#176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles

Robert Breedlove is a decentralized finance entrepreneur, philosopher, and podcaster. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Fundrise: https://fundrise.com/lex – LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack – Munk Pack: https://munkpack.com and use code LEX to get 20% off – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Robert’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Breedlove22 Robert’s Linktree: https://linktr.ee/breedlove22 What is Money Show: https://www.youtube.com/c/RobertBreedlove22 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:46) – Sovereignty (15:50) – Territorial imperative (20:28) – Property (26:33) – Anarchism (29:11) – Inflation is theft (33:35) – Volatility is truth (38:14) – Taleb and Bitcoin (42:22) – Life is information propagating through flesh (53:21) – Intelligence (57:34) – Space and time (1:04:16) – Pragmatic truth (1:15:14) – Creative destruction (1:19:03) – Capitalism vs Communism (1:31:46) – Jordan Peterson on religion (1:36:03) – Inflation (1:39:54) – What is money? (1:53:30) – What is Bitcoin? (2:04:36) – Bitcoin vs other cryptocurrencies (2:12:47) – Can governments ban Bitcoin? (2:25:29) – Bitcoin toxicity is tough love (2:38:47) – Crypto scammers (2:47:58) – Eric Weinstein and Bitcoin (2:54:21) – Satoshi Nakamoto (2:58:51) – Money is energy (3:06:05) – Proof of stake vs proof of work (3:08:45) – Morality (3:23:30) – Collapse of the Soviet Union (3:27:00) – Jordan Peterson and Bitcoin (3:39:28) – Book recommendations (3:58:49) – Advice for young people (4:02:20) – Love

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Robert Breedlove, someone who caught my attention and was recommended highly as a rigorous scholar and thinker in the space of decentralized finance and Bitcoin. His podcast, titled "What Is Money?", is a good representation of the way his mind works. He's willing to talk through ideas for many hours, willing to listen, willing to think, which makes him a great companion in conversation to explore the history, philosophy, and future of money. Quick mention of our sponsors: Fundrise, Element, Monkpack, and BetterHelp. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

• 0:41Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:21Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:05Lex Fridman?

  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. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of as now. I try to make these interesting, but I do give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It is in fact, the best way to support this podcast. I'm fortunate to be able to be very selective with the sponsors we take on.

• 2:47Lex Fridman?

  So hopefully if you buy their stuff, you'll find value in it, just as I have. This episode is sponsored by a new sponsor called Fundrise, a platform that allows you to invest in private real estate. If you're looking to diversify your portfolio, this is something you should consider. In fact, as I talk about with Robert and also others in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency space, the whole idea of diversification is complicated. When we're talking about digital currency or cryptocurrency, there's quite a bit of volatility across the different assets. And there is quite a bit of misinformation.

• 3:26Lex Fridman?

  So it feels like you're on unsteady ground when making investment decisions in the cryptocurrency space. So education and experience are obviously really valuable there. But I do think there's still a role for diversification, especially in the traditional things like private real estate. And that's where I think Fundrise is actually a really interesting platform. Check them out at fundrise.com/lex. 130,000 investors use it. It takes just a few minutes to get started at fundrise.com/lex. Like I said, they're a new sponsor. They're considering whether they want to sponsor this thing for a long time.

• 4:05Lex Fridman?

  So if you're considering it, now's the time to sign up at fundrise.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T, electrolyte drink mix. As I've talked about, for my happiness and for performance, I do a low carb diet. And I think the number one, most important thing for those kinds of diets is to make sure you get the electrolytes right. And that's where Element really helps out. They provide you with sodium, potassium, magnesium, and so on. It's kind of incredible, actually, how that can make all the difference in the world, especially when you're fasting, doing intermittent fasting, or one meal a day fasting,

• 4:46Lex Fridman?

  or doing multi-day fasting, which, by the way, I think GSP is gonna do carnivore and fasting. So I'm sure he really values electrolytes. For me, Element solved that problem. I rely on it. I enjoy it. It makes my whole quote-unquote dieting experience fun and easy. Although, given how much brisket I've been eating in Texas, I'm not sure, just by volume, that it can be called a diet. I'm getting fatter, but I'm enjoying life. So, there you go. Try Element at drinklmnt.com/lex. That's drinklmnt.com/lex.

• 5:26Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also sponsored by Monk Pack Keto Nut and Seed Bars. That sounds delicious. These things contain one gram of sugar or less, two to three grams of net carbs, and there are only 150 calories. My favorite flavor is coconut almond dark chocolate. Second favorite is peanut butter dark chocolate. Depends on the mood, coconut versus peanut butter. I know, I'm surprised to know and to have learned, that not everybody loves coconut. I love coconut. Coconut ice cream, probably my favorite ice cream. I enjoy it. But I know some people really don't. So if you don't do the peanut butter, or just the straight-up dark chocolate, it's always delicious. It's hard to believe it's keto-friendly.

• 6:08Lex Fridman?

  It's really my main go-to snack if I'm doing any kind of outdoor activity where I'm not going to have direct access to food, and I want to make sure that I'm keep fueling my body, all those kinds of things. All the kinds of endurance challenges I'm sure to be doing. Monk Pack is gonna fuel that. Sponsor or not, it's delicious, it's amazing, very convenient, and nutritionally, especially if you're keto or low-carb focused, it's perfect. Get 20% off your first purchase of any Monk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and enter code LEX at checkout. If you don't like it for any reason, I don't know why you wouldn't, but maybe you hate coconut, and you went with coconut, you tried it, but you should.

• 6:52Lex Fridman?

  And if you don't love coconut, I really question your sanity. But anyway, they'll exchange the product if you don't like it and they'll refund your money guaranteed. That's munkpack.com and enter code Lex. Try the coconut. If not, the peanut butter is delicious. Clearly I'm hungry. I'm not going to be able to get through this reeds, but let's persevere. Okay. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P. Help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a psychiatrist. I believed in the idea of talk therapy. I still do. I think it could be a huge help, especially with a professional. I also believe in just talking stuff out.

• 7:35Lex Fridman?

  That's why despite being an introvert, I get behind the microphone and I talk to people. I dig deep because people are beautiful. People are complicated, but beautiful. And exploring myself, if you will, through a kind of reflection in their eyes, reflection in their mind through the process of conversation is a really powerful tool to dig deep into my own mind, understand what the hell is wrong with me. I'm both highly self-critical and really appreciative of every single moment I'm alive. It's pretty simple. Anyway, BetterHelp is easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex. That's betterhelp.com/lex.

• 8:20Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman 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's in chains. So you talk about freedom and sovereignty quite a bit. What do these ideas mean to you? The idea of sovereignty?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Freedom and sovereignty, I think they're very closely related. Let's start just focusing on sovereignty, which is a word I don't think we talk about enough. And the general definition of that I would give is the authority to act as you see fit.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And 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 like back into ancient Egypt, the pharaoh had absolute sovereignty and everyone else was pretty much operating according to his interests. You fast forward to today, modern Western democracy, we have more decentralized sovereignty in that we all get to go vote and elect officials that make decisions on our behalf. So the, the theme of sovereignty across history is that it's been gradually

• 10:00Speaker 01

  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, where 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 shape, reshape the rules, right? 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

• 10:38Speaker 01

  in the world. So this concept of sovereignty, which today we call, it's common to call states or nation states or governments sovereign, meaning that they have power over people. But as I argue in a lot of my writing, I actually think that sovereignty adheres 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.

• 11:16Lex Fridman?

  That's one of my favorite books is Man's Search for Meaning. Maybe you can break that apart a little bit.

• 11:23Lex Fridman?

  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 at the societal level? You as an individual, isn't ultimately all boiled down to what you can do with your own mind, how you see the world?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yes. I interpret it. 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 here in the US.

• 12:06Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  And it's a tool, right? It's a tool we're using to decomplexify 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.

• 12:50Lex Fridman?

  And it's fascinating to think about the fact that money might be actually deeply integrated into the way we think and into our mind. Like this is, 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.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  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, you know, most words,

• 14:00Speaker 01

  the vast majority of words only have meaning in relationship to other words. Right, 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, right? Where you pick up rock and say rock. But most other words and much 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.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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

• 15:27Speaker 01

  to better satisfy our wants over time. And the most tradable tool in any society or the most tradable thing is money. So I really. I argue that action and speech are quintessential modes of self-sovereign expression, and that money is just sort of a tech layer we've put right on top of that, and that it's a natural derivation of action and speech.

• 15:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay, that's fascinating to think about sovereignty from the evolutionary perspective, and then ultimately, money is the technology layer that enables sovereignty. So, you know, it's really fascinating to think about our modern human society as deeply rooted in these 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?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  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'd 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.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  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, would argue, a 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.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  It is not the asset itself. So property, it's information, it's a relationship.

• 18:08Lex Fridman?

  By the way, my mind was just blown. Property is information, it's not the actual asset. That's really important.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Very important.

• 18:15Lex Fridman?

  That's really interesting.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then it comes down to how do we organize ourselves such that

• 18:24Speaker 01

  property, that the contributions people are making are commensurate with the consideration they're receiving? So if you're adding value to a piece of property, you're developing a piece of land for use. In theory, like to be fair, you should have the rights to that fruit, right? If you go out and plant a garden or whatever it may be.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  And this is very, 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.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  And you could think of, to get really primordial with it, the 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, right? Maybe there was a rainstorm or a snowstorm and he dug a little enclave and he protected himself.

• 19:29Lex Fridman?

  I thought you were gonna go, because you said primordial, I thought you were gonna go back to like earlier biological systems.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I guess primordial for human.

• 19:37Lex Fridman?

  For humans, yeah, okay.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And then the first communist or socialist would be someone that decided the fruits of his labor belonged to him. So he would have violently encroached on that individual and taken his plot for himself, for his own use. And that's, um, that's the spectrum across which capitalism in the pure sense and communism in the pure sense operate in that capitalism, each individual has the exclusive rights to the fruits of their labor. So anything they spend their time, effort, energy creating in the world, they own the rights to that and they can trade those rights with others, other self-owned people that have done similar things. Communism or socialism would imply

• 20:21Speaker 01

  that other people, typically the state, have the rights, at least some rights, to your, to the value you've created.

• 20:28Lex Fridman?

  So there's this interesting moment when that first caveman, that first capitalist, drew a line, a circle in this cave and said, you know, this is mine. You could say it was free to be claimed at the time he claimed it.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:43Lex Fridman?

  But it's an interesting moment when asset becomes an asset, when space-time, as you were referring to, becomes something that's now can be possessed by a human being.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 20:57Lex Fridman?

  Is there something special about this moment? Because it feels like, first of all, in terms of space and time, it feels like there's a lot of available space-time yet to be claimed. So if we just look at like the universe, right, we're talking about, there's a funny thing with 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

• 21:38Lex Fridman?

  special about this moment? Because in discussing sort of 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, you know, it's not always in conflict where people say, when you look at Hitler or something, for example. His claim would be in many of the lands that he attacked and invaded, that this is ultimately, this has always belonged to Germany. So is there something you could say as to like, what it means to own an asset or a property?

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in the ancient days of hunters and gatherers, we could say that property was mostly a loyial title, which meant it's just whatever you can defend. Right? So if you've got knives and daggers and satchels, and you know, maybe some pelts you've hunted, whatever you can hold and defend is yours. That's and there's not like, there's a government to appeal to. You know, you're just sort of a free agent operating in the wild, defending the assets you can protect on you more or less.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  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 create, you know, we can increase the population because we can harvest more energy from the sun and we can establish a longer term civilization. What happens in that transition is that we begin creating economic surplus. So for the first time in history, we have, you know, grain, stock houses of grain to defend, or maybe meat or cattle, or whatever it is we're creating, we now have savings.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  And it's at that time when government emerges as well. Because once you have savings or you have an economic surplus, you have something that other people want to steal. Right? This one thing we'll touch on a lot today is people always want something for nothing. There's always, people are always seeking the path to get something for nothing. And I think that drives a lot of our decision making. And it actually encourages us to be innovative in a lot of ways, right? We're trying to, 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.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And that's where we shift from kind of capitalistic society to something more communistic. And

• 24:26Speaker 01

  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 economics term. Basically means you're better at making hats, I'm better at making boots. If you and I, 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

• 25:07Speaker 01

  respect, if we're looking at it maybe in a tech sense, that the economy is the trade network that generates wealth, generates innovation, generates all, this whole lap of luxury we live in today that we've inherited from our 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

• 25:48Speaker 01

  problem has been that the protector tends to, you know, they're in a monopolistic position, we'd 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.

• 26:33Lex Fridman?

  What are your thoughts about anarchism? So I talked quite a bit, he'll be here in a few days, actually, Michael Malice.

• 26:42Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  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, you know, at the heart of every modern economy, which even we could say the US, we pride ourselves as free market capitalist. You know, we outcompeted communism in the 20th century. We think that this is the superior model.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  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 any 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.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  But inevitably, over time, because it is a political institution.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  There's an incentive there, right? For, for, again, to get something for nothing, to spend more than you're making through tax revenues. And with that incentive, people typically ultimately end up pursuing that inflationary path. So we can, we get deeper into that about. Inflation is a term that we've been conditioned to think today is just something normal. The prices just go up and then 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.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  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 wouldn't, you'd 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 a rapidly. And then causes the monetary system to collapse.

• 30:14Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's a benefit to inflation possibly? So, so when you have perfect information, perhaps you, you don't need inflation. Perhaps it is purely theft. But I think of inflation as like the snooze button on the alarm. Like you just, so if you have a hard standard, you better wake up when the alarm rings. But you know, all of us kind of like, probably shouldn't, but use the snooze button. 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, it becomes a drug that you fall in love with in your views. But nevertheless, the usefulness of the snooze button is that you don't know how you'll be actually feeling when the alarm rings.

• 30:59Lex Fridman?

  You might be able to ready to pop up. You might be like, you really need those few more minutes, like to psychologically get yourself out of bed. This and now, this metaphor is just not working at all. But, but do you think there's a use?

