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Robert Breedlove interviews Curt Jaimungal on Logical Paradoxes, Bitcoin, and John Von Neumann
November 13, 2022
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
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Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
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This is an auxiliary episode where Robert Breedlove of the What Is Money podcast interviewed me for his show. We talk about various logical paradoxes and what it's like to run theories of everything. Robert Breedlove is a digitally fluent finance and operations executive, a philosopher and an author,
with a broad spectrum of leadership experience across technology, finance, and wealth management. He's a freedom maximalist with innovative insights on Bitcoin, investments, and poverty alleviation. Enjoy today's auxiliary episode where Robert Breedlove interviews Kurt Jaimungal, that is me. Kurt Jaimungal, welcome to the What is Money show. Thanks for inviting me. Great to have you here just by way of quick introduction for my audience.
You are a filmmaker who decided to pursue filmmaking while studying mathematical physics at the University of Toronto. You are the host of the very popular Theories of Everything. You observe topics on theoretical physics, consciousness, God, free will, all the profound questions that we tend to outwardly ignore but inwardly wrestle with. Theories of Everything is one of the fastest growing science and philosophy podcasts.
it analyzes the current state of theories of everything that is a surveillance of the field theories of everything pros cons and the relations of each to be a part of the discussion type theories of everything oh this is your i was reading an intro for you and it sounds like that last part is not part of what i should read so theories of everything
very cool podcast with a lot of interesting guests and fascinating conversations. What I thought we would do today is just talk about your experience, starting the show, running the show, hosting the show. I'm really curious just individually as one one podcast or two another. And then also, I wanted to get a sense for like how much it's changed you, you know, because I know that
doing this show, talking to a lot of big thinkers has certainly had an influence on me. So I wanted to get a feel for that for you. So just to get started, maybe you could tell my audience a little bit about yourself a little bit about your podcast and how your journey brought you into this field. Sure.
My name is Kurt, as you have heard already, and I have a podcast called theories of everything. What it is, it's more of a project than a podcast. And what I mean is that I'm interested in toes. So that's the acronym for theories of everything. I stumbled upon
The theories of everything podcast in my effort to learn more about tells a theory of everything. First of all, well, what the heck is it? That's not easy to define because there's some controversy there. Some people take the word everything to mean everything. And then some people try to define, well, what is a thing? So that's Carl Friston's approach and Jacques Vallee has an approach like that. What the heck does it mean for there to be a thing and then every of it?
Well, initially what I meant was quantum mechanics and then quantum field theory and then gravity, which is general relativity, combining them is considered to be a toe. And then it's synonymized sometimes with grand unified theories, but those are actually separate. I'm interested in those as well.
As I wanted to learn more about theories of everything, some people said consciousness is involved quantum mechanically, but perhaps even more fundamentally than that. At first, being the person who came from an academic background and just learned math and physics, I was someone who excoriated that view as being generally one of mystics who misunderstand quantum mechanics and like to use the word quantum to give some scientific credence to whatever they're espousing mystically.
But as I started investigating it more and more, I'm less and less certain about virtually everything. You wanted to know how did it change me. Well, it put me in this void where I tumble and it's not exactly a pleasant place to be. So on the podcast, I also investigate consciousness. What role does that have to play with regard to the fundamental laws? And is the conceptualization of fundamental laws the correct conceptualization? Because that implies reductionism and maybe that's not the correct paradigm. So I'm interested in that as well. How about your podcast? What got you started with yours, man?
I assume it's not just about money. I looked through your guest list. Some of these people have nothing. Well, maybe tangentially have some views on money. Yeah, we definitely get into the nature of money. So it gets quite philosophical because the history of human beings and the history of humanity are pretty tightly bound. What started got me started on the show was I have an accounting and finance background.
And I had basically started a company to work for myself. Initially, it was a CFO consulting services. But when I started that company, it freed me up to investigate a lot of new things. This was late 16, early 17. And so I started looking, learning about crypto, really. And long story short, one thing led to another, ended up way down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and then operating a hedge fund in the space for a number of years.
And during that time, I was writing monthly updates to my investors. And I also started publishing like research findings just on the history of money and whatnot. And these things were becoming popular. My written work is becoming popular in Bitcoin circles. And I got invited on a podcast to talk about it. Those podcasts were popular. And so once again, kind of one thing led to another and people were telling me they wanted more, right? More writing, more talking.
And so I just jumped on the bandwagon and started a podcast. Uh, I got really lucky. My first guest was Michael sailor came on for so man talk about a first guest, you know, dynamite guests and you know, I, I guess part of the interaction with him and then also just other things going on in life, I really started to want to focus on education.
I just decided I was getting more more meaning out of that. And so the podcast is a great way to help, you know, educate people about things to learn really, I don't I don't even like to say education necessarily, because on the podcast, I'm basically learning, right? I'm learning from these other guests, we're engaging in dialogue, trying to get to truth on some particular topic.
And you're really just letting your audience observe that dialogical process in a way. So I've called it learning out loud, you know, as opposed or as education sort of sounds like I have some final answer that I'm trying to sell to an audience, which I don't really, I'm just, you know, it's exploratory, strong opinions loosely held, as they say. But yeah, that's it in a nutshell for me. Yeah. So you went to school for finance and accounting?
Coming in finance, yeah. Add a bit of a background about it. Yes, we do. The other part of your question, we talk about way more than just money. You know, money is this tool that we use to like, establish consensus on the relativity of exchange values, for instance. So it's got these informational components, it's got energy components. It's got a component. When you look at property rights, I think it's something like
The way human beings express territoriality, you know, like all, most social animals are territorial. Humans have just enshrined it in this, this institution called private property and money is the most important form of private property. So we talk about a lot of other things. We go down a lot of rabbit holes through that, um, to get back to you. So I, I wonder, it was the title, the theory theories of everything.
The first time I heard that term was, I think I read the book by Stephen Hawking. Pretty sure he has a theory of everything that I read when I was young. So I wanted to ask you about the inspiration for the title. And then also you were saying your, your interaction with your guests has made you less sure of everything, which is interesting, right? It's almost, I find that happening with me as well, that I've become much more, uh, I have a much greater affinity for Socrates when he said the only thing I know is that I have nothing at all.
Yeah. I also think that he did claim to know some things. So firstly, he was a theist. He believed strongly in the gods. And there was something else that he believed. Him saying, I know nothing was popularized as his main phrase, but I don't know if that's what he truly believed. But anyway, I agree, except I don't want to know nothing. It's not a pleasure. Like I said, it's not pleasant.
