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

“Prices are just the exchange ratios of things. So the smarter we can solve problems, the better we can solve problems, the less prices would be. So it induces more cooperation.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasing our natural predilection to be combative with one another because we think there's more scarcity in the world than there actually is. Versus in a world where you're not increasing the money supply, prices are declining every year. As prices decline, this is a signal to market actors in the market that scarcity is declining. There is less need to fight over things. And all of this ties back into the old bastiat saying that if goods don't cross borders, soldiers will. So, if we're not trading with one another, if we're not acting interdependently, and we're not Becoming more intelligent as a market And that increased intelligence or increased knowledge is reflected in decreased prices.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by inflation, I specifically mean arbitrary fiat currency supply. Buy a legal monopoly. Inflation is a commonly misunderstood word. That is amplifying the perception of scarcity among market actors in the world. And I would argue that it actually amplifies divisiveness. I think this is the key maybe to looking at the connection between the monopolization of money and things like cancel culture because it's increasing the”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we could think of the price itself is an indication, it's a data packet, if you will. The price is a data packet on supply and demand, right? It's telling you how much supply there is of something in the world relative to the demand. So, when you print money and artificially increase that price, it's diverging away from supply and demand. It's becoming just more of a product of policy than it is of free market fundamentals. The more expensive something is that is a signal to the marketplace and to market actors that it is scarce. Right? That's why Leonardo painting might sell for $16 million. There's only one. There's a lot of demand for it. Maybe my numbers are off, but you get the point. It's the reason mask spiked in price after the COVID announcement, right? There was not a supply. Toilet paper, et cetera, et cetera. So inflation.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inflation by artificially increasing the prices of goods and services in the world. We're injecting more dollars, chasing the same level of goods and services. We are artificially increasing scarcity. And when you increase perceived scarcity, you are amplifying divisiveness. Natural state of man is when everything is scarce and you really have to fight hard just to eat or drink water that day. So it's destivilizing in a way by artificially amplifying the perceived scarcity in the world.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And back to what we were saying in the beginning that if value truly is fundamental, I think it's interesting that all these stories point towards often common moral values. They're not perfectly aligned, but it does speak to just the evolutionary importance of morality and the subjectivity of morality, where morality sort of evolves over time based on Frankly, the capital stock we've accumulated. The more capital stock we've accumulated, the easier life is, the less barbaric we have to be. Whereas if we're living in conditions of true scarcity, then we tend to be a bit more barbaric towards one another. And that too, to dovetail this into something largely unrelated, but I think is really important, is inflation.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that mythology itself is another form of data compression. If you look at these stories, Cain and Abel is a good example, or Peterson makes the point that it's a tiny story. It's a paragraph-ish long, but it contains so many layers of meaning in regards to violence, to evil, betrayal, work, the divergence between intention and result, you know, because I think Cain is actually making He's making the effort to sacrifice for God, but the sacrifices he's making are not, God doesn't find them useful, right? And so he sort of rejects them. Again, we're organized by these useful fictions, these Herarian imagined orders, I think mythology is kind of the original version of that, where we were learning to organize ourselves around stories to best Coordinate our action across space and time. And so I think it's very foundational.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is not, and sometimes I bring up this point, and people like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Have you read the Old Testament? They're clobbering people with rocks when they do the wrong thing. The Bible doesn't claim to be this, like do everything that was done in the Bible. It's more like charting this moral progression where we came from this very barbaric society into something more like the New Testament where we're honoring individual sovereignty above the state and things like that.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think Jordan Peterson, who I'm a huge fan of, he's been very influential in my thinking and influential on my own religious views as well. Think his position would be, and he's said this before, that. He acts as if God exists. And I've had some arguments about this before, but to me, that points towards the preeminence of action and how important action is versus your cognitive beliefs necessarily. And I think there is a lot of utility in that, that if you follow the moral code of something like the Bible, you do reap benefits from that. Society reaps benefits from that.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that respect, that's why something like capitalism, even in its marginalized form, state capitalism, outcompetes communism. It's distributed computing versus centralized computing.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a centralized planning body like in Soviet Russia, they had the pricing czar. Maybe they had 10, 20,000 people deciding the prices for the entire country. You're only getting that much data throughput, right? 20,000 people times 120 bits per second. Whereas in a free market, if everyone is free to interact with deep capital markets based on an accurate price, you're getting the data throughput of 120 bits per second times the entire economy. So you're getting It's a more efficient means for disseminating knowledge effectively. And then again, knowledge is just the more knowledge a socioeconomic structure can contain, the more wealthy it is, right? Prices, tools, all these things are just knowledge.