doesn't really matter if governments allow it or not, because it's going to round around it. The great question is how? The $850 billion question, which is Bitcoin's market cap today, how do you stop it? So I understand they want to stop it. It's the greatest enemy of the state in human history. The question is how? So that was one point. He also thought he had the Facebook MySpace fallacy in his mind. So I had to do a discussion of network effects and protocols and how it's different than an application like Facebook versus MySpace. And I can't recall the other one. So where is he now on Bitcoin? As far as I know, and I haven't looked at it closely, is that he's allocating a small percentage of his portfolio into Bitcoin. He's always been a big gold proponent. That was another aspect. It's like, Ray, you get gold, right? You get the history of money. You know, where I think he stopped though is he would describe gold as having intrinsic value. And that that's an economic fallacy in and of itself. But it's also not enough. You need to know the properties gold was selected for in the free market. And that's why I was beating that drum for a long time. Money needs to be divisible, durable, recognizable, portable, scarce. Gold was the best technology we ever had satisfying those properties. Bitcoin essentially perfects those properties. So if you get your thinking to that layer of why gold was chosen, then you come to understand Bitcoin. So I tried to go through that in a letter as well. You run a company called Parallax Digital in Santa Monica. What do you do there? Yeah, so we had been operating multi-strategy crypto asset funds for a number of years. I got out of that business in late 2020. My epiphany that year, I think a lot of people had a lot of epiphanies, because I was spending all my blood, sweat and tears trying to outperform Bitcoin, which is a pretty high benchmark, literally the best performing asset in human history. So I thought to myself, and all the while my writing and talking is becoming popular, getting a ton of feedback from the market, people like, more, more, more, write more, talk more. So I decided what I could just hold Bitcoin and basically achieve the benchmark, have zero effort effectively, and then I could free myself up to do these things that I want and the markets resonating with. So that's what I did. I started the show. And around that time was when Saylor bought his first tranche of 500 million Bitcoin. This is August 2020, I guess, and he DMed me and was like, Hey, just bought some Bitcoin. Thanks for your work. And I was like, Oh, wow, that's cool. I'm thinking about doing this show, talking in long form about big ideas. Do you want to be my first guest? He agreed. I think we now have 17 episodes and 30 hours of content together. And my most successful series to date by far, I take no credit for that. Michael Saylor's a beast. He can practically interview himself. Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy are apart from, one assumes Satoshi is the biggest holder of Bitcoin. Do you worry that this is something that happens, people try to corner the market in gold or in silver or in whatever? Is that at all a threat in Bitcoin? No, I don't think so. I mean, the biggest risk is the liquidity risk of them dumping it all at once and temporarily impacting price. I don't care about price, honestly. I'm just buying Bitcoin every day. I opportunistically buy more when there's big dips and I have an extra chunk of USD coming in. When you adopt that strategy, you actually almost, you appreciate the downside volatility, right? When Bitcoin contracts on other people's fear, I'm on the other side of that trade. I'm being greedy when they're fearful. So in a situation where someone accumulates an excessive amount of Bitcoin, first of all, and specific to Saylor, I don't think he's ever going to sell. I think he's in it for the right reasons. I believe in the guy. There's a lot of Bitcoiners that have different thoughts, whatever. If though it was somebody that was going to accumulate 250,000 Bitcoin with the intention of dumping it, I'd bring it on. I'll buy it from you all day. What about your view of other cryptocurrency? In your view, is that even worth talking about or is that just a different kind of beast altogether? I can sum it up pretty quickly. I looked at Bitcoin as more akin to the Internet itself, like the Internet's a stack of protocols for information. Bitcoin's the same thing for moving economic value. It's one of a kind, path dependent emergence. It just can be replicated. It's its own animal. And it kind of snaps onto the Internet too. So it really is part of the Internet. Everything else is a control P of Bitcoin's code, trying to do other things. It's liquid venture capital over here. So we have the Internet, like a protocol no one can control, versus companies essentially that people can control. And so they might have some value for various kinds of uses and things like that. Venture capital though with a very low bar of due diligence. Traditionally, venture capital that we hear about in the world goes through a lot of filters before we see it. You and I can go start Reasoncoin in 15 minutes on Ethereum blockchain.   