https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iVym9wtopqs
Well, hello everybody. I’m trying something a little different today. I’m speaking with a book club set up by John Vellis, essentially centering on Bitcoin, which is a phenomenon that I’m very interested in, but know very little about. I ran across John’s podcast. Partly because their book club also focused on my first book, Maps of Meaning. And so I looked up Gigi Durr, who’s speaking with me today, John Vellis, Richard James and Robert Breedlove, who make up the four people in this particular incarnation of John’s book club. I was interested in their thinking about Bitcoin and I noticed they were also interested in Maps of Meaning. And so I thought we could try a free flowing discussion. I haven’t done a podcast YouTube video with five people before, so we’re going to see how it goes. And hopefully we’ll have an interesting discussion about money, about Bitcoin, about Maps of Meaning, about Maps of Value, about languages of value, about information, all of that. So I’d like to introduce Gigi Durr, John Vellis, Richard James and Robert Breedlove. And maybe I could start with Gigi and you could just introduce yourself and we’ll move from Gigi to John to Richard to Robert. So Gigi, it’s all yours. Yes, I’ll do my best. First of all, thanks for having us. It’s a great pleasure. I think we’re all great fans of yours. I think that’s obvious. And yeah, about me, I think most people know me in the Bitcoin world because I wrote a little book called Twenty One Lessons. It’s basically a short summary of what I’ve learned from falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And other than that, I’ve been involved in the Bitcoin space for a couple of years and I’ve just I’ve learned a lot. I’ve read a lot about it. And so I tried to pay the forward and share it with the community. And I think that’s what brought me here. Thanks, John. Yeah, my name is John Vellis. And as you said, Jordan, I host the Bitcoin Rapid Fire podcast. And first, I’ll I’ll echo what Gigi said. It’s a pleasure to be here. You know, big fan of your work, have listened to many hours of your stuff and, of course, read your books. I’ve been focusing in the podcast over the last year on exploring Bitcoin and what it is and what it means and speaking with all the different people that are involved in it. But as we told you earlier, I’ve been placing the phenomenon that’s been most interesting to me has been the transformations that seem to be occurring in individuals as a result of understanding and engaging with Bitcoin. And it’s a very peculiar phenomenon, of course. And so that’s why I found it so interesting. And of course, I think there’s the book Maps of Meaning. And part of the reason why we explored it in the book club is because I think that provides a framework for understanding that phenomenon better. So hopefully we’ll get into some of that today. Yeah. Well, part of the reason I wanted to talk to you guys was because when I started looking into what you were doing, I was struck by two things that there seemed to be a psychological element to your endeavor, but also perhaps to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community, such as it is. And then also, I was interested in your philosophical speculations about the domain of value. And so we’ll go delve into that. What have you noticed about individual transformation? And do you think it’s particular to Bitcoin? And like, it’s a strange thing to notice and to and to bring up. So maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit. Sure. Well, one of the answer is yes. And one of the interesting overlaps between your work and you and the changes that are represented in people that get involved in Bitcoin is I think there’s a lot of the instantiation of a lot of the things you talk about are represented in the changes we’re seeing in people that engage with Bitcoin. And of course, notwithstanding that your work generally, as it permeates out into the culture, is providing people with ideas to chew on. And that causes some degree of change. But what I’ve noticed in people in Bitcoin is that it rapidly accelerates this change toward taking more responsibility, as it were. Change. That is. Well, there’s a couple of reasons. And I think the other aspect, you know, to sum up and not take up too much time initially here is, is that it changes people’s time preference as well, changes their relationship to time. And so the first why I think that is, is it’s a very it’s a very peculiar thing. But I think the genesis of it is that Bitcoin allows you to own something and to have to allow you to exclusively own something for the first time ever. And that is the private keys to your Bitcoin. So it’s an extreme form of ownership that is not represented in any other domain of life. It’s an inherent property right. What do you think? What difference do you think this idea of unique ownership makes? And then how do you relate that? Or if you do to a difference in time preference, and what does that mean? Well, for one, I would say that because it’s the first time to experience something like that, it changes your relationship to responsibility. And I think one of the outcomes from that is it causes you to contrast that extreme form of both ownership and responsibility in that domain to all the other domains of your life where, let’s say, there’s a dependence that exists. And so this is kind of the idea of freedom that Bitcoin seems to engender, is that when you take complete sovereignty and control over the thing that most reflects who you are out into the social world, at the very least. And that is money. That is the emblem of your time and sacrifice or what you gain, rather, for your time and sacrifice. Once you take control over that, I think it provides a very powerful impetus to look at other areas of your life and see where you might establish greater sovereignty and take the responsibility to do that. Another part of it is once you come into this space and you start to realize basically the impact of the current system of money that we use. And I know this is a term that you use and you reference in the book, but you begin to see how Bitcoin represents the information, let’s say the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies that evolved as a result of false money, as a result of fiat money, let’s say. And I think you could broadly say that money is information regarding your own value hierarchies that you, when you use it, you can use it. And everybody else’s. Right. Right. And so when you use it, you communicate those. And to the extent that there’s an intermediary or that there’s anything that’s distorting the fidelity of that communication, pathological hierarchies, incongruencies between what you’re attempting to communicate and what you actually are communicating to that market, I think emerge. I think that was what I found interesting about the claims that you guys are making. And I wanted to have this discussion in part to evaluate that claim to see if there’s well to see how solidly developed that idea is because it’s a very interesting idea that in some manner Bitcoin is an incorruptible provides an incorruptible language of value, preferable to gold, say. So maybe you have to buy the argument first that gold is preferable to a currency that isn’t dependent upon something like gold. And that’s also a separate argument. But you’re making the case then that Bitcoin is superior even to gold. And so we’ll go into that. What’s your background, John? I started my career in finance. I lived in in Shanghai, China for about a decade. And then whilst I was there, I got out of that because I didn’t enjoy the incentives that, you know, the behavior that came from the incentives in that industry. And I went into natural medicine and did a degree in that and worked in that capacity for a couple of years. And then all the while, I had been interested in Bitcoin and studying Bitcoin. And in 2019, it just kind of became overwhelming. So at the time, I was living in Thailand and I decided to start the podcast. And as everyone on this podcast will attest, once you go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, it’s very, very difficult to claw your way out. You know, you’re attempting to find the bottom rather than back to the surface. So that kind of characterizes my pursuit since 2019. What’s your background? So I have a heavy tech background. I studied computer science and I studied a little bit of physics and I’ve been a computer programmer for the last like 15 plus years. So, yeah, I think that sums it up. I grew up with computers and I grew up online. And so I know a thing or two about distributed systems and those kind of ideas that are very helpful to make sense of Bitcoin. But still, it took me a very, very long time to make sense of Bitcoin, like many years and multiple touch points, because I lacked the economic knowledge that is required to understand this beast. And so the last couple of years, I read up on my economics and discovered Austrian economics. And that was most helpful to make sense of Bitcoin. And what? Right. And so that’s another touch point, because I’ve become interested in Austrian economics and going to be discussing Austrian economics with some Austrian economists. Well, they’re not actually Austrian, but they’re from that school. You also have a profound sense of sartorial splendor, just so that you know it. Richard, over to you. Thanks very much, Dr. Peterson. So, yeah, my name is Richard James. I’m a filmmaker by trade, although in more recent years, sort of have worked in other areas and just been running a small business in a completely unrelated area. But, you know, I’ve had almost a lifelong interest in economics. And I studied that through school and into university, but sort of fell out of love with it, I suppose. You know, I kind of dropped out of economics at university, but, yeah, maintained an interest in that. And then I also came across the Austrian School of Economics, and I found that to be particularly eye opening. And it led me down this path of asking that question of what is money? And as we’ve already mentioned, gold plays such an important role in that. And I think that understanding gold is the first step to understanding Bitcoin. And so, you know, in the last couple of years, I’ve sort of turned back to filmmaking and trying to link that interest to Austrian economics and Bitcoin. And last year, I sort of set myself a goal for a project to make a film related to Bitcoin. And it had two particular parameters. One was that I wasn’t allowed to spend a dollar and it had to cost zero