• 31:12Lex Fridman?

  To inflation sometimes from like economics perspective.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  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. If with inflation, you're essentially giving 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,

• 32:01Speaker 01

  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're experiencing a business recession, in a capitalist environment, the market needs to clear that malinvestment, that misallocation of capital. That means someone made a bet on a certain idea that it would satisfy wants in a particular way, and that bet did not pan out. If you then paper over the losses that business is creating,

• 32:41Speaker 01

  you're now delaying and exacerbating the volatility that that idea created. So this is kind of a telebrian concept where

• 32:52Speaker 01

  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 low unexpected inflation, basically.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And so they're trying to achieve economic growth in a stable way, quote unquote, stable way. This is their ostensible purpose.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  And that's just not possible. Growth is an inherently unstable process.

• 33:36Lex Fridman?

  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 sign of chaos. And so they want to escape chaos. But you're saying that that's actually, whether it's chaos or not, I don't know. But it's getting us closer to the fundamental like reality that we should not be trying to escape.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if we consider that the universe is pervaded by entropy, all 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 testing ourself 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,

• 34:53Speaker 01

  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

• 35:03Speaker 01

  sequence of courageously confronting the entropy of nature and converting it into good and useful order, which by the way, is like the ancient idea of God in Genesis, which I think is interesting,

• 35:15Speaker 01

  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 anti-entropy or order. You know, like the coastlines are guarded by the nation and the city has a certain police force that keeps it in order. Even the way we talk, like clearly the words matter, but also the non-verbal cues. All these things are like order that has been established over many, many, many thousands of years of human evolution. And I think that when I say volatility is truth, what I'm saying is that the experience

• 35:57Speaker 01

  of uncertainty is something that's ineradicable 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 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.

• 36:34Lex Fridman?

  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 have to be embracing the volatility at the edges.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  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 a way of enlightening the rest of us. Or if they figure something out, you know, Steve Jobs creates the iPhone, changes the world forever.

• 37:31Lex Fridman?

  Enlightening the rest of us.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  And Taleb would say-

• 37:35Lex Fridman?

  With the fire of their failure, okay.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Taleb would say, um, individual fragility is inseparable from ensemble anti-fragility. So this means that, again, every time that entrepreneur goes up in flames, or say, a restaurant goes out 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 it's this, this death of the individual components that contributes to the growth of the ensemble.

• 38:14Lex Fridman?

  As a small aside, 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, uh, but from my outsider's perspective, I thought, uh, Nassim 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, but can you, can you, uh, pull out some profound philosophical ideas from the disagreement of the chaos?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  I admittedly don't know too much about it either. I, I'm 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 just, he's got a very abrasive personality, he's kind of known for it. It's not, I don't think I'm passing any judgment here, he sort of embraces it.

• 39:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  But he had written, um, the foreword to a really important book in Bitcoin called The Bitcoin Standard for Safedean a Moose. And then I think they had a little Twitter beef because Safedean was, is very much against COVID mask and state intervention, whereas Taleb's on the other side of the fence.

• 39:23Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  And so, and then after that beef, Taleb came out against Bitcoiners, saying, oh, Bitcoiners are crazy and wrong.

• 39:30Lex Fridman?

  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 aspect. I don't know. I'm not paying attention to it. I actually tuned out.

• 40:15Lex Fridman?

  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 viron particles, like what kind of things, like from a scientific perspective, how do we prevent the spread of a pandemic? Forget COVID, any pandemic, super deadly or not deadly. Like, there's tools, there's testing, there's masks, there's all these tools, how well do they work? And then I realized, you know, in April or so, it became a tool of politics, a tool of philosophy. And that's when I sort of pulled out.

• 41:00Lex Fridman?

  So it's fascinating. I, I think it's a, it's a, it's a canvas on which people project their emotions. And I guess Taleb got caught up in that kind of, so there's nothing fundamental, I suppose, to their disagreement.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Not that I'm aware of, but he is, you know, he's written some about, in his books, the problem with centralization. I mean, a lot of his writing addresses that. And he actually points to, I think Switzerland is the best government in the world because it's decentralized. So.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  There's that. I don't think he has any, 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.

• 41:44Lex Fridman?

  It's just maybe his flavorful language and the way he likes to communicate.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  And the other theory is that maybe he's playing 4D chess and having a Twitter boating accident, you know? So I don't believe in Bitcoin. I've sold all my Bitcoin and.

• 41:56Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I see.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:58Lex Fridman?

  What?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  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, you know, whether it's a government or an individual is coming after you saying, give me all your Bitcoin or pay these taxes in Bitcoin, you go, oh, I had a boating accident and lost them all.

• 42:17Lex Fridman?

  Lost them all.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 42:22Lex Fridman?

  But back to the fundamental nature of spacetime. 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 spacetime. So first of all, maybe you can comment on what do you mean in this context about spacetime, but also about the nature of truth? Like, how much of all of this is knowable? 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

• 43:03Lex Fridman?

  about this world and it's noble? Or is it mostly chaos and we're just holding on for dear life?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I said that all action occurs within the bounds of spacetime. The other thing, everything we say, do, or make, the other thing is that everything we say, do, or make starts out as an idea. So there's this concept of universal Darwinism, which basically 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.

• 43:37Lex Fridman?

  That idea is so powerful, by the way. I don't think it's been understood fully. I think in the digital, in the, in the 21st century, in the digital world, from our perspective, in the artificial intelligence. There's yet to be some profound things to be discovered about this whole construct.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Agreed completely. It's been called an acid, actually, and then it just, it strips away all of the non informational components of something, just strips it down to its bare bones. I have a quote in here somewhere about that, but.

• 44:10Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, which is called an acid, the ideas?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  The universal Darwinism.

• 44:14Lex Fridman?

  Darwinism applied broadly, outside of the.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Applied broadly, and I would also condition all of this with saying that a lot, most of my thinking is shaped by a book I read recently called The Case Against Reality,

• 44:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  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."

• 45:35Speaker 01

  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 a binary, zeros and ones. And we are ideas, we are strategies competing with each other. And nature is that which selects, it's what selects the winning ideas, the ones that are most fit to environmental conditions, frankly.

• 46:11Lex Fridman?

  You know, talking about sovereignty and individualism.

• 46:16Lex Fridman?

  There might need to be some rethinking here about what is actually the basic individual entity that is to be sovereign. Like, maybe our biological meat vehicles were like way overly attached to them. Like, 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, you know, make, make one million robbers and, you know, but you'll all have the same idea. What is real, your real value as the, like, I could just shoot you and there'll still be

• 46:59Lex Fridman?

  999 of you, but the idea is the important thing.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:03Lex Fridman?

  The, the things you believe, so.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  I would argue that, I don't know, even if you clone someone perfectly, I don't think you can reproduce the individual themselves, because they're, we're all a product of nature and nurture, right? So my particular concourse of experiences, the path dependence that I represent cannot be replicated, as, nor can anyone's, for that matter.

• 47:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's, that's a hypothesis, so we, that's, of course, a, a human meatbag would say.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Good point.

• 47:38Lex Fridman?

  Like desperate trying to preserve himself, you know, it's, 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, what are the things that make you particularly you?

• 47:53Speaker 01

  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 adapting in different ways and that different

• 48:36Speaker 01

  animals have their own unique interfaces. So we have a certain amount of photoreceptors in our eye, whereas I think the number's three, might be five, or something like the mantis shrimp has like seven or nine. So they can see, and we only see one ten trillionth of the light spectrum. So talk about a tiny fraction. I mean, one ten trillionth is a very minuscule number and that makes up all of the light that we can interpret with our eyes. But something like a mantis shrimp could see much more of that. So I think there's this, we're very conditioned to have a fully materialist viewpoint on reality today, where we think, you know, the atomic clockwork kind of universe.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  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

• 50:06Speaker 01

  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 someone $100 to jump over this table. And this table could simultaneously be an accessory to you and I and an obstacle to someone else.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:21Lex Fridman?

  And that's ultimately exists in the space of ideas.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:25Lex Fridman?

  Not in the space of physical matter.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:07Lex Fridman?

  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. It's a, if we're actually being deeply honest about it, it's quite painful. I do appreciate that you defended your biological meat bag earlier, but it seems like ideas are the things that have power. That me, Lex, for example, is worthless.

• 52:39Lex Fridman?

  And relative to the ideas that used my brain for a bit of a time.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  But so far as we know, only human beings can generate and share ideas. So you can't say Lux is worthless. Like, you are the node of the idea sphere, the new sphere.

• 52:57Lex Fridman?

  So I'm, I'm, what is it? From a Bitcoin perspective, I'm like, I'm mining. I'm solving the cryptographic problem and generate.

• 53:09Lex Fridman?

  I'm like, in that sense, I'm a useful node.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're competing to solve the puzzle of entropy, right? And when you do solve it, it benefits the entire network.

• 53:18Lex Fridman?

  But I guess from my perspective, just because just working in AI, I'm looking at the long term vision. I see us humans and AI systems as really the same. And AI systems ultimately as something that supersedes humans.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  So what is intelligence?

• 53:42Lex Fridman?

  So in the context of our current discussion, I think intelligence is very closely linked to this notion of ideas. 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 and all those kinds of things. So in that sense, it's the turning chaos into order. It's the molding of ideas such that our human brains can work with it.

• 54:26Lex Fridman?

  And just from my perspective, I don't see any reason why that cannot be algorithmatized, converted into computational systems.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  I would agree.

• 54:36Lex Fridman?

  Which is scary.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Scary or potentially really promising, right? It's kind of the case of 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, in maybe its most simplistic form, is error correction.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  So we.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Humans have wants. Again, we're constantly expressing our value through action. There's no other way to express it, by the way. It's whatever you choose to do in any moment, you are expressing the values you hold in your mind and your heart. As we move from a, from less valued A to more valued B, we, entropy happens, uncertainty happens, we fall off course. And it is intelligence that enables us to render information from that experience and error correct. Right? So that we can move, we can move slightly, shift our trajectory slightly more towards B that we're trying to move towards.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  So I think that there's something there that I don't know that we can

• 55:48Speaker 01

  make synthetically. And that when we, if we, if we, if we define intelligence as error correction, it's like error correction to what? Error correction towards what we find is valuable.

• 55:58Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  So we're trying to satisfy human wants. Might not just be our own, could be others as well. If I'm an entrepreneur, I'm trying to solve the wants of others, not just myself. And I'm trying to error correct myself towards that goal.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Using intelligence and processing environmental feedback through intelligence to error correct. So I don't know how, if you eliminate the human element completely, who's doing the wanting, right? Where does value come from?

• 56:24Lex Fridman?

  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, there's no maybe objective values, absolute values. You're generating that very loss function, that objective function that you're, that function that measures the error comes from the human mind. Some aliens might disagree with you because they might have a different objective function.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Obviously, purpose comes from consciousness, I think. And without purpose, there's not error correction.

• 57:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, this is again, a hypothesis, like where does purpose come from? It seems to come from consciousness, you're right.

• 57:22Lex Fridman?

  That's where suffering comes from, and you want to lessen suffering. That's where pleasure comes from. It seems like it's consciousness. Maybe there is something to this biological meat bag.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  So 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.

• 57:44Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  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 dovetailed nicely with another book called Leela.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  The author is Robert Persig. So he wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a very popular book. Twenty 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 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.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  So he actually, and it's a beautiful book, I highly recommend it. He essentially is refuting causality itself. We think A causes B.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  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 Solzhenitsyn said this, that the the line between good and evil runs down the heart of every man. So it's as if our moral decisions are actually what's creating the outcomes in reality over time. And then that gets into all the wisdom traditions related to religion. Or it's always talking about, you know. Loving thy neighbor and loving God and all of these other things that are good morally to create the best outcomes.

• 59:24Lex Fridman?

  So values are fundamental.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Value, yes.

• 59:28Lex Fridman?

  Value is fundamental. Oh, boy, yeah, that's interesting.

• 59:34Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it does feel like physics is not capturing something. You know, there's some people, panpsychists, argue that consciousness might be one of the fundamental properties of nature, like from which emerges everything we see. So that could be just other words for this same notion of value. And then the basic laws of physics are not capturing that currently.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:11Lex Fridman?

  At the physics level.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  And it's, we contend with that underlying nature, whatever it is, with the logos. Right, so we are, we're looking at uncategorized nature and then we're assigning a word to it. So we're 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, right, whether it's the nation state or human rights or money.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  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, right? It needs to be something that's

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  It's not dictated by any one group. It's reached by consensus of the entire group. That's how, um, so you think it's like optimizing for error correction again, where a free market would be harnessing the intelligence of all market actors. And a central planning or essentially planned market would be harnessing just the intelligence of a small group of bureaucrats.

• 1:01:58Lex Fridman?

  And it's not obvious how to achieve this kind of consensus mechanism. I mean, there's obviously, we'll, we'll talk about sort of Bitcoin as an idea. Ultimately, the idea of Bitcoin is connecting it to physics. So like, you can trust that physical matter won't change. But, you know, there could be other ideas that were yet, maybe physics could be changed. Eric Weinstein has anything to say about it. Like, it's, it's on, you know, we right now believe that physics can't be changed, the physical matter of the world, but maybe it can in a way that we're totally not understanding. You mentioned sort of reality from, um, from Donald Hoffman's perspective.

• 1:02:41Lex Fridman?

  Like, if we don't have even close to direct access to the fabric of reality, maybe we're living in a world that's very like many dimensions, that the notions of space and time is just like a silly useful construct. It's not at all connected. You're, you're starting to look at like Stephen Wolfram's, I don't know if you're familiar with his view of the world, that it's like hypographs underneath it all, like these mathematical structures from which everything emerges. Like, they're like, uh, like many, many, many orders of magnitude smaller than what we think of as, they're even smaller than like strings in string theory. So like, those are the basic mathematical objects from which it emerges.

• 1:03:25Lex Fridman?

