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
“Yeah, I think it would assume kind of a materialist viewpoint on reality in that if you could reproduce every atom of an individual that you would have their experience encapsulated in that. And Hoffman's, which the book is very radical. He argues that space and time is not an objective reality. It's a biological interface. So we are scanning our environment for fitness payoffs and this space and time is the rendering specific to human beings that allows us to navigate reality effectively. So the further argument would be that we all have pretty similar interfaces, but they're all slightly different too because we're all adapting in different ways and that different animals have their own unique interfaces. So we have a certain amount of photoreceptors in our eye, whereas I think the number is three might be five, whereas something like the mantis shrimp has like seven or nine. So they can see.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would argue that I don't know, even if you clone someone perfectly, I don't think you can reproduce the individual themselves because we're all a product of nature and nurture, right? So my particular concourse of experiences, the path dependence that I represent cannot be replicated, nor can anyone's for that matter.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we are ideas, we are strategies competing with each other, and nature is that which selects. It's what selects the winning ideas, the ones that are most fit to environmental conditions, frankly.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Dendin says, quote, there is no denying at this point that Darwin's idea is a universal solvent, capable of cutting right to the heart of everything in sight. The question is, what does it leave behind? I have tried to show that once it passes through everything we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas. Some of the traditional details perish, and some of these are losses to be regretted, but good riddance to the rest of them. What remains is more than enough to build on. So the way I would interpret that is that life itself, I've come to view life as information propagating through flesh. And that we are, I guess, DNA is a quadratic code. I think it's four letters maybe versus a binary zeros and ones.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broadly. I would condition all of this with saying that most of my thinking is shaped by a book I read recently called The Case Against Reality, which introduced me to this concept, but it tied into Darwinism that I've used more broadly in the past, looking at things like money and economics. So the book, The Case Against Reality, by Donald Hoffman, he has a quote. In the book that describes universal Darwinism, it says, quote, universal Darwinism can, without risk of refuting itself, address our key question. Does natural selection favor true perceptions? If the answer happens to be no, then it hasn't shot itself in the foot. The uncanny power of universal Darwinism has been likened by the philosopher Dan Dennett to a universal acid.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agreed completely. It's been called an acid, actually, and then it just strips away all of the non-informational components of something and just strips it down to its bare bones. I have a quote in here somewhere about that, but.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I said that all action occurs within the bounds of spacetime. The other thing, everything we say to or make, the other thing is that everything we say to or make starts out as an idea. So there's this concept of universal Darwinism, which basically applies Darwinian principles, but outside of the biological sphere. So we could say that this kind of gets into Richard Dawkins' memetics, that even ideas are competing, reproducing, recombining”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The boating accident in Bitcoin is this. I guess it's proverbial by this point where it's the way you lose your Bitcoin. So if someone comes after you and says, hey, whether it's a government or an individual's coming after you saying, give me all your Bitcoin or pay these taxes in Bitcoin, you go, oh, I had a boating axe. I didn't lost them all.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other theory is that maybe he's playing 4D chess and having a Twitter boating accident, you know. So I don't believe in Bitcoin. I've sold all my Bitcoin.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that I'm aware of, but he is written some about in his books The Problem with Centralization. I mean, a lot of his writing addresses that. And he actually points to, I think Switzerland is the best government in the world because it's decentralized. There's that. I don't think he has any, I'm not to speak for him, but I don't think he's voiced any specific critiques on Bitcoin per se. Could be wrong about that”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I admittedly don't know too much about it either. I've a big fan of his writing. He's always Been a little different in person, like, I actually signed one of my books. I met him in person. He's just got a very abrasive personality. He's kind of known for it. It's not, I don't think I'm passing any judgment here. He sort of embraces it. But he had written the forward to a really important book in Bitcoin called The Bitcoin Standard for Safety in a Moose. And then I think they had a little Twitter beef because safety is very much against COVID masks and state intervention. Whereas clubs on the other side of the fence. Right. And so then after that beef, Talub came out against Bitcoiners saying, oh, Bitcoiners are crazy and wrong.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. To the left would say. individual fragility is inseparable from ensemble anti-fragility. So this means that, again, every time that entrepreneur goes up in flames or say a restaurant goes out of business. A restaurant goes out of business, that particular cuisine strategy they were implementing in that particular time. So restaurant food improves from bankruptcy to bankruptcy. So it's this death of the individual components that contributes to the growth of the ensemble.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reverence for entrepreneurship because these are the people Putting their neck out, so to speak, risking themselves. And they're going to contribute to society, by the way, whether they go up in flames or not. If they go up in flames, society has witnessed their experience as something not to do or something that doesn't work in a particular time and place. So that you could say them going up in flames is a way of enlightening the rest of us. Or if they figure something out. You know, Steve Jobs creates the iPhone and changes the world forever.