The Pomp Podcast - #1099 Robert Breedlove On Money, Power, War & Bitcoin

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Robert Breedlove is one of the great thinkers in the Bitcoin space. In this conversation, we talk about money as a proxy for power, the difference between physical & political power, and Bitcoin as an indestructible symbolic system. ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem.Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Alto CryptoIRA lets you invest in more than 200 different coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA.They make it easy to fund your Alternative IRA or CryptoIRA via your 401(k) or IRA rollover or by contributing directly from your bank account. There are no setup or account fees, and it’s all you need to do to invest in crypto tax free. Let me repeat that again:You can invest in crypto tax free. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Even better? Eight Sleep recently launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with double the amount of sensors, delivering you the best sleep experience on Earth. Go to eightsleep.com/pomp ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Robert Breedlove is one of the great thinkers in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In this conversation, we talk about money as a proxy for power. We define the difference between physical and political power. And then we talk about Bitcoin as an indestructible symbolic system. I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert, as always, and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. Once you listen to this episode, make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast and then get on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agree with,

and what you disagreed with. We enjoy the conversation as much as we do actually recording them. All right, let's get in this episode with Robert. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Robert here with me. I thought a great place that we could start the conversation is money is a proxy for

power. This is one of the big ideas I think that you've been thinking a lot about and talking about. what does that mean? Money is a proxy for power. Yeah. I guess I should first probably give a shout out to people that have helped me form these ideas. You know, Saylor's been very noteworthy for bringing this energy element into the discussion of money. Before him, I was really focused on the time aspect. And then people like Lowry started to bring this power projection thesis to the foreground and when i really started to dissect that and you look at power through the lens of physics there's a formula for power actually and it it has components of both energy and time so i'm hoping that this framing is a little bit more useful and telling about the nature and

history of money and then it also but to get there we have to kind of decompose power itself and start to define it um in my opinion you know most people i think today when we say power they think it's just like arbitrary political like i'm your boss or i'm your state statesman something like that i can tell you what to do my willpower is superordinate over yours but that's all of this political power that we create in our imaginations there's this other form of power that's very important which is physical power and um you know so money i guess is it somewhat obvious like if we talk about money in terms of purchasing power which is what we ultimately want you don't want whether you know it or not you don't want a number of dollars in

your bank account you what you actually desire is the purchasing power that money provides to you yes so when we talk about inflation being a diminishing of the purchasing power per unit that's why prices go up etc etc so there's a there's a parasitic relationship occurring in fiat currency, where producers of that currency are basically siphoning power off of those that use it and save in it. So this isn't like an original idea, really, like, again, if you just what you want in money is purchasing power. So money is a proxy for power. But then it gets interesting, I think, when we break it down into how it relates to the physical dimension of power versus the political dimension. Okay, talk about the physical one first. What does it mean the

physical dimension of power? Yeah. So I think the first, you know, when we start these deep conversations, we need to back up a little bit first. So first thing to understand is that humans are animals, right? We are participating in this Darwinian process of survival. I like to say that, you know, we are basically genetic information encoded for survival or programmed for survival through eons of evolution adapted to our surroundings to survive. So we are this message if you will propagating through blood flesh bone etc and in that way all life forms it's not just humans obviously all life forms are basically these survival strategies propagating through organisms and i think this is honestly this is a good through line too

because your your organs individually have their own survival strategy they've specialized if you will in this economy of your body the organism itself is a a macro representation of that and then even organizations that we create in the world they behave like organisms right they have life cycles they live and die in terms of economics they have to have more inflows and outflows just like you have to eat more calories than you expend otherwise you die so this is these are all systems of energy or power and that like we were talking about the italian prime minister video earlier that just aired and she had this great line in there where she said something to the effect of each of our genetic code is unique non-repeatable and therefore sacred yes it's like yes that's what

we're doing like and if you you have kids i have kids you know what it's like to be a parent like mother nature sort of flips a dial inside of you it's not something that is really within our control at all like we are part of nature rather than just controlling nature and so in that sense I think, you know, Nietzsche is famous for his, his will to power quote. And I think he's right, honestly, but he asked, you have to understand power through the physics sense. And so I'll read his quote real quick. Nietzsche wrote, even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals will have to be an incarnate will to power. It will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because

life simply is will to power so what we're doing right now like to breathe to speak to think to talk to move these are all expressions of a will to power because well to define power in the physics sense it's ultimately just to move energy across time so it's the capacity to move that's what power is in a purely physics sense and to get into the formula physics is power equals work divided by time um work so i have to decompose that formula further now work equals force times displacement which basically means a force applied across space so what do we do when we combine that You basically get power equals force times space divided by time. It sounds ridiculous.

But what it basically means is power is just the capacity for movement. That's what we're doing here. That's what we're doing in economics is we're trying to increase the amount of natural resources we can mobilize and bend it to our will to further our wants in the world, to satisfy more human wants in the world. It reminds me of two things. One is like weapons of war is who can move analog physical assets faster, larger, create more destruction, right? All these things. So if you think of a bullet, it's basically the ability to project power at a speed and in a very concentrated surface area to penetrate, whether it's armor, a human body, whatever. The other thing is things like an RPG in the most general sense basically are able to puncture armor and then insert a grenade-like object to then explode, which is another kind of secondary use of power.

So like the weapons of war is very obvious. But also, if you think of a corporation, which really is one of the key foundations of the Industrial Revolution and the ability to organize resources and people and capital and all these things, it was done not because people sat around like, let's create more bureaucracy, like, oh, we're unorganized. It was done because there was leverage to create more force, more movement and the ability to increase output. Yes. Right. And so in both of those situations, you are creating output. One is for an economic agenda. The other is for kind of a geopolitical or a war agenda. Yes. But it is all output. That's a great, great example, actually. And obviously closely related are the weapons of war and the political power structures. And I like the example of the corporation, too, because that is an imaginal structure, right? We fabricated that in the imagination of ourselves, and we implement it into the collective imagination, if you will.

And I'll expand on what more of this means as we go, but I guess the key point so far is that it grounds out in physics, right? As reality grounds out in physics. If you're not moving, breathing, talking, you're not alive, right? You're not relevant to this socioeconomic game we're all playing with each other. So in economics, you know, the entire point is to increase the division of labor. And we talked about this last time on our previous episode, but basically there is a physical principle that human beings accomplish more working cooperatively rather than they do in isolation. And so if that was not true, we would not trade with one another. It's not like we just decided to do this out of the kindness of our hearts.

It's a very pragmatic mode of being, let's say. Another kind of point to this, which I think is very interesting, there's a book that I recently read called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. It talks all about 1870 to 1970. And it completely changed the way that I looked at so many different things. But one of the key concepts was pretty much 1870 to like 1900, 1920, somewhere in there. Every single home was essentially an individual node. They were what they called un-networked. So they were not connected when it came to electricity, when it came to sewage and water and like all these different things.