dollars. And the other thing was I wasn’t allowed to leave my desk. So I sort of basically put this thing together using content that had already been created by people, you know, working in Bitcoin and talking about Bitcoin. And the film is called Hard Money. It’s available free online. So that’s sort of been been my contribution, I suppose. But I’m more interested in the philosophy of money, the history of money, in particular, the phenomenon of inflation and the way that links to things like time preferences, as we’ve already talked about. And also, I suppose, political philosophy or and libertarianism and these ideas that there’s a certain way of thinking in Austrian economics called praxeology, which is about human action and the way that, you know, really analyzing the way that people sort of pursue. It’s very general, general in the way that they use means to pursue ends. Like that’s the very first kind of axiom of the system. And from that, we can draw a whole lot of deductions. And it’s interesting the way that leads you down an ethical being able to create an ethical framework as well. And that’s where I guess your own work came into it, where, you know, I found that found myself interested in this this libertarian system of ethics or morals and, you know, maps of meaning, I think is essentially a book about morality as well in that it’s a book about how to act. So I found some very interesting parallels there. And what was it about? How would you define the Austrian School of Economics? And why did it? Why was it of particular interest to you? Well, the Austrian School is, I would say it’s a way of thinking that is about logical deduction rather than empiricism. I think the problem with economics in its current form, you know, modern economics, Keynesian economics, because it’s largely influenced by the work of John Maynard Keynes. I think it it has a problem where it has this desire to imitate a physical science. You know, it wants to analyze data, you know, get get complex in a mathematical sense. But there’s a fundamental problem there in that when you’re trying to analyze something in economics, you know, we can’t set up an experiment and, you know, run run a test on a parallel universe. We’re dealing with with real world. You know, you can’t isolate the independent variables, basically. So it makes that kind of analysis fraught with a lot of danger. The behavioral economists are trying to deal with that to some degree, right, by running actual economic experiments. They’re more like psychologists. They are psychologists fundamentally. And the Austrian School takes a very different approach, which is to say, you know, we’ll take a certain set of fundamental axioms, you know, and then we’ll just we’ll build our philosophy based on logical deduction. So it’s sort of all done from from the armchair, basically, rather than trying to validate anything via via real world data. I guess the relationship between action and economics and value, I suppose, is that people choose to act in relationship to those things that they value and that the manner in which they act is actually an indication of what they value. And so money becomes an index of people’s value preferences and value preferences associated with their preferences for action. I mean, that shapes even such things as perception, because perception, we think about that as something that’s automatic, essentially, because the world just appears to us in some sense. But you move your eyes constantly and you orient your head so that you can hear one thing rather than another. And you pay preferential attention to one thing rather than another. And you do all of that as a consequence of comparative value. And I was reading a book on on Austrian economics last night and they were talking about trying to define economics. And it struck me that the most suitable definition was something like the science of comparative value. It looks like that’s what economists concentrate on. And then money becomes an index of comparative value. And then that leads that leads. Well, I’m going to talk to Robert next. I’ll get him to introduce himself. But I know Robert has written a fair bit philosophically on the implications of money in general as a signal of value and of Bitcoin in particular. So, Robert. Hey, Jordan, my name is Robert Breedlove. It’s a great honor to speak with you today. I’ll just say that your work has had a profound impact on my life that I probably struggle to put into words, so I’ll just leave it at thank you. I’m a lifelong student of philosophy and economics, although more recently, thanks to Bitcoin actually was introduced to Austrian economics. I’ve been going down that rabbit hole for the past four years. My background before that is I have a master’s degree in accounting and finance. I was a CPA for a number of years, so I did tax strategies for high net worth individuals, investment partnerships. From there, I moved on to be pretty much a career CFO focused in technology. And then most recently, I was operating a hedge fund before last year. You know, 2020 was transformative for a lot of us. And this quote from H.G. Wells really struck me and resonated. He said that civilization as a race between education and catastrophe. And my realization is that the world is so poorly informed about the socioeconomic significance and even philosophic significance of Bitcoin that it was incumbent upon me to take what I think I see as the solution to many problems in the world and just pour all my energy into education. And to that end, I started the What Does Money Show. I called it this because I do believe that question. What is money? This is the gateway to this rabbit hole that we’ve all fallen down. It is the key to unlocking a lot of the untruths in the world. And I think it’s also the key to perceiving the corruption that’s embedded in our current socioeconomic system at the core of which is central banking, which I’m sure we’ll get into a lot today. And, yeah, I would just to echo a couple of the things that were mentioned earlier. That question, what does money has a lot of answers, one of which is I think you’ve related in the past is that money is essentially a contract of the future. And today, fiat currency, it’s a violated social contract. So we have a money by which an institution effectively robs our future. They’re compelling the demand for this money and they’re violating its supply to enrich themselves and dispossessing everyone else, mostly people economically vulnerable. And to the point about morality, it’s like if we don’t have a secure social contract in the most important market in the world, which is money, then we can’t possibly have a foundation for sound social morality. So it causes people to be more short term thinking when your money doesn’t hold value over time. You can’t plan. You can’t create trusting long term relationships. And then the last piece to that is, you know, with central banking violating the supply of money, they are twisting our perceptions. We perceive the world economically through prices. And when that perceptive, that perceptual mechanism is twisted, it breaks down your valuations, your goal orientations. Your trust. Trust. Yeah, it really corrodes socioeconomic fabric, social morality and even individually. To John’s point, I think it really breaks us down. And I’ve experienced that personally in my life. I’ve I’ve kind of flown high and mighty on the fiat currency standard and I’ve experienced a certain set of character traits develop in myself. And I’ve experienced an antithetical set of traits develop in myself as a result of studying and interacting deeply with Bitcoin. So can you elaborate on that a little bit? You’re making a moral contrast. It’s personal. There’s a story there. I’m kind of curious about it. So, yeah, I I made a lot of money quickly at a young age. And I would say that I I walked a bit of a darker path where I just thought that. I had made it, I had arrived, I would just kind of party and cut up and travel. I didn’t have a lot of I lost that deeper sense of meaning or sense of purpose that that you speak so eloquently to. And, you know, you don’t know it when you’re up against it. I still thought that I was doing good things and was more or less a good person, but I was just going further and further off course, you know, becoming more and more short term oriented, more and more pursuing immediate biological gratification, whether it’s drinking or whatever. And Bitcoin and this rabbit hole just gave me the larger lens, which we talk about time preference. And when we say lowering your time preference, what we mean is we’re expanding your time horizons. So you’re you gain a greater sphere of concern, let’s say, beyond yourself. And that that that sphere is made up of space and time. And as you do that, you start to see yourself as increasingly a more humble and infinitesimal piece of the total picture. But somehow it also enriches you to want to really dig into whatever gifts you have and give back to the whole picture. And why do you think why do you think the fiat currency? Why do you think the fiat currency versus Bitcoin issue is relevant to that conundrum? You know, it we could say in the very severe original state of nature, we’re all just cavemen running around trying to eat and, you know, have shelter. That is an environment with a lot of scarcity. There’s a lot of economic scarcity because we haven’t begun to trade. We haven’t created the division of labor and specialization that creates wealth. And I would argue that fiat currency, because it generates arbitrary inflation. So it’s it’s artificially magnifying prices in the world. It’s increasing prices when prices should be declining as we get smarter. It’s actually magnifying the perception of scarcity in the world. And I think that contributes to social divisiveness up to and including things like cancel culture and other things we see in the world today. I really believe that artificial central bank induced inflation is a corrosive moral cancer on society. And I think we under so let’s get some terms straight so that everybody knows what we’re talking about. So maybe we start with fiat currency and Gigi, I’m going to pick on you next, because I want you to give us a technical description of Bitcoin, if you would. And then we can start exploring its psychological and philosophical implications. So let’s talk about fiat currency, contrast that with a gold standard of Bitcoin. And then let’s talk also about central banking and inflation and just flesh that out so everybody knows where we’re at. That’s for you, Robert. Sorry, that’s for Robert. I’ll get Gigi. I’ll