Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
Robert Breedlove someone who caught my
attention and was recommended highly as
a rigorous scholar and thinker in the
space of decentralized finance and
Bitcoin his podcast titled what is money
is a good representation of the way his
mind works he's willing to talk through
ideas for many hours willing to listen
willing to think which makes him a great
companion in conversation to explore the
history philosophy and Future of money
quick mention of our sponsors fundrise
element monk pack and better help check
them out in the description to support
this podcast as a side note let me say
that I'll have a number of conversations
in the coming months on bitcoin and
other cryptocurrencies none of these
conversations are Financial advice
that's not a legal warning that's a
genuine description of my goals and
approach with these chats at least for a
while I personally won't act invest in
Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies
except to learn about the technology
itself I don't think this should be a
journalistic standard like the New York
Times trying to establish which I very
much disagree with in my humble opinion
I think journalists should be free to
invest in Bitcoin if they want to
luckily I'm not a journalist I just know
my own psychology and I feel that my
thinking will be muddled by excitement
if I invest before I understand I feel
the same way about Tesla for example I
still don't own any Tesla stock and I am
still indeed fascinated by Tesla
autopilot as an artificial intelligence
system I work hard to be cognizant of
the biases that arise in my mind and
always try to choose the path that
maximizes or maintains a freedom of
thought as much as possible also let me
say that I try to be very careful in
selecting guests based not only on the
contents of their IDE IDE as but the
richness complexity music style of their
mind and character yes I will talk with
people with whom you and I may disagree
people who some may call bad or even
evil human beings I want to understand
them because I believe that as soldier
nson said the battle line between good
and evil runs through the heart of every
man I think if you always run From Evil
you become blind to the truth of human
nature
this is the Lex Freedman podcast and
here is my conversation with Robert
breed love rouso opens his 1762 book the
social contract with the following
statement man is Born Free and
everywhere he's in Chains so you talk
about freedom and sovereignty quite a
bit what do these ideas mean to you the
idea of sovereignty freedom and
sovereignty um I think they're very
closely
related we start just focusing on
sovereignty which is a word I don't
think we talk about enough um and the
general definition of that I would give
is the authority to act as you see
fit um and it's a word that's
ethologically associated with words like
monarchy money Reign so historically
it's referred to whatever the Locust of
supreme power is in the sphere Of Human
Action so whether if you go like back
into ancient Egypt the Pharaoh had
absolute sovereignty and everyone else
was pretty much operating according to
his interest you fast forward to today
modern Western democracy we have um more
decentralized sovereignty and that we
all get to go vote and elect officials
that make decisions on our behalf so the
the theme of sovereignty across history
is that it's been gradually
decentralizing across our different
models of socio
economics and um it's largely you say
it's rooted heavily in the money I would
argue which is something we'll get a lot
into here where if you have money you
have the authority to act as you see fit
in the world um and even in our current
political sphere if you have enough
money you can actually shape reshape the
rules right you can reshape laws you can
Lobby
Congress um if you're in you know a
certain situation like many billionaires
you can negotiate your own tax treaty
such that you can get favorable tax
treatment with certain jurisdictions in
the world world so this concept of of
sovereignty um which today we call
it's common to call States or nation
states or governments Sovereign meaning
that they have power over people um but
as I argue in a lot of my writing
actually think that sovereignty inheres
within the individual and that we each
have our
own interiorized space of choice which
is something like Victor Frankle called
the final human freedom and that we no
matter what our circumstances are no
matter what uh exogenous situation we
Face we always have this endogenous
power to choose how we respond to it
that's one of my favorite books is U man
for
meeting maybe we can break that apart a
little
bit so you kind of spoken about
sovereignty as uh closely linked to
power but is there something about your
own mind being able to uh achieve
sovereignty no matter what the monetary
system is no matter what who has the
control over Central power the money or
whatever the mechanisms of uh
sovereignty at the societal level you as
an
individual isn't ultimately all boil
down to what you can do with your own
mind how you see the world you interpret
it yeah I agree and as we get a little
bit deeper into this so you I think
we'll come to see money as an extension
of your mind so there's a feedback
between money and mind for instance you
think in Dollars Today almost guarantee
it most of us do here in the US yes um
and it's it's a tool right it's a tool
we're using to DEC complexify the world
around us to deal with it
to understand the sacrifices and
successes across an entire history of
economic transactions we can boil that
all down to the price so it's data
compression and if you
can change if there's a central body or
Central governance mechanism that can
manipulate that money it can have an
impact on your mind um for instance
today so I agree with you on the
firsthand say that I do believe uh in
free will I do believe in individual
autonomy but I also think that um there
are certain devices and powers in the
world around us that can actually
influence how we think and it's
fascinating to think about the fact that
money might be actually deeply
integrated into the way we think and
into our mind like this is uh you think
about what are the core aspects of the
human mind what influences cognition
abil the way you reason about the world
you have the chsky like language is at
the core of everything mhm but you're
kind of placing
money as pretty close to the core of
what it means to be an intelligent
reasoning human MH I think money is a
direct derivation of action and speech
actually it's another expression of the
logos um if we even think of what it
means to think is that we are generating
two different courses of action
potential courses of action and we're
populating them with avatars right maybe
ourselves or others and then we're
comparing how we may act in each
situation and what we think the result
would be so actually it's comparison
basically it's comparison and
contrasting of possible courses of
action and that's the same thing with
words themselves like you know most
words the uh the vast majority of words
only have meaning in relationship to
other words right it's all contextual
definitions of a word are more words now
people have argued with me about this
because there is a first word right
where you pick up Rock and say rock but
most other words and much uh in in
higher abstraction tend to be
relative
and what's funny about action and speech
and this gets I got into a bit of this
in our our paper here is it it's linked
to evolutionary biology and that once
human beings adopted upright stance we
freed our hands we no longer needed our
hands for locomotion mhm so we started
to evolve more
dexterity um and notably we have OPP
posable thumb so this gives us an
ability to manipulate and particularize
the environment in a way that most other
animals cannot and what's interesting
about this is that as we gain this
ability to um manipulate natural
resources and you know count Point
pointing was a big deal and that we
could indicate uh prey or or items at a
far off distance and we could organize
ourselves um we at the same time we
co-evolved this fine musculature in the
face and tongue so it's as if speech
developed co-evolved really with our
dexterity and as a natural extension of
that came us making tools right we
started to create things to better
satisfy our wants over time and the most
tradable tool in any society or the most
tradable thing is money so I really I
argue that action and speech are
quintessential modes of self- sovereign
expression and that money is just sort
of a tech layer we put right on top of
that and that it's a natural derivation
of action and speech okay that's
fascinating to think about sovereignty
from The evolutionary perspective and
then ultimately money is the technology
layer that enables sovereignty so you
know it's really fascinating to think
about our modern Human Society as deeply
rooted in in these like evolutionary
roots from the very origins of life on
Earth so what you know some of the ideas
you just mentioned what do you see are
some interesting characteristics of just
life on Earth that propagated to us
humans like what ideas propagated
through uh have roots in the evolution
yeah I think one of the
deepest impulsions in life is the
territorial imper
erative so all life is seeking to expand
its dominion over space and time and we
think about you know again physically
with space uh it's advantageous to an to
an animal or an organism to have more
territory under its control to ra to
raise Offspring so it's all about
reproductive Fitness at the end of the
day and then we could also think of
reproduction itself as the genetic
impulse to have more to replicate
oneself across time so it's
territoriality across time in a way and
this is very common in most animals not
all animals are territorial but many are
um and you see very interesting
behaviors resulting from territoriality
this is like uh animal combat you know
the reason birds sing is
territoriality um a number of other
things and it's my hypothesis and others
have shared this hypothesis as well that
mankind is clearly I think would argue a
ter iial species and that he expresses
this territoriality in property
rights so property when that word we
hear that word we typically think of an
asset we think of oh this house or this
stock or whatever but property is
actually the socially acknowledged
relationship between a human and an
asset such that you have exclusive
rights and responsibilities to a
particular asset um it is not the asset
itself so property it's it's information
it's a relationship by the way my mind
was just blown property's information
it's not the actual asset that's really
important very important that's really
interesting yeah and then it comes down
to how do we organiz organize ourselves
such that um property that that the
contributions people are making are
commensurate with the consideration
they're receiving so if you're adding
value to a piece of property you're
developing a piece of land for use in
theory like to fair you should have the
rights um to that fruit right if you go
out and plant a garden or whatever it
may be um and and this is very uh this
is rooted in in natural law where we
have rights to life liberty and property
those are kind of just the base the
fundamental layer of of morality and
capitalism frankly um and you could
think
of to get really primordial with it the
the first capitalist in the world just
to kind of get some definition out here
I'll say capitalism versus communism or
socialism as the Spectrum I I'll speak
on the first capitalist in the world
would be the guy the caveman that maybe
dug a little hole for himself to Shield
himself from the elements right maybe
there was a rainstorm or snowstorm and
he dug a little enclave and he protected
himself I thought you were going to go
CU you said primordial I thought you
going to go back to like earlier
biological systems guess I guess
primordial for human
hum okay and then the first communist or
socialist would be someone that decided
the fruits of his labor belonged to him
so he would have violently encroached on
that individual and taken his plot for
himself for his own
use and that's
um that's the Spectrum across which
capitalism in the pure sense and
communism in the pure sense operate in
that capitalism each individual has the
exclusive rights to the fruits of their
labor so anything they spend their time
effort energy creating in the world they
own the rights to that and they can
trade those rights with others other
self-owned people that have done similar
things communism or socialism would
imply that other people typically the
state have the rights at least some
rights to your to the value you've
created so there's this interesting
moment when that first caveman that
first capitalist drew a line Circle in
this cave and said you know this is mine
you could say it was free to be claimed
at the time he claimed it yeah but it's
an interesting
moment when uh asset becomes an asset
when space time as you referring to it
becomes something that's now can be
possessed by a human being mhm is there
something special about this moment
because it feels like first of all in
terms of space and
time it feels like there's a lot of
available
space time yet to be claimed so if we
just look at like the universe right
we're talking about there's a funny
thing with uh with Elon Musk and Mars I
think they sneaked in there for SpaceX
that uh nobody on Earth has any
Authority on mars or any this is a very
interesting question it seems almost
like humorous at this time but perhaps
not perhaps there'll be sections of
space not just on planets that are going
to be even fought over so is there
something special about this moment
because in discussing sort of violence
and respect for property it feels like
this is a special
moment because uh ultimately conflict
arises when you make claims on a
particular territory it's you know it's
not always in Conflict where people say
when you look at Hitler or something for
example his claim would be in many of
the lands that he attacked and invaded
that this is all ultimately this has
always belonged to Germany mhm so is
there something you could say as to like
what it means to own an asset or a
property yeah so in the ancient days of
hunters and gatherers we could say
that property was mostly a loal title
which meant it's just whatever you can
defend right so if you've got knives and
daggers and satchels and you know maybe
some pelts you've you've hunted whatever
whatever you can hold and defend is
yours that's and and there's not like
there's a government to appeal to you
know you're just sort of uh free agent
operating in the wild defending the
assets you can protect on you more or
less um
and what really changed the nature of
property is when we get into the
agricultural age so there there's a big
flip where we went from just foraging
and hunting all the time constantly
moving trying to stay alive to deciding
we're going to settle here we figured
out how to cultivate crops we can create
uh you know we can increase the
population because we can Harvest more
energy from the Sun and we can establish
a longer term civilization what happens
in that transition is that we begin
creating economic surplus so for the
first time in history we have you know
grain uh uh stock houses of grain to
defend or maybe meat or cattle or
whatever it is we're creating we now
have savings MH and
it's at that time when government
emerges as well because once you have
savings or you have an economic surplus
you have something that other people
want to steal right this this one thing
we'll touch on a lot today is people
always want something for nothing
there's all people are always seeking
the path to get something for nothing
and I think that drives a lot of our
decision-making and it actually
encourages us to be Innovative in a lot
of ways right we're trying to um it's
you could say it's our laziness it's
helping us be in ventive in a way we
trying to accomplish greater results
with less efforts over time but they we
can cross that line in seeking something
for nothing where we start to violate
the life liberty and property of others
and that's where we shift from kind of
capitalistic Society to to something
more
communistic
and so that's what government is it's a
protection producing Enterprise for the
economic surplus generated by a trading
Society so when people begin to trade uh
they create What's called the division
of labor which is a very common
economics term basically means you're
better at making hats I'm better at
making boots if you and I you specialize
in hats I specialize in Boots and we
trade we've created a positive sum game
where you and I both benefit so we
become collectively more than the sum of
our parts through trade and that's why
human beings do trade because we become
more energy efficient as a result we
create more outputs per unit of input
and you could think of government in
that respect
if we're looking at it maybe in a tech
sense that the economy is the Trade
Network that generates wealth generates
Innovation generates all this whole lap
of luxury we live in today that we've
inherited from our forbears is from the
market it's not from a government the
government is the network security if
you will so we're we're we're paying
expenses to a vendor to protect peace to
preserve life liberty and property in
that Network so that we can have you
know when there's inevitably disputes
over private property we can have non
violent dispute resolution uh in the
rule of law um and we can have a
reasonable expectation of of being able
to conduct Commerce without violence the
problem has been that the protector
tends to you know they're in a
monopolistic position we' say they tend
to start abusing that position to
obtain uh property for themselves again
trying to get that something for nothing
when you control you know you are the
security guard for the economy the first
thing they tend to monopolize is money
because if you can control the money
you're effectively controlling people
their energy their
perceptions um and that becomes a you
know particularly through inflation
becomes an Avenue to get something for
nothing and that you can just print more
money that everyone else is forced to
sacrifice their time and energy to
obtain what what are your thoughts about
anarchism so um I talk quite a bit he'll
be here in a few days actually Michael
malice about ideas of Anarchy and his
idea or the idea of anarchists is that
any amount of government will eventually
become the very kind of thing that
you're referring to so there's almost no
way to have a government that doesn't
then try to um monopolize power money
and all those kinds of things do you
think it's possible to have a government
sort of on that spectrum of like Anarchy
maybe
libertarianism I'm not sure how exactly
the Spectrum goes but where you have a
small government that protects the
liberty and property rights and those
kinds of things and doesn't expand to
then also control the the monetary
system and all those other uh things AG
agreed completely it was not possible
until Satoshi
Nakamoto so for the first time in
history we have a money that cannot be
monopolized
cannot be corrupted cannot be
changed um cannot be weaponized frankly
our current monetary system is
weaponized by those who can print money
against those who
cannot um and I think when you have you
know at the heart of every modern
economy which even we could say the us
we pride ourselves as free market
capitalist you know we outc competed
communism in the 20th century we think
that this is the superior model um most
business people will tell you that the
free market is the best allocator of
resources all of these things but what
we have at the heart of every modern
economy including the US is an anti-c
capitalistic institution which is the
Central Bank um the temptation to
monopolized money throughout all of
history has been too strong for anyone
to resist so any even Ben benevolent
quote unquote dictators that have taken
over many dictators have inherited say
an inflationary regime or society's
coming apart because some someone was
clipping the coins or someone was
printing too much money and they'll
commit to going back to a hard money
standard so they'll keep Society on a
gold standard for instance such that
they cannot violate um the money to
benefit themselves but inevitably over
time because it is a political
institution there's an incentive there
right for for again to get something for
nothing to spend more than you're making
through tax
revenues and with that in of people
typically ultimately end up pursuing
that inflationary path so we can we get
deeper into that about inflation is a
term that we've been conditioned to
think today is just something normal the
prices just go up and then uh it's
pertinent to a healthy economy but it's
actually if you look at it from real
Force principles it is just theft
integrated into the money it's a
technology backd door is another way to
think about it you wouldn't buy a cell
phone knowing that someone siphon your
data off your private calls and sell it
into the market now I know we do that
with a lot of Social Media stuff today
and that's something else we can get
into but you wouldn't do it willingly
right you would you would prefer that
your cell phone and your data was
monetized by you or if you're going to
sell it you would be able to selectively
sell it inflation is that it's similar
it's a tech backdoor
so it's a money that only a few people
can siphon value off of syruptitious
uh typically slowly but but eventually
as we've seen throughout history that
slowly builds up into a rapidly and then
um causes the monetary system to
collapse do you think there's a benefit
to inflation possibly
so so when you have perfect information
but perhaps you you don't need inflation
Perhaps it is purely theft but I think
of inflation as like the snooze button
on the alarm like you just so if you
have a hard standard you better wake up
when the alarm rings but you know all of
us kind of like probably shouldn't but
use the snooze button he's like okay
well five more minutes or 10 more
minutes and then you're saying there's
naturally a slippery slope or you you uh
becomes a drug that you fall in love
with and you
abuse but nevertheless the usefulness of
this snooze button is that you don't
know how you'll be actually feeling when
the alarm rings you might be able to
radio to pop up you might be like you
really need those few more minutes like
to psychologically get yourself out of
bed this an this metaphor is just not
working at all but but do you think
there's a
use to uh to inflation sometimes from
like economics perspective I think the
drug metaphor is a little more apt in
that inflation does provide an
immediately stimulative effect um when
used early on
so but what it's doing is it's again we
talk about the balance between
incentives and disincentives right that
being NE necessary for a system to to
function properly if with inflation
you're essentially giving uh the people
that can print money a way to dampen the
disincentives they face
so it it it destroys feedback loops I
guess you might say and another way to
look at this is when you so using
inflation using mon quantitative easing
you can decrease short-term volatility
in the marketplace so the market is
basically this idea this form of free
exchange that's trying to zero in on the
best ideas and the ideas are those that
are most fit to reality to satisfying
the most wants it's going to overshoot
it's going to undershoot you have these
little business Cycles but when it's UND
shooting and you and you're experiencing
uh business
recession in a capitalist environment
the market needs to clear that
malinvestment that misallocation of
capital that means someone made a bet on
a certain idea that it would satisfy
wants in a particular way and that bet
did not pan out if you then paper over
the losses that business is creating
you're now delaying and exacerbating the
volatility that that idea created so
this is kind of a tban concept
where um you can dampen short run
volatility but volatility is truth
volatility is us matching our ideas to
reality right we're constantly again
overshooting and undershooting so if you
delay volatility you're just amp
amplifying it and exacerbating it in the
long run and that's what central bank is
doing the Central Bank mandate is low
unemployment and uh low unexpected
inflation
basically uh and so they're trying to
achieve economic growth in a stable way
quote unquote stable way this is their
ostensible purpose um and that's just
not possible growth is an inherently
instable
process can you can you elaborate a
little bit about the nature of
volatility why is it communicating
truth that's something that a lot of
people are afraid of is the volatility
almost like it's a it's a sign of chaos
and so they want to escape
chaos but you're saying that that's
actually whether it's chaos or not I
don't know but it's getting us closer to
the fundamental like reality that we
should not be trying to
escape yeah so if we consider that the
universe is praded by entropy right this
is the second law of Thermodynamics is
that every closed system tends towards
greater disorder over time and that life
itself again I would argue expressed
through the
logos we life is the anti-entropic
principle it's the only thing that's
converting entropy into order chaos into
order and that's what entrepreneurs are
doing right we're living at the edges of
the known and we're trying to we're
we're testing oursel against the entropy
of nature trying to figure out new and
better ways of saying doing or making
things and then if we do crack a code or
figure something out we then have a big
incentive the incentive is to get rich
right because then you have a new idea
that you could then sell back into the
marketplace so it's
this sequence of courageously
confronting the entropy of nature and
converting it into good and useful order
which by the way is like the ancient
idea of God in Genesis which I think is
interesting um that actually enables us
to construct civilization in these
layers of anti-entropy or order you
might say so today we live in a bubble
of of anti-entropy or order you know
