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 and conversation to explore the history, philosophy, and future
of money.
Quick mention of our sponsors, Fundrise, Element, Monkpak, and BetterHelp.
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 actively 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 ideas, 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 Solzhenitsyn 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 Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Robert Breedlove.
Rousseau opens his 1762 book, The Social Contract, with the following statement.
Man is born free and everywhere he is 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, 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.
The general definition of that I would give is the authority to act as you see fit.
It's a word that's etymologically associated with words like monarchy, money, reign.
So historically, it's referred to whatever the locus of supreme power is in the sphere
of human action.
So whether if you go back into ancient Egypt, the pharaoh had absolute sovereignty and everyone
else was pretty much operating according to his interest.
We fast forward to today, modern Western democracy, we have more decentralized sovereignty and
that we all get to go vote and elect officials that make decisions on our behalf.
So the theme of sovereignty across history is that it's been gradually decentralizing
across our different models of socioeconomics.
And it's largely, you could say it's rooted heavily in the money, I would argue, which
is something we'll get a lot into here.
If you have money, you have the authority to act as you see fit in the world.
And even in our current political sphere, if you have enough money, you can actually
reshape the rules.
You can reshape laws, you can lobby Congress.
If you're in 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.
So this concept of sovereignty, which today we call, it's common to call states or nation
states or government sovereign, meaning that they have power over people.
But as I argue in a lot of my writing, I actually think that sovereignty inheres within the
individual and that we each have our own interiorized space of choice, which is something like
Viktor Frankl called the final human freedom, and that we, no matter what our circumstances
are, no matter what exogenous situation we face, we always have this endogenous power
to choose how we respond to it.
That's one of my favorite books as a man search for meaning.
Maybe you can break that apart a little bit.
So you've kind of spoken about sovereignty as closely linked to power, but is there something
about your own mind being able to achieve sovereignty, no matter what the monetary system
is, no matter what, who has the control over centralized power, the money or whatever the
mechanisms of sovereignty and the societal level, use an individual, isn't ultimately
all boiled down to what you can do with your mind, how you see the world interpreted it?
Yes.
Yeah, I agree.
And as we get a little bit deeper into this, 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 in the US.
And it's a tool.
It's a tool we're using to de-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.
For instance today, so I agree with you on the first hand, say that I do believe in free
will.
I do believe in individual autonomy.
But I also think that 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.
I think this is, you think about what are the core aspects of the human mind?
What influences cognition, the way you reason about the world?
You have the Chomsky, like languages at the core of everything.
But you're kind of placing money as pretty close to the core of what it means to be an
intelligent reasoning human.
I think money is a direct derivation of action and speech, actually.
It's another expression of the logos.
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 most words, the vast majority of words
only have meaning in relationship to other words.
It's all contextual definitions of a word or more words.
Now, people have argued with me about this because there is a first word where you pick
up rock and say rock.
But most other words 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 paper here, is that 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.
So we started to evolve more dexterity, and notably we have opposable thumbs.
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 manipulate natural
resources and count, point, pointing was a big deal and that we could indicate prey or
items that are far off distance and we could organize ourselves, 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 the money is just sort of a tech layer we've 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 it's really fascinating to think about our modern human society as deeply rooted
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 to have roots in the evolution?
Yeah.
I think one of the deepest impulsions in life is the territorial imperative.
So all life is seeking to expand its dominion over space and time.
And we think about, you know, again, physically with space, it's advantageous to an animal
or an organism to have more territory under its control 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.
And you see very interesting behaviors resulting from territoriality.
This is like animal combat, you know, the reason birds sing is territoriality, a number
of other things.
And it's my hypothesis and others have shared this hypothesis as well that mankind is clearly,
I think, what are your territorial 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.
It is not the asset itself.
So property, it's information.
It's a relationship.
By the way, my mind was just blown.
Property is 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 organize ourselves such that property, that the contributions
people are making or 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, to be fair, you should have the rights to that fruit, if you go out and plant
a garden or whatever it may be.
And this is rooted in natural law, where we have rights to life, liberty, and property.
Those are kind of just the base, the fundamental layer of morality and capitalism, frankly.
And you could think of, to get really primordial with it, the first capitalist in the world,
just to kind of get some definitions out here, I'll say capitalism versus communism or socialism
as the spectrum 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.
Maybe there was a rainstorm, a snowstorm, and he dug a little enclave and he protected himself.
I thought you were going to go, because you said primordial, I thought you were going
to go back to earlier biological systems.
I guess primordial for humans.
And then the first communists or socialists 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 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.
Consumer socialism would imply that other people, typically the state, have the rights,
at least some rights to the value you've created.
So there's this interesting moment when that first caveman, that first capitalist drew
a line, a circle in this cave and said, this is mine.
You could say it was free to be claimed at the time he claimed it.
But it's an interesting moment when asset becomes an asset, when space-time, as you're
referring to it, becomes something that's now, can be possessed by a human being.
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 the universe, we're talking about there's a funny thing with Elon
Musk and Mars.
I think they sneaked in there for SpaceX that 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 violence and respect
for property, it feels like this is a special moment, because ultimately conflict arises
when you make claims on a particular territory.
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 ultimately...
This has always belonged to Germany.
So is there something you could say as to 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 loyal
title, which meant it's just whatever you can defend.
So if you've got knives and daggers and satchels and maybe some pelts you've hunted, whatever
you can hold and defend is yours.
And there's not like there's a government to appeal to.
You're just sort of a free agent operating in the wild, defending the assets you can
protect on you more or less.
And what really changed the nature of property is when we get into the agricultural age.
So 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 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 stockhouses of grain to defend or maybe meat
or cattle or whatever it is we're creating, we now have savings.
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.
This one thing we'll touch on a lot today is people always want something for nothing.
People are always seeking the path to get something for nothing.
And I think that drives a lot of our decision making and actually encourages us to be innovative
in a lot of ways.
You could say it's our laziness that's helping us be inventive in a way.
We're trying to accomplish greater results with less efforts over time.
But 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 a capitalistic society to something more communistic.
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, they create what's called the division of labor, which
is a very common economic term, basically means you're better at making hats, I'm better
at making boots.
If 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 in a tech
sense that the economy is the trade network that generates wealth, generates innovation,
creates all this whole lap of luxury we live in today that we've inherited from our forebears
is from the market.
It's not from a government.
The government is the network security, if you will.
So 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 nonviolent dispute resolution in the rule of law.
And we can have a reasonable expectation 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 would say.
They tend to start abusing that position to obtain 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.
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 are your thoughts about anarchism?
So I talk quite a bit, he'll be here in a few days actually, Michael Malis, 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 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 monetary system and all those other things?
Is it possible?
Agreed, 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, cannot be weaponized, frankly.
Our current monetary system is weaponized by those who can print money against those
who cannot.
And I think when you have at the heart of every modern economy, which even we could
say the US, we pride ourselves as free market capitalists, we out-competed communism in
the 20th century, we think that this is the superior model, 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-capitalistic
institution, which is the central bank.
The temptation to monopolize money throughout all of history has been too strong for anyone
to resist.
So even benevolent, quote unquote, dictators that have taken over, many dictators have
inherited, say, an inflationary regime where society is coming apart because 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
the money to benefit themselves.
But inevitably over time, because it is a political institution, there's an incentive
there, again, to get something for nothing, to spend more than you're making through
tax revenues.
And with that incentive, people typically ultimately end up pursuing that inflationary
path.
So 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 it's pertinent
to a healthy economy.
But it's actually, if you look at it from real first principles, it is just theft integrated
into the money.
It's a technology backdoor is another way to think about it.
You wouldn't buy a cell phone knowing that someone could siphon your data off of 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 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, surreptitiously, typically
slowly, but eventually, as we've seen throughout history, that slowly builds up into it rapidly
and then causes the monetary system to collapse.
Do you think there's a benefit to inflation possibly?
So when you have perfect information, but perhaps you don't need inflation, perhaps
it is purely theft, but I think of inflation as like the snooze button on the alarm.
So if you have a hard standard, you better wake up when the alarm rings, but all of us
kind of like probably shouldn't, but use the snooze button, it's like, okay, well, five
more minutes or 10 more minutes.
And then you're saying there's naturally a slippery slope where you, you, uh, it becomes
a drug that you fall in love with in your abuse.
But nevertheless, the usefulness of the snooze button is that you don't know how you'll
be actually feeling when the alarm rings.
You might be able to ready to pop up.
It might be like, you really need those few more minutes, like to psychologically get
yourself out of bed.
This metaphor is just not working at all.
But do you think there's a use to inflation sometimes from like an economics perspective?
I think the drug metaphor is a little more apt in that inflation does provide an immediately
stimulative effect 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 necessary for a system to function properly.
With inflation, you're essentially giving, uh, the people that can print money a way
to dampen the disincentives they face.
So it destroys feedback loops, I guess you might say.
And another way to look at this is when you, so using inflation, using 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 undershooting and you, and you're experiencing, uh, business recession in a
capitalist environment, the market needs to clear that malinvestment, that misallocation
of capital.
So you've 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 Tullibian 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 you delay volatility, you're just 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 and expected 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 unstable 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.
So they want to escape chaos.
But you're saying that that's actually, uh, 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 pervaded 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 ourselves
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 and 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, even the way we, we talk, like they're clearly the words matter, but also the nonverbal
cues, all these things are like order that has been established over many, many, many
thousands of years 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 constructed and slowly
expanding, but at the edges, you're always going to have that chaos, that volatility
and that the entrepreneurs are kind of like jumping into that chaos and some of them die
and some of them succeed.
And so like, if you want to grow this bubble of order, you, we have to be embracing the
volatility at the edges 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
is the way of enlightening the rest of us.
Or if they figure something out, you know, Steve Jobs creates the iPhone, it changes
the world forever.
So enlightening the rest of us and Taleb would say the fire of their failure.
Okay.
Yeah, exactly.
Taleb would say 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 of business, when a restaurant goes out of 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 is this death of the individual components that contributes to the growth of the ensemble?
As a smaller side, maybe you can guide me through it.
I don't know if you're paying attention, but there was some chaos around Taleb and the
Bitcoin community.
I wasn't quite paying attention, but from my outsider's perspective, I thought it seemed
to Taleb 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.
Can you pull out some profound philosophical ideas from the disagreement of the chaos?
I admittedly don't know too much about it either.
I have a big fan of his writing.
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 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.
But he had written 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 safety is very much against COVID
mask and state intervention, whereas Taleb's on the other side of the fence.
And then after that beef, Taleb 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
leads to World War III.
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, fuck you to the man, the government,
the 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 various kind of social aspects.
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 masks 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 viral 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 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 think it's a canvas on which people project their emotions and I guess until I 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's written some about in his books, the problem with centralization.
I mean, a lot of his writing addresses that and he actually points to, I think Switzerland
is the best government in the world because it's decentralized.
So there's that.