And it basically had to operate in a way where you said you have humans who live inside of this home. They have to get water and food and power and all these different components. And the people in that home went out into the world every day and did the things necessary to be able to do that. And so, you know, it was something like 75 percent of all people who lived at that time ended up doing jobs that were undesirable. A very large portion of them were farmers and they operated off of the land, like all this stuff. By the time you get to, for sure, 1970, but even as early as like 1920, those homes now had, you know, four or five different components. They now were networked for electricity. They were networked for water. They were networked for all these different things. and so in some way while we think of individual versus a group from a productivity standpoint

also on a societal standpoint if everyone was siloed in a single home on and they had to live off the land there's production that happens right but damn is it powerful when you put all these folks together in a network and they work on okay you're going to be the power company right right you make sure we all have power somebody else you're going to be the water company right and it ends up bringing people together in a really unique way that ends up increasing economic output 100 we what did uh biology said this at the conference yesterday many apes strong with a line from uh planet of the apes i think so when we cooperate especially when we cooperate intelligently right like you specialize in this i'll specialize in that we'll each honor one

another's property rights and we'll trade that's what increases the division of labor and allows us to accomplish way more than the sum of our parts yes so and that's the whole that's why we tinker that's why we innovate that's why we trade is to achieve greater results with less efforts that is equivalent to wealth right we can do more satisfy more wants enjoy more of a luxurious lifestyle ultimately because let's face it we live in absolute luxury compared to people 100 years ago or 200 years ago and that is you know there's a lot of problems to solve in the world but if you can solve that one that at least creates the freedom for people to go and address other problem so i think it's the most fundamental thing we should try and address as a species so

to do that and this is among the defining features of humanity we use open source technologies largely to contribute to that language mathematics even money as we've talked about before like gold i would argue is kind of an analog open source technology everyone could see how it works no one could do anything about it so it you know took over the world for a number of reasons. But all of these are designed to optimize our coordination. And there's a great term from a guy I talked to named John Vervaeke. He calls these psychotechnologies. So whereas a technology, like a physical technology, increases our fitness to the world, or fitness to purpose somehow, a psychotechnology is just something that enhances our cognitive

fitness to the world. So the fact that I can make these sounds with my mouth right now, and you know what I'm saying, it's because we're both users of this open source technology called english yes and so that is very fundamental to creating that division of labor that creates all this wealth and allows us to engage in the process of civilization so technologies psychotechnologies all really important to human flourishing but i think the key a key point that and this is where i hope this conversation is a little bit unique these things are all born in the human imagination yes like we we always forget to stop and consider that yes and when you start to have this lens on the world when i walk around downtown miami and i'm looking at all these you know high rises and

cars and all the software people are using i'm just you can get almost overwhelming like all of this was just born in someone's imagination and then well many people's imaginations over time and you they go and imprint that imagination into physical reality to create all this stuff so it's a very key component to all of this that we're talking about and that's it so we said humans are animals but humans are different because humans are animals with very sophisticated imaginations yes so we create these tools to increase our fitness to each other uh and to the world and again if you have kids this is sort of obvious i have to thank my daughter for inspiring a lot of this they grow up just plain imaginary non-stop right non-stop like new new outfit new

role new name you're this you're that here's my stuffed animal that's named this and then we just think kids stop doing that arbitrarily somewhere like in teenage years no we don't stop at all we're doing it right now right like you run a business several businesses those are all imaginal structures right people willingly engage in those hierarchies and assume a role in that structure but it's all imaginal right the authority that the boss projects over the employee like it's they've connected their imaginations together in this enterprise called the business and that's what we do that's how we run the world is because we engage with the our imaginal realities to reshape physical realities in a very sophisticated way i think a lot about real estate

like commercial real estate so um there is a couple blocks from here huge uh entire block of grass and it's kind of in a weird part because it's in downtown but it's grass there's nothing there and so uh i've walked by it hundreds of times and i've always said to myself like somebody's gonna do something with that somebody's gonna do something with that right something could be a strip mall could be a high-rise like there's a bunch of different things that you could do somebody could build a parking deck there right whatever it is recently it was announced that they are going to uh create a very large high-rise building that's residential with restaurants and all stuff well when they make that announcement uh they say who's gonna do it and what do they do

And they publicized the renderings of what is going to be there. And so somebody sat down and drew, this is what we could do. And they socialized it with the group. And the group was like, that looks awesome. We should do that. People will want to live there. That will create economic activity. The numbers work.

Like all of these other things started to follow. But it's not very different than a young kid sitting down saying like, look at this house I drew. Right? And what becomes fascinating is – and I think that this was maybe one of the Carlson brothers at Stripe or somebody I saw tweet and was like, you forget when you walk around that things that exist in the world, buildings, businesses, cars, all this stuff, somebody had to have the idea. Somebody had to have the conviction and the courage to go try to build it. And then somebody had to operationalize it to actually say, yes, it's possible to build a car. but what if we built tens of thousands of cars every single year what if we were able to actually create lots of concrete what if we were able to create elevators what if we were able to use glass

for windows and and do all this stuff and it sounds so stupid because you're like yeah guys duh like there's buildings but if you really kind of draw it back it's like human imagination in some way is the same thing like oxygen to the human body oh interesting right without the imagination you don't really have a society there's no civilization for sure yeah that you all you have is just straight up i kill you you kill me i need food for my family the imagination is what gives order organization uh and ultimately economic productivity super well said um yeah we're fighting against you know nature gives us plenty of uncertainty to deal with and the imagination as our greatest defense or weapon against that let's say and i don't know if that's the same

tweet you're referring to but someone referred to the entire world as a museum of passion projects so when you see all of these buildings and businesses and ideas and games and everything everything that humans create right starts here and then through a whole lot of work and perseverance sometimes if it's successful gets imprinted into the real world and then we just like plug into these realities and take them for granted in a lot of ways but it's easy to forget how much it took to get to this point so i guess the point is most people think kids stop playing imaginary at some point but i would say if you've got a job if you use money if you're a citizen of a country then you are engaged in serious imaginal play whether you understand it or not yep and i

would say if you don't understand it actually you're more likely to be possessed by one of those structures. Rather than if you understand how this works, you can just be a voluntary participant, let's say. And so I want to call these something. I want to call these imaginal structures. We often call them hierarchies. You could call them social institutions. You could call them imaginal structures. Yuval Harari in his book, Sapiens, I think called these the imagined orders. I today, I'm just, so all these terms, I'm going to use the term symbolic structure. okay so language is symbolic right we're using code to communicate and then when we press all those ideas together and then push them into the physical world when we press them together we

create a symbolic structure that gets pushed in the physical world to become a skyscraper or become a battleship or whatever it is so your company money nation states these are all symbolic structures that we inhabit in this imaginal space. Um, so we're, we're storytellers, right? That's what we're saying here. These are just stories. It's like Jordan Peterson always talks about. We live in stories. First time I heard that, I was like, that sounds ridiculous. Of course, everything's a story because everything's a description of a sequence of events, but that's not, I don't think that's what he meant. He meant something more like this, that we're creating these imagined realities and then we inhabit them like as in as a member of society

let's say plato has a great quote he said those who tell stories rule society this is fucking plato right like he got this he very brilliant guy there's another quote that someone said this reminded them of uh when i posted this on twitter they said who controls the past now controls the future who controls the present now controls the past so in these very deep but very true yes in these symbolic structures you know we've heard this quote history is written by the winners it's very often that the symbolic structure gets written or rewritten by the winner in the domain of the physical, right? So physical warfare.

If a new country undergoes a revolution and a new leader is installed, they'll typically go straight to work rewriting history. All right, if you go to North Korea today, there's all these statues deifying Kim, whatever his name is. Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un.