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have to run the system no matter what. So when people are always pursuing something for nothing and you put someone in a seat of much closer to absolute power where they're making all the pricing decisions, they own all of the productive factors in the economy, they're not beholden to any market force. There's no market check on their action. That institution tends to become more corrupt. And further, it's an inferior resource strategy. I alluded to this earlier, where the other way to think about free market versus central planning. Is it decentralized or distributed computing versus centralized computing? So each one of us, I think that the number is 120 bits per second of active awareness. So we can take in, clearly we process a lot more than that, but our active awareness, I think, is 120 bits per second.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And frankly, prices. Because the other thing in Soviet Russia is they tried to replace the profit motive or the price signal with this devotion, this nationalistic faith and devotion, where it's like, you don't need self-interest anymore. You don't need prices or profits. You can just protect Mother Russia and serve Mother Russia. And that would create wealth. And what happened? They destroyed price signals. There were shortages. There were famines. There's all levels of corruption. Because, you know, to your point, it's once you...”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But to your point, it does not scale right as we Move into this larger system of socioeconomic cooperation, which is necessary to deepen the division of labor, to generate more wealth, right? We need to interact with one another on much larger scales than this communistic utopian ideal. We get into the realm of capitalism, where we need really sound rules, hard rules, consensus, verifiability.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was just going to say that communism and capitalism is also a matter of scale The ideal behind communism is from each according to their ability to each according to their need. Sounds beautiful, right? Sounds like a great, peaceful, harmonious way to organize ourselves. The problem is, and by the way, I am a communist in my family, in my home, right?”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the best implementation we've had of it really has been the United States, I think, up until this point, but it's Central banking itself, this was in the 1848 manifesto of the Communist Party, measure number five reads an exclusive state monopoly in centralized control over cash and credit. So the central bank is a Marxist or communist institution. It is antithetical to the free market principles on which the United States was founded. And indeed, the United States resisted the implementation of a central bank. I think it was Andrew Jackson. I know there was the first national bank, the second national bank were both disbanded, and then Andrew Jackson, which is my favorite Tennessee, and he has some famous quotes about routing out the bankers like a den of vipers. I think he punched one of the central bankers in the face. Back when our leaders were a bit more badass, I might say.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intention. But the intention is divergent from the outcome. So in Telebian speak, he would say that human intervention moves us from mediocristan into extremistan. So mediocristan would be something much more like nature, where, for instance, you can't double your body weight in a day. Probably can't even do it in a year, right? But an extremist stand, which is something much more information based, you can double or send your net worth to zero in a single trade in a single moment, right? So when we try and intervene with natural biological systems that have these feedback loops, we actually start to push the system more to behave more like an extremist and system that has less short-run volatility, but more extreme long run volatility.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consequence of this is that the wildfires still occur eventually, but there are much larger and much more devastating in North America where human intervention has occurred because it is dampening nature's natural corrective mechanism of clearing this underbrush with these more frequent and smaller fires at the cost of much larger fires. So again, we're delaying short-term volatility and exacerbating long-run volatility. And in Mexico, it's the opposite, right? Just these wildfires burn much smaller, more continuously over time. The further effect of that in North America is that the fires can get so big and so hot that it burns away the topsoil. So it actually destroys the fertility of the soil itself. So the point of this is that human intervention, right, even the intention behind North American authorities managing that forest fire is to create less destruction.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a region in North America called Baja, California, and it runs into the United States and it runs down into Mexico as well. So the same topology, but two different jurisdictions. In the US, we very heavily manage forest fires. We're trying to manage nature effectively. Whereas in Mexico is much more unregulated. When wildfires spring up, they let them burn off. North America, when wildfires spring up, we're actually extinguishing them. So we're constantly trying to dampen the short-run volatility of these small brush fires. Whereas in Mexico, we just let them burn. We let nature do its thing.