Fat, Dumb, & Docile

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Analogy

   There's only so many sides of the cube that we can pick up and examine, and go, hmm, this side looks like it's part of a cube, and you turn it over in your hand, this side also looks like it's part of a cube, and eventually you just say, hey, it's a fucking cube. We don't need to sit here for hundreds of hours.

2. 00:47Claim · condensed

   Anything that is above the foundation of what is life, on the rung of problems or issues, always filters back to: does this allow us to generate more explanatory knowledge or less. If it incentivizes people inside the extended order to create less, then it's not good and you want to avoid that.

3. 01:26Claim

   If one person has the ability to manipulate markets, that's a huge red flag, and if you're still inside a system that can be manipulated like that by one person, that should be a giant red flag even if it's someone super smart.

4. 01:26Reference

   Besent on the television, he says no to the strategic reserve, and then he says yes four hours later.

5. 02:33Analogy

   Just pick anybody outside of Bitcoin to make this example fun. Who would you pick? Would you pick your uncle, who you know is a bit of a space cadet, or would you pick Besent? He seems quite knowledgeable on those things, now that could be the german fallacy of, just because you don't know about those things you think he sounds smart and therefore he might be an absolute space cadet.

6. 03:46Quote

   I want rules not rulers, right, that just takes away all of the problems, I don't have to ever think about it again because you can't break it.

7. 03:46Claim

   If you could have him as your personal banker, you'd be like, I'll choose Bitcoin, because I know Bitcoin is not gonna fuck me, even if there's a one percent chance that you fuck me, whether you're an absolute space cadet or you have no idea what you're talking about.

8. 03:46Claim

   Austrian economics and economists have filtered a tremendous amount of information and constructed a system of constraints that seems to be useful in the real world, the closest thing to being useful in economics, everything else is smoke and mirrors to make it seem smart and interesting.

9. 05:16Quote

   The left side of the bell curve is just buy Bitcoin. That's it. It can't be that easy, can it? Yes, it can.

10. 06:38Claim

    It's an information economy. I don't need to solve physical problems in the physical world at the moment, there's an arbitrage opportunity where nobody knows what Bitcoin is, so the best thing that I can do is grow my conviction as large as it possibly can be.

11. 08:23Analogy

    Knowledge is only as valuable as the ability for you to scale your efficiency. If you're on the desert island all by yourself, it doesn't matter if you know about Bitcoin, you're completely fucked in terms of knowledge.

12. 09:01Reference

    There's a human bite limitation, which is actually the entire point of the Hayek piece that we're gonna talk about today, which is the use of knowledge in society.

13. 09:01Reference

    The entire point is that the knowledge is distributed and it is local, and all of those people need to be able to express what is happening in their area of knowledge at any given time, and the result of that is price.

14. 09:01Claim

    The knowledge is distributed and it is local, because everyone will have a different experience and different deep specialization, and all of those people need to be able to express what is happening in their area of knowledge, and the result of that is price. So price is a signal.

15. 09:31Claim

    It just so happens that Bitcoin solves all the problems these guys were talking about, eighty years ago, or 1954, this thing came out, so they were onto something, they just didn't have the solution.

16. 10:15Analogy

    Imagine it's just a Lego block that's brand new in shape or size, or whatever how many connections it has, if we can just take that and plug it into all the existing knowledge, well that's a lot better than generating all that knowledge ourselves the first time.

17. 11:46Reference

    We're gonna look at Hayek and the use of knowledge in society, because it ties directly in with explanatory knowledge, with all the David Deutsch stuff.

18. 12:30Reference

    Which is the Cesar Hidalgo's piece, that one person can only have so much storage capacity, there's only so much exposure to new information, so many state changes.

19. 12:30Claim

    Time as experienced by an individual is just a series of state changes. You can only experience so many state changes, you can only hash so many times for knowledge before your time is up, once your time is up, no more hashing for knowledge.

20. 12:30Claim

    The best thing that you can do for everyone else around you, which also means it will result in the best thing for you personally, is hash for as much knowledge as you can and then record it in a way that is incredibly difficult to vary, and easy to access for other people that come after you.

21. 12:30Quote

    If it's on fucking papyrus scrolls, guess what, they're gone. It's like you never existed.

22. 14:00Claim

    The longer it takes to change a system, the better it is for planning. If a system is easy to change and requires very little friction to do so, then that system will be changed, right, you will be pressured from all around and whatever gives first, that's the part that's going to give.

23. 15:21Analogy

    Imagine there's a board with ten different knobs that you can alter and adjust different settings on. There's gonna be temptation from anybody that comes along that is looking to steward that system: I'm pretty smart, I know what's good for the rest of the world, if it's good for me it's probably good for the rest of the world.