turn to you for the technical description of Bitcoin. You’d like me to start with central banking? Sure. Yeah. So to give the very high level description, again, the answer to what is money has many questions or many answers. But one of them is we could say that it’s a device for moving value or expressing value across space and time. And historically, it’s a technology, right? The free market selects what the best tool for the job is. That’s true for essentially every market in the world today. But we’ve never allowed that to be the case in the realm of money. And the best approximation of that historically was gold. So if we understand that as a technology, money needs to fulfill five critical properties, needs to be divisible, durable, recognizable, portable and scarce. And I’ll gloss over a lot of history, but essentially monetary metals best satisfied the divisibility, durability, recognizability and portability properties of money. And of the monetary metals, gold was the most scarce and scarcity of money. So what scarcity means is when demand outstrips supply. But what’s unique about money is that demand always exceeds supply. There’s never enough people always want more money, right? It’s not like you’re going to reach a certain amount of apples in your kitchen and you’re satisfied with apples. There’s always more demand for money. So we could say that money always has this scarcity property inherent to it. But the market gravitates towards the good that best satisfies those first four properties. And then fifthly has the most inflexible supply. So another way to say this is the most inflation resistant monetary technology tends to be favored by market actors because as it turns out, surprisingly enough, or not surprisingly, people don’t like to get stolen from via inflation. You want to hold the money that holds its rarity and scarcity across time such that no one can dilute you. And so why do you regard inflation as theft? So inflation, it’s just very simple supply and demand economics. If price or purchasing power in the case of money is where supply meets demand, if someone can arbitrarily increase the supply, they can steal purchasing power from the others using that as a store value. So that’s why again, gold was selected on the market because there was sacrifice necessary to obtain gold. You had to expend time and energy to dig it out of the ground such that in this game theoretic selection of money, everyone could trust that no one could arbitrarily violate the supply of gold because if they could, they would just print gold if you could and still value it with silver or something like that. Which they did. Yeah, they’ve counterfeited gold and any number of things. The problem with gold though, essentially is that it was great for holding value. Again, back to our original definition, money is a device for moving value across time and space. So gold is excellent at holding value across time, but metals are pretty poor, especially for a globalizing society at expressing value across space. They’re very heavy and difficult to move. They’re expensive to move, expensive to secure, etc. So this is where paper currency was introduced. By abstracting gold into a paper currency, we could now increase its transactability across space. And so long as it was redeemable, one unit of currency for one ounce of gold, for instance, then it maintained its ability to express value across time as well. So we’re basically augmenting this free market selected technology to make it more transactable across space and time. The problem with that, of course, is that it introduced the need. First of all, it made money debt. So now all of a sudden we don’t have money. We have a paper certificate that’s redeemable for money, which is gold. So this paper certificate becomes a debt instrument. And the problem is you now needed to trust the custodian, the bank, whoever’s holding that gold. You have to trust they will not produce paper currency in excess of their gold reserves. Otherwise, they are then the one artificially inflating the currency and able to steal from everyone else. And as it turns out, again, money is like being the most important technology in the world. The temptation to manipulate its supply has proven historically to be essentially irresistible. And banks, which tend to become central banks or nationalized banking operations over time, have always violated that trust function placed within them. Can you give us some recent examples of that? Well, sure. In 1971, the infamous Nixon shock, he took the world off a gold standard. You know, subsequent to World War II, we held the Bretton Woods Conference where it was determined unilaterally by the United States that the dollar would be pegged to gold. Every other currency in the world would be pegged to the dollar. So this gave the United States, the infamous exorbitant privilege to just basically be able to print whatever amount of money they want, send the world these paper certificates called dollars, and then receive goods and services in exchange. But other countries agreed to this, one, because the US was the dominant military power at the time, and two, because dollars were redeemable for gold. But between 1944 and 1971, it reached a point where enough countries had had lost faith in the dollar that they were asking to redeem their currencies for gold, that Nixon decided to spontaneously close the gold window. So he just moved the world off of a gold standard onto a purely fiat currency standard. And then there’s since that point, actually since 1971 through today, it’s been about a 50-year experiment, we have had disastrous socioeconomic consequences across a whole gamut of data. There’s a great website to this effect. I would just encourage listeners to check out called WTF Happened in 1971.com. And we’ve had obesity, suicide, addiction, clearly global debt to GDP has exploded. It just points towards the devastating force that is arbitrary inflation. So yeah, I hope that answers it. Yes, go ahead. Can I just jump in for a sec? Before we move on, we’re talking a lot about value. And I think, Jordan, you mentioned something earlier that I just wanted to pull the string on a tiny little bit is, and you talk about this in your work, but when we, in order for value to emerge, we need to define limitations. So things are defined by their limitations. And as a result of that, we’re able to separate them. So things emerge out of the void, their limitations allow us to separate them. Then the problem is, how do we order them? And then so that is how these value hierarchies emerge. And the internal measuring stick we use to order things is our own limitations of time and energy. So for a very basic example, if I’m going to look at the lamp, then I’m excluding everything else that I could look at. I’m devoting my time and energy resources to look at that lamp, at the exclusion of everything else. The opportunity cost is infinite to anywhere you place your limited resources. And so the journey or the evolution of money, of finding a money has been to try to find something that mimics our limitations, that mimics the sacrifices that we make when we bestow value on something. Why would you say mimics? Well, because we want something to reflect the same limitation. When we’re bestowing value on something through our sacrifices, that’s basically what value is. I’m sacrificing my time and energy and perception to focus on one particular thing. If I want to express that out into the external world, the ideal way of doing that is to find something that is similarly limited as my own resources. So that’s interesting. So yeah, so money, I mean, it’s obvious in one sense that money is a reflection of human value, but I hadn’t exactly thought about it as a form of mimicry. So what we want is an arbitrary external agent that’s mobile across people that signifies what people value, of course. So that signifies the value structure. Why sacrifice? Well, that’s how we create wealth in the world. We sacrifice our time and energy to create things. So money, that’s just another definition. I didn’t mean to interrupt, but money as a measure of sacrifice. Okay, Gigi, let’s go to you now and let’s fill in some of the gaps about Bitcoin per se. Do you want to fill us in about what it is and why you think it’s significant? What’s revolutionary about it? I’ll try my best and I’ll try to link it to what’s just discussed. We always try to zero in on something that doesn’t just melt away and that we can use as money. And historically, as we just discussed, gold and silver, precious metals, we’re very good at that because gold is virtually indestructible and it’s also very scarce and invisible and so on and so forth. The problem is, and that’s what computer scientists try to solve for, I guess, 50 years plus, is if you want to do that in the informational realm, have something that represents value, it’s basically impossible because you can’t copy information indefinitely. And that’s what’s described by the double spend problem. If you can read information, you can also copy it. So you cannot have a token in the digital realm that can’t be copied. If you can read it, you can also write it down again. And that’s a basic copying mechanism. And that’s how computers work. Computers are just basic copying machines. So digital scarcity is kind of an oxymoron and was never possible before Bitcoin. And also in Bitcoin, the way that Bitcoin works, it doesn’t produce anything that can’t be copied. Everything in Bitcoin is copied all the time and you can copy every aspect of it. And there is also nothing that is really encrypted. It uses encryption technology like cryptographic technology, but it doesn’t really encrypt anything. It only uses digital signature schemes to make sure that the ownership of things is clear. But you can read everything in Bitcoin. It’s completely plain text. That’s why we also say it’s speech. You can basically print out how Bitcoin works and put it in a book and you can actually read it and you can feed it into another computer and just spin it up again. And also the output that Bitcoin produces, this ledger which records who owns what is completely plain text. You can make sense of it by just looking at it. And so we have this problem that historically we found physical artifacts to represent this value. Gold coins, for example. And the gold coins, they speak for themselves. Whoever has the gold coin is in possession of this value, this stored value. Someone else put work into it to extract the gold first and foremost. And after exchanges, you know that whoever earned this gold coin or also stole it, it doesn’t