This episode of the Bitcoin Infinity Academy covers Sovereignty Through Mathematics Chapter 3: The Gullible Collective
We discuss how collectivism can distort human judgment and lead to sociopaths thriving in positions of power, the implications of fractional reserve banking, and how Bitcoin disrupts traditional political and economic systems. Join in as we unpack the deep-seated biases in our societal norms, the dangers of collectivist thinking, and the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin as a tool for individual sovereignty. Follow along as we explore the hidden costs of inflation, the slow erosion of freedoms through taxation, and the critical role of free speech in a truly free market.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the Bitcoin InfinityAcademy, brought to you by
Plan B Network and Bit Box.
I'm Kwano and I'm here asalways with my partner in,
victimless crime, Luke de Wolfe.
How are you today, Luke?
I'm Greg Knu.
How are you?
All good.
We're doing another chapter today.
Yes, we are.
Next chapter of Sovereignty ThroughMathematics, the Gullible Collective.
(00:24):
I'm excited about this one.
Definitely some interestingtakes on collectivism.
Absolutely.
If you, if you don't know whatthis is, I mean, go to bitcoin
infinity.com and you can get the book.
You can go to a geyser page and signup for the academy and all of that.
So, but let's just dive into it.
Shall we look?
Let's do it.
I'll start by reading the firstparagraph, the Gullible Collective.
(00:47):
Chapter three of SovereigntyThrough Mathematics, we
humans are biased by nature.
Everything we think we know isdistorted in one way or another
by our cognitive shortcomings.
The human brain has been forced toevolve and adapt to whatever environment
it found itself in over millennia.
Having a brain that is capable ofsetting aside personal aims for
(01:10):
the sake of the collective hasproven to be advantageous for the
evolution of our species as a whole.
is true for every othersocial form of life.
However, letting these parts of our brainsguide our political judgment can lead
to disastrous results in the long run.
Not because of bad intentions, butbecause of the simple fact that a few
(01:30):
individuals will always thrive by playingevery political system for personal gain.
From an evolutionary perspective, an armyof as sayers and martyrs, regardless of
whether we're talking about an army ofhumans or an army of ants or bacteria, has
an advantage over a less disciplined one.
From an individual's evolutionaryperspective, though, it is better to
(01:52):
appear like you're a martyr, but to runand hide when the actual battle happens.
This at least partly explains thehigh percentage of sociopaths in
leadership positions all over the world.
If you can appear to act for thegood of the collective, but dupe
your way into more and more powerbehind people's backs, more likely to
succeed than someone playing a game.
(02:17):
Yes, It's a, a, a bit of a, a strangeparagraph to some maybe, but, uh, I
think this is alluding to incentivesbeing, uh, the driving force for, for
human beings and being super important.
Uh, so, uh, yeah, that's,that's what the paragraph means.
Uh, uh, why the sociopaths arewhere they are is because it's
(02:39):
beneficial for them to, to be there.
Uh, political leaders in particular have ahigh percentage of sociopaths among them.
Yeah, I think the distinction betweenthe individual and the collective is
a theme that we explore a lot, thatyou explore in your writings and that
we have explored in the inverse clownworld and in many of our conversations.
(03:04):
So I think this is oneof those cases where.
People might have the wrong idea.
I think about collectivism in general.
It's currently the, it's the thing thatin the western world, you're supposed to
be a little collectivist somehow, right?
We're all in this together.
We live in a society.
(03:24):
This is just the way things are.
We live in these nice welfare statesthat provide for people, but there's
a, there's a dark underside, right?
Exactly.
And, uh, you know, there's nothingwrong with human beings grouping
together and doing things together.
The, the, the wrongness of it comes, uh.
When, whenever there's, uh, violence orthreats thereof involved, so we are primed
(03:51):
to, to cooperate and help one another.
It's just that, uh, some peoplethink it's okay to do that at the
expense of a third person or ex atthe expense of another human being.
And, uh, uh, as we will learn throughthese books, that that is never the case.
The, the, the free market and, andconsensual interactions are way, way more
(04:11):
powerful than people, think, uh, and, andcollectivism and, and market interventions
are, are way worse than people think.
I definitely found it interestinghere, getting to the evolutionary
side of this also, because it'salso interesting to look at.
Reasons that explainindividual's behavior, right?
(04:33):
Like we talked about a littlebit in the last episode, the,
the financial atheism chapter.
well, maybe, maybe I'm drawinga different conclusion here, but
there is a, there is an evolutionaryexplanation to us as a species.
Basically, if you believe thescientific consensus that such as it
is, and evolutionary behaviors forwhat individuals do I, I, I think it
(04:58):
works perfectly well because thereare things hardwired in our brains
that get us to lean towards doingcertain things and different brain
configurations result in differentindividuals who behave differently.
So I find it really interestingto dig into these reasons.
(05:23):
For why people do certain things,it certainly helps to build empathy.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this is on evolutionary.
This is, this goes super deepand it's straight out of, uh, I
don't believe you need to believeanything to, uh, to, to buy this.
Uh, um, we are our bodies andour, and our brains are just a
(05:43):
collection of cells, cells who allact in their own self best interest.
So they have a, they do what they dobecause they're primed for survival.
The, the cells that behaved in acertain way, had a higher likelihood of
surviving that than cells that didn't.
So that's at the core of our verybeing and we're just a, a great hive
(06:04):
of, of cell cellular organisms that,found out over time that cooperating
was better than fighting one another.
That's what we are.
what we do as a collective, uh,may be good for, uh, the human
being, but not necessarily forthe cells in the human being.
So if we get a tattoo, for instance,to, to, uh, attract a woman, uh, that
(06:27):
might be good for the collection ofcells, but not maybe for the individual
cells in the arm that got the tattoo.
Like there's, you can, you cantake this to, to absurd levels.
Uh, it's just, uh, to distinctbetween, uh, between the, the what's
good for the individual, uh, what'sgood for the collective is not always
necessarily good for the individual.
(06:48):
That's what I'm trying to saywith the paragraph, I think.
And, uh, maybe let's, let's continueand to explore this a bit further
Sure.
onto the next one.
Story of banking and fiat currencyis a story about collective madness.
Historically, rulers have trickedpeople into killing each other
through the promise of an afterlife.
I. Central banking, the rulersof the world wars could trick
(07:12):
people into building armies forthem by printing more money.
This is seldom mentioned in historyclasses because it still goes on today.
On a massive scale, inflation might nolonger be paying tank factory workers,
but it is the main mechanism thatfunnels wealth into the pockets of the
super rich and away from everyone else.
(07:33):
Inflation is the mechanism thathinders us from transporting the
value of our labor through time.
It makes us avoid real long-term thinking.
We hardly ever consider this aproblem because none of us has ever
experienced an alternative to it.
Yeah, it's, this is the core ofthe problem that Bitcoin solves.
(07:54):
Many people think inflation is anatural thing that just happens, but
at the end of the day, it's alwaysbecause someone is printing more
money, giving it out as debt to people.
This has been going on for centuries.
Uh, humans have never been able toresist enriching themselves at the
expense of others by, by, uh, printingmore money if they've had that power.
(08:17):
And it still goes on today.
and, uh, the, the, what, what Idon't believe is like that there's
a cabal of, of, uh, evil mastermindslike Dr. Evil, um, types in a layer
somewhere is like figuring out thisway of mass control over people.
It's just the incentives are there.
(08:37):
Short term incentivesto make people do stuff.
So even uh, Nixon in 71 whenhe went off the gold standard,
I think that was a very.
High time preference decision.
Like he didn't think of theconsequences because the consequences
weren't of consequence to him.
He only had to think about thenext couple of years and winning
(08:59):
the next ele election and stuff.
So, so high time preference and, andus, not us having urges that we can't
control, is, is even behind the moneybeing corrupt, which leads to even
more high time preference decisionsand even more stuff we can't control.
So, high time preference inthis sense is the enemy here.
(09:23):
Totally agree, and I think it'sgreat that you got into a couple
of topics here in this paragraph.
I think the, the point thatyou referenced in terms of the.
Ball.
This is a set of ideas that getsexplored quite a bit more in, for
example, the creature from Jekyll Island.
I forget the author's name off myhead, but that's an easy one to find.
(09:45):
I really enjoy that read becauseit's a very good history of inflation
and money and, and all this.
But it, it's definitely, got somecontroversial elements, put it that way.
and, and I think even through that onetoo, the Nixon example, it's funny to
take any kind of devil's advocate on Nixontaking the US off the gold standard in 71,
(10:11):
but the one argument I've heard that holdsa little bit of water here on why not to
blame Nixon specifically is more that the.
Countries were already operating as ifthey weren't on a gold standard basically.
And if it hadn't have been Nixon,it would've been the next guy.
Instead of Nixon in 71, it would'vebeen Carter in 79 or whatever.
(10:35):
I don't know.
But it's, it's, it's just one ofthose things where that un, unless you
absolutely are drained away from beingable to do the high time preference
thing, it's going to happen eventually.
Something like that.
Someone is going to have toomuch temptation to do the thing.
(10:57):
Uh, I don't know.
Is, is that in line with whatyou were getting at here?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, uh, it's, uh, it's calledHanlon's Racer, and it's a bit
like Gresham's racer, uh, uh, it's,never attribute to malice that that
can be explained by stupidity, uh,uh, is one of my favorite razors.
Uh, and this one in particular is, it'stotally true, like the, the reason,
(11:19):
One reason Nixon went off the goldstandard is to keep funding the Vietnam
War, which was, uh, costing a lot.
But like, uh, running up to that, justas you say, there had been a lot of
fractional reserve going on already.
So, so they didn't have backing forall the gold receipts, AKA dollar bills
that they had given out to people.
(11:40):
So they were printing money before,before they let go of the gold standard.
Letting go of the gold standard wasa way of, of making that work short
term, but it's like it was a sacredprinciple that had to be sacrificed on
this altar because of other high timepreference decisions that came before.
And it's just.
(12:01):
tragic is the tragedy ofthe commons, if you will.
Like it's, uh, unfortunatethat that happened.
Then again, if that had not happened, wemight not have had Bitcoin, so we would
still be on a gold standard with, uh,um, semi fake fiat receipts for gold.
Uh, I kind of prefer a world whereBitcoin exists because it's, uh,
(12:22):
way, way, way better and more hopefulthan gold ever could dream of being.
So, so yeah, we are where we are.
Uh, history is what it is, and,uh, all we can do is like think of
the fu future and move forward andlearn, learn by studying the past.
Yeah.
And to tie this back, I think tothe central point, just to emphasize
(12:43):
this a little bit, is the, where yousay it is about collective madness.
Yeah.
The thing here is I. We have socialstructures that empower individuals
to make decisions for the collective.
I think that's the central point here,is that the individuals are giving up
(13:04):
their freedom, their sovereignty to otherindividuals who have their own motives.
And having money in control ofthat is really the, the problem.
As illustrated by examplesgiven such as 1971.
Yeah.
And uh, people in power who.
(13:26):
Got into those positions, not becauseof merit, but because of, uh, theft
and, uh, other like, uh, maliciousmechanisms, uh, that put them in power.
Now, the, the, uh, so this is the thing,whenever, whenever you say that you
want the government to do anything orthat you think that there should be
(13:48):
a law forbidding this, you are alsosaying that you are okay with theft
and you are okay with one human beingdeciding what's best for another, you,
you are, as you are okaying peopleto put themselves on a pedestal.
And I think people ingeneral underestimate how
(14:10):
dangerous that notion is.
Like why is, why, whypeople aren't libertarian?
Like it's, It's super dangerous tosay that you, you, you believe that
people should have, uh, that there,that there should be positions of
power that are not the result of merit.
yeah.
I'm stumbling on the words here,but, uh, you get the point.
(14:34):
I think look.
I do and, uh, continue onthese points as we continue.
So, let's go on.
Money is still vastly misunderstood by thelion's share of the world's population.
In most parts of the world,banks do something called
fractional reserve lending.
(14:54):
This means that they lend out moneythat they don't have conjuring up
new money out of thin air and handingit out to their customers as loans.
Loans that have to be paid back interest.
Interest that can't be paid backwith thin air, but has to be
paid with so-called real money.