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any government function that goes beyond those three core functions, which by the way are pretty much the core tenets of morality as well. So government's just really intended to preserve natural law, if you will. Anything that goes beyond that is moves us closer to an unfree market. So every regulation, every act of coercion is actually a gradation closer to a purely unfree market, which would be a monopoly. So in terms of what I guess theoretically we could say goes wrong in the free market is that it's volatile. It's trading off, it's accepting short-term volatility in exchange for less long-run volatility. And this tends to be the way of nature, by the way. So if we look at something like”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess to get back to the original question we've never seen a pure free market because money has always been monopolized and coerced, frankly. So to try and answer what goes wrong with a free market is really difficult because we've never actually seen it. And I would define Market is one in which government only protects life, liberty, and property. And so that's a very minimal role in society. Again, just as network security for the economic trade network. And anything that”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so maybe another way to look at this is that gold is the original governor of government, actually. And this is the reason governments have abused and gone off of the gold standard. So, historically, If you are a bank or a nation state and you produce more currency than your gold reserves can justify. Then gold will flow out of your bank or out of your country. So there's this natural check. Via the money that via capitalistic money, which is gold, right? Gold was selected by the free market. It's not decreed by a government. It provided this natural check on government action. So”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would first argue that we have never seen an actual purely free market. Closest example would be. Kind of geopolitically, we have a free market and that governments are not necessarily governed. But they are premised on. Governing large groups of individuals. So that's not doesn't exactly”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasing the capital stock of the world, which again, capital is the mitigation of risk, so we're reducing the overall risk of existence by accumulating more capital in the world. And that's what protects that entrepreneur that's deciding, hey, I saved up a million bucks, I'm going to go try this business idea. I'm going to put all my money on the line. And if he goes up in flames, then his cost of living when he comes back to reality and he's starting over from zero, his cost of living is substantially lower starting over from zero than he would be out in the wilderness on his own. So it's the accumulation of capital stock is the buffer against uncertainty for everyone. And it gives you actually more potential to go out and experiment, to go out and confront the chaos of nature because you are better healed effectively.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entrepreneurs that are exploring, and you're trying to do something new, if you're a pioneer of any kind, you are courageously facing pain. You're willfully confronting it. So I don't think it's avoidable in that sense. It's not like we can have pain-free economic growth like what the central bank would maybe have us lend to believe that we can just run these experiments. And when they fail, we'll just paper over all the losses and continue. Or you're just delaying. Exacerbating the inevitable volatility back to reality. But what I would say is that capitalism, because we're building”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that Is the inarguable basis of being, right? Pain is, no matter how you try to Explain it away or describe it or Not something you can rationalize away, right? It's no one. I think ever someone may want to cut themselves to have an endorphin high, but no one wants to suffer, I would say, right? So pain in that sense, it is what we're constantly trying to deal with. Move away from or create buffers between us and potential pain or potential uncertainty. And that pain is information. When we experience something that is misfit to the outcome we desired, that pain is what puts us, it encourages us to change our trajectory, to get back on course towards our valued aim. So as far as You need”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, in the sense of data compression, everyone in the world can see that price. Everyone in the world can then put their skin in the game by choosing to buy or sell or short or go long or do any number of financial actions on that price. That information is then propagated back out to everyone else, so it's this feedback loop between market actors and price that makes it. So useful That's what carries us. So it's these collisions of interest that carry us, it removes the unuseful aspects of ourselves or of our tools or of a price and reveals pragmatic truth to us.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, another way to consider competition itself is that it is a discovery process. So entrepreneurs are competing with one another and they're trying the best satisfy consumer wants at the lowest possible price. So they're placing bets of time, energy, and capital on themselves, on their idea, their business plan. And then the market decides, right? The consensus of market actors decide which one was better. One lives, one dies. So competition itself is helping us get closer to truth, to pragmatic truth. So we're discovering what is the right price for this asset. And that price, by the way, is derived”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and if we interfere with that free market process, again, if we overstep, which this maybe ties into murder, if you start to be coercive against life, liberty, or property, so if you're forcibly taking someone's life, you're breaking down the trust in that market that generates these pragmatic truths. If you forcibly infringe on someone's liberty, right, for any reason other than them originally breaking or infringing upon life, liberty, or property, then that's not going to work either. And then if you violate private property rights, if you steal property from others, you're breaking down the trust that the intersubjective fabric of money and markets and the rule of law, all of these useful fictions are meant to preserve, you're corrupting it and breaking it down.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, when we're talking about delaying volatility, right? If you lie, you're delaying short-term volatility, but you're increasing long-term volatility.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the third one I would argue is virtue, actually And another way to maybe. Think about this competitive competency, but it's also cooperative competency. So we're learning over time what characteristics, what patterns of action, what mindsets, what mental tools, what heuristics are most useful to satisfying customer wants. So I think that becomes, over time, becomes sharpened into virtue, right? Like we know it's best to be honest because if you lie, it's very energy inefficient, right? You're creating this little fork of reality. And then if someone else asks you about that lie again, you have to put another layer of lies on top of it. Where if you just tell the truth, you're just recollecting what happened. And so that sort of keeps.