like the coastlines are guarded by the
nation and the city has a certain uh
police force that keeps it in order um
um even the way we we talk like there
clearly the words matter but also the
non-verbal cues all these things are
like order that has been established
over many many many thousands of years
of of human
evolution
and I think that when I say volatility
is truth what I'm saying is that the
experience of uncertainty is something
that's ineradicable from from life right
uncertainty like it's kind of a paradox
because it's we're fighting against it
right we're trying to innovate our way
away from uncertainty to give us to
create more Capital which capital is
very simply uh a way of mitigating
uncertainty so this is why you might
have like a stash of food in case you
know the power goes out or a generator
like it helps you overcome uncertainty
over time but uncertainty is also where
all the sweetness of life is so there's
got to be this balance with one foot in
one foot out and so Human Society is
this kind of bubble of order that we've
distracted and slowly expanding but at
the edges you're always going to have
that chaos that volatility and that the
entrepreneurs uh are kind of like
jumping into that uh chaos and some of
them die uh and some of them succeed and
so like if you want to grow this bubble
of order you you have to be
embracing the volatility at the
edges that that and reverence for
entrepreneurship because these are the
people putting their neck out so to
speak risking themselves and they're
going to contribute to society by the
way whether they go up in Flames or not
if they go up in Flames Society has
witnessed their experience as something
not to do or something that doesn't work
in a particular time and place so that
you could say they're them going up in
Flames as a way of enlightening the rest
of us or if they figure something out
you know Steve Jobs creates the iPhone
changes the world
forever enlightening the rest of
us and TB would say with the fire of
their failure okay yeah exactly to would
say um individual fragility is
inseparable from Ensemble anti-
fragility so this means that again every
time that entrepreneur Goes Up in Flames
or say a restaurant goes out a business
when a restaurant goes out a business
that particular Cuisine strategy they
were implementing in that particular
time and place that's a signal to all
the other restaurants in the area that
that doesn't work so restaurant food
improves from bankruptcy to bankruptcy
so it's this this death of the
individual components that contributes
to the growth of The Ensemble as a small
side maybe you can guide me through it I
don't know if you're paying attention
but there was some chaos around TB and
the Bitcoin Community I wasn't quite
paying attention uh but from my
Outsiders perspective I thought uh theim
TB was a supporter of Bitcoin and then a
lot of people were very upset about
something I'm sorry if I don't know the
details but can you can you uh pull out
some profound philosophical ideas from
the disagreement of the chaos I
admittedly don't know too much about it
either I I've a big fan of his writing
um he's
always been a little different in person
like I actually he signed one of my
books I met him in person he's just he's
got a very abrasive personality he's
kind of known for it it's not I don't
think I'm passing any judgment here he
sort of Embraces it yeah but he had
written um the forward to a really
important book in Bitcoin called the
Bitcoin standard for safety in a moose
and then I think they had a little
Twitter beef because safe was is very
much against covid mask and state
intervention whereas tb's on the other
side of the fence right and so and then
after that beef TB came out against
bitcoiners saying oh bitcoiners are
crazy and wrong I think the great mask
debate of the 2020 will probably be the
thing that ultimately leased the World
War II
I've been very surprised how tense how
much like division this one little
arguably silly thing has led to I think
a lot of people sort of project their
like it's almost like not wearing a mask
is a statement of sovereignty of freedom
of like saying you to the man the
government that centralized power or the
dishonesty or the in the scientific
Community all those kinds of things and
then wearing a mask is a sort of kind of
signaling of of various kind of uh
social aspect I don't know I'm not
paying attention to it I actually tuned
out I was part of a group of scientists
that were looking into like do mask work
this very interesting question to me it
was an interesting question I sort of
roll in to ask that very interesting
question because I think it is an
interesting scientific question but then
I quickly realized that just as I was
doing this like scientific exploration
of this very interesting question about
about Von particles like what kind of
things like from a scientific
perspective how do we prevent the spread
of a pandemic forget covid any pandemic
super deadly or not deadly like there's
tools there's testing there's masks
there's all these tools how well do they
work and then I realized you know in
April or so it became a tool of politics
a tool of philosophy and that's when I
sort of pulled out so it's fascinating I
I I think it's a it's a it's a canvas on
which people project their emotions and
I guess until I'm got caught up in that
kind of so there's nothing fundamental I
suppose to their disagreement not that
I'm aware of but he is you know he's
written some about in his books the
problem with centralization I mean a lot
of his writing um addresses that he
actually points to I think Switzerland
is the best government in the world
because it's
decentralized um
so there's that I I don't think he has
any I'm not to speak for him but I don't
think he's voiced any specific critiques
on bitcoin per se could be wrong about
that it's it's just maybe his flavorful
language and the way he likes to
communicate and the other theory is that
maybe he's playing 4D chess and having a
a Twitter boating accident you know so I
don't believe in Bitcoin I've sold all
my Bitcoin and oh I see yeah what uh
sorry the boting accident in Bitcoin is
this um I guess it's proverbial by this
point where it's the way you lose your
Bitcoin so if someone comes after you
and says hey you know whether it's a
government or an individual is coming
after you saying give me all your
Bitcoin or pay these taxes in Bitcoin
you go oh I had a boating accident and
lost them all lost them all so
yeah uh but back to the fundamental
nature of SpaceTime let me ask you CU
we're kind of left it I'd like to go
back to this idea of um that you said
that everything we think say or do
occurs Within the bounds of
SpaceTime uh so first of all maybe you
can comment on what do you mean in this
context about space time but also about
the nature of uh truth like how much of
all of this is knowable how much of this
is accessible to us humans how much
uncertainty like what we're talking
about is there in the world are you do
you fall in a place where we can reason
deeply about this world and it's
knowable or is it mostly chaos and we're
just holding on for de
life yeah I think I said that all action
occurs within the bounds of SpaceTime
the other thing everything we say do or
make the other thing is that everything
we say do or make starts out as an idea
so there's this concept of universal
Darwinism which basically um applies
darwinian principles but outside of the
biological sphere so we could say that
this kind of gets into Richard Dawkins
memetics that even ideas are competing
reproduc producing recombining um that
idea is so powerful by the way I I don't
think it's been understood fully uh I
think in the digital in the in the 21st
century in the digital world from my
perspective in artificial
intelligence there's yet to be some
profound things to be discovered about
this whole construct agreed completely
it's been called an acid actually and
that it just it strips away all of the
non-informational components of
something just strips it down to its
bones um I have a quote in here
somewhere about that but sorry which is
called an asset the ideas the universal
Darwinism Darwin is implied broadly
outside of the broadly and um I I I
condition all of this with saying that a
lot most of my thinking is shaped by a
book I read recently called the case
against
reality um which introduced me to this
concept but it tied into Darwinism that
I've used more broadly in the past
looking at things like money and and
economics so the book the Case against
Reality by Donald Hoffman um he has a
quote in the book that describes un
Universal Darwinism it says quote
Universal Darwinism can without risk of
refuting itself address our key question
does natural selection favor true
perceptions if the answer happens to be
no then it hasn't shot itself in the
foot The Uncanny power of universal
Darwinism has been likened by the
philosopher Dan Dennett to a universal
acid and Dan Dennett says say quote
there is no denying at this point that
Darwin's idea is a universal solvent
capable of cutting right to the heart of
everything in sight the question is what
does it leave behind I have tried to
show that once it passes through
everything we are left with stronger
Sounder versions of our most important
ideas some of the traditional details
perish and some of these are losses to
be regretted but good riddens to the
rest of them what remains is more than
enough to build on
unquote so the the way I would interpret
that is that life itself I've come to
view life as information propagating
through
flesh um and that we are I I guess um
DNA is a a quadratic code I think it's
four letters maybe versus a binary zeros
and ones and we are ideas we are
strategies competing with each other and
nature is that which selects it's what
selects the the winning ideas the ones
that are most f
um to to environmental conditions
frankly you know talking about
sovereignty and
individualism there might need to be
some rethinking here about what is
actually the basic individual entity
that is to be Sovereign like maybe our
biological
meat Vehicles were like way overly
attached to
them like may maybe uh espe with
genetics and all those kinds of things
or artificial intelligence or living
more and more in Virtual Worlds will
become detached from that kind of idea
so for example if I can clone you you
know make make 1 million robbers and you
know but you'll all have the same idea
what is real your real value as the like
I could just shoot you and there'll
still be 9999 of you but the idea is the
important thing yeah the the things you
believe so
I would argue that I don't know even if
you clone someone perfectly I don't
think you can reproduce the individual
themselves because they're we're all a
product of Nature and nurture right so
my particular Concourse of experiences
the path dependence that I represent
cannot be replicated as nor can anyone's
for that matter well that's that's a
hypothesis so we that's that's a
course a human meat bag would say
so
so like desperately trying to preserve
himself uh you know it's I think it
reduces to some fundamental questions
about what is consciousness and whether
that can be cloned all those kind you
know it gets to the core of what it is
to be human what are what are the things
that make you particularly you yeah I
think it would assume kind of a
materialist viewpoint on reality and
that if you could reproduce every atom
of an individual that you would have
their experience encapsulated in that
and you know Hoffman's which is book is
very radical he argues that space and
time is not an objective reality it's a
biological interface so we are scanning
our environment for Fitness payoffs and
this space and time is the rendering
specific to human beings that allows us
to navigate reality um effectively so
the further argument would be that we
all have pretty similar interfaces but
they're all slightly different too
because we're all you know adapting in
different ways and different animals
have their own unique interfaces so we
have a certain amount of photo receptors
in our eye whereas I think the number is
three might be five where something like
the mantis shrimp has like seven or nine
so they can see and we only see one 10
trillionth of the light
spectrum so talk about a tiny fraction I
mean one 10 trillionth is a very
minuscal number and that makes up all of
the light that we can interpret with our
eyes but it's something like a mantis
shrimp could see you know much more of
that
so I think there's
this we're very conditioned to have a
fully materialist viewpoint on reality
today where we
think uh you know the atomic Clockwork
kind of universe but I think there's I
don't think that's true exactly and um
another school that goes into that is
actually Austrian
economics where we could say that you
know we mentioned earlier that an asset
is not proper it's actually based on the
relationship between the individual and
the property um there's this whole realm
of relevance associated with
uh we're all moving through life in the
course of a goal directed action so when
we walk across a room I go from A to B
it's because I valued B more than a so
value is inseparable from Human Action
we have a rank ordered value system in
our mind each of us and we're constantly
taking action in accordance with those
rank
values anything that accelerates us on
the course of our go directed action
towards our goal is
useful anything that impedes us or we
could say is valuable anything that
impedes us is actually uh obstructing to
value and anything that's irrelevant is
just
valueless
so this table that we're using right now
like this is a it's an accessory to you
and I because it's holding this paper
that's holding the information that's
guiding our conversation MH but we could
pay someone $100 to jump over this table
and this table could simultaneously be
an accessory to you and I and an
obstacle to someone else so it's this
domain this silent contention of
willpower and agendas occurring across
the face of the Earth that um is what
Austrian economics really looks at it's
um the The Realm Of Human Action as they
call it it's called praxiology so it's a
non-materialist viewpoint on reality and
that things we think in terms of matter
being reality but it's often more so in
the sphere Of Human Action what matters
that is reality it's the relevance of a
thing to the course of of one's go
directed action and that's ultimately I
exists in the space of ideas yes not in
the space of physical matter and just to
jump back to this line here I think his
fundamental line here is the question is
talking about Universal Darwinism as an
asset what does it leave behind I've
tried to show that once it passes
through everything we're left with
stronger Sounder versions of our most
useful ideas that's the key point to me
and that ideas and information so far as
we can tell are the most fundamental
substrate of
reality um and information itself back
to entropy information is the resolution
of entropy that's what the bit is right
it's a one or zero whatever reduces your
entropy by half is a bit and we measure
information in bits
so and you're right people don't have
ideas ideas have people I honestly I
it's it's a really profound idea uh or
uh a statement about reality a reframing
of reality it's it's a if we're actually
being deeply honest about it it's quite
painful I I I do appreciate that you
defended your biological Meb earlier but
it seems like ideas are the things that
have power that um me me Lex for example
is
worthless and uh relative to the ideas
that used my brain for a bit of a time
but so far as we know only human beings
can generate and share ideas so you
can't say Lux is worthless like you are
the node of the idea sphere the newest
sphere so I'm I'm uh I'm what is it uh
from the Bitcoin perspective I'm like
I'm mining I'm solving the cryptographic
pro problem and gener uh I'm I'm I'm a
use in that sense I'm a useful node uh
yeah you're competing to solve the the
puzzle of entropy right and when you do
solve it it benefits the entire network
but I guess um from my perspective just
because just working in AI I'm looking
at the long-term Vision I I see us
humans and AI systems as is really the
same and AI systems ultimately as
something that supersedes humans so what
is
intelligence so in the context of our
current discussion I think um
intelligence is very closely linked to
this notion of
ideas it's the ability to generate ideas
to mold ideas
to uh compress seeming chaos into some
model into some theory that efficiently
compresses the chaos in in a way where
you can then integrate it with other
ideas and they can play and all those
kinds of things so in that sense it's
the Turning chaos into order it's the
molding of ideas such that our human
brains uh can work with it and it just
from my perspective I don't see any
reason why that cannot be algorith
matized converted into Compu
computational systems I would agree uh
which is
scary scary or potentially really
promising right it's kind of the case
with all novelty it's terrifying as much
as it is promising that's why you're
pursuing it so heavily I would maybe
take it a step further and say the
intelligence and maybe it's most
simplistic form is error
correction so
we humans have wants again we're
constantly expressing our value through
action there there's no way to express
it by the way it's whatever you choose
to do in any moment you are expressing
the values you hold in your mind and
your
heart as we move from a from less valued
a to more valued B uh we we entropy
happens uncertainty happens we we fall
off course and it is intelligence that
enables us to render information from
that experience and error correct right
so that we can move we can move slightly
change shift our trajectory slightly
more towards uh B that we're trying to
move towards so I think
that there's something there that I
don't know that we
can make synthetically and that when we
if we if we if we Define intelligence as
error correction it's like error
correction to what it's Error correction
towards what we find is valuable right
so we're trying to satisfy human wants
might not just be our own could be
others as well if I'm an entrepreneur
I'm trying to solve the wants of others
not just myself myself M and I'm trying
to eror correct myself towards that goal
um using intelligence and processing
environmental feedback through
intelligence to error correct so I don't
know how If you
eliminate the human ele element
completely who's doing the wanting right
where does value come from I know
machine learning people who are
listening are saying that's exactly what
machine learning is which is error
correction because you have a lost
function objective function that
measures how wrong your thing is and you
want to make it less wrong next time
that's the whole process of machine
learning but you're saying what humans
are able to do is in a world where
there's there's
no maybe objective values absolute
values you're generating that very loss
function that objective function that
you're that function that measures the
error comes from the the human
mind uh some aliens might disagree with
with you cuz they might have a different
objective function obiously purpose
comes from Consciousness I think and
without purpose there's not error
correction yeah I mean this is again a
hypothesis like where does purpose come
from it seems to come from Consciousness
you're
right that's where suffering comes from
and you want to lessen
suffering that's where pleasure comes
from it seems like it's Consciousness
maybe there is something to this
biological meat meat bag so to take it
one layer the on this and the reason I
like this book so much again the case
against
reality so he's making the case that
space and time are not fundamental yes
which I I started my intellectual
Explorations in physics actually
astrophysics so for the longest time
even the way I describ money as I talk
about space and time so that that blew
my mind but this dovetailed nicely with
another book called Leela um the the
author is Robert perig so he wrote Zen
In The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
which is a very popular book book 20
years later he wrote Leela which no
one's heard of which is crazy and he
basically says he was wrong about his
first book and he lays out this entire
other uh metaphysics of of quality he
calls it so it's it's the metaphysics I
think it's metaphysics of quality but
his supposition is that it's not
physical reality that's fundamental it's
not informational information that's
fundamental it's
value so he actually and it's a
beautiful book book I highly recommend
it he essentially is refuting causality
itself we think a causes
B this book makes the case that b values
precondition a so that we are actually
creating our future through our value
systems and this goes back to um
something I think Soulja niton said this
that the the line between good and evil
runs down the heart of every man so it's
as if our moral decisions are actually
what's creating the outcomes in reality
over time and then that gets into all
the wisdom Traditions related to
religion where it's always talking about
you know loving thy neighbor and loving
God and all of these other things that
are good morally to create the best
outcomes so values are fundamental value
yes value yeah is
fundamental oh boy yeah that's
interesting I mean the
it does feel like physics is not
capturing
something you know there's some people
uh pan
psychist argue that Consciousness might
be one of the fundamental properties of
nature like from which emerges
everything we see so that could be just
other words for this same notion of
value and then the the basic laws of
physics are not capturing that currently
yeah so maybe humans in order to
understand from where humans came from
we have to understand these other
properties of nature which are yet to be
discovered right at the physics level
and it's we contend with that underlying
nature whatever it is with the logos
right so we are we're looking at
uncategorized nature and then we're
assigning a word to it so we're we're
slicing up chaos into little boxes of
order and then we're establishing this
social consensus as to those labels
which we' call words and we're using
that to communicate and when we
communicate um we can start to build
these other things this is like uh the
uvall Harari imagined orders so we can
create these useful fictions right
whether it's the nation state or human
rights or money and that allows us to
cooperate flexibly in large numbers so
that we can better contend with reality
we can produce more complicated things
um we can we can enlarge that bubble of
civilization against
entropy and that's what capitalism is
all about it's
about further specializing knowledge
further enriching Mankind's treasury of
knowledge um and doing it but but to do
that the the communication media that
we're using the words have to have
stable meaning the the money needs to
have um value that's dependable right it
needs to be something
that's it's not dictated by any one
group group it's reached by consensus of
the entire group that's how um so you
could think it it's like optimizing for
error correction again where a free
market would be harnessing the
intelligence of all Market
actors and a central planning or a
centrally planned Market would be
harnessing just the intelligence of a
small group of bureaucrats and it's not
obvious how to achieve this kind of
consensus mechanism I mean there's
obviously we'll talk about sort of
Bitcoin has an idea ultimately the idea
of Bitcoin is connecting it to
physics so like you can trust that
physical matter won't change
MH but you know there could be other
ideas that were yet maybe physics could
be changed Eric Weinstein has anything
to say about it like it's it's on you
know we right now believe that physics
can't be changed the physical matter of
the the world but maybe it can in a way
that we're totally not understanding you
mentioned sort of reality from um from
Donald Hoffman's perspective like if we
don't have even close to direct access
to the fabric of reality maybe we're
living in a world that's very like many
dimensions that the Notions of space and
time is just like a silly useful
construct that's not at all connected
you're you're starting to look at like
Stephen wolfs I don't know if you're
familiar with his view of the world that
it's like hypergraphs under benath it
all like these mathematical structures
from which everything emerges like
they're like
uh like many many many orders of
magnitude smaller than what we think of
as they're even smaller than like
strings and string theory so like those
are the basic mathematical objects from
which it emerges I don't you know I
think that's an interesting
philosophical framework it's also people
should check out uh a cool uh way to
play with beautiful hyper graph
mathematical structures so he has I
don't know if you know who Steven wol
from is but he has he created wol from
Alpha and all these tools that you can
actually visualize and play with so you
can play with physics in a visual way
which uh uh or at least discret
mathematics which I think is incredible
he doesn't get enough love one of the
reasons he I think doesn't get enough
love is because of this little Quirk of
human nature which is the
ego and he uh he sometimes uh frustrates
a few folks because um he's very uh
let's say proud of his work I
gota but it's it's uh it's interesting
to think about a world where we don't
have direct access to reality as Hoffman
argues and maybe I don't know if you can
comment I don't know if you're familiar
with an Ran's work and her whole
philosophy of objectivism or whole her
whole contention is that you know we do
have have
access I don't want to misstate it but
at
least she would claim
that it's not uh
useful or I think she'll probably say
it's not correct to argue that we don't
have access to reality we have hence
subjectivism we have direct access to
reality that's the only thing we can
reason about and the only way to live
life morally is to reason through
everything starting with the axioms of
reality which we do have direct access
to right you have thoughts about her
work or I am slightly ashamed to say I
have not read IR Rand yet so she is high
on my list and she's been recommended a