Real money of which there isn't enougharound to pay back all the loans so
(15:19):
that a constant need for new creditbecomes a crucial part of the entire
system to mention central banks, whichdo the same and worse for governments,
so used to it by now that every countryis expected to have a national debt.
All but a handful of ridiculouslyrich ones do debts are also
(15:39):
loans that have to be paid backwith interest backed by nothing.
Think about that.
Your taxes are payingsomeone else's interest.
Your tax money is not payingfor your grandmother's bypass
operation, paying interest bank.
Yeah, we started to get into someof the ideas from this paragraph
(16:01):
here, but uh, we're going deeper.
Yes.
Uh, there was a, uh, back when I firstgot interested in money, uh, and how
money functions at all, there was a shortYouTube series called Money as Debt.
Uh, I can highly recommend and, and itexplains fractional reserve banking and
how it started, like, so, so there wasa, some guy in the city who had a vault
(16:26):
or is the equivalent of a vault wherehe could keep people's, Valuable goods.
And he gave out receipts formostly gold because that's what,
uh, people use to store in vaults.
So, so here's a receipt forthis and that much gold.
Uh, and pretty soon the, that guyrealized that he could print out more
(16:47):
receipts than he had gold in his vaults,because the only time he would need
all the gold is if everyone, uh, triedto withdraw the, their gold at the
same time, also known as a bank run.
That's how the term bank run was born,because when people started to figure
out that the, the guy was counterfeitingreceipts, they, they re uh, responded by,
(17:08):
by all withdrawing their gold at the sametime, which is when the bank went bankrupt
and the banker was exposed as the fraud.
He was until the invention of the centralbank, which it was like invented to
prevent the runs But by bailing outthe bank that was supposed to, uh,
go bankrupt, uh, they, they avoideda short term problem by postponing
(17:33):
it and snowballing it into way biggerproblem way later down the line.
And that's what we're living in now.
We're living in this per perpetualdebt cycle that just grows and grows
and grows as you have to pay interestup on interest, up on interest.
All, all the field currencies turn intoa istic curve, hyper inflating things.
Sooner or later, inflation's justhyperinflation in, in slow motion.
(17:55):
So yeah, this is what this paragraphis about and what my books are about.
Definitely.
And I think the core concepthere that everyone getting into
Bitcoin has to gr at some pointis mechanism that inflation has.
(18:15):
Why fractional reserve banking justdoesn't work and requires that inflation.
I, I think it's really wellexplained, uh, in this paragraph here.
Money gets loaned out at aninterest rate and must be paid back.
It, it's, it's a game of musicalchairs, something like that.
Unless more, yeah, unless more creditis getting added into the system,
(18:39):
which is now the current system we'rein and central banks to backstop
banks from, from fractional reserve.
There, there are good.
Explanations of why fractional reservebanking, particularly, I think Lynn
Alden makes this argument that fractionalreserve banking is not all bad.
It's just the amount of it, and itdoesn't necessarily even need to, uh,
(19:03):
hit the money supply something like this.
I don't, I don't know enough aboutthis specific thing to agree or not.
I say maybe keep it simple and, and justdon't have that, uh, but not, but having
a lender of last resort is the thingthat, that is a lender of last resort that
is required under a threat of violence.
(19:27):
Uh, definitely makes the system worse.
That's, uh, my take on it anyway.
it is also important to stressthat, fractional reserve is possible
on Bitcoin, but much harder topull off since everyone can audit
everything at, at any point in time.
So, for instance, uh, a custodialwallet, like Wallet of Satoshi for
(19:48):
instance, could theoretically dofractional reserve banking already, as
long as, uh, not everyone was takingout all the Bitcoin at the same time.
They could pretend to have moreBitcoin than they actually have
because they only need that much incirculation at any point in time.
But it's, it, it's the, the,they have checks on it, like
they can't do too much of it.
Uh, with fiat you can literallydo it forever, uh, until people
(20:12):
lose faith in the currency and,and you go into civil unrest.
So, and which is what all fiats, allfiat currencies are on that trajectory.
They.
They've all died the same way.
They, they get printed intooblivion and lose all their value.
And it's, it's, it's tragic,uh, that, that it goes on.
And hopefully now Bitcoin isthe remedy to all of that.
(20:34):
Yeah, hopefully completely agree.
And, and you know, is isn't it reallythe case that I, I've tried to think
through this problem multiple times thatyou can't really give someone a loan in
Bitcoin terms and get interest back inBitcoin terms without someone losing.
(20:56):
Or maybe to extend that slightly, becauseI think we also talk about how it's not
a zero sum game, but whoever is doingthe, uh, whoever is taking the loan
needs to get more value back than theamount of the interest rate basically,
(21:16):
for it to make sense in Bitcoin terms.
When we're denominating in fiat, it'san entirely different matter, but.
When it's in Bitcoin terms, in orderfor any kind of lending and interest
rate to work, someone has to be doingsomething with that investment, right?
Yeah.
And it's pretty hard toget above that threshold.
(21:38):
Uh, so the, but the, the oppositeis also true, like in fiat.
Someone always loses like youcannot have, uh, inflation without
there being a looser somewhere.
Like it's impossible.
Uh, and this is true for every, uh, assoon as there's market interventionism
(21:59):
or market interventions, someoneloses like someone is making a
trade they wouldn't have made ifthat intervention wasn't there.
So, so it's always atthe expense of someone.
All inflation is theft.
All taxes are theft, allinterventions are theft.
There's no way around this.
(22:20):
There's always a looser when,when any of these things are,
are prevalent in society.
The the only way for the market to bethe win-win mechanism that it is, is
for there to be no interventionism.
Like, uh, if, if I exchange something withyou on a black market, so-called black
market voluntarily with consent and nothird parties involved, then we both win.
(22:46):
Or at least we perceive we both win.
Whenever there's any intervention,including inflation, someone
loses the, the guy that got that,uh, dollar bill at some point.
Is being, there's a breach of contractwhenever a single new dollar bill
is put into existence because itdilutes the value of that, that
(23:07):
dollar that the first guy had.
Like, there, there's no way around this.
And this might be whereI disagree with Lynn.
I don't know her exact position, soI'm not gonna pick this battle here.
but, uh, I'm very Roth guardianin my thinking around this, that
it cannot be done without, uh,a winner and a looser scenario.
Like, uh, it's fiduciarymedia, uh, fractional reserve.
(23:31):
the only, uh, time Icould think It's okay.
It's as if.
Everyone involved was aware of thefractional reserve banking going on,
which would defeat the very purposeof fractional the reserve banking.
So that cannot happen.
It is fraud.
Like that's what it is.
Like why would anyone agree to havingless back than they put into the bank?
(23:52):
That's a very bad investment.
If you, if you put something away in anaccount or, or, or invest in something,
you want a return on your investment.
You don't want less purchasingpower when you get the thing back.
Money is not a producergood nor a consumer good.
It's a good sue engineer is meaningthat it's only reason for existence
(24:13):
is being a medium exchange.
And if that loses value, inother words, if it's a bad
medium exchange over time, then.
some theft is going on somewhere.
There's no way around this.
So Bitcoin is the first and only probablythe last, instance where, where money
functions in a way where this is notpossible, uh, which makes it completely
(24:35):
different from everything else.
Much bigger deal than people think it is.
Another funny idea along theselines that I've heard is that
custodians, because to a certainextent, banks are fancy custodians
that just do a ton of extra stuff.
Basically with the money deposited,uh, they'll turn into paid custodians.
(24:59):
In other words, you pay someone tohold your Bitcoin for you basically.
Which is an interesting thought,but it might work for some people.
In other words, you don't trustyourself to hold your own keys 100%.
So you pay someone else to takethe risk for you essentially.
(25:21):
And in the absence of other ways of makingmoney off of that service, basically the
custodian is just going to charge a fee.
And we actually see that these daysalready with, with, uh, multisig
solutions, like, uh, the, there's a chargeto use one of the other keys that is
being held by someone else, for example.
So maybe it's not necessarily the,the case of someone holds your
(25:45):
Bitcoin as in the UT XOs with allkeys, but these multisig solutions,
it's, it's sort of a model like that.
I think it's aninteresting one, basically.
No.
And there's nothing wrongwith custodians in general.
Like if you want to have someonecustody your stuff, then that's fine.
The problem is when it's, when there'sfraud involved and, and the concept
(26:07):
of a bank just using the money youput in your account to invest in
other stuff and lend out that money.
No, not to invest, but to lendout that money to other people to
make a return on the investment.
And, you know, one interestrate paying for the other.
Uh, it's not inherently wrong aslong as, uh, both par it's completely
(26:28):
transparent and both parties are awareof all the risks with a contract because
there's no risk free lending like the.
It doesn't work.
You, you don't automatically get interestwithout there being a risk involved.
You, you, you, you should be aware thatwhenever you have an interest on something
paid by someone, it's because someoneelse is taking a risk with your money.
(26:50):
uh, otherwise there's fraud.
Like I, uh, I don't think I canexplain it better than that.
The only, uh, thing I'll add tothis is basically we've spent longer
than I anticipated we would on thissection, but it's so important.
And also it's just thisis working so great.
I'm, I'm really, I'm reallyenjoying digging into the, the
(27:11):
specifics of these things so much.
Uh, but there are, there are otherinteresting things in this chapter.
This wasn't even the pointof this chapter, basically.
So, shall we continue
Yes, this is a show of tangents.
show of tangents?
Yes.
Is that a, is that a, well,let's put that aside for
(27:31):
Yeah, you were thinking Proof of work.
Proof of results show tangents.
Right.
Something like that.
Yes.
Very good.
Yeah, let's get on with it.
Good stuff.
Alright.
Onto the next one.
When the ideas at theCatholic Church ruled Europe.
People who didn't believe in Godwere few and very seldom outspoken.
(27:55):
had good reason for this.
Since believing God was virtuallymandatory throughout society since
1971, when famously dishonest AmericanPresident Richard Nixon cut the last
string that tied the US dollar to gold.
Our conception of what the worldeconomy is and ought to be has been
skewed by an utterly corrupt system.
(28:17):
We are led to believe that we're allsupposed to work longer and longer
days in order to spend more and moremoney bury ourselves in more and more
debt to keep the machine running.
duped into thinking that buying anew car every other year is somehow
good for the environment, and thatbringing a cotton bag to the grocery
store will somehow save the planet.
(28:38):
Stores manipulate us all the timethrough advertising and product
placement, but we are led tobelieve that if we can be climate
smart, we are behaving responsibly.
Somehow gross domestic product issupposed to increase indefinitely while
politicians will save us from ourselves.
Carbon taxes, fortunately for us,and unfortunately for them, there
(29:01):
now exists a way for unbelieversof this narrative to opt out.
Life finds a way JeffGoldblum once so famously put.
I would say that this paragraphis the TLDR of, uh, the inverse
of Clown World, wouldn't you?
Very much so.
It's, um, it's about how, uh.
(29:24):
Yeah, the effects we talked about afterthe last paragraph with, you know,
ever increasing exponentially worseproblems through ever increasing interest
rates, leads to more and more clownishpolitical decisions and narratives.
And we, we end up in this societywhere we don't take any responsibility.
We just want to virtue signal that wedo, and we end up with clown world.
(29:46):
Um, that, that's it.
Totally agree.
And, uh, I think what's funny hereis we, we basically said most of
what is in this paragraph earlierin our discussion here, not every
single detail, but the rust of it.
And, you know, just the funnylittle details in the middle here.
Things, things like agross domestic product.
(30:08):
I, I really, really, like having figuredout that gross domestic product is just
the thing that has to keep going up.
That a fixed denominatorwould turn into deflation
Gross.
Gross is such, uh, such agood, uh, word to describe it.
It is gross,
Yes.
(30:29):
vulgar, even.
Uh, and not a numberto be taken seriously.
It does not measure progress thatyou ca you can't measure progress
because value is subjective.
Like the, this, it's all madeup to rationalize stateism.
all of these figures are likethe official inflation, inflation
numbers, the basket of goods.
(30:50):
It's all bullshit.
Don't fall for it.
No, don't fall for it.
As you say, we, we somewhat dig into alot of this stuff in much more detail
in future chapters, so I think, I thinkfor now, maybe let's, let's get to the
main point of this one onto the next one.
Collectivism has ruined many societies.