So that's how he is dominating the symbolic structure of North Korea is by deifying himself as part of it i think it's even uh i believe it uh you have to have a photo of him in your home so it's not just like the public you know uh i would say uh open spaces i don't know how open they are yeah um but like literally in your own home you have to have a photo of him that's crazy um but and so the uval harari thing in sapiens his whole punch line sorry to ruin the book if you haven't read it but human beings are the animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers there's many species that can cooperate flexibly um

example escapes me here there's many that can cooperate in large numbers like bees but they can't the way he puts it is only human you can only unite 10 000 human beings on a battlefield under a flag so whereas all these other animals are subject to the dunbar number or something equivalent for their species human beings are not we can combine our forces in a way that no other animal can and that's the reason we're the top of the food chain basically and so i think this is points to to why the struggle has always been for the collective human imagination right religion propaganda even modern nation statism where you it's much more energy efficient to get people to subscribe to your symbolic structure than it is to force it on them. Yes. Because if

you force it on them, they're going to, you know, cut corners, backstab you at every chance you can get. And we know this, we know this intuitively. So the, um, the game I guess is to try and be influential. Right. And so I want to focus on, we could talk about that for a long time. There's a lot of history there, but I want to focus on the nation state because that's the one we live in today, right? This is the dominant symbolic structure in the world. And I'm here, as you were there yesterday, to attend an event talking about the network state, which is this, let's say, embryonic idea for the future of nation states. And there was a small gathering here in Miami and a lot of really interesting ideas thrown around. And one was shared with me that you could actually

decompose nation state into nation and state sounds pretty obvious but the nation is more uh uh the root word of nation is natility i want to say and this relates to like natal so like the birth and growth of a people so this is going to refer to the people the culture the wisdom traditions uh the modes of being etc the state though is the like administrative layer or the political apparatus within that area that's really there it's a monopoly on violence that exists to resolve disputes over uh resolve disputes of people over scarce resources so another way to say that is the state exists to preserve the relationship between people and their stuff so if you create something of value and someone tries to take that from you recourse to the state

is how you resolve that. So we've outsourced the defense of our property effectively. And at its best, a nation state wields political power, and I'm going to get into what political power means shortly, to defend the market process from interruption. So you want people to be maximally free. And to be maximally free, you need strong property, or you need an integrity of the relationship between you and your stuff, so that you can engage in the process of a consensual exchange, increase the division of labor, increase wealth, and therefore increase the collective physical power harnessed by human beings in the marketplace, right? So it's this, and as we talked about last time, I framed this as useful ideas a lot.

And so it's kind of the same thing. It's more useful ideas are implemented, whether it's property, whether it's an iPhone or a laptop, these are just better ideas for communicating or accomplishing human purpose. that gives you more movement and more wealth creation. So that's what the state acts as like this insulating layer to prevent that from being attacked. But we've been trapped in this situation with the state for a long time that it tends to start to prey on the very thing it's supposed to protect over time,

which has been a real problem. When you start to kind of unpack the division of labor and a lot of these pieces it feels like the sum of the parts are more valuable than them individually but also when you then overlay things like property rights you then are able to do something very different because actually property rights usually are thought of as defense so you cannot take my property but in some way it's also a uh tailwind to give people more conviction to specialize yes so when you think of the farm why did you have the ability to get water food and all the things you needed for you and your family to survive because you had no confidence that anyone

else was coming to save you right now when you move to modern society i don't think that i know very many people who have a farm because they have greater confidence that the food supply whether you like it or not or think it's good or could be improved or whatever will provide food and so they have the confidence to not have to go spend time on farming because they say somebody else in our society has taken on that division of labor and i am going to go specialize in whatever whether it's a white collar job a blue collar job or anything in between and so property rights not only protect what you're doing but it gives you the confidence to become more and more and more specialized and still have the safety net of society that says yes food will be at the grocery

store yes whether you have property rights or not if at any point your confidence that food will be at the grocery store or clean water is going to be there or any of these things that you don't specialize in, if that ever breaks down, that's when all hell breaks loose. And we return back to a world where no one had confidence and they had to be self-sufficient. And there's just not a lot of people that are prepared to do that. Yes. Yeah. That would be the collapse of the division of labor, the collapse of wealth creation, which is equivalent to the collapse of civilization. Yes. It's like I hammer this point so hard. Wealth is demonized a lot. Wealth should not be demonized. It's the basis of the solution to most problems, I would argue.

And I think that point you made is so good because what does that mean, right? Confidence in property rights. That means other people are engaging in this symbolic structure, playing this imaginal game with you. And it's the confidence you have that they'll continue to honor the rules of the game, as will you. Now, if confidence is shaken for any reason, it unwinds the whole thing. The whole thing goes involuted. This episode is brought to you by Alto IRA. They can help you invest in Bitcoin and crypto in a tax-advantaged way.

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the changing of a law is no different than the five kids out in the backyard being like okay now uh that used to be out of bounds now it's not out of bounds anymore and then people start running over there and the game continues like that is the exact equivalent of legislation and Laws and like all these things that grownups are playing. Yes. But also laws and human nature are sometimes at odds. Yes. But the beauty of good laws is that it is able to use human nature as and align those incentives so that humans will do what humans are going to do, but do it within some agreed upon framework.

Yes. and so you know i always go back to like if there was no laws would most people go out in the streets and start killing people probably not right but if there was no food in a city and families were going hungry it doesn't matter if there's laws or not at some point right i think there's a saying like uh you really see what a man is capable of if uh if he doesn't eat for three days yeah right and so it's almost like the laws have to align with the human nature because you can't have people like the laws don't matter if people are hungry yeah the laws don't matter if people feel like uh their life's in danger yeah and you actually see this in society like thou shall

not kill is written into law yes except for if he's gonna kill you then you can you know what It's a very weird way to look at it, but in some way, the law and human nature do have to align or therefore society eventually rejects the law. 100%. So much good stuff there. Peterson, again, this idea that what you just said, thou shall not kill, is written directly into the law. there's a mythological substructure to western civilization a lot of it is the judeo-christian mythology right we we would not have gotten to property rights if we did not have thou shall not kill in our history like that's another important it's a it's almost like the blockchain of the imaginal structure right it's building in layers over time we didn't just decide out of the blue

that we're going to create the united states i mean read the federalist peppers papers these guys were diehard Christian, or at least inspired by the Bible to a large extent. And what you said too, like good laws map onto good incentives. And I would argue that people don't really follow laws, actually. People follow incentives, right? Now, if there's a credible threat of force behind a law, then that's a disincentive to break it. So you might follow it for some period of time, but ultimately people are going to bend to their own incentives. And the point with the kids, the kids hey that's out of bounds now that's out of bounds what do you think we're doing with national borders yes we're that's it this is this is your country this is my country and there's

layers to it like there's national borders but even if you think of like voting districts like that's the one that always cracks me up right is that like you ever seen them drawn and it looks like a square and then in one corner like reaches out and grabs like a city right and comes back and you're like if i was just to come up with a random voting city or voting district that's not the shape that i would draw right now it may be for good reason or bad reason or whatever right people love to debate that stuff but like that is the drawing of imaginary lines that then feed into a game that is around voting yes that then dictates who gets to play what role in the game who benefits from the proceeds stolen from taxation and inflation that's what that game is

Right. You get voted in office and then you get to decide what to do with the stolen booty. So, again, we needed to play that game because we needed to create integrity of relationship between people and their stuff in the physical world. But the problem with that game is that monopolist on violence, the security provider over time has tended to start to bend the rules to their own favor. The individuals that come into power inside of the state have tended to corrupt the state, and we'll get into corruption a bit later. And I also think a key piece of this is that's part of the division of labor, which people tend to forget, of like if you go back 200 years, like guess who protected your home? You better. Right. Right?

Because if you didn't or you and your equivalent of a neighborhood did not, you were fucked. Yes. And so at some point, the farmer said, okay, this other person is going to be the farmer and going to provide food for the village. And this other person is going to provide the security. This other person is going to provide whatever the horses or whatever the division of labor ended up being. But you had to have the confidence, not only in the property rights and all this, but they would do their job. Yeah. Because the fastest way for people to get really interested in self-defense is to look at a group of people and say, you can't protect me. Yeah. Right. And you see this actually the place where unfortunately we see it is look at natural disasters.