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 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 Twitter boating accident.
I don't believe in Bitcoin.
I've sold on my Bitcoin and-
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
Sorry, the boating accident in Bitcoin is this, 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, whether it's a government or an individual
is coming after you, so you can give me all your Bitcoin or pay these taxes in Bitcoin,
you go, oh, I had a boating accident and lost them all.
Yeah.
Right.
But back to the fundamental nature of space time, let me ask you, because we're kind of
left it.
I'd like to go back to this idea of that you said that everything we think, say, or do
occurs within the bounds of space time.
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 truth, like how much of all of this is noble?
How much of this is accessible to us humans?
How much uncertainty like 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 noble,
or is it mostly chaos and we're just holding on for dear life?
Yeah.
I think I said that all action occurs within the bounds of space time.
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 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, reproducing, recombining.
That idea is so powerful, by the way.
I don't think it's been understood fully.
I think in the digital world, 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, in that it strips away all of the non-informational
components of something.
It strips it down to its bare bones.
I have a quote in here somewhere about that.
Sorry, which is called an asset, the ideas?
The universal Darwinism.
Darwinism applied broadly, outside of the just...
I would all condition all of this with saying that most of my thinking is shaped by a book
I read recently called The Case Against Reality, 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 economics.
So the book, The Case Against Reality, by Donald Hoffman, he has a quote in the book
that describes 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, 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 riddance to the rest of them.
What remains is more than enough to build on, unquote.
So the way I would interpret that is that life itself, I've come to view life as information
propagating through flesh, and that we are, I guess, DNA is a quadratic code.
I think it's four letters, maybe versus the binaries, 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 winning ideas, the ones that are most fit 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.
We are biological meat vehicles, we're way overly attached to them.
Maybe especially 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, make one million robbers, but you'll all have the
same idea, what is your real value?
Like I could just shoot you, and there'll still be 999 of you, but the idea is the important
thing, the things you believe.
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 we're all a product of nature and nurture.
So my particular concourse of experience is the path dependence that I represent cannot
be replicated, nor can anyone's for that matter.
Well, that's a hypothesis.
So that's of course a human meatbag would say, like desperately trying to preserve
himself.
I think it reduces to some fundamental questions about what is consciousness and whether that
can be cloned, all those kinds, you know, it gets to the core of what it is to be human.
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 a 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 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 that different animals have their own unique interfaces.
So we have a certain amount of photoreceptors in our eye, whereas, I think the numbers three
might be five, or 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 miniscule 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, or we think, you know, the atomic clockwork kind of universe.
But I think there's, I don't think that's true exactly.
And 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 property, it's actually based
on the relationship between the individual and the property.
There's this whole realm of relevance associated with, 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 goal directed action towards our goal
is useful.
Anything that impedes us, or we could say is valuable, anything that impedes us is actually
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.
But we could pay some $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 is what Austrian economics really looks at.
It's the realm of human action, as they call it, it's called praxeology.
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 one's goal directed action.
And that's ultimately exist in the space of ideas, 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.
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 you're right.
People don't have ideas, ideas have people.
Honestly, it's a really profound idea, or a statement about reality, a reframing of
reality.
If we're actually being deeply honest about it, it's quite painful.
I do appreciate that you defended your biological meatback earlier, but it seems like ideas
are the things that have power.
That me, Lex, for example, is worthless, and 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
Lex is worthless.
You are the node of the idea sphere, the new sphere.
What is it?
From a Bitcoin perspective, I'm mining, I'm solving the cryptographic problem in the
general.
In that sense, I'm a useful node.
Yeah, you're competing to solve the puzzle of entropy, and when you do solve it, it benefits
the entire network.
But I guess, from my perspective, just because just working in AI, I'm looking at the long-term
vision.
I see us humans in AI systems as really the same, and AI systems ultimately as something
that supersedes humans.
So what is intelligence?
In the context of our current discussion, I think intelligence is very closely linked
to this notion of ideas, and it's the ability to generate ideas, to mold ideas, to compress
seeming chaos into some model, into some theory that efficiently compresses the chaos in a
way where you can then integrate it with other ideas, and they can play in all those kinds
of things.
So in that sense, it's the turning chaos into order.
It's the molding of ideas that our human brains can work with it, and just from my
perspective, I don't see any reason why they cannot be algorithmatized, converted into
computational systems.
I would agree, which is scary.
Very or potentially really promising.
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 that intelligence, and maybe its most simplistic
form is error correction.
Humans have wants.
Again, we're constantly expressing our value through action.
There's no other way to express it, by the way.
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 less valued A to more valued B, entropy happens, uncertainty happens, we
fall off course, and it is intelligence that enables us to render information from that
experience and error correct, so that we can move slightly, shift our trajectory slightly
more towards B that we're trying to move towards.
I think that there's something there that I don't know that we can make synthetically,
and that if we define intelligence as error correction, it's an error correction to what?
Error correction towards what we find is valuable, so we're trying to satisfy human
wants.
Why not just be our own?
Could be others as well.
I'm trying to solve the wants of others, not just myself, and I'm trying to error correct
myself towards that goal, processing environmental feedback through intelligence to error correct.
I don't know how, if you eliminate the human element completely, who's doing the wanting?
Where does value come from?
I know the machine learning people who are listening are saying that's exactly what machine
learning is, which is error correction, because you have a loss 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 no maybe objective values, absolute values, you're generating
that very lost function, that objective function that you're, that function that measures the
error comes from the human mind.
Some aliens might disagree with you, because they might have a different objective function.
Obviously, the 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's something to this biological meat bag.
To take it one layer deeper 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, which
I started my intellectual explorations in physics, actually astrophysics, so for the
longest time, even the way I describe money as I talk about space and time, so that blew
my mind, but this Dove told nicely with another book called Leela.
The author is Robert Persig, so he wrote Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which
is a very popular 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 metaphysics
of quality he calls it, so it's the metaphysics, I think it's the 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, 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 something
I think the Solzhen instance of this, that 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, or it's always talking about loving thy neighbor and loving God and all
of these other things that are good morally to create the best outcomes.
Values are fundamental.
Value, yes.
Value is fundamental.
Oh boy, yeah, that's interesting.
It does feel like physics is not capturing something.
There's some people, panpsychists, argue that consciousness might be one of the fundamental
properties of nature from which emerges everything we see, so that could be just other words
for this same notion of value, and then the basic laws of physics are not capturing that
currently, 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 at the physics level.
We contend with that underlying nature, whatever it is, with the logos, so we're looking at
uncategorized nature, and then we're assigning a word to it, so 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, we
can start to build these other things, this is like the Yuval Harari imagined orders, so
we can create these useful fictions, 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.
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,
and doing it, but to do that, the communication media that we're using, the words have to
have stable meaning.
The money needs to have value that's dependable, it needs to be something that's not dictated
by any one group, it's reached by consensus of the entire group.
That's how you think it's optimizing for error correction, again, where a free market would
be harnessing the intelligence of all market actors, and a central planning or essentially
planned market would be harnessing just the intelligence of a small group of bureaucrats.
It's not obvious how to achieve this kind of consensus mechanism.
Obviously, we'll talk about Bitcoin as an idea, ultimately the idea of Bitcoin is connecting
it to physics.
You can trust that physical matter won't change, but there could be other ideas, maybe physics
could be changed.
We right now believe that physics can't be changed, the physical matter of the world,
but maybe it can in a way that we're totally not understanding.
You mentioned reality from Donald Hoffman's perspective.
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 many dimensions, that the notions of space and time is just a silly
useful construct that's not at all connected.
You're starting to look at Stephen Wolframs, I don't know if you're familiar with this
view of the world, that it's like hypergraphs underneath it all, like these mathematical
structures from which everything emerges, like there are many, many, many orders of
magnitude smaller than what we think of, they're even smaller than strings and string theory.
Those are the basic mathematical objects from which it emerges.
I think that's an interesting philosophical framework.
It's also, people should check out, a cool way to play with beautiful hypergraph mathematical
structures.
I don't know if you know what Stephen Wolfram is, but he created Wolfram Alpha and all these
tools that you can actually visualize and play with.
You can play with physics in a visual way, or at least discrete 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.
He sometimes frustrates a few folks because he's very, let's say, proud of his work.
It's interesting to think about a world where we don't have direct access to reality, as
Hoffman argues.
Maybe I don't know if you can comment, I don't know if you're familiar with Ein Rand's work
and her whole philosophy of objectivism, or her whole contention is that we do have access.
I don't want to misstate it, but at least she will claim that it's not useful, or I
think she'll probably say it's not correct to argue that we don't have access to reality.
We have the hence objectivism.
We have direct access to reality.
That's the only thing we can reason about.
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.
You have thoughts about her work?
I am slightly ashamed to say I have not read Ein Rand yet.
She is high on my list, and she's been recommended a number of times.
But so I don't know a lot specifically about her philosophy or objectivism, but to me it
resonates closely with what the American pragmatist commented on truth.
They distinguished what you could say is absolute truth, which is at the bottom of reality,
whether it's Mr. Wolfram's mathematical formulas or value, whatever it may be.
It's something ineffable, something beyond the reach of epistemology, perhaps even.
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 using stories
to point towards the same transcendental mystery we all experience but cannot articulate.
So something like the artist uses lies to point to the truth, something like that kind
of thing.
That's really good.
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 close to social consensus and is not shakeable
by political action.
So that's what physics and mathematics are.
It's an unshakable 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 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 it versus pragmatic truth, which is something that's useful.
So 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 brisket restaurant,
is that because the map is true or is that because the map is useful?
They're very hard to disentangle when you'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 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 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, the price signal is the nerve.
And that's the first form 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 cost lower than the final solution 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 iterative process, we're constantly discovering new and 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 best way we know how to solve any particular problem based on 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, faster, cheaper, better, effectively.
I'm trying to generalize, you blow my mind a little bit here, I'm trying to generalize
the idea of tool, how to think about it, because I keep just, when you say tool, I keep imagining
different like specific concentrations of a tool.
I'm trying to see, so the price is a pragmatic truth that's communicating value in this network.
Subjective demands against objective supply.
So it's an economic democracy.
So that's the demand supply.
And then the tools are the ways of extracting or solving problems is the more general kind
of thing.
Or satisfying wants.
Yeah.
So wants are somehow, that's part of the supply and the demand.
And wants are back to value, right?
Because everything someone wants, they're expressing their value.
Okay.
Yeah.
So the shovel is a pragmatic truth.
The shovel is truth.
It feels like a good book title.
Okay.
Sorry.
So what other pragm...
And then the third one, I would argue is virtue, actually.
Oh, wow.
And 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 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 into virtue, right?
We know it's best to be honest because if you lie, it's very energy inefficient, right?
You're creating this little fork of reality.
And then if someone else asks you about that lie again, you have to put another layer of
lies on top of it.
Where if you just tell the truth, you're just recollecting what happened.
And so that sort of keeps, 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?
