YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Breedlove

lines on the record: 246
first: 2021-04-17
most recent: 2021-04-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Always try to have that higher order view of myself, and that it's just. Certain experience occurring at a certain level, but it shouldn't override your kind of highest order self. That's just resolutely accepted death and that this is your one play in life. So Hopefully that propels me towards proper action.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A deadline. Only time and Bitcoin are absolutely scarce. Unfortunate I guess I got started on this philosophical journey a bit when I was younger, but I got into Musashi and Sun Tzu quite a bit. Who wrote Musashi wrote the Book of Five Rings? Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. And one of the things that I mean, these guys were just absolute beasts. You know, they lived and died by the sword and they were just very... Great equanimity about all things in life. And I also found this kind of in the Stoic philosophy where they just are very cool with everything. And one of the lines there is that the way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of death. And so I've always tried to think about that. Like, of course, I experience fear, I experience everything that you do on a meat store.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Jordan Peterson goes deep into that where you have to listen to that sense of meaning in your life, or you might have some decision on paper that's so great this way, but your heart says no. Your heart says otherwise. I've tried to listen to my heart throughout, and I think that creates the best outcomes.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we are the high, you know, one of the highest forms of beauty that nature has created. If we just think one of the most Complex and adaptive thing or a reflection of nature. And another thing that Comes to mind here is that Has this quote where it says, truth or more accurately an accurate depiction of reality is necessary for any good outcome So, when we think that love or value is primary, I think that too reinforces this thesis that acting out of love or acting out of proper moral action, your best reflecting the fundamental nature of reality. Therefore, you're best creating the best possible outcomes or the things of the most beauty, whether that's your artistic expression, your children, your business, whatever it is.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I'm blessed to have a two and a half year old daughter. Love is a word we throw around, you know, it's like I love these potato chips, I love you, man. I love you, my daughter. It's got so many different intensities, I guess you might say. I don't know. My intuition is that Is something very fundamental to the universe. Again, I know words don't do a justice, but if we just Proxy love with selfless action The whole damn universe is selflessly acting, right? It's just unfolding. May sound a bit hippy dippy, but my intuition is just that love is the core of it somehow. I don't have anything to back that up really. It's just.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't regret any of it, but now that I'm kind of in this place where I feel good and I know the value of a good night's sleep and just I've more deeply explored my own potential that I feel maybe a little regretful that I didn't do this earlier is all I'm saying. So maybe. Exploring different sides of yourself, right? See what it's like to go and make a bunch of mistakes and be wild and crazy and then maybe try to walk the straight and narrow for a few months and just see what it's like.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, drinking, I think morality and eating. You know, I just was kind of doing whatever I wanted in some ways, let's say.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're exercising your divine trait, which is. Logos, right? That we are. These animals that can tell and believe stories. So it feels like almost a sacred duty to really sharpen that part of ourselves and use it to create the best world possible. And then the second one was the, I think, health and fitness stuff. Maybe everyone does this in their 20s. They just live a little fast and beat themselves up. Not that I wasn't like I was living well and you know successful by a lot of measures but I wish I had maybe gotten my act together a little bit sooner.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of financial people always give you a line of advice and then say, this is not financial advice. Oh, like, this is financial advice. Like, study, study, learn. Yeah.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the strongest piece of advice I have for. This is beyond just Bitcoin. This is you managing your own personal and financial affairs is that you need to invest in knowledge first. It's not good enough to just follow the crowd and buy a 60-40 portfolio and put it in a Roth RA and plan on Social Security. I mean, the world's changing much faster than any existing institution is going to be able to keep up with. That's why I like, I mean, that's why I named the show the question what is money. I think that. To me, it is the rabbit that took me down the rabbit hole is like just asking that question naturally progressed to these other questions, like, what is value? What is government? What is, you know, what is the purpose of society speech? All of these things. Encourage people to Arm yourself with knowledge and study.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got to the point personally where I was trying to wrestle with these ideas that are just so much bigger than me, and I have this backlog of books that was growing faster than I could read them, that I just reached a point where I decided I wanted to start making sacrifices toward attaining that. And alcohol was just an easy one. Even if you just drink socially on the weekends, you're probably spending. Five to ten hours drinking, and then maybe another five to ten hours recovering perhaps on the day after. So it was a difficult transition initially, but once you get through a couple of months, I feel amazing without it. I sleep better than ever. My workouts are better than ever. I'm sharper than ever. I'm more lucid. So I'm not trying to be a proponent for like not drinking, but I just want to proponent.