matter, whoever has this bearer instrument, whoever has this gold coin is in possession of some value and can redeem it. Go to society and redeem it. Whatever goods and services you want to have, you can exchange your gold coin for that. And in the digital realm, doing that without any trusted third party before Bitcoin was impossible because of this double spend problem, because of the nature of information that you can’t have any token that can’t be copied. So what Bitcoin actually does is it is this play kind of, it is this intricate dance of computers all around the world that spin up a system that checks and verifies copies of this ledger and it makes invalid copies useless. So you can copy it and you can kind of transform the copies as well. But everyone who participates voluntarily in this game agrees to certain rules and the rules say that we only accept valid copies according to the rules that we signed up to. And this is what makes all this possible. And what comes out of it is simply a list. It’s an unbreakable contract of trust. Yeah, it’s like unbreakable is a really big word and everything in Bitcoin works kind of probabilistically, including cryptography itself. It’s basically, it makes use of an asymmetry that some problems in our universe are very hard to solve unless you know the exact solution to it. So that’s basically all like the root of all cryptography. Like if I know the secret, I can decipher the message instantly, very easily. But if you don’t know the secret, you will have to guess every possible secret. And this is where this asymmetry of power comes from. So cryptography is inherently defensive. And this is what Bitcoin makes use of as well. Like if you don’t have my private key, you cannot spend my Bitcoin period. Like the heat death of the universe will come first before you will be able to do that. And this is the power of Bitcoin. So can you get extremely simple and describe what Bitcoin is? Yeah, that’s the 21 million Bitcoin question. I’m afraid there is no simple answer. Like the best I can give you is it’s basically, you can think of it as a shared excel sheet, like shared, a shared ledger that simply attests to who owes what to whom. Like it has a list of, these are the 21 million Bitcoins that we have. And John owns some and Robert owns some. And it’s a list of transfers. So it’s a list of transactions. And if you add all this up and make sense of all the transactions, what is recorded is from the genesis of Bitcoin up to the present moment, everything that happened in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And so that’s what makes it- To actually trade and ownership. That’s what makes it so trustworthy. It’s like a computerized accountant. It’s keeping track of who owns what and who owes what. And it’s distributed everywhere so no one can corrupt it. And you can’t get access to anyone’s store because their key is encrypted in a way that makes it impossible to break. It’s because everyone holds their own keys in the best case. Like I hold my own keys and you don’t even know, like you can’t associate my Bitcoin addresses with myself. That’s also why I’m an invisible man. So a lot of Bitcoiners take care about their privacy and that’s a big topic in the Bitcoin world as well. And so there is simply no attack vector. You cannot invade all the homes of all the Bitcoiners across the world and steal their private keys. So that’s what you would have to do to break the whole system. So the security is distributed in the sense that the security is at the edges and the system itself is insanely resilient. And what enables this trust is exactly as you have said, it’s transparent and it’s radically distributed. Everyone has a copy so I can check it for myself from the very first block, like the genesis of Bitcoin up to the present moment. I can verify everything myself. Right. So it’s completely transparent. It’s completely distributed. There’s no centralized authority. It can’t be cracked. It can’t be stolen. It doesn’t inflate. It can’t be inflated. It isn’t subject to, at least so far, to any form of overt administrative control. So let me ask all of you guys a question. Maybe John and Richard can chime in on this because they haven’t spoken too much yet. So one of the questions might arise, especially in relationship to Robert’s comments, is that we switched to a fiat currency back in 1971 and obviously you guys are no fans of fiat currencies, but we do have money and it does work. It still stores value. We can still spend it. And so I would say, please tell me why I’m wrong or if I’m wrong or if you agree, the American dollar has been the currency of record essentially since 1971, perhaps since before that, despite the fact that we’ve switched to a fiat exchange system. And my sense is the reason that people use the American dollar is because the judgment of the world is that by and large the social structure of the United States, social and economic structure of the United States, is such that it’s more reliable than any alternative. And so people trust individual Americans in some sense. They trust the trusted interrelationship they have with each other. They trust the emergent social institutions and as a consequence of that they’re willing to put the same kind of faith into the dollar that you guys put into bitcoin. And so that’s working. And so what’s the problem exactly? And is there something wrong with my reasoning? Maybe Richard, you could comment on that and if not, someone else jump in. Well, I think we can make a fundamental distinction between a money that is chosen by the free market and a money that is forced upon someone by the use of the threat of force, which is essentially what the US dollar is and any other fiat currency. Your point is well taken, which is that the US dollar works as money, but I guess the question is in relation to what or compared to what. And I think that because we sort of can’t imagine this universe that doesn’t exist where the free market was simply allowed to do what it would do. So there’s two problems with the US dollar. One is that it’s basically imposed by this legal tender law. So in the United States and yes, the United States has economic and political dominance and that extends around the world, but citizens in the United States aren’t free to transact in money that they choose. If I wanted to make a transaction in gold, I’m legally not allowed to do that. I’m not allowed to denominate a contract in gold. And I’m also in a technical sense prevented from saving my money in gold. And that’s really because of capital gains taxes. If I want to use gold, for example, to protect my savings from debasement because slowly but surely the value of the US dollar does decline over time. If I then want to go and use that saved money to actually make a transaction, because I’m legally obliged to, I have to pay a capital gains tax and sort of give back to the state the value I’ve tried to save. So I think, yeah, there’s a utilitarian dimension. So you wouldn’t regard that. You wouldn’t regard necessarily any increase in value that pertain to investment in gold as an actual capital gain. You’d be more inclined. I may be putting words in your mouth. I hope not, but you’d be more inclined to think of that as a hedge against inflation. And so not an increase in wealth, but an actual maintenance of wealth because gold hypothetically is more reliable than the dollar. Or you could make that case. Exactly correct. And this is the thing is that holding gold is yes, technically it’s not an investment because there’s no return. But the other interesting thing is that things that we put our money into these days that are investments such as real estate or shares and things like that, most people are only doing that in an effort, yeah, not to earn a real return, but only to sort of offset the loss of value that comes from the slowly depreciating currency. So that’s part of the problem of having a currency where the supply constantly inflates is that people aren’t able to simply save money in a simple sense. They’re not able to hold money. They have to take that money and invest it and take on the inherent risk in investing simply to maintain their purchasing power over time. And then that’s basically that purchasing power is taken away from them again when they try and go rotate out of that investment back into money. OK, so let me ask you a question about that. So maybe I could make a case that, you know, because we’re all interdependent, whenever I generate wealth, I generate it as a consequence of my interdependence with other people. I wouldn’t be able to do it on my own. I’m dependent on the infrastructure. I’m dependent on the government, or at least I have the advantages that those things provide me. And so could I not make a case that if I’ve managed to accrue a substantial sum of excess capital savings, that it’s reasonable for the rest of society to expect me to allow some of that to inflate away as a tax on my hoarding, as a consequence of the fact that part of my wealth is generated as part of a shared endeavor? Because, you know, you could posit a wealth tax, right, that might address inequality so that there’s a 2% wealth tax or something like that on fortunes over 500 million dollars. And so they decay with time to restore that hoarded wealth back to the general community. What do you think of an argument like that? Well, there’s the problem. Well, a lot of this comes back to, you know, we have to go right back to first principles about what we think about the nature of the government or the state. Like, do we think that that institution helps or hinders? Do we think that that institution can actually redistribute resources in a way that’s fair and equitable? Can it kind of do that efficiently? That’s almost an entirely different question. You know, I tend to be very skeptical of what the state can do in that respect. And I think that freely acting individuals would possibly be able to do a better job. So you basically have a free market response to that objection, that the free market is going to do better as a calculating device. Absolutely. And the only other thing I’ll quickly say before I think handing over is that the problem with using inflation as a redistributive method is that it actually unfairly works against the poor people in society, because those that have wealth, you know, you’re talking about a wealth tax or that sort of happens through inflation. But the way that it generally plays out is those people who are wealthy, they don’t store their money as dull as they store in assets. And those assets appreciate in value as a result of the inflation, whereas those