Bitcoin: The Portal Between the Digital and Physical Worlds (Uncut) 02-15-2025

Bitcoin: The Portal Between the Digital and Physical Worlds – SoftWar Explained Part 2 (WiM554)

The nation state as the dominant and defining institution of our time may be on its way out with the emergence of Bitcoin. If a government can print its own money, why do we have taxes? You got to keep them right there where you’ve sucked just enough blood out of that body that they can’t rise. Don’t want the parasite to kill the host, right? Government is like domesticating humans in a way, right? People become docile, become complacent.

It’s a hard thing to hear because we don’t want to think of ourselves as animals. If you’re caught in the consensual dream that is cyberspace, how do you pinch yourself? What is the second amendment you have in the cyberspatial realm? If you want to fire an ad off my way, you got to zap me some sass. When you make it costly for people to do things, they change how they act.

One thing that I would hope people would learn is that they are highly programmable. If you don’t take that seriously, then you’re going to get programmed by someone else. This is the first live money we’ve ever had.

Live money continues to live by adapting to its environment. Every money that we’ve had previously has been matter. Matter is energy in a potential state.

It is dead money. Dead money kills. Live money gives stuff.

Towards the end of our conversation yesterday, we were talking about Lowry’s book still, Software, which I’m holding here in my hands. Then towards the end of the book, he uses this geometric example of Gabriel’s horn as a way to describe the relationship between Bitcoin’s purchasing power and its money supply in a geometric way. I’m not sure what we said about it yesterday.

I know I was struggling to recall exactly what it was, but we’ve since revisited it. I just wanted to clarify my interpretation of what he’s saying here. This structure that you see on the screen looks like basically a two-dimensional sheet that’s curved towards infinity.

This is something very similar to what Einstein used to do a rendering of a black hole. In this metaphor, the surface area of Gabriel’s horn maps onto the purchasing power of Bitcoin in that the surface area can be pulled out to infinity. Equivalently, you can store infinite purchasing power in Bitcoin.

The paradoxical thing about this shape and what makes it such a useful visual metaphor for Bitcoin is that even though you can expand the surface area to infinity, the volume does not change. The volume of Gabriel’s horn is mapped onto the money supply of Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s money supply of 21 million does not change no matter how much purchasing power is stored in it.

This is not true for any other form of money. The more purchasing power you store in gold, the more incentive you create to mine gold. The more purchasing power you store in fiat currency, the more incentive you create to print more or counterfeit more fiat currency.

This geometric abstraction is amazing. He found this. It really is like the perfect shape to describe Bitcoin or to visually metaphorize Bitcoin.

There is one example. Although this is an abstraction, there is one example where this occurs in physical reality. I alluded to it at the beginning of this, but it is a black hole.

Black holes do the same thing. They are the singularity in the fabric of spacetime. This is how Einstein himself drew it out.

Bitcoin is an economic singularity in the same way a black hole is a spatiotemporal singularity. I think that is why this geometric metaphor is so fitting. I think yesterday we may have mentioned Bitcoin as unity of opposites.

I would also say this is another case of that where you are uniting zero and infinity. There is infinite purchasing power or surface area can be contained in a 0% change or perfectly finite money supply or volume. I know that is super abstract, but really interesting.

I will read one excerpt here. This is directly from the book. We are going to be reading some excerpts today.

Lowry wrote, this means the choice to describe bit power, which is another name for Bitcoin, produced by the Bitcoin protocol is an ordinary object like a coin. It could just be as accurately described as equally partitioned segments of surface area on Gabriel’s horn. Why do this? Because it highlights the protocol’s paradoxically logical, complex emergent properties.

So in all of this struggle we engage in trying to describe Bitcoin with the right words, I think he just found the definitively right geometric shape, which makes it really interesting. Yeah. And this, as abstract as it seems, it also drives home viscerally some of the real world qualities of Bitcoin.

Obviously, each one of these squares representing both value that can scale infinitely, each one of these coins is stretched out. As you get to that event horizon, the surface area increases the value of the coin, the amount of energy it represents. And so we see a definitive first mover advantage.

If you have coins earlier on, they’re stretched out. And we see that is one of the reasons that Lowry is so emotional and excitedly expounding this thesis, is because nation states that get on at the beginning here are in that stretched out surface area phase. And so, yeah, this very abstract, very excellent, it hits it at a high level, but it also reminds us of the practical and very immediate implications of adopting or not adopting Bitcoin.

Yeah, the huge incentive pressure to be a first mover, the first mover advantage, because you’re closer to the edge of the horn, basically, further away from the point. And as more purchasing power is put into the system, that benefits early adopters disproportionately. He also has this thing where he’s showing that the last 10% of the horn is still under construction, which is, well, we’re still mining Bitcoin until the year 2140.

Only 90% roughly of the supply has been issued, and there’s about 10% of the remaining. I think by the year, I think it’s in 10 years, 2035, 99% of the Bitcoin supply will have been issued, and we’ll spend the last 105 years of Bitcoin mining competing to issue that last 1%. So there’s another, again, the advantage of being first here to the game is it’s massive, and that’s what spurs and drives Bitcoin adoption.

It’s such a beautiful metaphor too, because if you look at it and the structure, and you imagine that part of it being pulled, stretched out for the entirety of infinity, and you see how it comes down asymptotically, that perfectly imitates the issuance of Bitcoin, right? The having. And we’re constantly decreasing the amount every four years that is issued. And just as an aside, obviously, this is such a beautiful metaphor for it, and it also perfectly explains why Bitcoin is so hard to understand, because who understands black holes, right? They don’t follow the things that we know to be true about physics, which are the way that we define the world.

So it’s no wonder that this is such a difficult concept to understand, but Jason Lowery found it. It re-emphasizes that trope. I guess maybe Saylor said this originally, that all your models are broken.

Yes. Well, here it is. Black holes break physical models, and Bitcoin breaks economic models.

We didn’t talk about this yesterday. I have had guests on the show that have been very influenced by Lowery’s work, like G-Money, and he’s actually titled the episode this Bitcoin as Digital 1776. Yeah, this is what the American Revolution was fought to escape the tyranny of, you know, largely the Bank of England.

You could also say just the tax authority of the state of England. And it’s been suggested that Bitcoin is a peaceful version of that, kind of a bloodless digital 1776. And I think this is a quote you guys have from Lowery himself, right? Yeah, he said this in some interview or another here, I believe, that Bitcoin is digital 1776, but the revolution has already occurred and those in power don’t yet realize it.

Right. I would argue that the digital 1776 was the inflection point when everyone realized what had happened. But the actual revolution occurred when people left the shores and they put an ocean between.

And that ocean was the opting out of the system. That ocean was going into Bitcoin where you cannot be touched by fiat. That separated them from power.

And when they did that, I’m sure that the people escaping England and Europe and all these places, I’m sure they realized what they were doing, or at least had some idea, because they suffered under it. As sailors, you know, you have a need to know. They were the ones that needed to know the value of crossing that ocean, crossing that divide.

But those that they were leaving, their oppressors, had no idea. And the revolution had already occurred. 1776 was just the finalization of it.

And perhaps the strategic Bitcoin reserve is the finalization of the revolution that is the exit of fiat, the exit of the matrix, and moving on. We really thought that this would be something really in line with what you talk about a lot, which is this freedom maximization and the self-reliance and individual ability to take care of oneself. Yeah.

Falling in that structure. Yeah, it brings up the difficulty in trying to circumscribe when an event actually begins. You know, it’s like when, you know, we would say it’s when the Declaration of Independence, the signatures were laid on that sheet of paper, but obviously it had been brewing for a long time prior and all the rewards fought afterwards too, right? To reinforce our independence and maintain it.

It’s the innovation versus the invention. The innovation is almost the theoretical, the idea, the I’m going to make a light bulb, I’m going to start trying, I’m going to make a vehicle, I’m going to start trying. But you cannot find that invention, you cannot find that revolution until you struggle through the waters of the Potomac in order to get to the other side.

Yeah. There are inflection points along the way. Even with Bitcoin, it’s like some people will say the day the Bitcoin white paper was issued is the day Bitcoin started.

Some people say the Genesis block. Hash wars. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Hash wars or the block size wars of 2017. Yeah.

So it’s like, yeah, hard to draw the line, I guess. I’ll read this. Can I say something on that too? Yeah, please.

There’s one thing that does specifically draw back to the thesis in that in the thesis, Lowry compares Bitcoin’s adoption to a Trojan horse, which also obscures the moment when an event is going to become a revolution, right? Until adoption begins as this economic phenomena, here is peer to peer electronic cash. We get sufficiently far along, we realize, oh, inside of this all along was a revolutionary military or at least war fighting protocol in the realm of cyberspace. Yeah.

No, that’s a great point. Yeah. Things are, again, back to complexity.

It’s just like things are complicated. You don’t know exactly where to draw the lines. Yeah.

So I’ll read this quote from Lowry and we’re going to be reading some excerpts from the book today. And I think this is, we didn’t do that yesterday, but this is probably the best way to really get a taste for why this book is so good. I mean, it just goes straight to the source and you get a sense of his, both his writing style, which is kind of paradoxically dense and lucid at the same time.

So it’s very informative, but it’s also a lot to chew on yet. It’s easy to read. So I don’t know.

I think he’s very, very skilled guy. So I’ll read this excerpt here. Lowry writes, quote, with the global adoption of cyberspace combined with the global adoption of an electro cyber form of physical power competition enabled by proof of work technologies like Bitcoin, humanity could be at the dawn of creating a completely new type of polity that it has never seen before a new or adjusted type of governance system, which enables the formation of an organized society that resembles something on par with, or perhaps even superior to a traditional government.

With the emergence of cyberspace and a new way to project power in, from, and through cyberspace, humanity could be crossing the event horizon of a highly impactful discovery akin to the discovery of agriculture. These technologies could reshape our understanding of what the term national defense means by changing what national means, because this technology could change how abstract power hierarchies are forged in the first place. Um, I mean, there’s a lot to unpack there, but the thing that immediately jumps out to me is, um, as a restatement in a way of the thesis expressed in the book, The Sovereign Individual, that once human beings had a money that they could opt into that did not debase them, basically a 0% monetary policy for lack of a better term, which is what Bitcoin is, that they would opt into that money and opt out of all other monies in droves, because well, guess what? No one likes to get shadow taxed by inflation.

And the numbers are staggering. You’d have to look at the book, The Sovereign Individual. I wrote about this years ago, so I don’t exactly recall, but it’s like even people that are making just a few hundred, you know, $100,000 a year, if you’re getting taxed at say 20 or 30% and you’re foregoing, uh, say 10, 5 or 10% return on that money, the lifetime, your lifetime earnings, the decision to opt out of inflatable money into non-inflatable money is like in the millions or tens of millions of dollars.

So it’s, there’s a huge financial incentive to adopt Bitcoin and not hold your savings in inflatable fiat currency. But this realization dawns on people, uh, gradually then suddenly, right? It’s like kind of a, we’re kind of probably still in the gradual phase. I mean, at some point maybe we’ll see more fiat currencies hyperinflate and then we’ll see Bitcoin become this dominant money.

But, uh, what that does is it takes away money printing as a option for the centralized state. So now they’re left with only explicit taxation and people tend to be much more resistant to explicit taxation. So the broader thesis of that book, the sovereign individual is that the emergence of what they, I think they call it global digital cyber cash, which basically we’re calling Bitcoin, um, would force the state, all states to become more accountable to the preferences of their citizens.

And I think that’s kind of what he’s getting at here is like, we may be eclipsing the nation state era, like the nation state as the dominant and defining institution of our time may be on its way out with the emergence of Bitcoin. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that brings it back to a Bitcoin as a digital 1776, but the revolution is conceptual.

And now the idea of nation is changing to bring back the importance of the sovereign individual. This nation is now who knows what it is, but the sovereign individual is forefront in what that’s going to be. And so, um, it’s, it’s very powerful that, um, somebody who’s a military theorist, uh, has the foresight to see that the next revolution may be something on par with like the development of individuality and the enlightenment or something like that, but it’s conceptual in nature and going back to sovereignty for the individual.

Yeah. This is the network state, right? This is Bology’s, the third, you know, we, we had the church, the church fell to the printing press. We had the nation, the nation fell to the internet, uh, and, and to, and to digital money.

And I’m glad you brought up the point about the, the hidden tax that is inflation, because our minds think linearly. We do not have the ability to think exponentially. People don’t understand that if you’re taxed 12%, then in six years, you’ve lost half your wealth.

In, in 24 years, you’ve lost 90% of your wealth. And in order to get that back, you have to gain 9,000%. I think that’s the correct, I’m not positive, but directionally correct as people are fond of saying now.

And so that aversion to loss has not been hammered into our heads because we’ve just been slowly bled, um, by the means of someone else having control of the money. And again, if we take the money back to being, to being a bearer asset, which it had to been for the entirety of human history prior to fiat, you know, we always had had natural money emerge that was agreed upon due to its ability to meet characteristics, um, that serve the purpose of money. And we’ve just had this fiat experiment that has been objectively an utter failure.