Well, I'm being able to figure out why murder is bad because I just keep wanting to murder
people.
And I've murdered many.
Well, that's why I'm trying to get an interview with Vladimir Putin.
So that's fascinating, virtue in this market with the supplies and demands.
And there's the tools, which is also a 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 for any reason other than them originally
breaking or infringing on life, liberty, or property, then that's not going to work either.
And then if you violate private property rights, if you steal property from others, you're
breaking down the trust that the intersubjective fabric of money and markets and the rule of
law, all of these useful fictions are meant to preserve, you're corrupting it and breaking
it down.
What's kind of interesting to think about the market is helping evolve the virtues.
It's sharpened into virtues.
And these virtues can then go into motivational posters 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 not perhaps fundamental, they're just pragmatic truths.
Yeah.
It's another way to consider competition itself is that it is a discovery process.
So 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 idea, their
business plan.
And then the market decides, the consensus of market actors decide which one was better.
One lives, one dies.
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 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 so useful.
And that's what carries us.
So it's these collisions of interest that carry us, it removes the unuseful aspects
of ourselves or of our tools or of a price and reveals pragmatic truth to us.
Can you play my therapist for a second and if we talk about creative destruction, I think
Bukowski, Hunter Stompson 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 universe.
Is there some way to protect a little bit against the pain of that destruction or that
creative destruction that entrepreneurs screaming on fire as he enlightens the rest of us?
Is there some role for us humans together in the togetherness of it?
Also government, but any kind of collectives in helping that entrepreneur who's on fire
to maybe after a few minutes to spray him with some water and put him out of his misery?
I would say that pain is the inarguable basis of being.
Pain is, no matter how you try to explain it away or describe it, it's not something
you can rationalize away.
No one I think ever, someone may want to cut themselves to have an endorphin high, but
no one wants to suffer, we'd say.
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 potential pain or potential uncertainty.
And that pain is information.
When we experience something that is misfit to the outcome we desired, that pain is what
puts us, it encourages us to change our trajectory to get back on course towards our valued aim.
So as far as you need entrepreneurs that are exploring and 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 pain-free economic
growth like what the central bank would maybe 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.
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 money on the line.
And if he goes up in flames, then 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 than he would be out in the wilderness on his own.
So it's the accumulation of capital stock is the buffer against uncertainty for everyone.
And it gives you actually more potential to go out and experiment, to go out and confront
the chaos of nature because you are better healed effectively.
So I think we're speaking in sort of 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 were talking about, is there ways it can go wrong?
So I would first argue that we have never seen an actual purely free market.
Closest example would be kind of geopolitically we have a free market and that governments
are not necessarily governed, 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 a free market, maybe you can correct me, is the free market
still grounded in the ideas of 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 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 via the money that, via capitalistic money, which is gold,
right?
Gold was selected by the free market.
It's not decreed by government.
It provided this natural check on government action.
So I guess to get back to the original question is we've never seen a pure free market because
money has always been monopolized 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 that's a very minimal role in society, again, just as a network security 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 natural law, if you will.
Anything that goes beyond that moves us closer to an unfree market.
So every regulation, every act of coercion is actually 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 trading off, it's accepting short-term volatility in exchange
for less long run volatility.
And this tends to be the way of nature, by the way.
So if we could look at something like, there's a region in North America called Baja, California,
and it runs into the United States and it runs down into Mexico as well.
So the same topology, but two different jurisdictions.
In the U.S., we very heavily manage forest fires, we're trying to manage nature effectively,
whereas in Mexico is much more unregulated.
It just, when wildfires spring up, they let them burn off.
North America, when 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 wildfires still occur eventually, but they're much larger
and much more devastating in North America, where human intervention has occurred.
Because it is, it's dampening nature's natural corrective mechanism of clearing this underbrush
with these 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 in Mexico, it's the opposite, just these wildfires burn much smaller and 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, even the intention behind North American authorities
managing that forest fire is to create less destruction.
That is the intention.
And the intention is divergent from the outcome.
So in Telemion speak, he would say that human intervention moves us from mediocristan into
extremistan.
So mediocristan 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 extremistan, which is something much more information-based, you can double or
syndrome net worth to zero in a single trade, in a single moment, right?
So when we try and intervene with natural biological systems that have these feedback
loops, we actually start to push the system to behave more like an extremist-an system
that has less short run volatility, but more extreme long run volatility.
But the question is, where you look at capitalism or communism, for example, and by the way,
yes, I will talk to somebody who's a Marxist or a communist, like Richard Wolff is a pretty
eloquent defender of these ideas, because it's always good to really understand ideas
as opposed to just reject them offhand.
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 of human nature?
And I mean, you're saying that there's never been a free market, it's a very true statement.
The question is, how resilient is capitalism or whatever implementations of capitalism
we had up to this point to human nature where one person will become successful through
legitimate means, then starts to try to manipulate the system that takes it away from a free
market or takes it away from the things that gave them the riches in the first place, and
then try to, through corruption, get more, get this, the thing you said, 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 central banking itself.
This was in the 1848 manifesto of the Communist Party.
Measure number five reads an exclusive state monopoly in 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.
I think it was Andrew Jackson.
I know there was the first national bank, the second national bank were both disbanded,
and then Andrew Jackson, which is my favorite Tennessean, he has some famous quotes about
routing out the bankers like a Den of Vipers.
I think he punched one of the central bankers in the face.
Back when our leaders were a bit more badass, like you might say, and finally in 1913, the
Federal Reserve was implemented, and it's been kind of all downhill from there.
So, what is... Oh, second.
I was just going to say that communism and capitalism, it's also a matter of scale.
The ideal behind communism is from each according to their ability to each according to their
need.
It sounds beautiful.
It sounds like a great, peaceful, harmonious way to organize ourselves.
The problem is, and by the way, I am a communist in my family, in my home, 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 Breedlove is a communist and the ideals of communism are beautiful.
Yes, context matters, people.
Sorry, go ahead.
But to your point, it does not scale.
As we move into this larger system of socioeconomic cooperation, which is necessary to deepen the
division of labor, to generate more wealth, 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, and frankly, prices.
Because the other thing in 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 and serve Mother Russia, and that would create wealth.
What happened?
They destroyed price signals.
There were shortages.
There were famines.
There's all levels of corruption, because to your point, people have to run the system
no matter what.
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 check on their action that that institution tends to become more corrupt.
Further, it's an inferior resource strategy.
I alluded to this earlier where the other way to think about free market versus central
planning is its decentralized or distributed computing versus centralized computing.
Each one of us, I think that the number is 120 bits per second of active awareness.
We can take in, clearly we process a lot more than that, but our active awareness, I think
is 120 bits per second.
In a centralized planning body like in Soviet Russia, they had the pricing czar.
Maybe they had 10, 20,000 people deciding the prices for the entire country.
You're only getting that much data throughput, 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.
It's a more efficient means for disseminating knowledge effectively.
Again, the more knowledge socioeconomic structure can contain, the more wealthy it is.
Prices, tools, all these things are just knowledge.
In that respect, that's why something like capitalism, even in its marginalized form,
state capitalism, outcompetes communism.
It's distributed computing versus centralized computer.
We brought up religion and Joseph Campbell and myth and the propagation of ideas.
Before I forget, I wanted to ask your thoughts about this.
Jordan Peterson, I haven't really understood exactly, be able to pin him down exactly what
he sees as the role of religion in human society, but it feels like he's describing it as having
value for us.
The ideas of myth are valuable.
They're valuable mechanisms toward, I think you mentioned, directing us in this world as
a human society.
Do you think about myth?
Do you think about religion?
What's the use of it in this construct of markets in this framework of where ideas are
ultimately the fundamental thing that makes societies work?
Yeah.
I think Jordan Peterson, who I'm a huge fan of, he's been very influential in my thinking
and influential on my own religious views as well.
I think his position would be, and he said this before, that he acts as if God exists.
I've had some arguments about this before, but to me, that points towards the preeminence
of action and how important action is versus your cognitive beliefs necessarily.
I think there is a lot of utility in that, that if you follow the moral code of something
like the Bible, you do reap benefits from that.
Society reaps benefits from that.
Sometimes I bring up this point and people are like, are you kidding me?
Have you read the Old Testament?
They're clobbering people with rocks when they do the wrong thing.
The Bible doesn't claim to 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 individual sovereignty
above the state and things like that.
I think that mythology itself is another form of data compression.
If you look at these stories, Cain enables a good example, or Peterson makes the point
that it's a tiny story, it's a paragraph-ish long, but it contains so many layers of meaning
in regards to violence, evil, betrayal, work, the divergence between intention and result.
I think Cain is actually making the effort to sacrifice for God, but the sacrifices
he's making are not, God doesn't find them useful.
So he sort of rejects them.
Again, we're organized by these useful fictions, these herarian imagined orders.
I think mythology is kind of the original version of that, where we were learning to
organize ourselves around stories to best coordinate our action across space and time.
I think it's very foundational, 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 values.
They're not perfectly aligned, but it does speak to just the evolutionary importance
of morality and the subjectivity of morality, where morality sort of evolves over time based
on, 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, then we tend to be a bit more barbaric
towards one another.
That too, to dovetail 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.
We're injecting more dollars, chasing the same level of goods and services.
We are artificially increasing scarcity, perceived scarcity.
When you increase perceived scarcity, you are amplifying divisiveness.
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.
It's de-civilizing in a way by artificially amplifying the perceived scarcity in the world.
Can you elaborate how does inflation increase the perceived scarcity in the world?
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.
It's telling you how much supply there is of something in the world relative to the
demand.
When you print money and artificially increase that price, it's diverging away from supply
and demand.
It's becoming just more of a product of policy than it is of free market fundamentals.
The more expensive something is, that is a signal to the marketplace and to market actors
that it is scarce.
That's why Leonardo painting might sell for $16 million.
There's only one.
There's a lot of demand for it.
Maybe my numbers are off, but you get the point.
It's the reason mask spiked in price after the COVID announcement.
There was no supply, toilet paper, et cetera, et cetera.
By inflation, I specifically mean arbitrary fiat currency supply inflation by legal monopoly.
Fiat inflation is a commonly misunderstood word.
That is amplifying the perception of scarcity among market actors in the world.
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 our natural predilection to
be combative with one 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 in the market that scarcity is declining.
There's less need to fight over things.
All of this ties back into the old Bastiot saying that if goods don't cross borders,
soldiers will.
If we're not trading with one another, if we're not acting interdependently and we're
not becoming more intelligent as a market and that increased intelligence or increased
knowledge is reflected in decreased prices because prices are just the exchange ratios
of things.
The smarter we can solve problems, the better we can solve problems, the less prices would
be.
It induces more cooperation.
I love how you tie inflation and cancel culture together as essentially artificial creation
of increase of conflict, artificially increasing scarcity and thereby artificially increasing
conflict.
That's really fascinating.