So I try to minimize that, but I just can't help but being shaken terribly from time to time. Okay, the name theories of everything that comes from the physics term. It's a physics term. And so it means what are the laws that we can write down mathematically that can predict every other observable phenomenon in a physical sense, materialist sense. You don't need to insert the word material there because it turns out science is
philosophically agnostic despite most scientists thinking that it proves or claims or assumes materialism it doesn't but anyway how can you predict any phenomenon or show that whatever we see here at a large scale so for instance that this is derived from something that's more fundamental and then also it'd be great if this theory could be yield new predictions and be falsifiable that's pretty much what the word theory of everything means and like i mentioned technically it's gravity and quantum field theory but but it's taken to be a bit more than that now
Okay, now I want to talk to you a little bit about paradoxes, if you don't mind. Yeah, one of my favorite words. So have you heard of Newcom's paradox? I don't think so. It's a money paradox. And in case you're interested, I'm writing a book on paradoxes. I'm writing a book on paradoxes slash free will and consciousness, basically the subjects of the Toe podcast.
And I'm doing so because I forget so much of it, like from one podcaster to another, I study voraciously for different guests. And then I end up forgetting it about one month later, almost all of what I've studied, because it's much like I'm cramming for an exam or a test. And then I have to move on to the next course. And I don't like that. I feel like a fool. And there's so much else that I need to know. And I need to remember, I need to have the stepping stones and then constantly removing the stepping stones or they're just disappearing behind me.
So as an effort for me to remember more, I'm writing a book. Well, anyway, who knows if this book will even be released, but either way, I'm writing a book. So paradoxes, there's a paradox called Newcombe's paradox. And what it is is, okay, imagine there's a genie. Okay. So there's genie and he has two boxes in front of you. And he says one box is transparent, made out of glass. So you can see what's inside. And the other is a safe. It's made out of metal. You can't see what's inside.
Transparency
As soon as you entered this room, I scanned your brain. I'm like a supercomputer. I'm like God. I predicted whether you will choose both. Like you're gonna have the choice. Do you want both boxes to take home or do you want just the safe? Okay, now if the genie says, I've predicted. Well, I'm not gonna tell you my prediction, but here's what the rules are. If you take both, there will be nothing in the safe. So I'm gonna punish you for being greedy. But if you just choose the safe,
I think the conditions are clear, but isn't it obvious that you just
Well, I guess if you believe the genie, you would just take the metal box. Right, right. Okay, now here's where there's some conflict. Because as a rational being who wants to maximize the amount of money you have, when you enter the room, there's two, this is why it gets into the tricky subjects of rationality, which people think is so clear cut, it's not. And same with free will, there's two different kinds of decision theory. So there's causal, it doesn't matter, there's names for these one where you want to maximize the amount of money you have. And then the other
where you just think about, well, what does the evidence lead me to believe? Okay. So the evidence leads you to believe that, hey, this genie has done this many, I didn't say this, but has done this thousands of times and is always correct. He always predicts correctly. So, and he said he's infallible. I'm going to believe him. This is the voice of God. I'm going to just choose this one safe. Okay. But then the causal decision theory says, well,
I'm all the genie has already made up his mind. The money is either there or not. So then the other point of view is look, I've entered this place, the money is either in the safe or not. So no matter what, there's either a million dollars there, or there's nothing, I may as well take both boxes. So I can get a million plus 1000. Or I can get maybe there's nothing in the box. Let me just take both. So that's the paradox. Well, which one do you do?
It's interesting. The point is, if you want to maximize the amount of money, what do you do? That's essentially the question. What do you do? Yeah, so it's drawing this line between the two forms of rationality you described. One is enhancing or maximizing your expected value, which would be to take both boxes, versus what does the evidence lead you to believe? I guess the other embedded presupposition there is
If the, it's almost like the genie already either did put the money in the box or not. Yeah. Yeah. I should have said that. That is the case. The genie has put the money or hasn't already. Oh, it has. You came in, he made that decision. Okay. And then he placed money in there without you looking. Got it. I was just saying the genie, he could make it appear or vanish based on your decision. No, it's already there. So now, now that you know that, what would you do, Robert? Well, I guess if I'm talking to a genie, I believe he's a genie.
I'm probably going to believe the guy, but, um, that the devil's kind of in the details for what makes you believe. Okay. So now here's a variation on that same problem. Okay. You can advise your friend. So there's still the genie, the whole setup, except now it's your friend coming in and it's not you. You're standing behind the box. So remember the box, this one is transparent and then this one is opaque. Okay. Well, you're now on this side. So you can see the transparent one, just like your friend can see the transparent one.
But on the other side of the safe, there's some glass, so you can actually see whether the genie put in the money or not. Now, you would always tell your friend, just take both boxes. Because you can see, you can see either there's money in there or there's not, so just take both boxes.
every time the decision is just take both boxes, because you can see it. Then the question is, well, why does that make a difference at all? Wow, that's a great question. Anyway, it's just for me, I think about this and I have to stop, I have to tell myself to stop and like I have OCD and these intrusive thoughts now and have to do meditation and mindfulness. So I don't think about it. That's a really interesting one, actually, because I Yeah, you. Well, I guess what so the takeaway there is always make
always maximize expected value this is like poker right if you're trying if you're playing really high if you're playing poker to high level you're basically always trying to make positive expected value calculations so it sounds like that yeah so this case that you should just always take both boxes no matter what the genie says
Yeah, but it's strange because the genie is right and there shouldn't be any money in the first box if you're going to take both boxes. So what's the resolution to this paradox? There is none. This is something that's been debated for I think decades and there are proposed solutions and then people find errors with those solutions and this continues on and on. So there's also the question of on the theories of everything podcast, we talk about UFOs sometimes and people are like, well, why do you why the heck do you care about UFOs and evidence and so on and so on?
the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so on. Well, firstly, evidence is not clear cut. Secondly, it's not as if there's a difference between extraordinary evidence and regular evidence. As Brian says, it's not like he's an experimental physicist. He's like, there's no box that I tell my graduate students, okay, now let's get the extraordinary evidence put in the extraordinary evidence box. But and then there's some paradoxes when it comes to what constitutes evidence.
So I don't know how to say them without seems like to though, because if you did just trust the genie and only take the metal box, but the money was not in the box and wasn't when the genie be lying at that moment, then you would have gotten 1 million. But I thought he already decided what is in there or not. He calculates as soon as you come in, he calculates he reads your brain and he knows what decision you're going to make. So if he knows that you're going to take just the safe, there will just be $1 million in the safe.