There is no fiat money that exists that is not down at least 99%. And nearly all of them, I think over 4,000 of them are now defunct. And you’ve got 160 of them that are just on their way to losing.

And what is the definition of insanity? We keep on thinking that you can prop this up and you just can’t because it’s a bad system. So the sovereign individual predicting this and, and you go, you know, there’s, there’s other writings, um, even prior to this that talked about like a, a digital cyber currency or some sort of thing, but it always was envisioning the power back to the people and the polity then having to compete, uh, on a, on a service level. You know, a government, if you want to tax me, if you want me to give up my money because you no longer have the right to take it, then you actually have to show value.

You have to have good roads. You have to have good schools. You have to enforce rule of law equally for all parties and not have a two tiered justice system for those with and those without.

Uh, in it, it puts all polities and all ideologies on notice that you now do have to conform to this thing that is rooted in physical nature that does not bend to your will. Yes. And cannot be, cannot be, cannot be fucked with.

Yeah. That reminds me of the, the Musashi quote, he goes, the truth is what it is. And you either bend to its will or you live a lie, right? It’s like Bitcoin’s exposing the lies of nations.

Um, and you brought up exponents. I think it’s EO Wilson. It’s one of the most important quotes for every mental model that I can think of.

He says, the greatest inability of the human race is our inability. The greatest inability of the human race is our ability to understand the exponential function. Like we’re not hardwired for it basically.

Right? Like you, um, compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. Einstein compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. Uh, to your further point, this is another mathematical shortcoming.

I think of a lot of people. If you incur, say you have a hundred dollars and you incur a 20% loss or 20% tax, right? Or 20% inflation, whatever it was, where you now have $80 worth of purchasing power, you don’t need 20% to get back to even money. You need a 25% gain to get back to even money.

Right? So you need 20, 20 on eighties, 25%. You need, you need a 25% gain. So like people often, they fell to understand that.

And it keeps going and it compounds on itself. 50% then you need a hundred percent to get 75% you need. And if you use it year over year, it’s a compounding effect.

So you get this exponential effect that you just can’t understand basically. And, uh, there’s a line in the sovereign individual where it says something like nations have become accustomed to milking their citizens as if they were cows. And it said in the digital age or the cyber age, whatever they call it, that these cows would grow wings basically that people could just, like we said yesterday, right? Bitcoin lets you vote with your feet in a way that’s much louder and higher signal than without, right? It’s not just that you’re, you’re taking your time, talents and family out of the country.

So that you’re taking your time, talents, family, and all your purchasing power out of the country that mistreats you. So all of a sudden nations are forced into this free market ish paradigm, right? They actually have to render useful services to their citizens and pay attention to what they want. And they can only tax them, um, in a way that’s explicit and visible.

They can’t, you know, print money and then blame someone else, blame the capitalists for increasing their prices. You know, as we do today, by the way, you know, Joe Biden was on a Superbowl commercial not long ago, blaming ice cream producers for increasing ice cream prices. And that one always boggles my mind.

Like the fact that this fucking guy gets away with this is a testament to how ignorant people are about money. And that, again, Bitcoin sort of is fixing that too, right? It’s just, it’s amazing. It’s a very simple question.

I mean, it’s such a simple question, but if a government can print its own money, why do we have taxes? Yeah. Right. And what is it? It is nothing more than a form of control.

It’s nothing more than a facade, um, a way to, a way to suppress, uh, suppress people’s ability to feel the true pain and, and thus be able to rise up against it. You know, there is that you, you have to be able to, you have to keep people in that sweet spot where if you hurt them too much, they rise up. Right.

Right. But you got to keep them right there where they’re just, you’ve sucked just enough blood out of that body that they can’t rise. Don’t want the parasite to kill the host.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah, so Lowry talks a lot about the concept of domestication and in part talking about how humans have domesticated, well obviously we’ve domesticated certain species of both plant and animal, which is a term he uses interchangeable with genetic enslavement, right? That we basically take an animal and we artificially select it into the form that we want, right? Even now, it’s gone further than that today with the genetic modification of crops and things like that. So, and this relates to money and governance because he, I think, and he’s careful the way he says this because obviously who his audience is, people inside of government, but there is this view that government is like domesticating humans in a way, right? Well, we’ve heard states described as tax farms, right? Where taxpayers are the crop, our labor and purchasing power is being harvested. I think that’s a pretty accurate description.

So I’ll read an excerpt from Lowry here who writes, quote, we should be cautious of people who encourage docility and condemn physical power as the basis for settling disputes, establishing control authority over resources or achieving consensus on the legitimate state of ownership or chain of custody of property. It’s clearly a security hazard and can also be a deliberate attack vector. And the example that came up for me here is just gun control, right? The hypocrisy of gun control, the monopoly on violence saying, hey, guns are illegal.

You don’t need guns. We will protect you. That is domestication slash enslavement, right? If you are the group that has the physical power projection capacity and you’re telling another group, hey, they don’t need it.

You’ll do it for them. That gets you into that asymmetric situation we described where, well, one has guns, one doesn’t, and whoever has the guns tends to exploit that advantage. I thought that was just a really good example of, it’s kind of like the state showing its true colors.

Like it actually does intend to domesticate people and harvest them, basically harvest their labor. Yeah. And that’s an excellent concrete example.

And even to back up and put it like in the general theoretical framework of Lowry’s theory, just taking a big step back, the domestication occurs when you have a dominance hierarchy, but you’re no longer using power projection to determine who gets the resources, the feeding and breeding rights. So you begin to select for things that do not indicate fitness for survival in the long run. You select for non-meritocratic things like nepotism, family relations.

You like somebody else. This other person’s willing to kowtow to you. Right.

Yeah. And when you get people then to enter into your abstract power hierarchy, you say, give up your ability to defend yourself. We’ll do it for you.

We don’t need those guns. We’ll manage all of that. It’s all fine.

And when you do that, people become docile, become complacent. It’s a hard thing to hear because we don’t want to think of ourselves as animals, think that we have that responsibility to continually be responsible for our own defense. But this is an evolutionary, this thesis is based in evolutionary thought and see yourself on that continuum with animals competing for resources and the way that they decide resource allocation and the way that we do.

And you begin to see that, you know, maybe it’s not so great to give up, you know, what is it, security for freedom, something or freedom for security rather. Right, right, right. Do you mind? No, go ahead.

Well, I was going to say to your point about the hypocrisy of the government saying that you don’t need guns, my old man’s fondest saying, when you outlaw guns, only the outlaws will have guns. That’s great. But what this makes me think of is what has arisen in the public consciousness over the last decade, which is this attack on toxic masculinity and effectively shaming men for being men.

Now, obviously, there’s examples of people that were horrible human beings that did have some righteousness thrown their way. But it reminds me of the way that Jordan Peterson defined the line in the Bible of the meek shall inherit the earth. He said, if you go back into the original text, what it actually says, and you really take it in, it does not say that the meek shall inherit the earth.

It says something more akin to that you shall become a monster, and then you must tame that monster. Because if you have no power, there’s no virtue in not displaying power. You’re just weak.

The virtue is in having the power and exercising restraint over that power. And the last thing that this makes me think of, one of my favorite songwriters, this guy named Todd Snyder, and he has this throwaway song where it’s just a whole bunch of lines that you write down. The very last one is, if worms had daggers, birds wouldn’t fuck with them.

We talk about governments and nations as being tax farms. And why are they? It’s because we don’t have daggers. But now we have this dagger that is instantiated in code, immutable, and cannot be changed, and it’s harnessed to the physical world.

And there is a cost. Yes. Yeah.

And I would say that’s why the United States has been the most resistant polity to a lot of this global push towards globalism, utopianism. In the UK right now, they’re arresting people for fucking tweets and Facebook posts. We don’t stand for that in the United States.

I mean, most parts of the United States. Obviously, we’ve had censorship, but no one’s been physically arrested for a tweet or whatever post they put online. And again, that’s backed by the symmetry of physical power projection capability that exists here because we have a high penetration of gun ownership that does not exist in the UK and other places.

So they are more vulnerable, basically, to tyranny. And that’s, you know, when the opportunity is there, it gets exploited. I think another good point here, which is, I mean, we keep going back to this.

It’s like, you can’t opt out of physics, I think is something Larry said, right? It’s like, this is a game you can’t opt out of. You’re a third law, right? Can’t win, can’t break even, you can’t quit playing the game. Can’t quit playing the game.

Exactly. And there’s that other quote that those who trade liberty for security end up with neither, right? It’s like, that’s not how it works. If you try to trade away your freedoms for someone to just keep you safe, well, you’ve now given up your ability to defend yourself.

Declawing cats. You’re declawing cats, right? And this is why states are always itching for gun control. And you look where some of the greatest atrocities have been committed, and it’s in states that had really disfavorable gun laws for individuals.

To that quote in the Bible, yeah, my read on that was something like, yeah, it’s not the meek shall inherit the earth, it’s that those who know how to use their weapons but choose to keep them sheathed, which is kind of like what you’re saying. It’s like you’re integrating, it’s integrating the Jungian shadow, ultimately. It’s like, you know what you’re capable of, but you’re choosing to be good, right? It’s not that you don’t know how to fight or don’t know how to defend yourself, and you’re just weak, as you said.

You do know that about yourself. You do have the guns or the technique or whatever the thing is that makes you comparatively competent to someone that would want to coerce you. But then there’s the choosing to do good and be good, and that’s how we actually transcend, I think.

We become stronger, better people. And there’s a reason, I think, why we choose not to do that. Having been around some soldiers and some fighters, those who truly know violence are really unwilling to advance into it.

Right. They know the cost, the risk. Which is why Congress and people in positions of a leadership with the ability to send sons and daughters to die into war who have never experienced that, they can do it without second thought.

And then you go sit next to a guy. My sister’s husband used to be the captain of the Army’s MMA team, and then he became a Special Forces soldier. And you sit next to him, and he’s the most dangerous person I know, but he’s the chillest guy.

And that’s so consistent among fighters and killers, is that they know, they have that ability, but they also know that there is a cost, even to them. And it goes clear back to what Jason was talking about with the theory of mind, which is that if you know that you can impart violence, one of the things that comes with that is the ability to envision exactly what that violence will do to somebody, and you distill that in your own mind. And it hurts.

People suffer from that. And I would just add to that that, so being close to violence in that sense, knowing it as a trade, it helps a person resist their own self-domestication, you know, having the ability to use arms, to MMA, the ability to do your own self-defense, to even have participated perhaps in a war, those types of things help a person not be self-domesticated. Lowry mentions another one of the thesis, go outside and look at the stars, see where you are in the universe, and know that you are responsible for yourself, and be in nature, essentially, is be close to violence maybe, but also be in nature and see what nature is about.

Yeah. Yeah, contending with entropy, right? That’s what we are here to do. And if we try to abdicate that responsibility, then it just opens us up to attack, basically, right? I don’t want to deal with it, let someone else deal with it.

Well, you’re now in a trust game, right? You have trust your protector not to exploit you. You’ve opened up an asymmetry and that can be used to exploit you. Domestication, though, is a tricky one, right? Because I think this next excerpt captures it well, because it’s not linear, it’s not one way, actually.

The domesticator and the domesticatee become entangled. So Lowry writes, quote, in the process of domesticating and entrapping animals, sapiens domesticated and entrapped themselves. And now they are incapable of knowing how utterly unhappy they are because they have never seen, known, or experienced anything except the inside of their agrarian cage.

So there’s, like all things in reality, there are feedback loops. You were giving the example of the baby. I think that was on yesterday’s recording.

And then one of you guys said something about the corn and the farmer. Yeah, no, that was Michael Polan’s example he gave in the book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And in fact, Lowry, in an interview, might’ve been with you, Robert, he noted that if you want to see who is the predator, the apex predator, if you’re an alien and you go to another planet, want to see who the apex predator is, see who has other species as their domesticated pets, see who has used domestication as a predatory strategy.

And kind of an interesting way to look at it from Polan’s angle is, well, if an alien came to earth and saw our endless fields of corn and the way we tend to them and just weighed biomass, what is the most biomass here, you might say that corn is the master. And we, you know, as an agrarian, as a, having entered the agrarian stage of evolution, moved on from hunting and gathering to a settled agrarian people, we are, we talked about this before too, we’re domesticated in the very literal etymological sense. We’ve accepted a domicile, a home, a fixed place where we now have to centralize our resources.

And the grain dump is now a thing that we have to protect in that an abstract power-based hierarchy can be constructed to allocate those resources to other people. It’s not, you go out hunting and gathering with a close connection of people, you kill something and you share it in a very egalitarian manner. Rather we being agrarian people, we concentrate our resource through specialized labor.

We become domesticated, stuck to a piece of earth and a centralized apparatus develops to distribute that out. Yeah. Yeah.

That is, that is the genesis of government actually, right? Is once we become an agrarian society, we start generating an economic surplus. Well, all of a sudden we have something to protect, right? We have silos of grain or whatever the thing may be. You have to protect that from plunder, right? You have to secure the borders.