(31:13):
Those of us fortunate enough to live inliberal democracies tend to forget that
even democracy is an involuntary system.
It's often referred to as theworst form of government, except
all others that have been tried.
But the system itself isvery rarely criticized.
We are so used to being governedthat not having a leader seems
(31:34):
preposterous to most of us.
Still.
We pay our taxes and an enormous cutof the fruit of our labor goes to a
third party via inflation, taxationof every good and service imaginable.
Institutions once in place.
Always favor their own survival justas much as any other living thing does.
(31:56):
People employed in the public sectorare unlikely to vote against policies
that threaten their livelihood.
This is a bigger problem than werealize because it's subtle and takes
a long time, but every democracyis headed in the same direction,
A bigger state, more complicatedsystem, and fewer individual freedoms.
(32:17):
Long term.
It seems that all of our systems tendto favor those who know how to play
that system and not those who contributethe most value to their fellow man.
Proponents of socialist policiesoften claim that failed socialist
states weren't really socialists.
Proponents of socialist policiesoften claim that failed socialist
states weren't really socialist, orthat that wasn't really socialism.
(32:41):
What most people fail to realize isthat we've never tried real capitalism.
Since we've always used more orless inflationary currencies,
this might very well be the mostskewed narrative of our era.
We're all experiencing real, albeitdisguised socialism every single day.
(33:01):
True free market capitalism is what wehaven't experienced yet, and it might
turn out to be a very different thing.
What we're told to believe that itis by almost all mainstream media.
Yes, I.
Yeah, a crucial point and, uh, uh, Ithink a thing that so many people miss.
(33:24):
I hear, uh, people blaming the free marketfor this and that all the time, uh, which
is to, to me, it's, it's oxymoronic evento blame the free market for anything
because how, how would you come to aconsensus on what constitutes a problem?
(33:46):
If not on the free market of ideas.
Like everything, uh, all the free marketis, is people doing things, uh, of their
own volition, like, uh, with consent.
Like, uh, they want to do the thing.
They, everyone wants the free market.
There is no one thatdoesn't want a free market.
(34:07):
If, if I've never heard anyone say,oh, how I wish that some third party
came in here and made my life harderand, and stopped me from doing
what I'm trying to do right now.
which is what you want.
If you don't want the freemarket to decide things.
And, and this is so misunderstood.
Like the free market isn'ta thing, it's a process.
(34:29):
It's the process of people doingthings because they want to,
not because they're forced to.
A funny thing here also is thatthese things are so subtle,
it's easy to ignore them, right?
You, you make the point here thatall of this stuff is just slow.
That's why it creeps up on us.
It's the frog getting boiled in the pot,
Yeah.
(34:49):
Slippery slope.
Every political decisionis a slippery slope.
and I, I think it's just becausenone of this stuff is that visible.
We don't, we don't worry aboutit basically, but it, it does
keep getting worse and worseand make life harder and harder.
I saw a wheat.
That no one wants to workanymore, as being said in
(35:13):
newspapers since the 19 hundreds.
And I just think, I just think that'sreally funny because maybe, okay,
it's a comment on attitudes thatthat which has been the norm for a
long time is no longer fashionable.
Like I think if people have achoice not to be coal miners, they
might choose not to be coal miners.
(35:35):
But the thing there too is thatit's a combination of advancing
technological progress as aindividuals aren't necessarily
wanting to do backbreaking labor.
If they can have a robot do itfor them, instead program a robot
to do the thing, for example.
Or it's that you get less andless for your labor all the time.
(36:01):
'cause of inflation and becauseof so much getting siphoned
away to this in that place.
And I just think that it's so hardto convince that this is a problem.
And really it takes getting this,it takes getting what the problem is
(36:22):
with inflation, what the problem iswith collective is, and to eventually
get to what the solutions are.
And it's not that it's a badthing on a micro level that
some people are isolated from.
It's good that humanity is progressingin such a way that this isn't something
(36:44):
on everyone's minds, but it is It isthe case that many people are affected
by inflation to such an extent thatthey should be thinking about it, but
it's so hidden that they don't know.
That's the problem.
People direct their energy towards,yeah, let's fix the climate, or
(37:05):
let's blame these millionaires.
Something within the system issupposed to solve the problem
for them when it's the system.
That problem.
that's the tragedy and that's what I hopewe can start to solve a little bit more.
No, uh, Fiat ruins everythingas Jimmy Song said, like, uh.
(37:26):
All prices ought to go down forever andeverything ought to be cheaper forever.
It's the simple questions like what weask in clown world, like if you practice
doing something, do you usually getbetter or worse at doing that thing?
Well, you usually get better.
So why aren't all pricesgoing down forever?
And if you use Bitcoin, they are, ifyou see the world through a Bitcoin
(37:47):
lens, all prices are going down forever.
Which is by the way, what, whatsaves people like the, from all
the, all the fears about the jobs.
Oh, they took our jobs from AIand stuff and all in industrial
revolutions have had these fears.
And technological pro,uh, progress does not.
(38:08):
Make people more poor.
They make people more wealthy.
The problem is like a, a minimumwage law, for instance, you can
deductively reason that aa axiomaticthinking yourself into the position
that minimum wage laws always lead toa worse outcome than if they weren't
there on a, a completely free market.
(38:29):
There cannot be unemployment, uh, becausethere's always someone willing to pay
something, to have something done.
Like, and, and in a world whereall prices go down, this is
not a problem for everyone.
Like the the money, it's the money.
Stupid.
Like if, if the money was working, wewouldn't need any of the other stuff.
(38:50):
And the, the, the whole notion thatwe need someone to fix a problem
is that's, that is the problem.
I couldn't agree more.
And uh, it's funny, I think wherewe're going next hits on some other
political things here, so I think let's
It's a very political chapter, isn't it?
It is, it is onto the next one.
(39:16):
The validity of the classic right leftscale describing political viewpoints
has been debated a lot lately.
And alternative scales like GalTan, the one with an additional
y axis describing more or lessauthoritarian tendencies are popping
up in various contexts around the web.
After the birth of Bitcoin,there's a new way to see this.
(39:40):
Imagine an Orgo zero point and avector pointing to the left of that.
All politics are arguably onthe left because all policies
need to be funded by taxes.
Taxation can be viewed, theft,taxation can be viewed as theft
because at its core, it's involuntary.
(40:02):
If a person refuses to pay his taxes,there is a threat of violence lurking
in the background to mention inflation.
Which Milton Friedman so elegantlydescribed as taxation without legislation.
What you do with a portion of yourwealth that you have in Bitcoin
is another matter altogether.
(40:22):
If you take sufficient precautionaryprivacy measures and you know what
you're doing, your business inBitcoin is beyond politics altogether.
With the introduction of theLightning Network and other privacy
improving features, it is nowimpossible for any third party to
confiscate your money or even knowthat you have it for that matter.
This changes the politicallandscape of every nation on Earth.
(40:45):
Bitcoin is much less confiscatedthan gold and other scarce assets,
which makes it a much better toolfor hedging against nation states.
In this sense, Bitcoin obsoletes borders.
You can cross any border on earth withany amount of Bitcoin in your head.
Think about that.
(41:05):
Your Bitcoin exists in everycountry simultaneously.
Any imposed limit on how muchmoney you can carry from one
nation to the other is now madeobsolete by beautiful mathematics.
Bitcoin is sometimes referredto as a virtual currency.
This is a very inaccurate description.
Bitcoin is just mathematics,and mathematics is just about
(41:27):
the most real thing there is.
There's nothing virtual about it.
Counterintuitive to some real nonetheless.
Yeah.
To me this is like, uh.
These things are at the coreof what Bitcoin is to me.
Like, um, a complete reimagination of, uh,what money is and what money ought to be.
(41:54):
Bitcoin has sort of pointed out toeveryone in the world that money doesn't
need to be anything but information.
the Satoshis exist in every countryat once, but the ability to move
them exists within the owner's head.
'cause you don't really own your Bitcoin.
You just find the probability thatsomeone else knows the same key to
be so low, so that you practicallyo own them in, in a sense, because
(42:17):
you are the one that knows the key.
no, and it's gonna change everything.
It, it changes how we interact.
It changes the validity ofthe nation state as a concept.
I think because like, the,the borders cannot stop this.
Like, uh, guns cannot stop this.
I mean, and I think this is all for good.
(42:38):
I think this is all better.
And there, there are a couple ofthings here about Bitcoin and privacy.
It's, uh, everything in this paragraph isonly true if, if about non KYC Bitcoin.
So if you buy them, not on an exchange,but if you accept them for your goods
and services and such, One of thetechnicalities everyone should know about
on, on Chain Bitcoin that aren't, youknow, coin joined or anything, is that,
(43:02):
uh, the, the, the person you buy them fromknows when you spend them, he knows when
that Bitcoin moves to another address.
You can, you can look that up.
Not everyone is aware of that.
The, the, the Lightning netNetwork makes privacy better.
Other things do too.
And the more time that passes,the more the Bitcoins and
(43:23):
their owners get mixed up.
And this is a good thing.
It makes, uh, it makes it harder forpeople who want to confiscate them to,
to, to figure out what's really going on.
Yeah, it's, the paragraph somewhatstarts with another point about politics.
Basically the, the taxationwithout legislation point, I
think is a good sum up to that.
(43:45):
There's a couple ofinteresting things here.
One, first of all, the, the Altan scale.
I, I think the political compasswould be more well known here, at
least in the English speaking world.
I, I actually didn't know what the GalTan Scale was, and when I looked it
up, it has articles on both Finnishand Swedish Wikipedia, so, so I was
(44:07):
able to read it, but it looks likeit's only used in those countries.
So it's a bit of a, a swish version of
Yeah, I think it's slightly different,but it pretty much is this political
compass idea where, where it
More or less authoritarian.
Yeah.
You've all seen it, I guess.
Anyway, I.
And, but I think your, I think yourportrayal that it is from an origin
(44:28):
point and all politics is left andupward basically, something like that.
It's, uh, yeah, it's an interesting onebecause it, it certainly does capture
the essence that all of the thingsthat governments do, that politics do
has to be funded by something and thatfunding has to come from somewhere.
I think this opens up interestingthought experiments that I don't
(44:48):
want to dive into too deeply rightnow, but for example, we have had
conversations about free cities, right?
Like, uh, I, I think that's aconcept that tries to, tries to get
this done a little bit differently.
Like, what if instead of taxes,you're paying a fee, and then what's
(45:09):
the difference between the two?
Right?
If you live in a free city andyou stop paying the fee, I. Are
they allowed to kick you out?
Do you really own what youhave there, your property?
Something like that.
It's interesting stuff.
It's just more like, I think thepoint to get across is all things
need to be paid for somehow, and byobfuscating where that comes from,
(45:35):
where many of the problems lie.
Is it, is it voluntary or not?
It's very simple question, likethe fee for the private city.
You pay that voluntarily when you enterthe city and when you buy a property
in it, like, uh, the taxes not so much.
You pay them because there's a gunthrough your, to your head, and
if you can avoid them, they do.
(45:56):
I, I don't know any person whowants to pay that he should pay
or, or she should pay more taxes.
Everyone wants fewer taxes or lesstaxes for themselves, but that others
should pay more for some odd reason.
Well, there is also, I think there'sa funny that says something like, oh,
(46:19):
I don't mind paying so much taxes.
I wouldn't even mind if I paid more taxes.
This is a very privileged group, Ithink, because the, they think that
the answer to society's problemsis, yeah, let the government take
more money and figure it out.
But instead, you could use that money todo something productive yourself, If you
(46:40):
care about one of the many causes that isplaguing the world, homelessness is one
of the ones that gets brought up a lot inthe US because it's a big problem there.
Well, you as a private individualcould donate time or money to helping
some homeless people or help toalleviate some of the structural
(47:00):
problems of homeless people.
But, well, many governmentinitiatives to solve that problem
don't seem to be all that effective.
So I think it's a bit of afallacy, but it's a common one.
And, and, and of course there are plentyof people that say that, that taxes are
the price you pay to live in a society.
(47:24):
Paraphrasing, but It's unfortunatebecause the only option that you
have to not do that is to leave.
And then there are people that say thatthere should be exit taxes, that when
you choose to leave a jurisdiction,you have to pay them to not get, I
don't know, again, thrown in jail orviolence again, something like that.