people who are living on fixed wages, salaries, you know, living week to week with a bank balance there, and because they’re spending a larger proportion of their money on goods and services, they’re the ones who are actually most unfairly targeted by inflation. So it actually has the effect of increasing inequality. And do why do you guys have any faith in the idea that there is actually measurable inflation? Because I don’t understand inflation. There’s a basket of goods and services that are calculated, the price of them is calculated every year, but what’s in that basket of goods and services seems to me to be a relatively arbitrary choice. I mean, what makes you think that there has in fact been objectively reliable inflation, say over the last 30 years, given, for example, that many, many manufactured goods and so forth have got dramatically cheaper? Now, I know housing in many places has skyrocketed, you know, to a tremendous degree, but do you really feel that the currency has become corrupted and that you can, you can, and what do you rely on to make that case? What data do you rely on? I could jump in here, I think. I would say unquestionably debasement of the currency, it is an arbitrary harvesting of the economic surplus a productive free market economy is creating. So as an economy gets more efficient, it generates more wealth that’s passed back into market to market actors in the form of declining prices. So we’re getting smarter at making shares, smarter providing services, electronics, all these things, but by printing money, you’re basically stealing claims on that productive, on that economic surplus and doling it out arbitrarily. So we could say another way to think about this is that the free market itself, as you’ve described, Jordan, it’s a distributed computing system. So we all have our, you know, 120 bits per second conscious attention span. You multiply that out by 8 billion market participants. That is the cognitive power of the free market. Right. I want to emphasize that because it’s such an important point and it could easily be skipped over because, you know, there are people who admire the ideas of central planning and you think, well, maybe there’s 40 people doing your central planning. And so maybe they’re the smartest people in the world and they’re doing your central planning, but they have to calculate on the fly a virtually infinite amount of information. If they don’t have free market prices at their disposal, they have to calculate what metal is worth, what nails are worth, what labor is worth, what rubber is worth, what cleanup is worth, what nursing is worth, et cetera, et cetera. And they have to do all those comparisons and they have to do those computations. And there’s actually no way even technically of doing that. And the alternative is to distribute that calculation across a virtually infinite number of actors or actors in the billions at least, and let every single person act as a computational device and sum all that. And that’s what the free market does. It’s not even in principle replaceable by a logical cognitive mechanism. I can’t see how it is. That’s exactly right. It’s not even possible that a centralized bureaucracy, a centralized computing model can compete with a distributed computing model of the free market. We could actually in fact say that the free market is a pure economic democracy. People are voting by buying and selling and whatever price is generated on any given asset, that’s effectively the truth of what it trades at. Any intervention on that, any intervention, any regulation, any pricing czar as they had in the USSR, you move along that spectrum towards an economic tyranny where we have now the arbitrary wishes of a few overriding what the free market democracy is selecting. And to tie this back to the problems with the dollar, the dollar was gold, by the way. Fiat currency never emerges on the free market. That distributed computing model never selects a fiat currency by itself. It’s only when natural law is violated, when they step across the line of life, liberty and property and say, I’m going to impose this technology on you or else. That’s the only time fiat currency has ever emerged. And in fact, the dollar itself was just kind of a bait and switch. It was something redeemable for free market money gold that was then replaced with this compelled money. And again, if money is speech, we could say then that fiat currency is effectively compelled speech. It’s the same thing. They’re forcing a language, a language of value. They’re forcing its use on you. And if you boil it down to brass tacks, the US dollar today and all fiat currencies, they are mechanically, they’re pyramid schemes. So pyramid scheme is a system of network marketing, basically, that’s using, that’s useful for enriching those in higher tiers at the expense of those in lower tiers. And you’re constantly recruiting more lower tiers to enrich the top. And that’s exactly- Let me draw an objection to that just briefly. So let’s, I’m going to accept the pyramid scheme hypothesis, but I’m going to say that it’s a pyramid scheme that sacrifices the future to the present. But that doesn’t matter because the future is going to be so much more productive than the present that we can afford that leverage. It would be, so to make, this is the kernel of economics, right? Is that I can delay consumption or gratification today, invest for the future, and then enjoy more in the future. Fiat currency and central planning more generally reverses that. It actually induces you to consume and take on debt today and disregard the future. This is the raising of the time preference that we spoke to earlier. And its arbitrary nature, again, as Mises would describe, all centrally planned action is it runs countervailing to what the free market would choose on its own. So no matter what you do, the government cannot make a good decision if they’re coercing people to do it because they’re withdrawing productive factors from the economy to fund that decision. If they want to go to war, for instance, the market may have not selected to go to war, but a government has decided that, no, we’re going to pull these productive factors from the economy and push us into warfare. So it’s contradictory to the essence of democracy itself. Right. So you guys really see that Bitcoin as a, you really do see it as a distributed form of government as well in some sense. It’s disruptive to centralized government. Yes. Yeah. And I think one of the elements of inflation, and again, this is the string back to what we were talking about earlier, and I do think it is a fundamental point to make, but if money is how we express our sacrifices and therefore our values into the matrix of value hierarchies that exist in the market, then inflation is doing so without the commensurate sacrifices that everyone else needs to make to allow them to communicate that to the market. And so this is where the idea of pathological hierarchies is applicable is because a naturally emerging market where the fidelity between one’s actions, one’s choices, one’s valuations, and the signal that they send out into the market is pristine, and I would make the case that’s what Bitcoin represents. Whenever that is diluted in whatever capacity, to a small degree or to a larger degree, that’s what creates incongruencies between the matrix of value hierarchies that are out in the market. If they are pristine, if we are all able to communicate with perfection our value hierarchies to the market, we will see, in my opinion, emergent order. I don’t see how it could be any other way. Where that gets thrown off is when that signal that we’re sending carries alternative information, not information that we, through our divine process of mediating chaos in order to bestow value on things and then express that through our actions, not that process, but through some other process of someone who controls the mechanism by which we communicate and so inflation is changing the relationship between the matrix of value hierarchies without the commensurate sacrifices and that is what creates pathological hierarchies and that’s what creates, you mentioned the inequality and the divisiveness and stuff. Why do we allow this? Now, we’re not going to degenerate into conspiratorial thinking, and I’m always wary of any conversation that involves they, an external actor. We’ve allowed this as a global community and if what we’ve done is flawed in the manner that your analysis indicates, why have we allowed it to happen? I could say who benefits and we could go there to begin with, but again, as I said, I’m very leery of conspiratorial thinking. I tend to think of large-scale social problems as everybody’s problem, you know, but so what do you think about that? Why have we allowed this to happen? And let’s say who benefits and why and who suffers? I’m with you and 99% of the time, I attribute the things that we see in the world that we might term evil or bad to incompetence and not- Malevolence. Right, evil, yeah, not malevolence. I think there’s many factors here, but one is it happens in slow motion and so people end up not being able to see it. For example, like you would say today, hey, I got my iPhone, I got Netflix, we’re talking on Zoom, things are good and right in the world. I know oftentimes you discuss not to discredit, not to go out and try to change the world, not to be too critical of the state of the world because the order that we experience is almost miraculous. But I would say that there’s an element of that that may cause you not to see how things have become disordered. I mean, it’s difficult to see that. And so when we talk about the disruptive effect of inflation that I just alluded to, a lot of people have a difficult time seeing that. We can objectively isolate problems that are going on in the world, inequality and social problems and all the craziness that we see in the world. And we attribute that to fill in the blank cause. Whereas I think what we attribute most of that to is the disordering that results from this fractured congruence of value hierarchies that are being communicated in a market. That’s where I think most of that comes from. But it takes time to play out. Right. So it’s a form of faulty information. Right. And we are leveraging right now, we are still benefiting from the order, the structure that was imposed as a result of, let’s say, being on a gold standard and the political and social dynamic that that fosters. In many cases, we’ve been living off the stability that that fosters for the last several decades. I think you could make a case that despite technological advancement