That’s the genesis of government. That’s where it originally comes from. So there is kind of a free market function to it, I suppose.

But then the conundrum we’ve always been in is how do you protect yourself from the protectors, right? If they choose to use their armaments, they’re securing the border with to turn around and go and plunder your goods or purchasing power from people working inside the borders. Well, what, what recourse do people inside the borders have? Right. And we’ve had, obviously we’ve, we’ve experimented with a number of things, you know, rule of law and civil liberties and all these things.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think we’ve solved it yet. And now Bitcoin does change that calculus. Like people can put their purchasing power on something that even the protectors would have a hard time expropriating.

So, yeah. That which seeks to protect you is that from which you need protection. Exactly.

You know, if the government does it, they call it protection. If the mob does it, they call it extortion. Exactly.

But it’s, it’s the same scheme, right? And oftentimes the mob does it for a little more efficient rate, you know? Yeah. Because there’s more competition. Yeah.

You know, and like Lowry does go into this when he’s asked about, you know, what is a private militia that beats the, the military that takes over the goods? It’s the new government, right? It’s just the guy that’s now, they now have the monopoly on violence. And I’d lived in Columbia for a while in a cartel controlled area. And, you know, they serve as the government.

They go around and they, in times of need, they hand out water and food and supplies. And in times of crisis, they protect. And you just don’t go down that road after dark and you stay out of their way.

And this, of course, this is not a vote to or from, but we do, I think, need to pull the veil off of our eyes and acknowledge that a cartel is simply a non-recognized government. Yeah. Yeah.

And they serve that purpose all across the world. Yeah. Yeah.

And then when the mafia comes to the local shop and demands protection money and they’re like, well, protection from what? And it’s, well, protection from what I’ll do to you if you don’t give me money. Exactly. So, yeah, it’s like they’re, the world’s complex, right? We do need physical protection, clearly.

Anytime you have something to protect, well, you got to protect it. But you don’t have to outsource the protection. We’ve been domesticated into that belief, right? Well, just pay your taxes and just serve your country and don’t ask any questions.

And like there is, there is a psychological operation ongoing to substantiate and justify centralized governance, but it’s not the only model, right? You could just have these decentralized gangs running around that you’re paying. And look, there’s all kinds of trade-offs too. I’m not saying that’s a better way to do it, but I guess the Bitcoin or argument would be that it lowers the cost of protecting your private property.

Therefore it makes these protection rackets, whether they are gangs or governments, it lowers the relevance of them, right? You’re not as dependent on them to protect your property. You can instead rely on this decentralized Bitcoin network. Yeah.

And lowers the relevance, I think is a good way to put it. Lowry says constrain when you have an abstract power-based hierarchy, it’s not that you maybe don’t need a hierarchy and that you don’t need a rule set. You just need a way to constrain its operation.

That is not the rule set designed by that hierarchy, which was where something like a decentralized currency, not controlled by anybody provides a hard constraint on any hierarchy, any abstract power-based hierarchy that would attempt to change the rules. Yeah. It’s like the checks and balances in the original founding of the United States.

As a constitutional republic, those checks and balances are what Lowry would probably describe as constraining constraints, basically, right? Constraining control actions, I think is the term he often uses. And so, yeah, you need a way to protect yourself from the protector, basically, as you said earlier. And Bitcoin is a more economically efficient way of doing that.

There’s another aperture through which to understand the importance of Bitcoin. Okay. So going back into kind of the cyberspace and Bitcoin discussion, Lowry writes, quote, with the way the internet is currently architected, users operating in cyberspace are automatically domesticated as the architecture necessary to project physical power to physically constrain belligerent actors is currently missing.

At least it was before the invention of Bitcoin. So what, I mean, this term domestication, there’s a bit of a self-domestication that’s occurring as well. What role does this play in his thesis? Yeah.

So the idea would be that when we use software provided by large corporations like Facebook, Twitter, whatever bank controls your financial data, these are abstract power-based hierarchies that are controlled by administrators who have God-king rights over how the system operates. You essentially then say to the admin, to the software provider, well, I mean, you’re powerless. You don’t have, you’re not defending your digital resources.

You’re outsourcing that, all of that to the software provider. You’re already domesticated because you’ve given up any power projection. And that makes sense kind of before Bitcoin, because how do you project power into the virtual realm? How do you project real physical power in such a way that you can resist domestication? What are your gun? What is the second amendment you have in the cyberspatial realm? What is the gun, so to speak? Once you have Bitcoin, you have the proof of work cybersecurity protocol that is essential to Bitcoin that allows the expenditure of real world energy in cyberspace to make bits provably costly.

The electro cybersecurity dome that we mentioned in the last conversation. And so now Bitcoin is the first instance of an ability to project real world physical power into cyberspace. And so reject the auto domestication that comes from downloading a piece of software and expecting it to do all the work for you as far as self defense.

Yeah. Again, there’s that abdication of responsibility almost. I mean, as you’re saying by necessity, because how could you all the only access point to the internet was through these centralized data monopolies, right? Whether that was AOL or, you know, even internet service providers, now social media companies, et cetera.

And there’s no way to there’s no rooting and physical reality, I guess, at least for the user. I mean, there are obviously physical servers, but the user can’t express their preferences with any type of physical oomph, basically. But Bitcoin allows us to do that, essentially.

And so that it changes the nature of the relationship between users of these applications and the providers of these applications. Well, and there’s it’s not just that you can’t express your preferences, it’s that the cost of someone to attempt to manipulate your preferences is effectively zero and continuous forever. Right.

In that, yeah, this is just kind of a thought experiment I had, which is if I had control of a couple hundred million dollars worth of ad money and I wanted to affect a revolution, maybe I wanted an assassination, what would I do? I would just simply break down all the profiles, look at the ones that are most psychologically apt to flip, and then just spam them with things that would flip them. And maybe I start with 200,000 people and all I need is one. Right.

So it takes, you think about like the JFK assassination, you think about how many people had to actually be in play in that conspiracy theory for it to work out to go from here to here to here to here to here. And there is somewhat of a paper trail or at least a relational trail. With this type of approach, you can Manchurian candidate somebody into doing your will and have this great distance between you and them, this deniability.

And there’s nothing to stop that. Up until this point, there had never been anything to stop that, except now we have the base layer of Bitcoin, which allows us to put a halo, allows us to put this electro cyber dome around our preferences and around ourselves as we travel through cyberspace such that if you want to fire an ad off my way, you got to zap me some sats. You’ve got to make, we’re going to make it costly for you to do that.

And when you make it costly for people to do things, they have skin in the game and they change how they act and they act right. Yeah. And to take, that’s a great argument.

And to take it a step further, you know, you said if you had a hundred million dollars or whatever it is, what have you just had a money printer? Exactly. Right. Then you don’t even, you don’t even need to spend your own money.

You can just pilfer the purchasing power from savers and then also engage in that social engineering. Or even cheaper than that. And this is the thing that has always been the inherent flaw of any sort of logic based system with that sort of God King is that yeah, Mark Zuckerberg has controlling power over 3.4 billion people.

He can unseat a sitting president, but you know who has power over him? The people that can lean on him, call him up through a direct channel and say, do this or else. And you don’t need the money printer. You just need the threat.

And so the administrator itself is that trusted third party is that security hole through which anyone can get. When you do penetration testing almost all the time, the fault is human. Sure.

You know, you, you can just manipulate somebody by, by changing, you know, but by, by pressuring them. Yeah, that’s a great point. So it’s like Bitcoin is kind of a two pronged attack on that whole dynamic, right? Not only does it allow us to put this digital halo around data, but it’s also defunding the money printer or removing the key man risk even that the, these layers are not going to be centralized and therefore vulnerable to political attacks.

And so, yeah, it just becomes a more self-organizing digital environment. And that is obviously a good thing for all participants involved. Have you ever wanted to start a business in the Bitcoin space? If so, then the Wolf startup accelerator could be for you.

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How does Bitcoin help us break free of this domestication? There are those explicit ways in which it changes our interaction with cyberspace, makes it provably costly to protect us from malicious control signals, like Lucas is mentioning, the types of attempts at social engineering. And there’s also that electric cyber dome that helps protect our digital resources, our financial data, our health data. I think there’s even a more grounded reason though.

The protection is yours and your responsibility. Not your keys, not your coins. You have to learn how to be sovereign with Bitcoin.

You have to learn, okay, cybersecurity is now my responsibility. I can’t outsource this to the software admin provider. What does it mean to do self-custody? What does it mean to have cold storage? Whatever types of thing that you’re considering doing, it’s now your responsibility.

And so once you in charge a person with their own responsibility for their own self-defense, you begin to push them back towards the need to develop their autonomy and self-sovereignty. You see this expressed so much in the lifestyle of Bitcoiners, that you navigate the shit storm that is fiat. You find your way out of that desert, and now you’ve found Bitcoin.

And you’re in this somewhat fugue state of realizing self-realization, becoming a self-actualized individual, where if I can control my own money, I can control my own body. I can control my own thoughts. I can control my own actions.

I can take responsibility for my environment. You go to a Bitcoin event, and what do you see? Happy, healthy people who are bettering themselves and proving that not only can people change, but that when you put people in a natural state of self-responsibility, they happily absorb that responsibility. They don’t want to deflect it.

But when you don’t have the technology… Again, this goes back to what Lowry says. A, technology does not negotiate, but B, no change has ever been made until one engineer does something that shifts the power structure. When that happens, then you liberate so much human freedom and affluence and joy.

It’s a beautiful thing to see how Bitcoin does help us break free from that domesticated status. When I found Bitcoin, I put all my ties in a box that says, do not open or break in case of wedding or funeral. Because that’s what that had always been the signal of.

Yeah, I saw a tweet from Russell O’Connor. He said he got rid of all the suits. And now he wants one, right? It’s by choice.

Yeah, he was throwing away these… Well, we talked about clothing yesterday. It’s like symbolizing your position in the hierarchy. What is the term where they call a business executive? A suit, right? Metonymy? It’s not metaphor.

Metonymy, maybe. I might be mispronouncing it. Anyways, it’s like he had suits because he was domesticated in his own fiat life philosophy.

And then when he got into the Bitcoin life philosophy, he discards all of them. But now in his own freedom, he wants a suit. So yeah, it sounds like a subtle difference, but I think it’s actually really profound.

When it is a choice, right? That’s profound. You’re deciding to happen to the world rather than let the world happen to you. And again, this self-domestication or domestication loop, Bitcoin does change it, at least if you just think about the agricultural age is maybe the easiest example.

It’s like, okay, well, we shifted from hunters and gatherers to agrarians. But that made us very dependent on the rhythms of agrarian life, right? Well, you got to get to bed at a certain time, wake up at a certain time, repeat certain actions. The diet changed, right? We talked about people’s teeth rotting and physical stature becoming diminished because you’ve changed the proportion of meat in your diet to more grain.

It’s such a paradox in a way. You’re trying to liberate yourself and create more food and overcome the economic scarcity of nature to have more economic abundance. You’re trying to strive for independence or freedom, but at the same time, you gain this dependence and that you now have to accord yourself with all the demands of agrarian lifestyle.

It’s like, okay, well, that’s fine. If you want to do that, great, but not everyone should have to do that. We really want people that are more like sovereign individuals that are choosing their own path, right? They can choose.

I mean, I guess we’re all domesticating ourselves in some way, right? It’s more, I think if I take it all the way down to the physics level, it’s entrainment, right? It’s like whatever you’re doing, you’re becoming like. Entrainment is where if you take the frequency of any system and you put it near another system, eventually they start to synchronize basically the vibration. They oscillate at the same frequency.

Exactly. Classic example is the tuning fork. If they’re on the same frequency or hertz or whatever the tuning fork measurement is, you hit one, the other one starts to vibrate, right? But it’s also true in biology.

You put women together and eventually their menstrual cycles start to harmonize. It’s also in just interpersonal dynamics. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, right? We’re all products of our environment.

We’re all, I mean, due to this physics concept, we are becoming like our surroundings. And so there’s some subtle shift with Bitcoin where you go from being programmed to being self-programmed, right? Like you get to choose, even us having this conversation right now, which is inspired by Bitcoin, it’s like helping us have this realization that, oh, I get to choose who I spend time with, what books I read, what job I do, what activities I engage in, et cetera. I get to entrain myself and can program myself basically.

If you don’t have that realization, you might just be meandering through life, right? Just doing whatever you can to survive, getting this job, getting that job, and then you were basically being programmed. So all that is to say what? Yeah, I guess, how else can we say Bitcoin is changing this? People are going to have this tendency to imitate the wealth acquisition strategy that works. So the example I like to use here is, okay, Putin today, Vladimir Putin, a notorious statesman, supposedly has like north of $200 billion net worth.

He’s acquired all of that wealth, not by building anything of value for anyone, he’s acquired it by coercing people. It was literally on top of a giant abstract power hierarchy that’s not a competence hierarchy, it’s a coercion hierarchy, right? It’s literally funded through tax revenue and taxation is theft. Okay, well, in a world of fiat currency and gold, the Vladimir Putin strategy seems to be very imitation worthy.