number of times um but so I don't know a
lot specifically about her philosophy or
objectivism but I to me it resonates
closely with what the American
pragmatist commented on truth and they
distinguished what you could say is
absolute truth which is at the bottom of
reality whether it's you know Mr
wolfram's mathematical formulas or value
whatever it may be it's something
ineffable something Beyond uh the reach
of epistemology perhaps even um and
maybe that's why religion just sort of
points to it right it's trying to
use I think Joseph Campbell said
something like religion is
um using stories to point Point towards
the same transcendental mystery we all
experience but cannot articulate mhm so
something like uh the artist the artist
uses lies to point to the truth
something like that that kind of thing
um that's really good but the American
pragmatist said that because at the end
of the day this is all about when we say
truth we need something that is socially
uh close to social consensus and is not
shakable by political action so that's
what you know physics and Mathematics
are it's it's
a an
unshakable um point of reference I guess
you might say so the American pragmatist
defined truth as the end of
inquiry and in markets we could say that
the the market itself is a forum that
generates truth we call this pragmatic
truth to separate pure objective truth
that we can't even talk about without
polluting
versus pragmatic truth which is
something that's useful so the the the
example here would be if I give you a
map and you're trying to go from your
house to the local brisket restaurant
and the map gets you from your house to
the BR brisket restaurant is that
because the map is true or is that
because the map is
useful right they're very hard to
disentangle just we're just looking at
it
pragmatically and in markets markets I
argue generate three forms of pragmatic
truth one is the price so this is the
collective subjective demand and
purchasing power of humanity running up
against the objective supply of capital
and resources in the marketplace so
there's Demand overlaid on Supply the
result of that is the price so that is
the the TR most truthful exchange ratio
which is the closest approximation to
the value of any good in the marketplace
so it gives us a data point on which we
can operate it's compressing all known
Market realities down into a single
actionable number you know based on the
price of bread or copper whether you
want to buy more of it you want to
abstain from buying it or maybe you want
to try and find substitutes and it's you
you can think of that price signal it's
like an economic nerve signal that's
coordinating Human Action across time so
if we're one
socioeconomic superorganism or
Collective that the price signal is the
nerve and that's the first form of of
pragmatic truth that markets generate
the second form would be tools and
Innovations themselves so entrepreneurs
are experimenting across time they're
trying to satisfy the wants of consumers
consumers are sovereign in the
marketplace whatever the consumer wants
the consumer gets right I'm trying to
satisfy that I'm trying to do it at a
profit so I'm trying to take viewing the
existing price signals of goods in the
marketplace I'm trying to assemble those
in a way at a at a cost lower than the
Final Solution on I'm delivering to my
customer I'm selling it at a price
higher than the productive factors I
combine to create
it and in that Pro that iterative
process we're constantly discovering new
and better way better ways of solving
problems or satisfying wants so we could
say to go out and dig a hole right
someone wants a hole dug that a shovel
is going to let you do it much faster
per hour than you would with your bare
hands so what is the pragmatic truth of
digging holes
it's a shovel right it's the it's the
best way we know how to solve any
particular problem based on uh the
existing treasury of knowledge so every
tool again we're back to ideas being
fundamental the shovel itself is just a
knowledge
structure we've figured out a way to
create this particular Implement and
then we've indexed the raw materials we
found in nature to this knowledge
structure to create a shovel which
allows us to better satisfy human wants
um you know faster cheaper better
effectively I'm trying to
generalize you're blowing my mind a
little bit here I'm trying to generalize
the idea of tool to how to think about
it because I keep I keep just when you
say tool I keep imagining different to
like specific instantiations of a tool
I'm trying to see so the price is a
pragmatic
truth that's um
communicating value in the in this
network subjective demands against
objective Supply
subjective so it's it's an economic
democracy got it so that's the demand
Supply and then the tools are the ways
of
extracting uh or solving problems is the
more General kind of or satisfying wants
satisfying wants y so wants are somehow
that's the that's part of the supply and
the demand and want wants are back to
Value right because everything someone
wants are expressing their value okay
yeah so the shovel is the pragmatic
truth the shst truth it feels like a
good book title okay sorry so uh what
what other prag what is the and the
third one I would argue is virtue
actually oh wow and another another way
to maybe think about this is competitive
competency but it's also Cooperative
competency so we're learning over time
what characteristics what uh patterns of
action what mindsets what mental tools
what heuristics are most useful to
satisfying customer wants so I think
that becomes over time becomes sharpened
in vertue right like we know it's best
to be honest because if you lie it's
very energy and efficient right you're
creating this little Fork of reality and
then if someone else ask you about that
lie again you have to put another layer
of lies on top of where if you just tell
the truth you're just recollecting what
happened yeah and so that sort of keeps
um again when we're talking about
delaying volatility right if you lie
you're delaying short-term volatility
but you're increasing long-term
volatility what about murder I haven't
been able to figure out why murder is
bad because I just keep wanting to
murder people and I've I've murdered
many see someone for that well that's
why I'm trying to get interview of
Vladimir Putin so that's fascinating
virtue in this market with the supplies
and demands and there's the tools which
is also pragmatic truth and there's
virtue it's a pragmatic truth yeah and
if we interfere with that free market
process again if we overstep which this
maybe ties into murder if you start to
be coercive against life liberty or
property so if you're forcibly taking
someone's life you're breaking down the
trust in that market that generates
these pragmatic truths if you forcibly
infringe on someone's Liberty right um
for any reason other than them
originally breaking U or infringing on
life liberty or property then that's not
going to work either and then if you
take if you violate private property
rights if you steal property from others
you're breaking down the trust the that
the inter subjective fabric of money and
markets and the rule of law all of these
useful fictions are meant to preserve
you're you're corrupting it and breaking
it down it's kind of interesting to
think about the market as um helping
evolve the
virtues it's sharpened into virtues and
then these virtues can then go into
motivational posters people or like in
books that we all agree on and then
eventually take for granted as if they
were somehow fundamental to human nature
but they're they're not perhaps
fundamental they're just pragmatic
truths yeah it's um another way to
consider competition itself is that it
is a discovery process so you know
entrepreneurs are competing with one
another and they're trying to best
satisfy
consumer wants at the lowest possible
price so they're placing bets of time
energy and capital on themselves on
their their idea their business plan and
then the market decides right the
collect the consensus of Market actors
decide which one was better one lives
one dies um so competition itself is
helping us get closer to truth to
pragmatic truth so we're discovering
what is the right price for this asset
and that price by the way is
derived again in in the sense of data
compression everyone in the world can
see that price everyone in the world can
then put their skin in the game by
choosing to buy or sell or short or go
long or do any number of financial
actions on that price and that
information is then propagated back out
to everyone else so it's this feedback
loop between Market actor and price that
makes it um so useful and and that's
what carries us it's so it's these
collisions of interest that carry
it removes the unuseful aspects of
ourselves or of our tools or of a price
and reveals pragmatic truth to us can
you um play my therapist for a second
and if we talk about creative
destruction I think buk not Bukowski
um Hunter Thompson is a quote something
like for all instances of beauty many
Souls must be
trampled wow
but
it there does seem to be an aspect of
competition that
destroys you were talking about
entrepreneurs sort of on the outside of
the circle of order striving to make
sense to
compress volatility of the chaos of the
of the
universe is there some way to protect a
little bit against the pain of that
destruction of that creative destruction
that uh entrepreneur screaming on fire
as he enlightens the rest of us is there
some role for us humans together in the
togetherness of it uh also government
but any kind
of collectives in helping that
entrepreneur who's on fire to maybe
after a few minutes to to uh spray him
with some water and uh put him out of
his misery
I would say that you know
pain it's the
inarguable basis of being right pain is
no matter how you try
to explain it away or or describe it or
um it's not something you can
rationalize away right it's no
one I think ever like someone may want
to cut themselves to have an endorphin
high but no one wants to suffer would'
say right so pain in that sense it is
what we're constantly trying to deal
with and to move away from or create
buffers between us and and potential
pain or potential you know
uncertainty and that pain is information
when we experience something that is
Misfit to the outcome we desired that
pain is what puts us in encourages us to
change our trajectory to get back on
course towards our our valued Aim so
as far
as you know you need entrepreneurs that
are exploring and if you're trying to do
something new if you're a pioneer of any
kind you are courageously facing pain
you're willfully confronting it so I
don't think it's avoidable in that sense
it's not like we can have painfree
economic growth like what the central
bank would maybe uh have us lend to
believe that we can just run these
experiments and when they fail we'll
just paper over all the losses and
continue or you're just delaying
and exacerbating the inevitable
volatility back to reality um but what I
would say is that
capitalism because we're
building we're increasing the Capital
stock of the world which again capital
is the mitigation of risk so we're
reducing the overall risk of existence
by accumulating more capital in the
world and that's what protects that
entrepreneur that's deciding hey I saved
up a million bucks I'm going to go try
this business idea I'm going to put all
my my money on the line and if he goes
up in flame
then he his cost of living when he comes
back to reality and he's starting over
from zero his cost of living is
substantially lower starting over from
zero then he would be out in the
wilderness on his own right so it's the
the accumulation of Capital stock is the
buffer against uncertainty for everyone
um and it gives you actually more
potential to go out and experiment to go
out and confront uh the chaos of nature
because you are are better healed
effectively I think we're
speaking uh in sort of U idealistic
terms about the power of capitalism when
it works well is there any aspects that
you think that don't work well in a free
market in all the basic pragmatic truths
that we're talking about is there is
there ways it can go
wrong so I would first argue that we
have never seen an actual purely free
market
um closest example would
be you know kind of geopolitically we
have a free market and that governments
are not necessarily
governed
um but they are premised
on governing large groups of individuals
so that's not doesn't exactly you mean
between governments yes see but isn't
there still so free market maybe you can
correct me a is a free market still
grounded in the ideas of you know
property rights and all those kinds of
things right so governments tend to also
sometimes be violent towards each other
that's right so they don't respect the
all the basic aspects of capitalism
that's right so maybe another way to
look at this is that gold is the
original governor of government actually
and this is the reason governments have
abused and gone off of the gold standard
so
historically if you are a bank or a
nation state and you produce more
currency than your gold reserves can
justify then people then gold will flow
out of your bank or out of your country
so there's this natural
check
um via the money that be via
capitalistic money which is gold right
gold was elected by the free market it's
not decreed by government it it provided
this natural check on government action
so my I guess to get back to the
original question is we've never seen a
pure free market because money has
always been
monopolized um and and coerced frankly
so to try and answer what goes wrong
with a free market is really difficult
because we've never actually seen it and
I would
Define free market is one in which
government only protects life liberty
and property and so has a very minimal
role in society um again just as network
security for for the economic Trade
Network and anything
that any government function that goes
beyond those three core functions which
by the way are pretty much the core
tenants of morality as well so
governments just really intended to
preserve uh you know natural law if you
well anything that goes beyond that is
moves us closer to an unfree market so
every regulation every active coercion
um is actually a a gradation closer to a
purely unfree Market which would be a
monopoly so in terms of what I guess
theoretically we could say goes wrong in
the free market is that it's volatile
it's it's trading off it's accepting
short-term short-term
volatility uh in exchange for less Long
Run volatility yeah and this tends to be
the way of nature by the way so if we we
could look at something like there's an
a region in North America called Baja
California and it it runs into the
United States and it runs down into
Mexico as well so the same topology but
two different
jurisdictions in the US uh we very
heavily manage Force fires we're trying
to manage nature effectively whereas in
Mexico is much more unregulated it just
that when wildfires spring up they let
them burn off North America when wild
wildfires spring up we're actually
extinguishing them so we're constantly
trying to dampen the short-run
volatility of these small brush fires
whereas in Mexico we just let them burn
we let nature do its thing yeah the
consequence of this is that the Wildfire
is still occur eventually but they're
much larger and much more devastating in
North America where human intervention
has occurred because it is um it's
dampening Nature's natural corrective
mechanism of clearing this underbrush
with these um more frequent and smaller
Fires at the cost of much larger fires
so again we're delaying short-term
volatility and exacerbating long run
volatility and and in Mexico it's the
opposite right just these wildfires burn
much smaller more continuously over time
the further effect of that in North
America is that the fires can get so big
and so hot that it burns away the top
soil so it actually destroys the
fertility of the soil itself so the
point of this is that human intervention
right even the intention behind uh North
American authorities managing that
forest fire is to create less
destruction that is the intention but
the intention is Divergent from the
outcome so in tban speak he would say
that human intervention moves us from
mediocre Stan into extremist Stan so
mediocre would be something much more
like nature where for instance you can't
double your body weight in a day
probably can't even do it in a year
right but in extremist stand which is
something much more information based
you can double or or cend your net worth
to zero in a single trade in a single
moment right so when we we try and
intervene with natural biological
systems that have um these feedback
loops we actually start to push the
system more to behave more like an
extremist an system um that has you know
less short run volatility but but um
more extreme long run volatility so but
the question is where you look at uh
capitalism or communism for example and
by the way yes I will talk to somebody
who's a Marxist or a communist Like
Richard wolf is a pretty eloquent
defender of these ideas because it's
it's always good to really understand
ideas as opposed to just reject them off
hand uh when you look at the system of
capitalism or the system of
Communism there's ideals and a lot of
people argue in this perfect form would
actually be good for the world the
question is how resilient are they to
the corruption MH uh of human nature and
I mean you're saying that there's not a
there's never been a free market it's
it's it's a very true statement the
question is how resilient is capitalism
or whatever implementations of
capitalism had up to this point to human
nature where one person who become
successful
at through legitimate means then starts
to try to manipulate the system that
takes it away from a free market or
takes it away from uh the the things
that gave him the riches in the first
place and then uh try to through
corruption get more get this the thing
you said uh the lazy human ways now I
try to figure out how to get something
for nothing that's right so how
resilient do you think is capitalism to
that well the best implementation we've
had of it really has been the United
States I think up until this point but
it's
still the C Central Banking itself this
was in the 1848 Manifesto of the
Communist Party measure number five
reads A an exclusive State Monopoly and
centralized control over cash and credit
so the central bank is a Marxist or
communist institution it is antithetical
to the free market principles on which
the United States was founded and indeed
the United States resisted the
implementation of a central bank um I
think it was Andrew Jackson I know there
was the First National Bank the Second
National Bank were both disbanded and
then uh Andrew Jackson which is my
favorite Tennessee in he's he has some
famous quotes about routing out the
bankers like a den and Vipers uh I think
he punched one of the central Bankers in
the face uh back when our leaders were
were a bit a bit more badass I guess you
might say and um you know finally in
1913 the the Federal Reserve was was
implemented and um it's been kind of all
downhill from there so what is uh can
you oh so good um I was just going to
say that that
communism and capitalism it's also a
matter of
scale you know the ideal behind
communism is uh from each according to
their ability to each according to their
need sounds beautiful right sounds like
a great peaceful harmonious way to
organize ourselves the problem is and
and by the way I am a communist in my
family in my home right at that very
smallest of scales yes in your very
small Circles of trust you're much more
likely to behave selflessly towards one
another by the way I look forward to the
Bitcoin Community clipping out that
part saying that Robert breed love is a
communist and the ideals of Communism
are beautiful yeah context matters
people sorry go ahead um but to your
point it does not scale right as we move
into this larger system of socioeconomic
cooperation which is necessary to deepen
the division of labor to generate more
wealth right we need to interact with
one another on much larger scales than
this communistic utopian ideal we get
into the realm of capitalism where we
need really sound rules hard rules
consensus
verifiability um and frankly prices
because the other thing in com in um
Soviet Russia is they tried to replace
the profit motive or the price signal
with this Devotion to this nationalistic
faith and devotion where it's like you
don't need self-interest anymore you
don't need prices or profits you can
just protect Mother Russia right and
serve Mother Russia and that would
create wealth and what happened right
they destroyed price signals there were
shortages there were famines there's um
all levels of corruption because you
know to your point it's once
you people have to run the system no
matter what so when you when people are
always pursuing something for nothing
and you put someone in a seat of much
closer to absolute power where they're
making all the pricing decisions they
own all of the productive factors in the
economy they're not beholden to any
Market Force there's no Market uh check
on their action that that institution
tends to become more corrupt and further
it's it's an inferior resource
strategy um I alluded to this earlier
where the other way to think about free
market versus Central
planning is it's decentralized or
distributed computing versus centralized
Computing so each one of us I think that
the number is 120 bits per second of
active awareness so we can take in
clearly we process a lot more than that
but our active awareness I think is 120
bits per
second
um in a centralized planning body like
in Soviet Russia where they had the
pricing are maybe they had 10 20,000
people deciding the prices for the
entire country you're only getting that
much data throughput right 20,000 people
times 120 bits per second whereas in a
free market if everyone is free to
interact with deep Capital markets based
on an accurate price you're getting the
data throughput of 120 bits per second
times the entire economy right so you're
getting it's a more efficient means for
disseminating knowledge effectively and
then again knowledge is just the more
knowledge uh a socioeconomic structure
can contain the more wealthy it is right
prices tools all these things are just
knowledge so in that respect that that's
why something like capitalism even in
its marginalized form State capitalism
outcompetes communism it's a it's
distributed computing versus centralized
Computing you know we kind of brought up
religion and Joseph Campell and myth and
the the propagation of ideas and kind of
before I forget I wanted to ask your
thoughts about this you know Jordan
Peterson I haven't really understood
exactly like be able to pin him down
exactly what he sees as the role of
religion in human society but it uh
feels like he's describing it as having
uh value for us this the ideas of myth
are valuable they are valuable
mechanisms to I think you mentioned kind
of directing Us in this world as a human
society um do you think about myth do
you think about religion what's the use
of it in the in this construct of uh
markets and this uh in this framework of
um where ideas are
ultimately the the
fundamental thing that makes societies
work yeah I think Jordan Peterson who
I'm a huge fan of he's been very
influential on my thinking um and
influential on my own religious views as
well um I think his position would be
and he said this before
that he acts as if God
exists and I've had some some arguments
about this before but to me that points
towards the preeminence of action and
how important action is versus your your
cognitive beliefs
necessarily um and I think there is a
lot of utility in that that if you
follow the moral code of something like
the Bible um you do reap benefits from
that Society reaps benefits from that um
and this is not and sometimes I I bring
up this point and people like oh my God
are you kidding me have you read the Old
Testament they're clobbering people with
rocks when they do the wrong thing it
the Bible doesn't claim to be this like
do everything that was done in the Bible
it's more like charting this moral
progression where we came from this very
barbaric Society into something
more like the New Testament where we're
honoring you know individual sovereignty
above the state and things like that so
I think that mythology itself is another
form of data compression if you look at
these stories um you know Kanan abble is
a good example or Peterson makes the
point that it's a tiny story it's you
know a paragraph is long but it contains
so many layers of meaning um in regards
to violence evil betrayal wor work um
the Divergence between intention and
result you know because I think Cain is
actually
making uh he's making the effort to
sacrifice for God but the sacrifices
he's making are not God doesn't find
them useful right and so he he sort of
rejects rejects
them for
a again if we're we're we're organized
by these useful fictions right these
these uh Harian imagined orders I think
mythology is kind of the original
version of that where we were learning
to organize
ourselves uh around
stories to
best coordinate our action across space
and time and so I think it's very
foundational um and back to what we were
saying in the beginning that if value
truly is fundamental I think it's
interesting that all these stories Point
towards often common moral value vales
they're not perfectly
aligned um but it does speak to just the
The
evolutionary importance of morality and
the subjectivity of morality where
morality sort of evolves over time based
on you know frankly the Capital stock
we've accumulated the more Capital stock
we've accumulated the easier life is the
less barbaric we have to be whereas if
we're living in conditions of true
scarcity um then we tend to be a bit
more barbaric towards one another
and that too to dovet tell this into
something largely unrelated but I think
is really important is
inflation inflation by artificially
increasing the prices of goods and
services in the world right we're we're
injecting more dollars chasing the same
level of goods and services we are
artificially increasing
scarcity perceived scarcity right and