Natural disasters come in and it breaks down so many of the agreed upon kind of structures of a society. And so if you go back to Hurricane Katrina maybe a decade ago or so now, I remember that there was – the National Guard was being called in. And literally you had armed National Guard men and women who were patrolling Walmart because Walmart was selling their physical goods and they were keeping the money in the back because there was no armored trucks to come pick it up. right like you start to say okay hold on a second did walmart call did an individual in the community did the governor like i don't know how it happened but the reason why we don't have armed soldiers in every single store is because there's a general belief that the local police the security systems the technology all this stuff can protect the goods and the store owner yes when that breaks down it goes back to get armed men here 100 100 that's a great example where hurricane katrina

was kind of like a real dose of physical power totally obliterating all of these symbolic structures a lot of them premised on yeah i never thought of it that way yeah and then as you said the armed guards they coalesce around the money right that's being taken in so political power coalesces to the physical power that money represents in in some way you could actually argue uh does society put more value on human life or on the money and if the armed guards or the help come into an area and they go and they protect the money yeah it opens up a lot of questions yes right and and thankfully it's not binary right it's not like hey there's only one person which way do they go it's a fork in the road because at the same time we had helicopters flying in

rescuing people off of roofs and and doing all of these like heroic actions where uh it was obvious that some value was being placed on the life but it does start to open up the nuance of a conversation it's like very interesting to think about 100 i i was actually there for a mission trip after like a i guess it was nine months maybe after okay in bay st louis where the eye of the hurricane hit did you know the canadian mounties made it there before the u.s national guard i did not know that yeah that is crazy so on their horses i don't know if they were on horses but they made it down there yeah um so their symbolic structure right was actually being more faithful to the people of this country at that time which i thought was shocking

um and then just one other point on the walmart thing had that been bitcoin though and the money was dematerialized you would have there would not be a need to defend the property in a physical way assuming you custody it properly so i'm kind of foreshadowing what we're going to talk about later but the physicality of money is what leads to the relevance of political power and force let's say in the physical world and and the value of human life versus monetary energy you know i would argue again there's the through line there of power People are a will to power. They're alive. They're useful to other people. They can perform labor. They have ideas. We can think. We can talk. Humans are amazing. We're the most amazing asset we have, frankly, is us.

And so to the extent that you can defend that, right, to protect the sanctity of the individual or that sacred genetic code, as the Italian prime minister said earlier, that's the whole game here. Absolutely. Okay, so a bit of a segue, but just on the emergence of the nation-state itself, it emerges as a result of the industrialization of military technology, right? There's a reason World War I and World War II were of such a scope, scale, and severity that the world had never seen before. Those reasons were the mechanization and industrialization of war-fighting equipment. And I would also insert fiat currency here. that these governments were not on a gold standard, right? So they would suspend redeemability for gold,

start printing money to finance the war up to the point of hyperinflating the currency. And then that has follow-on negative consequences when you consider Hitler was born from the ashes of the Weimar hyperinflation, right? Currency collapse, people, when the currency collapses, people go crazy, the whole world breaks down, the entire symbolic structure collapses, let's say,

And there becomes this rousing demand for strong leadership, law and order. And that's what led to Hitler. Without getting too much into the details, many people, I think, know the high level, Hitler and kind of somewhat of the rise to power and then his attempted and thankfully ultimate failure to take over much larger areas of geographic land. And but there's some scary nuance as you learn more and more about that situation, where even in American politics, there was a lot of people who were very supportive of Hitler for a very long time. Yeah. And part of it was because there was this great fear of Russia. And so a little bit of the your enemy, my enemy's enemy is my friend.

uh and then there was a long kind of this journey or timeline certain actions that hitler and and kind of his whole crew took that then was the tipping point okay fine now i don't like it okay now i'm worried okay now there's a threat but it's not like uh to your point that's a bad person they have no power they have no organization they have no weapons they have no anything and we know that's a bad person. It's a lot different, right? It's a much more complex story. Osama bin Laden is very similar in that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Maybe we should help that person defeat our enemy. And then the power consolidates and the weaponry and the training and all these things. And the next thing you know, it's like, oh, wait a second. Like actually maybe the ally is the

enemy. And it becomes this weird thing. And it's a story as old as time over and over and over and over again. But it does, it is worth learning about for people to understand. 100%. And it follows the wealth, right? It follows the money. So the reason so much gold ended up in North America prior to the end of World War II, during World War II, was because Hitler would invade a country and he would plunder the central bank's gold supply. So enough countries had seen this happen. They started sending their gold across the Atlantic. So when enough gold ended up in north america at a certain point we were very reticent to enter the war for a long time but at a certain point it was like well we got all the gold there's been enough devastation over there

we could probably just go clean it up declare ourselves the victor rewrite the global banking rules at the bretton woods conference and then be the global dollar hegemony yes which indeed we did and have been since 1944 and so it's funny how it doesn't read that way in the history books it's funny how it's been rewritten by the winner right it also uh uh simple things at the time how fast did the ships go yeah right and and i think today people are so removed from a lot of this that we don't think like oh who has the faster fighter jet or who has the better technology like that competition still happens to uh to a great degree but at the time like the difference between 24 or 30 knots literally could determine yes yeah yeah and still about power right yes

energy channeled across time the faster you can channel it the more effective you are as a combatant or as an entrepreneur even right if you can move people in a plane faster than you can move them in a car then people are going to prefer planes to cars obviously so the nation state is built on gold as we just said about the united states and for reasons we talked about in our last episode together gold was already selected by the free market as money It best satisfied five properties of money. But chief among those qualities that make gold good money is its scarcity, which was protected by the proof of work necessary to mine, discover, mine, extract, refine gold, and use it as money. And so that, and this is the same thing that maps onto Bitcoin, is that expenditure of energy necessary to produce gold as it is to produce Bitcoin that secures the supply from counterfeiting.

And as I've said a lot, inflation and counterfeiting are the same thing, right? The central bank is a global currency counterfeiting operation. That's all it is. It doesn't add any value. It's parasitical on the market economy. That, when you break, like fiat currency has zero proof of work effectively. That's why it gets produced ad infinitum and leads to World War I, World War II, global debt to GDP at 350%, et cetera. But I don't want to dwell on that.

I'm going to stay on the power track here. So proof of work basically means you need to expend energy to acquire the value of the money, right? You need to expend power to acquire the purchasing power, let's say. And this basically means you're protected from political power. If you hold gold, there's no political institution in the world that can arbitrarily say gold is not money anymore. And that's really important, especially in a world where Russian central bank reserves are being seized at the tune of $600 billion. Canadian truck protesters are having their assets seized for a peaceful, democratic demonstration. You know, you need seizure resistance in this world, especially.