And if he thinks you're going to if he knows that you're going to take both, then he will make sure there's zero. Then he doesn't do anything. So if he knows you're only going to take the metal box and he puts the million dollars in the box and then your friend is standing on the other side of the box telling you to just take both anyways, because there's a million and one. That's where the paradox is like, I guess your friend doesn't know the rules of the game, otherwise wouldn't be telling you to take
Well, right then and there, if he tells you to take both, that's what's so tricky about this, is that as soon as another person observes it, does this, why does that make a difference? Why the heck would that make a difference at all? Anyway, yeah, we can continue to talk about that for like, for hours. My brain first thing in the day here. Yeah, that's a really interesting one. So your book is going to be about this then, right? Writing, exploring paradoxes, free will, consciousness, etc.
Yeah, I like to do that. And then secondly, well, firstly, it's fun. I'm sure you have fun on your podcast. Maybe that's the first the primary reason you do it. And for me, and I'm sure for you, you would be doing what you're doing if you had all the money in the world. Well, maybe all the money in the world, you would maybe help out different causes and so on. But you understand. Yeah, it's it's a very fulfilling occupation and one that came about pretty quite organically. You know, it's not something I ever
chose myself, which is interesting. So that evolves over time. But yeah, I love to read. I love to talk about big ideas. And now I get to do that for a living. So it's it's pretty incredible. What was your inspiration originally for for starting theories of everything? I
Wanted to learn Donald Hoffman's theories. So if you've heard of Donald Hoffman, yeah, okay. So I've read him on the show. He makes many claims about consciousness and people just take it as and say, wow, that's so profound. And I'm thinking, okay, but he's tying this to some mathematics. I have a background in math. So why don't I just read the papers and then interview him? It doesn't seem like anyone is doing that. So that's what I did. And then I had a great technical interview with him.
And people seem to like that because there seemed to be a dearth of that in the podcast space. So I was encouraged by that because I actually like to read papers and I like to not play devil's advocate or pinholes or criticize, but just talk to people and say, here's what occurs to me when you say so-and-so and listen, it's like office hours with a professor. You're allowed to ask whatever questions you like to this intellectual giant. So why don't I just do that and see where this goes? And it ended up taking off.
I think this is just the story of podcasts. I don't know of many people who are successful at podcasts. What I mean is that they have a somewhat large podcast that went into it, trying to make a podcast. It's more like what happened upon it. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sure people ask you like what's the advice that you have for a new podcaster? Do you think that is there such a huge element of chance that you would just either have to stumble upon it and be successful or well essentially get lucky or you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, I think I mean my general advice is to do what is interesting to you, right? Like my litmus test for my episodes is I want to have conversations with people that I think I will find interesting and
I have questions I want to answer, you know, for whatever reason. And so if I'm genuinely engaged and hopefully attaining some dialogue with my guests, that that seems to be the magic that people really get into. It's like dialogue, active dialogue about big ideas is almost like a spectator sport where, um, you know, you see two people like when I see Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris debate,
You know, not that a podcast always has to be a debate, but that's one form of dialogue that is, um, exhilarating, right? You're seeing two people kind of pushing the boundaries on their mental models, kind of battling in a way. And then you're a, you're a spectator in that process of challenging your own viewpoints. And, um, you know, whether it's, whether it's a debate format or just a discussion format, I feel like that, um,
that process where you're banging these things together, you're reaching for unexplored territory, you know, trying to get a misconception brought into the world of knowledge or common consensus somehow that seems to be the sport that is that is podcasting or dialogue. So I try and just, yeah, try to aim for people that I
think are interesting to talk to about ideas I want to learn about. I think Plato had the first podcast. It's just before there were podcasts and he had the dialogical forum with Socrates and so on. And I think that's what podcasts are and are an extension of that. We're all just so in a sense, we're all following Rogan. But in another sense, we're all following Plato. No, that's a great framing. I've said that podcasts is like the resurgence of dialogue in the digital age, because in the 20th century, we had a very
top down media model, right? When my mom was a kid, I remember saying, all we had were channels three, six, three, nine and 12. I think she said, if the president's on your fucked. So we moved from that model where there's like very few media organs, you know, propagating out to everyone. Yeah, we have this, it's like, it's like from a one mini computer networking model to a mini model. And now, you know, nodes on this distributed network of thought,
I'm curious to ask you, if you don't mind, something I was thinking about is, how far does that go? And what I mean by that is, is there such a thing as too much freedom, too much decentralization? Well, I think it's a good question. And there's definitely trade-offs. You know, there's the old adage that if you want to go far,
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So if you stick to one centralized plan, right? If someone laid out a plan right now and said, Hey, we need to build spaceships. Everyone in the world needs to build spaceships just full time, flat out. That's what we need to do. That would be like one centralized plan. And if everyone did that, well, we could make a lot of spaceships really quickly, right? We could do it really fast.
but I don't think it's sustainable. I don't think like to adhere to a centralized plan over time doesn't seem to be sustainable because what you, what requires everyone to do is to drop their own wants or preferences and follow the central plan. Right. And that's why I think central planning historically has failed many, many times. Um, the libertarian philosopher Hayek made a great point too. He said, even if you could craft the perfect central plan,
and say here's what everyone should do in the world right now to best satisfy everyone else's wants in the most profitable economically efficient way that the moment you put that plan into motion it would start to deviate from reality because reality is always changing so central planning again even if it was the perfect plan for a moment in time it would never it's hard for it to be sustainable over time because reality is always changing the opposite end of that spectrum
It's really central planning versus decentralized planning, right? Because decentralization doesn't mean no planning, it just means each individual plans for themselves, or they engage in, you know, common enterprises, like companies with others, and they make collective plans. But the point is, there's no plan being imposed from on high on you. That's what I think decentralization would kind of be the spirit of.
And if you want something that's going to last for a long time, you know, like a mode of human socioeconomic organization, that's going to be sustainable, that's going to go far. I think you have to do it in a decentralized way. Ultimately, there's a great paper on this called the use of knowledge in society by Hayek, same guy I just mentioned. And he makes this argument that, you know, knowledge
sort of emerges everywhere and at local scales and it's it it's utility diminishes right like you get local knowledge that's useful right then and there but if you had to pass that knowledge to a bureaucracy wait two weeks get approval and then finally comes back and you can do whatever the thing is that really reduces the adaptivity of the marketplace and market actors right they can't act on local fresh knowledge right so it's losing it's losing some value when it goes through
the machinery of bureaucracy, for instance. So I think you want to decentralize as much as possible. Um, but that sort of leaves, leaves out the big central questions like what should we be doing as a society? What should we be optimizing for? Is it GDP? Is it some other metric of human flourishing? You know, et cetera. And,
I think Bitcoin is kind of an interesting animal in that way that it's a decentralized network that doesn't have any political leaders inside of it. Yet it's centered on this motif of 21 million. Like that is kind of the central plan of Bitcoin. It's like no matter what happens, this thing stays at 21 and not 20 or not 100. It's arbitrary. It's arbitrary what the number is. Actually, it's just the fact that it doesn't change.