when you increase perceived scarcity
you are amplifying
divisiveness this natural the natural
state of man is when everything is
scarce and you really have to fight hard
just to eat or drink water that day so
it's it's decivilizing in a way by
artificially amplifying the perceived
scarcity in the world C can you
elaborate how does inflation increase
the perceived scarcity in the world so
we could think the price itself is an
indication it's a data packet if you
will the price is a data packet on
supply and demand right it's telling you
how much Supply there is of something in
the world relative to the
demand so when you in when you print
money and artificially increase that
price it's diverging away from supply
and demand it's becoming just a more of
a product of policy than it is of free
market fundamentals
right the more expensive something is
that is a signal to the marketplace and
to Market actors that it is scarce right
right that's why uh uh Leonardo painting
might sell for $16 million there's only
one there's a lot of demand for it uh
maybe my numbers are off but but you get
the point uh it's the reason mask spiked
in price after the covid announcement
right there was Supply toilet paper etc
etc so
inflation and by inflation I
specifically mean arbitrary fiat
currency Supply inflation by a legal
Monopoly not um inflation is a commonly
misunderstood word that is amplifying
the perception of scarcity among Market
actors in the world and I would argue
that it actually amplifies divisiveness
I think this is the key maybe to looking
at the connection between the
monopolization of money and things like
cancel culture because it's increasing
the it's increasing our natural
production to be combative with another
because we think there's more scarcity
in the world than there actually is
versus in a world where you're not
increasing the money supply prices are
declining every year as prices decline
this is a signal to Market actors into
the market that scarcity is declining
there's less need to fight over things
and all of this ties back into the old
basate saying that if if Goods don't
cross borders soldiers will so if we're
not trading with one another if we're
not acting interdependently and we're
not
um becoming more intelligent as a
market and the that increased
intelligence or increased knowledge is
reflected in decreased prices because
prices are just the exchange ratios of
things so the smarter we can solve
problems the better we can solve
problems the less prices would be so it
induces more cooperation I love how you
tie inflation cancel culture together as
essentially artificial
creation of increase of conflict MH uh
increasing artificially increasing
scarcity and thereby artificially
increasing conflict that's really
fascinating um you're you're short
circuiting my brain many times
throughout this conversation okay um I'm
strugg this this robot is trying is
struggling to keep up okay maybe to step
back at um useful fictions or pragmatic
truths let me ask the question that
you've answered in many ways already but
let's explicitly look at what is money
well as you know that's my favorite
question that uh is the name of the show
I just launched the what is money show
um clearly the we could say the the
Bitcoin rabbit hole is What's led me to
explore a lot of these ideas in depth um
and I think as we've demonstrated today
it goes well beyond just the economic
sphere when you start to think about
things like exchange and morality and
and time preference and
civilization so I love the question what
is money I think it is the key to
incepting a deeper understanding of the
world into people that if you actually
just start to
ask the seemingly simple question it un
it surfaces more and more layers of
Truth
and I I recently I just wrote a piece I
think I have 30 something answers to
this question so there's so in some
sense it's actually a more systematic
way of asking the question of what is
the meaning of life you know there's
some questions that are almost
unanswerable but in their asking allow
you to uh deeply get closer to truth
deeply understand the nature of our
human existence and the meaning of life
is almost like this uh
initial philosophers uh striving towards
that if if money is indeed as as
fundamental you as as you've described
especially in the context of value being
fundamental then that is a really that's
a more let's like a 21st century way of
asking the same question about what is
the meaning of life you mentioned that
it's a meta property out of the list of
many ways to answer that question how
would you help people to think about
that yeah the
first most serious answer comes from the
school of Austrian economics and it
defines money as a Universal Medium of
exchange so this would be any good that
is
used held and used purely for purposes
of facilitating
exchange
so in the configuration of demand for
any particular asset it's bifurcated
between its utility which is something a
service that it can render to you in
real time whether it's you know um if
it's water you're thirsty that's the
utility of water is that it can quench
your
thirst uh whereas the marketability
would be the expectation of future
exchange that other people would want
this asset in the future to trade it for
whatever they may
have money is just going to be the good
in any trading economy that has the
highest proportion of marketability
relative to utility so today that would
be gold gold has utility it's used in
electronics it's used in Dental
dentistry and whatnot uh but it's
largely used as a store of value across
time and that's what it's been used for
for 5,000 years so if we say gold has A1
trillion do market cap maybe two
trillion of that is its utility value
where it's actually demand for use in
computers and Industry and an 8 trillion
of that is demand for its use as a store
of
value money the marketability aspects of
money boils down to five services that
money can
render money needs to be divisible it
needs to be durable it needs to be
recognizable needs to be portable and it
needs to be
scarce so I'll gloss over a lot of
history with this and just say that
historically money's always been a
technology still is a technology or a
tool I use these terms interchangeably
and you think of a technology as just a
more sophisticated tool effectively mhm
of for to best satisfy those properties
monetary metals were determined to be
the most satisfactory tool the most
divisible most durable most recognizable
most portable tool in the marketplace of
the monetary Metals gold was the most
scarce as Quantified by either its stock
to flow Ratio or its inflation
resistance so simple way to say this is
that people always prefer the money most
resistant to inflation that's a nice
definition of scarcity in the context
the money is uh if you were to measure
it the resistance to inflation so how
hard is it to artificially increase the
supply the supply of the thing that is
the hardness of money and that's why
gold is hard money because Alchemy is
hard that's right because no one cracked
Alchemy so gold became
money
so I mean that's such a nice clean
explanation of what is money uh with the
five elements and gold ultimately one
out because of the last piece of
scarcity that's right and to get to
maybe dig a Little Deeper there so
scarcity we commonly think of scarcity
as strictly a
supply uh property where if there's not
much of something then it's scarce but
it's not actually true scarcity occurs
when demand exceeds Supply so when
there's more demand than the supply can
justify
the thing becomes an economic good and
it it establishes itself a market price
so there's more demand for the thing
than the supply can satisfy the unique
thing about money as a concept at least
is that demand always exceeds Supply
there's never enough money to satisfy
everyone right because another
definition for money it's the most
marketable good so it can be trade it
can be traded for any other good service
piece of knowledge in the marketplace
mhm so being humans being what we are
we're never satisfied right we always
want more of something whatever it may
be so money as the ultimate token of
obtaining that something is always
scarce as a
concept but the problem with money is
that if you can as you alluded to easily
increase its Supply then all of a sudden
you can compromise the scarcity of it
over
time uh and you can rob people through
inflation mhm so so that's why the
market settled on gold as money and
robbing is reallocating the
value that I so essentially the one
property like why
scarcity is important is uh it uh adds a
lot more friction to the
reallocation uh like through essentially
violence or implied violence well it
prevents it through cost of extraction
too so if you want to go out and dilute
gold holders today you have to go out
into the world and mine gold it's a very
expensive process that process tends to
find equilibrium where production cost
equals the market value of gold so if
market value is $2,000 an ounce today of
gold its production cost is going to be
around there that's the natural market
equilibrium so that way gold miners
cannot just dilute people over time
whereas you look at something like fiat
currency which might we're jumping ahead
a little bit but its production cost is
zero so there's a reason the market
value of fiat currency historically has
always converged to zero because its
production cost is near zero so the the
extension to that question might be how
did we get from gold to paper currency
and again this is rooted in the
properties of
money uh as good as monetary metals were
and as good as gold is as money at
holding value across time it's rather
Limited in terms of portability it is
not as useful for moving value across
space
this is another definition of money by
the way a social device for moving value
across space and time mhm so to rectify
this technological shortcoming of gold
we introduced first of all the custody
of gold was gradually centralized into
more into fewer and fewer warehousing
operations this is because there are
economies of scale associated with using
um gold as money and that if you
centralize the custody the warehouse
owner can then issue a paper receipt
called the warehouse receipt for that
gold and then Market participants can
trade that paper as if it's good as gold
and everyone has an option at any time
to go and redeem real gold from the
warehouse so that system
works until the problem with it is that
it introduces the need to trust the
custodian so it's introducing
counterparty risk in the form of the
custodian and now should that warehouse
choose to increase the supply of paper
notes gold Beyond its Supply so if it's
got three tons of gold and IT issues six
tons worth of paper receipts all the
sudden it's participating in a fraud
it's basically lying it's representing
that it has more gold than it actually
does um and this is that is the pathway
that we got into Banking and Central
Banking is we needed a convenience
mechanism to rectify the portability
shortcomings of gold we needed to be
able to move value across space right
gold was doing a great job at moving
value over time but not space paper
currency gave us the ability to move
value across space but it introduced
this attack Vector for warehouse
operators which became Banks which
became central banks to modify the
supply to suit their own political
agendas added the snooze
button allows you to do just do a little
fraud get something for nothing
something just a little bit at first
yeah just just just this one morning
just a little bit
um I mean I don't know if you can speak
to um the birth of fiat currency is
there some interesting um
characteristics to that those early
steps that created it like could it have
been averted or is just the natural
progression of um of governments you
know what's funny is that Central
Banking was initially designed to be the
custodian of gold right so they were
going to custody the gold issue paper on
top of
it and they would maintain you could
trust the public stamp effectively you
could trust that the central bank had as
much gold on reserve as they said they
had and they were supposed to be the
trustworthy institution so we we went
from placing our trust in a free market
game theoretic process where we're
trusting gold and we began trusting this
institution
Instead This that institution would not
not have Arisen if the portability of
gold was really high if we could have
somehow sent gold across a
telecomunications channel there would
have been no need for a central bank
everyone could have custody their gold
in any any information bearing medium
frankly and they could beam it around
the world at any time so this whole
institution itself is rooted in a
technological shortcoming of gold so I
think it's another way to think about
that is maybe had there been all the
gold in the world today fills two
olympic size swimming pools all the gold
Min throughout all of human history so
there's not a lot right mhm what if
there had been just like way more there
just been I don't know 20,000 Olympic
swimming pools
worth portability wouldn't have been as
much of an issue right we could have and
this is to say assuming gold was still
the most scarce medal in all these
things um portability would have been l
of an issue we would have need we would
have had less dependence or need for a
central bank so I think it's it's kind
of idiosyncratic and that we just
happened to end up here on this planet
with a certain amount of gold it best
satisfied the properties of money and a
certain amount of humans geographically
dispersed such that portability had
certain properties that you want to
achieve for humans in the geographical
space to be able to be a um exchange
value became more of an issue as we
globalized right as we became more of a
global Society we need needed money that
could move across space really fast
right so we could trade in international
Capital
markets so that
drove the central bank to become the
dominant institution of the world and if
you follow the flows of gold throughout
history you know I've been watching this
uh documentary on World War I and World
War II on Netflix I think it's called
World War II in color oh yeah this
really good so good and when I say gold
has been the governor governments or
gold is geopolitical money like it is
the Bas layer operating system has been
the Bas layer operating system for
analog Society so it's always been about
who controls the
gold is who makes the
rules and that's in that context is why
Bitcoin is so interesting because it is
the disruptor to this Bas level
operating system that's functioned for
all of human history I think this is a
good place to ask we asked the what is
money
question what is
bitcoin that's a question as complicated
as what is money I
think if you get a general understanding
of money from a number of
angles that we could say Bitcoin is the
most Superior monetary technology that
has ever
existed so so one one of the most most
Superior implementation of the ideas of
money that you talked about you talked
about money as speech you talked about
money as an
idea he talked about a money of
sovereignty yeah so we're attaching the
concept of money to your point to
whatever tool best
satisfies those properties of money or
best renders those Services we need from
money and as you said you're using the
word tool and Technology interchangeably
here yes yes and another thing to think
about here is that we think often in
terms of goods or
services but actually everything is a
service so it's not the physical
properties of this pen that I find
valuable it's the services that it
renders to me that I want to write a
letter this gives this serves me by
allowing me to lay ink on paper and
communicate information
so value humans attached value as we
alluded to earlier two services not
Goods so the properties or the services
that money renders that human beings
value are those five properties
divisibility durability recognizability
portability
scarcity Metals best satisfied those
Services
historically but Bitcoin as the most
Superior monetary technology in human
history essentially perfects them it's
as close to Perfection as we've ever
been so in terms of divisibility each
Bitcoin can be broken down into 100
million subunits called a
Satoshi um it could if that divisibility
were ever our problem which actually um
there was a question that came up
recently if you divide the world
population by the total supply of
Bitcoin you end up at like 0.3 Bitcoin
per person call it uh 300,000 Satoshi
per person what if that was not enough
to facilitate economic activity and the
answer to that is Bitcoin can soft work
into further divisibility so if Bitcoin
ate all the money in the
world and the average Bitcoin or wealth
was say 300,000 Satoshi each but that
wasn't uh divisible enough maybe to buy
coffee and do all these day-to-day
transactions what would happen well we
would increases divisibility so
bitcoin's perfected divisibility the
divisibility of money lets us transact
across scales right we can buy coffee or
we can buy a
house
um durability is an interesting one so
clearly something like gold is very
durable it's resistant to degradation
over time Bitcoin is just pure
information but it's stored in a
distributed
format so information stored in a
distributed fashion tends to be
virtually infinitely durable uh the
example like to give here is something
like the Bible the Bible is just
distributed information it's stored
everywhere and nowhere so to speak and
for that reason it has outlasted Empires
and Bitcoin similar right you can't make
changes to it unilaterally but to uh
make explicit the the ways in which it
is not durable is the fact that it
relies on Computing infrastructure like
it uh it needs computers so if you were
to destroy all the computers in the
world yes it needs mechanisms that store
and transfer information that's right
and so you could attack it I mean you
could attack gold in the same kind of
way I suppose to the physics but it's
probably easier to destroy all the
computers in the world than it is to
destroy all the gold in the world maybe
not I don't know anyway yeah yeah you're
right uh maybe maybe I'm not sure which
one would be harder to destroy but the
other thing is there's a dynamic
incentive so every time you you destroy
Bitcoin miners you're creating
incentives for anyone else with access
to electricity to mine right cuz you're
making the algorithm easier yeah so the
the structure
is difficult because of the
decentralized nature of the whole thing
and the difficulty adjustment yeah yeah
so you're going to have to use nuclear
weapons and and cover the whole globe
but anyway yeah and by then we've got
much bigger problems than money
right that's right so okay so that's
durability so portability bitcoin's pure
information it can move at the speed of
light can't get much faster than that uh
recognizability refers to the ability to
verify the veracity of the money or or
it's AU authenticity so you can actually
when we used to transact gold there were
time onor techniques for verifying that
it was gold and not goldplated lead for
instance this is where we get the term
sound money a gold coin made a very
particular sound when dropped from a
certain height you know you've seen
people biting coins these are all
techniques for testing uh the
authenticity of gold and with Bitcoin we
have something unique and that if you're
running a full node you can verify that
the Bitcoin is Bitcoin right it cannot
be tampered with it cannot be faked and
in addition to that as a node operator
you can audit the total supply of
Bitcoin at any time which is unlike any
money in history so you know with full
certainty if you're holding 1,000
Bitcoin you have 1,000 out of a possible
21 million forever you have a guaranteed
fraction of the total Supply yeah so a
full note contains information about
every transaction that's ever been had
so you can figure out yeah I mean all
the truth of the this money is all right
there yeah it's like a fractal
constituent of the whole network right
the whole Bitcoin blockchain is
comprised in a node too not not the
proof of work piece but the entire
transaction history MH um and so that's
unique as well and that's what makes
Bitcoin the ultimate store value is that
you know with certainty what the total
Supply is and will ever be and you know
that your share of that Supply is fixed
it cannot change it can only improve
actually if someone loses is you know if
the Satoshi stash is truly gone forever
the million Bitcoin never moves then
we're talking about a th000 Bitcoin out
of 20 million instead and so on and so
forth as more PE as more people lose
access to their Bitcoin they're
basically making a contribution to
everyone else it's anti dilutive and
there's certain properties of Bitcoin
that are sort of a little bit more into
the details that ensure that the the
full nodes like the size of all the
transactions ever happened at least
currently can be stored in a single
computer for example so it's not it
doesn't blow up too quickly that's right
but you know there's arguments that
that's not necessary you can make
Arguments for that to be uh a very nice
property but you can also say that
there's like drawbacks to it and that's
hence the the the block size debates and
all those kinds of things yeah that was
the Bitcoin cash Civil War right was
that particular piece um yeah and you
know ostensibly they were saying oh we
need more transaction through but to buy
more coffee and do more transactions but
what they're actually doing was
increasing the
size um computing power necessary to run
a full node which would which would have
theoretically compromised
decentralization so yeah I but it would
in theory this is you know in theory it
would allow you to have much more
transactions that's right but the the
drawback it would because of no longer
can be stored in a single computer
personal computer than it naturally
leads to the centralization same kind of
thing we see with gold which would have
compromised its
survivability right so um I so what else
is there the last one which leads
straight into this one actually is the
most important one of money which is
scarcity and that you need to know the
supply is fixed and safeguarded from
counterfeiting um and inflation which
counterfeiting and inflation are the
same thing by the way counterfeiting is
criminalized inflation inflation is
legalized counterfeiting so central
banks today when they say they're
printing money they're not they're
counterfeiting currency um that's a very
important part and Bitcoin as I've
argued in some of my
writing is more than just an invention
it's actually the discovery of absolute
scarcity and that we have unveiled a
property of money that we will only
discover once
um and it's got really major
ramifications For The World At Large so
with gold for
instance as we've covered it became
money because it was the most relatively
scarce monetary metal right it's Supply
was hardest to in increase Over time
however if we could somehow flip a
switch today and make everyone in the
world go out and start mining gold we
could increase the supply much more
quickly we could you know it's historic
inflation rates about 2% we could double
that pretty quickly um
Bitcoin with Bitcoin it is not possible
so no matter how much effort and energy
and capital uh and operational
expenditure we pour into the mining
Network we cannot deviate from its fixed
and diminishing supply curve from
between now and the last Bitcoin being
mined in 2140 because of the difficulty
adjustment it's constantly it's adapting
to Human Action actually so the harder
we pursue it the more that it recedes
and then the less we pursue it the more
available it makes itself and this
is It's a real major breakthrough
because it's the closest
thing to perfect information we've ever
had in an economy and perfect
information is this it's a theoretical
but
unattainable state of the market where
all Market actors have all the relevant
information uh about everything so that
they can compete as efficiently as
possible possible and in the state in a
state of pure information we have I'm
sorry perfect information we have
perfect competition and in perfect
competition we maximize wealth
generation so we're competing uh as
freely as possible from coer of and
violent impediments and so I think
Bitcoin in that sense is going to pull
the world world closer to a state a per
of perfect competition than we've ever
been before which would increase wealth
of generation to an extent we've never
seen
before many of the things you said about
Bitcoin also hold for other
cryptocurrency technologies that
followed
after is can you say something to why
you think
Bitcoin is the
superior technology from a pragmatic
truth perspective than say ethereum but
also other crypto like Bitcoin cash
like other hard Forks of Bitcoin and uh
or maybe things that might yet to be
invent tools yet to be invented yeah so
this is a good point of argument because
a lot of people have countered me and
said Bitcoin cannot be absolute absolute
scarcity because you can Fork it and
create something with the same
properties as Bitcoin or potentially
Even Better Properties right you create
something with a deflationary monetary
policy uh that's what bit coin cash was
actually it forked Bitcoin with all of
the same properties except for the block
size that we alluded to earlier the
problem is is that money is valued again
it's it's the good with a configuration
of demand that is predominantly
marketability MH so it is valued based
on its liquidity that is how many other
trading partners are there in that
monetary Network so it is
a network valued because of its
liquidity and network effects so any new
entrant into the market for money will
all is incentivized to always
choose the money with the deepest
liquidity and the most Network effects
this is why money has tended to be a win
or take all Market because it's
essentially a single-purpose tool right
it is a tool
for if we consider that tools are
time-saving devices right the shovel
lets you dig more holes per man hour
than you can with your bare hands money
is a tool there's yet another definition
of money that lets us calculate
negotiate and execute trades more
quickly
so that function tends to coales towards
one
solution and so the short answer would