that might cause us to think, hey, things aren’t so bad or may cause to distract us. I think you can make the case that the equity that we’ve been living off of that stability is coming to an end. And I think we’re seeing that in many different cases. But I think that’s why it happens in slow motion. And people are not educated enough or necessarily paying attention enough to notice the relationship between all the different things that are going on. OK, so let me ask you guys a question about what happened in 2008. And so. I may be completely wrong about this, but my understanding was that the 2008 crisis was fundamentally produced by a technological revolution. And the technological revolution was something like the realization that you could take investments of a certain risk level mortgages, let’s say substandard mortgages, and by bundling them together in huge tranches and huge groups, you could quantify the risk. And as a consequence of quantifying the risk, you could discount. You could make the group of of of of investments more valuable than they would be as the sum of the individual investments, which I thought was a brilliant innovation. And so now the companies banks traded these huge tranches of subprime mortgages because they could quantify the risk. And that means that that could be accounted for financially. And so the risk was ameliorated. And the flaw was, well, no one realized that doing so on mass would increase the probability that housing prices would become correlated across time, across huge geographical regions, for example, across the entire United States. And so the housing market could collapse all at once. But so so you could make the case that that was actually a flaw in the free market computing prowess because a technological innovation came along, warped the entire system. And then what had to happen was the political system had to rescue it. And so I watched that and I thought, well, did I was the political system embedded in the economic system, which is, I think, the argument you guys are fundamentally making? Or is the economic system embedded in the political system? And is what’s wrong with my analysis of what happened in 2008? Wasn’t it the case that the market was rescued by the by the political actors? Is that incorrect? I see arson is putting out the fire. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, I could start and you guys feel free to jump in. So I would first encourage you to look into what’s called the euro dollar system, which is essentially these this. We control the pyramid scheme in the US, the domestic dollar supply, but there’s this offshore derivative system where everyone’s trying to peg the dollars that the central bank doesn’t control. That’s actually been considered to be at the root of the 2008 crisis. And then this was kind of a cover story. But if we just get back to error, so we could say risk is error, right? So there was this embedded risk that we thought we had calculated and contained. But what was actually happening is because we have centrally planned money, it’s pushing hidden risk into the economy, right? Because the free market distributed intelligence, intelligence being defined as error correction, it’s mitigated by the central planning of money. So these hidden risks accumulate. And that’s why we’ve had increased volatility since 1971. We have these huge economic booms. We print a bunch of money. Inflation runs hot, but so do assets. Everyone thinks they’re doing really well. And then we have these catastrophic retracement back to economic reality. And actually, that’s because incremental incremental reaction to risk is not is not being implemented. That’s what you’re diverging perceptions from reality effectively. So even the correction in March 2020, that was the sharpest liquidity collapse in the history of markets. It was faster than 1929. So we would expect as more fiat currency, which is artificial liquidity is pumped into the system, it’s further distorting this economic perceptual faculty and creates even more volatile boom and bust. This is the Austrian business cycle theory in a nutshell. And the only way, the only way to resolve this is to let the free market clear errors. That’s what it does. That’s what consciousness does too, by the way. So you can think of the free market as our interconnected consciousnesses mediated by the price signal. When you disturb the price signal, our consciousnesses become divided and we have increased errors and blowups. That’s why I suggest to people that they don’t engage in deception because they distort the value signals and they warp their own consciousness. It’s a very dangerous thing to do. That’s right. Because you only use deception. That’s exactly what money does. That’s exactly what fiat money does. Fiat currency is a living lie. That’s what that’s that’s it in a nutshell. And maybe to to bring this home, the question you asked could also be rephrased to pick a more like an example that people might be familiar with. You could also ask like, was the drug addict or was the person suffering from alcoholism saved by alcohol because he suffered withdrawal? And that’s like a very similar question. And then you could argue, yes, we gave him the substance and he survived. So it was a good thing and he made it through. But what would actually be necessary is kind of like that’s not the cure. You would need to quit cold turkey. And that’s what Bitcoiners are arguing or just in general, people advocating for sound money are arguing that we need to get off the fiat standard that can be arbitrarily manipulated and manipulates the price signals, manipulates the whole economy. OK, so that’s a fundamental tenet of Austrian economics is essentially that central planning in relationship to the monetary supply that isn’t informed by incremental free market decisions produces error that accumulates and produces cyclical booms and busts. That’s very interesting because there is a psychological analog to that. That psychological analog to that is failure to react to error when they’re committed incrementally to store the errors up, which compound across time and to collapse. And the oldest myths, some of which I talk about maps of meaning, talk about, for example, the reemergence of Tiamat in the Mesopotamian myth, which is the consequence of corruption accumulates and produces catastrophe. It’s the flood myth idea essentially. So the business cycle theory in Austrian economics is a recast of the flood myth and the Tower of Babel. Is that right? Because those are the two parallels, the two mythological parallels. Tower of Babel is administrative overload essentially and the corruption of systems and the flood is the catastrophe, the downside of the natural catastrophe, I would say. So I think you hit on one of the main points of this discussion generally is that truth is represented across scales. Maybe that’s a part of the definition of truth is that you can see it across scales. It’s represented in different forms. It’s certainly part of the definition of deep truth. Right. And so definitely when we look at maps of meaning, I think this is part of the reason why we’re so interested in talking about it is because we take those truths that are seemingly entirely unrelated to markets and money. It’s all about mediating the forces of nature, the structure of reality in conjunction with the social relationships that constitute life and trying to figure out what behavior is the most optimal balance between the two. And I think we could carry that over to money and markets. It’s funny because maps of meaning could have been called maps of value and obviously money is a map of value, but I hadn’t drawn the analogy between a map of value and money. Although in retrospect, that seems like an obvious thing to do, which is why I got interested in your idea about incorruptible money. Yeah. And so you think of incorruptible money as computationally advantageous essentially. That’s the basis of the idea. Yeah. And I think again, to pursue this, I think Bitcoin is the regenerative hero in different form. It takes the forces of nature. It digs into chaos, into pure entropy, into pure energy and let’s say mathematics and spits out the greatest form of order that we as human beings use in the social realm, which is money. And it does so in the archetypal way, in the maximal possible way of doing so. And it does so in an incorruptible manner. And so if you take a lot, if you take those things, that could easily have been talking about the regenerative hero as described in maps of meaning. And I think it’s represented in Bitcoin. It’s instantiated in Bitcoin and that’s why it’s having such a revelatory effect on me. It provides a really weird bridge between the objective world and the world of value too, doesn’t it? Because all the computation occurs in objective, like that’s objectively real and that objectively real incorruptible computation produces an unerring signal of value or that’s the theory at least. Okay, so let’s talk practically for a bit. So then we’ll return to the central discussion. I mean, Elon Musk has recently objected to Bitcoin on the basis of, and maybe this is, is this a flaw? Bitcoin becomes more and more expensive to produce as we proceed through time. And the consequence of that is that we do in fact use up more energy or at least that’s in one form, which is computational energy. Maybe we gain that back and efficiencies within the market itself, you could argue that. But what do you think about Musk’s recent decision with regard to Bitcoin? I would love to jump in on that because I have written about that extensively. And I think what you said is exactly right that Bitcoin is a map of value, so to speak. And what’s so interesting about Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is both the map and the territory. And as I’ve said before, in the informational realm, we cannot link usually, like we cannot link the map to the territory. You cannot do it. Like if you have something in the real world, writing something down about it, you will always have to trust the person that wrote it down. And what’s so ingenious in the world of Bitcoin is Bitcoin uses the only thing you can do with information, which is to transform it, to anchor it to the real world. So this is what proof of work does. That’s what the energy expenditure is for. And the energy is used for various things. So it’s used to secure the system. It’s used to distribute new coins. It’s used to make sure that the history becomes incorruptible. So it also secures the past. So it does a couple of things. It also makes sure like it even decentralizes time