So you have a money that can't cannot be inflated or counterfeited and that's the key could be knows why I mean there's a lot of thinking about why Satoshi chose 21 million.
I guess my question about decentralization becomes a question about freedom. In the Marxist circles, I hear them, they also care about freedom, or at least claim to. So it seems like everyone is just pursuing freedom, but then to me, I don't know if freedom is what we
like well how far does freedom go because you have skin now that's a form of a border you have constraints on you with the laws of physics and you want those there you were taught a language and so you didn't choose firstly to be born secondly to learn the values you learn to learn the language that you learned and so there is a form of tyranny of parenting and then there's the laws a fair kind of parenting and i don't like to be around those children and i'm sure most people don't including the parents but
That's because people have this need or have this philosophy that no, I don't want to impose because I don't like when the government imposes, but then they constantly think about in terms of government. So I'm just curious. Well, like how far does this freedom? Do we not need constraints? Jordan Peterson? I'm sure talks about this with order and chaos. You need both. McGill Chris talks about this. There needs to be some constraints as well.
The fundamental constraints that none of us know how to throw off are thermodynamics, gravity,
Earth's gravity, every every organisms survival strategy is adapted to Earth's gravity on Earth. Obviously, when we build cars and buildings, they're designed to stay, there's designed to have structural integrity in Earth's gravity. So there are certain restraints. So I guess the question is, what additional manmade restraint should we be placing on ourselves? And
The Rothbardian argument, this is a very strong argument made from the libertarian philosophy, the school of libertarian philosophy. I'm thinking of his book, in particular, The Ethics of Liberty, is that the boundary should be private property. Now you have to understand what property means. It basically means, most fundamentally, you own yourself, you own your own body. And then the things you go into the world and justly acquire
By extension, your own individual self ownership become yours. So when we talk about increasing freedom, I think that is the natural limiting principle is that you want everyone to have maximal freedom to do whatever they want with the limiting principle of other people's person and property, right? Like I should go into the world and accumulate whatever value I need. So long as I don't hurt anyone or steal from anyone.
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And that process, if you honor that boundary of private property, the interesting thing about that is that it creates more freedom defined as opening up of option space. So the guy that's on the desert island,
There's a certain things he can't do, right? If he's just there with only his body, he can't really leave the island. He doesn't have a boat or an aircraft. Uh, he can only pick fruit with his hands. He doesn't have tools and whatnot, but what can you do? He can delay gratification, right? Spend less time consuming fish, more time building a fishing rod. And then the next thing you know, he's economized fish production, right? He can catch more fish per hour with a rod than he does with his hands.
And then he can spend a bit more time building a boat. All of a sudden he's increasing his option space and how far out to sea he can go. Maybe he can eventually leave the island. And so it's that process, that capitalistic process that creates more freedom in the world, creates more options. For the Marxists out there, I would again point to the Mises critique of socialism, that they basically proved that
socialism doesn't work because it doesn't produce price signals so we can't allocate capital intelligently and that's why it degenerates into this game of just status rhetoric and nonsense and ultimately I would think mass murder again we're all just animals trying to do the best with the assets at hand and if you don't have a price signal and property rights to allocate these things
Intelligently and nonviolently then whatever system you build on top of it degenerates is my my view on that Man, I have many philosophical questions, but I think like we should save it for When you come on my podcast, yeah, yes, I need to ask you some more questions though That's fine. I enjoy this. Well, like here's just some thoughts and maybe I could
How far does that go? How far? Like what the heck does this extreme freedom? Well, we don't want freedom from the physical laws of nature. Well, then also what's the difference between you and a law of nature? Is there a separate separation?
Conversation with this by this mathematician named Raymond Smullion so people can look this up. I basically read it read it aloud on my channel
and it's Raymond Smullian. It's a conversation between man and God and the man is saying to God, why did you give me freedom? I find this to be a huge imposition because I have this huge moral weight to do good and it's not easy to do good and it's impossible to do 100% good. So please remove my freedom. And then God's like, well, why don't I remove the feelings of badness that you have, like the guilt. Then the guy's like, he thinks about it. He's like, well, if you remove that,
then i may commit atrocities in the future and myself now would be responsible for those future atrocities because i'm removing my guilt center then i'm just mad at you for giving me freedom to begin with it's this whole conversation of back it's like a dialogue like a play dough back and forth between a man and god it's so playful raymond smullions this great writer he's dead now
it's one of the people i would like to interview i can't but it then becomes all about well the distinction between you and natural law and what is free will and what is god and what is goodness and is there sin this is why when i read your description if i'm recalling it correctly i liked it because it said something like i explore what is money and the rabbit hole that entails something along the lines of that oh yeah because i think
that if you explore almost any phenomenon, so for instance, these headphones or this Blistex, it's a chapstick, that if you explore it and you try to understand it completely, it leads you to virtually every other question. You see this in science, where if you want to learn about a butterfly's brain, you need to learn about a lizard's brain, and then you need to learn about evolution, and you need to learn about the whole phylogenetic tree to, well, not the whole, but maybe the whole, if you want to learn
about what put out a thesis on a butterfly's brain then it's extremely interesting because i was speaking to someone named chloe valdry do you know who that is chloe valdry okay well anyway she's more of the consciousness zen mindfulness eastern type
who was saying, Kurt, I don't like your analytical approach with Toll because it's not going to lead you to answers. You can't have an analytical answer to an experiential problem. I think that that's the case. And I also don't think that what I'm doing with Toll is just analytical. I think that there's something about this format, Robert, both you and I and you and your guests and me and my guests, that is necessarily propositional because we're just speaking. And it's not like you can have a handful of people and then meditate with them.
But off air, I'm sure you do plenty of experiential work, and same with myself. So it's not as if I'm not exploring experientially. But then I also wonder how much of that's true. Cantor, for instance, thought he was analyzing the mind of God by analyzing infinity mathematically.
There are many other, historically people thought that studying physics was the same as studying God. And that's one of the reasons why there's so much writings about God from Newton. And that's one of the reasons why there's order to the universe at all, why we can do science, because God made it intelligible, at least this is their view. Did you also feel this to be the case that if we were to study anything, we incorporate everything? Yes, man, so much good stuff there. I think it was the physicist Brome that described reality as the unbroken wholeness.