be that for the same reasons
quantifiable reasons right like
inflation resistance and and liquidity
and network effects that we have one
analog gold we're only likely to have
one digital gold and I think the Bitcoin
cash Fork proves that out empirically
it's a good a good case study because
for case study right but it okay so that
that's really well put so like gold was
sticky uh once it was accepted the
network effects the winner take all took
over and here's a fundamentally
different kind of like analog versus
digital is a leap Technologies that's
right and you're suggesting that there
may not
be there's unlikely to be other leaps of
that kind into a whole another kind of
space of Technologies I would argue that
Bitcoin is kind of like the ideological
synthesis of gold taking the monetary
properties of gold and combining them
with the internet itself right and in
doing so it has essentially perfected
the properties of money right you can't
get more divisible durable recognizable
portable or scarce than Bitcoin so so
Satoshi has kind of he left no design
space for his Superior technology to
intercede and out compete Bitcoin at
this point now that it's established
liquidity in the far superior technology
right yeah but it's it's a combination
of the tech itself and the social layer
that is co you can't separate those two
out like they're all connected and then
the political as well I mean but you
know the portability for example that's
the another way to phrase that is the
what is it the scaling so the number of
transactions that's a limitation for
Bitcoin that many argue as a feature
many argu is a bug you have you have a
bunch of cryptocurrency technologies
that are able to achieve much
higher much faster frequency of
transactions much more transactions you
know all that kind of
stuff what are your thoughts on that uh
you know the the low level of
transactions that's possible with
Bitcoin do you think that's a feature do
you think that's a bug necessary for
security actually and even these other
crypto assets that settle more quickly
they settle with less Assurance of
finality so uh Nick Carter has a great
piece on this actually called it's the
settlement Assurance is stupid it's
really good where the gist of it is that
there is more work being done in each
block of Bitcoin that it can't it is
less vulnerable to reversion MH so it's
it's it's giv giving you higher degrees
of assurance that your settlement or
your trade has occurred with finality
whereas other blockchains are much more
vulnerable um and again with
Bitcoin The evolutionary path of money
with gold is that it was first used as a
collectible it then became used as a
store value after it had stored enough
value it became being it began to be
used as a medium of exchange and then
finally when it was used widely enough
as a medium of exchange it becomes a
unit of account we actually start to
think in the money bitcoin's following a
similar path so started out as kind of a
collectible today I would argue it's a
store value one of the most effective
store value we've ever seen so that
evolutionary path that Bitcoins
following it's similar to gold first of
collectible today is store value to Be
an Effective store value it has to
optimize for Supply cap yes that has to
be the first and this is all Bitcoin
really needs to do to be successful by
the way exactly what it's been doing for
12 years virtually flawlessly which is
keep creating a block every 10 minutes
and keep enforcing a supply cap of 21
million as long as those two things
hold it is uh sound money the Ultimate
Sound money the the
most inflation resistant money there's
ever been it's actually completely
immune it's taken unexpected inflation
to 0% we know with perfect certainty
what Bitcoin Supply will ever
be for it to be used more broadly as a
medium of exchange it can't make
trade-offs at the base layer to be uh to
increase its portability for instance
even though it's portability is maybe
kind of a misnomer because Bitcoin has
extremely high portability just doesn't
have extremely high transaction
throughput right so we could say you can
move it pretty quickly anywhere in the
world as long as you're willing to bid
up uh for the block space but you can't
can't satisfy all the world's economic
volume you can't do 300 million
transactions per second like you can on
a centralized database like
Visa but
Bitcoin needs to be this it has to be a
store value first before it can be a
medium of
exchange so it has to protect the supply
cap first before making any trade-offs
for that and I would argue
that that's why Bitcoin is so rigid is
that it's optimized for survivability
and optimized for that Supply cap and
it's pushing experimentation and um
other features that would increase his
transaction through but to higher layers
so I think lightning network is
something that's very interesting um
it's still early but there's a lot of
throughput already being used on the on
the lightning Network and it makes you
know some slight trade-offs in terms of
the trust minimization of Bitcoin you
end up trusting these these smart
contracts instead to move the Bitcoin
but you pick up nearly unlimited
transaction but so that's how and that's
how biology evolves that's how the
internet evolved it evolves in layers so
I think Bitcoin you can sort of conceive
of it as the latest layer to the
internet um and it's one that preserves
this store value property better than
any asset we've ever had let me ask sort
of a critical question of if you're
wrong about your statements of about
Bitcoin you find out years from now that
you were wrong what would that look like
what would be the things that make you
realize you were wrong likely ideas or
crazy out there ideas do you think about
this kind of stuff all the
time because you speak very confidently
about Bitcoin and one of the things let
me put it this way I think
certainty I feel like that's like a
stoic statement certainty leads to ruin
something like that like certainty I
think is
antithesis
to progress often and especially in your
writing but this is true for the Bitcoin
Community there's a there's a certainty
about the Bitcoin and that makes me very
skeptical no matter how good the ideas
are whenever things are good this might
be the russan of me I think like what
are the ways this is going to go wrong
so so what do you think are the ways
this might go wrong or you're wrong in
your conception of what what Bitcoin is
yeah so
science evolves via
negativa meaning that we're not proving
hypothesis and that's what becomes the
body of
science science is whatever is left over
as we disprove hypothesis right whatever
we can empirically through
experimentation disprove gets discarded
and whatever remains um whatever Theory
remains it hasn't been disproven is
science
effectively um this
process is similar to Market actors
zeroing in on a store value right
they're they're experimenting with
different forms of uh storing wealth
across time uh some do better than
others and eventually everyone ends up
on the one that is best that's what gold
was um in terms of understanding Bitcoin
I look at it as a similar approach and
that I'm actually that is the main
question I'm asking myself is how do you
stop this thing how do you turn it off
how do you end it if if you're a nation
state particularly who has the most to
lose in this
transition what is the attack vector by
which they neutralize Bitcoin I mean
that is the $250 trillion question
and you know I've spent five years
thinking about this thing very deeply
I've read everything on monetary history
I can get my hands on
um the general thought of how it is
stopped and this is this is the snag
point that a lot of people get to in
their Explorations down the rabbit hole
is they just say the government will
never allow it and that becomes kind of
their bottom it's like all right
bitcoin's interesting it's Superior
money blah blah blah but the government
will never allow it and they was Ray
doio did he say that diio was currently
stuck there yeah so R alio said that um
Bitcoin seems to be too promising yeah
uh if if it is in fact as promising as
it looks uh governments are going to uh
I don't forget what the exact quote is
but not allow ban it yeah governments
will ban it so how do you get ralo
unstuck from your perspective well and
how do you get unstuck from that idea
that governments will governments how do
you prevent governments from stopping a
thing that uh threatens centralized
power
well Bitcoin is an
idea so governments that are really good
at
fighting centralized threats to their
power right whether that's a currency
counterfeit or competing nation state or
business they don't like or an
individual they don't like you know they
can kill them they can throw them in
jail they can use any number of course
of or violent tactics to suppress it but
how do you point a gun at an idea how do
you how do you coers an idea
um and that's you know there's some
there is some anecdotal history here
where there's the pgp case which in the
United States uh the court was trying to
classify it as Munitions when we were
shipping this pretty good privacy
software over uh overseas government
wanted to classifi it as Munitions and
restrict that exportation
but and this was a circuit court case
precedent when uh the pgp attorneys
actually printed out the source code on
paper and presented it as evidence in
the court all of the sudden it became
protected under freedom of speech and
that it's just code is speech code is is
language and um therefore at least in
the United States it's protected under
the First
Amendment
um I think a government ban would be
largely unenforceable frankly on bitcoin
um being that it's pure
information if you
suppress Market actors from using it in
one jurisdiction you're just creating
incentives for them to go elsewhere uh
and you're actually increasing the
incentives for other jurisdictions to be
be favorable towards it because then
they can create they get to benefit from
the tax revenue and the businesses and
The Innovation that's occurring in and
around Bitcoin as a result so you don't
think if a particular Central
Bank like in Europe or United States
bans it not maybe using those terms but
in some kind of way mhm you think
there's a that provides a really strong
incentive for the other big players to
enable it that's
right and that they're more likely by
the way since and governments know this
by the way too the other thing that
causes the government to shoot itself in
the foot is that if they ban something
they draw a lot of attention to it yeah
people are I mean people ask why why
would the government ban it why can't I
use this so that's kind typically be the
the last arrow in their quiver um they
may try to ban it if Bitcoin you know
really starts to monetize very quickly
and this the power structures that they
impose today start to
dissolve uh faster than I you know
others might think they will then they
might try and ban it but I think that
ban will be largely
unenforceable um they're more likely to
tax it which they already do tax it um
they're likely to increase taxation of
it uh they would they're likely to try
and make it more white Market but
actually tracing Bitcoin seeing who has
it attaching identities to bitcoin
ownership um and making sure that
they're getting their pound of flush on
all the transactions it results in but I
don't think the other thing about this
is so we saw the internet out compete
intranets mhm um and that the we could
say that open source networks tend to
out compete closed Source networks and
there's a really good reason for this
it's because in a Clos Source
Network there are costs associated with
defending the network
itself so you have
to the Network owners the owners of the
close Source Network have to expend
resources protecting it from competitors
and they have to expend resources
imposing its
rules because people they're not
voluntarily adopted rules so you
actually have to impose these rule sets
whereas an open- Source Network which is
something much more akin to capitalism
pure in its pure sense these are
voluntarily adopted rules so all Market
participants have agreed and consented
to this rule set so there's no
enforcement cost and there's no Turf
protection because anyone can freely
enter or exit the open
network for that energetic reason I
think open networks out compete close
networks typically and in the digital
age that's why I think open that's why
internet out competes internet and
that's why open source networks are
going to eat closed Source networks so
what Bitcoin would be in that lens is
the ultimate open source monetary
Network devouring closed Source Central
Bank monetary
networks and I I just don't see
how there's no possibility of
unilaterally stopping Bitcoin or
destroying it so then they're more
likely to regulate or tax it uh and
again the other fallacy here is that a
lot of people tend to think of
governments as these singular
indivisible uh entities like that just
move under one plan but in reality it's
a lot of people right A lot of people
with Loosely coupled interest and
agendas and
whatnot uh regulators and and um others
with they're wearing their citizen hat
they're going to see this thing
monetizing they're going to be on the
front lines of um trying to regulate it
trying to control it and I think what's
likely to happen is they're going to
start to adopt it to buy some of
it uh even as an individual or possibly
even ultimately as a at a central bank
or Sovereign wealth fund level as an
insurance policy against its
success and once you start to acquire
something and then you have a a vested
economic interest in its monetization I
think it kind of dissolves any of the
power structures that are arrate against
it from the inside mhm so I've written a
lot about this uh in a new series called
sovereignism which is based Loosely on a
book called The sovereign
individual and that's the general thesis
is that microprocessing technology would
devour our organizational models uh the
most important of which is the nation
state so I think we're going into this
world where coercion and violence is
just much less rewarding um it you can't
the economics of violence are declining
because of the the low cost of
protecting property right you can
now protect your monetary property uh in
Bitcoin at orders of magnitude less cost
than is necessary to run a banking
Network
so it changes the way uh it changes the
way we organize ourselves and again if
we zooming back to gold as kind of the
original Governor to governments where
if they manipulated the money gold would
leave their country that's why
governments have um taking cons
relatively concerted action to go off of
a gold standard there's a great book on
this called the gold Wars um that that
outlines how governments have been
waging a cold war against gold for the
past 50
years Bitcoin sort of uh renews hope for
that free market governor of governments
and that is this digital gold that
governments cannot stop or
co-opt so I think it's something that's
why I think it's such a big deal is that
it is
is changing it's a new useful fiction
you might say a useful fiction that's
superordinate to the mythology of the
nation state and government as the
dominant institution in the world well I
I hope you're right that uh all forms of
centralized
power start breaking apart naturally so
governments the more and more power is
given to the individual whatever the
technology is and Bitcoin seems to be a
promising technology that empowers that
enables that that seems to be the trend
and that's a promising trend from uh at
least from a perspective of somebody who
values this particular biological meat
bag that's full of Consciousness I think
Bitcoin is exposing the greatest scam in
human history which is political
Authority like who gives anyone the
right to be politically have political
authority over anyone else people should
be free to adopt the rules and systems
and tools that best suit their
needs and you know that AR that Arc of
History we covered earlier where
as socioeconomic systems have become
more favorable towards individual
sovereignty the more wealthy we have
become the more we have given the
individual we've maximized individual
Choice uh the more wealth that Society
has created and the more it has
outcompeted uh the systems that have
come before it the latest would be you
know capitalism triumphing over
socialism
before maybe we eat uh you are in Texas
uh you brought over some brisket before
we maybe indulge in that let me bring up
one quick topic and then we'll take a
break and the topic of uh the what some
may term the toxicity of the Bitcoin
community that uh you've written that
Bitcoin toxicity tough
love do you want to break that apart a
little bit sort of
um the idea the philosophy of the
toxicity that's seems to be present in
in part in the Bitcoin Community yeah we
were talking about this a little bit
before we recorded and I've been through
the gauntlet with Bitcoin toxicity as
well um I came into this
space professionally in
2017 uh was originally running a multi
strategy crypto asset hedge fund and my
initial investment thesis on the world
was that you know Bitcoin was a big deal
but there were all these other exciting
coins and projects and ways the
technology was going to be
used and that view of reality met this
immune I guess you could say as an
ideological immune system is Bitcoin
toxicity and that it's kind of a a
filter that's trying to catch bad or
useless or even scamming ideas that this
space is very well known for for um you
know as we've touched on today Bitcoin
in my opinion is this world shattering
Innovation but it's in a c of the most
scammy stuff ever right people anybody
can go and create a
coin so you can go and launch one
immediately online um and you can throw
up a website an advisor page you know
post a white paper talking about how
great your technology is going to be and
how it's going to change the world and
you can raise $30 million in Bitcoin or
ethereum in 30 seconds kind of thing so
it's drawn in a lot of this scam
Artistry you might say and I
think people living through that because
there is this natural predilection for
people when they first come into Bitcoin
you're excited about it then you get
lost in the shitcoin universe and then
just looking at the market success of
Bitcoin versus and when I use the word
shitcoin I'm just you say with all the
love in the world all the love in the
world I guess you could call me a toxic
maximalist in some ways although I
consider myself a freedom maximalist not
a Bitcoin maximalist yeah I saw that
line that's a so it's a good line
Bitcoin tracking the market success of
Bitcoin versus alternative crypto assets
uh the signal is very clear that Bitcoin
has out competed all of them so I think
that Bitcoin cultural toxicity has
evolved as an immune response to those
bad ideas which is actually if you think
about it it kind of is a tough love
right you don't want new entrance to the
space to get lost in shitcoin Jungle and
learn the hard way the way many Bitcoin
maximalists have that uh the real
Innovation is Bitcoin but like an immune
system I think it can also go too far
and so I think it's useful when it is
defending the space from false
narratives we might say but it becomes
detrimental when it's attacking people
that are inquiring about Bitcoin or
people that are approaching Bitcoin with
a a a good spirit and good intention and
a uh a desire to learn because then at
that point it's actually impeding the
free flow of ideas which you know the
example and um your clip that was
totally taken out of context and then
you're literally just saying I'm here to
learn and contribute I think I've got
some stuff to do and then people attack
that like that doesn't make any
sense it's like you're attacking someone
who's approaching it in a good spirit
and asking questions yeah and I think
sometimes talk talking about
it the toxicity in the Bitcoin Community
as an immune
response has a negative effect of giving
at a
pass because like it almost says look it
equates it with the IM the human immune
system which seems to do a really good
job and so you could say that the
toxicity has a lot of features in the
sea
of
fraudulent projects that
um Ste steal money from people it's
really useful to make sure that um you
give people the harsh truth about who is
and isn't a
scammer you have to take it apart take
it away from that metaphor of the immune
system and look at basic human nature
and human nature can go to some Dark
Places which is it's sad to say that
some
people maybe many of us can enjoy for
its own sake the tox icity the mockery
the derision and you uh stop being part
of the immune system that makes a
successful idea propagate and start
being a sort of a destructive virus
yourself and that's something I think
about because I I am new to uh this
particular immune system but I've
explored other immune
systems
and the
I think you understand this world much
better than me but I tend to prefer sort
of love as a mechanism for spreading
ideas to to air on the side of love and
kindness and almost like the
open-mindedness in a way where you're
constantly lowering yourself in the face
of other ideas constantly questioning
yourself but I think I understand that
that that might be more applicable in
certain contexts like maybe in the space
of science or something like that but in
the space of uh Bitcoin as it currently
stands there's so many people that are
trying to scam others out of their money
that the kind of harshness required is
different nevertheless I
do want to put it on people like
yourself and others who I know you
wouldn't consider yourself this but
you're one of the faces or leaders in
the space to call people out a little
bit to inspire them to be more loving I
I suppose but it's difficult cuz you
want to walk that line carefully you
don't want to be too loving and
open-minded otherwise your brain falls
out I I get it it's a difficult balance
to walk it is it is subtle and it's
nuanced and it is difficult to walk and
I think that that's why I try to say
tough love
because you know when we're young we may
have certain ideas about how we the way
we want our life to go but then maybe
our parents are not letting us do
certain things and we think they're I
know when I was a kid I wanted to get my
when I was in fifth grade I want to get
my ear pierced my mom wouldn't let me do
it and I was you know oh come on mom
thought it was so cool and then two
years later I'm like thank you Mom for
not letting me get my ear pierc um I
think it comes from a place of good
intention that they are
actually they have asked themselves that
question right that they've been
inquiring and why not this crypto asset
or this crypto asset and they they've
done the exploration they keep coming
back to bitcoin and they've seen people
being taken advantage of um but you know
to your point it's like it can this
tough love can become detrimental just
like the immune system can become
detrimental right it can overreact and
it can actually harm the human body so I
would say that it's it's such a tricky
and nuanced topic that even biology
hasn't figured it out right A lot of
people have autoimmune diseases
um and then there's the other thing that
we we have this natural I agree with you
about love I think love is like the
deepest value um that's a whole another
philosophical thing but it's we're
biologically programmed to pay more
attention to things that are adversarial
or harmful right that's part of the US
protecting the meat suit so to speak so
there is some uh maybe better
delivery method by being a little bit
toxic to really get the point across
like hey don't get lost over here these
things can hurt you really try to focus
on bitcoin but the toxicity of that
message I guess it increases its ability
to penetrate the individual but it can
also go too far so it is it's
interesting but I almost to push back a
little bit toxicity is a funny word I
think tox maybe another way to say it is
uh I brought up like Christopher Hitchin
and somebody
who like okay you might say he's toxic
or something like that cuz he's
basically a intellectual Powerhouse
who's also a troll so he's constantly
it's a gorilla Warfare in the space of
ideas he's very harsh in his
disagreements and criticisms but it's
done with Incredible Grace and skill and
poetry so we could use more of that we
could use more that so toxicity
just like
um these are just words they can mean a
lot of different things but disagreement
doesn't have to be done with
love but it should be done with skill if
it's to be effective so there's a lot of
ways to be effective in G gorilla
Warfare but you want to learn how to
shoot or whatever the weapon you're
using and to do it well some people do
it better than others and uh it's
worthwhile to learn to do it well again
I prefer love but even love you know
just because you think you're
communicating a good idea which you very
well may be doesn't mean it also doesn't
require skill to do the communication
well whether it's disagreement and harsh
or more uh agreement and loving and so
on yeah I think very
fundamentally that all of our decisions
you know we we alluded to earlier that
every decision is an expression of value
reaction we take they ultimately come
from fear or love fear would would be
something much more in the biological
domain where it's like we're trying to
protect ego we're trying to behave
selfishly this is the domain of sin you
know I don't know all the sins gluttony
greed sloth wrath lust Pride Envy like
these are all selfish behaviors or is
something like love is much it's morally
Superior and that it's more selfless I I
don't know that we can properly Define
love with words at all but I would say
maybe like selfless action could be kind
of a generalization of it and that way
it is really hard to your point it's
hard
to to love in a world that has a lot of
conflict that might make you fearful if
you're really focused on your meat suit
but if you're focused on the bigger
picture and you're focused on others and
Legacy and life that um there is a way
to do it and that's why I actually think
Christ that is the highest moral aim
right he met all of the vitri all in
life you know betrayal hate violence he
met it all with love and he met it with
compassion and that's why like
regardless of if you believe that he