(47:46):
It's all clown world.
It's all, all that.
I mean, the, the, the comment, Iwouldn't mind to pay higher taxes.
Uh, yeah, there's a very Scandinavianthing to say for, to begin with,
but I think everyone who saysthat is a liar because nothing is
stopping them from paying more taxes.
Watch what they do, not what they say.
(48:07):
Like the, you can donate money to thegovernment, not, not like no one is gonna
stop you, especially not the government.
So, so I, I simply don't buy that.
Like, it's, it's, it's always a lie.
It's virtue signaling andit's, uh, very disingenuous.
Yes,
there was actually, uh, uh, there hasbeen examples of voluntary tax funds.
(48:32):
Like, there, there, there was, therewas such a thing in Norway and, uh.
After a year or so, they got the,the, the fantastic amount of, uh,
uh, 1,700 euros from the entirecountry or something like that.
That's what people werewilling to give up.
Uh, but so it doesn't work because noone wants to pay for something where they
(48:54):
cannot know what they're getting back.
Like if you pay for acar, you pay for the car.
Like if you pay for, if you paytaxes, you have no way of knowing how
much worth you got for you, how muchvalue back you got for your money.
Like there's simply no way.
So everyone prefers transactionswhere they know what they get.
and everyone who says,uh, otherwise is a liar.
(49:18):
Yeah.
And another thing here toois that Norway of all places.
Norway has massive taxes already, eventhough it's got this massive sovereign
wealth fund from its natural resourcesand then asking people to pay more anyway.
It's just, it's just laughable.
And I think it's also the case thatanother side to, to this fallacy
(49:40):
really is that there's a complaint.
Why don't people donate to charity more?
Well, you're already giving so muchof your money to the government if
you have, if you have the resources todonate to charity in the first place.
And charities are anotherwhole thing altogether.
Honestly, most charities spendmost of their money on, uh,
internal administrative costs.
(50:02):
And I think they're just as bad at the, asthe government at actually doing things.
So it's, there's something here.
Solving the world's problems collectivelyor channeling the energy of many
individuals into a shared group goal.
So.
Perfectly valid and worthy thing.
(50:23):
If it's all done voluntary and people havea stake in it and they want to see the
thing succeed, and there are incentivesfor the thing to succeed, but when it's
done through this mechanism of, oh, I'mjust gonna throw money at it and let
someone else worry about the problem, Ithink it comes back to the original point
that sociopaths co-opt these mechanismsand ruin it without the sociopaths, maybe
(50:49):
we don't really have so much of a problemhere, but the sociopaths ruin everything.
Then again, uh, I think it would beruined anyway, because, because, so
this is a, a thing that me has pointedout in his book about socialism, that
it's not an incentive problem, but a,uh, a price signaling problem because,
(51:11):
uh, if, if you have, if the state takescontrol of the means of production.
Which it's does to some extent byjust taxing and inflating the, uh,
the, the normal things a state does.
It does skew the market signal.
Any intervention skews the marketsignal, and it makes it harder for
(51:31):
producers to produce what consumers want.
So you end up with the Soviet Union,whereas the, there's like kilometers
of, uh, a line you have to, to wait into get a loaf of bread because no, no
one produces what needs to be produced.
so the sociopaths is one part of theproblem, but the, the bigger problem
(51:51):
is, is the, the, uh, the price signals.
Because money doesn't measurevalue, it signals value.
Uh, and this is what the, the mainmisconception of what money is, I think.
Love it and the price signal is.
Definitely another one of those conceptswe'll dig more into at other times.
So
(52:12):
Absolutely.
onto the next one.
The complexity of human socialhierarchies and power structures
is described perfectly in a classicchildren's book, the Emperor's New
Clothes by Hans Christian Andersonsee the world as the kid who points
out that the king is naked in the tailand everything starts to make sense.
(52:36):
Everything in human society is manmade.
Nations leaders, laws, politicalsystems, they're all castles in
the air with nothing but a lurkingthreat of violence to back them up.
Bitcoin is a different beast altogether.
It enables every individual to verifythe validity of the system at all times.
(52:58):
If you really think aboutit, morality is easy.
Don't hurt other people anddon't steal other people's stuff.
That's the basic premise humanshave, but two ways of resolving
conflict, conversation and violence.
In this sense, to hurt someonecan only mean physical violence.
This is why free speech is soimportant and why you should
(53:20):
defend people's right to speaktheir minds above everything else.
It's not about beingable to express yourself.
It's about your right to hear everyside of every argument, and thus not
have to resort to violence shoulda conflict of interests occur.
You can't limit free speechwith just more speech.
(53:41):
There's always a threat of violencebehind the limitations code, which
both Bitcoin and the Internet areentirely made up of is speech.
Any limitations or regulations thatyour government implements in regard
to Bitcoin are not only a displayof Bitcoin's censorship resistance,
but also a test of your government'sstance on freedom of expression.
(54:05):
A restriction on Bitcoinuse is a restriction a.
Yes, this is, uh.
This is an interesting paragraph.
I've somewhat changed my views here, I'dsay and say that, uh, free speech laws
are a downstream of property rights.
So if, if we had absolute propertyrights, there wouldn't be a need for
(54:29):
freedom of speech laws because freedomof sp speech is only applicable to
public domains like a public, so publicsquare or a public social media outlet.
What, whatever it might be,public service, television.
and those are all, uh, uh, preceded byan appropriation of someone's property.
(54:51):
The government had to steal stuffbecause before they could make
prop public property a thing.
So, so, uh.
In this way, I think freedom of speech andproperty rights are inexorably linked and
that you can't have one without the other.
if you have absolute property rights, andI get to say, I get to dictate who gets
(55:13):
to say what on my social media platform.
I get to dictate who gets to saywhat in on my property, in my house.
And I, I also get the right tothrow people out to say things
that I don't wanna listen to.
So,
and this is great and on, on Nosterfor instance, uh, you, you get to
decide, What to do with your posts.
(55:35):
Uh, no one else owns them.
Uh, if you use x, Elon gets to decide.
Uh, and Elon is more expensiveto bribe than many others,
uh, which is a good thing.
Anyway, the, the whole thing is money isjust speech and, and, uh, and information.
And Bitcoin has pointed that out to usthat there is no difference between a
(55:58):
physical object and information in thesense that, that in the value sense, uh,
value is entirely subjective like this.
It's, it's all, uh, Austrian economicsthat, uh, that's at the base of it.
And once again, I'd like to stress thatif you are pro anything that isn't, uh,
(56:18):
free market, that isn't sound money,capitalism, that isn't an arco consensual.
Then you implicitly are pro violence.
You think that people, that it's okayfor people to use violence and threat,
their threats thereof to, to imposetheir will on others and I, I do
(56:39):
not, I don't think violence is okay.
that's at the core of whyI have the values I do.
Very good explanation.
And you know, I think my best response isactually, I'm realizing that I should have
just continued reading the, the very lastparagraph here, because it, it might as
well have been exactly what you just said.
(56:59):
So I think I'm just gonna readthat and we'll see if there's
anything else to say about it.
Remember.
The only alternative to speech thatanyone has is violence Code is a language,
mathematics is a language, and moneyis a linguistic tool, a linguistic
tool we use as a means of expressingvalue to each other and as a way to
(57:23):
transport value through space and time.
any restrictions or regulationsregarding how you can express value.
For example, making it impossible tobuy Bitcoin with your credit card,
prove that the money you have in yourbank account is not really yours.
When people realize this, the demandfor Bitcoin goes up, not down.
(57:43):
If you know what you're doing, there'sno need to fear the regulators.
They, on the other hand, have goodreason to fear an invention that
shamelessly breaks their spell.
Yeah, I mean, uh, this is a pointthat I think few people get, uh,
politicians trying to ban Bitcoinand trying to stop people from using
(58:07):
Bitcoin actually help Bitcoin succeed.
I I, I think there's a under underratedpoint, like underappreciated point,
uh, what they do is a, they, theyshow to people that they think
Bitcoin is valuable, otherwise theywouldn't need to do anything about it.
Uh, and they, they limit the supplyeven more in that specific jurisdiction,
(58:29):
making the bitcoins that are lefteven more scarce for other people.
And thus, demand staysthe same number goes up.
Like, it's, it's very simple.
You uh, it's like politicianstrying to decide, uh, that the
ocean shouldn't be there the dayafter, but the ocean is still there.
Like they can't do anything about it.
It's a force of nature.
(58:50):
I think this is just a fantastic summaryand wrapping up exactly what you've
been saying here about information andthe freedom to do that and to do so.
I think I'll echo just one thing thatwe, we keep saying whenever we talk about
freedom, a lot of times when we talkabout freedom is that the flip side of
(59:12):
the coin to freedom is responsibility.
When you have the freedom to do thethings you want to do, you also take the
responsibility for your own actions andthere could be consequences for actions.
So sending money to someone in a waythat is permissionless, you might
(59:32):
never get that back, and that can bescary, but at the same time it is free.
And so we have to take all thetrade-offs as they are basically.
In order to get away fromany kind of collectivism, the
only answer we can ever have
(59:53):
and the individual needs totake responsibility for itself.
Sovereignty, all of the things, andthis is something that Bitcoin promotes
so well, but I think maybe it's a caseof that it's part of the problem with
(01:00:17):
Bitcoin's marketing, something like that.
Why fewer people get Bitcoinis that maybe they're running
away from that responsibility.
It's hard
role.
Some people want to nothave control, I guess.
Yeah, they want a shepherdto tell them what to do.
(01:00:37):
I'd say, uh, as a final pointhere, uh, my final point to this
is that don't steal is the core ofboth freedom and responsibility.
It's, it's, it's what, uh, whatit, it, the, the don't steal needs
to be, be there for both sides ofthat coin, uh, coin to be there.
So you need people around you tonot steal in order for you to be
(01:01:01):
free and you need to not stealin order to take responsibility.
Stealing is not taking responsibility.
Taking responsibility is doing thingsis, is trading with other people
and trading with a fool yourselfand making voluntary transactions.
If you're stealing itdoesn't fucking count.
You're not taking responsibilityand other people around you can't be
(01:01:25):
free if you are stealing from them.
So, so don't steal is if, if I do,uh, if I were to do A-T-L-D-R on this
specific chapter, it would be don't steal.
I think it, it's actuallyA-T-L-D-R on, on all four books.
Don't steal.
Perfect summary.
(01:01:45):
Say we wrap it up there.
I say we do.
Thank you for this one, Luke.
Yes.
Thank you, Knut.
And the, the next one is calledan immaculate conception,
so that will be interesting.
Very much so.
Okay.
Well with that I think we should justremind everyone how to get involved.
(01:02:08):
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This is how you can join theBitcoin Infinity Academy, get
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We have our telegram group where wediscuss everything that is going on in a.
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(01:02:30):
everything else that we have coming up.
And you can, you can join the specificcourses so you can join us live for these,
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Uh, but of course everythingis still available for free on
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(01:02:51):
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(01:03:13):
Uh, and I think we, we also,uh, we also should mention, um,
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Yes, and don't forget tocheck out the bit box.
Go to Bit do Bit Box Swiss tofind our favorite hardware wallet.
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Uh, we have a discount code there,Infiniti as everywhere else.
So check that out.
It's very user friendly and uh,an overall great hardware wallet.
Absolutely.
And finally, just a reminder ofeverywhere you can see us conference
wise, first Knut is in Ireland inMay, but then we're aligned for
basically the rest of the summer here.
(01:04:18):
So we're gonna be in Prague, then we'regonna be in Calgary for Bitcoin rodeo,
then we're gonna be in Riga, and thenwe're going to be in Helsinki for BTC.
Hell.
And so join all of those conferencesif they're convenient for you, and
you can come see us, get a booksigned, uh, whatever you like, hang
out, talk about all this stuff.
(01:04:39):
Uh, but come to Helsinki if youcan at all, if at all possible.
We're really excited about this.
The, the vibes, uh, are, are awesome.
The, the team is reallyexcited about it, not just us.
So, uh, come see us there.
Uh, you can do the Riga, Helsinki trip allin one go if you want to, if you've been
holding off on this, if you've been, ifyou live, uh, somewhere really far away.
(01:04:59):
So, uh, come see us in anyconference you like, but really
try to come to Helsinki if you can.