You can get a $200 billion net worth by acting like this guy. But in a world that’s running on Bitcoin, this wealth acquisition strategy does not work as well. We would expect to see more entrepreneurs having the people that have created products and services that are better, faster, cheaper, and improving people’s lives.

We would expect them to have the $200 billion net worth. And so this changes the propagation of memetic patterns or imitation worthy patterns. So you would see more people imitating these hypothetical future entrepreneurs than you would imitating statesmen because statecraft is becoming less profitable over time.

And so I think, yeah, basically in that world, people are going to imitate successful entrepreneurs rather than imitating statesmen. So that means we’re going to be more peaceful, prosperous, more moral, even. It’s hard to understate the… There’s some continuity between material incentives, wealth acquisition, and then imitation.

And Bitcoin is changing the material incentive layer, which then changes the way we acquire wealth. Obviously, it’s either making or taking. Taking is now much more expensive or less profitable, to say it that way.

Making is therefore the preferred strategy. So people get rich engaging in making. So what does that mean? People start imitating that and you get a lot more entrepreneurs and a lot less statesmen.

Yeah. And it re-centers us on an evolutionary track for the species as a whole that conduces to our systemic fitness. That’s one of Lowry’s underlying points is when you have a hierarchy that domesticates everybody, you’re not just subject to oppression from the people who exploit you at the top of the hierarchy, but also from some sort of existential risk, a comet that comes, changing weather patterns.

But if we re-center ourselves to reward the entrepreneurs, as you say, instead of the statists, instead of those who are parasitical in their wealth accumulation, then now as a whole, our species is once again on an evolutionary track to bootstrap us into the next Kardashev level, harness all the energy from the sun, perhaps bootstrap new technologies as we search for new energy sources, types of things that could mitigate existential risk from whatever a comet coming in. If we have new sources of power that’ll enable new rockets to shoot at it or whatever. But yeah, that mimesis is very important for social animals.

And so if we have correct incentives are going to incentivize our own evolution in the correct direction. Yeah. Yeah.

We go from the 60s, which is a decade in which we set an impossible goal to make it to the moon and achieve it. And then 71, we go off the gold standard and we enter this fiat nightmare, which because of the rewards, and you correctly state that these rewards, you know, I want to acquire the same wealth as someone who’s at the top of the game. So I need to mimic what they’re doing.

What they’re doing is not ethical. So I therefore need to be not ethical. And it draws these minds.

And I look at the 70s and 80s and 90s as what happened is that because of the rewards in finance, all of these brilliant physicists, mathematicians, statisticians went into finance instead of advancing. Like we have an advanced physics, right? And Eric Weinstein will pound on this, right? Yeah. We haven’t gone off the track in the early seventies.

They never, they never rooted in money, but yes, I agree completely. Yeah. So we just, you know, we, we lost all these brilliant minds to financial derivatives and money changer schemes and, you know, proof of that, like the largest market in the world, the Forex market set like $7 trillion a day of nothing but extracting value.

Paper pushing. Yeah. Nonproductive.

Yeah. And so we, when you have fiat money, you adopt a fiat mindset, which is fiat ethics, and then you fight fiat wars and you have to continue to fight those fiat wars in order to justify the fiat money. Yeah.

And it becomes the self-licking ice cream cone. It’s self-serving. It’s the gluttonous monster that can feed itself.

Yeah. So yeah. No, that’s wonderfully said, man.

And that is the spiritual cancer that is fiat, right? And that’s, I mean, you just summed it up really well. It’s like what I’ve been trying to say on the show for so long is like, you talk about money and people think, oh, you’re talking about finance. It’s like, no, no, no.

It’s like the interconnection of every layer of existence, right? Psychological, technological, geopolitical, and they’re all swirling and interconnected with this money. And it’s like, if you just poison the money, well then you fuck everything. That’s a blood disease on the global human organism, basically.

It rewards extraction, right? I mean, that’s what finance is. It’s an extraction economy. It does not add.

It does not promote human abundance or influence. It is nothing more than a legalized shit coin casino, which is a taker’s game. And so yeah, you end up continually promoting that.

And we put on a pedestal and we praise the two or three that are at the top. And we don’t consider all the huddled masses at the bottom that have just had their lifeblood and their energy sucked out of them. Even the super, you know, the hyper successful entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, a lot of their success is attributable to either circumventing state tax or regulation or getting contracts, right? Like in the case of Musk, well, Amazon was a good way to circumvent state sales tax for a long time.

So they could undercut their competitors in the retail space for the first 10 or 15 years because the state hadn’t caught up to how do you exact sales tax for online sales. It took a while. So therefore, Amazon had this advantage.

In the case of Musk, you know, SpaceX gets giant government contracts, right? Tesla had all these subsidies for electric cars. So even our entrepreneurs that we celebrate, like they’re kind of pseudo entrepreneurs in a way, right? They’ve got one foot in both worlds to some extent. And we all do, right? We all live in the paradigm of statism.

But what would a pure entrepreneur look like, right? What would the guy with subjected to no taxation and not deriving his revenues from theft or coercion? What would that look like? You know, what would he or she be inventing? Yeah, that’s what excites me about Bitcoin. Yeah. Cause you make a really good point about a figure like Musk, you know, by necessity, they have to become a semi-political figure.

What, you know, you wouldn’t think to get man to Mars, a way stop on that journey is to buy Twitter to have like a, you know, propaganda arm or whatever to recenter politics, to enable hopefully competence, to be used as a criterion, um, and to eliminate regulation. So, I mean, you just make a really good point that what would an entrepreneur look like and the entrepreneurs that we have, what would they be doing if they didn’t have to redirect energy into politics? Essentially. Absolutely.

It’s a dissipation of entrepreneurial energy. You don’t have to be engaged in the political process at all. And then you also have to presume there’s even doing it for the right reasons.

Like we think, Oh, we’re on both for freedom of speech. It’s like, who knows what game he’s playing, right? He could be, we don’t know, basically. It’s a waste of talent.

Exactly. You know, the comedian Mitch Hedberg? Yeah, of course. So he talks about, he talks about, you know, so if you’re a successful comedian, what do they always want you to do? They want you to have a show, right? It’s like, you’re funny.

Can you write? He’s like, that’s saying to a chef, you’re a great chef. Can you farm? Yeah. This is a waste of my talent.

I should not be doing this. I do. Like I’ve seen Elon on Twitter directly address that and note that their contracts are a very small portion of, but yes, they do need that stuff to get started.

However, one of the things that I thought was hilarious is that, so Bezos used to be a citizen of Washington state, right? Washington state passed this thing called a billionaire’s tax, which they projected something like $4.2 billion worth of tax revenue from. And Bezos goes, I think I’ll move to Florida. And that was half.

And so, you know, he is, I think, uh, I, you know, this is what a, what a beautiful example of vote by vote with your feet and just get the hell out. Yeah. And that is a vestige of the United States as a constitutional Republic that it had this decentralized structure for reasons like that.

If this one state is mistreating you, well, then you got 49 other sandbox. Yeah. We didn’t have 49 to start, but you know, other options basically.

And so that, yeah, the founding fathers were trying to inculcate this free market kind of paradigm. It, the governmental level, which Bitcoin takes to another level, right? It’s like pushing it to an extreme in a way. Um, this all sounds well and good, but there’s, I think there’s something to be said for the, the fear that comes with this, right.

That there is, I mean, we can beat up on statism all day and there’s a number of reasons to do so, but there is a certain level of stability or predictability that a hierarchy offers, even if it’s tyrannical. Yeah. Right.

Um, that, you know, the, the biblical examples like the Israelites, right. When they escape Egypt, Moses leads them into the desert and they’re wandering for 40 years. Well, a lot of them wanted to go back, right? They’re like, fuck, we’re out here in the middle of nowhere and there’s all this entropy and unknown.

And you know, they encountered all kinds of issues. They had, they were going through the process of entraining themselves to a new situation outside of the predictability or stability of a hierarchy. And that’s a painful process by definition.

And so the world we’re describing, I mean, I think there is going to be a certain level of unpredictability or fear. It doesn’t have to be fear. Definitely unpredictability that comes with moving from one paradigm to another.

Um, and yeah, I mean, what, what the, but the process of that is necessary. Cause like at the end of that, Moses, you know, after four years, he’s saying like, okay, here are, here’s what you guys have been doing. You’ve had all these conflicts.

Here’s how you have resolved them. Here they are now written down. So here are the rules basically to go and construct a new hierarchy.

And so that is a process of becoming, what are you saying? Freedom comes with a process of becoming undomesticated, right? Like the pain of becoming undomesticated even. And then you get to re-choose how you’re going to domesticate yourself again in this new hierarchy. And so I think we’re going to go through something similar with, with Bitcoin.

Yeah. I think Lowry has a, I believe Lowry has this quote, if not as another thinker, that we are clay statues that are shaping ourselves and that shaping is painful. Oh yeah.

Yeah. So in the process of not becoming domesticated, there is the anxiety of freedom. There is all the things that could happen to you in the wild, in the desert.

Um, and there are different psychological types. Some people are more risk averse. Some people, um, measure risk in different ways.

And you know, that’s not a problem if you have Bitcoin as an alternative. If Bitcoin is the standard, some people will store their coins with a custodian on a centralized platform like Coinbase. Some people will have shares of an ETF.

Um, and there’s a spectrum that you can do. And some people, you know, may not be ready for a full jump into off the grid self-sovereignty or whatever. And so there’s, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

There’s different types of people. And as long as there is that base level ability to abs exercise absolute sovereignty, then, um, people can based on the risk averseness and their psychological profile kind of adapt to that. Yeah.

And you, again, this is kind of the beauty of it is you could choose, even as a Bitcoin or to opt in to one of these super advanced rigid hierarchies, right. And you could just slot yourself in and play your role and have a lot of predictability. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve never been to Singapore, but I’ve heard it’s a very, uh, very strongly policed hierarchy, right? There’s the road, the streets are clean and all of that.

It’s like, you could do that. Or you can go into the wild, wild West, so to speak, wherever that may be. And it’s more of this like choose your own adventure thing.

That seems really important versus forcing people into certain social roles or certain social hierarchies. Um, also recharacterizing the hierarchy based on competence rather than coercion. Obviously that’s very important.

You want people doing what they’re good at and not coursing one another. That’s a good situation to live in, right? You get to enjoy the fruits of everyone else’s labor as they get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. And then preferably people aren’t, uh, coursing one another because that’s good for peace and enjoyment.

Yeah. So this makes me think of, so Jordan Peterson’s 2017 Harvard lectures, he goes into the Oedipal mother and the Oedipal mother is the woman who loves her infant so much that she, um, she resents them for becoming a toddler, a child, a preteen, a teen, and then an adult, right? And so therefore- The mothers that can’t let go. Yes, they can’t let go.

And in talking about how to treat that, and so now what I’m doing is I’m, I’m projecting the Oedipal mother as the government, um, and the safe place. Oh, you can stay here. I’ll feed you Cheetos.

I’ll make your bed. Don’t worry about a thing. You’ll always be near mommy.

And he says, you know, the risk is that if you leave here, you could lose your life, right? That risk is real. But the risk that occurs if you stay here is that you’ll lose your soul. And you should value your soul heavily, right? To not, to not taint that.

And if, if you never make a choice, you’ll never know the truth. You just have to continue making these choices because they refine your ability to assess risk. And, uh, I saw, I told you yesterday, I saw this online.

It made me, made me really think, uh, highly of all the failures that I had, which was that the fail, um, I have failed more times than you have tried. Right. And it puts into perspective, like, you know, failure is not something to be ashamed of.

Failure is feedback. It’s a loop. We do better.

We make better risk assessments after. That’s excellent. Uh, yes.

Again, a call back to the sovereign individual because they describe the state as the nanny nation state, right? That infantilizes you. Um, and this is what Bitcoin again enables the emergence of the sovereign individual. And I think the sovereign individual could be straightforwardly described in the context of what you just said, as someone who values their soul more than their life.

There you go. That’s good. All right.

Like they want to go out and live their life to the fullest, all risk included. I mean, maybe not accounted for, but they’re just willing to take the risk or the entropy of freedom, um, to live life to the fullest. And I don’t think there’s any other way, right? You can’t have both.

Yeah. In any, I can’t in any conflict, the winner is always the one that’s willing to die. Yeah.

Right. So if you value your soul more than your life, then you’ll win everything. Right.

Just whatever you set your mind to, whatever you push towards, you know, the, the fear that you have of staying the same, if it’s greater than the fear of the pain of changing, um, then, then you’ll make that move. Yeah. And you’ll make that choice.

You’ll make that jump. You’ll exit the matrix. You’ll start pumping some iron and walking around and getting some sunlight, you know, and then you’ll become a self-actualized individual.

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Metacognition is an idea Lowry explores in his book and he talks about how it can make us susceptible to abstract power. So I guess first to try and define metacognition, I’ll start with a quote from the book. Lowry writes, sapiens are effectively trapped behind a neocortical cage, unable to interpret the world objectively for what it is without skewing it with imaginary meaning and symbolism.