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in that iterative process, we're constantly discovering new and better ways of solving problems or satisfying wants. So we could say to go out and dig a hole. Someone wants a hole dug, that a shovel is going to let you do it much faster per hour than you would with your bare hands. So what is the pragmatic truth of digging holes? A shovel, right? It's the best way we know how to solve any particular problem based on the existing treasury of knowledge. So every tool, again, we're back to ideas being fundamental. The shovel itself is just a knowledge structure. Figured out a way to create this particular implement, and then we've indexed the raw materials we found in nature to this knowledge structure. To create a shovel which allows us to better satisfy human wants, faster, cheaper, better, effectively.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Action across time. So if we're one socioeconomic Super organism or collective that the price signal is the nerve. And that's the first form of pragmatic truth that markets generate. The second form would be tools and innovations themselves. So entrepreneurs are experimenting across time. They're trying to satisfy the wants of consumers. Consumers are sovereign in the marketplace. Whatever the consumer wants, the consumer gets, right? I'm trying to satisfy that. I'm trying to do it at a profit. So I'm trying to take... Viewing the existing price signals of goods in the marketplace. I'm trying to assemble those in a way at a cost lower than the final solution I'm delivering to my customer. I'm selling it at a price higher than the productive factors I combine to create it.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in markets, markets, I argue, generate three forms of pragmatic truth. One is the price. So this is the collective subjective demand and purchasing power of humanity running up against the objective supply of capital and resources in the marketplace. So there's demand overlaid on supply. The result of that is the price. So that is the most truthful exchange ratio, which is the closest approximation to the value of any good in the marketplace. So it gives us a data point on which we can operate. It's compressing all known market realities down into a single actionable number. You know based on the price of bread or copper, whether you want to buy more of it, you want to abstain from buying it, or maybe you want to try and find substitutes. And you can think of that price signal. It's like an economic nerve signal that's coordinating human activity.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in markets, we could say that the market itself is a forum that generates truth. We call this pragmatic truth to separate pure objective truth that we can't even talk about without polluting it versus pragmatic truth, which is something that's useful. So the example here would be, if I give you a map and you're trying to go from your house to the local brisket restaurant, and the map gets you from your house, the brisket restaurant, is that because the map is true or is that because the map is useful? They're very hard to disentangle. We're just looking at it pragmatically.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The American pragmatists said that because at the end of the day, this is all about. We say truth, we need something that is Socially close to social consensus and is not shakable by political action. So that's what physics and mathematics are. It's a Unshakable point of reference, I guess you might say. So the American pragmatists defined truth as the end of inquiry.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using stories to point towards the same transcendental mystery we all experience but cannot articulate. So something like the artist uses lies to point to the truth, something like that, that kind of thing.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am slightly ashamed to say I have not read Ayn Rand yet, so she is high on my list and she's been recommended a number of times. But so I don't know a lot specifically about her philosophy or objectivism, but to me it resonates closely with what the American pragmatist commented on truth They distinguished what you could say is absolute truth, which is at the bottom of reality, whether it's Mr. Wolfram's mathematical formulas or value, whatever it may be. It's something ineffable, something beyond the reach of epistemology, perhaps even. And maybe that's why religion just sort of points to it, right? It's trying to use I think Joseph Campbell said something like religion is.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Further specializing knowledge further enriching mankind's treasury of knowledge and doing it. But to do that, the Communication media that we're using, the words have to have stable meaning. The money needs to have value that's dependable, right? It needs to be something that's It's not dictated by any one group, it's reached by consensus of the entire group. That's how... So you can think it's like optimizing for error correction again, where a free market would be harnessing the intelligence of all market actors. And a central planning or essentially planned market would be harnessing just the intelligence of a small group of bureaucrats.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We contend with that underlying nature, whatever it is, with the Logos, right? So we are looking at uncategorized nature, and then we're assigning a word to it. So we're slicing up chaos into little boxes of order. And then we're establishing this social consensus as to those labels, which we call words. And we're using that to communicate. And when we communicate, we can start to build these other things. This is like the Yuval Harari Imagined Orders. So we can create these useful fictions, right? Whether it's the nation state or human rights or money. And that allows us to cooperate flexibly in large numbers so that we can better contend with reality. We can produce more complicated things. We can enlarge that bubble of civilization against entropy. And that's what capitalism is all about. It's about”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But his supposition is that it's not physical reality that's fundamental. It's not informational that's fundamental, it's value. So he actually, and it's a beautiful book. I highly recommend it. Essentially, refuting causality itself. We think A causes B This book makes the case that B values precondition A. That we are actually creating our future through our value systems. And this goes back to something I think Soljinson said this, that the line between good and evil runs down the heart of every man. So it's as if our moral decisions are actually what's creating the outcomes in reality over time. And then that gets into all the wisdom traditions related to religion, where it's always talking about, you know, Loving thy neighbor and loving God and all of these other things that are good morally to create the best outcomes.