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lower the inhibitions and lower the guest of uncertainty that is the sweetness of life, right? To be able to go out. Be a flenur at a party and not really know what you're going to do. And we have this draw to the wild side of life as much as we try and build up order around ourselves. I think there's always going to be an appetite for that. I've always, most of my life, I've always been a social drinker, but actually gave up alcohol a year ago. And I would add that to the idea, the repertoire for dealing with bigger ideas because Alcohol is fun. It's amazing good times. It can be analgesic. It can do all of it. It can give you all these benefits if you use the right amounts.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The food thing is so hard, by the way. I still. Know, I can't tell you how many times I've learned the lesson don't eat that. But then you go a few weeks of not eating whatever that is and you're feeling good and then Know something creeps up inside you like, ah, you could just have one, or you could just do this. But for me, it's sugar like sugar just makes me feel terrible. But I always, not always, but if it's been a long time, I start to make that exception in my mind. Like, oh, you can have a little bit. And then I eat it and I feel terrible. So I don't know how many times I've done that dance, but it's not cool.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you got to know yourself, right? Like, it took me a long time to realize I need solitude. Like just how I'm wired, how I'm built. I need like an hour a day solitude. So you got to listen to that part of yourself. You might be compromising something like that where you feel like you always need to be with your girlfriend or whatever it may be. But I would suggest listening to that voice.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. And there's utility to the boredom too, I think, Give your mind the space, I guess your subconscious maybe the space to chew on some of these problems, right? Where you've imbibed so much knowledge, you know, you've highlighted and thought about something, but then you need to stop thinking about it for a while and let it marinate in the subconscious. And then, you know, these flashes of insight that people have described, sometimes I get them in the middle of the night. Like I just wake up from a dream and have them and I got to write it down or sometimes it's in nature taking a walk. But I think that's very important too. We can't just brute force our way into understanding. You know, there's this interplay between kind of the brute force reading intake and then just relaxing, meditating, sleeping, being bored, letting your subconscious do the heavy lifting.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you're strenuous exercise, I guess you would say, and then I end up typing notes into my phone as fast as I can with all these ideas that are flowing. So I've created a lot of good writing out of that.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one other thing I really like, and this is more of a new one, is I used to always listen to music at the gym, but now I've just, because I'm so backlogged on podcast, right? They're just, there's so many. I exclusively listen to podcasts. When I'm walking or when I'm at the gym, anytime I'm doing something that I can't, you know, read basically And I think there's something really special about exercise and ideation. I mean, I don't know if this happens to everyone, but my creative juices just go ballistic when I'm at the gym. Like I hit a certain point of, I guess, heart rate and you're sweating enough, then the idea is to start to flow. So I'm basically at the gym now listening to podcasts, exercising as fast as I can to try to get to that state of.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know maps of meeting and human action are both extremely dense, but they're just, I had to read those books very slow. You just have to take your time with them to give you an idea with Jordan Peterson. He's said this a lot with maps of meaning. Spent three hours a day riding for 15 years to write that book. It's probably, I think it's a 600 page book. He said he estimates he rewrote every sentence in the book 50 times 5-0 to try and get it just perfected. And when you read these sentences, you can tell that he rewrote it 50 times.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know your mind or your spirit signal that that is something meaningful to you and you should, to your point, reread it, sit with it for a long time, write about it. That becomes the ultimate. Triumvirate of synthesizing an idea, actually. If you can read about it And then write about it Then go and talk about it. You get this crystallization of understanding that's just not possible doing any one of the three or any two of the three. So definitely highly recommend people to do that. And in terms of Are those books difficult? I mean, in every way. They're all long books in terms of Density. I would say Leela is the least dense. Maybe maps of meaning.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny. I like to be dynamic actually. So usually speed reading initially and that diffused that internal dialogue for me because when I was reading one word at a time, I was having that too. You almost get a feedback in your own head when you're reading the word out loud. If you're speed reading, you can't do that. You just taking in groups of words at a time, so you can't internally verbalize it, I guess. And then I also am really big on annotating, underlining, writing in the margins. I prefer a physical book, but I also read the Kindle a lot because it's just so convenient anywhere you're waiting in line or every night before bed, I'm reading my Kindle. And I also advocate rereading a lot. So if you found something that, you know, struck you at a deep level you found particularly fascinating you have to listen to that. That's your”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a reader. I love to read. One of the most useful things I've ever done was take a speed reading course Actually, I think there's a version of this available on Timferris' website. It's like a 30 minute speed reading course, it's all about eye movement instead of moving your eye continuously line over line. It's more about jumping and your brain, you can train your brain to just absorb words in their totality versus kind of reading word by word.