  I don't, you know, I think that's an interesting philosophical framework. It's also, people should check out a cool, uh, way to play with beautiful hypograph mathematical structures. So he has, I don't know if you know who Stephen Wolfram is, but he has, he created Wolfram Alpha and all these tools that you can actually visualize and play with. So you can play with physics in a visual way, which, uh, 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. It's because of this little quirk of human nature, which is the ego.

• 1:04:04Lex Fridman?

  And he, he sometimes frustrates a few folks because he's very, let's say, proud of his work.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 1:04:14Lex Fridman?

  But it's, it's, uh, it's interesting to think about a world where we don't have direct access to reality, as Hoffman argues. And maybe, I don't know if you can comment, I don't know if you're familiar with Ayn Rand's work and her whole philosophy of objectivism, or her whole contention is that, you know, we do have access.

• 1:04:37Lex Fridman?

  I don't want to misstate it, but at least she would claim that it's not useful, or I think she would probably say it's not correct to argue that we don't have access to reality. We have, hence, objectivism. We have direct access to reality. That's the only thing we can reason about. And the only way to live life morally is to reason through everything, starting with the axioms of reality, which we do have direct access to.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:10Lex Fridman?

  You have thoughts about her work?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  I am slightly ashamed to say I have not read Ayn Rand yet. So 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 I, to me, it resonates closely with what the American pragmatist commented on truth. And they distinguished what you could say is absolute truth, which is at the bottom of reality, whether it's, you know, Mr. Wolfram's mathematical formulas or value, whatever it may be. It's something ineffable, something beyond the reach of epistemology, perhaps even. And maybe that's why religion just sort of points to it, right? It's trying to use, I think Joseph Campbell said something like, religion is...

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Using stories to point towards the same transcendental mystery we all experience, but cannot articulate. So something like, uh, the artist, the artist uses lies to point to the truth, something like that, that kind of thing. That's really good. But the American pragmatist said that, because at the end of the day, this is all about, when we say truth, we need something that is socially, uh, close to social consensus and is not shakeable by political action. So that's what, you know, physics and mathematics are. It's, it's a, an unshakable, um, point of reference, I guess you might say.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  So, the American pragmatist defined truth as the end of inquiry.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  And in markets, we could say that the, the market itself is a forum that generates truth. We call this pragmatic truth to separate pure objective truth that we can't even talk about without polluting it versus pragmatic truth, which is something that's useful. So the, the example here would be, if I give you a map and you're trying to go from your house to the local brisket restaurant, and the map gets you from your house to the brisket, brisket restaurant, is that because the map is true or is that because the map is useful? Right? They're very hard to disentangle, just when you're just looking at it pragmatically. And in markets, markets, I argue, generate three forms of pragmatic truth. One is the price.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  So this is the collective, subjective demand and purchasing power of humanity, running up against the objective supply of capital and resources in the marketplace. So there's demand overlaid on supply. The result of that is the price. So that is the, the 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.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  And it's, you, you could 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. Super organism or collective that 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.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  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 combined to create it. And in that iterative process, we're constantly discovering new and better way, better ways of solving problems or satisfying wants. So we could say to go out and dig a hole, right? Someone wants a hole dug, that a shovel is going to let you do it much faster per hour than you would with your bare hands. So what is the pragmatic truth of digging holes?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  It's a shovel, right? It's the, 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.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  You know, faster, cheaper, better effectively.

• 1:10:06Lex Fridman?

  I'm trying to generalize. You're blowing my mind a little bit here. I'm trying to generalize the idea of tool to how to think about it. Cause I keep, I keep just, when you say tool, I keep imagining different like specific constantiations of a tool. I'm trying to see, so the price is a pragmatic truth. That's communicating value in this network.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Subjective demands against objective supply.

• 1:10:35Lex Fridman?

  Subjective.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  So it's an economic democracy.

• 1:10:38Lex Fridman?

  Got it. So that's the demand supply. And then the tools are the ways of extracting or solving problems is the more general kind of.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Or satisfying wants.

• 1:10:49Lex Fridman?

  Satisfying wants.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:10:51Lex Fridman?

  So wants are somehow, that's part of the supply and the demand.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  And wants are back to value, right? Because everything someone wants, they're expressing their value.

• 1:11:02Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  And then the third one, I would argue, is virtue, actually.

• 1:11:17Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  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? Like, 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,

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:09Lex Fridman?

  What about murder? I haven't been able to figure out why murder is bad because I just keep wanting to murder people. And I've murdered many.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  You should see someone for that.

• 1:12:19Lex Fridman?

  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 pragmatic truth. And there's virtue. It's a pragmatic truth.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if we interfere with that free market process, again, if we overstep, which this maybe ties into murder, if you start to be coercive against life, liberty or property. So if you're forcibly taking someone's life, you're breaking down the trust in that market that generates these pragmatic truths. If you forcibly infringe on someone's liberty, right? For any reason other than them originally breaking or infringing upon life, liberty or property, then that's not going to work either. And then if you take, if you violate private property rights, if you steal property from others, you're breaking down the trust that the intersubjective fabric of money and markets and the rule of law,

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  all of these useful fictions are meant to preserve. You're corrupting it and breaking it down.

• 1:13:23Lex Fridman?

  It's kind of interesting to think about the market as helping evolve the virtues. It's sharpened into virtues. And then these virtues can then go on to motivational posters or like in books that we all agree on and then eventually take for granted as if they were somehow fundamental to human nature. But they're, they're not perhaps fundamental. They're just pragmatic truths.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's another way to consider competition itself is that it is a discovery process. So, you know, entrepreneurs are competing with one another and they're trying to best satisfy consumer wants at the lowest possible price. So they're placing bets of time, energy and capital on themselves, on their, their idea, their business plan. And then the market decides, right? The collect, the consensus of market actors decide which one was better. One lives, one dies. 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.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  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. It's so it's these collisions of interest that carries. It removes the unuseful aspects of ourselves or of our tools or of a price and reveals pragmatic truth to us.

• 1:15:14Lex Fridman?

  Can you play my therapist for a second? And if we talk about creative destruction, I think Bukowski, not Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson is a quote, something like, "For all instances of beauty, many souls must be trampled."

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:15:36Lex Fridman?

  But it, there does seem to be an aspect of competition that destroys. You were talking about entrepreneurs sort of on the outside of the circle of order, striving to make sense, to compress volatility of the chaos of the of the universe. Is there some way to protect a little bit against the pain of that destruction, of that creative destruction? That entrepreneur screaming on fire as he enlightens the rest of us? Is there some role for us humans together in the togetherness of it?

• 1:16:19Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  I would say that, you know, pain is the inarguable basis of being, right? Pain is, no matter how you try to explain it away or describe it or.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  It's not something you can rationalize away, right? It's no one, I think, ever, like, someone may want to cut themselves to have an endorphin high, but no one wants to suffer, we'd say, right? So, pain in that sense, it is what we're constantly trying to deal with and to move away from, or create buffers between us and potential pain, or potential, you know, uncertainty. And that pain is information. When we experience something that is misfit to the outcome we desired, that pain is what puts us, it encourages us to change our trajectory, to get back on course towards our valued aim.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  So, as far as, you know, 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.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  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 gonna go try this business idea, I'm gonna 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. Mm-hmm. Right? 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.

• 1:19:03Lex Fridman?

  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're talking about, is there ways it can go wrong?

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  So I would first argue that we have never seen an actual purely free market.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Closest example would be, you know, kind of geopolitically, we have a free market and that governments are not necessarily governed.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  But they are premised on governing large groups of individuals. So that's not, doesn't exactly...

• 1:19:58Lex Fridman?

  You mean between governments?

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:01Lex Fridman?

  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, you know, property rights and all those kinds of things, right? So governments tend to also sometimes be violent towards each other.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:20:17Lex Fridman?

  So they don't respect all the basic aspects of capitalism.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  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 a

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  government. It provided this natural check on government action. So...

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  My, I guess to get back to the original question is, we've never seen a pure free market because money has always been monopolized 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 network security for the economic trade network. And anything that, any government function that goes beyond those three core functions,

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  which by the way are pretty much the core tenets of morality as well. So governments just really intended to preserve, you know, natural law, if you will. Anything that goes beyond that is, 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, it's trading off, it's accepting short-term volatility in exchange for less long-run volatility. Yeah. And this tends to be the way of nature, by the way.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  So if we, 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 US, 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

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  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 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, right? Just these wildfires burn much smaller, more continuously over time. The further effect of that in North America is that the fires can get so big and so hot that it burns away the topsoil. So it actually destroys the fertility of the soil itself. So the point

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  of this is that human intervention, right, even the intention behind North American authorities managing that forest fire is to create less destruction. That is the intention. But the intention is divergent from the outcome. So in telebian speak, you 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 send your net worth to zero in a single trade

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  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 more to behave more like an extremistan system that has, you know, less short-run volatility but more extreme long-run volatility.

• 1:25:12Lex Fridman?

  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,

• 1:25:38Lex Fridman?

  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 not a, there's never been a free market. It's, 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 at, through legitimate means, then starts to try to manipulate the system that takes it away from a free market, or takes it away

• 1:26:17Lex Fridman?

  from the, the things that gave him the riches in the first place, and then try to, through corruption, get more, get, this is the thing you said, the lazy human ways, now try to figure out how to get something for nothing.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:26:33Lex Fridman?

  So how resilient do you think is capitalism to that?

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  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 and centralized control over cash and credit." So the central bank is a Marxist or communist institution. It is antithetical to the free market principles on which the United States was founded. And indeed, the United States resisted the implementation of a central bank. I think it was Andrew Jackson, I know that there was the First National Bank, the Second National Bank, were both disbanded. And then Andrew Jackson,

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  which is my favorite Tennessean, he's, 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, were a bit, a bit more badass, I guess you might say. And, you know, finally in 1913, the, the Federal Reserve was, was implemented. And it's been kind of all downhill from there.

• 1:27:48Lex Fridman?

  So what is, can you, oh, second.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say that, that communism and capitalism, it's also a matter of scale.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  You know, the ideal behind communism is from each according to their ability to each according to their need. Sounds beautiful, right? Sounds like a great peaceful, harmonious way to organize ourselves. The problem is, and, and by the way, I am a communist in my family, in my home, right?

• 1:28:14Lex Fridman?

  At that very smallest of scales.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  Yes, in your very small circles of trust, you're much more likely to behave selflessly towards one another.

• 1:28:23Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, context matters, people.

• 1:28:36Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, go ahead.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  But to your point, it does not scale, right? As we move into this larger system of socioeconomic cooperation, which is necessary to deepen the division of labor, to generate more wealth, right? We need to interact with one another on much larger scales than this communistic utopian ideal. We get into the realm of capitalism where we need really sound rules, hard rules, consensus, verifiability.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  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, right, and serve Mother Russia, and that would create wealth. And what happened, right? They destroyed price signals. There were shortages, there were famines, there's all levels of corruption. Because, you know, to your point, it's once you... People have to run the system no matter what. So when people are always pursuing something for nothing,

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  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. And 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 it's decentralized or distributed computing versus centralized computing. So each one of us, I think that the number is 120 bits per second of active awareness. So we can take in,

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  clearly, we process a lot more than that, but our active awareness, I think, is 120 bits per second.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  In a centralized planning body like in Soviet Russia, where 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, right? 20,000 people times 120 bits per second. Whereas in a free market, if everyone is free to interact with deep capital markets based on an accurate price, you're getting the data throughput of 120 bits per second times the entire economy. Right? So you're getting, it's a more efficient means for disseminating knowledge, effectively. And then, again, knowledge is just, the more knowledge a socioeconomic structure can contain, the more wealthy it is. Right? Prices, tools, all these things are just knowledge.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  So in that respect, that's why something like capitalism, even in its marginalized form, state capitalism, outcompetes communism. It's distributed computing versus centralized computing.

• 1:31:47Lex Fridman?

  You know, we kind of brought up religion and Joseph Campbell and myth, and the propagation of ideas. And before I forget, I wanted to ask your thoughts about this. You know, Jordan Peterson, I haven't really understood exactly, like be able to pin him down exactly what he sees as the role of religion in human society. But it feels like he's describing it as having value for us. The ideas of myth are valuable. They're valuable mechanisms toward,

• 1:32:27Lex Fridman?

  I think you mentioned, kind of 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?

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  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's said this before, that he acts as if God exists. And 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. And I think there is a lot of utility in that, that if you follow the moral code of something like the Bible,

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  you do reap benefits from that. Society reaps benefits from that.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  And this is not, and sometimes I bring up this point and people are like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Have you read the Old Testament? They're clobbering people with rocks when they do the wrong thing. The Bible doesn't claim to be this, like, do everything that was done in the Bible. It's more like charting this moral progression, where we came from this very barbaric society into something more like the New Testament, where we're honoring, you know, individual sovereignty above the state and things like that. So I think that mythology itself is another form of data compression. If you look at these stories, you know, Cain and Abel is a good example, or Peterson makes the point that it's a tiny story. It's, you know, a paragraph-ish long, but it contains

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  so many layers of meaning in regards to violence, evil, betrayal, work, the divergence between intention and result, you know, because I think Cain is actually making, he's making the effort to sacrifice for God, but the sacrifices he's making are not, God doesn't find them useful, right? And so he sort of rejects, rejects them. For a, again, if we're organized by these useful fictions, right, these, these Hararian imagined orders, I think mythology is kind of the original version of that, where we were learning to

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  organize ourselves around stories to best coordinate our action across space and time. And so I think it's very foundational. And back to what we were saying in the beginning, that if value truly is fundamental, I think it's interesting that all these stories point towards often common moral 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, you know, frankly, the capital stock we've accumulated.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  And 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, right, we're injecting more dollars, chasing the same level of goods and services. We are artificially increasing scarcity. Perceived scarcity, right? And when you increase perceived scarcity, you are amplifying divisiveness. This natural, the natural state of man is when everything is scarce and you really have to fight hard just to eat or drink water that day.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  So it's, it's decivilizing in a way by artificially amplifying the perceived scarcity in the world.