Yeah, go to hell.
There's a reason why there's a highwayto hell and only a stairway to heaven.
Perfect.
With that, put a ribbon on this one.
See you in the next one.
(01:05:20):
This has been theBitcoin Infinity Academy.
Thank you for listening.
Welcome to the Bitcoin InfinityAcademy, brought to you by
Plan B Network and Bit Box.
I'm Kwano and I'm here asalways with my partner in,
victimless crime, Luke de Wolfe.
How are you today, Luke?
I'm Greg Knu.
How are you?
All good.
We're doing another chapter today.
Yes, we are.
Next chapter of Sovereignty ThroughMathematics, the Gullible Collective.
(00:24):
I'm excited about this one.
Definitely some interestingtakes on collectivism.
Absolutely.
If you, if you don't know whatthis is, I mean, go to bitcoin
infinity.com and you can get the book.
You can go to a geyser page and signup for the academy and all of that.
So, but let's just dive into it.
Shall we look?
Let's do it.
I'll start by reading the firstparagraph, the Gullible Collective.
(00:47):
Chapter three of SovereigntyThrough Mathematics, we
humans are biased by nature.
Everything we think we know isdistorted in one way or another
by our cognitive shortcomings.
The human brain has been forced toevolve and adapt to whatever environment
it found itself in over millennia.
Having a brain that is capable ofsetting aside personal aims for
(01:10):
the sake of the collective hasproven to be advantageous for the
evolution of our species as a whole.
is true for every othersocial form of life.
However, letting these parts of our brainsguide our political judgment can lead
to disastrous results in the long run.
Not because of bad intentions, butbecause of the simple fact that a few
(01:30):
individuals will always thrive by playingevery political system for personal gain.
From an evolutionary perspective, an armyof as sayers and martyrs, regardless of
whether we're talking about an army ofhumans or an army of ants or bacteria, has
an advantage over a less disciplined one.
From an individual's evolutionaryperspective, though, it is better to
(01:52):
appear like you're a martyr, but to runand hide when the actual battle happens.
This at least partly explains thehigh percentage of sociopaths in
leadership positions all over the world.
If you can appear to act for thegood of the collective, but dupe
your way into more and more powerbehind people's backs, more likely to
succeed than someone playing a game.
(02:17):
Yes, It's a, a, a bit of a, a strangeparagraph to some maybe, but, uh, I
think this is alluding to incentivesbeing, uh, the driving force for, for
human beings and being super important.
Uh, so, uh, yeah, that's,that's what the paragraph means.
Uh, uh, why the sociopaths arewhere they are is because it's
(02:39):
beneficial for them to, to be there.
Uh, political leaders in particular have ahigh percentage of sociopaths among them.
Yeah, I think the distinction betweenthe individual and the collective is
a theme that we explore a lot, thatyou explore in your writings and that
we have explored in the inverse clownworld and in many of our conversations.
(03:04):
So I think this is oneof those cases where.
People might have the wrong idea.
I think about collectivism in general.
It's currently the, it's the thing thatin the western world, you're supposed to
be a little collectivist somehow, right?
We're all in this together.
We live in a society.
(03:24):
This is just the way things are.
We live in these nice welfare statesthat provide for people, but there's
a, there's a dark underside, right?
Exactly.
And, uh, you know, there's nothingwrong with human beings grouping
together and doing things together.
The, the, the wrongness of it comes, uh.
When, whenever there's, uh, violence orthreats thereof involved, so we are primed
(03:51):
to, to cooperate and help one another.
It's just that, uh, some peoplethink it's okay to do that at the
expense of a third person or ex atthe expense of another human being.
And, uh, uh, as we will learn throughthese books, that that is never the case.
The, the, the free market and, andconsensual interactions are way, way more
(04:11):
powerful than people, think, uh, and, andcollectivism and, and market interventions
are, are way worse than people think.
I definitely found it interestinghere, getting to the evolutionary
side of this also, because it'salso interesting to look at.
Reasons that explainindividual's behavior, right?
(04:33):
Like we talked about a littlebit in the last episode, the,
the financial atheism chapter.
well, maybe, maybe I'm drawinga different conclusion here, but
there is a, there is an evolutionaryexplanation to us as a species.
Basically, if you believe thescientific consensus that such as it
is, and evolutionary behaviors forwhat individuals do I, I, I think it
(04:58):
works perfectly well because thereare things hardwired in our brains
that get us to lean towards doingcertain things and different brain
configurations result in differentindividuals who behave differently.
So I find it really interestingto dig into these reasons.
(05:23):
For why people do certain things,it certainly helps to build empathy.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this is on evolutionary.
This is, this goes super deepand it's straight out of, uh, I
don't believe you need to believeanything to, uh, to, to buy this.
Uh, um, we are our bodies andour, and our brains are just a
(05:43):
collection of cells, cells who allact in their own self best interest.
So they have a, they do what they dobecause they're primed for survival.
The, the cells that behaved in acertain way, had a higher likelihood of
surviving that than cells that didn't.
So that's at the core of our verybeing and we're just a, a great hive
(06:04):
of, of cell cellular organisms that,found out over time that cooperating
was better than fighting one another.
That's what we are.
what we do as a collective, uh,may be good for, uh, the human
being, but not necessarily forthe cells in the human being.
So if we get a tattoo, for instance,to, to, uh, attract a woman, uh, that
(06:27):
might be good for the collection ofcells, but not maybe for the individual
cells in the arm that got the tattoo.
Like there's, you can, you cantake this to, to absurd levels.
Uh, it's just, uh, to distinctbetween, uh, between the, the what's
good for the individual, uh, what'sgood for the collective is not always
necessarily good for the individual.
(06:48):
That's what I'm trying to saywith the paragraph, I think.
And, uh, maybe let's, let's continueand to explore this a bit further
Sure.
onto the next one.
Story of banking and fiat currencyis a story about collective madness.
Historically, rulers have trickedpeople into killing each other
through the promise of an afterlife.
I. Central banking, the rulersof the world wars could trick
(07:12):
people into building armies forthem by printing more money.
This is seldom mentioned in historyclasses because it still goes on today.
On a massive scale, inflation might nolonger be paying tank factory workers,
but it is the main mechanism thatfunnels wealth into the pockets of the
super rich and away from everyone else.
(07:33):
Inflation is the mechanism thathinders us from transporting the
value of our labor through time.
It makes us avoid real long-term thinking.
We hardly ever consider this aproblem because none of us has ever
experienced an alternative to it.
Yeah, it's, this is the core ofthe problem that Bitcoin solves.
(07:54):
Many people think inflation is anatural thing that just happens, but
at the end of the day, it's alwaysbecause someone is printing more
money, giving it out as debt to people.
This has been going on for centuries.
Uh, humans have never been able toresist enriching themselves at the
expense of others by, by, uh, printingmore money if they've had that power.
(08:17):
And it still goes on today.
and, uh, the, the, what, what Idon't believe is like that there's
a cabal of, of, uh, evil mastermindslike Dr. Evil, um, types in a layer
somewhere is like figuring out thisway of mass control over people.
It's just the incentives are there.
(08:37):
Short term incentivesto make people do stuff.
So even uh, Nixon in 71 whenhe went off the gold standard,
I think that was a very.
High time preference decision.
Like he didn't think of theconsequences because the consequences
weren't of consequence to him.
He only had to think about thenext couple of years and winning
(08:59):
the next ele election and stuff.
So, so high time preference and, andus, not us having urges that we can't
control, is, is even behind the moneybeing corrupt, which leads to even
more high time preference decisionsand even more stuff we can't control.
So, high time preference inthis sense is the enemy here.
(09:23):
Totally agree, and I think it'sgreat that you got into a couple
of topics here in this paragraph.
I think the, the point thatyou referenced in terms of the.
Ball.
This is a set of ideas that getsexplored quite a bit more in, for
example, the creature from Jekyll Island.
I forget the author's name off myhead, but that's an easy one to find.
(09:45):
I really enjoy that read becauseit's a very good history of inflation
and money and, and all this.
But it, it's definitely, got somecontroversial elements, put it that way.
and, and I think even through that onetoo, the Nixon example, it's funny to
take any kind of devil's advocate on Nixontaking the US off the gold standard in 71,
(10:11):
but the one argument I've heard that holdsa little bit of water here on why not to
blame Nixon specifically is more that the.
Countries were already operating as ifthey weren't on a gold standard basically.
And if it hadn't have been Nixon,it would've been the next guy.
Instead of Nixon in 71, it would'vebeen Carter in 79 or whatever.
(10:35):
I don't know.
But it's, it's, it's just one ofthose things where that un, unless you
absolutely are drained away from beingable to do the high time preference
thing, it's going to happen eventually.
Something like that.
Someone is going to have toomuch temptation to do the thing.
(10:57):
Uh, I don't know.
Is, is that in line with whatyou were getting at here?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, uh, it's, uh, it's calledHanlon's Racer, and it's a bit
like Gresham's racer, uh, uh, it's,never attribute to malice that that
can be explained by stupidity, uh,uh, is one of my favorite razors.
Uh, and this one in particular is, it'stotally true, like the, the reason,
(11:19):
One reason Nixon went off the goldstandard is to keep funding the Vietnam
War, which was, uh, costing a lot.
But like, uh, running up to that, justas you say, there had been a lot of
fractional reserve going on already.
So, so they didn't have backing forall the gold receipts, AKA dollar bills
that they had given out to people.
(11:40):
So they were printing money before,before they let go of the gold standard.
Letting go of the gold standard wasa way of, of making that work short
term, but it's like it was a sacredprinciple that had to be sacrificed on
this altar because of other high timepreference decisions that came before.
And it's just.
(12:01):
tragic is the tragedy ofthe commons, if you will.
Like it's, uh, unfortunatethat that happened.
Then again, if that had not happened, wemight not have had Bitcoin, so we would
still be on a gold standard with, uh,um, semi fake fiat receipts for gold.
Uh, I kind of prefer a world whereBitcoin exists because it's, uh,
(12:22):
way, way, way better and more hopefulthan gold ever could dream of being.
So, so yeah, we are where we are.
Uh, history is what it is, and,uh, all we can do is like think of
the fu future and move forward andlearn, learn by studying the past.
Yeah.
And to tie this back, I think tothe central point, just to emphasize
(12:43):
this a little bit, is the, where yousay it is about collective madness.
Yeah.
The thing here is I. We have socialstructures that empower individuals
to make decisions for the collective.
I think that's the central point here,is that the individuals are giving up
(13:04):
their freedom, their sovereignty to otherindividuals who have their own motives.
And having money in control ofthat is really the, the problem.
As illustrated by examplesgiven such as 1971.
Yeah.
And uh, people in power who.
(13:26):
Got into those positions, not becauseof merit, but because of, uh, theft
and, uh, other like, uh, maliciousmechanisms, uh, that put them in power.
Now, the, the, uh, so this is the thing,whenever, whenever you say that you
want the government to do anything orthat you think that there should be
(13:48):
a law forbidding this, you are alsosaying that you are okay with theft
and you are okay with one human beingdeciding what's best for another, you,
you are, as you are okaying peopleto put themselves on a pedestal.
And I think people ingeneral underestimate how
(14:10):
dangerous that notion is.
Like why is, why, whypeople aren't libertarian?
Like it's, It's super dangerous tosay that you, you, you believe that
people should have, uh, that there,that there should be positions of
power that are not the result of merit.
yeah.
I'm stumbling on the words here,but, uh, you get the point.
(14:34):
I think look.
I do and, uh, continue onthese points as we continue.
So, let's go on.
Money is still vastly misunderstood by thelion's share of the world's population.
In most parts of the world,banks do something called
fractional reserve lending.
(14:54):
This means that they lend out moneythat they don't have conjuring up
new money out of thin air and handingit out to their customers as loans.
Loans that have to be paid back interest.
Interest that can't be paid backwith thin air, but has to be
paid with so-called real money.
Real money of which there isn't enougharound to pay back all the loans so
(15:19):
that a constant need for new creditbecomes a crucial part of the entire
system to mention central banks, whichdo the same and worse for governments,
so used to it by now that every countryis expected to have a national debt.
All but a handful of ridiculouslyrich ones do debts are also
(15:39):
loans that have to be paid backwith interest backed by nothing.