actually lived or any of this this he is
symbolic of the highest moral
Consciousness possible and you know Carl
Young would say that that was a
suitable alternative to psychoanalysis
was actually setting your moral aim
higher and striving towards it
diligently so
I mean I agree completely we need more
of that in the Bitcoin space uh we need
more of that in the world frankly the
world yeah um and these things they're
all intertwined you
know we touched on the beginning that
all of us get to decide but the world
does influence kind of if we adopt fear
or love um but it takes I don't know it
takes good systems and it takes I guess
good leaders to to set an example yeah I
do I do believe that there's like
individual people can have a ripple
effect mhm so that's that's what I try
to do sort of embody the I'm just one
ant but I one of the things I have faith
in
is I'm trying to do that
more I know this is a podcast but I'm
trying to do less talking and more
doing um I've been disappointed in
myself if I'm being honest how much
talking I've been doing you know as as
opposed to
um like my own private life I live the
thing I talk about but I also haven't
created
much you know and uh I believe in the
power of individuals that create stuff
like create an idea yeah through those
individuals that try to create something
new the world progresses and hopefully
there's more and more more and more of
those people so we mentioned kind of
people
who what the Bitcoin Community called
scammers I have a lot of passions in my
life life that I focus a lot of my
attention
to you know Bitcoin doesn't happen to
be yet one of them Bitcoin and
cryptocurrency you know glad you said
yet I I'm always looking um for things
to really fall in love with so how is a
person like me supposed to figure
out I also have happen to have a
platform a little bit and how am I
supposed to figure out who is a
interesting uh what is an interesting
set of ideas and what are not because
people are financially tied into a lot
of the cryptocurrencies that we're
talking about certainly with Bitcoin you
know their livelihood their well-being
is tied up to it so it becomes much more
emotional much more personal it's no
longer purely an exploration of ideas
it's really almost like a threat on your
property like it's a personal threat it
makes it very difficult to explore those
ideas so I understand it but it makes it
very difficult for somebody like me to
just walk in and be curious so how do I
proceed in this difficult World in
exploring this
landscape and um not give a platform to
ideas that may uh that may harm others I
guess first I'd like to commend your
forthrightness about this because I
don't think many people try to walk that
line necessarily people
again kind of the territorial imperative
they'll put whoever on they will help
expand their reach oh yeah you know I
don't or say whatever needs to be said
to expand their reach so I think it's
you're coming from a good place I'll say
that um there's a great piece written on
the topic of scammers and scamming uh I
think it was by Goldstein he wrote a
piece called everyone's a scammer and
it's sort of back to this you know
General human proclivity to try and get
something for nothing always which again
it can be
it can be Inova or it can negative can
be try to steal from
people
um that might be I think that's a useful
piece just to kind of see the crypto
world do that lens and that's how
bitcoiners are thinking all the time
they are by Nature adversarial thinkers
so they're trying to minimize the need
for trust in any situation and maximize
verification um as far as sifting
through
the idea I I
guess this is back where the the
cultural immune system has some utility
yeah because I there were times when I
thought this particular crypto asset you
know augur was one I was really into
that it could facilitate prediction
markets and prediction markets could
make um you know markets more efficient
etc etc
but when that investment thesis
basically met the cultural uh filter or
immune system it it forced me to
re-evaluate my position forced me to
really look into it more deeply and
through that exploration I realized that
it would need to be built on bitcoin to
work basically so but it really comes
down to like you doing your homework but
we can't all deeply evaluate every idea
out there right yeah one of the things I
struggle with with Alex Jones for
example had had dinner with
him uh that I could tell that would be a
very fun conversation but
like then I also understand that
there's like consequences to the to that
conversation that should be uh explored
with care mhm and uh so you you need to
take on the responsibility of being a
chef of the puffer fish and all those
kinds of things that said just like you
said it's very difficult to know this
ahead of
time and uh I will probably make
mistakes and that's a shitty thing to
have to live with that I'm going to make
mistakes and some of them very large
like um yeah I mean I can imagine a
bunch of different ways but all we can
do in this world is once we make the
mistakes we acknowledge those mistakes
yes learn and learn and also you know I
have to put this on the on on the rest
of us that you don't take one thing that
a person did and then burn them at the
Stak for it that uh you realize that we
all make mistakes that a particular
mistake does not make the person and you
know this applies to taking stuff out of
context over you know hundreds of hours
of talking but it applies to actual like
in
context big mistake okay so what if I
murdered somebody at some point just
give me a break no there are some things
that are too far of course but in
general uh we need to give each other a
chance yeah but I'm still
I walk with a heavy heart knowing that
I'll probably make a mistake especially
one that I didn't mean to that's the one
that worries me most but this is human
nature like hamara to miss the mark
That's the root word of sin we are
sinful by Nature we can't help it
there's no way again pain is information
right there's no way to learn other than
trying
failing learning and then you put
yourself in better formation right in
formation to better deal with it next
time so I I I hope I don't get the sense
that you're actually afraid of wor or of
making a m upep like I think you're just
um maybe disappointed it's a better word
like you know you're going to make the
mistakes that's exactly that's much much
better word but we have to embrace that
yeah that's the only way anything the
only way we can advance is if we're
dealing with an incomprehensible reality
all we can do is throw spaghetti at the
wall and see what sticks yeah and in
that process we're all you know
inherently going to hurt ourselves and
hurt others and that's where love and
forgiveness come into play right and
um yeah I think the other thing is that
this culture of reducing people down to
a label right whether it's racism or
whether you're calling them a scammer or
um any number of terms you're you're
discounting their sovereignty to zero
right you're taking a super complex
human that is vast contains multitudes
is changing over time and you're trying
to put them in a bucket of a
word and that is just I think a
cognitive fallacy like it's not only
going to hurt the person that you're you
know winnowing down to a word it's also
going to hurt you and it's going to in
your attempt to DEC
complexify Reality by assigning this
person to a term you're actually going
to create bad outcomes for yourself
because you're not going to understand
that person I do also think there's a
failure of our social media technology
that incentivizes that kind of reduce
reduction to a label it just uh the
viral nature of that reduction so it's
not not only do we humans naturally do
that the our social media
platforms make that easier more fun MH
uh more effective to do that at scale
the mass hysteria so I think there's
actually uh like technological ways of
uh adding friction to that yeah I wonder
I mean I agree with you that it's social
media is an amplifier to our natural uh
this natural way of dealing with one
another but I wonder and my thinking has
evolved a lot on this that there's
something below the way we're treating
each other too right that we could say
civilization sort of advances in the
tools we make and the way we treat each
other we tend to have better tools
better quality of life and better
morality better uh quality of living and
uh ways of dealing with one another and
I think that when you corrupt the money
that it really does push us the the
negative Direction pushes us away from
uh again encouraging or ampli magnifying
scarcity artificially causes us to be
more divisive when things are more
divisive we tend to be less civilized
less nuanced more you know black or
white or this or that or you're you're
this or label a or label B so I really
think and this is a harder one to
unravel but I think if we can fix the
money right which again is the base
layer operating system for human moral
action in the world um that it has
Downstream effects so we' actually maybe
start to treat each other a little
better on social media despite the fact
that it enables this um faster
communication that's interesting so
perhaps fixing like social media as I've
been thinking about is uh treating the
symptom not the cause yeah that is the
Bitcoin rabbit hole in a nutshell is it
you know they say fix the money fix the
world you keep tracing these different
um social males or or you know
technological difficulties lack of
innovation you know Weinstein's entire
portal podcast something went wrong in
the early 70s we went off the gold
standard in
1971 and there's a great
website WTF happen1
1971c goes through this whole gamut of
socioeconomic data that's completely
gone uh a skew since since the early'
70s yeah you had this whole video what
do you think about Eric Weinstein and uh
and
Bitcoin and uh the gold standard and
does he I actually haven't heard him
talk about his uh thesis about the the
70s in connection to the going off of
the gold standard um yeah what are your
thoughts there what what are your
thoughts about his general relationship
with the with the Bitcoin idea and the
community
yeah the first exposure I had to Eric
was his I think it was his first episode
with Peter teal and they're going
through that thesis that there's been
this General institutional rot and
suppression of innovation since the
early 70s and he's trying to identify
what it is I don't think they ever
pinned it on the money U on on going off
the gold standard but in recent um
interactions with Eric you know I've
interacted with him on clubhouse um we
recently released an episode of the show
I did with Chris espley and was titled
dear Eric Weinstein so we're going
through his worldview that he's
expressing the portal and tying it back
to the money in in different ways and
he's been he's engaged Eric uh retweeted
the show we had we exchanged some
messages he's been very open-minded he's
asked some really good questions so I
get the sense that he's approaching this
um very
wholeheartedly uh he does bring with him
his existing worldview and his existing
Theory the the one that really blew up
was gauge Theory they got really popular
I don't know a lot about gauge Theory I
actually messaged Eric and said I want
to learn more genuinely because um you
know he seems to be serious that that
needs to be considered in the sphere of
money and so I want to learn more about
it um but I think overall it's great
it's great to see an intellectual
heavyweight of his caliber gravitating
towards
Bitcoin yeah he has some gaau theoretic
conceptions about the world broadly but
also
about economics which ultimately boils
down to just a set of mathematics which
allows you to more effectively reason
about the world and he has a certain set
of views there so it's fascinating to
see him grapple with it I think he's
also kind
of actually kind of like all of us uh
grappling with the idea of what is
Bitcoin in this world it's a very young
technology and it's unclear
exactly how the ideas of the past fit
with it yeah and integrate how the two
integrate together and so it's
interesting to explore uh not just
Bitcoin the particular so for me like
what I've always uh saw Bitcoin as from
the
beginning from a narrow world view is
computer science which is what where I
come from and so I wasn't almost aware
in the uh social political Financial
aspects of Bitcoin but now I see that
there's not just power but there's
fascinating ideas to explore on that
side of things not just the computer
science not just the technical
details but the political the
socioeconomic yeah the philosophical
philosophic yeah that's that's where I
you know find all the fascination in the
world frankly um I would I would one
other thing about uh Weinstein and
intellectuals more generally that are
skeptical of Bitcoin I would challenge
them to read the book Human Action WR by
written by misus I think in 1949 he
published the English
version uh it's essential essentially
the the Bible of Austrian economics and
I
think Austrian economics is a noticeable
Gap in most modern intellectuals
worldviews that it's not taught in
school I mean I have a master's degree
in accounting and finance you know
studied a lot of economics in school
there's not one peep of auston the
the love talking about all the degrees
he has I was a CPA
all um but it's it that curriculum that
we get in college is noticeably
deficient in Austrian economics and I
think there's a reason why right it's
it's he heavily government
influenced um again Master's green
accounting they never taught me about
what money is or where money comes from
all you learn is that the Central Bank
issues money and the central bank takes
money away so it's it's conceived of in
the textbooks quite literally as God
right an entity that suffers no
opportunity cost that um B basically is
the foundation of the entire Keynesian
worldview that you're taught in
economics and Austrian
economics is the opposite end of the
spectrum of that right it's it's
actually the culmination which econ ICS
is the youngest science in the world by
the way so it is um kind of the front
it's the frontiers of Science in many
ways like to actually you when I say
praxiology many people have never even
heard of that but it's something uh it's
an a priori study equivalent to
something like mathematics that you're
Building Things From First principles to
reason about economic reality and I
think that book it's a very difficult
book written by misis 1200 pages
translated from German the way he wields
English is fascinating and terrifying
all at the same time uh it probably take
you 6 months to read it if you read it
daily seriously like it's a it's a beast
of a book but that will plug the Gap I
think in most any intellectual that's
skeptical about Bitcoin I think that
will plug the Gap that's necessary for
you to see it in in a new light well
I'll take that as a challenge now that
we took a little bit of a break as some
good Texas brisket thank you for that by
the way over quite welcome let me ask
the ridiculous
question at the core of uh the idea of
Bitcoin is this guy or this entity named
Satoshi Nakamoto so the ridiculous
question is who is Satoshi Nakamoto and
first of all is it
you it's not
me I
wish and is this an interesting question
or is it just something about our human
nature that wants to that always uh
tends towards mystery well as we've
touched on
a bit
today you know mythology in my opinion
is something that is intrinsic to how we
see the world in a lot of ways like it's
how it's kind of the
structure by which we build these useful
fictions and so in that way you could
just say that Satoshi is the godhead of
Bitcoin effectively
and I think a compelling argument could
be made that his disappearance is what
really solidifies bitcoin's
decentralization because if there were
one individual to personally vilify or
denigrate or
attack um you know to disparage or
question the motives
of um you know if he's out out in the
Hollywood Hills partying everyone knows
he's got a million Bitcoin you know it
would just kind of tarnish the entire
project a lot of way but the fact
that on that theme something for nothing
this guy actually gave Humanity
something for nothing
and it appears that he didn't profit in
any way he she or they um I actually
heard recently that he identified as a
he in some of his communication so
sounds like it is a
he um see like his communication is
being like studied like almost like
exactly as if he is a religious uh
that's right like a
prophet yeah yeah mean it's fascinating
to imagine that he's still
alive and living in this world and it's
even more fascinating to imagine that
he's perhaps participating in the
Bitcoin
Community because I mean that's that
takes a special human being to out of
principle do that to do uh to to remain
anonymous that's very much to George
Washington I always wonder like how many
people are like that there's a cliche
that like absolute power corrup corrupts
absolutely like power corrupts but it
seems like the progress of humanity
depends on the people whom power doesn't
corrupt interesting and it's enough to
have just a small selection of those
yeah and even if most of us are too
weak we give in to power if given the
chance all it takes is a few that's I've
never thought of it like that but Marcus
Aus immediately came to mind yeah you
know guy that he had the keys to the
kingdom and
he apparently adhered to the stoic
virtues Until the
End um but yeah I agree with Satoshi the
other thing that's interesting
is he would
be by far the most wealthy person in the
world on a liquid asset basis because he
has a million Bitcoin which is 60
billion liquid net worth at current
prices so
if he is still alive and just operating
in the world he is daily and moment to
moment resisting massive incentives to
go and just be the richest guy in the
world he's the ultimate hodler yeah yeah
I mean so it's I mean it's uh turning
down not just
financial success but also Fame I mean
Fame is another drug it's kind of power
but it's in itself is also a drug
especially in this modern societ mhm in
this attention and he would have both he
would have both it's fun to imagine who
who it could be it's fascinating if it's
somebody like you or somebody like Elon
or somebody like that that's fascinating
to think about I think Elon would be
hilarious if he came out and he was
Satoshi like hey guys I know I'm already
the richest guy in the world but got to
go ahead and double my lead here what do
you make uh of Elon Musk investing with
Tesla investing in Bitcoin maybe broad
broaden it out in some of these
other you know big billionaires but also
people tied to major companies investing
in
Bitcoin yeah I think Michael sailor
really led the charge on that uh he's
the CEO of micro strategy that I think
they've acquired upwards of2 billion
dollar in Bitcoin now started
acquiring August maybe of
2020 and he's you know personally bought
a lot of it he bought a lot as a
treasury Reserve asset for his company
micro strategy then they leveraged up uh
on a convertible note and bought more so
he's really gone really leading the
charge in this Bitcoin institutional
adoption yeah your conversation with him
is a really interesting one your series
of I mean series of episodes I suppose
but it's only a couple of conversations
I guess yeah we we we recorded twice
five and a half hours each so about 11
hours of content and yeah thank you it's
a lot of people have said that uh it's
the best first principle thing they've
ever seen on bitcoin which I take no
credit for that at all I mean I just sat
down with a guy and Unleashed him he's
he's just a beast yeah but it's
fascinating that
uh his long-term Vision with it I mean
I'm not sure I'm all philosophically
bought in but if he's right
if this set of ideas are as powerful as
um he describes as you describe that
this this would change the world which
as you say it's funny that a company
like micro
strategy uh might
be the the the the company that has the
the biggest macro effect uh on our
economy on our world yeah the
conversation reshaped my worldview a lot
too because he framed money as energy
which often thought of money as time um
and it explored those connections a lot
in my writing but looking at it as
energy and then his supposition
that the purpose of life is to basically
Channel Energy across space and time so
we're just trying to figure out how to
channel more energy across space and
time toward the satisfaction of
aims and uh his definition or his answer
to that question what is money is it
money is the highest form of energy a
human being can channel so it's a claim
to all other forms of energy we can
manifest in the world and that just
completely reshaped how I see it brought
in this whole other side to my my
intellectual explorations of money can
you elaborate on that a little bit so I
I understand money is time which in
itself a really powerful idea but money
is energy and channeling energy can can
you break that apart yeah so I
guess definitely have to check out the
whole series to really get his
perspective but I'll do my best to
condens it
um life itself all forms of life are you
know they're dependent on energy right
Energy Fuels everything fuels life and
action and motion and all of that and we
could say that uh maybe like a
plant is harnessing solar energy and
then reallocating that into growth so
it's aim is to grow towards the sun
right so it's allocating energy towards
its goal of
harnessing more solar energy kind of
thing
so and humans too uh have
evolved to figure out how to harness
energy in different ways
to satisfy higher and more complicated
aims so the original energy
network uh that he made that he
referenced was fire right we actually
learned to wield fire as a tool in and
of itself so not only are we learning to
channel energy but actually learn how to
isolate energy as a tool in and of
itself so we went into that how
harnessing fire had had changed human
beings and actually
um this is one of the earliest examples
too of a co-evolution between tool and
our biology because when we developed
fire we developed cooking and cooking is
you can kind of think of it as
pre-digestion in a way we're liberating
these macronutrients or making things
that otherwise would not be digestible
edible um and it increases the
efficiency by which we extract nutrients
from food that's what cooking does so
when we figured out cooking we free we
liberated all these digestive resources
um that were reallocated towards higher
cognitive development so there's this uh
evolutionary path between figuring out
fire and us becoming smarter which which
was interesting um some other early
examples he gave he went into were
missiles and
hydraulics so missiles
being we learn to hunt at a distance you
know we can't bring down a woolly
mammoth maybe with Spears
and and uh up close in personal Force
but we could with Spears and javelins
and slings and whatnot and then he went
into uh how we've used water to channel
hydraulic energy so we can basically
overcome gravity we can move you know um
there's theories that the pyramids were
constructed using the blocks were moved
using hydraulic energy or using water uh
clearly we use like cargo ships and what
to move things much more efficiently
across water than we could the
land so this his whole view is how we
keep figuring out better ways and more
efficient ways to harness energy and and
channel it and in
that
perspective money has always represented
a claim on all other forms of energy so
whatever energy couldn't be channeled
towards something useful in the economy
historically would go into gold mining
so gold became this residual this
economic this token of the excess energy
created by the market economy and then
you could take that token of energy and
use it use it to redeem for any other
form of energy or any other products of
energy
itself so
it's I guess it's my best approximation
of it and it just really shattered my
worldview again because I'd always
thought about it as time like we spend
time sacrificing to obtain money that we
then redeem for commencer sacrifices
from other others but I'd never
considered it purely as energy and then
it also ties back into
gold
where there was an energy expenditure
necessary to obtain gold so there's a
proof of work associated with obtaining
gold that protected its market value
right so you had to expend again if
Market Market if market value of Gold's
2,000 an ounce you had to expend 1,900
an ounce mining so it kept uh producers
honest in a way so do you think
something like proof of stake that's
more about reputation than
um then um actual exertion like energy
can work no I think proof of stake is
inherently
centralizing um it's like the old
Matthew principle
from those who have to those who have
more will be given from those who have
not everything will be taken that's what
proof of stake is you need proof of work
to embody skin in the game in the
marketplace such that contributions are
commensurate with consideration received
that's how systems
work what's the idea why proof of work
might incentivize decentralization
like do you worry that uh as Bitcoin
becomes more powerful it may become
again more
centralized well the decentralization of
Bitcoin is largely driven by the nodes
actually which aren't actually mining
they're just choosing which rule set to
implement
um and then the the mining network is
actually enforcing that rule set so I
think the mining Network
is inherently decentralized in that
really anyone with access to cheap
energy can become a minor you can freely
enter or exit the market or the network
at any time um but maintaining the block
size at a manageable level is what's key
to maintaining node
decentralization this an interesting
question who do you think has more power
the miners of the
nodes because the nodes carry the uh the
idea of the protocol like the the
specifics so in some sense they have
more power if Bitcoin is an
idea they're kind of mutually
indispensable though because you can't
have there's no security without the
miners so without the miners Bitcoin is
just an idea and we the idea of Bitcoin
is maybe existed even before Bitcoin
right just sound money we just say sound
money is an
idea but there was no way to root that
into thermodynamic reality without