24. 15:21Claim

    The more dials and knobs a person, or a committee, or the entire civilization has to change or to alter, that increases the surface area of possible wrong moves.

25. 16:12Claim

    If you can't change anything, you immediately remove all of the energy that would have gone into deciding, and then checking, and seeing, and confirming that things have gotten better.

26. 16:43Claim

    The fiat system is not costly to change. There's an incredibly small cabal of individuals who manage the system that the entire world operates on, and this skews incentives for those holding the keys to that kingdom toward the power they have.

27. 18:20Claim

    You could increase the money supply, under report inflation, mandate large funds and pensions to hold dogshit paper by deeming it safe, put in capital controls, tariffs, taxes. Each one of those ways of manipulating the system is doing what? It's adding noise. What does price communicate? Price communicates where there is knowledge to be hashed.

28. 19:07Reference

    This is exactly why people watch the FOMC minutes and the press conference of the Federal Reserve, because they are trying to filter the information they do have access to for some sort of hint on what the actual rules are going to end up being.

29. 20:12Analogy

    I'm not looking at the map of the territory, I have to go through someone from the Federal Reserve Board who's giving a press conference talking about the map, and the map is describing the territory. Hopefully the person describing the map speaks the same language as me and isn't trying to deceive me, when in fact all the incentives would point to deceiving me.

30. 21:40Claim · condensed

    Is all this resource spent tracking Fed communication counterproductive to generating explanatory knowledge that solves problems in the extended order? It is. Even if only half of the people who track this nonsense instead solved problems in the real world, think about how large of a jump in productivity that would be.

31. 22:23Analogy

    If you had a tick on your body that was biting you and sucking blood out of you, that would be really bad. But if that tick was also preventing you from opening your mouth to consume food, that would be way worse. That's exactly what's happening on the flip side of what the government is doing.

32. 22:23Claim

    Every culture in every society that has maximized its citizens' ability to generate knowledge has dominated the world, until enough plaque builds up in the system because it's so good.

33. 23:40Claim

    People who don't solve problems think they should have the same life as people who do solve problems, and they don't understand the distribution of energy inside that system. If you can get a handout from the government for doing sweet fuck all, that is the best path forward for you individually.

34. 24:54Claim

    The problems that remain are often too big for one human bite, one restricted mind. So what do we have to do to overcome those problems? We got to team up, and if we have to team up that means we have to communicate and coordinate.

35. 25:34Claim · condensed

    If we have to coordinate to solve a problem, the dumbest thing we could do is input noise into the channels of communication during that process. If we couldn't understand what other people on the same team were doing, we might double work or work in opposite directions.

36. 27:10Idea

    All that the government is doing is generating noise. They're generating noise by taking signal and scattering it, they take it from the private sector and they scatter it, and when you scatter order, what happens, disorder. They are entropy agents.

37. 27:10Quote

    They are entropy agents.

38. 27:52Claim

    The vast majority of information generated by the private sector is worthless dogshit, but we need to generate all of it and test it to make sure it's not good, and then over time the cream rises, and people realize this piece of information is useful.

39. 28:32Claim · condensed

    You need a license to cut hair, a license to sell alcohol, a fishing license, a permit for a shop. That is friction. And if it's not physical friction, it's noise in the communication about those things, and because they can manipulate them, uncertainty leads to less long term planning.

40. 29:44Claim

    They decide what to spend on without a thought into the returns of that actual investment, because they don't need returns. So they are injecting noise into the price itself, not just into communication, not just into the workflow of solving problems, but into the very prices themselves.

41. 30:36Claim · condensed

    Solve the biggest problem you can and you'll be rewarded, because people will happily share in the energy you save them. If you want to be poor, don't solve any problems, be a problem, slow others down, inject noise into every system you can, amplify the friction wherever possible.

42. 31:20Claim

    The government doesn't need to take in taxes, it has a money machine, it collects taxes because mouth breathers that vote for their overlords don't understand how money or the role of government works. Taxes are used to direct spending, to control behavior.

43. 32:39Analogy · condensed

    If you structured the pipe in Super Mario Brothers so there were twists and turns and blockages and constraints, what would you be introducing into Mario's path, friction, more work to overcome. What happens in the game as it is, you go in the pipe, you pop out the other side, there's nothing there, it's as open and cavernous as it can possibly be.

44. 34:00Claim · condensed

    None of the things that a specialized problem solver needs are best provided by centralized governments, not roads, not schools or farms or infrastructure, not security either.