• 1:36:53Lex Fridman?

  Can you elaborate? How does inflation increase the perceived scarcity in the world?

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  So we could think the price itself is an indication, it's a data packet, if you will. The price is a data packet on supply and demand, right? It's telling you how much supply there is of something in the world relative to the demand. So when you, when you print money and artificially increase that price, it's diverging away from supply and demand. It's becoming just a more of a product of policy than it is of free market fundamentals.

• 1:37:25Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  The more expensive something is, that is a signal to the marketplace and to market actors that it is scarce.

• 1:37:32Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  Right? That's why a Leonardo painting might sell for 16 million dollars. There's only one, there's a lot of demand for it. Maybe my numbers are off, but, but you get the point. It's the reason mask spiked in price after the COVID announcement, right? There was not enough supply. Toilet paper, et cetera, et cetera. So inflation.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  And by inflation, I specifically mean arbitrary fiat currency supply inflation by legal monopoly, not inflation is a commonly misunderstood word. That is amplifying the perception of scarcity among market actors in the world. And I would argue that it actually amplifies divisiveness. I think this is the key, maybe to looking at the connection between the monopolization of money and things like cancel culture, because it's increasing the, it's increasing our natural predilection to be combative with one another, because we think there's more scarcity in the world than there actually is.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  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 and the market that scarcity is declining. There's less need to fight over things. And all of this ties back into the old Bastiat saying that if, if goods don't cross borders, soldiers will. So if we're not trading with one another, if we're not acting interdependently, and we're not 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.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  So the smarter we can solve problems, the better we can solve problems, the less prices would be. So it induces more cooperation.

• 1:39:27Lex Fridman?

  I love how you tie inflation and cancel culture together as essentially artificial creation of increase of conflict. Increasing artificially increasing scarcity and thereby artificially increasing conflict. That's really fascinating. You're, you're short-circuiting my brain many times throughout this conversation. Okay, I'm struggling, this, this robot is trying, is struggling to keep up. Okay, maybe 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?

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  Oh, as you know, that's my favorite question.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  That is the name of the show I just launched, the What Is Money Show.

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  Clearly, the, we could say that the Bitcoin rabbit hole is what's led me to explore a lot of these ideas in depth.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  And I think as we've demonstrated today, it goes well beyond just the economic sphere. When you start to think about things like exchange and morality and time preference and civilization. So I love the question, what is money? I think it is the key to incepting a deeper understanding of the world into people. That if you actually just start to ask the seemingly simple question, it surfaces more and more layers of truth. And I recently, I just wrote a piece, I think I have thirty something answers to this question. So there's.

• 1:41:09Lex Fridman?

  So sometimes it's actually a more systematic way of asking the question of what is the meaning of life? You know, there's some questions that are almost unanswerable, but in their asking allow you to deeply get closer to truth, deeply understand the nature of our human existence. And the meaning of life is almost like this initial philosopher's 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?

• 1:41:53Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned that it's a meta property. Out of the list of many ways to answer that question, how would you help people to think about that?

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Most serious answer comes from the School of Austrian Economics, and it defines money as a universal medium of exchange. So this would be any good that is used, held and used purely for purposes of facilitating exchange. So in the configuration of demand for any particular asset, it's bifurcated between its utility, which is something, a service that it can render to you in real time. Whether it's, you know, 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,

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  that other people would want this asset in the future, to trade it for whatever they may have. Money is just going to be the good in any trading economy that has the highest proportion of marketability relative to utility. So today, that would be gold. Gold has utility. It's used in electronics, it's used in dental dentistry and whatnot. But it's largely used as a store of value across time. And that's what it's been used for, for 5,000 years. So if we say gold has 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 then 8 trillion of that is demand for its use as a store of value.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  Money, the marketability aspects of money boils down to five services that money can render. Money needs to be divisible, it needs to be durable, it needs to be recognizable, it needs to be portable, and it needs to be scarce.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  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. Of

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  To best satisfy those properties, monetary metals were determined to be the most satisfactory tool, the most divisible, most durable, most recognizable, most portable tool in the marketplace. Of the monetary metals, gold was the most scarce, as quantified by either its stock to flow ratio, or its inflation resistance. So, a simple way to say this is that people always prefer the money most resistant to inflation.

• 1:44:36Lex Fridman?

  That's a nice definition of scarcity in the context of money, is if you were to measure it, the resistance to inflation. So, how hard is it to artificially increase the supply of the thing?

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  That is the hardness of money. And that's why gold is hard money.

• 1:44:52Lex Fridman?

  Because the alchemy is hard.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  That's right. Because no one cracked the alchemy, so gold became money.

• 1:44:58Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  That's right. And to get to, maybe dig a little deeper there. So scarcity, we commonly think of scarcity as strictly a supply property, where if there's not much of something, then it's scarce. But it's not actually true. Scarcity occurs when demand exceeds supply. So when there's more demand than the supply can justify, the thing becomes an economic good, and it establishes itself a market price. So there's more demand for the thing than the supply can satisfy. The unique thing about money, as a concept at least, is that demand always exceeds supply. There's never enough money to satisfy everyone, right?

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  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, right? We always want more of something, whatever it may be. So money as the ultimate token of obtaining that something is always scarce as a concept.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  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 settled on gold as money.

• 1:46:35Lex Fridman?

  And robbing is reallocating the value that I, 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.

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  Well, it prevents it through cost of extraction, too. So if you want to go out and dilute gold holders today, you have to go out into the world and mine gold. It's a very expensive process. That process tends to find equilibrium where production cost equals the market value of gold. So if market value is $2,000 an ounce today of gold, its production cost is going to be around there. That's the natural market equilibrium. So that way, gold miners cannot just dilute people over time. Whereas 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 net, the extension to that question

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  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 more, into fewer and fewer warehousing operations.

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  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, call 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

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  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 this is, that is the pathway that we got into banking and central banking, is we needed a convenience mechanism to rectify the portability shortcomings of gold. We needed to be able to move value across space, right? Gold 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 banks, which became central banks, to modify the supply to suit their own political agendas.

• 1:49:48Lex Fridman?

  Added the snooze button. Allows you to, just do a little fraud.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  To get something for nothing.

• 1:49:55Lex Fridman?

  Something, just a little bit at first. Just, just, 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? Like, could it have been averted? Or is this the natural progression of, of governments?

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  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, we went from placing our trust in a free market game theoretic process. We're trusting gold and we began trusting this institution instead.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  This, 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. Everyone could have custodied their gold in any, any information bearing medium, frankly. And they could beam it around the world at any time. So this whole institution itself is rooted in a technological shortcoming of gold. So I think it's, another way to think about that is maybe had there been, all the gold in the world today fills two Olympic sized swimming pools. All the gold mined throughout all of human history. So there's not a lot, right?

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  What if there had been just like way more, there's just been, I don't know, 20,000 Olympic swimming pools worth? Portability wouldn't have been as much of an issue, right? We could have, and this is to say, assuming gold was still the most scarce metal and all these things.

• 1:52:00Speaker 01

  Portability would have been less of an issue, we would have need, we would have had less dependence or need for a central bank. So I think it's, it's kind of idiosyncratic in that we just happened to end up here on this planet with a certain amount of gold. It best satisfied the properties of money.

• 1:52:16Lex Fridman?

  And a certain amount of humans, a geographical dispersed such that portability had certain properties that you want to achieve for humans in the geographical space to be able to be a exchange value.

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  It became more of an issue as we globalized, right? As we became more of a global society, we needed money that could move across space really fast, right? So we could trade in international capital markets. So that drove the central bank to become the dominant institution of the world. And if you follow the flows of gold throughout history, you know, I've been watching this documentary on World War I and World War II on Netflix. I think it's called World War II in Color.

• 1:52:54Lex Fridman?

  Oh yeah, that's really good.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  So good.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  When I say gold has been the governor of governments, or gold is geopolitical money, like it is the base layer operating system, has been the base layer operating system for analog society. So it's always been about who controls the gold. It's who makes the rules. And that's, in that context, is why Bitcoin is so interesting, because it is the disruptor to this base level operating system that's functioned for all of human history.

• 1:53:30Lex Fridman?

  I think this is a good place to ask, we asked the what is money question.

• 1:53:36Lex Fridman?

  What is Bitcoin?

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:54:00Lex Fridman?

  So 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.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we're attaching the concept of money, to your point, to whatever tool best satisfies those properties of money, or best renders those services we need for money.

• 1:54:25Lex Fridman?

  And as you said, you're using the word tool and technology interchangeably here.

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And another thing to think about here is that we think often in terms of goods or services, but actually, everything is a service. So it's not the physical properties of this pen that I find valuable. It's the services that it renders to me. That I want to write a letter. This gives, this serves me by allowing me to lay ink on paper and communicate information. So. Value, humans 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

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  five properties: divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability, scarcity. Metals best satisfied those services historically, but Bitcoin as the most superior monetary technology in human history essentially perfects them. It's as close to perfection as we've ever been. So in terms of divisibility, each Bitcoin can be broken down into 100 million subunits, called a Satoshi. 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,

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  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 Bitcoins perfected divisibility. The divisibility of money lets us transact across scales, right? We can buy coffee, or we can buy a house. Durability is an interesting one.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  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 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, right? You can't make changes to it unilaterally.

• 1:57:05Lex Fridman?

  But to make explicit, the ways in which it is not durable is the fact that it relies on computing infrastructure, like it, it needs computers. So if you were to destroy all the computers in the world.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:57:21Lex Fridman?

  It needs mechanisms that store and transfer information.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:57:26Lex Fridman?

  And so you could attack it. I mean, you could attack gold in the same kind of way, I suppose, through 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.

• 1:57:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. Maybe, I'm not sure which one would be harder to destroy, but the other thing is, there's a dynamic incentive. So every time you destroy Bitcoin miners, you're creating incentives for anyone else with access to electricity to mine, because you're making the algorithm easier.

• 1:57:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so the, the structure is difficult because of the decentralized nature of the whole thing.

• 1:58:05Speaker 01

  And the difficulty adjustment.

• 1:58:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you're gonna have to use nuclear weapons and cover the whole globe. But anyway.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and by then, we've got much bigger problems than money, right?

• 1:58:16Lex Fridman?

  That's right. So, okay, so that's durability.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  So portability, Bitcoin's pure information, it 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 know, you've seen people buying 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

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:59:21Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  And so that's unique as well. And that's what makes Bitcoin the ultimate store of 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 1,000 Bitcoin out of 20 million instead. And so on and so forth. As more people lose access to their Bitcoin, they're basically making a contribution to everyone else. It's anti-dilutive.

• 2:00:19Lex Fridman?

  And there's 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's not, it doesn't blow up too quickly.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:00:37Lex Fridman?

  But, 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. Hence the block size debates and all those kinds of things.

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was the Bitcoin Cash civil war, right? Was that particular piece?

• 2:00:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  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, computing power necessary to run a full node, which would have theoretically compromised decentralization.

• 2:01:15Lex Fridman?

  So, yeah, but it would, in theory, you know, in theory, it would allow you to have much more transactions.

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:01:24Lex Fridman?

  But the drawback, it would, because no longer it can be stored on a single computer, personal computer, then it naturally leads to decentralization.

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:34Lex Fridman?

  Some kind of thing we see with gold.

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  Which would have compromised its survivability.

• 2:01:39Lex Fridman?

  Right. So, what else is there?

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  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

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  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. We could, you know, it's historic inflation rate's 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

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  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 proceeds, 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

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  all market actors have all the relevant information about everything so that they can compete as efficiently as possible. And in the state, in a state of pure information, we have, I'm sorry, perfect information, we have perfect competition. And in perfect competition, we maximize wealth generation. So we're competing 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.

• 2:04:36Lex Fridman?

  Many of the things you said about Bitcoin also hold for other cryptocurrency technologies that followed after.

• 2:04:44Lex Fridman?

  Can you say something to why you think Bitcoin is the superior technology from a pragmatic truth perspective than, say, Ethereum, but also other cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin Cash, like other hard forks of Bitcoin? And, or maybe things that might yet to be invented, tools yet to be invented?

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So. This is a good point of argument because a lot of people have countered me and said Bitcoin cannot be absolute scarcity because you can fork it and create something with the same properties as Bitcoin or potentially even better properties, right? You can 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, 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

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  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, right? It is a tool for, if we consider that tools are time-saving devices, right? The shovel lets you dig more holes per man-hour than you can with your bare hands. Money is a tool, there's yet another definition of money,

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  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 that for the same reasons, quantifiable reasons, right? 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...

• 2:07:08Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's one 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 in technologies.

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:07:28Lex Fridman?

  And you're suggesting that there may not be...

• 2:07:34Lex Fridman?

  There's unlikely to be other leaps of that kind into a whole nother kind of space of technologies.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  I would argue that Bitcoin is kind of like the ideological synthesis of gold, taking the monetary properties of gold and combining them with the internet itself.

• 2:07:50Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  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 a superior technology to intercede and outcompete Bitcoin at this point, now that it's established liquidity in the network.

• 2:08:11Lex Fridman?

  Far superior technology, right?

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's a combination of the tech itself and the social layer that is coalesced to it.

• 2:08:19Lex Fridman?

  You can't separate those two out.

• 2:08:20Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:08:21Lex Fridman?

  They're all connected and then the political as well. I mean, but you know, the portability, for example, that's the, another way to phrase that is the, what is it? The scaling, so the number of transactions. That's a limitation for Bitcoin that many argue is a feature, many argue is a bug. You have, you have a bunch of cryptocurrency technologies that are able to achieve much higher, much faster frequency of transactions, much more transactions, you know, all that kind of stuff. What are your thoughts on that? You know, the, the low level of transactions that's possible with Bitcoin? Do you think that's a feature? Do you think that's a bug?

• 2:09:03Speaker 01

  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 Assurance Is Stupid." It's really good where the gist of it is that there is more work being done in each block of Bitcoin that it can't, it is less vulnerable to reversion. So it's, 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.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  And again, with Bitcoin.