You're short circuiting my brain many times throughout this conversation.
This robot is struggling to keep up.
We need to step back at the 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?
As you know, that's my favorite question.
Is the name of the show I just launched, the What Is Money show?
Basically the Bitcoin rabbit hole is what's led me to explore a lot of these ideas in
depth.
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 time preference and civilization.
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 surfaces more and more
layers of truth.
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.
There are some questions that are almost unanswerable, but in their asking allow you to deeply understand,
get closer to truth, deeply understand the nature of our human existence.
The meaning of life is almost like this initial philosophers striving towards that.
If money is indeed as fundamental as you've described, especially in the context of value
being fundamental, then that is a really, that's a more, let's take a 21st century
way of asking the same question about what is the meaning of life.
You mentioned that it's a metaproperty 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.
This would be any good that is held and used purely for purposes of facilitating exchange.
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,
if it's water, you're thirsty.
That's the utility of water is that it can quench your thirst, 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 dentistry and whatnot, but it's largely used as a store
value across time, and that's what it's been used for for 5,000 years.
So if we say gold has a $10 trillion market cap, maybe $2 trillion of that is its utility
value, or it's actually demand for use in computers and dentistry, and an $8 trillion
of that is demand for its use as a store value.
Money, the marketability aspects of money boils down to 5 services that money can render.
Money needs to be divisible, it needs to be durable, it needs to be recognizable, it 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 if you think of a technology as just a more sophisticated
tool effectively.
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.
That's 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, if you were to measure it, the resistance to inflation.
How hard is it to artificially increase the supply of the thing?
That is the hardness of money, and that's why gold is hard money.
Because the alchemy is hard.
That's right.
Because no one cracked the alchemy, so gold became money.
So that's such a nice, clean explanation of what is money with the five elements and
gold ultimately won out because of the last piece of scarcity.
That's right.
To get to maybe dig a little deeper there, so scarcity, we commonly think of scarcity
as strictly a supply property, whereas there's not much of something that 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 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 because another definition for money, it's
the most marketable good.
So it can be traded for any other good service, piece of knowledge in the marketplace.
So humans being what we are, we're never satisfied.
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 and you can rob
people through inflation.
So that's why the market's settled on gold as money.
And robbing is reallocating the value that, so essentially the one property, like why
scarcity is important is it adds a lot more friction to the reallocation, 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 a 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 if you look at something
like fiat currency, which 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 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.
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.
So to rectify this technological shortcoming of gold, we introduced, first of all, the
custody of gold was gradually centralized into fewer and fewer warehousing operations.
This is because there are economies of scale associated with using 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 to gold beyond its
supply?
So if it's got three tons of gold, and it issues six tons worth of paper receipts, all
of a sudden it's participating in a fraud.
It's basically lying.
It's representing that it has more gold than it actually does.
And 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 is 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 central banks, to modify the supply
to suit their own political agendas.
The snooze button allows you to just do a little fraud to get something for nothing.
Just a little bit at first.
Just this one morning, just a little bit.
I mean, I don't know if you can speak to the birth of fiat currency.
Is there some interesting characteristics to that those early steps that created it?
Could it have been averted or is this the natural progression 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 then 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 went from placing our trust in a free market game theoretic process, or trusting
gold, and we began trusting this institution instead.
That institution would not have arisen if the portability of gold was really high.
If we could have somehow sent gold across a telecommunications channel, there would
have been no need for a central bank.
One could have custodied their gold in 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-sized swimming pools, all the gold mined throughout
all of human history.
So there's not a lot.
And what if there had been just way more, there'd just been, I don't know, 20,000 Olympic
swimming pools worth?
Portability wouldn't have been as much of an issue.
And this is to say, assuming gold was still the most scarce metal in all these things,
portability would have been less of an issue.
We would have had less dependence or need for a central bank.
So I think 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 a geographical space to be able to be exchange
value.
It became more of an issue as we globalized.
As we became more of a global society, we needed money that could move across space
really fast, 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, I've been watching this documentary
on World War I and World War II on Netflix.
I think it's called World War II in color.
Oh, yeah.
That's really good.
It's so good.
When I say gold has been the governor of governments or gold is geopolitical money, it is the base
layer operating system has been the base of our operating system for analog society.
So it's always been about who controls the gold is who makes the rules.
And in that context, that's why Bitcoin is so interesting because it is the disruptor
to this base 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.
Not one of the 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.
We talked about money as sovereignty.
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 for money.
And as you said, you're using the word tool and technology interchangeably here.
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 serves me by allowing me to lay ink on paper and communicate information.
So value, humans attach value, as we alluded to earlier, to services, not goods.
So the properties or the services that money renders that human beings value are those
five properties, visibility, 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.
If that divisibility were ever a problem, which actually 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 300,000 Satoshis per person.
What if that was not enough to facilitate economic activity?
And the answer to that is Bitcoin can soft fork into further divisibility.
So if Bitcoin ate all the money in the world, and the average Bitcoin or wealth was say
300,000 Satoshis each, but that wasn't divisible enough maybe to buy coffee and do all these
day to day transactions, what would happen?
Well, we would increase its divisibility.
So Bitcoin's perfected divisibility, the divisibility of money, lets us transact across
scales, we can buy coffee or we can buy a house.
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.
The example I'd 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's similar.
You can't make changes to it unilaterally.
But to make explicit, the ways in which it is not durable is the fact that it relies
on computing infrastructure, like it needs computers.
So if you were to destroy all the computers in the world.
It needs mechanisms that store and transfer information.
And so you could attack gold in the same kind of way as opposed 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.
You're right.
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 destroy Bitcoin miners, you're creating incentives for anyone else
with access to electricity to mine, because you're making the algorithm easier.
Yeah.
So the destruction is difficult because of the decentralized nature of the whole thing.
And the difficulty adjustment.
Yeah.
So you're going to have to use nuclear weapons 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.
Bitcoin's pure information that can move at the speed of light, can't get much faster
than that.
Recognizability refers to the ability to verify the veracity of the money or its authenticity.
So you can actually, when we used to transact gold, there were time honored techniques for
verifying that it was gold and not gold-plated 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've seen people biting coins.
These are all techniques for testing the authenticity of gold.
And with Bitcoin, we have something unique in 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 node contains information about every transaction that's ever been had.
So you can figure out, yeah, I mean, all the truth of 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 the proof of work piece, but the entire transaction history.
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, you know, if the Satoshi stash is truly gone forever, the million Bitcoin
never moves, then we're talking about a 1,000 Bitcoin out of 20 million instead and so on
and so forth.
I mean, as more people lose access to their Bitcoin, they're basically making a contribution
to everyone else.
It's anti-dilutive.
And there are certain properties of Bitcoin that are sort of a little bit more into the
details that ensure that the full nodes, like the size of all the transactions that ever
happened, at least currently can be stored in a single computer, for example.
So it doesn't blow up too quickly.
That's right.
You know, there's arguments that that's not necessary, you can make arguments for that
to be a very nice property, but you can also say that there's like drawbacks to it.
That's hence the block size debates and all those kinds of things.
Yeah.
That was the Bitcoin cash civil war, right?
It was that particular piece.
And you know, ostensibly they were saying, oh, we need more transaction throughput to
buy more coffee and do more transactions.
But what they were actually doing was increasing the size of computing power necessary to run
a full node, which would have theoretically compromised decentralization.
So yeah, but it would, in theory, you know, in theory, it would allow you to have much
more transactions.
That's right.
But the drawback, it would, because of no longer it can be stored in a single computer,
in a single computer, then it naturally leads to decentralization, the same kind of thing
we see with gold.
Which would have compromised its survivability, right?
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, in that you need to know the supply is fixed and safeguarded
from counterfeiting 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.
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, in that we have unveiled a property of money
that we will only discover once.
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?
Its supply was hardest to 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.
It's historic inflation rates about 2%.
We could double that pretty quickly.
Bitcoin, with Bitcoin, it is not possible.
So no matter how much effort and energy and capital 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 about everything so that they can compete
as efficiently as possible.
And in the 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 as freely as possible from coercive and violent impediments.
And so I think Bitcoin in that sense is going to pull the world closer to a state of perfect
competition than we've ever been before, which would increase wealth 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.
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 maybe things that might yet to be invent, tools yet to be invented.
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.
That's what Bitcoin 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 that money is valued.
Again, it's the good with a configuration of demand that is predominantly marketability.
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 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 winner-take-all market because it's essentially a single-purpose
tool.
It is a tool for, if we consider that tools are time-saving devices, right?
The shovel that 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 coalesce towards one solution.
And so the short answer would be for the same reasons, quantifiable reasons, like inflation
resistance 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 case study because it's for a case study, right?
But okay, so that's really well put.
So like gold was sticky.
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.
And you're suggesting that there may not be, there's unlikely to be other leaps of that
kind into a whole nother kind of space of technologies.
I would argue that Bitcoin, it's kind of like the ideological synthesis of gold, taking
the monetary properties of gold and combining them with the internet itself.
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 Satoshi has kind of, he left no design space for superior technology to intercede
and out-compete Bitcoin at this point now that it's established liquidity in the network
effects.
Far superior technology, right?
Yeah.
But it's a combination of the tech itself and the social layer that is co-left to it.
And the social layer.
You can't separate those two out.
That's right.
They're all connected.
And then the political as well.
I mean, but, you know, the portability, for example, that's 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 argues a feature, many
argues a bug.
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, you know, 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 Nick Carter has a great piece on this actually called, it's the settlement insurance 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.
So it's giving you higher degrees of assurance that your settlement or your trade has occurred
with finality, whereas other blockchains are much more vulnerable.
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 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 Bitcoin's following is similar to gold.
First a collectible, today a store value, to be an effective store value, it has to
optimize for supply cap.
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 sound money, the ultimate sound money, 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 increase its portability, for instance, even though portability is maybe
kind of a misnomer because Bitcoin has extremely high portability, just doesn't have extremely
high transaction throughput.
So we could say you can move it pretty quickly anywhere in the world as long as you're willing
to bid up for the block space, but you 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 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 other features
that would increase its transaction throughput to higher layers.
So I think Lightning Network is something that's very interesting.
It's still early, but there's a lot of throughput already being used on the Lightning Network.
And it makes some slight trade-offs in terms of the trust minimization of Bitcoin, you
end up trusting these smart contracts instead to move to Bitcoin, but you pick up nearly
unlimited transaction throughput.
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,
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 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?
Early 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 an antithesis to progress often, and especially in your writing,
but this is true for the Bitcoin community, 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 Russian in me, I think like, what are the
ways this is going to go wrong?
So what do you think are the ways this might go wrong, or you're wrong in your conception
of what Bitcoin is?
Yeah, so science evolves via negativa, meaning that we're not proving hypotheses, and that's
what becomes the body of science.
Science is whatever is left over as we disprove hypotheses.
Whatever we can empirically, through experimentation, disprove gets discarded, and whatever remains,
whatever theory remains that hasn't been disproven is science, effectively.