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So it's in everything touches everything else, right? It's continuous throughout, but we
as rational beings use language and thought to kind of draw boxes around things and we turn a perception into a conception and then so then you know so to go from rock to the idea of a rock and then we create a language that's established on it's our consensus of understanding so when i create this sound with my mouth it says rock it's like i can reliably presume you're running the same open source software called english
that it conjures up roughly the same image that i had in my mind right so um it's interesting that we it's like i've said this a number of ways reality is like a stack of patterns on patterns on patterns that rhyme but don't repeat or you could look at it as like an ocean with no shore and no surface that the whole thing is just this continual fluid body that's wholly interconnected but to navigate it
we have to map it right and we have to map it with these with concepts and conceptions and groupings and ideas which we then you know obviously it's a it's an abstraction away from reality like when you convert an experience into something linguistic but the linguistics and paradoxically perhaps somehow let you navigate that reality more efficiently effectively etc over time right lets you build
Whatever a better boat car jet spaceship whatever it may be so There is something really fascinating about that and it is divine in a way I guess in that we were sort of You know if the idea of God is the creator whatever words you want to insert their nature the universe whatever that creative force is that made all this and
We kind of participate in that to some extent because we know that we can create new tools and new ideas, new languages, et cetera, that actually influence our own evolutionary path. We mentioned this earlier, just the idea of private property. That's not a thing. That doesn't exist anywhere. It's this game that we've kind of imagined. Yet if we pretend it's true, if we pretend everyone owns themselves,
and everyone has rights to the fruit of their own labor, then we create this very pragmatic outcome of more wealth in the world. So that's interesting to me that it's we kind of like the animal that plays imagination, but the imaginal play that we engage in has very real consequences. This is where I'm not sure. So I don't know if private property is just a social construct. I don't know if there's something like the platonic forms, which is mathematical.
but for any idea or any conception. So it exists. It's just not in the way that we think of existence. And then also, I know it's said so frequently in the modern and perhaps even ancient Eastern side that non-dualism is what you're at least intimidating or at least insinuating. Sorry. I wonder how much of that is strangely a left brain phenomenon on something that's a right brain issue. So what I mean by that is,
It sounds like, hey, no, what are you talking about? Like the left brain is the analytical one. We're the more creative types who are the ones that are in touch with consciousness and we could see the undividedness of nature. I don't know. I know that Ian McGilchrist says that the left brain likes to categorize and place as a whole everything and see everything as the same. Whereas the right brain, the creative one is actually the one that likes to make distinctions and see this as different. I don't know. I've had experiences of oneness
I've also had many experiences of dividedness and I wonder how much of it is. Metaphysically, I think the next number up from one is not two, it's three. And the reason is that if you have a vertex, then if you add another vertex, it doesn't mean anything to this vertex unless there's a connection. As soon as you have two and then the connection, then you have three objects. You have two vertices in one edge or just a single vertices. So I wonder how much of reality is a threeness or even more. And we're just saying is undivided. That's the wrong way of saying it.
And we're saying it's both undivided and not. That's wrong. But then am I perverting every metaphysical claim with my language is just abandonment of language, the route? Well, that's what some monks say, like just just stop. It's even a sin to speak, or at least a sin to be curious and speak about these large issues. I don't know. I've had feelings of each way. And I'm constantly yes, I think you asked me like, what have I learned from this podcast, I've just learned to
Well...
i agree with you about by the way i don't see it as a virtue to be like the socratic like not knowing i think it's healthy to have a a certain amount of close-mindedness and maybe that's even hearkens back to what i was saying about constraints as well as openness you need that otherwise you'll just dissolve in a pool yeah you're right yeah yeah you i think chester zinn said don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out everywhere
There and it always comes back to me comes back for me to that relational aspect, you know Peterson calls it order and chaos Obviously I did this long series on metaphysics It was it was about the book Lila by Robert Persig But he's making the point that subject object is kind of a false paradigm that there's really this betweenness that is more
A higher resolution depiction of reality, if you will. John, I've talked to John Verbeke a lot about this, too. He says rather than subjectivity or objectivity, the betweenness is transjectivity. Yeah, it's like there's this infinite complex system around us called reality. And then we're trying to generate different knowledge structures to map portions of it and communicate about it.
But we have to take all of those. I call these like a symbolic structure, if you will. This could be anything. This could be a theory. This could be force equals mass times acceleration. This could be a company. These are all just symbolic structures we've created to help us do something practical with that reality, to navigate it, or understand it, or talk about it. But we have to always understand that those symbolic structures are provisional. They're subject to change.
You know, Newton gave us certain laws that made a lot of sense for a long time and let us accomplish practical things in the real world. But eventually those laws were proven to be insufficient to be a deeper descriptor of reality, right? That's when Einstein came along, for instance. So I guess that's the way I look at it. Overall. Now it's not, I'm not saying the only thing I know is I know nothing at all. Knowledge serves no purpose, but I think Aristotle said,
The purpose of knowledge is not knowledge, it's action. So that these structures we create need to ground out in some practical change in how we engage with the world. Otherwise, they're not useful. And then we also have to, and in that way, I would kind of think my based on all that, I kind of think maybe we can't have a theory of everything.
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I could maybe keep reaching and always have a theory of everything, but I don't know that we'll ever hit the bottom and be like, Oh, this is a, this piece of knowledge and codes everything about reality. I don't know that that's even possible. Yeah, I agree. And there's some mathematical reasons why that's not the case. I'm sure you've heard of girdles and completeness theorem. Yeah. The question is, well, if physics is embedded in math and math is incomplete, then is the whole physical enterprise and the whole theory of everything enterprise a doomed one? Well, maybe we
that's why i think even defining what a theory of everything is a treacherous endeavor because maybe we just want a theory of most and that's good enough or we want who knows man who knows i'm so torn i oscillate so frequently on this who is someone historically that you would like to have interviewed okay on your top two or three list that's dead that's no longer around oh that's ten wow well mises right off the bat um you know the
most profound writer and thinker in Austrian economics as far as I can tell. I mean, there's a lot, but he's really, really stands out to me. Plato. I mean, that guy's after going through, I went through the Republic recently with John Breveke and this other book. Yeah. Plato is super interesting thinker. I would love, love to have talked to, um,
I would love to have talked with Jesus of Nazareth.
Or, oh, never mind. I thought it was, I was thinking of a different one. Von Neumann, you may have heard of Von Neumann machines, which is the idea that there can be extraterrestrials that send out probes and those probes self replicate and it just.
Okay, so let's imagine you have two cars and they're going toward each other 50 miles per hour each. They're initially, let's say, 50 miles apart.
or let's say 100 miles apart. Okay, so there are 100 miles apart going at each other at 50 miles per hour. Then there's a fly who is at the tip of one of these cars. And he deftly moves at 200 miles per hour, like quick 200. But this is important 200 miles per hour from the tip of this guy's car to the next one. As soon as he hits the next one, he goes to this one. But then this initial one has traveled some bit. So then he goes to the next one. And that one has traveled a bit until the cars crash.