Put a white paper up, put a web set up, convince a bunch of people to buy our coin, and we're all for running. And that's why there's so much scamminess in this space. Do you, just as a general moment, and I'm thinking broadly when you were talking about the Internet, the Internet kind of emerged in the late 80s as a semi-public format, certainly in the 90s as the web was laid on top of it and became user-friendly, became a mass medium. The 90s was a very optimistic time for technology in general. And since then, we are now in a kind of pessimistic mode.  We really hate it more than ever. Are we in a technological, you know, pessimism mode? And what snaps us out of that? Do we hate it? I don't know. Well, this is, let's put it this way, the rhetoric around it is negative, right? Yeah, I mean, obviously we're using this stuff more and more, but so you would go with the revealed preference, is that no, we actually, the stuff we like, we're using more often. And look, I mean, there's a grand sociological experiment taking place here, social media. And really, it's flipped the script on everything. All right, we used to have public discourse on television. And now it's like you watch Twitter to see what they're talking about on TV. And you use your TV to watch YouTube videos. It's always fascinating. The Emmys, or not the Emmys, the Oscars, you know, the only reason anybody watched that was because of a clip that went viral. Right, right, right. So yeah, interesting to think about that, too. Are you? Well, I guess that's a final question. You have children or a child? I have a daughter. Yeah. She's three and a half years old. Okay. So, you know, 20 years from now, do you think she's going to be living in a freer world? A less free world? You know, what do you think? Yeah, I think it emerges unevenly across the world. I actually have a good series with Bellagio about this. He has a thesis on centralized East, decentralized West. I think that's got some coherence to it. I fully intend to help contribute to a freer world. Obviously, I also think, I mean, and that's a drop in the bucket of what's actually happening. And freer equates with decentralized, right? Generally speaking. Yes, you could say that. Less coercion, right? Again, so the stronger your property rights are, the more capacity you have to say no or opt out or move your capital yourself, et cetera. The more optionality the individual has, the freer they are, the better off we all are. We actually create more wealth in that world. So, when the right of exit is maximize people behave better, systems behave better. That's right. You know, just again, if we're sitting down to do a trade and we can't come to terms at any point, you could say no and walk out the door, right? That prevents any value from being destroyed. Like unless we can come to terms and have mutual creation of value, then there's no deal, right? So, you remove the option for coercion or imposition, actually pragmatically create more wealth, capital and satisfaction in the world.  Old millennial. I think the cutoff's 38. So, you know, among millennials when you look at surveys and things like that, millennials tend to be more skeptical of capitalism. However, they define that. Yeah, because they haven't defined it properly. Yeah. So, what do you think's going on? Why do younger Americans seem to have a more negative opinion to things like capitalism, to things like markets, to things like profit? Yeah, they're misattributing the current problems they see in the world. You hear this late sage capitalism, but as I said earlier, we're not even close to capitalism, right? If you have a central bank, you're 50% communist out of the gate. You've also given the government a mechanism to grow excessively. So, things like in the US, healthcare is pretty communist, insurance is pretty communist, like all these industries that are close to the state apparatus, finance, education, right? It's not capitalist whatsoever. So, it's a miseducation, I guess. People don't understand what capitalism means. And I'm also convinced people, like in a fiat world, maybe, and maybe this has to do with the technological distraction or all subject to, but some people are taking the time to think deeply. A lot of people are taking things that face value, a word like socialism just sounds better. Social, right? We all, I like to socialize. I'm a social person. I think people- I have a social disease. I don't know. We can play this either way. I don't know. And social media can have a mixed reputation. My point is this, capitalism is very obscure, kind of nebulous term. People don't necessarily understand what capitalism means, but socialism just sounds friendlier, more comrade. You can hear young people calling each other comrade, but there's so much ignorance behind that. You haven't studied the 20th century at all if you're framing a world like that. Right. And I try to not get trapped in that by just talking about statism and non-statism. I think Bitcoin gets us, helps us transcend statism in all of its modes. Fascism, capitalism, capitalism is actually not a state doctrine, but it's been co-opted by the state, communism, socialism, et cetera. Bitcoin gives us a transcendence of statism that's premised more on cooperation, less on coercion. Okay, we're going to leave it there. Robert Breedlove, thanks for talking to me. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.


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