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are things, and then these things become means or ends once we channel our purpose through them. So this realm of non materialist relevance that I think is really important to grasping economics at a first principles level, I think that book lays it out tremendously. And then the last one would be, I think I mentioned this at the beginning, was that book Leela by Robert Persig, where he's making the case that value is fundamental. And all of these books, they kind of all point to that, actually. They're pointing back to value being the fundamental thing, values and values expressed through moral action as being the fundamental substrate of reality. So if you're like me that I grew up quite scientific-minded, it'll help diffuse some of that and maybe retrain you to the other side of reality.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an excellent book. It's very dense and difficult to read. Actually, this trilogy is pretty brutal. It'll probably take you a year to read hours a day. The second one I mentioned earlier was human action by Mises, the ultimate tome on Austrian economics will help explicate this realm of relevance. I think that economics truly is where we're. Again,”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we mentioned a couple of them here today, but I think a really useful Triplet of books. That I've been recommending recently To help diffuse this materialist worldview of reality where we still think in kind of the Newtonian model that it's atoms and cause and effect. I'd first recommend Jordan Peterson's book, Maps of Meaning. It's a deep dive into mythology and how it's developed over the course of history and how it's reflected both in our social structures and our intra-psychic nature, really, and how they come to reflect one another in a way, like the way we think, again, shapes the world and then the way the world shapes the way we think.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Satisfaction of a particular want that they value so much they've acquired so much of your good or service that you've become rich you can only maintain that position of wealth so long as you continue to serve your fellow man so it changes the incentive such that dominance in the world is no longer can no longer be paired with coercion it has to be paired with competence and it's that's that's how this when we say bitcoin fixes this that's what we mean like it restores that skin in the game, that balance of incentives and disincentives that help us properly navigate reality. And it prevents the buildup of systemic rot like we see with the central bank.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The consumer is sovereign. So you cannot earn value in the world unless you are serving your fellow man, unless they have. Express through their buy and sell decisions in the marketplace, right? You've created”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have the plan or they have the course of action that will save the world, that if everyone would just listen to them, that they would lead us to the promised land, right? Whether this is Bill Gates saving us from a climate crisis or any of these other economic policies that are targeted at a certain outcome, but almost always diverge, almost perfectly from that outcome, creating its opposite effect. I think that's the problem that we have this mechanism that can concentrate wealth and power into the hands of so few that it leads to the proliferation of evil, meaning that it convinces people that their knowledge is complete. Whereas Something like a Bitcoin almost forces the opposite outcome. In a Bitcoin denominated world, in a pure free market.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that gets into a lot of these, I don't know if they call themselves elites or people call them elites or whatever, like let's say shareholders of central banks, people participating in the world economic forum, things like this. They come, I guess the incentives, right? The incentive schema they're in is rewarding them constantly, telling them everything they're doing, saying and thinking is correct because they just keep getting richer all the time. And it leads you closer to this definition of evil, which Book Paradise Lost Friedman said, Evil is the force which believes its knowledge is complete. So these people become more and more convinced.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it's something that we all sort of desire to be completely powerless, you're really unhappy, right? If you're totally powerless, you're a slave. Someone else tells you what to do. You have no autonomy. It's miserable, right? So there's this, it makes the consolidation of power alluring and that we want to protect ourselves from that slave state, let's say. But like many things, it can be taken too far When you concentrate power into too few hands, Hayek argues that it actually changes, it transforms, it becomes something much more intoxicating than it would be if it was held in a more distributed way.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think has lost a lot of its relevance in the modern age, and I don't think it will survive the ever galvanizing gaze of the digital age. There's just too much sunlight, too much transparency today. Ideas move too quickly for something like this to remain relevant Are just people, they are just seeking something for nothing. But I think when you concentrate that much power and that much control, that much wealth into the hands of few, it does change. Hayek argued that the nature of power.