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, to take it one layer deeper on this, and the reason I like this book so much again, the case against reality. So he's making the case that space and time are not fundamental. I started my intellectual explorations in physics actually, astrophysics. So for the longest time, even though I describe money as I talk about space and time, so that blew my mind. But this dovetailed nicely with another book called Leela, the author is Robert Persig. So he wrote Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a very popular book. Twenty years later, he wrote Leela, which no one's heard of, which is crazy. And he basically says he was wrong about his first book. And he lays out this entire other metaphysics of quality, he calls it. So it's the metaphysics. I think it's the metaphysics of quality.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to error correct myself towards that goal using intelligence and processing environmental feedback through intelligence to error, correct. So I don't know how if you eliminate Human element completely, who's doing the wanting, right? Where does value come from?”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we move from less valued A to more valued B, we entropy happens, uncertainty happens, we fall, of course, and it is intelligence that enables us to render information from that experience and error correct, right? So that we can move slightly, shift our trajectory slightly more towards B that we're trying to move towards. I think that. There's something there that I don't know that we can. Make synthetically and that when we, if we define intelligence as error correction, it's like error correction to what? Error correction towards what we find is valuable. So we're trying to satisfy human wants. Why not just be our own? Could be others as well. If I'm an entrepreneur, I'm trying to solve the wants of others, not just myself.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scary or potentially really promising, right? It's kind of the case with all novelty. It's terrifying as much as it is promising. That's what you're. Pursuing it so I would maybe take it. Step further and say that intelligence, and maybe its most simplistic form is error correction. Humans have wants. Again, we're constantly expressing our value through action. There's no other way to express it, by the way. It's whatever you choose to do in any moment, you are expressing the values you hold in your mind and your heart.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But so far as we know, only human beings can generate and share ideas. So you can't say Lux is worthless. Like you are the node of the idea sphere. The new sphere. So”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just to jump back to this line here, I think his Fundamental line here is the question is talking about universal Darwinism as an asset, what does it leave behind? I have tried to show that once it passes through everything we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most useful ideas. That's the key point to me, and that ideas and information so far as we can tell are the most fundamental substrate of reality. And information itself, back to entropy, information is the resolution of entropy. What the bit is, right? It's a one or zero. Whatever reduces your entropy by half is a bit, and we measure information in bits.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This table that we're using right now, like this is an accessory to you and I because it's holding this paper that's holding the information that's guiding our conversation. But we could pay some $100 to jump over this table. And this table could simultaneously be an accessory to you and I and an obstacle to someone else. So it's this domain, this silent contention of willpower and agendas occurring across the face of the earth that is what Austrian economics really looks at. It's the realm of human action, as they call it. It's called praxeology. So it's a non-materialist viewpoint on reality in that things, we think in terms of matter being reality, but it's often more so in the sphere of human action, what matters, that is reality. It's the relevance of a thing to the course of one's goal-directed action.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're all moving through life in the course of a goal directed action. So when we walk across a room, I go from A to B, it's because I valued B more than A. So value is inseparable from human action. We have a rank-ordered value system in our mind, each of us, and we're constantly taking action in accordance with those rank values. Anything that accelerates us on the course of our goal directed action towards our goal is useful. Anything that impedes us, or we could say, is valuable. Anything that impedes us is actually obstructing to value. And anything that's irrelevant is just valueless.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we only see one ten trillionth of the light spectrum. So talk about a tiny fraction. I mean, one ten trillionth is a very minuscule number, and that makes up all of the light that we can interpret with our eyes. But it's something like a mantis shrimp could see much more of that. I think there Very conditioned to have a fully materialist viewpoint on reality today where we think the atomic clockwork kind of universe. But I think there's, I don't think that's true exactly. Another school that goes into that is actually Austrian economics, where we could say that we mentioned earlier that an asset is not property. It's actually based on the relationship between the individual and the property. There's this whole realm of relevance associated with”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source