Satoshi figuring out not just proof of
work it's the entire uh composite of the
difficulty adjustment proof of
work uh one-way hashing Etc so I don't
know that's hard hard to say hard to
disentangle the two you've talked about
money as morality too um how do you
think about moral and immoral action in
the context of
money there's this great great quote by
rothbard who's a famous Austrian
Economist and he says quote to be moral
an act must be
free
unquote
and you know I think morality it changes
over time and it
is it has its roots in biology um Jordan
Peterson makes the point that even
animals have the own um sort of pseudo
morality where like uh with wolf packs
for instance if there's a dispute
between the alpha males or I guess
between an alpha male and a uh incumbent
the two males will have a uh you know a
fight basically and then when
one it's decided that one has won the
loser will basically roll over and give
up his neck to uh the alpha male and
they do this instead of fighting to the
death because in a wolf pack they need
every wolf so they can go out and bring
down you know you never know when you're
going to need the the 20th wolf to bring
down the big buffalo the next day or
whatever so they've developed this less
than fight to the death social morality
to optimize their effectiveness as a
wolf pack um and our similarly for
humans like our morality sort of emerges
um through competition and play even it
there are these implicit it rules that
come into place based on how we're
organizing ourselves over
time and
with so with money it's interesting
because most tools we would consider to
be
amoral as in you know a hammer can be
used to build a house which could be
seen to be good like a good constructive
purpose or could be used to bash
someone's skull which could be something
evil um and that the the tool itself is
amoral doesn't have any independent
morality of its own all the the morality
is associated with the wielder of the
tool so what's the quote like any tool
can be a weapon if you hold it right
sort of thing but money's um maybe a
little bit different in
that when you monopolize money it's only
useful as a tool for one thing and
that's for allocating wealth away from s
and two others so it is the only utility
of monopolized money is theft there's no
other you know that there's a lot of
propaganda out there that will say oh we
need to print money to get out of this
disaster or
to give to the poor whatever this
whatever
moralistically camouflaged political aim
is being discussed at the the base layer
of monopolized money is that it's only
useful for taking from some and giving
to others so another way to think about
this is that money is a paper claim on
the savings of
society so it is just a ticket for
redeeming savings which could be time
could be Capital could be Knowledge from
any Market actor in the
world so it's kind of a list of who owns
what if you will it's a proxy list if
there's one group that can amend that
list and others cannot then they're
basically able and incented
to modify that list to their own
benefit and that's effectively what a
central bank is doing so a central bank
is determining how much money to create
they're also determining who gets to
receive that money first and the first
recipients of that money are going to be
the beneficiaries in an inflationary
regime so those that received the money
last are the ones being robbed those
that receive the money first are the
ones that
are uh receiving the stolen proceeds
let's say MH
and this has a
really um corrosive effect on social
morality
because if we consider
that people's time Horizon which the a
is called the time
preference the more short-term thinking
you are the more likely you are to
engage in selfish
behavior right if you know that it's all
over
tomorrow you've been working your whole
life to develop you know this business
or create this reputation or whatever
your thing is but you just are given the
forn knowledge that tomorrow it's all
going to end you're much more likely to
go out and just maybe get drunk and
party that night because there's no more
repercussions
right whereas if you know that you're
going to live for a very long time
you're much more likely to plan for the
future um and money is very so we would
just say that that your time Horizon is
closely related to your morality right
the longer term thinking you are the
more moral you would tend to behave the
more you would care about long-term
relationship building versus going out
and getting wasted and money too
impinges very closely on our time
preference uh and again time preference
is the Austrian term so low time
preference means you're long-term
oriented High Time preference means
you're short-term oriented which can be
a little trippy for some people because
it sounds backwards but um
if your money constantly loses value you
are incentivized to become more
short-term oriented you are handicapped
in your ability to plan for the future
because your money which
is intended to be here's another
definition of money as an insurance
policy against uncertainty so no matter
what problems you encounter in the world
this money will best help you deal with
those problems MH when that insurance
policy against uncertainty is injected
with uncertainty it's polluted with the
uncertainty of inflation your time
Horizon shrinks your ability to plan
long-term
shrinks uh and this impinges on social
morality so there's a great book on this
called honest money by Gary North and in
that book he gives the parable of the
wine
maker the wine
maker if we just imagine the
hypothetical wine maker operating a
business and essentially banked economy
and let's say his Central Bank just
doubled the money supply to quote
unquote save the economy um say it
increase the money supply from 1 to 2
trillion this wine maker that's
accustomed to selling wine at $20 a
bottle is now faced with basically three
choices
um and an important Point here too
before we get into his three choices are
what prices are themselves prices are
the most visible aspect of any service
so when you increase
prices you are incentivizing your
customers to look elsewhere they're
going to look at your competition when
you decrease prices you're incentivizing
Market actors to look closer at your
product right you're delivering a
solution at a lower price so this wine
maker that's customed to selling his
wine at a $20 price point all of a
sudden because of his Central Bank has
tripled the money supply he has three
choices he can either keep selling his
bottle at $20 and all of his in puts
will increase due to inflation by 50% so
he will lose 50% of his profit margin as
a
result uh so he can choose to eat that
loss he can choose to double the selling
price of his bottle of wine from $20 to
$40 because all of the price of his his
inputs doubled so then he would maintain
his profit
margin or the third one is that he could
choose to water down his wine or use
inferior ingredients so he could use
cheaper inputs and maintain the output
at the same price um so he could
basically start selling his customers an
inferior product for the same price to
preserve his profit
margin now again case number one is not
very palatable he doesn't want to eat
the economic loss case number two is not
very good either because he's then
incentivizing all of his customers to go
shop other wine makers if he doubles his
price so human nature being what it is
trying to get something nothing
inflation actually seeps into other
industries by encouraging producers into
option three which is to deceive your
customer in the short run and again this
would be done initially at the margins
maybe it's just a few drops of water
maybe it's just some cheaper grapes but
over time
um this inflation is actually inducing
producers to weigh their financial
well-being against their moral integrity
so it's forcing them into this dilemma
that would not exist in a free market
economy
and as they charge more money for wine
that is inferior the buyers of that wine
also living in a central bank economy
are also getting scammed by not only the
inflation but also the wine so it
becomes this kind of
corrosive contagious moral effect um
that propagates throughout an
economy
and that's why I've argued in a lot of
my writing that inflation is this
infectious moral cancer on the world um
I think it is tied back to a lot of
the the social strangeness we've seen in
modern times where you know there seems
to be a lot of fake people and a lot of
fake businesses and a lot of scams all
of these things I think it really is
rooted in the money and you know Bitcoin
has the first money in history that has
a 0% terminal inflation rate or said
differently zero unexpected inflation
there's no there's no theft integrated
into Bitcoin you can only earn it
through work or sacrificing resources to
obtain it um it it is the antidote to
this moral cancer uh that inflation
riddles our society with again you're
blowing my mind a little bit to think
about the Ripple effects of inflation
the the way it seeps through our
interactions so at the very uh the early
ripples is the effect it has on the
products on the the dilution of the wine
but also it might have uh Ripple effects
on the character on the behavior of
people
MH that's interesting artificial
creation of scarcity creating
um H having effects on Society at the
social like the social Fabric and I
guess you're arguing the
morality it's perverting free market
dynamics which again we said free market
markets generate pragmatic truth so
inflation distorts price signals which
means it confuses Capital allocation
yeah so we're trying to solve problems
but all of a sudden we can't tell if
this price increase is a matter of true
supply and demand change or a matter of
policy change so it it it clouds our
economic perceptions uh it suppresses
Innovation because now you've you've
exacerbated the boom and bus business
cycle people are going to over borrow
and go into projects that they can't
profitably sustain so be a huge collapse
so that actually breaks um the the
Market's function of generating
Innovation and then yeah I would argue
too that it pollutes our our our pursuit
of virtue let's say maybe it's pushing
back but I don't think so I'm it's not
as clear to me perhaps because I haven't
thought about it deeply that money is
core to life and human
interaction because there might be other
forces other fraudulent forces other
things in human nature that are creating
these effects as well so it's clear I
think you're articulating really well
that there's these negative effects from
inflation I wonder if there's other
undiscovered not undiscovered but ones
we're not making explicit n forces that
are
creating the you know all the things
we're seeing now with like you said
cancel culture and all those things but
also the negative
effects on the on the quality of
products and
Excellence of the creativity and The
Innovation all those kinds of things I
wonder if there's other factors it's
it's kind of listen um it's compelling
to think money is at the core of it all
like if you fix I forgot what the phrase
was fix the money fix the world yeah fix
the money fix the world
that uh again things that sound good I'm
skeptical of by Nature so I wonder if
there's other things that are Beyond
money that are somehow deeply integrated
into our human nature another one
related to money is social cohesion
itself so very simple anecdote for this
was the more you increase the inflation
rate social cohesion is inversely
proportionate to that so the extreme
example would be hyperinflation right
where the money is produced in such
excess that it loses all meaning and
relevance so today in Venezuela there is
Cash clogging the gutters clogging the
streets clogging the sewer system um
because the cash has lost all
relevance and so anecdotally we would
suspect that okay if if there's a
inverse relationship between inflation
and social cohesion if we could then
take inflation to zero couldn't we
theoretically increase social cohesion
to its
maximum um so another way to say that is
inflation is a decivilizing force
whereas natural price deflation which
would occur in a hard money economy
where there's either a fixed supply of
Bitcoin or a relatively um scarce supply
of gold for
instance that lays claim to a to an
increasing Capital stock of goods and
services prices would naturally decline
every year as we became smarter so the
market price becomes a reflection of our
Collective knowledge so by letting
prices decline naturally over time we
can actually induce
civilization but by trying to Force
prices higher all the time via the
Central Bank were creating the opposite
effect so we talked a little bit about
the Soviet Union and I happen to have
lived through the collapse of the Soviet
Union and so what are the factors the
causes in your mind to why the Soviet
Union
collapsed so I you know definitely a
multivariate situation I think there's a
lot of factors um
one that jumped out to me recently again
from that documentary that I didn't note
before was that at one point Stalin
eliminated I think 75% of his
intelligence
Force um which I think when you're
competing with another nation state you
know and intelligence and covert
operations are very integral to your
survival I think that was a uh
definitely a shot in the foot but at a
higher level I would say that capitalism
and communism were each resource
strategies of the 20th century nation
state um and they seem you know we
commonly consider them to be
diametrically opposed but there's
actually a lot of commonality between
the two the difference would be that in
Soviet
Russia as we alluded to earlier they
tried to completely replace price
signals with this nationalistic faith
and devotion so it it they removed the
economic nerve signal which coordinated
the allocation of capital over time so
this inhibited their ability to generate
wealth whereas in the United States we
left most markets open to free
enterprise so we we honored the
Integrity of price signals and we
allowed people to trade and accumulate
wealth um so in every Market except the
market for money both markets maintain a
central bank as we as we've gotten to
so I think in a really big picture
standpoint that's
why capitalism out competes communism is
because it is able to generate more
wealth than communism was and therefore
was able to put Financial pressure on
the USSR until it reached the point of
bankruptcy
essentially this a similar model I would
argue is
that for the same reason we saw
capitalism out compete communism which I
think at the the the data that I recall
was that the ussr's economy was valued
at close to onethird of its inputs so if
you just didn't do anything inside the
USSR and just sold all the raw materials
that were going into it it would have
been worth three times as much as
sending the materials in running it
through the efforts and then shipping
things back out it was it was value
destructive versus value creative and I
would argue this is because again the
the centralized Computing model versus
decentralized Computing model it just
became more and more corrupt over time
um it got to the point where I think
most of the occupations in USSR towards
the end were as
informance right they were working for
the state um Jordan Peterson makes this
point too that at some point it was
actually illegal to be sad in Soviet
Russia because if you were sad you were
contradicting the utopian view of the
state so if you were sad you're implying
the state's not doing something wrong
but by the way this does remind me what
uh do you know what Jordan Peterson
thinks about Bitcoin and about the
future impact of Bitcoin on the
society no I don't actually um we're
hopefully going to be talking to him
soon about that we did a a book club on
his book maps of meaning and he engaged
with us about it so hoping to deliver
the orange pill to Mr Peterson the
orange pill I think his audience um is
one of the most important audiences in
the world to understand Bitcoin
these people that are conscientious and
responsible um I think they'll quickly
understand bitcoin's value proposition
and help elucidate it to the world I'm
trying to remember what he said about
about it basically I think his support
of Bitcoin is grounded in the kind of
people who are opposing
Bitcoin so without understanding Bitcoin
he starts to like Bitcoin because of the
people who are opposing
it he's you know you start to I mean
that's partially why I am interested in
Bitcoin it's like all the people in uh
in power and all the kind of shady
fraudulent and non- genuine people who
are dismissing Bitcoin yeah
uh are making me think hm one one of uh
Jordan's definitions of God is he says
God is found in the truthful speech that
rectifies pathological
hierarchies
and I think that is a beautiful
definition of what Bitcoin is doing in
the world and that we have this
pathological hierarchy called Central
Banking by which the rich get richer and
the poor get poorer um that is used as a
mechanism for Perpetual theft and
funding Warfare at a global
scale uh like Ron Paul said it's no
coincidence that the 20th century of
Total War was also the century of
Central
Banking um when you have an
institution of currency counterfeiting
which the central bank is you are no
longer bounded by your own balance sheet
when you go to war you don't have to
just go to war on your own resources you
can now pillage the Commonwealth and
pull for the savings of society as a
whole before you go bankrupt and indeed
this is what Hitler did right Hitler
hyperinflated uh in the wear Republic to
to fund his War
efforts um and frankly every dictator
every World War every internment camp in
history was made possible by the
weaponization of money in fiat currency
so I hope I know Jordan Peterson is a
huge proponent of free speech and I
think that's ultimately at it at its
deepest Essence that's of what Bitcoin
really is right it is just the purest
form of monetary speech we've ever had
and by purifying that primary Operating
System Of Human Action I think we can
eliminate this pathological hierarchy
that is unfortunately the dominant
institution in the world today yeah I'm
definitely especially with these
explorations of Bitcoin uh this journey
I've been on I'll revisit some of the
some of the aspects of human history
that I've been looking at like Stalin
and Hitler with a from a perspective of
a monetary perspective like what are the
effects of inflation MH how was it used
as a tool in um in gaining power in
maintaining power in
manipulating the populace in doing
um in inflicting suffering and uh I
would say evil onto the world it's
interesting I it's interesting I'm going
have to sort of go back into the whole
so I tend to focus more on
the human
nature and less about the tools that
human nature leverages to AFF fact
change but you're right that uh in some
sense
money is a a tool which can be uh effec
itively used to
uh perform moral and immoral actions
depending on how it's used there's a
feedback between the two right there's
um specifically with money itself
it's
the incent here's the the way I've been
posing it lately is that I actually
think we typically think of people as
good or bad again trying to label people
all the time but I think people and
their characters are emergent properties
of the incentive structures they inhabit
yeah so you know what does Charlie
Monger say don't show me the incentives
I'll show you the outcome kind of
thing this is a flawed incentive
structure we've been operating within
now I'm not I'm not speaking to the
intention people want to argue with me
all the time like Jerome Pal's not a bad
guy he's doing his best at the Central
Bank he's doing what he thinks is right
that's
fine whether that's true or not it
actually doesn't matter the intention is
Divergent from the outcome the
institution that they are running is
premised on deception and theft and it
is handicapping the productive economy
so when we're even the terms we use
printing money you're not creating any
new value you're not infusing the
economy with anything any new productive
factors whatsoever you're just
harvesting the economic surplus created
by entrepreneurs in the marketplace
there's it's impossible to add any value
to an economy by increasing the paper
claims on its
savings so
um there's a feedback loop between man
and Tool between Creator and created and
I think we have to honor the
relationship above either one right
trying to put the right people in the
system or just build the right system we
need both do you think the interesting
question whether the people that are in
control of central
banks or in positions of power there if
they themselves are malevolent
they themselves are Bad actors or
they're
simply like leaves floating along the
river sort of just a
cog uh in the machine an ant in an ant
colony that operates in a certain kind
of way like where do you put the blame
do you put the blame on the way things
are operating onto the individuals or
onto the system itself the idea behind
the system
where and is it useful to place the
blame somewhere because for me it might
be useful to understand that in order to
figure out what the solution is I tend
to not put the blame on the individual
like I tend to believe most people are
good and want to see themselves as
good and and so in that case it's very
difficult to be truly malevolent as you
would need to be to control to gain
centralized power at the large
scale but I know a lot of conspiracy
theory
theorists and just a lot of people think
that there is evil humans in the world
that seek power maintain that power and
then use that power for bad
purposes I think they're just people and
they're just trying to get something for
nothing like all of us do I like this
framework of thought that you have yeah
honestly yeah and that's what the
central bank is is the ultimate
institution to get something for nothing
you yeah get a Perpetual income stream
the ability to acquire more and more
territory in the world through
monopolizing the supply of
money and you can literately print money
you can buy your way out of anything and
buy your way into anything in the world
so it is I think the
most not say the most but a group of
very intelligent people put this thing
together and figured out how to get
something for nothing in perpetuity
um by clouding people's conception of
money and you know if we look at the
central bank is it's been around for a
while but the latest
implementation uh here in the US is the
Fed you know it's about 100 years old
it's an analog age institution that I
think has lost a lot of its relevance in
the Modern Age um and I I don't think it
will survive the ever galvanizing gaze
of the digital age is just too much
sunlight um too much transparency today
ideas move too quickly for something
like this to remain
relevant
but there are just people they are just
seeking something for nothing but I
think when you concentrate that much
power and that much control that much
wealth into the hands of few it does
change uh hyek argued that the nature of
power again it's something that we all
sort of Desire we to be completely
powerless you're really unhappy right if
you're totally powerless you're a Slave
someone else tells you what to do you
have no autonomy it's miserable right so
there's this it makes the consolidation
of power alluring and that we want to
protect ourselves from that slave state
let's say but like many things it can be
taken too far and when you concentrate
power into too few hands Hayek argues
that it actually change it transforms it
becomes something much more intoxicating
than it would be if it was held in a
more distributed way and I think that
gets into a lot of these you know the I
don't know if they call themselves
Elites or people call them Elites or
what like um let's say shareholders of
central banks people participating in
the world economic Forum things like
this they come I guess the incentives
right the incentive schema they're in is
rewarding them constantly telling them
everything they're doing seeing and
thinking is correct because they just
keep getting richer all the time and it
leads you closer to this definition of
evil which um
in the book Paradise Lost fredman said
evil is the force which believes its
knowledge is complete so these people
become more and more
convinced that they have the plan or
they have the course of action that will
save the world that if everyone would
just listen to them that they would lead
us to the promised land right whether
this is Bill Gates saving us from a
climate crisis or uh any of these other
economic policies that are targeted at a
certain outcome but almost always
diverge almost perfectly from that
outcome creating its opposite
effect um I think that's the problem
that we have this mechanism that can
concentrate wealth and power into the F
into the hands of so few that it leads
to the proliferation of evil um meaning
that it convinces people that their
knowledge is complete
whereas something like a Bitcoin almost
forces the opposite outcome it
in a Bitcoin denominated World in a pure
free market the consumer is Sovereign so
you cannot earn value in the world
unless you are serving your fellow man
unless they have through expressed
through their buy and sell decisions in
the marketplace right you've
created a satisfaction of a particular
want that they value so much they've
acquired so much of your good or service
that you've become rich you can only
maintain that position of wealth so long
as you continue to serve your fellow man
so it changes the incentive such that
dominance in the world is no longer can
no longer be paired with coercion it has
to be paired with competence and it's
that's that's how this when we say
Bitcoin fixes this that's what we mean
like it
restores that skin in the game that
balance of incentives and disincentives
that help us properly navigate reality
and it prevents the buildup of of
systemic rot like we see with the
Central
Bank what books people love this
question and you're exceptionally well
read uh you've explored all kinds of
ideas is there some books technical
fictional philosophical coloring books
children's books had an impact on your
life and you would uh uh maybe recommend
to others that they should
read um I think we mentioned a couple of
them here today but I I think a really
useful
triplet of