itself, which sounds kind of weird, but it’s very hard to keep a decentralized system synchronous because of relativity and other effects. So if you wouldn’t have something like physical proof of work, you would need to trust a central authority in terms of time, because the order of things, like the order of transactions needs an absolute order of time. And all these things combined are solved by the proof of work system that Satoshi Nakamoto introduced. And so like the energy expenditure, the basic question becomes, once you realize that the basic question becomes, is it worth it? And society in general, society in general asks this question about all kinds of things like our car is worth it, our smartphone is worth it, is the internet worth it? All these things, they take up a lot of energy. And Bitcoiners argue that Bitcoin is definitely worth it. For this for the sound money aspect alone. Musk is determining by fiat that it isn’t. Well, I mean, it’s very hard to decipher what Musk meant with his recent comments, because Tesla is still holding like a lot of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. I think it’s about 2 billion US dollars worth in Bitcoin, and they don’t intend to sell any. And so, you know, like it’s a political game to… So let me ask you this, if you guys are right, tell me if I’m leaping somewhere I shouldn’t be here, but what should happen is that whatever energy is expended in the production of Bitcoin and the maintenance of the system should be more than recouped by the increased efficiency of every system that use Bitcoin as a transactional device. And so the net energy, there’ll be a net energy gain, not a net energy loss if you calculated it across the entire system. And so it’s a mistake just to look at the cost of generating Bitcoin in the absence of considering the efficiencies that Bitcoin would produce. And the same is true for gold as well. You know, like it takes a lot of energy to extract gold from the ground. And historically, society in general answered this question in the affirmative. Yes, it’s way worth it. Like it’s worth to dig this up. Right. But there were limits, right? Because once the ore becomes insufficiently rich, at some point you stop refining it. So there’s a limit. But according to your logic, at least the limit on the energy expenditure that Bitcoin produces should be produced by the market response to Bitcoin, not by some fiat judgment about whether or not it’s like ecologically sustainable, because that’s just a guess. And the best indicator that we have for ecological stability is going to be cumulative free market decisions, even though those aren’t necessarily very good. They’re better than anything else we could possibly generate rationally. And just to clarify one point, and then I’ll let Robert dig into this, Bitcoin doesn’t take energy because the production of Bitcoin takes energy. The production of Bitcoin, it’s an emission schedule. So it’s constant. We know when the last Bitcoin will be mined, it’s going to be around in 2140. And it doesn’t matter how much energy you expend, it won’t go quicker, it won’t go slower. So if you dig harder for it, it will be harder to find. And if you stop digging for it, it will get easier to find. So that’s the genius invention of the difficulty adjustment. So there is no one-to-one link of Bitcoin production and energy expenditure. And the energy is used for different things, for its security, for example. And Robert, I think you want to say a few things. Robert Stringer Yeah, I’ll try to dovetail and tie some things together. So the general tenet here is there is no value in money without sacrifice. There has to be an energy expenditure to secure the supply of money or the network of money. That’s what ensures against its corruption, basically. And if we zoom out even- Robert Stringer Otherwise it wouldn’t cost anything. Robert Stringer That’s right. And someone would just arbitrarily suck value out of it by printing it, right? That’s what the central bank is designed to do. So if we zoom out a little further, we could say the entire purpose of the world economy is to increase collective energy efficiency. That’s why we are trading and specializing. That’s what profits are, actually, right? It’s an indication that we’ve- John Ligato A free energy. Robert Stringer Provided we’ve satisfied a want more efficiently. And that rewarded profits to the entrepreneur that then invites more competition, more production, etc., etc. So back to John’s point, the entrepreneur, this is the individual element that courageously faces the chaos of nature, right? With his skin in the game, his own capital plans, etc., trying to convert it into good and useful order. The entrepreneur is the living hero myth. And that’s what the free market honors. It honors the sacrifices that entrepreneurs go out into the world and make for us, whereas something like a bureaucracy is antithetical to that. So to get back to your point about why central banking, how did we allow it to happen, I boil it down to this, is that even the entrepreneur, he’s pursuing something for nothing. He’s trying to find a way to satisfy wants more cheaply, more efficiently to enrich himself and to enrich others. That axis you talk about between chaos and order, good and evil, right? We’re all pursuing something for nothing, but there’s a point where you can cross that axis into the domain of evil, where it’s intentionally harmful to others to benefit ourselves. I think that’s what central banking has done, right? The entrepreneur wants something for nothing by figuring out how to provide a good or service, but so does the central bank. But it’s crossed that divide to where it’s actually economically harming others to give its shareholders, its private shareholders, a perpetual economic free lunch. It has no sacrifice in the money creation process. It pays a dividend to undisclosed shareholders. It’s a parasite on the productive economy, effectively. And I would say that no one is better than their incentives, right? It’s not like, how did we let this happen? It’s like, there was just an attack vector on gold. There’s technological shortcomings of gold that allowed it to be corrupted. That’s how we got the central bank built on top of gold. So I think by introducing Bitcoin, a money that’s really hard to steal in terms of inflation or confiscation, it pushes us to be more hardworking as a society, because that is the only profitable strategy. We become entrepreneurial. Whereas if money is easy to steal, like it is under the central bank model via inflation, we slide towards kleptocracy. And that’s what you see. Even Elon, he’s very close to the fiat currency. Yeah, I like the we terminology a lot better, you know, because it does, you make a case there, you make a case for a kind of technological inadequacy is that as a species, we haven’t been able to generate a sufficiently incorruptible language of value. And that has produced all sorts of negative consequences, some of which you’re outlining. It’s a problem that we all have. OK, so practically speaking, guys, Bitcoin, it’s not easy to spend. It’s not you can’t go into a store and spend it like it doesn’t have that portability that you described, Robert, as a cardinal element of a necessary currency. And it isn’t obvious to me that it’s been rapidly moving in that direction. But that may be a mere consequence of my ignorance or my timescale. It’ll do happen in 10 years. And that’s virtually instant from a historical perspective. How do you think? Do you think Bitcoin can leap the gap between its what would you say somewhat? Store value exchange? Yes, that’s right. Exactly. Can I just hop in real quick on the last point before we answer this and then we’ll get to it? But Jordan, you mentioned, you know, is this energy expenditure and the environmental issues around Bitcoin, is it worthwhile? Right. And as you said, the market is the best thing to determine whether something is worthwhile or not. I tend to think of our impact on the planet, not as a planet in isolation, but as in human flourishing. I mean, isn’t that what we should be looking at when we talk about the environment, not just is the natural world harmed in some way, but is our relationship? Otherwise, we’re just talking about maximizing someone’s ideological perception. This is what the environment should be. Right. So I think our question should be, what is basically the ratio between the consumption of resources and the human flourishing that it nets? And I think that money, because it’s the thing that allows you to determine the relative worthwhile of worth wildness of everything else, it means that there is nothing more important than that object. So whatever the free market selects as the money, the resources used to instantiate that, to perpetuate it, are definitely worthwhile because it permits the relative valuation of everything else downstream of it. I just wanted to get that piece out. Yeah, yeah. A fair point. If I might jump in, in terms of like, you can’t go to the corner shop and spend your Bitcoin, I would say, you know, that’s a fair criticism, but that was true 20 years ago for e-commerce and other technologies. So it happens gradually than suddenly. Like that was the same criticism was like, what am I going to do with a smartphone? What am I going to do with the internet? Electricity. It doesn’t work yet. You know, yeah. Electricity, a lot of Bitcoins or some Bitcoins like to use this metaphor because Bitcoin is also a network and electricity is also a network. So you have network effects that they they take a while to grow, but Bitcoin is very usable already. And there are a lot of people already living on a Bitcoin standard. So they are earning Bitcoin, they are spending Bitcoin, they are using Bitcoin day to day. Currently, because we are still in this early adoption phase and Bitcoin is an exponential technology built upon other exponential technologies. So it lives on the internet and it uses like smartphones and other devices that are exponential in nature to propagate itself. Then it will just take a while until it is ubiquitous. But I think also it is unstoppable, just like the internet was. You know, the internet dematerialized all kinds of things and it just took a little bit to play out. And Netflix wasn’t possible from day one and video Zoom calls that we are having right now weren’t possible from day one. And very similarly, Bitcoin is evolving and building itself up in layers. And currently its main use is as a censorship resistant money. If you are not allowed to have a bank account for whatever reason, Bitcoin serves you very well. And if you want to have