This process is similar to market actors zeroing in on a store value, right?
They're experimenting with different forms of storing wealth across time, some do better
than others, and eventually everyone ends up on the one that is best.
That's what gold was.
In terms of understanding Bitcoin, I look at it as a similar approach, and 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 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?
That is the $250 trillion question.
I've spent five years thinking about this thing very deeply.
I've read everything on monetary history.
I can get my hands on.
The general thought of how it is stopped, and 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.
Was Ray Dalio, did he say that?
Yeah, he was currently stuck there, yeah.
So Ray Dalio said that Bitcoin seems to be too promising.
If it is in fact as promising as it looks, governments are going to, I don't forget what
the exact quote is, but not allow it ban it.
Governments will ban it.
So how do you get Ray Dalio 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 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 counterfeiter or a competing nation state, or business they
don't like, or an individual they don't like, 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 course an idea?
And that's, there is some anecdotal history here where there's the PGP case, which in
the United States, the court was trying to classify it as munitions.
When we were shipping this pretty good privacy software overseas, government wanted to classify
it as munitions and restrict that exportation.
But and this was a circuit court case precedent when the PGP attorneys actually printed out
the source code on paper and presented it as evidence in the court.
All of a sudden it became protected under freedom of speech, and that it's just code
is speech, code is language, and therefore at least in the United States, it's protected
under the First Amendment.
I think a government ban would be largely unenforceable, frankly, on Bitcoin, 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, and you're actually increasing the incentives for other
jurisdictions to 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, you think there's a that provides
a really strong incentive for the other big players to enable it?
That's right.
And 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.
People are smart.
I mean, people ask why?
Why would a government ban it?
Why can't I use this?
So that's kind of typically be the last arrow in their quiver.
They may try to ban it if Bitcoin really starts to monetize very quickly, and the power structures
that they impose today start to dissolve faster than others might think they will, than they
might try and ban it.
But I think that ban will be largely unenforceable.
They're more likely to tax it, which they already do tax it.
They're likely to increase taxation of it.
They're likely to try and make it more white market by actually tracing Bitcoin, seeing
who has it, attaching identities to Bitcoin ownership, and making sure that they're getting
their pound of flesh 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
in that we could say that open source networks tend to out-compete closed source networks.
And there's a really good reason for this, and it's because in a closed source network,
there are costs associated with defending the network itself.
So you have to, the network owners, the owners of the closed source network, have to expend
resources protecting it from competitors, and they have to expend resources imposing
its rules, because 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 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 closed networks typically.
And in the digital age, that's why internet out-competes intranet, 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 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.
And again, the other fallacy here is that a lot of people tend to think of governments
as these singular, indivisible entities that just move under one plan, but in reality,
it's a lot of people, right, and a lot of people with loosely coupled interests and
agendas and whatnot.
Regulators and others, whether they're wearing their citizen hat, they're going to see this
thing monetizing.
They're going to be on the front lines of 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, even as an individual or possibly even ultimately 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 vested economic interest in
its monetization, I think it kind of dissolves any of the power structures that are arrayed
against it from the inside.
So I've written a lot about this 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, 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.
You can't, the economics of violence are declining because of the low cost of protecting property.
You can now protect your monetary property in Bitcoin at orders of magnitude less cost
than is necessary to run a banking network.
So 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 taken relatively concerted action to go off of the gold standard.
There's a great book on this called The Gold Wars that outlines how governments have been
waging a cold war against gold for the past 50 years.
Bitcoin sort of 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 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 hope you're right that 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 a, 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 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.
The more wealth that society has created, and the more it has outcompeted the systems
that have come before it.
The latest would be capitalism triumphing over socialism.
Before maybe we eat UR in Texas, you brought over some brisket.
Before we may be indulged in that, let me bring up one quick topic and then we'll take
a break.
And the topic of what some may term the toxicity of the Bitcoin community, that you've written
that Bitcoin toxicity is tough love.
Do you want to break that apart a little bit, sort of the idea, the philosophy of the toxicity
that seems to be present 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.
I came into this space professionally in 2017, was originally running a multi-strategy crypto
asset hedge fund, and my initial investment thesis on the world was that 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, this Bitcoin toxicity, in that it's kind of a filter that's trying to catch bad
or useless or even scamming ideas that this space is very well known for.
As we've touched on today, Bitcoin, in my opinion, is this world-shattering innovation,
but it's in a sea of the most scammy stuff ever.
Anybody can go and create a coin, so you can go and launch one immediately online, and
you can throw up a website, an advisor page, 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
shit coin universe.
And then just looking at the market success of Bitcoin versus, and when I use the word
shit coin, 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 good line.
Bitcoin, tracking the market success of Bitcoin versus alternative crypto assets, the signal
is very clear that Bitcoin has outcompeted 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, kind of is a tough love.
You don't want new entrance to the space to get lost in shit coin jungle and learn the
hard way the way many Bitcoin maximalists have that 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 good spirit and good intention and a desire
to learn.
Because then at that point, it's actually impeding the free flow of ideas, which the example
in 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 fucking sense.
It's like you're attacking someone who's approaching it in a good spirit and asking questions.
Yeah.
And I think sometimes talking about it, the toxicity in the Bitcoin community as an immune
response has a negative effect of giving it a pass because it almost says, look, it equates
it with 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 steal money from people.
It's really useful to make sure that you give people the harsh truth about who is and isn't
a scammer.
You have to 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 toxicity, the mockery, the derision.
And you 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 am new to this particular immune system,
but I've explored other immune systems.
And 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 err on the side of love and kindness and
almost like an 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 might be more applicable in certain contexts, like
maybe in the space of science or something like that.
But in the space of 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 this space to call
people out a little bit, to inspire them to be more loving, I suppose.
But it's difficult because you want to walk that line carefully.
You don't want to be too loving and open-minded.
Otherwise, your brain falls out.
I get it.
It's a difficult balance to walk.
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 when we're young, we may have
certain ideas about 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 wanted to get my ear pierced, my mom wouldn't let
me do it.
And I was like, oh, come on, mom, I thought it was so cool.
And then two years later, I'm like, thank you, mom, for letting me get my ear pierced.
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've done the exploration.
They keep coming back to Bitcoin and they've seen people being taken advantage of.
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.
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.
That's a whole nother 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, 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 a tux, maybe another way to say it is, uh, I brought up like Christopher Hitchens
and somebody who like, okay, you might say it's toxic or something like that.
Cause he's basically a intellectual powerhouse who's also a troll.
So he's constantly, it's like guerrilla 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 of that.
So toxicity just like, um, these are just words.
They can mean a lot of different things, but this agreement 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 guerrilla warfare, but you want to learn how
to shoot or whatever the weapon you're using and to do it well.
Some people do 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 and you're very well, maybe doesn't mean it also doesn't require skill to do the
communication well, whether it's this agreement and harsh or more, uh, agreement and loving
and so on.
Yeah, I think very fundamentally that all of our decisions, you know, we alluded to
earlier that every decision is an expression of value or a reaction we take.
They ultimately come from fear or love.
Fear 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 that gluttony greed, sloth
wrath, lust, pride, envy, like these are all selfish behaviors, whereas something like
love is much, it's morally superior and that it's more selfless.
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 vitriol 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,
he is symbolic of the highest moral consciousness possible.
And you know, Carl Jung 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.
We need more of that in the world, frankly.
And these things, they're all intertwined, you know.
We touched on the beginning, all of us get to decide, but the world does influence kind
of if we adopt fear or love.
But it takes, I don't know, it takes good systems and it takes, I guess, good leaders
to set an example.
Yeah, I do believe that there's, like, individual people can have a ripple effect.
So that's what I try to do, sort of embody the, I'm just one ant.
But 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.
I've been disappointed in myself, if I'm being honest, how much talking I've been doing,
you know, as opposed to, like in my private life, I live the thing I talk about, but I
also haven't created much, you know.
And I believe in the power of individuals that create stuff, like create an idea 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 you mentioned kind of people who, what the Bitcoin community might call scammers.
I have a lot of passions in my 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.
Like I said, yeah.
I'm always looking for things to really fall in love with.
So how is a person like me supposed to figure out, I also happen to have a platform a little
bit and how am I supposed to figure out who is interesting, what is an interesting set
of ideas and what or 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.
It's a personal threat and it makes it very difficult to explore those ideas.
So I understand that, 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 not give a
platform to ideas 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'll help expand
their reach.
Oh yeah, that's right.
Or say whatever needs to be said to expand their reach.
So I think you're coming from a good place, I'll say that.
There's a great piece written on the topic of scammers and scamming.
I think it was by Goldstein, he wrote a piece called Everyone's a Scammer.
And it's sort of back to this general human proclivity to try and get something for nothing
always.
But again, it can be positive, it can be innovative, or it can be negative, it can be trying to
steal from people.
That might be, I think that's a useful piece just to kind of see the crypto world through
that lens, and that's how bit corners 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.
As far as sifting through the ideas, I guess this is back where the cultural immune system
has some utility.
Because there were times when I thought this particular crypto asset, Auger was one I was
really into, that it could facilitate prediction markets, prediction markets could make markets
more efficient, et cetera, et cetera.
But when that investment thesis basically met the cultural filter or immune system,
it forced me to reevaluate 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.
But it really comes down to you doing your homework, but we can't all deeply evaluate
every idea out there, right?
One of the things I struggle with, Alex Jones, for example, had dinner with him, I could
tell that would be a very fun conversation.
But then I also understand that there's consequences to that conversation that should be explored
with care.
And so you need to take on the responsibility of being a chef or 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 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, yeah, I mean, I can imagine a bunch of different ways.
But all we can do in this world is want to make the mistakes.
We acknowledge those mistakes.
Yes.
Learn.
And learn.
And also, I have to put this on the rest of us that you don't take one thing that a
person did and then burn them at the stake for it, that you realize that we all make
mistakes and that a particular mistake does not make the person.
This applies to taking stuff out of context over hundreds of hours of talking, but it
applies to actual, in context, big mistake.
So what if I murdered somebody at some point?
Just give me a break.
No.
We're too far, of course, but in general, 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.
This is human nature.
Like, ha-martia 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 hope, I don't get the sense that you're actually afraid of making a mist up.
Like I think you just, maybe disappointed's a better word, like you know you're going
to make the mistakes.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That's a much, much better word.
But that's the only way anything, it's the only way we can advance is that we're dealing
with an incomprehensible reality.
All we can do is throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.
And in that process, we're all inherently going to hurt ourselves and hurt others and
that's where love and forgiveness come into play, right?
And 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 any number of terms, 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.
It's going to, in your attempt to de-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 the failure of our social media technology that incentivizes
that kind of reduction to a label.
It's just the viral nature of that reduction.
So not only do we humans naturally do that, our social media platforms make that easy
easier, more fun, more effective to do that at scale, the mass hysteria.