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that when I say volatility is truth, what I'm saying is that the experience of uncertainty is something that's ineradicable from life, right? Uncertainty, it's kind of a paradox because we're fighting against it, right? We're trying to innovate our way. Away from uncertainty to give us to create more capital, which capital is very simply a way of mitigating uncertainty. So this is why you might have like a stash of food in case the power goes out or a generator. Like it helps you overcome uncertainty over time. But uncertainty is also where all the sweetness of life is. So there's got to be this balance with one foot in, one foot out.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sequence of courageously confronting the entropy of nature and converting it into good and useful order, which by the way is like the ancient idea of God in Genesis, which I think is interesting, that actually enables us to construct civilization in these layers of anti-entropy or order, you might say. Today, we live in a bubble of anti-entropy or order, you know? The coastlines are guarded by the nation, and the city has a certain police force that keeps it in order. Even the way we talk, clearly the words matter, but also the nonverbal cues, all these things are like order that has been established over many, many, many thousands of years of human evolution. And”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if we consider that the universe is pervaded by entropy, right, this is the second law of thermodynamics. Is it every closed system tends towards greater disorder over time That life itself again, I would argue expressed through the Logos. Life is the anti entropic principle, it's the only thing that's converting entropy into order, chaos into order. And that's what entrepreneurs are doing, right? We're living at the edges of the known and we're trying to, we're testing ourselves against the entropy of nature, trying to figure out new and better ways of saying, doing, or making things. And then if we do crack a code or figure something out, we then have a big incentive, the incentive is to get rich, right? Because then you have a new idea that you could then sell back into the marketplace. It's this.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they're trying to achieve economic growth in a stable way, quote unquote, stable way. This is their ostensible purpose. And that's just not possible. Growth is an inherently unstable process.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a capitalist environment, the market needs to clear that malinvestment, that misallocation of capital. That means someone made a bet on a certain idea that it would satisfy wants in a particular way, and that bet did not pan out. If you then paper over the losses that business is creating, you're now delaying and exacerbating the volatility that that idea created. So this is kind of a Telebian concept where You can dampen short run volatility, but volatility is truth. Volatility is us matching our ideas to reality, right? We're constantly, again, overshooting and undershooting. So if you delay volatility, you're just amplifying it and exacerbating it in the long run. And that's what central bank is doing. The central bank mandate is low unemployment and low unexpected inflation basically”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It destroys feedback loops, I guess you might say. And another way to look at this is when you, so using inflation, using quantitative easing, you can decrease short-term volatility in the marketplace. So the market is basically this idea, this form of free exchange that's trying to zero in on the best ideas. And the ideas are those that are most fit to reality, to satisfying the most wants. It's going to overshoot. It's going to undershoot. You have these little business cycles. But when it's undershooting and you're experiencing business recession,”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The drug metaphor is a little more apt in that inflation does provide an immediately stimulive effect when used early on. What it's doing is it's again we talk about. Balance between incentives and disincentives, right? That being necessary for a system to function properly. With inflation, you're essentially giving the people that can print money a way to dampen the disincentives they face.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a money that only a few people can siphon value off of surreptitiously, typically slowly, but eventually, as we've seen throughout history, that slowly builds up into a rapidly and then causes the monetary system to collapse.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we get deeper into that. Inflation is a term that we've been conditioned to think today is just something normal, that prices just go up and then it's pertinent to a healthy economy, but it's actually, if you look at it from real first principles, it is just theft integrated into the money. It's a technology backdoor is another way to think about it. You wouldn't buy a cell phone knowing that someone could siphon your data off of your private calls and sell it into the market. Now, I know we do that with a lot of social media stuff today, and that's something else we can get into, but you wouldn't do it willingly, right? You would prefer that your cell phone and your data was monetized by you, or if you're going to sell it, you would be able to selectively sell it. Inflation is that it's similar. It's a tech backdoor.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standard, for instance, such that they cannot violate the money to benefit themselves. Inevitably over time, because it is a political institution. There's an incentive there again to get something for nothing, to spend more than you're making through tax revenues. And with that incentive, people typically ultimately end up pursuing that inflationary path.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think when you have at the heart of every modern economy, which even we could say the U.S., we pride ourselves as free market capitalist. We out-competed communism in the 20th century. We think that this is the superior model. Most business people will tell you that the free market is the best allocator of resources, all of these things. But what we have at the heart of every modern economy, including the US, is an anti-capitalistic institution, which is the central bank. The temptation to monopolize money throughout all of history has been too strong for anyone to resist. So even benevolent quote-unquote dictators that have taken over, many dictators have inherited, say, an inflationary regime or society's coming apart because someone was clipping the coins or someone was printing too much money, and they'll commit to going back to a hard money standard. So they'll keep society on a gold standard.