So I would argue that gold was a good proxy for power because it required power to obtain the purchasing power stored therein. It's skin in the game. It's symmetry. And you can't counterfeit energy. This is very key. If you want a money that can't be counterfeited, well, then root it in the thing no one knows how to counterfeit, which is the thermodynamic physical reality of energy itself. cannot be created nor destroyed cannot produce it without work um and so the nation state historically is the most politically powerful institution in the world but i would argue it's only because they hold the most physically power relevant tool which was gold right the state that accumulated the most gold became the dominant state in the world so a little bit more on gold and then we can move on the as i said earlier the physicality is kind of a double-edged sword right so the physicality of gold as we're talking about when the walmart the guards are securing the

cash at walmart right there's physical cash that requires physical security to protect it from theft or seizure from others so in a physics sense the physicality of gold makes it a good proxy for power if that's how we're defining gold in the sense that you have to expend energy to earn the energy that gold represents. But I would say in a political sense, and I'm going to define this more shortly, gold's bad because it incentivizes the centralization of gold into one location. And I think that's because gold's just not portable, right? We need money to be movable. It needs to be transactable. It's much better if I can beam money around the world at the speed of light than it is load a bunch of gold bars on a container ship and wait three

months. If we're going to increase the division of labor, we need fast money. So another definition I've given is money's a tool for moving value across space and time. Gold was good at time, but not space. Currency's good at space, but because we break it from gold, it does not hold value over time. That's why dollars are a terrible store of value. And as we'll talk about a little it later, you know, Bitcoin perfects both of these effectively. So the lack of gold's portability led to the creation of this derivative application called currency. But then when you break it with that application, you have to trust someone to maintain the peg to gold. Otherwise, you radically empower the currency issuer. If they can just start producing currency with no check, meaning

citizens have no option to redeem that currency for gold then the issuing institution which is the central bank will grow and grow and grow until it pathologizes the whole world that's what's going on in the world today in my estimation when you think through the ramifications of that so that's what's happening what is like the biggest ramification that you identify well i think it is and again the next thing i want to do is define political power which sort of rounds out the other side of this so far we basically said that physical power is the essence of being alive and everything we're doing in the world but to maximize our physical power footprint in the world to harness more

energy and channel it across time we need these symbolic structures right where the animal that plays imaginary. Acting in concert enables us to move a lot more matter than we could in isolation, as you described with your example earlier. But the symbolic structures themselves, if they're just stories, they're subject to political power. And so I want to define political power as something born from the faith humans have in that symbolic structure and the roles that individuals play inside of it. So when you go into a meeting with, I don't know, a representative of a sovereign wealth fund, right?

He's just a guy playing a role inside of a symbolic structure that has authority over certain assets that may or may not invest in whatever project you're there to talk to him about, for instance. So this, but that gives the individual a lot of power, you know political power that they can start to again follow their own incentives rather than following the laws and bend things in a way that benefit them perhaps at the expense of other participants in the symbolic structure because often there's an information asymmetry right

an individual an insider may know certain things that outsiders do not and they can use that information to arbitrage and other activities to profit for themselves at the expense of others which, again, the central bank, I would say that's exclusively what they're doing. Correct. It's a monopoly on currency production to externalize the cost, privatize the profit. So, and again, you know, so political power exists everywhere that it basically, everywhere that we're being human, it exists to at least some extent. It doesn't matter, again, if it's your company, right?

You've got company politics, surely. You obviously have state politics, country politics, all these things. But the symbolic structures and the power anyone has over you inside of them results from the collective imagination, right? Like you could always quit your job. You can always start a new company. You can always opt out of these things. So it's not a real physical power that the president has

over 330 million apes in the United States. It's all premised on this symbolic structure, which has a political dimension to it as a result of us just being human. Um, so biology said this yesterday. It's like, we have to LARP these things into existence, LARP being the acronym for live action role-playing. And it really seems like that's what we're doing. We have to kind of pretend, fake it till you make it, pretend these realities into existence.

But then the, we kind of start to forget, you know, like we just think it's real. Like we think the United States is some permanent fixture of reality or any other country or any other company, whatever, maybe not companies so much. And we forget that we just, it's just play. It's just imaginal, serious play that we're engaged in. And so a couple of these ideas that we've created that have been tremendously important, we've already alluded to this earlier, the idea of the individual, actually. This is one we take so for granted, it sounds funny for me to even say. Yes. but pre-Christ, the idea of the individual was not really that strong.

It was about, they called it the paterna familias, I think if I'm pronouncing it right, the family, right? You were just a component of the family. Typically, it was related to a very distinct geographical plot of land. They used to have like a fire they would maintain in the hearth, and they would always keep the fire alive. And if they ever had to move, they would move the fire, and it was symbolic of their ancestors.

So the idea of the individual, much less a sovereign individual, didn't exist in our symbolic structure pre-Christ. And I won't go into this topic. There's a great book called Inventing the Individual where I got this. I would just encourage people to check it out. With no idea of the individual, you cannot have an idea of private property, obviously. It doesn't make sense that an individual can have an exclusive relationship to assets if you don't even have the idea of the individual in the first place. So that, I mean, it just shows you, like you said earlier, this segue of, you know, Christianity leading to the founding of the United States and then private property and then economic success stories like FANG stocks. You would not think that Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Google are related to Christ that much.

But when you understand how integral property is to the process of civilization, I think you can draw this through line. And so like to that end, the U.S. Constitution, in terms of symbolic structures, it's been one of the most successful that we've ever created. And it was, you know, we're set up as a decentralized republic with checks and balances built in. And again, built on this Christian notion of honoring the sovereignty of the individual. so it's just it's tremendous how in some way the constitution is the code base yeah right it is the constitution is uh kind of that initial code base and uh there are amendments right that there are changes there are additions uh whatever um and uh in some way also there is uh uh the ability to propose changes uh there has to be discussion uh and eventually there has to be a process as

to which to reach agreement on those amendments or changes. But it is very similar to the creation of software, both in kind of the initial inception, but also in the upgrading of that document, those ideas, and at the end of the day, those words and language for a society. And it is. It's distributed cognitive software that we're writing, rewriting. Stories we're building, we're inserting ourselves into,

taking ourselves out of. I would take it a step further and say the way you describe the Constitution sounds a lot like the way the Bible was written, actually, right? It was a long process, a lot of people, a lot of amendments, rejections, changes, et cetera. That's almost like the moral code base or a moral code base, not the, a moral code base. And then the U.S. Constitution was like the legal ratification of that moral code base into something political. Yeah. I think of the dictionary a lot, too. Like there's a movie, I think it's like a genius and a madman or something.

and uh you forget that like somebody sat down it was like we are going to write a list of every word yes and what what the definition is right that's that was like the idea for the dictionary uh and um it is a database of words and those words actually end up getting debated uh and we have seen in recent times some of the definitions have changed some of those definitions have been upgraded some people would argue that they actually are being changed for political reasons right whatever but it's a database of words that goes through these processes and what's fascinating is that if language is derived from all of us there's like this one little group of people marion webster right as one example who gets to decide what is in their list of words

right is that a collective decision or is that have we outsourced words and definitions to an organization right yeah it's kind of the a centralizing effect on that open source software we call english and it's man it's such a good point because when you consider that every the word is almost like the elementary particle of the symbolic structure right obviously like you need language to be a human to create these things but my understanding of a word and your understanding of a word like the degree to which language is useful is that the degree to which our understanding aligns on those words but they obviously don't right you've lived a different life you've had a different experience as of i you've heard the word used in different contexts

as of i now in a very common word like v it's probably pretty sharp our consensus on that word but on some more abstract term it might be a little more deviated so this whole thing is like we're constantly engaging in dialogue to try and reach consensus on the meaning of words and then use those words to create these stories that we live in and integrity is key the thing needs to mean the same thing over time so to the extent i don't know about this but to the extent webster or whatever political institution or symbolic structure is changing the definitions of words and where the word recession came up for me there where i know recession uh uh the uh the male female well also uh things like uh the cdc uh expanded the definition

of vaccine these types of things um but also uh what is even fascinating is it doesn't have to be maybe uh what i would say are the most controversial or debatable where people get uh into the cultural wars and things like that the idea of political parties republican and democrat over the years the stance on certain topics or the ideological uh kind of position of those political parties has changed drastically sometimes changes and then changes back like a 180 but but the word uh republican or democrat the definition has naturally changed and what's most interesting about it is that the definition from a uh objective standpoint may not change but from a uh kind of understanding through society changes because the ideological ideological position

isn't necessarily on every single topic written to the definition of what is republican what is democrat right 100 yeah yes that's it's kind of like theory versus uh reality yeah right and and And I think that's what you see with a lot of these concepts. And I think that's why aspiring dictators seek, well, historically seek to control the media and control the money, right? These are two very important symbolic structures for allocating and moving information. So the U.S. Constitution is one of the most useful symbolic structures we've created to date. And this, I would say that's true because the problem, the very pragmatic problem humans have been trying to solve for a long time is like, how do we preserve the relationship between us and our stuff? As we've said, property, right?