So I think there's actually technological ways of adding friction to that.
Yeah.
I wonder, I mean, I agree with you that it's social media is an amplifier to our natural,
this natural way of dealing with one another.
But I wonder, am I thinking it has evolved a lot on this, that there's something below
the way we're treating each other too, right?
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 quality
of living and ways of dealing with one another.
And I think that when you corrupt the money, that it really does push us the negative direction,
pushes us away from, again, encouraging or magnifying scarcity artificially causes us
to be more divisive.
When things are more divisive, we tend to be less civilized, less nuanced, more black
or white or this or that 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, which again is the base layer operating system for human moral action in the world,
that it has downstream effects.
So we'd actually maybe start to treat each other a little better on social media, despite
the fact that it enables this faster communication.
That's interesting.
So perhaps fixing social media as I've been thinking about is treating the symptom, not
the cause.
Yeah.
What is the Bitcoin rabbit hole in a nutshell is that they say, fix the money, fix the world.
You keep tracing these different social malayses or technological difficulties, lack of innovation.
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, WTFHap in 1971.com, goes through this whole gamut of socioeconomic
data that's completely gone askew since the early 70s.
Yeah.
You had this whole video.
What do you think about Eric Weinstein and Bitcoin and the gold standard?
Does he, I actually haven't heard him talk about his thesis about the 70s in connection
to the going off of the gold standard.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts there?
What are your thoughts about his general relationship 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 pended on the money on going off the gold standard.
But in recent interactions with Eric, I've interacted with him on Clubhouse.
We recently released an episode of the show I did with Chris Espley and it was titled
Dear Eric Weinstein.
So we're going through his worldview that he's expressed in the portal and tying it
back to the money in different ways.
And he's been, he's engaged.
Eric retweeted the show.
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 very wholeheartedly.
He does bring with him his existing worldview and his existing theory, the one that really
blew up was gauge theory.
They got really popular.
I don't know a lot about gauge theory.
Actually, message Eric and said, I want to learn more, genuinely, because 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.
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 gauge 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 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 and integrate, how the two integrate together.
And so it's interesting to explore, not just Bitcoin, the particular.
So for me, what I've always saw Bitcoin as from the beginning, from a narrow worldview
is computer science, which is where I come from.
And so I wasn't almost aware in the 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, the philosophical.
That's where I find all the fascination in the world, frankly.
I would, one other thing about Weinstein and Intellectuals more generally that are skeptical
of Bitcoin, I would challenge them to read the book, Human Action, written by Mises.
I think in 1949, he published the English version, it's essentially 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, I studied a lot of economics
in school.
There's not one peep of Austrian econ.
The latest, I really love talking about all the degrees he has.
I was a CPA.
But that curriculum that we get in college is noticeably deficient in Austrian economics.
And I think there's a reason why, right?
It's heavily government influenced.
Again, master's degree in 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 conceived of in the textbooks quite literally as God, an entity that suffers no
opportunity cost, that 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.
It's actually the culmination, which economics is the youngest science in the world, by the
way.
It's the frontiers of science in many ways, like to actually, when I say praxeology, many
people have never even heard of that.
But 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 Mises, 1200 pages, translated
from German.
He wields English is fascinating and terrifying all at the same time.
It'll probably take you six months to read it.
If you read it daily, seriously, like 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 a new light.
Well, I'll take that as a challenge.
Now that we took a little bit of a break, it's some good Texas brisket.
Thank you for that, by the way.
It's over.
Quite welcome.
Let me ask the ridiculous question.
At the core of 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 always tends towards mystery?
Well, as we've touched on a bit today, mythology, in my opinion, is something that is intrinsic
to how we see the world in a lot of ways.
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 to disparage
or question the motives of, if he's out on the Hollywood Hills partying, everyone knows
he's got a million Bitcoin.
It would just kind of tarnish the entire project in 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 actually heard recently that he identified as a he and some of his communications.
So it sounds like it is a he.
See, like his communications being like studied like almost like exactly as if he is a religious
that's right.
Like a prophet.
Yeah.
I 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 how to principle
do that, to do, to, to remain anonymous.
That's very much the George Washington.
Yeah.
I always wonder like how many people are like that?
There's a cliche that like absolute power 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.
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 Aurelius immediately came to mind.
Yeah.
You know, the guy that he had the keys to the kingdom and he apparently adhered to the
historic virtues until the end, 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.
Yeah.
So it's, I mean, it's 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 society
in this attention.
And he would have both.
He would have both.
It's fun to imagine 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.
Yeah.
I think Elon would be hilarious if he came out and he was Satoshi and be like, Hey guys,
I know I'm already the richest guy in the world, but I'm going to go ahead and double
my lead here.
What do you make of Elon Musk investing with Tesla investing in Bitcoin and maybe broaden
that out in some of these other, you know, big billionaires, but also people tied to
major companies investing in Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I think Michael Saylor really led the charge on that.
He's the CEO of MicroStrategy that I think they've acquired upwards of $2 billion 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, MicroStrategy.
Then they leveraged up on a convertible note and bought more.
So he's really gone, really leading the charge in this Bitcoin institutional adoption.
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.
He recorded twice, five and a half hours each, so it's about 11 hours of content.
And yeah, thank you.
It's, a lot of people have said that 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 just a beast.
Yeah.
But it's fascinating that his long-term vision with it, I mean, I'm not sure I'm all first
softly bought in, but if he's right, if this set of ideas are as powerful as he describes
as he described, that this would change the world, which as you say, it's funny that a
company like MicroStrategy might be the company that has the biggest macro effect on our economy
and our world.
Yeah.
And the conversation reshaped my worldview a lot too, because he framed money as energy,
which I had often thought of money as time, 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 his definition, his answer to that question, what is money?
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 intellectual
explorations of money.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
So I understand money is time, which in itself is a really powerful idea, but money is energy,
channeling energy.
Okay.
Can you break that apart?
Yeah.
So I guess I definitely have to check out the whole series to really get his perspective,
but I'll do my best to condense it.
Life itself, all forms of life are dependent on energy, right?
Energy fuels everything, fuels life and action and motion and all of that.
And we could say that maybe like a plant is harnessing solar energy and then reallocating
that into growth.
So its aim is to grow towards the sun, right?
So it's allocating energy towards its goal of harnessing more solar energy kind of thing.
And humans too have evolved to figure out how to harness energy in different ways to
satisfy higher and more complicated aims.
So the original energy network 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 we actually learned how to isolate energy
as a tool in and of itself.
So we went into that, how harnessing fire had changed human beings.
Actually, 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 predigestion in a way.
We're liberating these macro nutrients or making things that otherwise would not be
digestible, edible, and it increases the efficiency by which we extract nutrients from food.
That's what cooking does.
So when we figured out cooking, we liberated all these digestive resources that were reallocated
towards higher cognitive development.
So there's this evolutionary path between figuring out fire and us becoming smarter,
which was interesting.
Some other early examples he gave, he went into were missiles and hydraulics.
So missiles being, we learned to hunt at a distance.
We can't bring down a woolly mammoth maybe with spears and up close in personal force,
but we could with spears and javelins and slings and whatnot.
And then he went into how we've used water to channel hydraulic energy so we can basically
overcome gravity.
We can move, there's theories that the pyramids were constructed using the blocks were moved
using hydraulic energy or using water.
Clearly we use cargo ships and whatnot to move things much more efficiently across water
than we could the land.
So his whole view is how we keep figuring out better ways and more efficient ways to harness
energy 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 to redeem for any other form of
energy or any of the products of energy itself.
So 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 commencement sacrifices from 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.
So you had to expend again, if market value of gold is 2,000 an ounce, you had to expend
1,900 an ounce mining.
So it kept producers honest in a way.
So do you think something like proof of stake that's more about reputation than actual exertion
like energy can work?
No.
I think proof of stake is inherently centralizing.
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?
Do you worry that 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.
And then 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 miner.
You can freely enter or exit the market or the network at any time.
But maintaining the block size at a manageable level is what's key to maintaining node decentralization.
This is an interesting question.
Who do you think has more power, the miners or the nodes?
Because the nodes carry the idea of the protocol, like the specifics.
So in some sense, they have more power if Bitcoin is an idea.
They're mutually indispensable, though, because there's no security without the miners.
So without the miners, Bitcoin is just an idea.
And the idea of Bitcoin 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 composite of the difficulty adjustment, proof of work,
one way hashing, et cetera.
So I don't know, that's hard to say, hard to disentangle the two.
You've talked about money as morality, too.
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 I think morality, it changes over time, and it has its roots in biology.
Jordan Peterson makes the point that even animals have their own sort of pseudo morality,
or with wolf packs, for instance, if there's a dispute between the alpha males, or I guess
between an alpha male and an incumbent, the two males will have a fight, basically.
And then when one is decided that one has won, the loser will basically roll over and
give up his neck to 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 never know when you're going to need 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.
And similarly for humans, our morality sort of emerges through competition and play even.
There are these implicit rules that come into place based on how we're organizing ourselves
over time.
And so with money, it's interesting because most tools we would consider to be amoral,
as in a hammer can be used to build a house, which could be seen to be good, like a good
constructive purpose, or it could be used to bash someone's skull, which could be something
evil and that the tool itself is amoral, doesn't have any independent morality of its own.
All of 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 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 some and to others.
So it is the only utility of monopolized money is theft.
There's no other, you know, 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 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 incentive 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 receive the money last are the ones being robbed.
Those that receive the money first are the ones that are receiving the stolen proceeds,
let's say.
And this has a really corrosive effect on social morality because if we consider that
people's time horizon, which the Austrians call the time preference, the more short-term
thinking you are, the more likely you are to engage in selfish behavior.
If you know that it's all over tomorrow and you've been working your whole life to develop
this business or create this reputation or whatever your thing is, but you just are given
the foreknowledge 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.
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.
And money is very...
So we would just say that your time horizon is closely related to your morality, 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 and 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.
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.
And 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.
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 winemaker.
The winemaker, if we just imagine the hypothetical winemaker operating a business and essentially
a banked economy, and let's say his central bank just doubled the money supply to quote-unquote
save the economy, say an increase in money supply from $1 to $2 trillion.
This winemaker that's accustomed to selling wine at $20 a bottle is now faced with basically
three choices, 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.
You're delivering a solution at a lower price.
So this winemaker that's accustomed to selling his wine at a $20 price point, all of a sudden,
because if a central bank has tripled the money supply, he has three choices.
He can either keep selling his bottle at $20, and all of his inputs will increase due to
inflation by 50%.
So he will lose 50% of his profit margin as a result.
So we 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 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.
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, it's not very palatable.
He doesn't want to eat the economic loss.
Case number two, it's not very good either, because he's then incentivizing all of his
customers to go shop other winemakers if he doubles his price.
So human nature being what it is, trying to get something for 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, 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 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.