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  The evolutionary path of money with gold is that it was first used as a collectible. It then became used as a store of value. After it had stored enough value, it became being, it began to be used as a medium of exchange. And then finally, when it was used widely enough as a medium of exchange, it becomes a unit of account. We actually start to think in the money. Bitcoin's following a similar path. So started out as kind of a collectible. Today, I would argue it's a store of value, one of the most effective store of value we've ever seen. So that evolutionary path that Bitcoin's following is similar to gold. First a collectible, today is store of value. To be an effective store of value, it has to optimize for supply cap. Yes.

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  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 a sound money, the ultimate sound money, the, the most inflation resistant money there's ever been. It's actually completely immune. It's taken unexpected inflation to 0%. We know with perfect certainty what Bitcoin's 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

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  to be, to increase its portability, for instance. Even though it's, portability is maybe kind of a misnomer because Bitcoin has extremely high portability, just doesn't have extremely high transaction throughput. 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 this, it has to be a store of 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.

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  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, you know, some slight trade offs in terms of the trust minimization of Bitcoin. You end up trusting these smart contracts instead of move the 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.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:12:47Lex Fridman?

  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? Likely ideas or crazy out there ideas? Do you think about this kind of stuff?

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 2:13:13Lex Fridman?

  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 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?

• 2:13:57Lex Fridman?

  Or you're wrong in your conception of what Bitcoin is?

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, science.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  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. Right? Whatever we can empirically through experimentation disprove gets discarded. And whatever remains, whatever theory remains, it hasn't been disproven is science effectively. This process is similar to market actors zeroing in on a store value. Right? They're they're experimenting with different forms of storing wealth across time.

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  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 then I'm actually, that is the main question I'm asking myself is how do you stop this thing? How do you turn it off? How do you end it? If you're a nation state particularly, who has the most to lose in this transition? What is the attack vector by which they neutralize Bitcoin? I mean, that is the $250 trillion question. And, you know, I've spent five years thinking about this thing very deeply. I've read everything on monetary history I can get my hands on.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  The general thought of how it is stopped, and this is, this is the snag point that a lot of people get to in their explorations down the rabbit hole is they just say the government will never allow it. And that becomes kind of their bottom. It's like, all right, Bitcoin's interesting, it's superior money, blah, blah, blah. But the government will never allow it.

• 2:15:49Lex Fridman?

  Was Ray Dalio, did he say that?

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  Dalio was currently stuck there. Yeah.

• 2:15:54Lex Fridman?

  So Ray Dalio said that Bitcoin seems to be too promising.

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:01Lex Fridman?

  If 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.

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  Ban it.

• 2:16:11Lex Fridman?

  Ban it.

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:12Lex Fridman?

  Governments will ban it. So how do you get Ray Dalio unstuck from your perspective?

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:16:19Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  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, you know, they can kill them, they can throw them in jail, they can use any number of coercive or violent tactics to suppress it. But how do you point a gun at an idea? How do you coerce an idea? And that's, you know, there's some anecdotal history here where there's the PGP case,

• 2:17:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  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 incentive 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.

• 2:18:27Lex Fridman?

  So you don't think if a particular central bank, like in Europe or the 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?

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  And they're more likely, by the way, since, and governments know this, by the way, too. The other thing that causes a government to shoot itself in the foot is that if they ban something, they draw a lot of attention to it.

• 2:18:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:59Speaker 01

  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, you know, really starts to monetize very quickly. And this, the power structures that they impose today start to dissolve faster than I, you know, others might think they will, then they might try and ban it. But I think that ban will be largely unenforceable. They're more likely to tax it, which they already do tax it. They're likely to increase taxation of it. They would, they're likely to try and make it more white market by actually tracing Bitcoin, seeing who has it, attaching identities to Bitcoin ownership,

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  so we saw the internet outcompete intranets.

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  And that the, we could say that open source networks tend to outcompete closed source networks. And there's a really good reason for this. And it's because in a closed source network,

• 2:20:12Speaker 01

  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 people, they're not voluntarily adopted rules. So you actually have to impose these rule sets. Whereas an open source network, which is something much more akin to capitalism, pure, in its pure sense, these are voluntarily adopted rules. So all market participants have agreed and consented to this rule set. So there's no enforcement costs and there's no turf protection because anyone can freely enter or exit the open network.

• 2:20:51Speaker 01

  For that energetic reason, I think open networks outcompete closed networks typically. And in the digital age, that's why I think open, that's why internet outcompetes internet, and that's why open source networks are going to eat closed source networks. So what Bitcoin would be in that lens is the ultimate open source monetary network, devouring closed source central bank monetary networks. And I, I just don't see how, there's no possibility of unilaterally stopping Bitcoin or destroying it. So then they're more likely to regulate or tax it. And again, the other fallacy here is that a lot of people tend to think of governments

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  as these singular indivisible entities, like 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, and others, whether 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 as a, at a central bank or sovereign wealth fund level, as an insurance policy against its success.

• 2:22:15Speaker 01

  And once you start to acquire something, and then you have 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 Sovereignty, 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.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  You can't, the economics of violence are declining because of the, the low cost of protecting property, right? You can now protect your monetary property in Bitcoin at orders of magnitude less cost than is necessary to run a banking network. So. It changes the way, uh, it changes the way we organize ourselves. And again, if we, zooming back to gold, it's kind of the original governor to governments. Where if they manipulated the money, gold would leave their country. That's why governments have, um, taken relatively concerted action to go off of the gold standard.

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  Uh, there's a great book on this called The Gold Wars, um, that, that outlines how governments have been waging a cold war against gold for the past 50 years. Bitcoin sort of, uh, renews hope for that free market governor of governments. And that is this digital gold that governments cannot stop or co-opt. So I think it's something, that's why I think it's such a big deal is that it is 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.

• 2:24:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, I, I hope you're right that, uh, all forms of centralized power start breaking apart naturally. So governments, the more and more power is given to the individual, whatever the technology is. And Bitcoin seems to be a promising technology that empowers that, enables that. That seems to be the trend and that's a promising trend from a, at least from a perspective of somebody who values this particular biological meat bag that's full of consciousness.

• 2:24:43Speaker 01

  I think Bitcoin is exposing the greatest scam in human history, which is political authority. Like who gives anyone the right to be politically, have political authority over anyone else? People should be free to adopt the rules and systems and tools that best suit their needs. And, you know, that heart, that arc of history we covered earlier, where as socioeconomic systems have become more favorable towards individual sovereignty, the more wealthy we have become. The more we have given the individual, we've maximized individual choice. Uh, the more wealth that society has created and the more it has outcompeted, uh, the systems that have come before it. The latest would be, you know, capitalism triumphing over socialism.

• 2:25:29Lex Fridman?

  Before maybe we eat, you are in Texas, you brought over some brisket. Before we maybe indulge in that, let me bring up one quick topic and then we'll take a break. And the topic of the, 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's seems to be present in part in the Bitcoin community?

• 2:26:07Speaker 01

  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. I 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 is an ideological immune system, this Bitcoin toxicity, in that it's kind of a filter that's trying to catch

• 2:26:51Speaker 01

  bad or useless or even scamming ideas that this space is very well known for. You know, 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, right? People, 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, you know, post a white paper talking about how great your technology is going to be and how it's going to change the world. And you can raise $30 million in Bitcoin or Ethereum in 30 seconds kind of thing. So it's drawn in a lot of this scam artistry, you might say.

• 2:27:36Speaker 01

  And I think. People living through that, because there is this natural predilection for people. When they first come into Bitcoin, you're excited about it. Then you get lost in the shitcoin universe. And then just looking at the market success of Bitcoin versus, and when I use the word shitcoin, I'm just.

• 2:27:55Lex Fridman?

  You say with all the love in the world.

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:28:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I saw that line. That's a good.

• 2:28:06Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:28:07Lex Fridman?

  It's a good line.

• 2:28:08Speaker 01

  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, right? You don't want new entrants to the space to get lost in shitcoin 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,

• 2:28:52Speaker 01

  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, you know, the example, 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.

• 2:29:27Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:29:39Lex Fridman?

  Because like 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 apart, take it away from that metaphor of the immune system and look at basic human nature. And human nature can go to some dark places, which is, it's sad to say that some people,

• 2:30:24Lex Fridman?

  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, I am new to this particular immune system, but I've explored other immune systems. And the, I think you understand this world much better than me, but I tend to prefer

• 2:31:05Lex Fridman?

  sort of love as a mechanism for spreading ideas, to err on the side of love and kindness and almost like the open mindedness in a way where you're constantly lowering yourself in the face of other ideas, constantly questioning yourself. But I think I understand that that 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.

• 2:31:51Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:32:15Speaker 01

  It is subtle and it's nuanced and it is difficult to walk. And I think that that's why I try to say tough love because, you know, when we're young, we may have certain ideas about how we, the way we want our life to go. But then maybe our parents are not letting us do certain things and we think they're, I know when I was a kid, I wanted to get my, when I was in fifth grade, I wanted to get my ear pierced. My mom wouldn't let me do it. And I was, oh, come on, mom. I thought it was so cool. And then two years later, I'm like, thank you, mom for not 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 in why not this crypto asset or this crypto

• 2:33:00Speaker 01

  asset? And they've, 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

• 2:33:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:34:13Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting, but I, almost to push back a little bit, toxicity is a funny word. I think maybe another way to say it is I brought up like Christopher Hitchens and somebody who like, okay, you might say is toxic or something like that because he's basically an 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.

• 2:34:51Speaker 01

  We could use more of that.

• 2:34:53Lex Fridman?

  We could use more of that. So toxicity, just like, these are just words. They can mean a lot of different things, but disagreement doesn't have to be done with love, but it should be done with skill if it's to be effective. So there's a lot of ways to be effective in 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 it better than others and it's worthwhile to learn to do it well. Again, I prefer love, but even love, you know, just because you think you're communicating a good idea, which you very well may be, doesn't mean it also

• 2:35:36Lex Fridman?

  doesn't require skill to do the communication well, whether it's disagreement and harsh or more agreement and loving and so on.

• 2:35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think very fundamentally that all of our decisions, you know, we alluded to earlier that every decision is an expression of value, right? Every action 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, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, lust, pride, envy, like, these are all selfish behaviors. Whereas something like love is much, it's morally superior in 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

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  of a generalization of it. And that way, it is really hard, to your point, it's hard to.

• 2:36:37Speaker 01

  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 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, betrayal, hate, violence. He met it all with love and he met it with compassion. And that's why regardless of if you believe that he actually lived or any of this, this he is symbolic of the highest moral consciousness possible.

• 2:37:16Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 2:37:35Lex Fridman?

  In the world, yeah.

• 2:37:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:37:48Speaker 01

  But it takes, I don't know, it takes good systems and it takes, I guess, good leaders to set an example.

• 2:37:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I do believe that there's like individual people can have a ripple effect. So that's, that's what I try to do, sort of embody the, I'm just one ant. But I, one of the things I have faith in is, I'm trying to do that more.

• 2:38:12Lex Fridman?

  I know this is a podcast, but I'm trying to do less talking and more doing.

• 2:38:19Lex Fridman?

  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 own 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.

• 2:38:57Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:39:10Speaker 01

  Well, you said yet.

• 2:39:12Lex Fridman?

  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 an interesting? What is an interesting set of ideas and what are not? Because people are financially tied into a lot of the cryptocurrencies that we're talking about, certainly with Bitcoin. You know, their livelihood, their well being is tied up to it. So it becomes much more emotional, much more personal. It's no longer purely an exploration of ideas. It's really almost like a threat on your property. Like it's a personal threat. It makes it very difficult to explore those ideas.

• 2:39:56Lex Fridman?

  So I understand it, but it makes it very difficult for somebody like me to just walk in and be curious. So how do I proceed in this difficult world in exploring this landscape? And not give a platform to ideas that may, that may harm others?

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:40:34Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  You know, I don't, 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, you know, general human proclivity to try and get something for nothing always, which again, it can be positive, it can be innovative, or it can be negative. It can be trying to steal from people.

• 2:41:06Speaker 01

  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 Bitcoiners are thinking all the time. They are by nature adversarial thinkers. So they're trying to minimize the need for trust in any situation and maximize verification.

• 2:41:25Speaker 01

  As far as sifting through the ideas, I guess this is back where the cultural immune system has some utility.

• 2:41:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:37Speaker 01

  Because there were times when I thought this particular crypto asset, you know, Augur was one I was really into, that it could facilitate prediction markets, prediction markets can make, you know, 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. So, but it really comes down to like you doing your homework, but we can't all deeply evaluate every idea out there, right?

• 2:42:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. One of the things I struggled with, with Alex Jones, for example, had dinner with him.

• 2:42:25Lex Fridman?

  I could tell that would be a very fun conversation, but like then I also understand that there's like consequences to that conversation that should be explored with care. And so you need to take on the responsibility of being a chef of the puffer fish and all those kinds of things. That said, just like you said, it's very difficult to know this ahead of time.

• 2:42:52Lex Fridman?

  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, um, 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.

• 2:43:11Speaker 01

  Yes. Learn.

• 2:43:12Lex Fridman?

  And learn. And also, you know, I have to put this on the, on the rest of us, that you don't take one thing that a person did.

• 2:43:24Lex Fridman?

  And then burn them at the stake for it. That you realize that we all make mistakes, that a particular mistake does not make the person. And, you know, this applies to taking stuff out of context over, you know, hundreds of hours of talking. But it applies to actual, like, in-context, big mistake. Okay? So what if I murdered somebody at some point? Just give me a break. No, there are some things that are too far, of course, but in general, we need to give each other a chance. Yeah, but I'm still.

• 2:43:59Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:44:07Speaker 01

  Well, this is human nature, like, hamartia, to miss the mark. That's the root word of sin. We are sinful by nature. We can't help it. There's no way, again, pain is information, right? There's no way to learn, other than trying, failing, learning. And then you put yourself in better formation, right? In formation to better deal with it next time. So I, I, I hope, I don't get the sense that you're actually afraid of, or of making a misstep. Like, I think you're just, um.