45. 35:20Claim

    The game of security has changed like everything else in the modern world. It used to be a manpower equation, now it's a brainpower equation, look at these small anti-drone systems mounted in the back of a car that eliminate consumer sized drones. You don't even need the guards in the watchtowers.

46. 35:50Event

    If you watch the Ukraine-Russia saga, you see any of the videos from the front line, it's like, hmm, we could send the two hundred dollar consumer drone or we could send the battalion of troops. Well, let's try the drone first, and if they get that one, let's just send a thousand more, because that's more efficient.

47. 35:50Prediction

    Everything is gonna move that way, it's not even gonna be manpower, and then how do you exchange for that, well I'm gonna need something that's real, that represents energy, it's gonna be Bitcoin.

48. 36:23Claim

    All of the services that were once provided by a centralized government are becoming cheaper and more efficient everywhere outside of that space. They're not gonna give up power easily, but it's in your best interest to remove the ability to inject ambiguity into the system, a system that does that can be relied upon even by enemies.

49. 36:23Quote

    Gravity works the same for the Chinese as it does for the Sudanese as it does for the Russians as it does for the Americans. There's no policy update on gravity.

50. 37:11Analogy

    Imagine you're looking down a microscope at a basic organism floating around in a soup of other organisms, the entire microscopic world is trying to break this thing down, it has enough problems as it is just surviving. It doesn't need to be disordered from the inside as well.

51. 37:11Claim

    Any time you encounter information that is presented as though it is helping to make the world a better place by taking someone's energy and giving it to other people without their consent, that should be a giant red flag. Order is being destroyed, and that means local entropy is increasing.

52. 38:35Claim

    Imagine the worst possible regime in charge and ask yourself if you would still agree and be comfortable with their ability to control those levers and dials. If the answer is no, which it most certainly should be, then the answer should be Bitcoin.

53. 39:11Quote

    You can upgrade your own personal information armor. You can do it without asking for permission and without filing for a license or a permit. You can just choose to not get fucked anymore.

54. 39:11Claim

    You remember twelve words, and you keep them secret, and the words are your Bitcoin, even though it's just an easy way to remember a really long, secret number that no one else knows. As long as you keep that secret, you're safe.

55. 39:11Claim

    I would make it as hard as possible for you to leave that system if I was milking you for all of your energy. I would pretend that I was your friend, I would say I'm doing this for your benefit, rather than treating that friction as too much friction, it should be a giant neon sign going, this is the right way.

56. 40:35Claim · condensed

    They'll limit your withdrawals, you can only take out five hundred dollars a day, then a hundred, then fifty, and all the while it's for your protection because there are really bad people out there. I'll deny a certain number of transactions, and tell you it's for your protection, but it's not.

57. 41:09Analogy

    It's more useful than anything you could do in your normal nine to five, in terms of future wealth generation. Anything you can do is not going to be as effective as stopping the boat from leaking now.

58. 41:09Claim

    You should control your own destiny, if you're scared at that thought, you probably shouldn't make it. You have been coddled, the real world is not Disney, mother nature doesn't give a flying fuck about you. You must generate the order, if not you, then who.

59. 42:09Analogy

    You don't want some yoked up cow, a monster beast of a bull, if you're going to try and milk them. You want some big fat doughy looking thing with big dough eyes that just loves you because you feed it grain, that's what you want, some dunce of a thing.

60. 42:42Quote

    You have been domesticated. You're fat, you're stupid, you're dependent, you're the perfect source of energy.

61. 43:14Claim

    Sound money is an epistemic tool. Knowledge is what we want. Sound money helps us generate more explanatory knowledge, explanatory knowledge is useful, we want more of that. You want to maximize your ability to transform the physical world around you.

62. 43:14Quote

    Sound money is an epistemic tool.

63. 43:47Claim

    We are all the wealthiest that the extended order has ever been, and that is what allows for Bitcoin to even exist in the first place. Other people before us didn't have the option to opt out.

64. 44:19Claim

    All of this has been achieved with the overlords sucking the extended order dry for half their goodies all of the time, sometimes even more. Just imagine if that just stopped happening.

65. 44:51Open question

    People that have been in Bitcoin for twice as long as you, are they better off, do Bitcoiners on the whole get sucked down the rabbit hole and start changing and challenging other information about their lives. You have to ask yourself, why is that, why do they do that.

66. 44:51Claim

    Bitcoin is a giant filter, it filters reality from fiction so that I don't have to, that frees me up to focus all of my energy on other areas. If you get a group of people that use that filter, the pooled savings that they are able to achieve gets very large very quickly, and that is good.