This makes it exceptionally difficult to know what real is, unquote. And he also gives a great example in the book, which is, you know, you can practice anytime, anywhere. Basically, you just open a book, look at the letters and words and try not to infer any meaning from them.

Try to see them as just scribbles. Now, obviously you can do this if the book’s written in a language that you don’t know, right? You open a book written in Chinese, if you’re me, all I see are scribbles. I don’t know what it means, but it’s interesting when you try it with a book written in English and you look at it, you can’t not see the symbolic meaning.

It’s like we are superimposing this meaning layer on ink on paper, basically. And it happens sonically too, like we’ll have those dissociative moments where pancake, pancake, pancake, you say it enough, and then the word doesn’t come to you with any sort of semantic connotation. It’s just like this, it’s alien to you.

Yeah. Oh, you’re saying if you say the word enough. Yeah, you can denature it in some way.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, but sometimes, usually you can’t say a word without it already having its meaning pregnant in it. We hear the meaning with the word, we can’t separate abstract and the objective sonic signature of the word, they come together. But sometimes that happens, that moments of disassociation where a word doesn’t hit you as a word, it’s a set of sounds or something.

Interesting. And yeah, he makes the point in the book that this is different than all other animals. Animals sort of see reality as it is, whereas we are always superimposing this symbolic overlay on it.

And that’s, again, that’s useful. That’s our superpower in a way that we can do that. But it can also be, it also opens us up to exploitation, basically, right? We can be exploited by rhetoric and storytelling.

And, you know, he has a whole list of the abstract activities in the book. I’ll read a longer quote now. I’d just say that, yeah, the fact that, to relate it back to metacognition, it’s very difficult for us to separate the world outside from the ideas in our head.

We construct hypotheses about the world in a form of patterns, then we see those patterns in the world. And there’s this flooding out of our metaphors that we use to construct the world internally into the world and we see them there. We see tree, we don’t see the tree, we don’t see the individual thing.

We see our idea of tree and that’s the metacognitive kind of flaw or weakness that humans have. We don’t have the ability to think about, we have the ability to think about thinking, we’re just not always the best at it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We often don’t stop.

We, you know, often, well, this is kind of like the, what is money question, right? We always often think through money, right? We think in terms of money when you’re negotiating or you’re, am I going to buy this or not? I’m going to go on this vacation or not. You’re planning, you’re, you’re paying your taxes, whatever it may be that you’re dealing with money. You’re thinking through it actually.

Um, but you don’t stop to think about it, right? So the analogy would be, you know, you’re looking through your glasses, but we don’t often take off the glasses and examine them to see how they are distorting our perception. Basically that is metacognition, right? Thinking about thinking or thinking about the terms you are thinking through, right? You could also be about thinking about language, um, which is all of these things are interesting rabbit holes. The thing about language and money that’s common, there’s a number of maybe more than this, but the thing that’s most relevant in my opinion is that they’re both metaphorical and that you, a metaphor is something where you have a target domain and a source domain.

So you’re thinking about the target domain in terms of the source domain. So you’re typically thinking about something unfamiliar or abstract in terms of something concrete and familiar. So, um, you know, when it comes to money, we’re thinking about economic goods in terms of number and number makes it universally communicable and you know, we can negotiate and execute trades more quickly.

Things like that. Um, so yeah, I guess although we have the ability for metacognition, it’s a bit of a higher order cognitive capacity that, I mean, most people don’t know what the word means for crying out loud. Um, and so I think those who do understand metacognition can exploit those who do not understand metacognition.

And that to me points to Plato’s old quote that those who tell stories rule society. It’s like, if you can manipulate people at that metacognitive abstract layer, then you can actually, you can engage in programming basically, right? Like you can program other people. That’s what propaganda is.

This is what fake news is, is what psyops are. So this is a theme we come back to a lot on the show. It’s like, it’s almost like if there’s one thing I could get people, I don’t want to say it like that.

I don’t want to get people to do anything. One thing that I would hope people would learn watching this show is that they are highly programmable. They have a lot of cognitive flexibility.

We have very malleable cognitive software, however you want to say it. If you don’t take that seriously, then you’re going to get programmed by someone else basically. But if you do take it seriously, then you can program yourself, right? Like as we said earlier, you can choose the books you read, the people you spend time with and et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth.

I’ll jump into his next excerpt unless you guys have anything to add to that. I just wanted to say, so I was going to bring up exactly what you said about once you recognize that you are being programmed, you then are liberated with the idea that you can program yourself. Exactly.

And perception is something that you don’t realize that you have until it changes and you leave that behind and you continually shed these new skins. You realize that I have been accepting the story that’s been told to me, but now if I choose, I can be the hero of my own story. I can tell myself my own story.

And this is not just philosophical. This is not just dorm room stoner thought. This is the neuroscience of understanding how we perceive the world around us, which is that our eyes prioritize threats because threat is more damaging than reward is additive.

You know, if for 2 million years, if I rolled my ankle, if I tripped and fell, I might not survive a week. And so our brains have not evolved to catch up to the non-threatening world that we currently live in. And so we are constantly over-prioritizing threats and taking those in first.

That’s our first filter through which we view the world. But then, and that is something we have in common with animals. But the second filter is the story that is embedded within our programming.

It is the filter of narrative and the way that we view the world. And if you want different result, then tell yourself a different lie, change that narrative, change that story, and view the world in a different way such that you can leave behind the perception that has been constraining you. And you can walk away seeing no spoon and having the power to fly above.

Yes, wonderfully said. Self-limiting beliefs, we often call them. The revelation that meaning is a, it’s co-created, right? There’s not, again, when I read the words, I have a certain idea of what the word being, I just picked a word here, being, I have a certain interpretation of what that word means, right? You and I may not share that exact interpretation and the definition of the world is probably different than both of our interpretations of it, right? I don’t know the exact definition.

Actually, the word being is really complicated, right? It goes straight into metaphysics. That’s a great one to pick. But the point is that the meaning is always somehow generated between, right? It doesn’t adhere in any object or word or thing.

It’s some kind of middle ground, middle point agreement between two acting agents. So, yeah, it’s difficult to think about because you are within the system that you’re trying to observe and you’re trying to take, you need to take that step outside of the system to get that neutral perspective on the system. But you kind of can’t because you’re always inside of language.

If you’re trying to do it with language, it’s a little bit easier with money, actually, because money, you don’t have to think through money. We can think through just language. But I think, honestly, I think that’s why the title of the show has been so successful, because it is a metacognitive question and therefore very philosophically tantalizing for people.

It gets a little quantum. Yeah. You know, it gets a little, you know, I think about this thing, I change this thing, this thing changes that thing.

Right. You know, two things together. Yes.

Yeah. It’s the deepest question. Yeah.

And the realization that causality is not linear, right? That there’s, it’s always cause effect, but then effect changes cause, cause changes effect and so on and so forth. Yeah. And that you can’t, you mentioned, you can’t think yourself outside of systems.

And a point that Lowry makes, and that really, I think, enriches our understanding of abstract power hierarchies is that they intentionally obfuscate our metacognitive thinking. Like we have, he gives the example of, if you have a king, the king wants to project that he is powerful. And so part of that might be the metonymy of the crown for the king.

You have the symbolic, like, ah, we reduce him to that, this powerful symbol. Metonymy, that’s the word I was looking for. Yeah.

Yeah. You used that earlier. I was like, that’s the, that’s the perfect word for that.

The other example he explicitly gives though, is the king then has an enforcer class of knights. The knights do the king’s will. People confuse the king as being powerful because they see the knight’s power through him.

And so these hierarchies where we are within, we hypostatize, that’s the word, it’s a logical fallacy. Lowry uses it. We attribute misplaced concreteness to abstract things because the hierarchies we are within, we are within, really are doing it intentionally in a certain sense.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a game ultimately, right? And we’re, we’re all playing pretend with one another.

And this is not childish. This is like adult, serious, pretend play. Right? And we arrange ourselves into hierarchies because, well, we can cooperate more efficiently.

And ultimately, again, it grounds out in physical power. We can move more energy per unit time when we cooperate than when we don’t. So the ab, the ability for abstract power enables greater projection of physical power.

And that’s like, ah, it’s a big, big idea, but very important for being human. All right, I’m going to read this next excerpt. So Lowry writes, quote, because of the way our neocortices effortlessly, effortlessly engage in bidirectional abstract thinking and symbolic reasoning, people can and often do live their entire lives cognitively entrapped under these population scale, consensual hallucinations where it’s impossible for them to see how vulnerable they are to psychological abuse and exploitation through their belief systems.

Dogmatism in a nutshell, right? Tragically, this also makes them incapable of seeing how easy it would be to escape their psychological entrapment. People will legitimately believe those who wear striped headcloths or lapel pins are actually powerful and fear their quote unquote divine power over generations birthing dynasties of oppressive God Kings. Populations will labor for their God Kings, kill for them, forfeit their resources to them, and even let their oppressors define what’s right or good or fair.

I think that’s one of the most powerful passages in the book, but like really coming to terms with what it means to be human. And again, he says you can’t opt out of the physics game. You kind of can’t opt out of the abstract power game either.

I mean, I guess you could go sit alone in the middle of the woods and never talk to anyone, but I assume you’re still going to have thoughts at some point. And those thoughts are probably language mediated. So this abstract power game is as un-opt-out-able, if that is a way to say it, damn near as much as the physics game.

And he’s so much more eloquent the way he puts it. I have this brief passage in my book where I’m talking about something similar. And the example I give is like you would probably feel nervous meeting the US president.

And the question is why? At the time I wrote this, Joe Biden was the president. I said, it’s just a child-sniffing old man. Why are you so nervous to meet this guy? And the reality is because he is the commander in chief.

He holds the station at the top of the most dominant military symbolic hierarchy in the world. So he actually, although I don’t think he actually does, he ostensibly holds the lovers to the most power of anyone on earth. So therefore you’d be, oh, it’s the president.

But in reality, it’s just this old, feeble guy. And so that should give you a sense of this relationship between we’re inhabiting physical reality, but we’re equally inhabiting abstract reality. Yeah.

And this line in here, I think, relates to that. He says, this makes people incapable of seeing how easy it would be to escape their psychological entrapment. If you can occasion that internal mental shift away from leader, commander in chief towards frail, elderly individual.

And one of the examples that Lowry uses is a quote from 300, the movie. Xerxes is the god king, but what they want to do is make Xerxes bleed. Once you can project power and show that the abstract power hierarchy is based purely on abstraction is imaginary.

That’s a perfect example. Yeah. The king is naked.

Absolutely. The king bleeds just like we do. The king is a body, not anything more or less.

It’s tragic, like he says, it’s tragic how easy it would be. And it seems you just got to make Xerxes bleed. Yes, absolutely.

And that proves that he is a man and not a god. And so then that abstraction is shattered because it’s been reconciled to the physical reality of him being a biological male. And all of a sudden, well, if you’ve shattered that illusion, then there’s this cascading effect of like, oh, well, maybe I don’t need to serve this guy or be a slave to this guy or whatever it is.

And so, yeah, it’s so interesting, right? They didn’t even need to kill him. They just needed to cause him to shed blood, basically. It’s a great example.

Okay. Is there anything you guys want to add to metacognition? I mean, I think we’ve kind of defined it pretty well. The next question I was going to ask is like, what is its big role in Lowery’s thesis? I think it has a few roles, but I think one of the big things that it reminds us of is that because metacognition is metabolically costly, you have to do this cognitive shift to stop seeing the world as your mental projection and for what it is, which many people maybe have lost that capacity entirely to get out of the dream they’re in.

But that idea that we are in a dream, especially in cyberspace and metacognition, the things that are metacognitive tactics enable us to extricate ourselves from that type of hallucination that we’re caught within in an abstract power hierarchy. For example, one such tactic, if you’re in a real dream or think you’re in a dream, rather, you pinch yourself. You project real world physical power and you see, ah, I felt that, I did not feel that.

And so the question in Lowery’s thesis is if you’re caught in the consensual dream that is cyberspace, how do you pinch yourself? How do you project real world physical power to show you what is real and what is not within that realm? And of course, we’ve talked about Bitcoin’s proof of the proof of work aspect of that as projecting power. And so that’s the connection to Lowery’s thesis. And it’s a metacognitive tactic to help us break out of the hallucination.

Yeah, it’s, that is a, it’s a reconciliation, right? That you’re testing the, because even your, your own perception, and it goes into this in the book, right? That you can’t even really trust the integrity of your perception because it, well, it could be a hallucination, could be a dream. That’s why we say pinch yourself. It’s a physical, like a physical test of the illusion.

And so you see if there’s a physical signal of pain inside of the illusion, and that tells you if it’s real or not. And then that actually becomes a metaphor people use, right? Like, Oh, something great happens. Like, Oh, pinch me.

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Again, that is Coinbits, B-I-T-S dot app slash breedlove. You know, Nick Szabo talks about money as being the trust-minimized asset. And he means something like it is the asset that lets us depend least on interpersonal trust.