• 2:44:43Speaker 01

  Maybe disappointed is a better word? Like, you know you're gonna make the mistakes.

• 2:44:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's exactly, that's a much, much better word.

• 2:44:48Speaker 01

  But we have to embrace that.

• 2:44:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:44:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:58Speaker 01

  And in that process, we're all, you know, inherently gonna hurt ourselves and hurt others. And that's where love and forgiveness come into play, right? And, um. Yeah, I think the, the other thing is that this culture of reducing people down to a label, right? Whether it's racism, or whether you're calling them a scammer, or, um, any number of terms. You're, you're discounting their sovereignty to zero, right? You're taking a super-complex human that is vast, contains multitudes, is changing over time. And you're trying to put them in a bucket of a word. And that is just, I think, a cognitive fallacy. Like, it's not only gonna hurt the person that you're, you know, winnowing down to a word, it's also gonna hurt you.

• 2:45:43Speaker 01

  And it's gonna, in your attempt to decomplexify reality by assigning this person to a term, you're actually gonna create bad outcomes for yourself. Because you're not gonna understand that person.

• 2:45:53Lex Fridman?

  I do also think there's a failure of our social media technology that incentivizes that kind of reduce reduction to a label. It's just the viral nature of that reduction. So it's not, not only do we humans naturally do that, the, our social media platforms make that easier, more fun, more effective to do that at scale, the mass hysteria. So I think there's actually like technological ways of adding friction to that.

• 2:46:26Speaker 01

  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, and my thinking has evolved a lot on this, that there's something below the way we're treating each other too, right? That we could say civilization sort of advances in the tools we make and the way we treat each other. We tend to have better tools, better quality of life, and better morality, better 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, the negative direction, pushes us away from,

• 2:47:08Speaker 01

  again, encouraging or amplifying scarcity artificially causes us to be more divisive. When things are more divisive, we tend to be less civilized, less nuanced, more, you know, black or white, or this or that, or you're this, or you're label A or label B. So I really think, and this is a harder one to unravel, but I think if we can fix the money, right, which again is the base layer operating system for human moral action in the world, 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.

• 2:47:49Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting. So perhaps fixing like social media, as I've been thinking about, is treating the symptom, not the cause.

• 2:47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is the Bitcoin rabbit hole in a nutshell, is that, you know, they say, fix the money, fix the world. You keep tracing these different social malazes or, or, you know, technological difficulties, lack of innovation. You know, Weinstein's entire portal podcast, something went wrong in the early 70s. We went off the gold standard in 1971. And there's a great website, wtfapp1971.com, goes through this whole gamut of socioeconomic data that's completely gone askew since the early 70s.

• 2:48:31Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first exposure I had to Eric was his, I think it was his first episode with Peter Thiel. And they're going through that thesis that there's been this general institutional rot and suppression of innovation since the early 70s. And he's trying to identify what it is. I don't think they ever pinned it on the money on going off the gold standard. But in recent interactions with Eric, you know, 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.

• 2:49:40Speaker 01

  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 Gage theory. They got really popular. I don't know a lot about Gage theory. I actually messaged Eric and said, I want to learn more genuinely because, you know, he seems to be serious that that needs to be considered in the sphere of money. And so I want to learn more about it. But I think overall, it's great. It's great to see an intellectual heavyweight of his caliber gravitating towards Bitcoin.

• 2:50:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he has some Gage-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.

• 2:51:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:51:04Lex Fridman?

  And integrate, how the two integrate together. And so it's interesting to explore, not just Bitcoin, the particulars. So for me, like 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.

• 2:51:34Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:51:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:46Lex Fridman?

  The philosophical.

• 2:51:47Speaker 01

  Philosophical, yeah.

• 2:51:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:48Speaker 01

  That's where I, you know, find all the fascination in the world, frankly. Um, I would, 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. Uh, it's essential, 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. You know, studied a lot of economics in school. There's not one peep of Austrian econ.

• 2:52:30Lex Fridman?

  The, the.

• 2:52:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:52:32Lex Fridman?

  Really love talking about all the degrees he has.

• 2:52:35Speaker 01

  I was a CPA.

• 2:52:39Speaker 01

  But it's, it, that curriculum that we get in college is noticeably deficient in Austrian economics. And I think there's a reason why, right? It's, it's heavily government influenced.

• 2:52:54Speaker 01

  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, it's conceived of in the textbooks quite literally as God, right? An entity that suffers no opportunity cost, that, um, basically is the foundation of the entire Keynesian worldview that you're taught in economics. And Austrian economics is the opposite end of the spectrum of that, right? It's, it's actually the culmination, which economics is the youngest science in the world, by the way. So it is, um, kind of the front, it's the frontiers of science in many ways, like to actually, when I say praxeology, many people have never even heard of that.

• 2:53:40Speaker 01

  But it's something, uh, it's an.

• 2:53:43Speaker 01

  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, 1,200 pages, translated from German. The way he wields English is fascinating and terrifying all at the same time. It'd 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.

• 2:54:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, I'll take that as a challenge. Now that we took a little bit of a break, ate some good Texas brisket. Thank you for that, by the way.

• 2:54:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:54:26Lex Fridman?

  Brought some over.

• 2:54:26Speaker 01

  Quite welcome.

• 2:54:27Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:54:43Speaker 01

  It's not me. I wish.

• 2:54:48Lex Fridman?

  And is this an interesting question? Or is it just something about our human nature that wants to, that always tends towards mystery?

• 2:54:55Speaker 01

  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, I could tell. 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,

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  you know, to disparage or question the motives of, you know, if he's out on the Hollywood Hills, partying, everyone knows he's got a million Bitcoin, you know, it would just kind of tarnish the entire project in a lot of ways. But the fact that...

• 2:55:55Speaker 01

  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. I actually heard recently that he identified as a he in some of his communications. So it sounds like it is a he.

• 2:56:16Lex Fridman?

  See, like, his communications being like studied, like, almost like exactly as if he's a religious, uh,

• 2:56:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:56:24Lex Fridman?

  Like a prophet.

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:27Lex Fridman?

  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, out of principle to that, to do, uh, 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.

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  Hmm. Interesting.

• 2:57:08Lex Fridman?

  And it's enough to have just a small selection of those.

• 2:57:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:13Lex Fridman?

  And e- even if most of us are too weak, we give into power if given

• 2:57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:19Lex Fridman?

  the chance. All it takes is a few.

• 2:57:22Speaker 01

  That's, I've never thought of it like that, but Marcus Aurelius immediately came to mind.

• 2:57:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:28Speaker 01

  You know, the guy that had the keys to the kingdom. And he apparently adhered to the Stoic 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 is 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.

• 2:58:09Lex Fridman?

  He's the ultimate hodler.

• 2:58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, so it's, I mean, it's turning down not just financial

• 2:58:19Lex Fridman?

  success, but also fame. I mean, fame is another drug. It's a kind of power, but it's in itself is also a drug, especially in this modern society, in this attention.

• 2:58:29Speaker 01

  And he would have both.

• 2:58:30Lex Fridman?

  He would have both. It's fun to imagine who who it could be. It's fascinating if it's somebody like you or somebody like Elon or somebody like that. That's fascinating to think about.

• 2:58:40Speaker 01

  I think Elon would be hilarious. If he came out and he was Satoshi, like, hey, guys, I know I'm already the richest guy in the world, but I gotta go ahead and double my lead here.

• 2:58:51Lex Fridman?

  What do you make of Elon Musk investing with Tesla investing in Bitcoin? And maybe broaden broaden it out in some of these other,

• 2:59:03Lex Fridman?

  you know, big billionaires, but also people tied to major companies investing in Bitcoin?

• 2:59:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Michael Saylor really led the charge on that. So 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.

• 2:59:44Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:59:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, we we 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 the guy and unleashed him. He's he's just a beast.

• 3:00:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But it's fascinating that.

• 3:00:17Lex Fridman?

  His long-term vision with it. I mean, I'm not sure I'm all philosophically bought in, but if he's right, if this set of ideas are as powerful as he describes, as you describe, 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.

• 3:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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? Is it money is the highest form of energy a human being can channel? So it's a claim to all other forms of energy we can manifest in the world.

• 3:01:29Speaker 01

  And that just completely reshaped how I see it, brought in this whole other side to my intellectual explorations of money.

• 3:01:39Lex Fridman?

  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 and channeling energy. Can you break that apart?

• 3:01:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I guess 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, you know, they're dependent on energy, right? Energy fuels everything, fuels life in 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. All right, so it's allocating energy towards its goal of harnessing more solar energy kind of thing.

• 3:02:29Speaker 01

  So, and humans too have evolved to figure out how to harness energy in different ways to.

• 3:02:41Speaker 01

  Satisfy higher and more complicated aims. So the original energy network that he made, that he referenced was fire, right? We actually learned to wield fire as a tool in and of itself. So not only are we learning to channel energy, but we actually learn how to isolate energy as a tool in and of itself. And so we went into that, how harnessing fire had changed human beings. And actually,

• 3:03:11Speaker 01

  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 macronutrients 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 free, 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, which was interesting.

• 3:03:54Speaker 01

  Some other early examples he gave, he went into were missiles and hydraulics.

• 3:04:00Speaker 01

  So missiles being, we learn to hunt at a distance, you know, we can't bring down a woolly mammoth, maybe with spears and

• 3:04:10Speaker 01

  and up close in personal force, but we could with spears and javelins and slings and whatnot. And then he went to how we've used water to channel hydraulic energy. So we can basically overcome gravity. We can move, you know, there's theories that the pyramids were constructed using, the blocks were moved using hydraulic energy or using water. Clearly, we use like cargo ships and whatnot to move things much more efficiently across water than we could the land. So this, his whole view is how we keep figuring out better ways, more efficient ways to harness energy and channel it. And in that,

• 3:04:51Speaker 01

  Perspective.

• 3:04:54Speaker 01

  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 other products of energy itself. So it's, I guess it's my best approximation of it. And it just really shattered my worldview again because I'd always thought about it as time, like we spend time sacrificing to obtain money that we then redeem for commensurate sacrifices from others.

• 3:05:38Speaker 01

  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. All right, so you had to expend, again, if market value of gold's 2,000 an ounce, you had to expend 1,900 an ounce mining. So it kept producers honest in a way.

• 3:06:05Lex Fridman?

  So do you think something like proof of stake, that's more about reputation than than actual exertion, like energy can work?

• 3:06:18Speaker 01

  No, I think proof of stake is inherently centralizing.

• 3:06:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:06:48Lex Fridman?

  What's the idea why proof of work might?

• 3:06:53Lex Fridman?

  Incentivized decentralization.

• 3:06:58Lex Fridman?

  Do you worry that as Bitcoin becomes more powerful, it may become again more centralized?

• 3:07:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:07:19Speaker 01

  And then the mining network is actually enforcing that rule set. So I think the mining network

• 3:07:28Speaker 01

  is inherently decentralized in that really, anyone with access to cheap energy can become a miner. He can freely enter or exit the market or the network at any time.

• 3:07:39Speaker 01

  But maintaining the block size at a manageable level is what's key to maintaining node decentralization.

• 3:07:46Lex Fridman?

  This is an interesting question. Who do you think has more power, the miners or the nodes?

• 3:07:53Lex Fridman?

  Because the nodes carry the the idea of the protocol, like the specifics.

• 3:08:01Lex Fridman?

  So in some sense, they have more power if Bitcoin is an idea.

• 3:08:07Speaker 01

  They're kind of mutually indispensable, though, because you can't have.

• 3:08:12Speaker 01

  There's no security without the miners. So without the miners, Bitcoin is just an idea. And the idea of Bitcoin is maybe existed even before Bitcoin, right? Just sound money, we just say sound money is an idea. But there was no way to root that into thermodynamic reality without Satoshi figuring out. Not just proof of work, it's the entire composite of the difficulty adjustment, proof of work,

• 3:08:40Speaker 01

  one-way hashing, et cetera. So I don't know, that's hard to say, hard to disentangle the two.

• 3:08:46Lex Fridman?

  You've talked about money as morality, too.

• 3:08:50Lex Fridman?

  How do you think about moral and immoral action in the context of money?

• 3:08:56Speaker 01

  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

• 3:09:12Speaker 01

  you know, I think morality, it changes over time and it is.

• 3:09:19Speaker 01

  It has its roots in biology. Jordan Peterson makes the point that even animals have their own sort of pseudo morality. Where like with wolf packs, for instance, if there's a dispute between the alpha males, or I guess between an alpha male and a incumbent, the two males will have a, you know, a fight, basically. And then when one, it's decided that one has won, the loser will basically roll over and give up his neck to the alpha male. And they do this instead of fighting to the death because in a wolf pack, they need every wolf so they can go out and bring down, you know, you never know when you're gonna need the 20th wolf to bring down the

• 3:10:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:10:16Speaker 01

  And similarly for humans, like 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 with, so with money, it's interesting because most tools we would consider to be amoral, as in, you know, a hammer can be used to build a house, which could be seen to be good, like a good constructive purpose, or it could be used to bash someone's skull, which could be something evil. And that the, the tool itself is amoral, doesn't

• 3:10:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:11:16Speaker 01

  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, that we're, there's a lot of propaganda out there that will say, oh, we need to print money to get out of this disaster. Or to give to the poor, whatever this, whatever moralistically camouflaged political aim is being discussed. At the, the base layer of monopolized money is that it's only useful for taking from some and giving to others.

• 3:11:56Speaker 01

  So another way to think about this is that money is a paper claim on the savings of society. So it is just a ticket for redeeming savings, which could be time, could be capital, could be knowledge from any market actor in the world. So it's kind of a list of who owns what, if you will, it's a proxy list. If there's one group that can amend that list and others cannot, then they're basically able and incented to modify that list to their own benefit. And that's effectively what a central bank is doing. So a central bank is determining how much money to create. They're also determining who gets to receive that money first.