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're just people and they're just trying to get something for nothing like all of us do. Honestly, That's what the central bank is the ultimate institution to get something for nothing you Get a perpetual income stream, the ability to acquire more and more territory in the world through monopolizing the supply of money. And you can literally print money. You can buy your way out of anything and buy your way into anything in the world. So it is, I think, the most. Say the most, but a group of very intelligent people put this thing together and figured out how to get something for nothing in perpetuity. Clouding people's conception of money. And if we look at the central bank, it's been around for a while, but the latest implementation here in the US is the Fed. It's about 100 years old. It's an analog age institution that”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true or not, it actually doesn't matter. The intention is divergent from the outcome. The institution that they are running is premised on deception and theft, and it is handicapping the productive economy. So even the terms we use printing money, you're not creating any new value, you're not infusing the economy with anything, any new productive factors whatsoever. You're just harvesting the economic surplus created by entrepreneurs in the marketplace. It's impossible to add any value to an economy by increasing the paper claims on its savings. A feedback loop between man and tool, between creator and created, and I think we have to honor the relationship above either one, right? Trying to put the right people in the system or just build the right system. We need both.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a feedback between the two, right? Specifically with Money itself. Here's the way I've been posing it lately is that I actually think we typically think of people as good or bad or again trying to label people all the time. But I think people and their characters are emergent properties of the incentive structures they inhabit. Know what Charlie Munger say? Don't show me the incentives. I'll show you the outcome kind of thing. This is a flawed incentive structure we've been operating within. Now, I'm not speaking to the intention. People want to argue with me all the time, like Jerome Powell's not a bad guy. He's doing his best at the central bank. He's doing what he thinks is right. That's fine.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know Jordan Peterson is a huge proponent of free speech, and I think that's ultimately at its deepest sense. That's what Bitcoin really is, right? It is just the purest form of monetary speech we've ever had. And by purifying that primary operating system of human action, I think we can eliminate this pathological hierarchy that is unfortunately the dominant institution in the world today.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Currency counterfeiting, which the central bank is, you are no longer bounded by your own balance sheet when you go to war. You don't have to just go to war on your own resources. You can now pillage the Commonwealth and pull for the savings of society as a whole before you go bankrupt. And indeed, this is what Hitler did, right? Hitler hyperinflated in the Weimar Republic to fund his war efforts. And frankly, every dictator, every world war, every internment camp in history was made possible by the weaponization of money in fiat currency. So I hope”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of Jordan's definitions of God is Says God is found in the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies. Think that is a beautiful definition of what Bitcoin is doing in the world and that we have this pathological hierarchy called central banking by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer that is used as a mechanism for perpetual theft and funding warfare at a global scale. Like Ron Paul said, it's no coincidence that the 20th century of total war was also the century of central banking When you have an institution”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think his audience is one of the most important audiences in the world to understand Bitcoin. People that are conscientious and responsible. I think they'll. Quickly understand Bitcoin's value proposition and help elucidate it to the world.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't, actually. We're hopefully going to be talking to him soon about that. We did a book club on his book maps of meaning and he engaged with us about it. So we're hoping to deliver the orange pill to Mr. Peterson.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sad in Soviet Russia? Because if you were sad, you were contradicting the utopian view of the state. So if you were sad, you're implying the state's not doing something wrong.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same reasons we saw capitalism out compete communism, which I think at the data that I recall was that the USSR's economy was valued at close to one-third of its inputs. So if you just didn't do anything inside the USSR and just sold all the raw materials that were going into it, it would have been worth three times as much as sending the materials in, running it through the efforts, and then shipping things back out. It was value destructive versus value creative. And I would argue this is because, again, the centralized computing model versus decentralized computing model, it just became more and more corrupt over time. It got to the point where I think most of the occupations in USSR towards the end were as informants. They were working for the state. Jordan Peterson makes this point too, that at some point it was actually illegal to be”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With this nationalistic faith and devotion. So they removed the economic nerve signal, which coordinated the allocation of capital over time. So this inhibited their ability to generate wealth. Whereas in the United States, we left most markets open to free enterprise. So we honored the integrity of price signals and we allowed people to trade and accumulate wealth. So, in every market except the market for money, both markets maintained a central bank as we've gotten to. Think in a really big picture standpoint, that's why. Capitalism out competes communism is because it is able to generate more wealth than communism was and therefore was able to put financial pressure on the USSR until it reached the point of bankruptcy essentially. A similar model, I would argue, is it”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Definitely a multivariate situation. I think there's a lot of factors. One that jumped out to me recently again from that documentary that I didn't note before was that at one point Stalin eliminated, I think, seventy five percent of his intelligence force. Which I think when you're competing with another nation state, you know, and intelligence and covert operations are very integral to your survival, I think that was a. Definitely a shot in the foot, but at a higher Level, I would say that. Capitalism and communism were each resource strategies of the twentieth century nation state. And they seem, you know, we commonly consider them to be diametrically opposed, but there's actually a lot of commonality between the two. The difference would be that Soviet Russia We alluded to earlier, they tried to completely replace price signals.