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agreed completely. It was not possible until Satoshi Nakamoto. So, for the first time in history, we have a money that cannot be monopolized, cannot be corrupted, cannot be changed, cannot be weaponized, frankly. Our current monetary system is weaponized by those who can print money against those who cannot.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that becomes particularly through inflation, becomes an avenue to get something for nothing and that you can just print more money that everyone else is forced to sacrifice their time and energy to obtain.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not from a government. The government is the network security, if you will. So we're paying expenses to a vendor. To protect peace, to preserve life, liberty, and property in that network so that we can have when there's inevitably disputes over private property, we can have nonviolent dispute resolution in the rule of law, and we can have a reasonable expectation of being able to conduct commerce without violence. The problem has been that the protector tends to, you know, they're in a monopolistic position, we would say. They tend to start abusing that position to obtain property for themselves. Again, trying to get that something for nothing. When you control, you know, you are the security guard for the economy. The first thing they tend to monopolize is money because if you can control the money, you're effectively controlling people, their energy, their perceptions.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's what government is. It's a protection producing enterprise for the economic surplus generated by a trading society. So when people begin to trade, they create what's called the division of labor, which is a very common economic term. Basically means you're better at making hats, I'm better at making boots. If you and I, if you specialize in hats, I specialize in boots and we trade. We've created a positive sum game where you and I both benefit. So we become collectively more than the sum of our parts through trade. And that's why human beings do trade, because we become more energy efficient as a result. We create more outputs per unit of input. And you could think of government in that respect if we're looking at it maybe in a tech sense that the economy is the trade network that generates wealth, generates innovation, generates all this whole lap of luxury we live in today that we've inherited from our forebears is from the market.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's at that time when government emerges as well. Because once you have savings or you have an economic surplus, you have something that other people want to steal this one thing we'll touch on a lot today is people always want something for nothing. People are always seeking the path to get something for nothing. And I think that drives a lot of our decision making. And it actually encourages us to be innovative in a lot of ways, right? We're trying to say it's our laziness. It's helping us be inventive in a way. We're trying to accomplish greater results with less efforts over time, but we can cross that line. Seeking something for nothing where we start to violate the life, liberty, and property of others. And that's where we shift from kind of capitalistic society to something more communistic.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really changed the nature of property is when we get into the agricultural age. So there's a big flip where we went from just foraging and hunting all the time, constantly moving, trying to stay alive to deciding we're going to settle here. We figured out how to cultivate crops. We can create the population because we can harvest more energy from the sun and we can establish a longer-term civilization. What happens in that transition is that we begin creating economic surplus. So for the first time in history, we have grain stockhouses of grain to defend or maybe meat or cattle or whatever it is we're creating, we now have savings.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in the ancient days of hunters and gatherers, we could say that Property was mostly alloidial title, which meant it's just whatever you can defend, right? So if you've got knives and daggers and satchels and maybe some pelts you've hunted, whatever you can hold and defend is yours. And there's not like there's a government to appeal to. You're just sort of a free agent operating in the wild defending the assets you can protect on you more or less.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the first communist or socialists would be someone that decided the fruits of his labor belonged to him. So he would have violently encroached on that individual and taken his plot for himself for his own use. That's the spectrum across which capitalism in the pure sense and communism in the pure sense operate in that capitalism each individual has the exclusive rights to the fruits of their labor. So anything they spend their time, effort, energy, creating in the world, they own the rights to that and they can trade those rights with others, other cell phone people that have done similar things. Communism or socialism would imply that other people, typically the state have the rights, at least some rights to the value you've created.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first capitalist in the world, just to kind of get some definitions out here, I'll see capitalism versus communism or socialism as the spectrum I'll speak on. The first capitalist in the world would be the guy, the caveman that maybe dug a little hole for himself to shield himself from the elements. Maybe there was a rainstorm, a snowstorm, and he dug a little enclave and he protected himself.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And then it comes down to how do we organize ourselves such that property, that the contributions people are making or commensurate with the consideration they're receiving. So if you're adding value to a piece of property, you're developing a piece of land for use. In theory, to be fair, you should have the rights to that fruit, right? If you go out and plant a garden or whatever it may be. And this is very rooted in natural law where we have rights to life, liberty, and property. Those are kind of just the base, the fundamental layer of morality and capitalism, frankly. And you could think of... To get really primordial with it”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mankind is clearly, I think, would argue a territorial species, and that he expresses this territoriality in property rights. So, property, when that word, we hear that word, we typically think of an asset, we think of, oh, this house or this stock or whatever. But property is actually the socially acknowledged relationship between a human and an asset, such that you have exclusive rights and responsibilities to a particular asset. It is not the asset itself. So property, it's information. It's a relationship.