• 3:12:39Speaker 01

  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, uh, receiving the stolen proceeds, let's say. And this has a really corrosive effect on social morality. Because if we consider that.

• 3:13:09Speaker 01

  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. Right? If you know that it's all over tomorrow. You've been working your whole life to develop, you know, this business or create this reputation or whatever your thing is, but you just are given the foreknowledge that tomorrow it's all gonna end. You're much more likely to go out and just maybe get drunk and party that night because there's no more repercussions, right? Whereas if you know that you're gonna live for a very long time, you're much more likely to plan for the future.

• 3:13:52Speaker 01

  And money is very... So we just say that that your time horizon is closely related to your morality. Right? The longer-term thinking you are, the more moral you would tend to behave. The more you would care about long-term relationship building versus going out and getting wasted. And money too, impinges very closely on our time preference. And again, time preference is the Austrian term. So low time preference means you're long-term oriented. High time preference means you're short-term oriented, which can be a little trippy for some people because it sounds backwards, but...

• 3:14:27Speaker 01

  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. When that insurance policy against uncertainty is injected with uncertainty, it's polluted with the uncertainty of inflation, your time horizon shrinks, your ability to plan long-term shrinks. And this impinges on social morality. So there's a great book on this called Honest Money by Gary North.

• 3:15:13Speaker 01

  And in that book, he gives the parable of the winemaker. And the winemaker, if we just imagine a hypothetical winemaker operating a business in a centrally banked economy, and let's say his central bank just doubled the money supply to quote unquote, "save the economy," say it increased the money supply from one to two trillion dollars. This winemaker that's accustomed to selling wine at $20 a bottle is now faced with basically three choices.

• 3:15:45Speaker 01

  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're incentivizing your customers to look elsewhere. They're going to look at your competition. When you decrease prices, you're incentivizing market actors to look closer at your product, right? You're delivering a solution at a lower price. So this winemaker that's accustomed to selling his wine at a $20 price point, all of a sudden, because of 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%.

• 3:16:29Speaker 01

  So he will lose 50% of his profit margin as a result.

• 3:16:35Speaker 01

  So he can choose to eat that loss. He can choose to double the selling price of his bottle of wine from $20 to $40, because all of the price of his inputs doubled, so then he would maintain his profit margin.

• 3:16:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:17:02Speaker 01

  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...

• 3:17:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:18:32Speaker 01

  I think it is tied back to a lot of the social strangeness we've seen in modern times, where, you know, there seems to be a lot of fake people and a lot of fake businesses and a lot of scams, all of these things. I think it really is rooted in the money. And, you know, Bitcoin 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.

• 3:19:14Lex Fridman?

  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 it has on the products, on the dilution of the wine, but also it 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.

• 3:19:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:20:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:03Speaker 01

  So we're trying to solve problems, but all of a sudden, we can't tell if this price increase is a matter of true supply and demand change, or a matter of policy change. So it 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'll 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.

• 3:20:38Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 3:20:52Lex Fridman?

  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 the, you know, all the things we're seeing now with, like you said, cancel culture and all those things, but also the negative effects on the, on the quality of products and the excellence of the creativity and the innovation, all those kinds of things. I wonder if there's other factors. It's, it's kind of, listen, it's

• 3:21:34Lex Fridman?

  compelling to think money is at the core of it all. Like if you fix, I forgot what the phrase was.

• 3:21:39Speaker 01

  Fix the money, fix the world.

• 3:21:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, fix the money, fix the world. That.

• 3:21:44Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 3:21:56Speaker 01

  Another one related to money is social cohesion itself. So very simple anecdote for this was the more you increase the inflation rate, social cohesion is inversely proportionate to that. So the extreme example would be hyperinflation, right? Where the money is produced in such excess that it loses all meaning and relevance. So today in Venezuela, there is cash clogging the gutters, clogging the streets, clogging the sewer system because the cash has lost all relevance. And so anecdotally, we would suspect that, okay, if there's a inverse relationship between inflation

• 3:22:37Speaker 01

  and social cohesion, if we could then take inflation to zero, couldn't we theoretically increase social cohesion to its maximum?

• 3:22:47Speaker 01

  So another way to say that is inflation is a decivilizing force. Whereas natural price deflation, which would occur in a hard money economy, where there's either a fixed supply of Bitcoin or a relatively 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.

• 3:23:30Lex Fridman?

  So we talked a little bit about the Soviet Union and I happen to have lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so what are the factors, the causes in your mind to why the Soviet Union collapsed?

• 3:23:47Speaker 01

  So I, you know, definitely a multivariate situation. I think there's a lot of factors.

• 3:23:55Speaker 01

  One that jumped out to me recently, again, from that documentary that I didn't note before, was that at one point Stalin eliminated, I think, seventy-five percent of his intelligence force.

• 3:24:08Speaker 01

  Which I think when you're competing with another nation-state, you know, and intelligence and covert operations are very integral to your survival, I think that was a, definitely a shot in the foot. But at a higher

• 3:24:25Speaker 01

  level, I would say that capitalism and communism were each resource strategies of the twentieth century nation-state.

• 3:24:36Speaker 01

  And they seem, you know, we commonly consider them to be diametrically opposed, but there's actually a lot of commonality between the two. The difference would be that in Soviet Russia, as we alluded to earlier, they tried to completely replace price signals with this nationalistic faith and devotion. So it, it, they removed the economic nerve signal, which coordinated the allocation of capital over time. So this inhibited their ability to generate wealth. Whereas in the United States, we left most markets open to free enterprise. So we, we honored the integrity of price signals and we allowed people to trade and accumulate wealth.

• 3:25:20Speaker 01

  So in every market except the market for money, both markets maintained a central bank as we, 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

• 3:25:54Speaker 01

  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

• 3:26:33Speaker 01

  more corrupt over time. It got to the point where I think most of the occupations in 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.

• 3:27:00Lex Fridman?

  But by the way, this does remind me, do you know what Jordan Peterson thinks about Bitcoin and about the future impact of Bitcoin on this society?

• 3:27:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:27:27Lex Fridman?

  The orange pill.

• 3:27:28Speaker 01

  I think his audience is one of the most important audiences in the world to understand Bitcoin. These people that are conscientious and responsible, I think they'll quickly understand Bitcoin's value proposition and help. elucidated to the world.

• 3:27:47Lex Fridman?

  I'm trying to remember what he said about about it. Basically, I think his support of Bitcoin is grounded in the kind of people who are opposing Bitcoin. So without understanding Bitcoin, he starts to like Bitcoin because of the people who are opposing it.

• 3:28:06Lex Fridman?

  You know, 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 non genuine people who are dismissing Bitcoin

• 3:28:26Lex Fridman?

  are making me think, hmm.

• 3:28:27Speaker 01

  One of Jordan's definitions of God is he says, God is found in the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies.

• 3:28:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:29:01Speaker 01

  Like Ron Paul said, it's no coincidence that the 20th century of total war was also the century of central banking.

• 3:29:09Speaker 01

  When you have an institution of currency counterfeiting, which the central bank is, you are no longer bounded by your own balance sheet when you go to war. You don't have to just go to war on your own resources. You can now pillage the Commonwealth and pull for the savings of society as a whole before you go bankrupt. And indeed, this is what Hitler did, right? Hitler hyperinflated in the Weimar Republic to fund his war efforts. And frankly, every dictator, every world war, every internment camp in history was made possible by the weaponization of money and fiat currency. So I hope.

• 3:29:54Speaker 01

  I know Jordan Peterson is a huge proponent of free speech. And I think that's ultimately at its deepest essence, that's what Bitcoin really is, right? It is just the purest form of monetary speech we've ever had. And by purifying that primary operating system of human action, I think we can eliminate this pathological hierarchy that is unfortunately the dominant institution in the world today.

• 3:30:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, 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, with a, from a perspective of a monetary perspective. Like, what are the effects of inflation? How was it used as a tool in gaining power? In maintaining power? In manipulating the populace? In doing, in inflicting suffering? And I would say evil onto the world? It's interesting. It's interesting. I'm gonna have to sort of go back into the whole.

• 3:31:05Lex Fridman?

  So I tend to focus more on the human nature and less about the tools that human nature leverages to affect 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.

• 3:31:32Speaker 01

  And there's a feedback between the two, right? There's, specifically with money itself, it's...

• 3:31:43Speaker 01

  The, and since, here's the way I've been posing it lately, is that I actually think, 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.

• 3:32:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:01Speaker 01

  So, you know, 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.

• 3:32:23Speaker 01

  Well, 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. And I think we have to honor the relationship above either one,

• 3:33:07Speaker 01

  trying to put the right people in the system or just build the right system. We need both.

• 3:33:12Lex Fridman?

  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 the cog in the machine, an ant in an ant colony that operates in a certain kind of way? Like, where do you put the blame? Do you put the blame on the way things are operating onto the individuals or onto the system itself? The idea behind the system?

• 3:33:55Lex Fridman?

  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. And so in that case, it's very difficult to be truly malevolent as you would need to be to control, to gain centralized power at a 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 then use that power for bad purposes.

• 3:34:39Speaker 01

  I think they're just people and they're just trying to get something for nothing like all of us do.

• 3:34:44Lex Fridman?

  I like this framework of thought that you have.

• 3:34:47Speaker 01

  Well, 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. So 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.

• 3:35:27Speaker 01

  By clouding people's conception of money. And, you know, if we look at the central bank is, it's been around for a while, but the latest implementation here in the US is the Fed, you know, it's about a hundred 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. There's just too much sunlight, too much transparency today. Ideas move too quickly for something like this to remain relevant. But 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.

• 3:36:13Speaker 01

  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, right? If you're totally powerless, you're a slave. Someone else tells you what to do, you have no autonomy. It's miserable, right? So there's this, it makes the consolidation of power alluring and that we want to protect ourselves from that slave state, let's say. But like many things, it can be taken too far. And when you concentrate power into too few hands, Hayek argues that it actually changes, it transforms. It becomes something much more intoxicating than it would be if it was held in a more distributed way. And I think that gets into a lot of these, you know, the, I don't know if they call themselves elites

• 3:36:58Speaker 01

  or people call them elites or what, like, I'll say shareholders of central banks, people participating in the World Economic Forum, things like this.

• 3:37:08Speaker 01

  They come, I guess the incentives, right? The incentive schema they're in is rewarding them constantly, telling them everything they're doing, seeing and thinking is correct because they just keep getting richer all the time. And it leads you closer to this definition of evil, which in the book Paradise Lost, Friedman said, evil is the force which believes its knowledge is complete. So these people become more and more convinced that they have the plan or they have the course of action that will save the world, that if everyone would just listen to them, that they would lead us to the promised land, right? Whether this is Bill Gates saving us from a climate crisis or any of these other economic

• 3:37:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:38:33Speaker 01

  So you cannot earn value in the world unless you are serving your fellow man, unless they have, expressed through their buy and sell decisions in the marketplace, right? You've created a satisfaction of a particular want that they value so much, they've acquired so much of your good or service that you've become rich. You can only maintain that position of wealth so long as you continue to serve your fellow man. So it changes the incentives such that dominance in the world is no longer, can no longer be paired with coercion. It has to be paired with competence. And it's, that's, that's how this, when we say Bitcoin fixes this, that's what we mean.

• 3:39:15Speaker 01

  Like it restores that skin in the game, that balance of incentives and disincentives that help us properly navigate reality. And it prevents the buildup of systemic rot like we see with the central bank.

• 3:39:29Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 3:39:49Speaker 01

  I think we mentioned a couple of them here today, but I think a really useful triplet of books that have been recommended recently to get, to help diffuse this materialist worldview of reality, where we, we still think in kind of the Newtonian model that it's atoms and cause and effect. 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 intrapsychic nature, really, and how they come to reflect one another in a way.

• 3:40:32Speaker 01

  Like, the way we think, again, shapes the world and then the way the world is shaped, shapes the way we think. That's an excellent book. It's a very dense and difficult read. Actually, this trilogy is pretty brutal. 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. So this, this realm of, of non-materialist relevance

• 3:41:16Speaker 01

  that I think is really important to grasping economics at a first principles level. I think that book lays it out tremendously. And then the last one would be, I think I mentioned this at the beginning, was that book, Leila by Robert Persig, where he's, you know, making the case that value is fundamental. And all of these books, all, they kind of all point to that, actually. They're pointing back to value being the fundamental thing. Values and, values expressed through moral action as being the fundamental substrate of reality. So it'll, 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.

• 3:41:56Lex Fridman?

  So you said these books are difficult. Maybe you can comment on which aspect is difficult. Is it just the technical nature? Is it the length? Is it the depth of the ideas? Or how long it takes to integrate them? And more sort of importantly, is there recommendation advice you can give on how to integrate these ideas? How to read? How to learn in this space? Is there, from your own life? Like, how do you enjoy taking in ideas? And 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, or even watching podcasts and all those kinds of things?

• 3:42:38Speaker 01

  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's 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. You can train your brain to just absorb words in their totality versus kind of reading word by word.

• 3:43:05Lex Fridman?

  And also not, 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.

• 3:43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:43:17Lex Fridman?

  I'm saying the words inside my head and that's actually getting in the way.

• 3:43:21Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:43:21Lex Fridman?

  So there's a lot of little hacks like that. I maybe lazily, now that you mention it, I'll have to revisit this. But I have convinced myself that I don't need to read faster because that's not ultimately the bottleneck. The bottleneck is in the me thinking about stuff. In fact, I like reading really slowly, or so I convinced myself. Because ultimately, it's not about gaining more information. It's about... Time spent thinking deeply.

• 3:43:47Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 3:43:49Lex Fridman?

  But 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.

• 3:43:58Speaker 01

  It's fine. I like to be dynamic, actually. So 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 when you're reading the word out loud.