Then the question is, well, how far did the fly travel? Okay, so you can do this infinite series where you have an infinite series, so it's a difficult one to compute. You have to use pen and paper. Or you can realize that there's a trick. Okay, these cars are coming at each other at 50 miles per hour. That's akin to one of them standing still and the other going at 100 miles per hour.
How far were they initially? 100 miles apart. Okay, so it takes them one hour to collide. This fly travels at 200 miles per hour. So then it's only traveled for one hour. So it's traveled 200 miles. There's a trick. Okay, so someone said this to von Neumann. And then von Neumann said, almost like in two seconds, he's like, Okay, 200. The answer is 200. They're like, Oh, you know this trick. And then he's like, What trick? I just summed the infinite series. And you're like, Oh, gosh.
She's cheese cheese. People would say they'd be working on problems for like weeks or days and he would come in and just offhandedly say the answer. So he's someone I would just like to speak to. That's funny that the heuristic you could maybe make it even simpler in that.
You know, the cars were traveling for one hour, you know, the fly goes 200 miles an hour. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just hilarious that he's like, oh, I just summed it. That's incredible. I could see that in that series in my mind, but there's no way I could ever sum that up. And then as for a third person, I don't know. I don't know. So what about so of guests that you've had, are there any particular conversations that really stand out to you that
that I don't know have been especially popular or impactful for you. Yeah, I think most of them are and that it's more difficult like they're just a few that haven't been so it's easier to me to point out that these ones were just home drum conversations but then that's rude for me to say oh yeah these five people I don't know I don't know how to I just say most of them are how about for you do you find that almost each one is extremely impactful or they're just a few
Well, there's so I mean, it spans. It's a wide spectrum for me. But again, I'm trying to have conversations that are fascinating. Sometimes. Like, especially when we get into the political dimensions of Bitcoin, I'm less I'm just less engaged politically. I kind of think. Well, the way I see it is. So what do we have in and you have to be clear with your definition of politics?
One definition is it's kind of like the ethics of distributed cognition. So we have, we're solving a lot of problems in the world through by connecting our minds to other people. You know, a lot of this is the marketplace itself. There's an argument to be made. Well, okay. That distributed computing system needs an ethical component, obviously to be, you know, to serve humans.
So if you mean politics in that sense, I'm I'm sympathetic to that like yeah, of course we need ethical systems, you know legal systems and whatnot but The over emphasis on the political dimensions of our characters individually and collectively I this idea that you know your views and my views are different so we need to go like shout it out on Twitter to try and
one of us emerge victorious to then create the rules that the rest of us need to follow. I think that is a product of the fiat currency complex. Like we're trying to get way too many competing interests under one umbrella. Whereas in reality, these people should just live in separate states. They should just, you should have more optionality in terms of locating yourself within a jurisdiction. But the reason we don't have that is because of
federal government overgrowth, which is rooted in the corruption of money itself, that we can keep printing more money to fund these programs that otherwise could not exist. So that's why I'm not like, I think in a Bitcoin eyes world, and this is a whole rabbit hole conversation, we moved from a world today, we have like almost 200 nation states. I think we move into a world that has something more like 20,000
Have people said you need to have on more socialists or more Marxists?
I should talk to some, because what I've never heard a socialist or Marxist do is refute the Austrian argument that you can't compute price signals. So if you can't do that, then how do you allocate capital? I've never heard even a slightly viable response to that question. Instead, it just spins off into these epic fantasies of, you know, if I was the one in charge,
I could somehow make the socialist utopia a reality. We never had real socialism before, but I think that is just hubristic to the maximum. You're somehow the special individual that can solve the human organizational problem that no one's ever been able to solve. By, you know, concentrating power into the hands of a few, just don't think that works. Yeah, though, interestingly enough, there are some anarchist socialists. So for instance, well, anarchist syndicist or syndicalist,
is chomsky and someone that i know i'll try and tiptoe around this someone i know closely is as radical left uses the term radical left so i'm not disparaging as you can be
And she was saying, yeah, no, it has to be anarchistic. Like our whole enterprises has to be anarchistic. And I was thinking, how the heck, what are you talking about? As far as I know, it's all, it starts with a larger government or it starts by you petitioning to the government to do so and so. So if you're anarchistic, shouldn't you be reeling from that and align yourself a bit more with the libertarians? So I don't know, but I haven't studied this much. And when I put out on Twitter, I said, I would like to do a podcast on the potential of a large upcoming recession slash crash and what that even means.
And what to do about it, practically what to do about it for people who are of the 99% and so on. Someone said, yeah, but are you going to get on someone who challenges this capitalistic system? And what I think is much of the time they have this idea of a capitalist who if they were to speak to that capitalist would say, we don't have a capitalist system. You're telling me that I like the status quo. They have this idea, but then also the capitalists have this idea of what a socialist is.
and then you have people like Richard Wolff who said that's not like me and here's actually what I believe. It's all so complex and I'm just like here with my pen and paper and just like give me some, let me stick to the partition function and Wilson loops and so on. It's much more simple, at least it's much more simple in terms of these are variables I can control. Yes, well I try and transcend that debate by just talking about statism
versus i've been calling it sovereignism like you could historically call this capitalism just pure capitalism but we've never had that there's never been pure capitalism because capitalism basically means it's life liberty and property right you you own yourself you go into the world and create things that a value that you also own other people do the same thing and then you trade with people to create more wealth but the problem is that
violence and theft has always been a viable wealth acquisition strategy. So you can never have that idealized world so long as there's any form of violence or coercion. And so I think the real trick in the world is to create systems that make violating property rights more expensive. And if you get more expensive than you're making, you know, theft and violence, a less viable wealth acquisition strategy,
and that leaves people the only other option that leaves people with them is long-term trade cooperation innovation all these things that we engage these modes of engagement that are consensual versus non-consensual like you know taxation theft war all these things are non-consensual forms of exchange and so yeah i i'm very partial to the capitalist that would say no this is not a capitalistic system because if you understand what a central bank is
The central bank is an anti-capitalistic organization. It does not emerge on the free market, right? It's forcefully inserted by the monopolist on violence, which is the state and it's used to control monetary policy, which is the same thing as saying it's used to steal from people. It's used to steal from people through inflation. So anyone that says this is late stage capitalism doesn't understand central banking at all.
Central Banking actually comes straight out of Marx's 1848 manifesto to the Communist Party. Measure number five centralized state monopoly over cash and credit. It's not capitalistic, does not emerge on the free market. No one consensually accepts it. So yeah, this is not, we've never seen, and I hate to say this because it's the same argument socialists use.