So it’s like, you know, in the case of gold, gold was really good at preserving purchasing power over time because nobody knows how or knew how or knows how to counterfeit it, right? Because it could not be counterfeited, it was reliably scarce. Therefore, it was a good store of value across time. That reduces the need to trust someone, right? If they pay you in gold, then you don’t need to trust that they’re good for the money or you don’t have to accept their promise in the future.

It’s like you’ve just taken something that has no counterparty risk, basically. So in a way, gold sort of reduces our reliance on metacognition, that you don’t need to get into this abstract game with other people, this confidence games, if we want to use that term, that it’s like, you know, talk is cheap, put your money where your mouth is kind of thing. Or as they say in hip hop songs, fuck you, pay me.

You know, it’s like once you get paid, I don’t need to know all of these other things about you and play these metacognitive games. I can just depend on the integrity of the monetary instrument. But gold ultimately did fall victim to that abstract power game, right? Because as we talked about yesterday, it lacks portability.

So we put it all in one vault and we have a gold-based derivative on it called the banknote. And that does exist in that abstract sphere where it’s a promise to gold, it’s not the gold itself. So how does Bitcoin reduce our reliance on metacognition in a way, which I don’t know if I’m saying this exactly, how does Bitcoin reduce our exposure to the risk of metacognition, perhaps, in a way that gold failed to? I think you said a great one.

So originally gold, there is a proof of power connected to gold because you had to extract it through a costly mining process. So it’s a real thing and we recognize its realness, but then it’s turned into an abstraction. It’s not portable, like you said, and central banking develops as a way to abstract it.

So Bitcoin can protect, so we have these metacognitive failures relating to our ability to distinguish what is real relating to, there’s different realms in here, but software is a big one for Lowry’s thesis. And so we can’t determine what is real. We’re constantly, when you, your computer, your digital resources, you’re constantly being spammed by potentially malicious incoming control signals, maybe explicit hackers or spam, things like that.

And, but what Bitcoin does is it helps us metacognitively decide between those which are real, which are not by requiring them to be physical in a sense, because they’re provably physically costly. And so the proof of power is proof of realness. And so those that come in with a stamp or receipt or a coin collateralized by that real form of exercised physical power have a realness to them.

And we can, you know, that helps us metacognitively sort in this realm of software and in the realm of cyberspace, which of those control signals are, can be trusted and because they have that realness. Yeah, I think when you’ve got, your brain is a computer, it’s processing power and it has limited processing power. And when you have to give attention to the outside world and constantly try to assess if your trust is being put in the correct place, that steals your ability to use that to question your own assumptions.

You can only run so many programs at once. You can only dedicate so much mental processing power to any one thing. And there are people who do live in the dream, but there are also people living the exact same life who are living in the nightmare.

And they, the difference is that one of them is living in this toxic world where they think that power is being taken from them. The other is living in the dream world where they are the hero of their own story and they realize that power cannot be taken, it can only be given. And so you do have to, you know, Bitcoin takes away the need for inter species trust and it gives you back the processing power to challenge intra, in your own mind, the trust that you have in your own narrative, your perceptions, your beliefs.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s, the other, I mean, the other framing we had on, this is a framing taken from Lowry’s book, right? And he talks about the benefit to cost ratio of attack oftentimes, but you could also say the benefit to cost ratio of betraying trust, right? Like what is the payoff of breaking trust basically? And Bitcoin is something that lowers that, which is another way of saying it makes establishing trust more cost effective. And that’s what enables greater interpersonal cohesion.

But the intrapersonal thing is really interesting too, that something about Bitcoin humbling, maybe it’s just the study of Bitcoin that’s so fucking, I was thinking about that this morning, like how much humility it really gives you because it’s so complex. It teaches you so much, I don’t know, it teaches you, opens your eyes to so much about the world. And like the feeling is like you just become like a more and more infinitesimal part of the whole, like the more, the deeper down the Bitcoin rabbit hole you go.

And with that comes a healthy dose of humility. And that is something like an intrapersonal, you don’t trust yourself so much. I mean, that sounds bad, but it’s actually good in a way that you’re learning that you don’t know it all, right? There’s so much more for you to learn and to see through the eyes of other people.

Another framing, I don’t know if this is exactly correct or not, but the way, when I look at gold, it’s like, again, I use this in the book, not about gold specifically, but I talk about, the book talks a lot about metaphor, as you may have guessed by now. And I talk about metaphor as the bridge between action and abstraction. And so action is that world where you have to physically do things, right? You have to move energy per unit time to do anything basically, even to think, right? You could sit still and think or meditate, which is most people would call that inaction, but you’re doing something, right? Your metabolism is doing something, you’re breathing, you’re thinking, or ideally not thinking if you’re meditating.

That’s the domain of action. And then abstraction is more of that. I mean, it’s again, connected to the physical world because you’re thinking, but it’s this, the domain, the word you used yesterday, right? Simulation.

We’re simulating the possibilities that could occur in physical space. And then we’re like playing with the variables and choosing which path we’re going to take in future action, basically. And so gold as money was something that’s very much rooted in action, right? It’s a physically derived commodity money, which is pretty, it’s proof of real, it’s proof of power, as Lowry would say, the problem with it, as we touched on yesterday, it’s like, it doesn’t move around very fast.

And as your point about Len Alden, like once we got into this world of telecommunications, all of a sudden our abstraction layer is zipping around lightning fast and it way outruns our money. So we have this divorce of action and abstraction in money. And Bitcoin is just like the fusion of those two things.

It’s like we, you know, the digital gold analogy is apt here, right? It’s like it’s, it’s the internet and gold had a baby and its name is Bitcoin. And so we get this thing that, that moves around really fast. And then to take that all the way back, it’s lower, reducing the benefit costs, benefit to cost ratio, which is the same thing as saying, increasing the cost to benefit ratio of attacking, coercing, betraying trust, et cetera.

So it’s a bit, it’s tricky with the words, but it’s, it’s like by creating a more trust minimized money, you actually create the conditions in which interpersonal trust can flourish, which is why I think it’s more useful to say it lowers the cost of establishing trust. Therefore trust becomes more plentiful. Yeah.

No, and that’s Satoshi’s innovation is solving the Byzantine generals problem with how do you coordinate between hostile parties to manage a ledger in a neutral way. But I just, I love the, what you said about like the intrapersonal trust, both of your guys’ discussion of that. It made me think that in the same way that a computer is spammed by malicious incoming trolls to control signals, denial of service attacks, hackers, our mind as well is getting signals, do this, do that.

And how do we decide what we’re going to do? Well, in a fiat world, you know, we bring future consumption into the present moment and we follow those internal prompts that say, buy this, buy that. Bitcoin changes, it protects us from certain prompts. We realize if I save, my savings are actually going to increase in value.

And so those controls, those signals that are telling us to do things that maybe we’d describe as vicious, as vice based, consumptive, Bitcoin perhaps blocks some of those out because it wants us to not enjoy today what we could save for and enjoy in a more fulsome manner tomorrow. All your models are broken. Oh yeah.

Mental models too. All your, when you, you mentioned that quote before we started rolling by Saylor and I used to be a financial advisor and you’d get the sheets from the Motley Fool or Moody’s or whatever. And there’s 35 pages and there’s a hundred different metrics and they’re the same for this company as for this company, but this one’s rated to buy and this one’s rated to sell.

And none of them, none of them coalesce with each other. And what Saylor’s proving now is that one metric matters, which is Bitcoin yield, but also in warfare, it has broken all of our models. You know, it’s not how many soldiers you have, how many missiles, how many megatons that your nuclear bombs can blast out.

It is the power to protect your information and not be affected by the outside power. So yeah, take it, it shatters the world. It shatters everything.

And we’re left to pick up the pieces and rebuild them as we see fit. Yeah. Shatters and simplifies, right? In a way it’s like you don’t, instead of going to financial advisors, I think almost puts them out of a job in a way.

It’s like all you need to do, if it doesn’t make sats, it doesn’t make sense basically. And you don’t need to be so widely diversified and all these different complex investments. You just need to be reliably increasing your sat stash basically.

And then it acts because it’s sound money and it’s a global, it’s acting like a non-counterparty index fund on all global productivity. Like any business that’s successful in the world accretes purchasing power to your Bitcoin. So you can, it’s not to say you wouldn’t invest at all.

Again, like you’ll invest in things that you expect to outperform that, but the bar is really high at this stage in Bitcoin’s monetization. Obviously the bar comes down over time as Bitcoin matures. But yeah, just super interesting how it changes the trust game, it changes the investment game, it breaks all the models, changes your model of yourself, right? It’s pretty radical.

Anything else on that or should we jump to the next? Just the last thing is that when you hear, like when you hear Saylor describe why he invests only in Bitcoin, it’s because he talks about how diversification is indecision. You know, show me, if you say that Bitcoin needs a 2% allocation in your portfolio, show me 49 better ideas, right? And you don’t, in life when you make these huge choices that you plant your flag and you say, this is where I stand, you marry one person, you live in one house, you wear one pair of pants, you know, you make that choice because wealth is created by concentration. It’s preserved by diversification, but you have to make that choice.

And if you don’t make the choice, you’ll never know the truth. You’ll never know where you could have gone if you’re constantly assessing everything and living in anxiety. I’m fearful of everything and therefore I’m going to spread my attention to the entire world, which opens me up to threats from every vector.

Yeah, well said. Yeah, I can’t help but wonder how much diversification is just a fiat symptom. Yeah, well, because, I mean, what has it always been is that there are bubbles that move.

The bubble moves from tulips to real estate, to beanie babies, to collectible cars, to wine, and it’s just the money chasing itself around and trying to find something that outperforms. Right. And it’s not the underlying asset that actually outperforms.

Yeah, but the thing is like sound money, again, I think when we go back to a sound money standard, it has built in diversification because you don’t need exposure to the business directly. You just need to hold savings in a reliably scarce money. Any business that’s successful, that increases the productivity or capital stock of the human race, that purchasing power accretes to sound money with no counterparty risk.

So it’s like, you don’t need to go out and research all these companies and figure out where to, and you could do that with a portion of your wealth. I’m not saying you don’t, but you don’t have to. You can just hold the non-counterparty index fund to all global businesses that is sound money.

Yeah, that’s a brilliant way to say that, that you just brought up. Like, investing in Bitcoin is a bet on humanity. Yeah, exactly.

You’re betting on human ingenuity. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah.

This word has been utterly destroyed by Ethereum’s marketing team, but I think Lowry’s saying something fundamentally different when he describes Bitcoin as a world computer. I’ll just read an excerpt here. He writes, a core hypothesis of this thesis is that Bitcoin is emerging as the base layer operating system and infrastructure of a planetary scale computer and consequently a new form of physically constrained and thermodynamically restricted state space that can be added to the internet.

If this theory is valid, then global adoption of Bitcoin simultaneously represents the global adoption of a planetary scale computer. Now, I mean, I read this, I think I shared this yesterday, but one of the more, it’s a deep way to describe Bitcoin, but I think it’s probably one of the most important as well is that it’s something like we have imported the integrity of the laws of physics into the socioeconomic domain. Bitcoin, by engaging in proof of work energy expenditure to secure the network, it provides the most credible assurance that Bitcoin’s money supply will not change.

It becomes a fixed supply asset by this rooting into physical reality. Whereas most computers, as Lowry says, they’re kind of running the other direction. They’re trying to get more, they want to be able to change state space with less energy expenditure.

So they’re more computationally flexible or agile, I suppose, that Bitcoin’s like the opposite tact. It’s trying to be something that’s very hard to change. You have to expend the most energy to even change the next block, to change it incrementally in terms of its history of transactions.

And if you want to change the whole network, you have to summon 51% of the hash power, which is what makes it hard money. I don’t know, a hard computational layer, as he might say. What are your guys’ thoughts on that, on Bitcoin as a world computer? Yeah, this is the part of Lowry’s theory that I find incredibly interesting, but also difficult to wrap my mind around.

So I’m glad we’re talking about it. As I was reading through this second time, a distinction that I think may be helpful is that within computer theory, there are general purpose state machines and special purpose state machines. The special purpose state machine has the one thing that it’s good at.

It’s special purpose. A computer computes, a special purpose state machine computes one thing. Like an ASIC, right? Yes, yeah.

And so Bitcoin as a world computer is a special purpose state machine. It computes the ledger, essentially. And so it verifies that, it has all of its rules, right? But it’s about creating up to the supply cap, provably costly bits, and then providing for their costly transfer through the updating of the ledger.

That’s what it does. Ethereum as a world computer, we might consider that a general purpose state machine. I don’t know much about it, but they say program smart contracts, other things into the base layer of Ethereum.

So it is supposed to have all this extra functionality. With extra functionality comes the potential for extra security hazard. The state space expands, the tax surface expands.

So what Bitcoin does as a world computer, it has a special purpose of securing the transactions of these provably costly bits. And it does that by, this is the part that’s really mind blowing, reaching out into the real world, using real world energy. The integration, the world, the planetary computer that is Bitcoin integrates the world itself in a way that no other computer does because the energy consumption is part of the computation.