That's the exclusive purpose of government. I know it's grown a lot and expanded beyond the scope of that originally, but that is really all we need it to do. The market can do everything else. The other way to say that is like back to the will to power. How do we preserve the extension of the individual will to power into the world? so that if the entrepreneur goes into the world and engages all his ingenuity and faculties to create something other people value, we don't want other people to come and steal that from him because then that disincentivizes entrepreneurship and leads to de-civilization.

So we need a security provider, as we said, to enshrine and defend that idea of property. And in that way, the property is, and I talk about this until I'm blue in the face on my show, but I really think, I agree with Ayn Rand, property is the basis of civilization. It's the, there are no other human rights possible without property. If you can't preserve the fruits of your labor across time, there's nothing else beyond that. And so it's also the source of all this political strife

because the state exists to preserve property and it is also preying on property through taxation and inflation. So as, you know, there's a great quote by Clausewitz, who's an old german philosopher in warfare he says war is just the continuation of policy or politics by other means so it's the it's fighting over stuff that's all we're trying to solve for here honestly it may sound like an oversimplification but i don't see where there's anything else there yeah this episode is brought to you by eight sleep good sleep is the ultimate game changer and the eight sleep pod is the ultimate sleep machine the pod is the only sleep technology

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perspective what is our stance on climate uh change or on energy or uh in uh ecological uh preservation or you know all these different you can go really really deep in the rabbit hole you can start with the really high ideas most people have no fucking clue like i go to work every day i do the best to do a good job there i get paid and take care of my family and like Leave me alone. Right. But when a country engages in war, that is the point at which it becomes policy has risen to the severity and conversation level that now everyone, for the most part, is aware of. Right. Not 100 percent, but 90 plus percent of people. And so in some way, whether they agree or not with the policy, if your nation is at war, you will be asked to participate directly or indirectly. Oh, yeah. And that is like a very interesting way to back into like politics don't matter. Don't pay attention, all that. Until you get to the extremes and then all of a sudden it's the only thing that may matter for an individual.

Yeah, I'm reminded of that quote. You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. yes right again when the physical the situation of physical power comes to the foreground right whether it's hurricane katrina or it's world war ii all of the sudden everyone in that symbolic structure is oriented one direction right it's towards that in some way so the danger all right again we said this earlier the danger of these things is that they're they're stories so they can be corrupted, and I want to try and define corruption here. I would define corruption as participants inside of a symbolic structure that understand the rules and expectations to be one thing, right? There's consensus on the rules, consent of the governed, as we say in the U.S.

If an individual operating in a position of authority inside that symbolic structure will now bend or twist those rules for private gain and that does not apply to the public, typically it costs the public because they're often extracting resources that the public has generated through the market process. That is corruption, right? So bending a rule for private gain,

I'm sorry, bending a public rule for private gain, I would define as corruption. And this is like that phrase that we've heard recently, rules for thee, not for me, right? That is, that's corruption in a nutshell. So again, symbolic structures, and this is could be social institution, hierarchy, story, whatever you want to call it, necessary for us to live at the top of the food chain. But given the ethereal nature of these things, they're not real, right? That we can, they can be twisted in the imaginations of people and the image, the

imaginations of inhabitants by others, right? You can tell a new story or a competing story. These are often called narratives too, right? Like information warfare, narrative warfare. And this is the domain of propagandists, rhetoricians, bullshitters, right? They're trying to feed you some false symbolic reality to get you to do something that they want you to do. They're trying to bend you to their will effectively.

And so that is corruption in a nutshell. And we know corruption precedes self-destruction, right? Have you ever had a corrupted hard drive? have you ever seen the end game of a corrupt government uh look what happened to enron right they bent this reality of public accountability for private gain and vaporized 70 billion dollars of wealth in the process right corruption is like it's pathology it's destruction it's disease and so the more we can prevent public rules from being bent twisted or broken to the end of private gain, the less corruptible the symbolic structure becomes,

the better off we all are. Yes. And so what we really need, what humans need is an incorruptible, which I think is the equivalent to saying an indestructible symbolic structure. Because if you can't corrupt the story, then you can't destroy the story. I mean, at least, I know this is a bit abstract, but seems about the same thing to me. and so we need a story to inhabit that cannot be rewritten by the winner right by by the most violent you need an actual um story hopefully based on something like principles right truth

justice freedom all these things that we all want and seek we have a natural inclination towards we want that integrated into the symbolic structure that we inhabit and so you know if it's justice what to just keep what you earn or get what you deserve that's what the justice system is right and that's what our natural idea of justice is just people getting what they deserve so we've are this is not something new we've been attempting to do this for a long time uh i think hopefully i'm just throwing light on it in kind of a new way but so in that world where people get what they deserve i think that's It's similar to saying we have a world where property is unbreakable or inviolable.

So people, what they work to create, they keep. And what is stolen is returned, right? That's kind of the general themes of justice we would like to see in socioeconomic reality. It's where the relationship between people and their assets is a non-revocable relationship. And that would make all trade consensual, right? Because you wouldn't, in that world where you can't steal people's stuff, I always say this on the show too, there's two avenues to wealth acquisition. There's making and there's taking. To the extent that you cannot engage in taking, if I can't take stuff from people, I'm left with no other option than to go to work, right?

Make something, trade with people. So the game we've been playing is trying to reduce the incentives toward taking in our symbolic structure so we can tilt people towards making. and if we had something like that there was like actual inviolable property an indestructible symbolic structure that would maximally amplify the individual will to power all of a sudden people would be able to go out and to the best of their abilities create what they want for themselves in the world with the limiting principle of other people's will to power right you can't tread on other people to take their stuff so everyone's almost they're sovereign right this is the sovereign individual idea and it's i would say that

indestructible symbolic structure like that is absolutely necessary to maximize human freedom we have to have a symbolic structure to the extent that it's not corruptible it lasts longer over time it produces more wealth it creates more satisfaction if you want it increases the carrying capacity of the planet for god's sakes so like if you if you are if you have a will to power which you do if you're alive and listening to this you would want this as a thing and again i think that's what the u.s was an attempt at right we try to create this decentralized less corruptible governance mechanism with checks and balances intrinsic to it such that it would resist corruption but i think also that is what bitcoin is bitcoin has it's the closest thing to an

indestructible symbolic structure we've ever had. Yeah, I agree with that. These are rules that cannot be twisted or broken for private gain. It's essentially, and it's paradoxical in a lot of ways, but it's essentially this public utility used to facilitate the transfer of private property. Like two things we never thought we could get into one bucket and we somehow have. Rules that can't be changed. It's based on a purely opt-in opt-out social consensus. nothing there's no coercion in it whatsoever there's nothing hidden right there's not there's not even the opportunity for information asymmetry because it's open source technology so towards this idea which we've been working i think bitcoin is the greatest

reach yet when you think of the rules not rulers right idea um it does feel like uh the financialization of this software uh in some way imagine if uh the constitution had a stock you know price or ticker price uh attached to it and people could trade it people may not put as much uh importance on uh the constitution's words the ideas like all of these other components that we find so valuable it the birth of a nation the the kind of north star if you will And if you are able, which is hard for humans, if you're able to look past the volatility in an exchange price and you are simply to evaluate the system based on the technology, the ethos, and the idea, it is, I would venture to say, probably the only piece of technology that we have which provides rules without rulers. which allows for this coordination on a global scale with the ability for people to opt in or out.