We've had enough socialism to know that price signals can't be generated, capital cannot be allocated intelligently, and then you're left with just might is right, basically. That's what socialism devolves into. It doesn't have the distributed computing and allocation capabilities that capitalism does. But capitalism has been so beat up, that term, you can't use it or you get into this endless
dance so i try to just i've been writing this series called sovereignism or you just honor the life liberty property of the individual and then let everyone else self-organize so you never bring coercion to bear other than to protect life liberty and property and this is not a new idea this is this was what king john signed in 1215 when he signed the magna carta they said life liberty inviolable property this is the scope of government anything beyond this is
Is nonsense for government to be involved with so yeah, it's extremely complex extremely complex and it gets into the economics of Violence and force really it's like we're it's physics. Ultimately if if you can project power Physical power in a certain way to steal someone else's wealth Then you're gonna do that, right? That's what states do. That's what that's what militaries are and
Inversely, if you can make it really hard to take someone's wealth by force, then we pour ourselves into a new incentive schema where the best way to acquire wealth is through trade and cooperation. The big hope of Bitcoin is that it pushes the world
in that direction, because it's very expensive to steal Bitcoin.
Well, uh, making something expensive is a disincentive to use it or an incentive to use substitutes, right? So you don't use the word disincentive because the word disincentive is broader than making it expensive. Expensive implies disincentive, but disincentive doesn't imply. Okay. Yes, correct. Yeah. Yeah. There are different types of disincentives other than cost, but you can also put it all under the rubric of risk, you know, make it risky to violate property. That's in terms of
It's either going to cost you more or there might be retribution, you might get hurt or it might backfire or whatever it is. So making property more risky to violate is a big push for humans towards productive cooperative behavior and away from destructive behavior. I don't like, well, not that I don't like, but I have issues when people say everything is political.
And that tends to come from the activist side. I don't hear it much on the activist right side. I hear it on the activist left side, though maybe they say just as much. Well, the last thing I'll say about the politics is what I see in the world is a lot of people yelling and fighting amongst themselves. But what do they like zoom it all the way out? What are they doing? They're saying I think these rules
should be the rules in play. And I think money that the state is stealing through taxation and inflation should be used to fund the imposition of these rules on others. So if you're like, okay, wait a minute, if it really happened in that situation is the people you're trying to impose rules on, they should just fork off and be their own other society, right, then you don't have the cost of enforcing these rules. And there's nothing there's no political
Is there a connection between cryptocurrency
not bitcoin in particular but cryptocurrency and consciousness or physics well uh i look at all cryptos that are not bitcoin as basically a scam okay then choose bitcoin it doesn't matter to me i just want to know is there a connection
Is there a connection between Bitcoin and consciousness? And the reason is that I would like to learn more about cryptocurrencies and explore it on the podcast. But I have such a let's paradoxically call it a narrow view of a theory of everything. So like I'm narrowly focused on everything. And so that means that I, I spent all my almost all my time thinking about
Well, what are the different toes and how do they relate and consciousness and so on that if I'm to investigate Bitcoin in particular on the podcast it would need to be it would need to have some direct maybe even causal relationship with consciousness and it does have a relationship with math clearly because it's based in math but also physics like like is there something about the laws of physics or the way that cryptocurrencies work that can be used as a machine learning model for the way that the universe may have began and so you understand you understand I don't know so
It's a hard question for me. I think consciousness is one of the most mysterious words there is. We, as a species, don't seem to have much idea what it is. I have no clue, frankly. The way I will try to answer your question is money is at least a really important perceptual apparatus. I've brought up the term price signals a lot, but we think through money.
Alright, it's almost like we when you see and this is stock markets, right? You're looking at the prices of things changing. You don't know the story behind that. You don't know the natural disasters or the new production utilities or the new trade agreements that led to that price. All you know is the price and you know, often in markets, they say price is truth. So it's like the ultimate
Economic telecommunications device, the pricing system, and this is again what allocates capital intelligently in a capitalistic marketplace, a thing that socialism cannot do. Well, all of that communication is occurring through money, right? We're speaking through dollars or whatever currency it is. So I don't know that there's a relationship between money and consciousness per se, but there's at least one between money and perception.
like it radically, it lets us see the world through the eyes of others. Yeah. There may be a relationship between perception and reality. Yes. So everyone involved with the, the cotton price goes up. That's interesting. Seeing the world through all the eyes of cotton producers and consumers and where the market is clearing up. That's extremely interesting.
data compression mechanism, right? You can see the eyes of so many people in one number. Okay. So when you say price, I'm translating in my head to worth, but you're, you, you say, no, don't price is an exchange ratio. So instead of saying this house costs 11 cars, right? Because everything trades at some ratio of everything else. You say house is $440,000.
Okay, I don't think I should have used the word worth. What I meant was
Where should one spend their attention? Spend. As soon as you say the word spend, then you think of it as a commodity. As soon as you think of it as that, you think of it as something with a number and that some are valued higher. So you think of it on an ordered number line.
So something with an echelon, so then you can decide what to pay attention to some things and not others, and that's influenced by price. I need to work through this. But it's extremely interesting. I never thought about that before, about how price influences perception. But perception, to me, I'm not convinced of this, but there are arguments, convincing arguments, or let's say potentially convincing arguments, that there's a relationship between perception and reality. There's certainly a relationship between perception and consciousness.
So thank you for giving me that man. Happy to do it. And there's, it's, again, there's reciprocal feedback, though, because all this, this distillation of market actions gets compressed into the price. But then the price is also informing all those market actors what to do, right? So if the price is up, then I'm going to consume less, produce more, and vice versa if it's down. So it's this feedback
You're talking about centralization, decentralization earlier. It's like everything centralizes to the price, but then it informs the decentralized actions of all those market participants. And so it's really, it's just like a never ending feedback loop. And that's probably how cognition works in some way. I'm not, you know, I'm not super familiar on this, but again, I would call that distributed cognition. Yeah.
I would imagine the individual cognitive network works some
in some ways similar to that. We also certainly sexual selection works like that. Have you heard of assortative dating? No. The studies on it where you put a number on your head and no one knows their own number, but they're all looking at each other. You've seen studies like this or you've heard of this? Okay, so you get people in a room and general and you say like, who do you want to make out with something like that, like choose a partner that you're willing to make out with. We're not going to get you to make out with them, but choose someone you're willing to make out with. Generally, the people who are best looking pair up with one another. And then it just goes down to
the worst-looking people.
If your number is three, you look at someone else and you're able to judge unconsciously the way that they look at you and someone else who is a ten would look at you as a three and not want to join you. Somehow they unconsciously know their own number and then they pair up with numbers that match each other even though you don't know your own number. Wow.
and the reason i was saying that i forget there's a point to this well anyway the fact that you're evaluated as a number and then that has such meaning that means that well price is there's a relationship between price and value i know that you didn't want to say price and worth and but there is a relationship there is there so austrian economists would say that all value the process of valuation it's always a matter of
we're
like something in pricing is something you can compare and say, this is $50 to $5. It's not ordinal. So the pricing system is converting ordinal value expression into a cardinal numeral system. And so that's very useful that you're kind of converting qualitative, something qualitative, right? Which is just preference into something that's quantitative, which is a price. And so it lets us engage in this distributed compute.