It’s not just agnostic. It doesn’t just need a regular computer. You plug it in and then it runs.

The Bitcoin computer solicits, in a sense, more energy to be thrown at it. The difficulty adjustment then occurs and you’re rewarded if you’ve solved that block, you’ve mined that block. So more energy comes in.

That’s part of the world computer. So there’s a lot there, but that’s kind of where my thinking is going on that. The idea is just very mind blowing for me.

I think when you think about Ethereum is a great counter to Bitcoin because Ethereum came out promoting this idea that, as Grant mentioned, you can program contracts into the base layer. To me, what I think about there is you’ve got a paper airplane and you’re strapping a rocket to it and it’ll go fast until it literally incinerates and burns up. Or it’s like you’re prioritizing, you’re Henry Ford and you’re trying to make the car and your priority is cup holders before locomotion, right? Elon says the greatest failure of an engineer is to optimize the thing that shouldn’t exist.

And I think it’s very understandable why these thought leaders on Bitcoin, Saylor, Lowry, Alden, they have backgrounds in systems engineering. And systems engineering understands that any failure is catastrophic failure. That we’re building this cruise ship and before we choose what color gold or how much gold is going to be in the faucets and what the chandelier looks like, we need to make sure it doesn’t sink.

That is the base layer. I think it’s very hard to conceptualize Bitcoin as a world computer right now because we simply have the unsinkable hole. And as we continue to build layers into the stack onto that, that add that functionality and trace back to the physical constraints of Bitcoin, then we will be able to more easily conceptualize the thing.

But it’s just so easy to think, well, how can it be a world computer? I can’t play Diablo on, right? I can’t send text message or I can’t play video games or do whatever on it. I can’t watch my cat videos. You’ll be able to do that.

We just have to get there. And we’re prioritizing security over speed because speed is fun until you crash. And then you’re done.

You’re a flame. Yeah, yeah. Bitcoin is like the thermodynamic core of the internet or something like that, right? With microchips and you know, we want to make more and more microchips.

We want them to be smaller and smaller and higher performing, right? Again, more computationally flexible. It’s Moore’s law, right? It’s doubling every 18 months or whatever it may be. That’s all well and good.

But what you don’t want doing that is the ownership of purchasing power, the distribution of purchasing power, right? You want that to be allocated in accordance with who has rendered other people the most valuable solutions to their problems, right? The entrepreneurs that have provided goods and services that solve problems better, faster, cheaper. They should earn purchasing power and consensual exchange. And then you don’t really want that to change.

You don’t want that ledger to be rewritten arbitrarily or faster or more flexible. You actually want it to be very difficult to change. That’s what gold was like an analog proxy for effectively.

And then so there’s like the world, I mean if you’re saying a world computer, it’s not like Bitcoin is separately a world computer. It’s almost like an adjunct to the internet that is the world. The internet is a world computer basically.

Bitcoin is the monetary and or cyber security layer for that world computer. And then you see it too. So in the same way that Bitcoin imported the integrity of the laws of physics into the socioeconomic domain, I think it’s also, it can also pass that integrity on.

It can export that integrity further. Like if you look at something like the lightning network, it’s not, you know, it makes certain tradeoffs, right? It’s not as trust minimized as base layer. So it trades off a little bit of trust minimization, but it’s a new application that lets you move Bitcoin transactions with basically, you know, unlimited throughput when you get certain network densities.

So lightning network and other applications, they can inherit integrity from Bitcoin in the same way Bitcoin inherited integrity from the laws of physics through proof of work. And so that, I struggle with this area too, but it seems to me like that’s kind of what he’s saying is like it’s, the internet has already evolved in layers, right? That’s what the internet protocol suite is HTTP, TCP, IP, et cetera, SMTP. Bitcoin is just another one of those layers and it’s not the last, like it might be, it might be like the capstone of the internet, but other things can be built on top of it as well.

And so that’s kind of how I’ve come at this. I don’t know that it’s exactly correct, but we were talking earlier too about how it’s, you know, we use this term like reverse optimizing, like instead of microchips getting smaller and faster, this is like one macro chip that gets bigger. It doesn’t get slower, but it gets harder to change, right? The bigger it gets, like we use the metaphor yesterday or the analogy yesterday of the safe that gets harder to crack, the more money you stuff in it, basically.

And we drew this example earlier, to the U.S. Constitutional Republic, like that’s the way it was founded to be. It was set up to be decentralized, lots of checks and balances, difficult to change the state, right? You don’t want to get one tyrant in there or aspiring tyrant and have him take over the whole thing. That’s what the founding fathers were guarding against in creating a decentralized governance structure.

And so what is that? Those are expensive state changes basically. And what corrupts the Constitutional Republic and makes it trend toward tyranny? The institution with very cheap state changes, the central bank, right? That’s what the Fed is doing every time they print money, is they’re changing the state of that computer that is the distribution of global purchasing power, at least in the savings accounts of $4.5 billion users. They’re just arbitrarily changing it, right? There’s no cost.

So the cost of attack is zero, basically, whatever it costs them to run that SQL database that’s at the Fed. It’s one node. It’s purely centralized.

It’s opaque. There’s seven guys deciding. We don’t know who the shareholders are.

We don’t know what criteria they’re deciding on. We don’t know what the dollar supply is, was, or will be. We don’t know.

It’s the anti-Bitcoin, right? It is a black box, whereas Bitcoin is just this system where nothing can be hidden, basically. That helps me understand a bit more. I like how you describe it as the internet is already a stacked phenomena, and Bitcoin is now the security stack, if Lowry’s thesis is correct.

It could be the monetary stack, just generally, but it could also be the security stack. In that way, one of the things Lowry says in his thesis that kind of now makes sense to me is that the Bitcoin network, as it runs, creates a new state space within the internet where those things are provably costly, and there is proof of realness to those things. It acts upon the internet to create a new state space within it for all of the functions that are operating on the Bitcoin part of the stack.

If we’re to believe Lowry’s thesis, more and more functionality will go over to that part of it, and the internet will re-architect itself around a base layer of provable costliness and realness. Yes. Change is meant to be costly.

I went skydiving, and my skydiving instructor taught me that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. When you make a change, you pull down slightly. You don’t yank.

You don’t want the pendulum to swing too far, because when it does, it gains momentum. Then we see where we are now, where as we see the end of the fiat system dying before our eyes, it is violently swinging left and right. We see that to a certain extent in the United States, but our partners in other countries who feel the effects of our inflationary, deflationary swings even more, they are the ones who are more rapidly seeing the benefits of Bitcoin and adopting even faster.

Lowry does note that it is great that our Constitutional Republic makes state changes expensive. It does keep us from being subject to one man, one woman coming up and becoming a dictator and tyrannical. However, what it exposes us to in this exact instance is that it makes us slow to adopt Bitcoin as a weapon.

Bukele did it quick, and the next guy will do it faster. You can just move. It’s the advantage of centralized decision-making is they have a lot more agility, where we can suffer from gridlock.

Again, it gets into this complexity of, well, strength can be a weakness just depending on context. The same thing that gives our hierarchy longevity is the same thing that detracts from its agility. Again, the Founding Fathers, I think they were just doing the best they could.

We probably do want to optimize for longevity over agility, because if you have a super agile hierarchy, well, that’s the one that’s going to be vulnerable to corruption or some aspiring tyrant taking over. It’s interesting to frame it that way. I think the difficulty adjustment, too, we were going to talk about is like, man, this is one of the most interesting parts of Bitcoin.

This is the thing that I really think makes Bitcoin like an organism, and that it is adapting to us all the time. The harder we try to mine Bitcoin, the more hash power that comes online, the mining puzzle becomes more difficult to solve in a very exact proportion to adhere to the issuance schedule that’s fixed and diminishing towards zero in the year 2140. Inversely, if hash power goes offline, then the mining puzzle becomes less difficult to solve so that it adheres to the same issuance curve.

It’s like this thing that it is adapting to human action all the time. It’s single purpose, tunnel vision, whatever. It doesn’t have different goals.

It has one goal, but man, it adheres to it with basically perfection. The difficulty resets every two weeks, and it doesn’t miss or hasn’t missed at least up until this point. The metaphor that I’ve used for people on that is like the horizon.

Well, there’s the horizon. Go touch the horizon. It’s like, okay, well, when you get to where the horizon is, guess what? It’s not there, and there’s another horizon.

It’s equally as far as it was. The same thing if you back up. If you move away from the horizon, well, the horizon comes towards you.

It’s like Bitcoin is this horizon, or at least the difficulty of mining Bitcoin is this horizon that’s always adapting to how much energy we’re putting into mining Bitcoin basically. That’s really interesting. It’s like all this oscillation in the world, no matter what changes are occurring, innovation, war, hash power coming online, offline, whatever, shit coins, Bitcoin just stays perfectly steady.

I just can’t think of any comparable technology or anything for that matter that does. There’s not even a life form that does that. You describe it well when you call it an organism.

It gives light to the idea that it is in a sense alive. It’s continuously adapting. I think in our first talk about this, I had the idea, the realization that this is live money.

This is the first live money we’ve ever had. Live money continues to live by adapting to its environment by that adjustment mechanism. Every money that we’ve had previously in a very real sense has been matter.

And matter equals MC squared. Matter is energy in a potential state. It is, as Saylor described, it’s dead money.

Frozen energy. Dead money kills. Dead money kills.

Live money gives life. And it gives us it gives us abundance as we move forward. Yeah, it’s wonderful.

There’s this image here that, again, the world computer macrochip thing is difficult to understand. But actually, maybe you could talk us through this image. Yeah.

And I think, well, and also just to give credit, Robert, I think you mentioning this kind of analogy, how these things we have here is the global power, like the light coming off the global power grid, essentially. And then we have a circuit chip here that has its own circuits that run electricity. I believe, if I’m correct, you mentioned this to Jason in one of your discussions, right? And at that point, he glommed onto it and like a mental connection was made for him, right? Yeah.

As I recall it, I mean, I think he had the idea already formed, basically. I think he says in the book, using the global electricity grid as a computer, more or less. I just threw out the word macrochip instead of microchip.

And that was, yeah. Yeah. And I think, so this does help us to conceptualize or to see how Bitcoin is a planetary computer in the sense that the way that it is interacting with the power grid, which is dispersed over the surface of the world and will continually continue to be even more built out as a result of Bitcoin’s utilization of it.

The way that it uses the power grid is somewhat akin to a computer chip circuitry, because through the difficulty adjustment, it directly contributes to the computations that are being made. The difficulty adjustment is like sampling the average hash rate that is a direct result of all of this energy feeding into it from the power grid. So Bitcoin is a planetary computer in that sense, in that the world’s power infrastructure becomes part of the computations that are making and transferring these provably costly bits.

So it’s turning the world in that sense. And I struggle with how metaphorical and how literal it is into a macrochip, as you say, or here the microchip picture. Yeah.

Yeah. You get this structural integrity in cyberspace, right? To build applications that have more longevity or have more resilience or more censorship resistance or whatever the thing may be. They’re more physical and less abstract, basically.

Absolutely. And again, Bitcoin is that bridge between the physical and the abstract. It’s sort of allowing things to cross that bridge, I guess, right? These abstractions can now become a bit more concrete.

And that has certain advantages. You don’t want it for everything, right? It’s like online blackjack probably doesn’t need censorship resistance, but maybe. I still get tripped up here, though, because I thought for the longest, the freedom of speech technology we would use online would have to be built on top of Bitcoin.

But now I had a guy, I had rabble on here the other day talking about Nostr and apparently they’ve solved that without Bitcoin in a way. Nostr is not built on Bitcoin. It’s adjacent to Bitcoin, even though you can still use the lightning network to send zaps on Nostr.

It’s not inheriting that immutability. I’ve heard Lowry talk about Nostr and its relationship to Bitcoin as a security protocol on one of the many interviews that he did. And I’m not entirely familiar with how Nostr works, but I think Lowry’s point would be that zaps, the ability to send a like collateralized by a provably costly bit, is always going to protect from Sybil attacks and impersonation, bot farms.

When you have all these created accounts that can artificially boost a signal, I don’t know how this interacts with Nostr, but potentially if it does have some sort of potential to boost signals based on bots producing a lot of comments or whatever the like structure is like in if you incorporate Bitcoin as a way to make control signals provably costly, it could potentially enhance the security structure of a system like that. So it’s still the inheriting of properties from Bitcoin into other applications still seems to be like the general theme, but I guess I’m just less technically clear on how all that works. Again, I thought Nostr, I didn’t know it’d be called Nostr obviously, but I thought whatever Nostr would, the Nostr that would succeed, I thought that would need to be built on Bitcoin, but it actually isn’t.

They’ve solved it a different way. So anyways, yeah, I mean, it’s not to say that decentralization is difficult to achieve, but not impossible. Basically, it sounds like Nostr is, I don’t know if you’d describe it as fully solved, but it seems to be the best thing we’ve done so far in the communication domain at least.