And as you said, cannot be used for corrupt purposes in the sense of the people that are actually using the system as people of positions of power and influence. Because I think one of the other things is when you hear rules without rulers, there's a difference between the ruler right having a a government with a monopoly on violence or whatever political power stuff right the president or prime minister or whatever that doesn't mean that there aren't people that have positions of influence or power a single mining node right or a single uh uh asic that has a position now it may be a very small

position of power influence in this larger network but it is still a position is a seat at the table in that specific consensus mechanism part of of the the system also individuals who simply just hold the asset have a position of power and influence it may again be very small in the grand scheme of things but it is a position and so in some way it is rules without rulers but there are still people who are involved in this process because it goes back to this part of like the people make up the society the people make up a kind of civilization the people end up making up the network as well now they may choose to exhibit their participation via uh buying and holding some people want to do it trading so we want to do it spending but also they may say and actually i want

to coordinate resources to buy machines to secure the network or or maybe i want to create content around it or whatever it is but it's still at the end of the day people participating on an individual level and that's what ultimately makes up this huge network but it doesn't allow anyone to rise to the position of ruler which is one of if not the greatest advantage the system provides absolutely it yeah we're talking about i mean bitcoin is a global decentralized organization the first of its kind right so it's a leaderless ceo less organization and it has a gigantic market cap. It's been stunningly successful in what it set out to do. And to your point, the individuals inside of that network are maximally sovereign or individually empowered. Their will to power

is being honored such that they don't suffer kings, right? There's not an opportunity for political authorities to rise to power as much in a Bitcoinized world because citizens can always vote with their wallet or vote with their feet. If you're not treating me well in a certain jurisdiction, I can take my capital and leave very easily, which is, you know, obviously in countries today, a lot of that's inhibited through capital controls and all kinds of other bureaucratic machinations. So all we're talking about here is increasing the individual will to power holds the symbolic structure of government in check, right? It makes it accountable to its P&L and therefore accountable to its customers, which are citizens. That I would say is kind of

the core problem we have on the fiat standard is that government doesn't care about its P&L because it can paper over all of its losses by printing new money. That's why we get all these antiquated government organizations that never go away. And if you're not accountable to your P&L as an organization, why do you care about the preferences of your customers? You can just steal from your customers so that like this is the problem this is the human problem right now is that we have this the dominant symbolic structure in the world extracts from us and we don't have a way to cast well pre-bitcoin we did not have a way to cast a credible vote of no confidence and say this doesn't work for me uncle sam i'm gonna do something different and bitcoin is an emergent

alternative to the whole game right it's it's like the first level playing field we've ever had or the first true you know equitable story whatever you want to call it i almost think uh in some crazy way if you've ever played uh backyard football or street uh football uh and let's say it was in a neighborhood as a kid and you showed up and you kind of sort of knew the kids they lived in the neighborhood or in the general area uh and you're playing a game and you pretty much knew almost immediately like hey this is a game where uh the rules are very well defined or like oh you stepped out of bounds where's that a bounce ah it's like kind of like lined up here you know and you would very quickly be able to tell like oh these people are going to

bend the rules however to try to gain an advantage in the game in many cases although yes we do have the rules written down we have seen uh those rules changed in what i'll call the legacy world and so that can be uh around taxation that can be around monetary policy it can be around fiscal policy and that can be around a whole bunch of other aspects it is not to argue that they don't have the power to change the rules they do uh it is not to argue even sometimes that the rule changes aren't positive sometimes they are positive but it is just that the rules can change unilaterally uh based on those in power yes and there's unpredictability the difference is if you showed up to play that backyard football and they had basically a granite you know tablet

and they had chiseled the rules in and it said these are the rules if you play the game these are the rules we play by yes and now there is no debate yes it is there are the rules and no one's going to walk over even with a uh a racer and a marker and oh let me erase rule number three and write a different one it is they are literally chiseled into granite that is two different environments and that's i think ultimately what we're talking about is this like analogous situation where uh you cannot change the monetary policy right and it does not matter how many people you get that want to do that because there have been people who have wanted to change whether There's monetary policy, technical components, whatever.

And they have even been able to loosely coordinate with more than 50% of the hash rate in the miners. Still cannot do it. And this idea, which I haven't heard a lot of people explore, is that in the United States government, which I think most people would look at and say this is a democratic government, and it's the best that we've seen so far. Can somebody come up with a better solution? Maybe. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. But right now, this seems to be the best way of governance that the world has ever seen. We have three branches of government.

And those three branches of government provide checks and balances on each other. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, we also have three branches. You have the developers, you have the nodes, and you have the miners. And those three branches of Bitcoin end up providing checks and balances on each other. And so when you compare those two things, I don't know if people can argue that there is a better way to actually protect the rules of economic trade than what we already know is the best system of governance we've ever created. We simply are now just copying and pasting it via software and technology for this new system. Yeah, it's an upgrade of what the spirit of the U.S. Constitution lives in Bitcoin.

Yes. Right. And that the idea of the rules chiseled in granite, the immutable rule set, I would argue that is the bedrock of peaceful gameplay. Yes. I've talked about this a lot. Right. If you sit down to play poker and the hand rankings or rules change every few hands, you're just going to go nuts. Right. You can't play the game. How how can you form a productive strategy when the rules are changing all the time? There's too much unpredictability in the system. So that's all we're saying with Bitcoin. It's like, just give us a level playing field and let people play the game of the market process. And let's just create as much wealth as possible to solve as many problems as possible. And the further point to it is that when they're immutable and changeless and open and transparent, it's all opt-in, right?

No one's forcing you to use Bitcoin. And in the episode I did with Jordan Peterson, he talked about this. It's kind of obvious. Kids only like to play games that are voluntary. As soon as you try to go and play a game, here are the new rules and like, OK, bully, we're going to go over here and play. All right. So there's this natural inclination to organize around the rules that are voluntary, open, clear, changeless. And kids do it like how about we start doing it as adults? Right. We actually learn something from kids in this respect.