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think one of the deepest impulsions in life is the territorial imperative. So, all life is seeking to expand its dominion over space and time. And think about, you know, again, physically with space, it's advantageous to an animal or an organism to have more territory under its control, to raise offspring. So it's all about reproductive fitness at the end of the day. And then we can also think of reproduction itself as the genetic impulse to have more, to replicate oneself across time. So it's territoriality across time in a way. And this is very common in most animals. Not all animals are territorial, but many are. And you see very interesting behaviors resulting from territoriality. This is like animal combat. You know, the reason birds sing is territoriality, a number of other things. And it's my hypothesis, and others have shared this hypothesis as well, that”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as a natural extension of that came us making tools, right? We started to create things to better satisfy our wants over time. And the most tradable tool in any society or the most tradable thing is money. So I really. Argue that action and speech are quintessential modes of self-sovereign expression and that money is just sort of a tech layer we've put right on top of that and that it's a natural derivation of action and speech.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's funny about action and speech, and this gets, I get into a bit of this in our paper here, is that it's linked to evolutionary biology and that once human beings adopted upright stance, we freed our hands. We no longer needed our hands for locomotion. So we started to evolve more dexterity. And notably, we have opposable thumb. So this gives us an ability to manipulate and particularize the environment in a way that most other animals cannot. And what's interesting about this is that as we gain this ability to manipulate natural resources and count, point, pointing was a big deal and that we could indicate prey or items at a far off distance and we could organize ourselves. At the same time, we co-evolved this fine musculature in the face and tongue. So it's as if speech. Develop, co evolved really with our dexterity.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know most words, the vast majority of words only have meaning in relationship to other words. It's all contextual, definitions of a word are more words. Now, people have argued with me about this because there is a first word, right, where you pick up rock and say rock. But most other words and higher abstraction tend to be relative. And”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think money is a direct derivation of action and speech, actually. It's another expression of the Logos. If we even think of what it means to think. That we are generating two different courses of action potential courses of action, and we're populating them with avatars, right? Maybe ourselves or others. And then we're comparing how we may act in each situation and what we think the result would be. So we're actually, it's comparison, basically, it's comparison and contrasting of possible courses of action. That's the same thing with words themselves.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For instance, today, so I agree with you on the firsthand, say that I do believe in free will. I do believe in individual autonomy, but I also think that there are certain devices and powers in the world around us that can actually influence how we think.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I agree. And as we get a little bit deeper into this, I think we'll come to see money as an extension of your mind. So there's a feedback between money and mind. For instance, you think in dollars today, almost guarantee it. Most of us do here in the U.S. And it's a tool, right? It's a tool we're using to decomplexify the world around us, to deal with it, to understand the sacrifices and successes across our entire history of economic transactions. We can boil that all down to the price. So it's data compression. And if you can... Change if there's a central body or central governance mechanism that can manipulate that money, it can have an impact on your mind”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interiorized space of choice, which is something like Victor Frankl called the final human freedom, and that we no matter what our circumstances are, no matter what exogenous situation we face, we always have this endogenous power to choose how we respond to it.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's largely, you could say it's rooted heavily in the money, I would argue, which is something we'll get a lot into here, where if you have money, you have the authority to act as you see fit in the world. And even in our current political sphere, if you have enough money, you can actually reshape the rules, right? You can reshape laws. You can lobby Congress. If you're in a certain situation like many billionaires, you can negotiate your own tax treaty such that you can get favorable tax treatment with certain jurisdictions in the world. So this concept of sovereignty, which today we call. Common to call states or nation states or government sovereign, meaning that they have power over people. But as I argue in a lot of my writing, I actually think that sovereignty inheres within the individual and that we each have our own.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a word that's etymologically associated with words like monarchy, money, reign. So historically, it's referred to whatever the locus of supreme power is in the sphere of human action. So whether if you go back into ancient Egypt, the pharaoh had absolute sovereignty and everyone else was pretty much operating according to his interest. You fast forward to today modern Western democracy. We have more decentralized sovereignty and that we all get to go vote and elect officials that make decisions on our behalf. So the theme of sovereignty across history is that it's been gradually decentralizing across our different models of socioeconomics.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Freedom and sovereignty. I think they're very closely related. Sort of just focusing on sovereignty, which is a word I don't think we talk about enough. And the general definition of that I would give is the authority to act as you see fit.”
2021-04-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #176 – Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source