Think about that.
Your taxes are payingsomeone else's interest.
Your tax money is not payingfor your grandmother's bypass
operation, paying interest bank.
Yeah, we started to get into someof the ideas from this paragraph
(16:01):
here, but uh, we're going deeper.
Yes.
Uh, there was a, uh, back when I firstgot interested in money, uh, and how
money functions at all, there was a shortYouTube series called Money as Debt.
Uh, I can highly recommend and, and itexplains fractional reserve banking and
how it started, like, so, so there wasa, some guy in the city who had a vault
(16:26):
or is the equivalent of a vault wherehe could keep people's, Valuable goods.
And he gave out receipts formostly gold because that's what,
uh, people use to store in vaults.
So, so here's a receipt forthis and that much gold.
Uh, and pretty soon the, that guyrealized that he could print out more
(16:47):
receipts than he had gold in his vaults,because the only time he would need
all the gold is if everyone, uh, triedto withdraw the, their gold at the
same time, also known as a bank run.
That's how the term bank run was born,because when people started to figure
out that the, the guy was counterfeitingreceipts, they, they re uh, responded by,
(17:08):
by all withdrawing their gold at the sametime, which is when the bank went bankrupt
and the banker was exposed as the fraud.
He was until the invention of the centralbank, which it was like invented to
prevent the runs But by bailing outthe bank that was supposed to, uh,
go bankrupt, uh, they, they avoideda short term problem by postponing
(17:33):
it and snowballing it into way biggerproblem way later down the line.
And that's what we're living in now.
We're living in this per perpetualdebt cycle that just grows and grows
and grows as you have to pay interestup on interest, up on interest.
All, all the field currencies turn intoa istic curve, hyper inflating things.
Sooner or later, inflation's justhyperinflation in, in slow motion.
(17:55):
So yeah, this is what this paragraphis about and what my books are about.
Definitely.
And I think the core concepthere that everyone getting into
Bitcoin has to gr at some pointis mechanism that inflation has.
(18:15):
Why fractional reserve banking justdoesn't work and requires that inflation.
I, I think it's really wellexplained, uh, in this paragraph here.
Money gets loaned out at aninterest rate and must be paid back.
It, it's, it's a game of musicalchairs, something like that.
Unless more, yeah, unless more creditis getting added into the system,
(18:39):
which is now the current system we'rein and central banks to backstop
banks from, from fractional reserve.
There, there are good.
Explanations of why fractional reservebanking, particularly, I think Lynn
Alden makes this argument that fractionalreserve banking is not all bad.
It's just the amount of it, and itdoesn't necessarily even need to, uh,
(19:03):
hit the money supply something like this.
I don't, I don't know enough aboutthis specific thing to agree or not.
I say maybe keep it simple and, and justdon't have that, uh, but not, but having
a lender of last resort is the thingthat, that is a lender of last resort that
is required under a threat of violence.
(19:27):
Uh, definitely makes the system worse.
That's, uh, my take on it anyway.
it is also important to stressthat, fractional reserve is possible
on Bitcoin, but much harder topull off since everyone can audit
everything at, at any point in time.
So, for instance, uh, a custodialwallet, like Wallet of Satoshi for
(19:48):
instance, could theoretically dofractional reserve banking already, as
long as, uh, not everyone was takingout all the Bitcoin at the same time.
They could pretend to have moreBitcoin than they actually have
because they only need that much incirculation at any point in time.
But it's, it, it's the, the,they have checks on it, like
they can't do too much of it.
Uh, with fiat you can literallydo it forever, uh, until people
(20:12):
lose faith in the currency and,and you go into civil unrest.
So, and which is what all fiats, allfiat currencies are on that trajectory.
They.
They've all died the same way.
They, they get printed intooblivion and lose all their value.
And it's, it's, it's tragic,uh, that, that it goes on.
And hopefully now Bitcoin isthe remedy to all of that.
(20:34):
Yeah, hopefully completely agree.
And, and you know, is isn't it reallythe case that I, I've tried to think
through this problem multiple times thatyou can't really give someone a loan in
Bitcoin terms and get interest back inBitcoin terms without someone losing.
(20:56):
Or maybe to extend that slightly, becauseI think we also talk about how it's not
a zero sum game, but whoever is doingthe, uh, whoever is taking the loan
needs to get more value back than theamount of the interest rate basically,
(21:16):
for it to make sense in Bitcoin terms.
When we're denominating in fiat, it'san entirely different matter, but.
When it's in Bitcoin terms, in orderfor any kind of lending and interest
rate to work, someone has to be doingsomething with that investment, right?
Yeah.
And it's pretty hard toget above that threshold.
(21:38):
Uh, so the, but the, the oppositeis also true, like in fiat.
Someone always loses like youcannot have, uh, inflation without
there being a looser somewhere.
Like it's impossible.
Uh, and this is true for every, uh, assoon as there's market interventionism
(21:59):
or market interventions, someoneloses like someone is making a
trade they wouldn't have made ifthat intervention wasn't there.
So, so it's always atthe expense of someone.
All inflation is theft.
All taxes are theft, allinterventions are theft.
There's no way around this.
(22:20):
There's always a looser when,when any of these things are,
are prevalent in society.
The the only way for the market to bethe win-win mechanism that it is, is
for there to be no interventionism.
Like, uh, if, if I exchange something withyou on a black market, so-called black
market voluntarily with consent and nothird parties involved, then we both win.
(22:46):
Or at least we perceive we both win.
Whenever there's any intervention,including inflation, someone
loses the, the guy that got that,uh, dollar bill at some point.
Is being, there's a breach of contractwhenever a single new dollar bill
is put into existence because itdilutes the value of that, that
(23:07):
dollar that the first guy had.
Like, there, there's no way around this.
And this might be whereI disagree with Lynn.
I don't know her exact position, soI'm not gonna pick this battle here.
but, uh, I'm very Roth guardianin my thinking around this, that
it cannot be done without, uh,a winner and a looser scenario.
Like, uh, it's fiduciarymedia, uh, fractional reserve.
(23:31):
the only, uh, time Icould think It's okay.
It's as if.
Everyone involved was aware of thefractional reserve banking going on,
which would defeat the very purposeof fractional the reserve banking.
So that cannot happen.
It is fraud.
Like that's what it is.
Like why would anyone agree to havingless back than they put into the bank?
(23:52):
That's a very bad investment.
If you, if you put something away in anaccount or, or, or invest in something,
you want a return on your investment.
You don't want less purchasingpower when you get the thing back.
Money is not a producergood nor a consumer good.
It's a good sue engineer is meaningthat it's only reason for existence
(24:13):
is being a medium exchange.
And if that loses value, inother words, if it's a bad
medium exchange over time, then.
some theft is going on somewhere.
There's no way around this.
So Bitcoin is the first and only probablythe last, instance where, where money
functions in a way where this is notpossible, uh, which makes it completely
(24:35):
different from everything else.
Much bigger deal than people think it is.
Another funny idea along theselines that I've heard is that
custodians, because to a certainextent, banks are fancy custodians
that just do a ton of extra stuff.
Basically with the money deposited,uh, they'll turn into paid custodians.
(24:59):
In other words, you pay someone tohold your Bitcoin for you basically.
Which is an interesting thought,but it might work for some people.
In other words, you don't trustyourself to hold your own keys 100%.
So you pay someone else to takethe risk for you essentially.
(25:21):
And in the absence of other ways of makingmoney off of that service, basically the
custodian is just going to charge a fee.
And we actually see that these daysalready with, with, uh, multisig
solutions, like, uh, the, there's a chargeto use one of the other keys that is
being held by someone else, for example.
So maybe it's not necessarily the,the case of someone holds your
(25:45):
Bitcoin as in the UT XOs with allkeys, but these multisig solutions,
it's, it's sort of a model like that.
I think it's aninteresting one, basically.
No.
And there's nothing wrongwith custodians in general.
Like if you want to have someonecustody your stuff, then that's fine.
The problem is when it's, when there'sfraud involved and, and the concept
(26:07):
of a bank just using the money youput in your account to invest in
other stuff and lend out that money.
No, not to invest, but to lendout that money to other people to
make a return on the investment.
And, you know, one interestrate paying for the other.
Uh, it's not inherently wrong aslong as, uh, both par it's completely
(26:28):
transparent and both parties are awareof all the risks with a contract because
there's no risk free lending like the.
It doesn't work.
You, you don't automatically get interestwithout there being a risk involved.
You, you, you, you should be aware thatwhenever you have an interest on something
paid by someone, it's because someoneelse is taking a risk with your money.
(26:50):
uh, otherwise there's fraud.
Like I, uh, I don't think I canexplain it better than that.
The only, uh, thing I'll add tothis is basically we've spent longer
than I anticipated we would on thissection, but it's so important.
And also it's just thisis working so great.
I'm, I'm really, I'm reallyenjoying digging into the, the
(27:11):
specifics of these things so much.
Uh, but there are, there are otherinteresting things in this chapter.
This wasn't even the pointof this chapter, basically.
So, shall we continue
Yes, this is a show of tangents.
show of tangents?
Yes.
Is that a, is that a, well,let's put that aside for
(27:31):
Yeah, you were thinking Proof of work.
Proof of results show tangents.
Right.
Something like that.
Yes.
Very good.
Yeah, let's get on with it.
Good stuff.
Alright.
Onto the next one.
When the ideas at theCatholic Church ruled Europe.
People who didn't believe in Godwere few and very seldom outspoken.
(27:55):
had good reason for this.
Since believing God was virtuallymandatory throughout society since
1971, when famously dishonest AmericanPresident Richard Nixon cut the last
string that tied the US dollar to gold.
Our conception of what the worldeconomy is and ought to be has been
skewed by an utterly corrupt system.
(28:17):
We are led to believe that we're allsupposed to work longer and longer
days in order to spend more and moremoney bury ourselves in more and more
debt to keep the machine running.
duped into thinking that buying anew car every other year is somehow
good for the environment, and thatbringing a cotton bag to the grocery
store will somehow save the planet.
(28:38):
Stores manipulate us all the timethrough advertising and product
placement, but we are led tobelieve that if we can be climate
smart, we are behaving responsibly.
Somehow gross domestic product issupposed to increase indefinitely while
politicians will save us from ourselves.
Carbon taxes, fortunately for us,and unfortunately for them, there
(29:01):
now exists a way for unbelieversof this narrative to opt out.
Life finds a way JeffGoldblum once so famously put.
I would say that this paragraphis the TLDR of, uh, the inverse
of Clown World, wouldn't you?
Very much so.
It's, um, it's about how, uh.
(29:24):
Yeah, the effects we talked about afterthe last paragraph with, you know,
ever increasing exponentially worseproblems through ever increasing interest
rates, leads to more and more clownishpolitical decisions and narratives.
And we, we end up in this societywhere we don't take any responsibility.
We just want to virtue signal that wedo, and we end up with clown world.
(29:46):
Um, that, that's it.
Totally agree.
And, uh, I think what's funny hereis we, we basically said most of
what is in this paragraph earlierin our discussion here, not every
single detail, but the rust of it.
And, you know, just the funnylittle details in the middle here.
Things, things like agross domestic product.
(30:08):
I, I really, really, like having figuredout that gross domestic product is just
the thing that has to keep going up.
That a fixed denominatorwould turn into deflation
Gross.
Gross is such, uh, such agood, uh, word to describe it.
It is gross,
Yes.
(30:29):
vulgar, even.
Uh, and not a numberto be taken seriously.
It does not measure progress thatyou ca you can't measure progress
because value is subjective.
Like the, this, it's all madeup to rationalize stateism.
all of these figures are likethe official inflation, inflation
numbers, the basket of goods.
(30:50):
It's all bullshit.
Don't fall for it.
No, don't fall for it.
As you say, we, we somewhat dig into alot of this stuff in much more detail
in future chapters, so I think, I thinkfor now, maybe let's, let's get to the
main point of this one onto the next one.
Collectivism has ruined many societies.
(31:13):
Those of us fortunate enough to live inliberal democracies tend to forget that
even democracy is an involuntary system.
It's often referred to as theworst form of government, except
all others that have been tried.
But the system itself isvery rarely criticized.
We are so used to being governedthat not having a leader seems
(31:34):
preposterous to most of us.