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, another way to say that is inflation is a decivilizing force, whereas natural price deflation, which would occur in a hard money economy, where there's either a fixed supply of Bitcoin or a relatively scarce supply of gold, for instance. That lays claim to an increasing capital stock of goods and services, prices would naturally decline every year as we became smarter. So the market price becomes a reflection of our collective knowledge. So by letting prices decline naturally over time, we can actually induce civilization. But by trying to force prices higher all the time via the central bank, we're creating the opposite effect.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another one related to money is social cohesion itself. So very simple anecdote for this was the more you increase the inflation rate. Social cohesion is inversely proportionate to that. So the extreme example would be hyperinflation, right? Where the money is produced in such excess that it loses all meaning and relevance. So today in Venezuela, there is cash clogging the gutters, clogging the streets, clogging the sewer system because the cash has lost all relevance. And so anecdotally, we would suspect that okay, if there's an inverse relationship between inflation and social cohesion, if we could then take inflation to zero, couldn't we theoretically increase social cohesion to its maximum”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's perverting free market dynamics, which again, we said free markets generate pragmatic truth, so inflation distorts price signals, which means it confuses capital allocation. We're trying to solve problems, but all of a sudden we can't tell if this price increases a matter of true supply and demand change or a matter of policy change. So it clouds our economic perceptions. It suppresses innovation because now you've exacerbated the boom and bust business cycle. People are going to overborrow and go into projects that they can't profitably sustain. So there'll be a huge collapse. So that actually breaks the market's function of generating innovation. And then, yeah, I would argue too that it pollutes our pursuit of virtue, let's say.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The social strangeness we've seen in modern times where there seems to be a lot of fake people and a lot of fake businesses and a lot of scams, all of these things. I think it really is rooted in the money. And Bitcoin as the first money in history that has a 0% terminal inflation rate or said differently zero unexpected inflation. There's no theft integrated into Bitcoin. You can only earn it through work or sacrificing resources to obtain it. It is the antidote to this moral cancer that inflation riddles our society with.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As they charge more money for wine, that is inferior, the buyers of that wine, also living in a central banked economy, are also getting scammed by not only the inflation, but also the wine. So it becomes this kind of corrosive, contagious moral effect that propagates throughout an economy. That's why I've argued in a lot of my writing that inflation is this infectious moral cancer on the world. I think it is tied back to a lot of the...”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, case number one is not very palatable. He doesn't want to eat the economic loss. Case number two is not very good either because he's then incentivizing all of his customers to go shop other winemakers if he doubles his price. So human nature being what it is, trying to get something for nothing, inflation actually seeps into other industries by encouraging producers into option three, which is to deceive your customer in the short run. And again, this would be done initially at the margins. Maybe it's just a few drops of water. Maybe it's just some cheaper grapes. But over time, This inflation is actually inducing producers to weigh their financial well-being against their moral integrity. So it's forcing them into this dilemma that would not exist in a free market economy.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can either keep selling his bottle at $20, and all of his inputs will increase due to inflation by fifty percent, so he will lose fifty percent of his profit margin as a result. So we can choose to eat that loss. He can choose to double the selling price of his bottle of wine from $20 to $40 because all of the price of his inputs doubled. So then he would maintain his profit margin. Or the third one is that he could choose to water down his wine or use inferior ingredients so he could use cheaper inputs and maintain the output at the same price. So he could basically start selling his customers an inferior product for the same price to preserve his profit margin.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say an increase in money supply from one to two trillion dollars. This winemaker that's accustomed to selling wine at $20 a bottle is now faced with basically three choices. An important point here, too, before we get into his three choices, are what prices are themselves. Prices are the most visible aspect of any service. So when you increase prices, You are incentivizing your customers to look elsewhere. They're going to look at your competition. When you decrease prices, you're incentivizing market actors to look closer at your product, right? You're delivering a solution at a lower price. This winemaker that's accustomed to selling his wine at a $20 price point, all of a sudden because of his central bank has tripled the money supply, he has three choices.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source