I think it is tied back to a lot of the social strangeness we've seen in modern times where
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 Bitcoin as the first money in history that has a 0% terminal inflation rate or said
differently, zero unexpected inflation.
There's no theft integrated into Bitcoin.
You can only earn it through work or sacrificing resources to obtain it.
It is the antidote to this moral cancer that inflation riddles our society with.
Again, you're blowing my mind a little bit to think about the ripple effects of inflation,
the way it seeps through with our interactions.
So at the very, the early ripples is the effect that has on the products, on the dilution
of the wine, but also you might have ripple effects on the character, on the behavior
of people.
That's interesting, artificial creation of scarcity, creating, 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 markets generate pragmatic
truth.
So inflation distorts price signals, which means it confuses capital allocation.
So we're trying to solve problems, but all of a sudden we can't tell if this price increases
a matter of true supply and demand change or a matter of policy change.
So it clouds our economic perceptions.
It suppresses innovation because now you've exacerbated the boom and bust business cycle.
People are going to overborrow and go into projects that they can't profitably sustain,
so then there will be a huge collapse.
So that actually breaks the market's function of generating innovation.
And then yeah, I would argue too that it pollutes our pursuit of virtue, let's say.
Maybe it's pushing back, but I don't think so.
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
now forces that are creating all the things we're seeing now, like you said, cancer culture
and all those things, but also the negative effects on the quality of products, on the
excellence of the creativity and the innovation, all those kinds of things.
I wonder if there's other factors.
It's kind of, listen, 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.
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, 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, because the cash has lost all relevance.
And so anecdotally, we would suspect that, okay, if there's a inverse relationship between
inflation and social cohesion, if we could then intake inflation to zero, couldn't we
theoretically increase social cohesion to its maximum?
So another way to say that is inflation is a de-civilizing 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 scarce supply of gold, for instance, that lays claim 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, we're creating
the opposite effect.
So we talked a little bit about the Soviet Union, and I happened 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 definitely a multivariate situation, I think there's a lot of factors.
One that jumped out to me recently, again, from the documentary that I didn't note before,
was that at one point Stalin eliminated, I think, 75% of his intelligence force, which
I think when you're competing with another nation-state intelligence and covert operations
are very integral to your survival, I think that was 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.
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 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 honored
the integrity of price signals, and we allowed people to trade and accumulate wealth.
So in every market, except the market for money, both markets maintained a central bank,
as we've gotten to.
So I think in a really big picture standpoint, that's why capitalism outcompetes 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 reasons we saw capitalism outcompete
communism, which I think the data that I recall was that the USSR's economy was valued at
close to one third 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 value-destructive versus value-creative.
And I would argue this is because, again, the centralized computing model versus decentralized
computing model, it just became more and more corrupt over time.
It got to the point where I think most of the occupations in the USSR towards the end
were as informants.
They were working for the state.
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, do you know what Jordan Peterson thinks about Bitcoin
and about the future impact of Bitcoin and the society?
No, I don't, actually.
We're hopefully going to be talking to him soon about that.
We did a book club on his book Maps of Meaning, and he engaged with us about it.
So we're hoping to deliver the orange pill to Mr. Peterson.
The orange pill.
I think his audience is one of the most important audiences in the world to understand Bitcoin.
People that are conscientious and responsible.
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 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, you start to, I mean, that's partially why I am interested in Bitcoin.
It's like all the people in power and all the kind of shady, fraudulent, and non-genuine
people who are dismissing Bitcoin are making me think, hmm.
One of 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.
That is used as a mechanism for perpetual theft and funding warfare at a global scale.
Like Ron Paul said, it's no coincidence that the 20th century of total war was also the
century of central banking.
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.
Indeed, this is what Hitler did, Hitler hyperinflated in the Weimar Republic to fund his war efforts.
Frankly, every dictator, every world war, every internment camp in history was made possible
by the weaponization of money in fiat currency.
I know Jordan Peterson is a huge proponent of free speech, and I think that ultimately
at its deep essence, that's what Bitcoin really is.
It is just the purest form of monetary speech we've ever had.
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.
I'm definitely, especially with these explorations of Bitcoin, this journey I've been on, I'll
revisit some of the aspects of human history that I've been looking at, like Stalin and
Hitler, from a perspective of a monetary perspective.
What are the effects of inflation?
How was it used as a tool in gaining power, in maintaining power, in manipulating the
populace, in inflicting suffering and, I would say, evil onto the world?
It's interesting.
It's interesting.
I'm going to have to go back into the whole.
I tend to focus more on the human nature, and less about the tools that human nature
leverages to effect change, but you're right that, in some sense, money is a tool which
can be effectively used to perform moral and immoral actions, depending on how it's used.
There's a feedback between the two, specifically with money itself.
Here's the way I've been posing it lately, is that we typically think of people as good
or bad, or again, trying to label people all the time, but I think people and their characters
are emergent properties of the incentive structures they inhabit.
So what does Charlie Munger 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 speaking to the intention.
People want to argue with me all the time, like Jerome Powell'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 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.
It's impossible to add any value to an economy by increasing the paper claims on its savings.
So there's a feedback loop between man and tool, between creator and created.
I think we have to honor the relationship above either one, trying to put the right
people in the system or just build the right system.
We need both.
Do you think the interesting question of whether the people that are in control of central
banks or in positions of power there, if they themselves are malevolent, if they themselves
are bad actors, or they're simply like leaves floating along the river, sort of just a cog
in the machine, an ant in an ant colony that operates in a certain kind of way, where do
you put the blame?
You put the blame on the way things are operating onto the individuals or onto the system itself,
the idea behind the system, where 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.
I tend to believe most people are good and want to see themselves as good.
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 theorists and
just a lot of people think that there is evil humans in the world that seek power, maintain
that power, and they 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.
Honestly, and that's what the central bank is, is the ultimate institution to get something
for nothing.
You 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 literally print money.
You can buy your way out of anything and buy your way into anything in the world.
It is, I think the most, I'd 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 by
clouding people's conception of money.
If we look at the central bank, it's been around for a while, but the latest implementation
here in the US is the Fed.
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, and I don't think it will survive the ever-galvanizing gaze of the digital age or
just too much sunlight, too much transparency today, ideas move too quickly for something
like this to remain relevant.
There are just people.
There 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.
Hayek argued that the nature of power, again, it's something that we all sort of desire.
To be completely powerless, you're really unhappy.
If you're totally powerless, you're a slave.
Someone else tells you what to do.
You have no autonomy.
It's miserable.
It makes the consolidation of power a learning, and that we want to protect ourselves from
that slave state, let's say, but like many things, it can be taken too far.
When you concentrate power into too few hands, Hayek argues that it actually transforms.
It becomes something much more intoxicating than it would be if it was held in a more
distributed way.
I think that gets into a lot of these, I don't know if they call themselves elites or people
call them elites or 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, saying and thinking is correct because
they just keep getting richer all the time.
It leads you closer to this definition of evil, which in the book Paradise Lost, Friedman
said, evil is the force which believes its knowledge is complete.
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, whether this is Bill Gates saving us from a climate
crisis or 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.
I think that's the problem, that we have this mechanism that can concentrate wealth and
power into the hands of so few that it leads to the proliferation of evil, meaning that
it convinces people that their knowledge is complete, whereas something like a Bitcoin
almost forces the opposite outcome.
In a Bitcoin-denominated world, a pure free market, the consumer is sovereign.
You cannot earn value in the world unless you are serving your fellow man, unless they
have expressed their buy and sell decisions in the marketplace.
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.
It changes the incentive such that dominance in the world can no longer be paired with
coercion, it has to be paired with competence.
That's how this, when we say Bitcoin fixes this, that's what we mean.
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 systemic rot like we see with
the central bank.
What books, people love this question and you're exceptionally well read, you've explored
all kinds of ideas.
Is there some books, technical fiction, philosophical, coloring books, children's books, had an
impact on your life and you would maybe recommend to others that they should read?
I think we mentioned a couple of them here today, but I think a really useful triplet
of books that I've been recommending recently to help diffuse this materialist worldview
of reality where we still think in the Newtonian model that it's atoms and cause and effect.
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 intracyclic 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 shapes the way we think.
That's an excellent book.
It's a very dense and difficult read.
Actually, this trilogy is pretty brutal.
It'll probably take you a year to read hours a day.
The second one I mentioned earlier was Human Action by Mises.
The ultimate tome on Austrian economics will help explicate this realm of relevance.
I think that economics truly is where, again, there are things and then these things become
means or ends once we channel our purpose through them.
This realm of non-materialist relevance that I think is really important to grasping economics
at a first principles level, I think that book lays it out tremendously.
The last one would be, I think I mentioned this at the beginning, was that book Leela
by Robert Persig, where he's making the case that value is fundamental.
All of these books, they all point to that, actually.
They're pointing back to value being the fundamental thing, values expressed through moral action
as being the fundamental substrate of reality.
If you're like me, I grew up quite scientific-minded.
It'll help diffuse some of that and maybe retrain you to the other side of reality.
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?
More importantly, is there recommendation advice you can give on how to integrate these
ideas, how to read, how to learn in this space?
From your own life, how do you enjoy taking ideas?
This could be for these books, but also in the Bitcoin world and reading a bunch of different
ideas written by others, just integrating stuff, even watching podcasts and all those
kinds of things.
Yeah.
I'm a reader.
I love to read.
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 Ferriss' 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 in
your brain.
To just absorb words in their totality versus reading word by word.
Also, I haven't fully taken that journey, actually, but I remember taking a few steps
on that journey, realizing that I'm speaking inside my head.
I'm saying the words inside my head, and that's actually getting in the way.
That's right.
There's a lot of little hacks like that.
I may be lazily, now that you mentioned it, I'll have to revisit this.
I have convinced myself that I don't need to read faster, because that's not ultimately
the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is in me thinking about stuff.
In fact, I like reading really slowly, or so I convinced myself, because ultimately it's
not about gaining more information.
It's about time spent thinking deeply.
Maybe that's just me being very lazy, because yes, it's true.
It's important to think deeply, but maybe I could speed up the consumption of information.
It's fun.
I like to be dynamic, actually.
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 it's outing your thoughts.
If you're speed reading, you can't do that.
You're taking in groups of words at a time, so you can't internally verbalize it, I guess.
Then I'm also really big on annotating, underlining, writing in the margins.
I prefer a physical book, but I also read the Kindle a lot, because it's just so convenient.
Anywhere you're waiting in line, or every night before bed, I'm reading my Kindle.
I also advocate rereading a lot.
If you found something that struck you at a deep level, or you found particularly fascinating,
you have to listen to that.
That's your mind or your spirit signal that that is something meaningful to you, and you
should, to your point, reread it, sit with it for a long time, write about it.
That becomes the ultimate triumvirate 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.
I definitely highly recommend people to do that.
In terms of how are those books difficult, in every way, they're all long books.
In terms of density, I would say Leela is the least dense, maybe maps of meaning.