So to try to bring this thing full circle, as we said at the beginning, money is a proxy for power. and i decompose power into physical and a political sense um and i think bitcoin is the best proxy for power we've ever had and that it's a story that can't be rewritten by those that wield violence right this is very important it's a story that can't be rewritten by the winners uh it's a property relationship so again relationship between owner and asset that's virtually independent of the monopoly on violence like if you hold your private keys in a proper custody schema and i always recommend multi-signature distributed geographically you you're very independent or isolated from the political apparatus there's no law

passing that can change anything there's no confiscation or inflation that's going to affect you and it's an incentive structure it's a brand new symbolic structure that has very strong incentives that tilts all of humanity away from warfare and towards peace and this is like probably the most beautiful promise of the whole thing and it's a good proxy for power in my opinion because it's rooted in physical power through proof of work you have to spend energy to gain the purchasing power stored therein and it's also so that like it's like gold in that respect but unlike gold it's resistant more resistant to political power because it's dematerialized to use sailor's awesome word and it's it's has this uh i would even say the satoshi creation myth is part of

this as well right it's it's a foundational to that symbolic structure uh to the idea of decentralization that's encoded into bitcoin and it's the reason these other projects can't seem to achieve decentralization right they can't get the magic of that in a bottle not to say that it's not possible but it's proven to be damn hard so far and so i'm on the satoshi creation myth i'm reminded that movie batman begins where bruce is coming back from his training and um wherever he was in the mountains and he's on the plane i think he's with alfred and he says as a man i'm flesh and blood i can be ignored i can be destroyed but as a symbol as a symbol i can be incorruptible i can be everlasting so when satoshi vanished like he took bitcoin from some project that a guy started

to this symbolic structure with no individual right to attack or denigrate or anything like this so he transcended like satoshi is now just a symbol right we don't know who he is he's just symbolic and he's like the godhead of this mythological structure we've created in bitcoin and so i think bitcoin is a fundamental reimagining of human civilization right we have a perfect proxy for power, if you will, something that optimizes the individual will to power and is bounded by the will to power of others. So my interests stop where yours begin, right? We can all push up against each other, but it's only through consensual exchange in a Bitcoinized world that we are productive. The taking strategy for wealth acquisition is less profitable than the

making strategy its integrity is rooted in the law laws of physics as we've already said with proof of work and it's resistant to politics because it's dematerialized so i think that's it bitcoin optimizes our ability to express our will to power and therefore lets us be free i'll leave you with one last part of this idea that i think is really important you can't kill an idea that's right which is a saying that i think as people understand a lot about history they realized many of these ideas have been passed down but there was a bifurcation of history ideas used to be passed down exclusively by word of mouth i would tell you something you would tell somebody who would tell somebody who would tell somebody and then eventually their

kids and their grandkids and their great-grandkids and it'll get passed all the way down the lineage and it was all word of mouth and at some point somebody figured out we should write it down and writing it down meant that that piece of paper had to survive and there was great care that was uh put to have that piece of paper survive and then the idea of well maybe we should multiply it so that if one gets destroyed the idea is available in other places and so you get kind of this uh history of how ideas got from inception all the way down to modern day bitcoin is the exact same thing there is this idea of decentralization of uh being able to create rules not rulers being able to build a system for economic trade on a global scale that

is dematerialized that uses economic uh kind of value protected by energy it's an idea somebody wrote it down in code and then that code was able to garner enough attention where it is protected to some degree but it also was then multiplied and sets on every single node yes and so if one copy gets destroyed it still lives on and so one of the key ideas that i think is really hard for people to wrap their heads around a company is an idea a building is an idea the idea of a company or the idea of a building can actually not be killed people will always know what a company is they will always know what a building is a specific company the idea of enron still lives on but that company is dead and so there's this separation between the idea and the asset

with bitcoin what is unique is that unless you were able to convince every single miner every single node every single holder to essentially walk away through coercion force or whatever the idea will never go away but the asset will not either because of the multiplication effect yes it's like having taking a a idea put it into books and then have created millions and millions and millions of copies yes you can burn half a million a million five million ten million twenty five hundred million yes you can't burn them all right and i think that that ends up being this kind of hydra like uh uh kind of concept that once people wrap their heads around it it gives you a very different perspective as to what the future will look like, specifically related to

a concept like this. I love that. It's the anti-fragility of an idea of these symbolic structures. And it's, to your point, rooted in that technological reality of copying. When we create the printing press, and all of a sudden the cost of book production collapses, you can burn as many bibles as you want the bible as an idea is not going anywhere right it's totally decentralized it's here it's here to stay basically there are people who can recite it without even reading it right right and so bitcoin is again just taking that principle a step further right it's it's replicated in so many different places constantly all the time that it makes it very close to indestructible or definitely anti-fragile at least and so it's phenomenal

you know and it's interesting how much again if we're just ideas we're just genetic information we're imprinting these ideas into the world through various substrates right whether it's paper or digital and then that somehow feeds back into us like we're engaging this co-evolutionary process that we call civilization and so it you know there's a there's a moral imperative here it's ethical it's technological it's pragmatic it's financial and you know i just hope that all this talking we're doing about bitcoin is helping nudge the world in the right direction the concept of bitcoin has a lot of surface area you see as a financial asset as a technology solution uh as an ethos like all these different things what i find so powerful for it is you can

take a single idea which is the bitcoin system and if it only had one surface area it would not be nearly as valuable because in some way bitcoin is different for everyone what what is the value to you if you are fleeing a country the idea that you can now move your assets without having it confiscated is pretty damn important you don't care about volatility you don't care about uh cheap fees or any of those things you just want the ability to have sovereignty yes there are other people who say all of my assets are completely sovereign i go to the bank i can do all these different things the sovereignty aspect of it is not very important to my day-to-day life but i send a lot of money back home to my family in another country and so the ability to do that

very cheaply and quickly is important to me and so when you have that what it does is it also opens the surface area of the addressable market and if you really look at it money may be the only thing that has an addressable market that matches the number of humans on earth right i'm not sure that there is another technology the internet probably would be the one other technology that people would point to there are plenty of people language right language right yeah i guess there's another one yeah but but there's not many of them yeah and everyone speaks everyone transacts not everyone uses the internet right right right um and so it's like this very weird thing where we're headed towards a world where these assets that you and i kind of think through and talk

about the person who adopts them or or is interested in them 10 years from now they're not going to care so much about some of these underlying elements so i think a lot about uh sequence 10 years ago the technical components of bitcoin were really fucking important because you needed to uh attract a certain type of uh individual who could then help to propel bitcoin forward for the next three four five years but we've gone through some of these regime shifts the technical components obviously still matter for bitcoin in terms of the security and the decentralization but not a lot of people or the majority of people are not showing up now being like you know what i love about bitcoin i love the uh difficulty adjustment and and the beauty like

right that's not the mainstream group of people who are showing up now but a lot of them are showing up and saying hey the fact that uh with the backdrop of undisciplined monetary and fiscal policy that no one can unilaterally change that that's really important to me which is corruption again i just want to emphasize monetary and fiscal policy are both corruption and so when you then fast forward five years from now i don't know what it will be at the time but there will be something else that then is attracting people to the idea and to me that's the beauty of this is that it's constantly evolving it's beautiful indeed and uh indispensable in the current macro backdrop of the world where we're actively witnessing legacy symbolic structures collapse

around us right rome is burning and so there will come a point where people may think they don't need the sovereignty aspect of bitcoin because they trust their bank and they trust their brokerage account and clear whatever there could come a point where that trust is diminished significantly to where they will seek shelter in an indestructible symbolic structure like Bitcoin and so I you know not only is it as we said indispensable to human freedom but as the other ones collapse there's gonna be this like osmotic pressure I think that forces people into and I think this is where a lot of detractors just don't get it they think it's some arbitrary choice like

don't choose dollars though I choose bolivars it doesn't matter why would I i choose bitcoin it's like this is why because all of the other structures are being corrupted and breaking down and so people will naturally you know in expressing their will to power they will seek shelter in the one that is resistant to corruption and destruction without a doubt where can we send people to find you on the internet if uh if they would like more ideas from your brain uh i'm on twitter at breedlove22 b-r-e-e-d-l-o-v-e-2-2 i've got a sub stack. And then you can check out the what is money show. What is money podcast.com. We're on RSS feed and YouTube. And thank you so much for having me. As always, I we can do this literally

every day. And I don't think we'd run out of things to talk about. So I appreciate you coming and we'll definitely do it again. Thanks, man. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the

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