a long term store of value, Bitcoin is an excellent choice of store of value as well. And just look at the data, like historically, year over year, Bitcoin compared to the US dollar gained 200%. So if you put some money in Bitcoin, if you have done that in the past, you are better off than having money on the bank account or under your mattress because of the inflationary nature of fiat currencies that we discussed. And I think it will just continue to evolve just like the internet did and people will find it useful for various different reasons. And now you regard it as unstoppable. And so on what basis do you make that claim? Why do you believe that Bitcoin is pure information? It is pure information. And also the system that is running it like the asset itself is pure information. I can store 12 words in my head and I have Bitcoin in my head, literally. So it is very useful in that regard. That’s what makes it virtually resistant to… Nobody can take it away from you. If you secure it properly, Bitcoin has certain properties that allows you to make sure that you and only you can spend the Bitcoin. And on the system side of things, the Bitcoin network itself, it’s just computer code. And so it’s just information. And we as a society are very good at making sure that important information, information that various people regard as important survives. So we often like to compare Bitcoin to other informational texts, just like the Bible, for example, that outlast empires because it is very hard to destroy pure information if it is distributed well enough. And the whole reason for the Bitcoin system to work in that complicated manner that it does is because it maximizes decentralization. It maximizes censorship resistant. The whole idea of the Bitcoin system is to build something that they can’t stop and it doesn’t matter who they are. So it’s to build a system that we as humanity can’t stop. Right, right. To build a system that we can’t. Well, so that’s kind of an interesting conundrum there too. You kind of ask yourself, there’s no shortage of dire science fiction predictions about the buildings of systems that we can’t even stop. Downsides to Bitcoin. Well, how about the facilitation of criminal activity, underground criminal activity, for example? And like if you guys put your heads together and you had to critique Bitcoin as a social danger, what would you say? Oh, there’s definitely the criminal element, which seems immediately relevant. I would say it’s the same as with every powerful tool. Like a chef’s knife is a very dangerous weapon, but you can also prepare beautiful meals with it. And we have to kind of make sure to wield these powerful tools directly. But it’s also kind of, you know, like the genie is out of the bottle. We kind of have to, just like with the internet, you know, like the internet and every other technology before it, it can, it’s just a tool. It can be used for good and bad. And there’s plenty of crime facilitated online as well. And, you know, like I don’t even want to go into bank robberies and cars that were early adopted by bank robbers so that they can run away faster. So I think that would be my answer to that question. And Jordan, just very quickly on that one, you know, in your writing and such, you detail how the religious traditions, particularly Christianity in our case, have informed the legal system. And one of the very special ways that it’s done so is that it sanctifies the sovereignty of the individual, even if that individual is, has obviously committed a crime. They are given the right of due process. They are presumed innocent until proven guilty. And this is a technology that fundamentally sanctifies the sovereignty of every individual. And what they choose to do with that sovereignty is their choice. Yes, as a society we will hold them to account. You’re also making a case, all of you, that the very act of Bitcoin sanctifying the sovereignty of the individual is actually tilting individuals towards doing something good rather than something bad. That there is, that it’s not just neutral, as Gigi was laying it out, that there’s an intrinsic ethic to Bitcoin that is more likely to tilt it in a positive direction, which would be a more, what would you say, a more powerful rejoinder to the Bitcoin equals criminality criticism. So the question is, is that, see, that’s what I’m trying to wrestle with here is, okay, so let’s accept your proposition that Bitcoin is an incorruptible currency. And that seems fair enough. I mean, I can’t come up with an obvious rejoinder to that. And then, so that means that we have an incorruptible language of value that enables us to make better decisions. Well, we do use money to make decisions. I mean, sometimes, look, sometimes when I’m trying to decide whether I’ll do one thing or another, I’ll do the thing that makes more money because I can’t decide any other way, right? It’s an obvious way of picking one thing over another when they’re relatively commensurate. Other people seem to value it more because they’ll pay more for it. So it’s actually helpful as a cognitive, it’s a helpful cognitive tool pricing, obviously, because it simplifies decision making to a tremendous degree. So it’s integrally involved with decision making. You could make the case that in an economy or in a market that’s properly constituted and structured, i.e. people’s expression of their values is not corrupted, that you following that signal of something being more financially rewarding is moving toward the good because the good is the aggregation of all. So that’s really what’s at the bottom of this, as far as I was concerned. That’s what got me so intrigued by what you were thinking, because that’s an unbelievably radical claim. And it doesn’t apply if the money is corrupted. Right. You’re basically saying that you could rely on an incorruptible currency as an unerring signal of value. So you’re doing all your computation externally. In this new book I wrote, Beyond Order, I made the case that a lot of our sanity is distributed. We tend to think of ourselves as organized within. That’s part of the psychoanalytic tradition, the psychological tradition for that matter. We sort of keep ourselves sane if our psyches are well structured. A lot of the way we stay sane is by interacting with other people. The signals they send us and that we respond to keep us sane. You can see we’re all going off in all sorts of weird conspiratorial directions as a consequence of being locked down under COVID for so long because everybody’s brains are… We haven’t been subjected to enough social correction for a while because we’re isolated and we all go kind of off the rails as a consequence. So if the value language is incorruptible, then you can externalize your cognition and you can rely on the market almost completely to make decisions for you. So you’d buy the cheapest car, for example, all other things being equal because the calculation would have already been done for you. I mean, there’s going to be a bit of individual idiosyncrasy, but fundamentally… I think the greatest reward would be climbing the value hierarchy of the market in aggregate. Then the question becomes, what is at the top of the value hierarchy of the market, of the collectivity of all people? And so then, in my opinion, yes, that allows you to outsource some of your cognitive load and determine where you should deploy your resources more easily, but I think that also allows us to contend with what is. And if we can do that, then I think we can solve our problems more easily. And of course, the market is a massive component of identifying those things. And I think it empowers us to say, which is a huge part of your message, is when we see things out in the world that we don’t like or agree with, our action is what changes those things. Our contribution to that market to nudge or shift the matrix of value hierarchies in whatever way is the best way we can affect change. Well, we do affect change because we buy things and then there’s more of them. I mean, we do have that impact every time we make a purchasing decision. So that. Hmm. And part of this, I would just add that so sovereignty itself, it’s the generative source of sovereignty. It is the logos, right? So as you’ve described in your work, we first had thought, I guess you could say, then we had action, then we had developed speech to describe our actions. And that became embedded in something like the Bible would describe our moral development across time. And then money, we’d say money is the tech layer on top of that. It is the natural extension of speech and action that allows us to, as a mode of self-sovereign expression. And that’s rooted in the logos, the logos defined as the word or ratio in Greek. Prices are exchange ratios denominated in money for, again, outsourcing this cognitive load to the market. It’s the same thing as words. That’s a competition of value, yeah. Prices in words, you could say prices are speech, right? Or money is speech expressed through prices. And when we violate that, when we have an institution, which also we create institutions to do the same thing. We want an institution so we don’t have to think about the important civilizational operation. We can just rely on the institutional practice so we don’t need to think about it. When we corrupt, that institution tries to corrupt words or prices as communism did in the 20th century, or central banking does to prices today. It destroys the generative principle of order in the world, which is individual sovereignty. So that’s what Bitcoin is. It’s just a tool that maximizes the freedom and the sovereignty of the individual, empowering them to be entrepreneurial and then usher in a more wealthy and abundant world as a result. And maybe if I tag on to that, I think you in your work, you came to the conclusion that free speech is paramount, but it’s also dangerous, but it is good. And we would be saying that Bitcoin is free speech money. And along the same lines, it is very powerful and it can be dangerous, but it is also good. So the net benefit outweighs everything else. All right. That is a great place to end, guys. That’s a nice natural place to end. Gigi, John, Richard, Robert, thank you very much. I can’t believe that our time is over. That flew by madly and that’s exactly what I was hoping it would do. So it was a pleasure talking to you guys. We’ll do this again. And I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. And I hope everybody who’s listening or watching found this engaging and useful. And I’ll keep reading what you’re doing and watching what you’re doing. And we’ll see how all this transpires.