I don't know, maps of meaning and human action are both extremely dense.
I had to read those books very slow, that you just have to take your time with them.
To give you an idea with Jordan Peterson, he said this a lot with maps of meaning.
He spent three hours a day writing for 15 years to write that book.
I think it's a 600-page book.
He said he estimates he rewrote every sentence in the book 50 times, 5-0, to try and get
it just perfected.
When you read these sentences, you can tell that he rewrote it 50 times.
I've used actually Anki for space repetition.
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 you wanted to memorize.
Oftentimes, what I'm reading, what I want to memorize is the key idea, but also I use
it for...
I'm terrible with names, so I started to use it for names too, of names of people, names
of people that I want to remember, and also throughout history and also my personal life,
but also events.
Dates to me are usually not important, but sometimes dates are really important.
It's really useful.
I recommend Highlight.
Naval, I think, mentioned a piece of software called ReadWise or something like that, that
I hope I'm saying that correctly.
It's something like that.
What it does is it goes to your highlights from your Kindle or the various places where
you highlight stuff that integrates with good reads, and it does the same kind of space
repetition, but for things you've highlighted.
That's super cool.
It sends an email every day.
It's been really...
I recommend it highly because it sends to me an email form, a selection of the things
I've highlighted and previous things I've read, and it's like this weird shock to your
memory that sprinkles, I'll probably weigh too much Orwell in there, and it just brings
you back.
These ideas are 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 an emotional impact on you.
These things are just hitting you hard again.
It's like, whoa.
It might not be meaningful to anyone else except you, and it's something I recommend.
You never know with these hacks or tools and so on what's actually BS and what is amazing,
and that one is kind of amazing.
So at least for me, it works for me and Naval, 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.
The one other thing 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 podcasts, 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 read, basically.
I think there's something really special about exercise and ideation.
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
idea is to start to flow.
So I'm basically at the gym now listening to podcasts, exercising as fast as I can to
try to get to that state of where you're just straining your strenuous exercise, I guess
you would say.
And then I end up typing notes into my phone as fast as I can with all these ideas that
are flowing.
So I've created a lot of good writing out of that.
Yeah, it's kind of worked.
So I do running quite a bit, so running outside and I'll listen to, I've been, okay, I told
myself this has been going on for about a year.
Is I only listen to stuff that's either World War II or World War I related.
So Hitler, Stalin, like difficult historical stuff.
And also listen to brown noise.
So those are the two modes.
So brown noise helps me, this is like white noise, but like deeper, I guess, it helps
me remove the world and at the gym, there's a lot of distractions.
When you're running, there's a lot of distractions that 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 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, it's hard, man, like running and thinking in the sense that some of the
ideas that come into your head are pretty heavy.
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 thinking through it has been really for me rewarding in the same way that you're
saying it is for you.
It's true that like podcasts and music, like 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 audiobooks have been truly rewarding.
I try to listen now less and less to podcasts that are just fun because I feel like I enjoy
it too much and I don't allow my mind to get bored and to think through stuff, to explore
ideas.
It's so easy to fill the space that usually would be filled with thought and 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, it's not, you don't get much value except entertainment.
Right, right.
There's utility to the boredom too, I think, to give your mind the space, I guess your
subconscious may be the space to chew on some of these problems, right, where you've imbibed
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 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, letting your subconscious do the heavy lifting.
And there's, I think you should be aware of the fact that there's a war for your attention
going on.
There's been 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 and the internet wanting
your attention.
In fact, clubhouse as an app has been, I'm probably not going to use clubhouse much
anymore.
There's some aspect of my own inner loneliness and whatever it is that pulled me into clubhouse
a little bit too much to where, where it robbed me from that lonely time alone where I sit
and listen to Bruce Springsteen and think about life.
Right?
So I want to-
That's a way more important.
That's a way, well, yeah.
At least, you know, it's all in balance because there is a clubhouse like a lot of these social
networks when you use right can be a way to discover new ideas and new people.
But the boredom and just being alone with your thoughts is 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 tried to, I tried to remember things that made me feel good over time.
Like longterm had positive impact and longterm had negative impact and do more of the former
unless there's a ladder.
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.
In the moment, it's hard to remember that.
But you have to remember that that's the case and in the same way, exercise, it's hard
to remember that exercise makes me feel good.
Especially when it's time to go to the gym.
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 he's beautifully said, that you have to know yourself.
The kind of person I am without exercise is a less good person, a person I'm less proud
of.
Yeah.
The food thing is so hard, by the way.
I still, you know, 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 feeling
good and then you're, I don't know, something creeps up inside you like, ah, you can just
have one or you just do this.
But for me, it's sugar.
Like sugar just makes me feel terrible.
But 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 many times I've done that dance, but it's not cool.
What depends on how painful it is and then you learn the lesson, I've actually embraced
the fact that I'll never learn the lesson with vodka every time I drink, especially
with Russians is like, I quit drinking every time and then I forget there's like a slow
drop off.
It'll be like a two weeks and then.
Nasterovia.
Nasterovia.
Very good.
So it never makes me feel good.
It never results in anything good, except the beautiful social chaos, which is ultimately
somehow there's value to chaos too, you know, there's value to that.
Whatever the hell stupid stuff you do when you get trashed, the over the top emotion
of love, usually or whatever camaraderie, there's value to that too.
Like as I get older, I realize because the world, sometimes especially when you get older
and the 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 to do all the stupid shit you
can, even if you're like getting older.
To lower the inhibitions.
Lower the inhibitions.
Again, it's that taste of uncertainty that is the sweetness of life, right?
To be able to go out and be a flaner at a party and not really know what you're going
to do.
And it's, we have this draw to the wild side of life as much as we try and build up order
around ourselves.
I think there's always going to be an appetite for that.
I've always, most of my life, I've always been a social drinker, but I actually gave
up alcohol a year ago and I would add that to the idea, the repertoire for dealing with
bigger ideas because alcohol is fun, it's a, you know, good times.
It can be analgesic.
It can give you all these benefits if you use 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 I, and I have this backlog of books that was growing faster than I could read
them.
Did I just reach the point where I decided 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 five to 10 hours drinking and then maybe another, what, five to 10 hours recovering
perhaps on the day after.
So 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 not trying to be a proponent for like not drinking, but I just want to say.
But you're a proponent for sacrifice.
I am a big proponent for sacrifice.
Is there advice you would give to a young person today, curious about Bitcoin, curious
about how they succeed in the world or both career-wise and just 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.
It's not good enough to just follow the crowd and buy a 6040 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 is going to be able
to keep up with.
So that's why I like, I mean, that's why I named 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 the purpose of society, speech, all of these things.
So I would encourage people to arm yourself with knowledge and study.
A lot of financial people always give you a line of advice and then say, this is not
financial advice.
Well, like this is financial advice, like study, study, learn.
Knowledge is power.
Yeah.
This is official financial advice.
Yes.
And you're exercising your divine trait, which is the logos, right, that we are these animals
that can tell and believe stories.
So it feels like almost a sacred duty to really sharpen that part of ourselves and use it
to create the best world possible.
And then, you know, the second one was the, I think health and fitness stuff.
I was, maybe everyone does this in their 20s.
They just live a little fast and beat themselves up.
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.
I just think health wise, morality wise, yeah, drinking, I think morality and eating,
you know, I just was kind of doing whatever I wanted in some ways, let's say, 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.
Maybe the 20s are all about the mistakes, accumulate the most mistakes possible as quickly
as possible.
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've more deeply explored my own potential
that I feel maybe a little regretful that I 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.
There's probably a guy doing vodka shots right now listening to this podcast with his
buddies and they, if you are pleased to take a shot for all the mistakes and you should
make in your 20s and what about love?
We talked about money is ultimately a mechanism by which you can pave a moral path through
life.
You know, to me, one of the purest expressions that is love broadly defined for a family,
for others, for knowledge for the world is basically an optimistic open view to the world
that embraces all that is beautiful about this world.
So do you think about love often in a personal sense, romantic family, friendship, and in
the broad sense about its value in a successful life?
Yeah, of course.
I'm blessed to have a two and a half year old daughter and 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.
It's got so many different intensities, I guess you might say, but I don't know.
My intuition is that it is something very fundamental to the universe.
Again, I know words don't do it justice, but if we just proxy love with selfless action,
the whole damn universe is selflessly acting, right?
It's just unfolding, and it may sound a bit hippie-dippy, but my intuition is just that
love is the core of it somehow.
I don't have anything to back that up really, it's just...
In the way you're framing it, it's making me think that love, we're 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, almost like accepting
this notion that ideas have you, you don't have ideas, that you're not existing in the
universe, the universe is existing through you, it's sort of like, that's what selfless
in that context means, is embracing that thought.
That's the weird thought, that we're just here for a little bit of time.
These meat vehicles, receptacles, and this much bigger thing is just using us, not in
a malevolent way, but just 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?
That's a trippy thought, man, that in some sense the universe created us to experience
itself.
We are one of the highest forms of beauty that nature has created, if we just think one
of the most complex and adaptive thing, or reflection of nature.
Another thing that comes to mind here is that Dalio has this quote where he says, truth
or more accurately an accurate depiction of reality is necessary for any good outcome.
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.
Jordan Peterson goes deep into that where you have to listen to that sense of meaning
in your life, or you might have some decision on paper that's so great this way, but your
heart says no, your heart says otherwise.
I've tried to listen to my heart throughout and 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?
As we talk about scarcity, one of the certain things that ensure the scarcity of the human
experience is the fact that you and your consciousness are going to be done.
They have a deadline.
Only time and Bitcoin are absolutely scarce.
I guess I got started on this philosophical journey a bit when I was younger, but I got
into Musashi and Sun Tzu quite a bit.
Who wrote Musashi with the Book of Five Rings, Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War.
One of the things that, I mean, these guys were just absolute beasts.
They lived and died by the sword and they were just very great equanimity about all
things in life.
I also found this in the Stoic philosophy where they just are very cool with everything.
One of the lines there is that the way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of
death.
I've always tried to think about that.
Of course, I experience fear, I experience everything that you do on a meat suit, 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 highest order self.
That's just resolutely accepted death and that this is your one play in life.
Hopefully, that propels me towards proper action.
I think scarcity cannot help but lead to something good.
Just like with this conversation, sadly, it must come to an end.
The scarcity of it is what makes it beautiful.
Robert, this was one of my favorite conversations philosophically and in every other level,
the ideas and the way you express them around Bitcoin, around morality, around money has
been really inspiring and really educational and I'm glad you're out there fighting the
good fight.
I'm glad you're wasting all of this time with me.
It was really fun and thank you for coming down to Texas and having some good old brisket
together.
This was really fun, man.
This was awesome.
Thanks for having me, man.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert Breedlove and thank you to Fundrise,
Element, Monkpak, and BetterHelp.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness.
The resilient resists shocks and stay the same.
The antifragile gets better.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.