• 3:44:12Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 3:44:12Speaker 01

  Out in your thoughts. If you're speed reading, you can't do that. You're just, you're taking in groups of words at a time. So you can't, you know, internally verbalize it, I guess. And then I also am 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. And I also advocate rereading a lot. So if you found something that, you know, struck you at a deep level, you found particularly fascinating. Like you have to listen to that. That's your, I don't know, your mind or your spirit signal that that is something meaningful to you. And you should, you know, to your point, reread it, sit with it for a long time, write about it.

• 3:45:00Speaker 01

  And that, 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.

• 3:45:19Speaker 01

  So definitely highly recommend people to do that. And in terms of how are those books difficult? I mean, in every way, they're all long books. In terms of density, I would say Leela is the less, the least dense. Maybe Maps of Meaning.

• 3:45:41Speaker 01

  I don't know, but Maps of Meaning and Human Action are both extremely dense. But they're just, I had to read those books very slow. You just have to take your time with them. To give you an idea, with Jordan Peterson, he's said this a lot with Maps of Meaning. He spent three hours a day writing for 15 years to write that book. It's probably, I think it's a 600-page book. He said he estimates he rewrote every sentence in the book 50 times, five zero, to try and get it, you know, just perfected. And when you read these sentences, you can tell that he rewrote it 50 times.

• 3:46:17Lex Fridman?

  I've, I've used actually Anki for spaced repetition. It's like a piece of, it's an app. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it allows you to load in facts, or terms, or entire paragraphs. And then it brings them, you review them every day, and then it brings them up less and less often over time as you show yourself being able to remember the thing that you wanted to memorize. And oftentimes when I'm reading, what I want to memorize is the key idea. But also, like, I use it for, I'm terrible with names, so I'm starting to use it for names too, of names of people, names of, like, people that I want to remember.

• 3:47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:47:02Lex Fridman?

  And also throughout history, and also in my own personal life, but also events. You know, dates to me are usually not important, but sometimes dates are really important. And so it's really useful. I recommend it highly. 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. And what it does is it goes to your highlights from your Kindle, or the various places where you highlight stuff that integrates with Goodreads. And it does the same kind of spaced repetition, but for things you've highlighted. It's, it sends an email every day.

• 3:47:44Lex Fridman?

  It's been really, I recommend it highly because it it sends like to me in email form, a selection of the things I've highlighted in previous things I've read. And it's like this weird like shock shock to your memory that sprinkles like I'll have a I have probably way too much Orwell in there. And it just kind of like it brings you back and 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 and like an emotional impact on you. And so like these thing are just like hitting you hard again. It's like, whoa, it might not be meaningful to anyone else except you.

• 3:48:29Lex Fridman?

  And it's it's something I recommend. You never know with these like hacks or tools and so on, like 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 I think.

• 3:48:44Speaker 01

  It's read wise, you said.

• 3:48:45Lex Fridman?

  Read wise or something close to that. It could be read something else like read wealth or something.

• 3:48:52Speaker 01

  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, right? There's just, there's so many. I exclusively listen to podcasts when I'm walking or when I'm at the gym, anytime I'm doing something that I can't, you know, read basically. And I think there's something really special about exercise and ideation. I mean, I, I don't know if this happens to everyone, but my creative juices just go ballistic when I'm at the gym, like I hit a certain point of, I guess, heart rate and you're sweating enough that the ideas just 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.

• 3:49:39Speaker 01

  You know, where you're just strenuous exercise, I guess you would say. And then I'm end up typing notes into my phone as fast as I can with all these ideas that are flowing. So I've I've created a lot of good writing out of that.

• 3:49:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's it's kind of work. 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 like the the stuff that's either World War Two or World War One related. So Hitler, Stalin, like, like difficult historical stuff.

• 3:50:18Lex Fridman?

  And also listen to brown noise. So those are the two modes. So brown noise helps me. It's 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. It helps me remove the world. So one, I'll be listening to difficult historical ideas. And then when my mind is all of a sudden starting to generate ideas, I'll listen to brown noise and then force myself to think. It's kind of, it's meditative in a sense. And your mind wants to be lazy. You want to, you, it's hard, man, like running and thinking

• 3:51:00Lex Fridman?

  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 like thinking through it has been really for me rewarding in the same way that you're saying is 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.

• 3:51:46Lex Fridman?

  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 uh, to explore ideas. It's so easy to fill the, the space

• 3:51:58Lex Fridman?

  that usually would be thought, filled with thought, instead fill it with fun podcasts. Like, there's a bunch of comedy podcasts I really enjoy. So, there's value to that, of course, but you have to realize it's entertainment. It's not, uh, it's, it's not, um, you don't get much value except entertainment.

• 3:52:16Speaker 01

  Right, right. And there's utility to the boredom too, I think, where to give your mind the space, I guess your subconscious, maybe 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 gotta write it down. Or sometimes it's, uh, in nature, taking a walk. But I think that's very important too. We can't just brute force our way into understanding. You know, there's this interplay between kind of the brute force,

• 3:52:55Speaker 01

  reading intake and then just relaxing, meditating, sleeping, being bored, uh, letting your subconscious do the, the heavy lifting.

• 3:53:04Lex Fridman?

  And there's, uh, you should be aware of the fact that there's a war for your attention going on. So there's a lot of, there's been better and better and better mechanisms that are designed to steal your attention. So I kind of see it as a war zone between my right for boredom and the internet wanting your attention. In fact, um, Clubhouse is an app has been, I'm probably not gonna use Clubhouse much anymore. There's, 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. So I wanna.

• 3:53:49Speaker 01

  That's way more important.

• 3:53:50Lex Fridman?

  It's way, well, yeah, at least, you know, it's all in balance. Cause there is a clubhouse, like a lot of these social networks, when you use right, can be a way to discover new ideas, new people. But the boredom and just being alone with your thoughts is priceless.

• 3:54:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And you gotta know yourself, right? Like, it took me a long time to realize, I need solitude.

• 3:54:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:54:12Speaker 01

  Like, just how I'm wired, how I'm built, I need like an hour a day solitude. So you gotta 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.

• 3:54:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I try to, I try to remember things that made me feel good over time, like long-term had positive impact, and long-term had negative impact, and do more of the former and less of the latter. 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.

• 3:54:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:54:50Lex Fridman?

  In the moment, it's hard to remember that. But you have to remember that, that that's the case. In the same way, exercise, it's hard to remember that exercise makes me feel good.

• 3:55:04Speaker 01

  Especially when it's time to go to the gym.

• 3:55:06Lex Fridman?

  Especially when it's time to go to the gym, but you should remember that, because the kind of person you are without exercise, for me, just like he beautifully said, that you have to know yourself, the kind of person I am without exercise is a less good person, a person, a person I'm less proud of.

• 3:55:23Speaker 01

  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 could just have one, or you just do this. But for me, it's sugar, like, sugar just makes me feel terrible. But I always, not always, but if it's been a long time, I start to make that exception in my mind, like, oh, you can have a little bit.

• 3:55:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:55:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:55:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, it depends on how painful it is and then you learn the lesson. I've haven't, I actually embrace 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.

• 3:56:13Speaker 01

  Nazdrovia.

• 3:56:14Lex Fridman?

  Nazdrovia. Very good. So it never makes me feel good. It never results in anything good.

• 3:56:24Lex Fridman?

  Except the beautiful, social chaos.

• 3:56:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:56:28Lex Fridman?

  Which is ultimately somehow, there's value to chaos too. Yes. 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. Cause the world, sometimes especially when you get older and the world wants you to be an adult.

• 3:56:56Lex Fridman?

  In order to maintain the youthful spirit, you have to use all the tools you can. Alcohol is one of them.

• 3:57:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:57:02Lex Fridman?

  To do all the stupid shit you can, even if you're like getting older.

• 3:57:06Speaker 01

  To lower the inhibitions and.

• 3:57:08Lex Fridman?

  Lower the.

• 3:57:08Speaker 01

  Again, it's that, that taste of uncertainty that is the sweetness of life, right? To be able to go out and be a flanur at a party and not really know what you're gonna do. And it's, we, 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 gonna 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, the idea, the repertoire for dealing with bigger ideas. Because alcohol's fun. It's amazing, you know, good times.

• 3:57:48Speaker 01

  It can be analgesic, it can do all of the, 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, that I just reached a 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,

• 3:58:31Speaker 01

  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-

• 3:58:45Lex Fridman?

  But you're a proponent for sacrifice in some domain.

• 3:58:47Speaker 01

  I am a big proponent for sacrifice, yes.

• 3:58:49Lex Fridman?

  Is there advice you would give to a young person today, curious about Bitcoin, curious about how they succeed in a world, or both career-wise and just in life in general?

• 3:59:04Speaker 01

  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 60/40 portfolio and put it in a Roth IRA 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 of What Is Money? Like, I think that, to me, is the rabbit that took me down the rabbit hole. It's like just asking

• 3:59:49Speaker 01

  that question naturally progressed to these other questions, like what is value? What is government? What is, you know, what is the purpose of society? Speech, all of these things. So I would encourage people to-

• 4:00:05Speaker 01

  Arm yourself with knowledge and study like that. That a lot of financial people always give you, you know, a line of advice and then say, this is not financial advice or like this is financial advice. Like study, study, learn.

• 4:00:20Lex Fridman?

  Knowledge is power.

• 4:00:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:00:22Lex Fridman?

  This is official financial advice.

• 4:00:23Speaker 01

  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's our, it feels like almost a sacred duty to really sharpen that part of ourselves and use it to create the best world possible.

• 4:00:45Speaker 01

  And then, you know, the second one was the, I think, health and fitness stuff. I, I was, maybe everyone does this in their twenties. They just live a little fast and beat themselves up.

• 4:01:00Speaker 01

  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 got my act together a little bit sooner.

• 4:01:13Speaker 01

  I just think.

• 4:01:13Lex Fridman?

  Health wise, morality wise.

• 4:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, drinking, I think morality and eating, you know, I just was kind of doing whatever I wanted in some ways, let's say.

• 4:01:25Lex Fridman?

  Is there a value to a trajectory that includes a lot of mistakes? So maybe you're supposed to make the mistakes in your twenties.

• 4:01:31Speaker 01

  That's a great point.

• 4:01:32Lex Fridman?

  Maybe the twenties are all about the mistakes. Accumulate the most mistakes possible.

• 4:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't.

• 4:01:36Lex Fridman?

  As quickly as possible.

• 4:01:39Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 4:02:07Lex Fridman?

  There's a, there's probably a guy doing vodka shots right now, listening to this podcast with his buddies and they, if you are, please take a shot for us, for all the mistakes you should make in your twenties.

• 4:02:21Lex Fridman?

  And what about love?

• 4:02:26Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 4:03:06Speaker 01

  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, I love these potato chips. I love you, man. I love you, my daughter. This has got so many different intensities, I guess you might say. I don't know. My intuition is that it is something very fundamental to the universe. Again, I know words under a justice, but if we just proxy love with selfless action, the whole damn universe is selflessly acting, right? It's just unfolding.

• 4:03:48Speaker 01

  And it may sound a bit hippy 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...

• 4:04:00Lex Fridman?

  In the way you're framing it, it's making me think that love, we talked about sort of meditation, is, as opposed to thinking from an egocentric perspective of you, the individual, operating in this world, is allowing you to be empathetic towards the world and thereby, think of the universe, think of the world acting through you, 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 like embracing that thought. That's a weird thought.

• 4:04:45Lex Fridman?

  That's a 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, like a river flows. Is using us to create more and more beautiful things.

• 4:05:07Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, more and more beautiful things. We are the universe experiencing itself, frankly, right?

• 4:05:14Lex Fridman?

  So. That's a trippy thought, man. Yeah. That in some sense, the universe created us.

• 4:05:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:05:21Lex Fridman?

  To experience itself.

• 4:05:22Speaker 01

  And we are the high, you know, one of the highest forms of beauty that nature has created. If we just think one of the most complex and adaptive thing, we're a reflection of nature. And another thing that comes to mind here is that Dalio has this quote where he says, truth, or more accurately, an accurate depiction of reality is necessary for any good outcome. So when we think that love or value is primary, I think that too reinforces this thesis that acting out of love or acting out of proper moral action, you're best reflecting the fundamental nature of reality.

• 4:06:07Speaker 01

  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. And, you know, 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, I, I've tried to listen to my heart throughout, and I think, I think that creates the best outcomes.

• 4:06:36Lex Fridman?

  But nevertheless, does it make you sad that you in particular, Robert, are going to be dead pretty soon? As, 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.

• 4:07:00Speaker 01

  Only time and Bitcoin are absolutely scarce.

• 4:07:04Speaker 01

  I'm fortunate that when I, 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.

• 4:07:20Speaker 01

  Who wrote, Musashi wrote The Book of Five Rings.

• 4:07:24Speaker 01

  Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. And one of the things that, I mean, these guys were just absolute beasts. You know, they lived and died by the sword and they were just very

• 4:07:36Speaker 01

  great equanimity about all things in life. And I also found this kind of in the Stoic philosophy where they just are very cool with everything. And one of the lines there is that the way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of death. And so I've always tried to think about that. Like, of course, I experience fear. I experience, you know, everything that you do on a meat suit, right? Like anxiety and all the things, but I always try to have that higher order view of myself and that it's just a certain experience occurring at a certain level, but it shouldn't override your kind of highest order self.

• 4:08:15Speaker 01

  That's just resolutely accepted death and that this is your one play in life. So hopefully that propels me towards proper action.

• 4:08:28Lex Fridman?

  I think scarcity cannot help but lead to something good. Just like with this conversation sadly must come to an end. The scarcity of it is what makes it beautiful. So, Robert, this was one of my favorite conversations philosophically and in every other level. Just the ideas and the way you express them around Bitcoin, around morality, around money,

• 4:08:57Lex Fridman?

  has been really inspiring and really educational. And I'm glad you're out there fighting the good fight. And 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, this was really fun, man.

• 4:09:15Speaker 01

  This was awesome, man. Thanks for having me, man.

• 4:09:18Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Robert Breedlove, and thank you to Fundrise, Element, Monkpack, 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 and robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stay the same. The antifragile gets better."

• 4:09:46Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.