Yeah, so again, if I go back to, you know, money is a, if we’re using the computer metaphor, money is a database of who owes what favors or who owns what purchasing power, however you want to call it. Bitcoin is the database that can only be updated by people that actually do the work, whereas fiat and shit coins are not. Now there’s a more sophisticated argument about why proof of work shit coins don’t work.

It essentially boils down to centralization versus decentralization. It’s not trust minimized. Like you can have, we can spin up Bitcoin 2.0 right now and copy the rules exactly, but we don’t, we will not have attained, and I wrote a lot about this in the numbers here on Bitcoin, but things like path dependence, first mover advantage, multi-sided network effects.

There’s a reason why we can’t just recreate decentralization in a lab, right? There’s this idiosyncratic sequence of events that has to transpire to become decentralized over time. Like you could even say, well, Bitcoin starts out as centralized in the mind of Satoshi and then it, you know, it goes on and on and on. When it survived something like the block size wars of 2017, like that’s a very credible event that reinforces or even strengthens the decentralization of Bitcoin.

And so you can’t, there’s a lot of external things going on in the world that cement decentralization in a way that you can’t just do abstractly in a lab, basically. It requires network effects, right? It requires. And path dependence, right? This thing was first mover, this thing had network effects, and money’s like a winner take all.

So it’s, you know, there’s a reason we only have one gold. Same basic economic principles, we’re only going to have one digital gold and Bitcoin has already won that race. Yeah.

The philosopher Nick Gland has this idea of hyperstition where speculative ideas about the future can bring the future into the present, can realize. Yeah. And so you have a few maniacs at Bitcoin’s inception that are already willing to see it as money.

And so they bootstrap it into the future. They bring the future into the present. If you don’t have that, you don’t get that path dependence that brings us to the present moment where now it’s big enough to go beyond a handful of maniacs, right? And to survive.

It’s another interesting feedback loop between action and abstraction, kind of going the other direction, right? Yeah. And inflation is another good example of that. Like if you think the currency is going to be depreciated 10% next year, well then you’re going to sell your currency to buy something that’s not.

And that’s actually creating the inflation that you anticipated. Yeah. So inflation is a psychological phenomenon.

I guess monetization is as well, right? Yeah. So yeah. And we talked yesterday about persuasive versus coercive power, but I think, you know, what makes Bitcoin, money is basically always persuasive power.

It’s like, someone’s only going to accept money in exchange for goods and services if they’re persuaded to believe that that money will hold its value into the future or increase in value. But when it can be taken by force, you know, then it can be acquired non-persuasively or coercively. And that’s the problem we’re trying to solve for.

It’s like, how do you create a money that is not vulnerable or incentivizing to coercion basically? Yeah. I’d say on money as persuasive, it’s persuasive among the people who are using it for any specific transaction, but it’s kind of coercive on, we settle on the best money and you can’t just say, I’m going to use this other thing as money. And so you can’t have an abstract power hierarchy that persuades you to use something that’s not good money as good money.

You are coerced by the laws of nature into settling upon something that has the characteristics of hard money. That’s why I’d have a semantic quibble because I would say coercion is reserved for me, human on human, I guess animals too, but any organism with a teleological aim can coerce basically. Fair enough.

I don’t know, animals, do they coerce you or are they just, I don’t know, that’s a whole nother can of worms. But when game theory persuades you to adopt Bitcoin to preserve your purchasing power, I call that persuasion. You could call it self-preservation, I guess is another way to look at it.

But coercion, I would say is more like legal tender laws. You will pay your taxes in this money or else we’re coming after you. So Bitcoin is something that is just more characterized by persuasive power rather than coercive power.

I can see that distinction, yeah. All right, we’re getting a little bit close on to time here. I do have to jump in 15 minutes.

So this is the last one here. All right, this one and one more, this is the last one. Yeah, we have two more, you’re right.

So what do you want? No, we can do it. We just gotta go a little bit quick, but I think we should read these. Okay, Bitcoin is a bi-directional portal linking the real and the virtual.

Another sentence that makes us sound crazy. Lowry writes, quote, Satoshi opened a portal from the physical realm into the digital. Oh, I’m sorry, Lowry’s quoting Saylor here.

Satoshi opened a portal from the physical realm into the digital realm and energy began to flow into cyberspace, bringing life into a formerly dead realm consisting of only shadows and ghosts, bringing conservation of energy and objectivity, truth, time, and consequences into the digital realm, delivering property rights, freedom, and sovereignty. And then Lowry’s explanation in the book goes, Bitcoin appears to be bridging our shared objective physical reality to virtual reality by turning the planet itself into a computer, which can be programmed and plugged back into the internet. This could theoretically allow people to import the physically constraining and thermodynamically restrictive properties of our surrounding physical environment into cyberspace so that we can create real-world materially consequential effects in, from, and through cyberspace.

As engineers like Saylor have observed, proof-of-work protocols like Bitcoin appear to have opened a portal between the physical realm and the digital realm. In so doing, these protocols appear to be importing properties from one reality to the other in a manner that people apparently don’t, didn’t think was possible. And here we have a diagram which harkens back to one he shared earlier in the book that you mentioned, right? About hunters and gatherers.

Yeah. So this is what we might say is how we perceive objective reality when we also have cyberspace as an internal metaphor for how we’re viewing objective reality. So the, the initial point for Lowry is that how we view the objective physical world is always influenced and intermixed with our abstract beliefs about the world.

We talked about that earlier. And so it’s just that idea. If that diagram in the book just replaced this network of computers with the human brain and the earth wouldn’t have the plug in there, it would just be the earth.

So this is then expanding that idea. And we were also just talking about this with Bitcoin as a world computer that maybe some of the characteristics of the objective physical world, the input in the form of energy from across the world in an increasing amount of energy is going to have some impact on the way that cyberspace is structured, making bits provably costly. That’s then going to give us new metaphors and ways that we look out at the world and structure our view of the world.

There’s that bi-directional portal in some sense where the virtual becomes more real and the real takes on some characteristics that we learned or derived from the newly real virtual. Yeah. Well, I mean, the internet today is heavily distorted with censorship and all this stuff.

And like Bitcoin’s definitely purifying of that. So if nothing else, you get an internet that is a more accurate portrayal of actual intersubjective reality versus the views of a few being widely expressed. You kind of get a good democratization of the views of the many, something like that.

And so that, yeah, there’s a feedback there clearly, right? If we see the truth of what other people are thinking and doing, the algorithm is not manipulating what we’re seeing. Now this kind of goes beyond Bitcoin because it gets into Nostra and these other things, but Bitcoin has enabled Nostra even, right? Again, all the developers working on it, the money going into it, like it’s all Bitcoin wealth and Bitcoin developers. So even though it may not be built on Bitcoin per se, Bitcoin still enabled the emergence of Nostra.

Yeah, we get an internet that looks more like the real world, I think. You had to touch on what I was waiting for that word to come out, which is truth. And I think what we see when we are able to constrain things to the physical world is that we will have an internet that is more true.

It is more tied to and grounded in nature and natural law. And it will be, as you rightly, I think, observe a whole lot less noise and a whole lot more signal and therefore far more valuable. And so we think about how much value the internet has brought to the world.

Again, this takes us into that mind blowing Bitcoin fixes slash changes everything. It rewrites everything about the world. A nation has always been, not always, but sometimes been described as a group of people who collectively agree to forget the same thing.

And so you leave truth that could be useful because we think about the fourth turning. The fourth turning always occurs because that fourth generation has forgotten the lessons of the first. And we’ll be able to take those truths further and hopefully indefinitely into the future with us such that we aren’t continuously relearning the same things and suffering the same tragedies.

Yeah. An immutable record of history that can’t be rewritten by the victors of warfare. Yeah.

The only thing I would add to that, Bitcoin as a world computer, as a bi-directional portal will, as you mentioned, Robert, I think you’re dead on, help us verify our intersubjective reality and make sure that it’s not corrupted by what occurs in cyberspace that is not more to reality. It also feeds back into the real world in that we begin to harness stranded energy. We begin to develop sources of clean energy.

New energy technology is developed in response to both of these things. And so innovation occurs in the real world. Infrastructure is built out in relation to Bitcoin mining and the increase of value of that.

That’s a great point. Yeah. It’s an amplifier to human ingenuity in a way.

Obviously, the quicker and more efficiently we can discover truth, well, the quicker we can get back to building stuff, right? If we’re trying to sort through all the bullshit to figure out what’s true, well, that’s inefficient. Basically, that’s economically wasteful. To conclude here, I think Lowry makes this point that we’re trying to describe Bitcoin.

We’re all grasping for metaphors and the right words. It’s pretty amazing, actually. It’s somewhat simple in its value proposition, but also not.

It’s like money that nobody can print. Great. We’re done here.

But then everyone has a different lens and a different Bitcoin descriptive rabbit hole you can dive into. And obviously, Lowry has his own here that we’re exploring. So Lowry writes this.

People seem to be missing vital information about Bitcoin security or jumping to inappropriate conclusions about it because of an arbitrary decision by its inventor to describe it as a peer-to-peer cash system, unquote. So yeah, I think he’s got a quibble with Satoshi calling this thing money, right? And then I go the other direction and say, well, money itself is a metaphor. We talk about economic goods in terms of numbers.

And yeah, I’ve already said it, I think, yesterday, but it’s like either Bitcoin is more than money or money is more than we understand. Basically, it’s like one of two possibilities. And I don’t know.

The verdict is out. Yeah. And there’s just a general point that Lowry makes in here, not necessarily a quibble with Satoshi.

A programmer has to define the objects that they’re working with in a certain way. There’s object-oriented programming. It’s this idea that the emergent phenomena from software are typically defined by the programmer.

In terms of the function that they want that thing to be ascribed on your computer desktop, you’ll have a folder and a trash bin. These are not actual folders, not actual trash bins. That’s the functionality that the programmer wants us to utilize as we interact with it.

And so it’s just such a great recurring point of idea to keep in our mind that the metaphor that we predominantly use to think of Bitcoin was an arbitrary design specification of the founder. It was a very good one. And it does do a lot to define what Bitcoin is.

And if one has a very ample definition of money, maybe it covers anything in any case. But it’s a good reminder to keep an open mind about an emergent technology. Yes.

Yeah. And the way we frame it is important, because as he said in many of his interviews, he needs to reframe it as something other than money to get the attention of people involved in national security strategy, let’s say. Okay.

Anything else or should we go to this closing quote here? Go ahead. Yeah. All right.

Lowry writes, quote, like Neo or anyone else who has spent too much time in cyberspace, the public seems increasingly less capable of remembering there is no spoon. That software is nothing more than a method of communicating abstract ideas, unquote. So Bitcoin makes the spoon more real? It shows us that there is a way to determine that spoons are real or are not real if they’re provably costly.

And Bitcoin does do that. It shows us with certain bytes representing perhaps a spoon, if it’s accompanied by a bit power stamp, we can have some assurance that it’s real. So again, Bitcoin, hopefully its potential is to make the hallucination that is cyberspace more real, something that’s a problem that’s going to become more and more compelling as artificial intelligence begins to exponentially generate new realities in cyberspace.

We need a way to sort through that spam, sort through the dream, wake ourselves up and see which, yeah, remember that there is no spoon and verify what actually is a spoon, what is provably real, I guess. Proof of real. Yeah.

Proof of real. Exactly. When I see this quote, what future we have is what future we will make.

And we have been fed the spoon and we have been spoon fed. And now we have the ability because of the engineer that created the technology that allows us to interpret the spoon however we please. And we can view that.

This goes all the way back to the grounded theory of methodology. Satoshi viewed it as money because that’s the angle that he took. Jason views it as power projection technology because that’s the angle he took.

We have no metaphor for this because we have never seen the nth state of anything. We’ve been constantly iterating throughout human history. And this is the first time that we have gotten to the end.

And now we get to build back and build something new. Yeah. It’s the unfamiliar thing we’re trying to describe in terms of the familiar things.

And that’s why there’s so many different ways to describe Bitcoin. It’s like money was strange enough, but now that we have the perfection of money, it’s even stranger. Guys, thank you so much for doing this.

This has been a blast. It’s so much fun, Robert. Thank you so much.

As many times I’ve read this thesis, this conversation deepened my understanding. I really appreciate that. Of course.

Absolute pleasure. Thank you. It’s been a total honor to talk about this idea that Jason Lowery has, I think, promoted wholeheartedly, full-throatedly as a patriot.

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

You guys have a YouTube channel where you explore this and other books more deeply. You want to plug that? Sure. Yeah.

So we go through Bitcoin books and things that are related to that. It’s called Bitcoin Study Sessions. We post first on X and then on YouTube and Spotify as well.

So that’s how we go at it. This is Grant Reichert. He’s at the whole frame on Twitter.

I’m Lucas Maddy. I’m at Lucas Maddy. Awesome.

We’ll link to everything in the show notes. Thank you guys again. Yeah.

Thanks, Robert. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, click here to find more just like it and here to find our most recent episode.

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