Still.
We pay our taxes and an enormous cutof the fruit of our labor goes to a
third party via inflation, taxationof every good and service imaginable.
Institutions once in place.
Always favor their own survival justas much as any other living thing does.
(31:56):
People employed in the public sectorare unlikely to vote against policies
that threaten their livelihood.
This is a bigger problem than werealize because it's subtle and takes
a long time, but every democracyis headed in the same direction,
A bigger state, more complicatedsystem, and fewer individual freedoms.
(32:17):
Long term.
It seems that all of our systems tendto favor those who know how to play
that system and not those who contributethe most value to their fellow man.
Proponents of socialist policiesoften claim that failed socialist
states weren't really socialists.
Proponents of socialist policiesoften claim that failed socialist
states weren't really socialist, orthat that wasn't really socialism.
(32:41):
What most people fail to realize isthat we've never tried real capitalism.
Since we've always used more orless inflationary currencies,
this might very well be the mostskewed narrative of our era.
We're all experiencing real, albeitdisguised socialism every single day.
(33:01):
True free market capitalism is what wehaven't experienced yet, and it might
turn out to be a very different thing.
What we're told to believe that itis by almost all mainstream media.
Yes, I.
Yeah, a crucial point and, uh, uh, Ithink a thing that so many people miss.
(33:24):
I hear, uh, people blaming the free marketfor this and that all the time, uh, which
is to, to me, it's, it's oxymoronic evento blame the free market for anything
because how, how would you come to aconsensus on what constitutes a problem?
(33:46):
If not on the free market of ideas.
Like everything, uh, all the free marketis, is people doing things, uh, of their
own volition, like, uh, with consent.
Like, uh, they want to do the thing.
They, everyone wants the free market.
There is no one thatdoesn't want a free market.
(34:07):
If, if I've never heard anyone say,oh, how I wish that some third party
came in here and made my life harderand, and stopped me from doing
what I'm trying to do right now.
which is what you want.
If you don't want the freemarket to decide things.
And, and this is so misunderstood.
Like the free market isn'ta thing, it's a process.
(34:29):
It's the process of people doingthings because they want to,
not because they're forced to.
A funny thing here also is thatthese things are so subtle,
it's easy to ignore them, right?
You, you make the point here thatall of this stuff is just slow.
That's why it creeps up on us.
It's the frog getting boiled in the pot,
Yeah.
(34:49):
Slippery slope.
Every political decisionis a slippery slope.
and I, I think it's just becausenone of this stuff is that visible.
We don't, we don't worry aboutit basically, but it, it does
keep getting worse and worseand make life harder and harder.
I saw a wheat.
That no one wants to workanymore, as being said in
(35:13):
newspapers since the 19 hundreds.
And I just think, I just think that'sreally funny because maybe, okay,
it's a comment on attitudes thatthat which has been the norm for a
long time is no longer fashionable.
Like I think if people have achoice not to be coal miners, they
might choose not to be coal miners.
(35:35):
But the thing there too is thatit's a combination of advancing
technological progress as aindividuals aren't necessarily
wanting to do backbreaking labor.
If they can have a robot do itfor them, instead program a robot
to do the thing, for example.
Or it's that you get less andless for your labor all the time.
(36:01):
'cause of inflation and becauseof so much getting siphoned
away to this in that place.
And I just think that it's so hardto convince that this is a problem.
And really it takes getting this,it takes getting what the problem is
(36:22):
with inflation, what the problem iswith collective is, and to eventually
get to what the solutions are.
And it's not that it's a badthing on a micro level that
some people are isolated from.
It's good that humanity is progressingin such a way that this isn't something
(36:44):
on everyone's minds, but it is It isthe case that many people are affected
by inflation to such an extent thatthey should be thinking about it, but
it's so hidden that they don't know.
That's the problem.
People direct their energy towards,yeah, let's fix the climate, or
(37:05):
let's blame these millionaires.
Something within the system issupposed to solve the problem
for them when it's the system.
That problem.
that's the tragedy and that's what I hopewe can start to solve a little bit more.
No, uh, Fiat ruins everythingas Jimmy Song said, like, uh.
(37:26):
All prices ought to go down forever andeverything ought to be cheaper forever.
It's the simple questions like what weask in clown world, like if you practice
doing something, do you usually getbetter or worse at doing that thing?
Well, you usually get better.
So why aren't all pricesgoing down forever?
And if you use Bitcoin, they are, ifyou see the world through a Bitcoin
(37:47):
lens, all prices are going down forever.
Which is by the way, what, whatsaves people like the, from all
the, all the fears about the jobs.
Oh, they took our jobs from AIand stuff and all in industrial
revolutions have had these fears.
And technological pro,uh, progress does not.
(38:08):
Make people more poor.
They make people more wealthy.
The problem is like a, a minimumwage law, for instance, you can
deductively reason that aa axiomaticthinking yourself into the position
that minimum wage laws always lead toa worse outcome than if they weren't
there on a, a completely free market.
(38:29):
There cannot be unemployment, uh, becausethere's always someone willing to pay
something, to have something done.
Like, and, and in a world whereall prices go down, this is
not a problem for everyone.
Like the the money, it's the money.
Stupid.
Like if, if the money was working, wewouldn't need any of the other stuff.
(38:50):
And the, the, the whole notion thatwe need someone to fix a problem
is that's, that is the problem.
I couldn't agree more.
And uh, it's funny, I think wherewe're going next hits on some other
political things here, so I think let's
It's a very political chapter, isn't it?
It is, it is onto the next one.
(39:16):
The validity of the classic right leftscale describing political viewpoints
has been debated a lot lately.
And alternative scales like GalTan, the one with an additional
y axis describing more or lessauthoritarian tendencies are popping
up in various contexts around the web.
After the birth of Bitcoin,there's a new way to see this.
(39:40):
Imagine an Orgo zero point and avector pointing to the left of that.
All politics are arguably onthe left because all policies
need to be funded by taxes.
Taxation can be viewed, theft,taxation can be viewed as theft
because at its core, it's involuntary.
(40:02):
If a person refuses to pay his taxes,there is a threat of violence lurking
in the background to mention inflation.
Which Milton Friedman so elegantlydescribed as taxation without legislation.
What you do with a portion of yourwealth that you have in Bitcoin
is another matter altogether.
(40:22):
If you take sufficient precautionaryprivacy measures and you know what
you're doing, your business inBitcoin is beyond politics altogether.
With the introduction of theLightning Network and other privacy
improving features, it is nowimpossible for any third party to
confiscate your money or even knowthat you have it for that matter.
This changes the politicallandscape of every nation on Earth.
(40:45):
Bitcoin is much less confiscatedthan gold and other scarce assets,
which makes it a much better toolfor hedging against nation states.
In this sense, Bitcoin obsoletes borders.
You can cross any border on earth withany amount of Bitcoin in your head.
Think about that.
(41:05):
Your Bitcoin exists in everycountry simultaneously.
Any imposed limit on how muchmoney you can carry from one
nation to the other is now madeobsolete by beautiful mathematics.
Bitcoin is sometimes referredto as a virtual currency.
This is a very inaccurate description.
Bitcoin is just mathematics,and mathematics is just about
(41:27):
the most real thing there is.
There's nothing virtual about it.
Counterintuitive to some real nonetheless.
Yeah.
To me this is like, uh.
These things are at the coreof what Bitcoin is to me.
Like, um, a complete reimagination of, uh,what money is and what money ought to be.
(41:54):
Bitcoin has sort of pointed out toeveryone in the world that money doesn't
need to be anything but information.
the Satoshis exist in every countryat once, but the ability to move
them exists within the owner's head.
'cause you don't really own your Bitcoin.
You just find the probability thatsomeone else knows the same key to
be so low, so that you practicallyo own them in, in a sense, because
(42:17):
you are the one that knows the key.
no, and it's gonna change everything.
It, it changes how we interact.
It changes the validity ofthe nation state as a concept.
I think because like, the,the borders cannot stop this.
Like, uh, guns cannot stop this.
I mean, and I think this is all for good.
(42:38):
I think this is all better.
And there, there are a couple ofthings here about Bitcoin and privacy.
It's, uh, everything in this paragraph isonly true if, if about non KYC Bitcoin.
So if you buy them, not on an exchange,but if you accept them for your goods
and services and such, One of thetechnicalities everyone should know about
on, on Chain Bitcoin that aren't, youknow, coin joined or anything, is that,
(43:02):
uh, the, the, the person you buy them fromknows when you spend them, he knows when
that Bitcoin moves to another address.
You can, you can look that up.
Not everyone is aware of that.
The, the, the Lightning netNetwork makes privacy better.
Other things do too.
And the more time that passes,the more the Bitcoins and
(43:23):
their owners get mixed up.
And this is a good thing.
It makes, uh, it makes it harder forpeople who want to confiscate them to,
to, to figure out what's really going on.
Yeah, it's, the paragraph somewhatstarts with another point about politics.
Basically the, the taxationwithout legislation point, I
think is a good sum up to that.
(43:45):
There's a couple ofinteresting things here.
One, first of all, the, the Altan scale.
I, I think the political compasswould be more well known here, at
least in the English speaking world.
I, I actually didn't know what the GalTan Scale was, and when I looked it
up, it has articles on both Finnishand Swedish Wikipedia, so, so I was
(44:07):
able to read it, but it looks likeit's only used in those countries.
So it's a bit of a, a swish version of
Yeah, I think it's slightly different,but it pretty much is this political
compass idea where, where it
More or less authoritarian.
Yeah.
You've all seen it, I guess.
Anyway, I.
And, but I think your, I think yourportrayal that it is from an origin
(44:28):
point and all politics is left andupward basically, something like that.
It's, uh, yeah, it's an interesting onebecause it, it certainly does capture
the essence that all of the thingsthat governments do, that politics do
has to be funded by something and thatfunding has to come from somewhere.
I think this opens up interestingthought experiments that I don't
(44:48):
want to dive into too deeply rightnow, but for example, we have had
conversations about free cities, right?
Like, uh, I, I think that's aconcept that tries to, tries to get
this done a little bit differently.
Like, what if instead of taxes,you're paying a fee, and then what's
(45:09):
the difference between the two?
Right?
If you live in a free city andyou stop paying the fee, I. Are
they allowed to kick you out?
Do you really own what youhave there, your property?
Something like that.
It's interesting stuff.
It's just more like, I think thepoint to get across is all things
need to be paid for somehow, and byobfuscating where that comes from,
(45:35):
where many of the problems lie.
Is it, is it voluntary or not?
It's very simple question, likethe fee for the private city.
You pay that voluntarily when you enterthe city and when you buy a property
in it, like, uh, the taxes not so much.
You pay them because there's a gunthrough your, to your head, and
if you can avoid them, they do.
(45:56):
I, I don't know any person whowants to pay that he should pay
or, or she should pay more taxes.
Everyone wants fewer taxes or lesstaxes for themselves, but that others
should pay more for some odd reason.
Well, there is also, I think there'sa funny that says something like, oh,
(46:19):
I don't mind paying so much taxes.
I wouldn't even mind if I paid more taxes.
This is a very privileged group, Ithink, because the, they think that
the answer to society's problemsis, yeah, let the government take
more money and figure it out.
But instead, you could use that money todo something productive yourself, If you
(46:40):
care about one of the many causes that isplaguing the world, homelessness is one
of the ones that gets brought up a lot inthe US because it's a big problem there.
Well, you as a private individualcould donate time or money to helping
some homeless people or help toalleviate some of the structural
(47:00):
problems of homeless people.
But, well, many governmentinitiatives to solve that problem
don't seem to be all that effective.
So I think it's a bit of afallacy, but it's a common one.
And, and, and of course there are plentyof people that say that, that taxes are
the price you pay to live in a society.
(47:24):
Paraphrasing, but It's unfortunatebecause the only option that you
have to not do that is to leave.
And then there are people that say thatthere should be exit taxes, that when
you choose to leave a jurisdiction,you have to pay them to not get, I
don't know, again, thrown in jail orviolence again, something like that.
(47:46):
It's all clown world.
It's all, all that.
I mean, the, the, the comment, Iwouldn't mind to pay higher taxes.
Uh, yeah, there's a very Scandinavianthing to say for, to begin with,
but I think everyone who saysthat is a liar because nothing is
stopping them from paying more taxes.