books uh that I've been recommending
recently to get to help diffuse this
materialist worldview of reality where
we we still think in kind of the
Newtonian model that it's atoms and
cause and effect and um I'd first
recommend Jordan Peterson's book maps of
meaning it's a deep dive into mythology
and how it's developed over the course
of history and how it's reflected both
in our social structures and our intas
psychic um nature really and how they
come to reflect one another in a way
like the way we think again shapes the
world and then the way the world is
shape shapes the way we
think um that's an excellent book it's
very dense and difficult read actually
this Trilogy is pretty brutal probably
take you a year to read hours a day uh
the second one I mentioned earlier was
Human Action by
misus uh the the ultimate to on a
economics will help explicate this realm
of relevance I think that economics
truly is
where again um there are things and then
these things become means or ends once
we Channel our purpose through them so
this this realm of of non-materialist
relevance that I think is really
important to grasping economics at a
first principal level I think that book
lays it out
tremendously um and then the last one
would be I think I mentioned this at the
beginning was that book Leela by Robert
pers where he's you know making the case
that value is fundamental and all of
these books all they kind of all point
to that actually they're pointing back
to Value being the fundamental thing
values and um values expressed through
moral action as being the fundamental
substrate of reality so it'll it'll if
you're like me that I grew up quite
scientific minded it'll help diffuse
some of that and maybe retrain you to
the other side of reality
uh so you said these books are difficult
maybe you can comment on which aspect is
difficult is it just the technical
nature is it the length is it the depth
of the ideas or how long it takes to
integrate them and more sort of
importantly is there recommendation
advice you can give on how
to integrate these ideas how to read how
how to learn in the space is there from
your own life like how do you enjoy
taking in ideas and this could be for
these books but also uh in the Bitcoin
world and reading a bunch of different
ideas written by others just integrating
stuff even watching podcast and all
those kinds of things yeah I I'm a
reader I love to read um one of the most
useful things I've ever done was take a
speed reading
course I actually think there's a
version of this available on Tim Ferris
website it's like a 30 minute speed
reading course it's all about eye
movement instead of moving your eye
continuously line over line it's more
about jumping and your brain you can
train your brain to just absorb words in
their totality versus kind of reading
word by word and also not I've I've
haven't fully taken that Journey
actually but uh I
remember taking a few steps on that
Journey realizing that I'm speaking
inside my head yeah I'm saying the words
inside my head and that's actually
getting in the way that's right so
there's a lot of little hacks like that
I maybe lazily I'll have to now that you
mentioned I'll have to revisit this yeah
but I have convinced myself that I don't
need to read faster because that's not
ultimately the bottleneck the bottleneck
is in the me thinking about stuff in
fact I like reading really slowly or so
I convince
myself because I ultimately it's not
about gaining more information it's
about time spent thinking deeply yes yes
um but maybe that's just me being very
lazy cuz yes it's true it's important to
think deeply but maybe I could speed up
the the consumption of information but
it's fun it's I I like to be dynamic
actually so um usually speed reading
initially and that diffused that
internal dialogue for me because when I
was reading one word at a time I was
having that too you almost get a
feedback in your own head you're reading
the word out loud and clouding your
thoughts if you're speed reading you
can't do that you're just you're taking
in groups of words at a time so you
can't uh you know internally verbalize
it I guess and then I also am really big
on annotating underlining writing in the
margins uh I prefer a physical book but
I also read the Kindle a lot because
it's just so convenient you anywhere
you're waiting in line or every night
before bed I'm reading my Kindle um and
I also Advocate rereading a lot so if
you found something that you know struck
you at a deep level or you found
particularly fascinating like you have
to listen to that that's your I don't
know your mind or your spirit signal
that that is something meaningful to you
and you should you know to your point
reread read it sit with it for a long
time write about it um and that that
becomes the
ultimate trium of of synthesizing an
idea actually if you can read about it
and then write about it and then go and
talk about it you get this
crystallization of understanding that's
just not possible doing any one of the
three or any two of the three um so
definitely highly recommend people to do
that um and in terms
of how are those books difficult I mean
in every way they're all long books uh
in terms of density I would say Leela is
the less the least
dense maybe maps of
meaning I don't know but maps of meaning
and Human Action are both extremely
dense but they're just you I had to read
those books very
slow you just have to take your time
with them um to give you an idea with
Jordan Peterson he's said this a lot
with maps of meaning he spent 3 hours a
day writing for 15 years to write that
book it's probably I think it's a 600
page book he said he estimates he
rewrote every sentence in the book 50
times 5 to try and get it you know just
perfected and when you read these
sentences you can tell that he rewrote
it 50
times I've uh I've used actually anky
for space
repetition um it's like a piece of it's
an app I'm not sure if you're familiar
with it but it allows you to load
in facts or terms or entire
paragraphs and then it brings them you
review them every day and then it brings
them up less and less often over time as
you show yourself being able to remember
the thing that uh you wanted to memorize
and often times when I'm reading what I
want to memorize is the key idea uh but
also like I use it for I'm terrible with
names so I'm started to use it for names
too of names of people names of uh like
people that I want to remember yeah and
also throughout history and also my own
personal life but also events you know
dates to me are usually not important
but sometimes dates are really important
and so it's really useful I recommend it
highly nval I think mentioned a piece of
software called readwise or something
like that that I'm hope I'm saying that
correctly it's something like that and
what it does is it goes to your
highlights from your
Kindle or the various places where you
highlight stuff that integrates with um
good reads and it does the same kind of
space repetition but for things you've
highlighted that's super cool it's it
sends an email every
day it's it's been really I recommend it
highly because it it sends like to me in
email form a selection of the things
I've highlighted in previous things I've
read and it's like this weird like sh
shock to your memory that sprinkles like
I I'll have a have probably way too much
Orwell in there and it just kind of like
it brings you back and these ideas there
because what you realize depending on
how you highlight but at least for me
and I think it's probably true for a lot
of people the things you've highlighted
had at that moment like an emotional
impact on you yeah and so like these
things are just like hitting you hard
again yeah it's like wo uh it might not
be meaningful to anyone else except you
and it it's uh it's something I
recommend you never know with these like
hacks or tools and so on like what's
actually BS and what what is amazing and
that one is kind of amazing so at least
for me it work it works for me and Naval
I think I think he's the one readwise
you said readwise or something close to
that it could be read something else
like read wealth or something uh the one
other thing I I
really like and this is more of a new
one is I used to always listen to music
at the gym but now I've just because I'm
so backlogged on podcast right they're
just there's so many I exclusively
listen to podcasts when I'm walking or
when I'm at the gym anytime I'm doing
something that I can't you know read
basically and I think there's something
really special about exercise and
ideation I mean I I don't know if this
happens to everyone but my creative
juices just go ballistic when I'm at the
gym like I hit a certain point of I
guess heart rate and you're sweating
enough then the ideas just start to flow
yeah so I'm basically at the gym now
listening to podcast exercising as fast
as I can to try to get to that state of
um you know where you're just straining
you're strenuous exercise I guess you
would say and then I'm end up typing
notes into my phone as fast as I can
with all these ideas that are flowing so
I've I've created a lot of good writing
out of that yeah it's kind of work so I
I do running
uh quite a bit so running outside and uh
I'll listen I've been okay I told myself
this has been going on for about a year
uh is I only
listen like to the stuff that's either
World War II or World War One related so
Hitler
Stalin like like difficult historical
stuff
um and also listen to Brown noise so
those are the two modes so Brown noise
helps me this like white noise but like
deeper I guess it helps me remove the
world at the gym there's a lot of
distractions when you're running there's
a lot of distractions it helps me remove
the world so one I'll be listening to
difficult historical ideas and then when
my mind is all of a sudden starting to
generate ideas I'll listen to Brown
noise and I'll then force myself to
think it's kind
of it's meditative in a sense and your
mind wants to be lazy you want to you
it's hard man like running and thinking
in the sense that some of the ideas that
come into your head are pretty heavy uh
it's about your own life it's your own
demons come in there but also just
difficult ideas that require you
thinking through and persevering through
that like not letting yourself get lazy
and like thinking through it as has been
really for me rewarding in the same way
that you're you're saying is it is for
you it's true that like podcasts and
music like um shallow like funny
podcasts or music have been a kind of
filler
distraction but informational podcasts
like podcasts that have some depths of
ideas or Audi books have been uh truly
rewarding I try to listen now less and
less to podcasts that are just fun
MH cuz I feel like I enjoyed too much
and I don't allow my mind to get bored
and to think through stuff to uh to
explore ideas it's so easy to fill the
the
space that uh usually would be thought
filled with thought instead fill it with
fun podcasts like there's a bunch of
comedy podcasts I really enjoy so
there's value to that of course but you
have to realize it's entertainment it's
not uh it's it's not um you don't get
much value except entertainment right
and there's utility to the boredom too I
think or to give your mind the space I
guess your subconscious maybe the space
to chew on some of these problems right
where you've emed so much knowledge you
know you've highlighted and thought
about something but then you need to
stop thinking about it for a while and
let it marinate in the subconscious and
then you know these flashes of insight
that people have described sometimes I
get them in the middle of the night like
I just wake up from a dream and have
them and I got to write it down or
sometimes it's uh in nature taking a
walk but I think that's very important
too we can't just Brute Force our way
into understanding you know there's this
interplay between kind of the brute
force reading intake and then just
relaxing meditating sleeping being
bored uh letting your subconscious do
the the heavy lifting and there's uh
like you should be aware of the fact
that there's a war for your attention
going on so there's a lot of there's
been better and better and better
mechanisms that are designed to steal
your attention so I kind of see it as a
war zone between my right for boredom
yeah and the internet wanting your
attention in fact um clubhouse as an app
has been I'm probably not going to use
clubhous much anymore it's there's some
aspect of my own inner loneliness and
whatever it is that pulled me into
clubhous a little bit too much to where
where it robbed me from that lonely time
alone where I sit and listen to Bruce
Springstein and think about life right
so I want to that's way more important
that's way well yeah at least you know
it's all in Balance cuz there is a a
clubhouse like a lot of these social
networks when you used right can be a
way to discover new ideas new people but
the boredom and just being alone with
your thoughts is uh Priceless absolutely
and you got to know yourself right like
it took me a long time to realize I need
Solitude yeah like just how I'm wired
how I'm built I need like an hour a day
Solitude so you got to listen to that
part of yourself you might be
compromising something like that where
you feel like you always need to be with
your girlfriend or whatever it may be
but I would suggest listening to that
voice yeah I try to I tried to remember
things that made me feel good over time
like long-term had positive impact and
long-term had negative impact and do
more of the former and less of the
latter yeah we don't often think like
that you know we talked offline about
like carnivore diets for
example I try to remember that carbs
don't make me feel good yeah that's what
in the moment it's hard to remember that
hard but you have to remember that that
that's the case and in the same way
exercise it's hard to remember that
exercise makes me feel
good uh like especially when it's time
to go to the gym especially when it's
time to go to the gym but you should
remember that because the kind of person
you are without exercise for me just
like you beautifully said that you have
to know yourself the kind of person I am
without exercise is a less good person a
person a person I'm less proud of of
yeah the food thing is so hard by the
way I
still you know I I can't tell you how
many times I've learned the lesson like
don't eat that but then you know you go
a few weeks of not eating whatever that
is and you're you're feeling good and
then you're you're I don't know
something creeps up inside you're like
ah you could just have one or you just
do this but for me it's sugar like sugar
just makes me feel terrible but I always
not always but if it's been a long time
I start to make that exception in my
mind like oh you can have a little bit
and then I eat it and I feel terrible so
I don't know how times I've done that
dance but it's not cool well it depends
on how painful it is and then you learn
the lesson I've haven't I actually
embraced the fact that I'll never learn
the lesson with vodka every time I drink
especially with
Russians it's like I I quit drinking
every time and then I forget there's
like a slow drop off it'll be like two
weeks and then
nasia very good so it never makes me
feel good it never results in anything
good
um except the beautiful
social chaos yeah which is ultimately
somehow there's value to chaos too you
know there there's value to that
whatever the hell stupid stuff you do
when you get trashed the overthe toop
emotion of Love usually or whatever
camaraderie there's value to that too
like that's as I get older I
realize cuz uh the the world sometimes
especially when you get older and the
world World wants you to be an
adult in order to maintain the youthful
Spirit you have to use all the tools you
can and alcohol is one of them right to
do all the stupid you can even if
you're like getting older to lower the
inhibitions and lower against that that
taste of uncertainty that is the
sweetness of life right to be able to go
out and be a Flur at a party and not
really know what you're going to do and
it's we we have this draw to the Wild
Side of Life uh as much as we try and
build up order around ourselves I think
there's always going to be an appetite
for that um I've always most of my life
I've always been a social drinker but I
actually gave up alcohol a year ago and
um I would add that to the the idea uh
the repertoire for dealing with bigger
ideas because alcohol is fun it's amaz
you know good
times it can be analgesic it can do all
it can give you all these benefits if
you use uh the right amounts but
I got to the point personally where I
was trying to wrestle with these ideas
that are just so much bigger than me
that and I have this backlog of books
that was growing faster than I could
read them that I just reached the point
where I decided um I wanted to start
making sacrifices toward attaining that
and alcohol was just an easy one you
know it's you
spend even if you just drink socially on
the weekends you're probably
spending 5 to 10 hours drinking and then
maybe another what 5 to 10 hours
recovering perhaps on the day after um
so it it was a difficult transition
initially but once you get through a
couple of months I feel amazing without
it I sleep better than ever my workouts
are better than ever I'm sharper than
ever I'm more Lucid so I'm I'm not
trying to be a proponent for like not
drinking but I just want to say but
you're a proponent for sacrifice in I am
a big component for sacrifice yes is
there advice you would give to a young
person today curious about Bitcoin
curious about how they succeed in a
world uh or both careerwise and just in
in life in general I mean the strongest
piece of advice I have
for this is beyond just Bitcoin this is
you managing your own personal and
financial affairs is that you need to
invest in knowledge
first um it's not good enough to just
follow the crowd and buy a 60/40
portfolio and put it in a Roth ra and
plan on Social Security I mean the
world's
changing much faster than any existing
institution um is going to be able to
keep up with so that's why I like I mean
that's why I Nam the show the question
what is money like I think that to me is
the rabbit that took me down the rabbit
hole is like just asking that question
naturally progressed to these other
questions like what is value what is
government what is uh you know what is
the purpose of Society speech all of
these things so I would encourage people
to arm yourself with knowledge and study
like that that a lot of financial people
always give you you know a line of
advice and then say this is not
Financial advice or like this is
financial advice like study study learn
um knowledge is power this is official
fin natural device yes and you're you're
exercising your Your Divine trait which
is the logos right we
are these animals that can tell and
believe stories so it's our it feels
like almost a sacred duty to really
sharpen that part of ourselves um and
use it to create the best world
possible um and then you know the second
one was the I think health and fitness
stuff
I I was I maybe everyone does this in
their 20s they just live a little fast
and uh beat themselves up
um not that I wasn't like I was living
well and you know Successful by a lot of
measures but I wish I had maybe gotten
my act together a little bit
sooner
um I just healthwise morality wise yeah
drinking I think morality and eating you
know I just was kind of doing whatever I
wanted in some way
let's say um is there a value to a
trajectory that includes a lot of
mistakes so maybe you're supposed to
make the mistakes in your 20s that's a
great Point too maybe the 20s are all
about the mistakes accumulate the most
mistakes possible yeah I do as quickly
as I don't regret any of it but now that
I'm kind of in this place where I feel
good and I know the value of a good
night's sleep and just I I've I've more
deeply explored my own potential that I
feel maybe a little regretful that
didn't do this earlier is all I'm saying
so
maybe just exploring different sides of
yourself right see what it's like to go
and make a bunch of mistakes and be wild
and crazy and then maybe try to walk the
straight and narrow for a few months and
just see what it's like so there's uh
there's probably a guy doing vodka shots
right now listening to this podcast with
his buddies and they uh if you are
please take a shot for us for all the
mistakes and you should make in your
20s and um
What about
love we talked about money is ultimately
a mechanism by which you can
uh pave uh a moral path through life uh
you know to me one of the purest
expressions of that is love broadly
defined for family for others for
knowledge for the world it's it's
basically an optimistic open view to the
world that Embraces all that is
beautiful about this world
so um do you think about love often in
in a personal sense romantic family
friendship and in the broad sense about
its value in in uh in a successful
life yeah of course I'm blessed to have
a two and a half-year-old daughter and
um love is a word we throw around you
know it's like I love these potato chips
I love you man I love you my daughter
this it's got so many different uh
intensities I guess you might say
but um I don't know my intuition is
that it is something very fundamental to
the universe like again I know words
don't do it justice but if we just proxy
love with selfless action mhm the whole
damn universe is selflessly acting right
it's just unfolding and
um it may sound a bit hippie dippy but
my intuition is just that love is the
core of it somehow um I don't have
anything to back that up really it's
just in the way you're framing it is
making me
think that uh love we're talked we
talked about sort of meditation
is as opposed to thinking from an
egocentric perspective of you the
individual operating in this world is
allowing you to be empathetic towards
the world and thereby think of the
universe think of the world acting
through you MH almost like uh accepting
this notion that uh ideas have you you
don't have ideas that's right that
you're not existing in the universe the
universe is existing through you sort of
like like that's that's what
selfless in that context means it's like
embracing that thought that's a weird
thought it's a weird thought that we're
just here for a little bit of time these
meat
vehicles receptacles and uh this much
bigger thing is just using
us not in malevolent way but just like
like a river flows is using us to create
more and more beautiful things yes yes
more and more beautiful things we are
the universe experiencing itself frankly
right so that's a Trippy thought man
that uh that in some sense the universe
created us yeah to experience itself and
are the high you know one of the highest
forms of beauty that nature has created
right if we just think one of the
most complex and adaptive thing we're a
reflection of Nature and another thing
that comes to mind here is
that Delio has this quote where he says
truth or more
accurately um an accurate depiction of
reality is necessary for any good
outcome so when we think that love or
value is primary I think that too
reinforces this thesis that acting out
of love or acting out of proper moral
action you're best reflecting the
fundamental nature of reality therefore
you're best creating the best possible
outcomes or the things of the most
Beauty whether that's your artistic
expression your children your business
whatever it is um and you know Jordan
Peterson goes deep into that where you
have to listen to that sense of meaning
in your life where you might might have
some decision on paper that's so great
this way but your heart says no your
heart says otherwise um I I I've tried
to listen to my heart throughout and I
think I think that creates the best
outcomes but nevertheless does it make
you sad that you in
particular Robert are going to be dead
pretty
soon uh as as uh we talk about scarcity
one of the certain things that ensure
the the uh the scarcity of The Human
Experience is the fact that you you and
your Consciousness are going to be done
they have a deadline only time and
Bitcoin are absolutely
scarce I
um I'm
fortunate when I I guess I got started
on this philosophical Journey a bit when
I was younger but I got into um Musashi
and sunzu quite a bit uh who wrote
Masashi wrote the book of five rings
uh uh sunzu wrote The Art of War and one
one of the things that I mean these guys
were just absolute beasts you know they
lived and died by the sword and they
were just
very uh great equinity about all things
in life and I also found this kind of in
the stoic philosophy where they just are
very cool with
everything and uh one of the lines there
is that the way of the warrior is the
Resolute acceptance of death and so
always tried to think about that like of
course I experience fear I
experience you know everything that you
do in a meat suit right like anxiety and
all the things but I always try to have
that higher order view of myself and
that it's
just a certain experience occurring at a
certain level but it shouldn't override
your kind of highest order self that's
just resolutely accepted death and that
this is your one play in life so
hopefully that propels me towards proper
action I think scarcity cannot help but
lead to something
good just like with this conversation
sadly must come to an end the scarcity
of it is what makes it beautiful so
Robert this was uh one of my favorite
conversations uh philosophically and
every other
level just the ideas and the way you
express them around Bitcoin
around morality around
money um has been really inspiring and
really educational and I'm glad you're
out there uh fighting the good fight and
I'm glad you wasting all of this time
with me it was really fun and thank you
for coming down to Texas and having some
good old uh brisket together this was uh
this is really fun man this is awesome
thanks for having me man thanks for
listening to this conversation with
Robert Breedlove and thank you to
funrise element monk pack and better
help check them out in the description
to support this podcast and now let me
leave you with some words from Nim
Nicholas TB antifragility is beyond
resilience and robustness the resilient
resists shocks and stay the same the
antifragile gets
better thank you for listening and hope
to see you next time