Watch what they do, not what they say.
(48:07):
Like the, you can donate money to thegovernment, not, not like no one is gonna
stop you, especially not the government.
So, so I, I simply don't buy that.
Like, it's, it's, it's always a lie.
It's virtue signaling andit's, uh, very disingenuous.
Yes,
there was actually, uh, uh, there hasbeen examples of voluntary tax funds.
(48:32):
Like, there, there, there was, therewas such a thing in Norway and, uh.
After a year or so, they got the,the, the fantastic amount of, uh,
uh, 1,700 euros from the entirecountry or something like that.
That's what people werewilling to give up.
Uh, but so it doesn't work because noone wants to pay for something where they
(48:54):
cannot know what they're getting back.
Like if you pay for acar, you pay for the car.
Like if you pay for, if you paytaxes, you have no way of knowing how
much worth you got for you, how muchvalue back you got for your money.
Like there's simply no way.
So everyone prefers transactionswhere they know what they get.
and everyone who says,uh, otherwise is a liar.
(49:18):
Yeah.
And another thing here toois that Norway of all places.
Norway has massive taxes already, eventhough it's got this massive sovereign
wealth fund from its natural resourcesand then asking people to pay more anyway.
It's just, it's just laughable.
And I think it's also the case thatanother side to, to this fallacy
(49:40):
really is that there's a complaint.
Why don't people donate to charity more?
Well, you're already giving so muchof your money to the government if
you have, if you have the resources todonate to charity in the first place.
And charities are anotherwhole thing altogether.
Honestly, most charities spendmost of their money on, uh,
internal administrative costs.
(50:02):
And I think they're just as bad at the, asthe government at actually doing things.
So it's, there's something here.
Solving the world's problems collectivelyor channeling the energy of many
individuals into a shared group goal.
So.
Perfectly valid and worthy thing.
(50:23):
If it's all done voluntary and people havea stake in it and they want to see the
thing succeed, and there are incentivesfor the thing to succeed, but when it's
done through this mechanism of, oh, I'mjust gonna throw money at it and let
someone else worry about the problem, Ithink it comes back to the original point
that sociopaths co-opt these mechanismsand ruin it without the sociopaths, maybe
(50:49):
we don't really have so much of a problemhere, but the sociopaths ruin everything.
Then again, uh, I think it would beruined anyway, because, because, so
this is a, a thing that me has pointedout in his book about socialism, that
it's not an incentive problem, but a,uh, a price signaling problem because,
(51:11):
uh, if, if you have, if the state takescontrol of the means of production.
Which it's does to some extent byjust taxing and inflating the, uh,
the, the normal things a state does.
It does skew the market signal.
Any intervention skews the marketsignal, and it makes it harder for
(51:31):
producers to produce what consumers want.
So you end up with the Soviet Union,whereas the, there's like kilometers
of, uh, a line you have to, to wait into get a loaf of bread because no, no
one produces what needs to be produced.
so the sociopaths is one part of theproblem, but the, the bigger problem
(51:51):
is, is the, the, uh, the price signals.
Because money doesn't measurevalue, it signals value.
Uh, and this is what the, the mainmisconception of what money is, I think.
Love it and the price signal is.
Definitely another one of those conceptswe'll dig more into at other times.
So
(52:12):
Absolutely.
onto the next one.
The complexity of human socialhierarchies and power structures
is described perfectly in a classicchildren's book, the Emperor's New
Clothes by Hans Christian Andersonsee the world as the kid who points
out that the king is naked in the tailand everything starts to make sense.
(52:36):
Everything in human society is manmade.
Nations leaders, laws, politicalsystems, they're all castles in
the air with nothing but a lurkingthreat of violence to back them up.
Bitcoin is a different beast altogether.
It enables every individual to verifythe validity of the system at all times.
(52:58):
If you really think aboutit, morality is easy.
Don't hurt other people anddon't steal other people's stuff.
That's the basic premise humanshave, but two ways of resolving
conflict, conversation and violence.
In this sense, to hurt someonecan only mean physical violence.
This is why free speech is soimportant and why you should
(53:20):
defend people's right to speaktheir minds above everything else.
It's not about beingable to express yourself.
It's about your right to hear everyside of every argument, and thus not
have to resort to violence shoulda conflict of interests occur.
You can't limit free speechwith just more speech.
(53:41):
There's always a threat of violencebehind the limitations code, which
both Bitcoin and the Internet areentirely made up of is speech.
Any limitations or regulations thatyour government implements in regard
to Bitcoin are not only a displayof Bitcoin's censorship resistance,
but also a test of your government'sstance on freedom of expression.
(54:05):
A restriction on Bitcoinuse is a restriction a.
Yes, this is, uh.
This is an interesting paragraph.
I've somewhat changed my views here, I'dsay and say that, uh, free speech laws
are a downstream of property rights.
So if, if we had absolute propertyrights, there wouldn't be a need for
(54:29):
freedom of speech laws because freedomof sp speech is only applicable to
public domains like a public, so publicsquare or a public social media outlet.
What, whatever it might be,public service, television.
and those are all, uh, uh, preceded byan appropriation of someone's property.
(54:51):
The government had to steal stuffbecause before they could make
prop public property a thing.
So, so, uh.
In this way, I think freedom of speech andproperty rights are inexorably linked and
that you can't have one without the other.
if you have absolute property rights, andI get to say, I get to dictate who gets
(55:13):
to say what on my social media platform.
I get to dictate who gets to saywhat in on my property, in my house.
And I, I also get the right tothrow people out to say things
that I don't wanna listen to.
So,
and this is great and on, on Nosterfor instance, uh, you, you get to
decide, What to do with your posts.
(55:35):
Uh, no one else owns them.
Uh, if you use x, Elon gets to decide.
Uh, and Elon is more expensiveto bribe than many others,
uh, which is a good thing.
Anyway, the, the whole thing is money isjust speech and, and, uh, and information.
And Bitcoin has pointed that out to usthat there is no difference between a
(55:58):
physical object and information in thesense that, that in the value sense, uh,
value is entirely subjective like this.
It's, it's all, uh, Austrian economicsthat, uh, that's at the base of it.
And once again, I'd like to stress thatif you are pro anything that isn't, uh,
(56:18):
free market, that isn't sound money,capitalism, that isn't an arco consensual.
Then you implicitly are pro violence.
You think that people, that it's okayfor people to use violence and threat,
their threats thereof to, to imposetheir will on others and I, I do
(56:39):
not, I don't think violence is okay.
that's at the core of whyI have the values I do.
Very good explanation.
And you know, I think my best response isactually, I'm realizing that I should have
just continued reading the, the very lastparagraph here, because it, it might as
well have been exactly what you just said.
(56:59):
So I think I'm just gonna readthat and we'll see if there's
anything else to say about it.
Remember.
The only alternative to speech thatanyone has is violence Code is a language,
mathematics is a language, and moneyis a linguistic tool, a linguistic
tool we use as a means of expressingvalue to each other and as a way to
(57:23):
transport value through space and time.
any restrictions or regulationsregarding how you can express value.
For example, making it impossible tobuy Bitcoin with your credit card,
prove that the money you have in yourbank account is not really yours.
When people realize this, the demandfor Bitcoin goes up, not down.
(57:43):
If you know what you're doing, there'sno need to fear the regulators.
They, on the other hand, have goodreason to fear an invention that
shamelessly breaks their spell.
Yeah, I mean, uh, this is a pointthat I think few people get, uh,
politicians trying to ban Bitcoinand trying to stop people from using
(58:07):
Bitcoin actually help Bitcoin succeed.
I I, I think there's a under underratedpoint, like underappreciated point,
uh, what they do is a, they, theyshow to people that they think
Bitcoin is valuable, otherwise theywouldn't need to do anything about it.
Uh, and they, they limit the supplyeven more in that specific jurisdiction,
(58:29):
making the bitcoins that are lefteven more scarce for other people.
And thus, demand staysthe same number goes up.
Like, it's, it's very simple.
You uh, it's like politicianstrying to decide, uh, that the
ocean shouldn't be there the dayafter, but the ocean is still there.
Like they can't do anything about it.
It's a force of nature.
(58:50):
I think this is just a fantastic summaryand wrapping up exactly what you've
been saying here about information andthe freedom to do that and to do so.
I think I'll echo just one thing thatwe, we keep saying whenever we talk about
freedom, a lot of times when we talkabout freedom is that the flip side of
(59:12):
the coin to freedom is responsibility.
When you have the freedom to do thethings you want to do, you also take the
responsibility for your own actions andthere could be consequences for actions.
So sending money to someone in a waythat is permissionless, you might
(59:32):
never get that back, and that can bescary, but at the same time it is free.
And so we have to take all thetrade-offs as they are basically.
In order to get away fromany kind of collectivism, the
only answer we can ever have
(59:53):
and the individual needs totake responsibility for itself.
Sovereignty, all of the things, andthis is something that Bitcoin promotes
so well, but I think maybe it's a caseof that it's part of the problem with
(01:00:17):
Bitcoin's marketing, something like that.
Why fewer people get Bitcoinis that maybe they're running
away from that responsibility.
It's hard
role.
Some people want to nothave control, I guess.
Yeah, they want a shepherdto tell them what to do.
(01:00:37):
I'd say, uh, as a final pointhere, uh, my final point to this
is that don't steal is the core ofboth freedom and responsibility.
It's, it's, it's what, uh, whatit, it, the, the don't steal needs
to be, be there for both sides ofthat coin, uh, coin to be there.
So you need people around you tonot steal in order for you to be
(01:01:01):
free and you need to not stealin order to take responsibility.
Stealing is not taking responsibility.
Taking responsibility is doing thingsis, is trading with other people
and trading with a fool yourselfand making voluntary transactions.
If you're stealing itdoesn't fucking count.
You're not taking responsibilityand other people around you can't be
(01:01:25):
free if you are stealing from them.
So, so don't steal is if, if I do,uh, if I were to do A-T-L-D-R on this
specific chapter, it would be don't steal.
I think it, it's actuallyA-T-L-D-R on, on all four books.
Don't steal.
Perfect summary.
(01:01:45):
Say we wrap it up there.
I say we do.
Thank you for this one, Luke.
Yes.
Thank you, Knut.
And the, the next one is calledan immaculate conception,
so that will be interesting.
Very much so.
Okay.
Well with that I think we should justremind everyone how to get involved.
(01:02:08):
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This is how you can join theBitcoin Infinity Academy, get
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We have our telegram group where wediscuss everything that is going on in a.
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(01:02:30):
everything else that we have coming up.
And you can, you can join the specificcourses so you can join us live for these,
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Uh, but of course everythingis still available for free on
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(01:02:51):
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(01:03:13):
Uh, and I think we, we also,uh, we also should mention, um,
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Yes, and don't forget tocheck out the bit box.
Go to Bit do Bit Box Swiss tofind our favorite hardware wallet.
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Uh, we have a discount code there,Infiniti as everywhere else.
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It's very user friendly and uh,an overall great hardware wallet.
Absolutely.
And finally, just a reminder ofeverywhere you can see us conference
wise, first Knut is in Ireland inMay, but then we're aligned for
basically the rest of the summer here.
(01:04:18):
So we're gonna be in Prague, then we'regonna be in Calgary for Bitcoin rodeo,
then we're gonna be in Riga, and thenwe're going to be in Helsinki for BTC.
Hell.
And so join all of those conferencesif they're convenient for you, and
you can come see us, get a booksigned, uh, whatever you like, hang
out, talk about all this stuff.
(01:04:39):
Uh, but come to Helsinki if youcan at all, if at all possible.
We're really excited about this.
The, the vibes, uh, are, are awesome.
The, the team is reallyexcited about it, not just us.
So, uh, come see us there.
Uh, you can do the Riga, Helsinki trip allin one go if you want to, if you've been
holding off on this, if you've been, ifyou live, uh, somewhere really far away.
(01:04:59):
So, uh, come see us in anyconference you like, but really
try to come to Helsinki if you can.
Yeah, go to hell.
There's a reason why there's a highwayto hell and only a stairway to heaven.
Perfect.
With that, put a ribbon on this one.
See you in the next one.
(01:05:20):
This has been theBitcoin Infinity Academy.
Thank you for listening.
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