Okay, so we'll just leave it with one big question here. Is there a guess or conversation that took you down an unexpected path that you are currently going down and if so, what is that path?
Well, I guess thinking about a lot recently. Yeah, like I mentioned, they're easier for me to find people who were dull than that were engaging. But the last two, so Ian McGilchrist and Tim Maudlin. So Tim Maudlin, I talked to him about interpretations of quantum mechanics.
and that made me he doesn't call this interesting he doesn't call what physicists study in undergrad or graduate studies or even phd level he doesn't call that quantum theory he calls that quantum mechanics or quantum field theory but he doesn't like to use the word theory because to him theory means that you have to know what you're talking about it's not just the mathematical description you need to have an ontology as well or show how this math relates to what is so
That's why he includes, as soon as you have an interpretation of quantum mechanics on top of quantum mechanics, then you have a quantum theory. At least this is his terminology. Okay, so that's interesting. And I personally, I like mathematics. And I think that much can be gleaned from the well, not much, plenty can be gleaned from the mathematics to the interpretation. Speaking with him, I'm less certain about that. And I'm
Much more interested now in interpretations of quantum mechanics. And so maybe I'll dedicate an entire section of the book to interpretations of quantum mechanics, because I'd like to understand them more. Okay, so that's a rabbit hole I'm going down that I thought I had explored, but I'm realizing it was vacuous. So I'm interested in that.
Then with Ian McGillchrist, well, he just bangs on all cylinders of my consciousness, philosophy. See, I think that there are these people who label themselves as skeptics. I don't think you should label yourself as a skeptic. I think that you should be an open-minded investigator of what is, and not a skeptic. That includes some paradigm-agnostic inquiries. You're open to other definitions of what is, is.
so sometimes they have these self-evident truths i don't think being or what is simple and also when people talk about god i'm super interested in in different definitions of god and i happen to think that whenever anyone says god is so-and-so like they come up with a definition i think it's false i think that anything that you place into that blank of god is so-and-so will automatically demean it and it's akin to constructing an idol
But anyway, so Ian McGilchrist banks on all of those cylinders. I'm just wrestling with those. It's super, super fun. And it's super destabilizing as well. So it's not fun. Like, geez. Fun and not fun. Yeah, it's not fun. Good paradox. It's right. I want to tell you one more paradox, if you don't mind. It's just one that I heard the other day and I thought, this is super fun. So it's called, I don't know what it's called, like the surprise paradox. It goes like a teacher says there's going to be a surprise test.
You will be surprised. That's the condition. It's a school teacher. So it's Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, not the weekends. Okay. And it's next week. You're going to be surprised next week. There's a test coming up. So the students then confer with each other. They're like, oh shoot, when, when, when is it going to be? They think, you know what, if it is going to be a surprise, it can't be Friday. Why? Because by Thursday evening, if we hadn't had the test, we know it's tomorrow. So we're certain it's tomorrow. It's no longer a surprise. Okay. Now we've ruled out Friday.
By that same logic, we can rule out Thursday. And then by the same logic, we can rule out Wednesday. By the same logic, we can rule out Tuesday. By the same logic, we can rule out Monday. There's not going to be a surprise test next week. It's impossible. Then the teacher comes. So that's already interesting. But then the teacher comes and at noon on Wednesday, they get a test. And she's like, surprise. So everything the teacher said came true. There was a surprise test.
because they had ruled out the fact that there would be a surprise and the question is well how is this all possible like where's the flaw in this logic and this apparently has been debated again for decades and decades it's something that i i'm thinking about too so that's what i'm thinking about so there's something about expectation in these paradox in the last example too i don't know well it's
Quite the trip to think about, to say the least.
Yeah, I don't know how much of what we're doing even here is like a sin because we're just muddying the waters by speaking. I have intimations of that, but I also am not fully convinced that there's two routes to go. I'll end with this. There are two routes. You can make the case that
Languages just pragmatic is just use. And that's the Wittgenstein case. And I think to me, that's the easiest case to make. I'm of the position that the easiest case to make is, well, the Primrose path is usually one that has that's false in some manner. So I don't, it could be the case, like sometimes there's just an easy answer. It's like Lockham's razor, right? Just languages for utility.
Yeah, and there are issues with Occam's Razor, too. We can talk about that another time. But anyway, like people love, Tim Modelin talks about this. He's like, if you think there's a single adage that can get you to choose between two theories, like you're mistaken, that's not how the world works. And also, then you wonder, well, what's an assumption? If you just put an and between two assumptions, is that now one assumption? If I say God did it? Is that one assumption? Or is that like 50 assumptions? Is God one or 50? Like, who knows what an assumption is? Anyway,
So there's the case to be made that language is just for use and that it's not meant to investigate these metaphysical questions or there's the case that we need more
Explicit language a more explicated language. So more differentiation rather than more unity And I don't know as the analytic part and the experiential part of me are torn in different directions And I think maybe there's a third option or fourth like we just keep breaking it down analytically experientially Are those the two? Is there a third? Is there a multitude? Is there 12? There's something holy about the number 12. So I tend to like that. So just mystically it's fun 12, but
i don't know anyway it's good good talking with you man oh yeah and if people are interested in the sorts of questions that i ask here or the sorts of topics that we raised here then visit theories of everything type that in into youtube into spotify itunes and so on and you'll browse through the guest list there's quite a few there's chompsky he's been on seven times eight times he's coming up again
And then there's Tim Maudlin and Stephen Wolfram and Eric Weinstein and Jordan Peterson though Jordan Peterson interviewed me much like you that was that must have been like must be like oh man this is so cool yeah it's like the largest platform I've been on so I was super nervous during that but anyway thanks man yeah Kurt thank you so much really enjoyed this conversation hope we do it again
The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc.
It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " This is an auxiliary episode where Robert Breedlove of the What Is Money podcast interviewed me for his show. We talk about various logical paradoxes and what it's like to run theories of everything. Robert Breedlove is a digitally fluent finance and operations executive, a philosopher and an author,"
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"text": " with a broad spectrum of leadership experience across technology, finance, and wealth management. He's a freedom maximalist with innovative insights on Bitcoin, investments, and poverty alleviation. Enjoy today's auxiliary episode where Robert Breedlove interviews Kurt Jaimungal, that is me. Kurt Jaimungal, welcome to the What is Money show. Thanks for inviting me. Great to have you here just by way of quick introduction for my audience."
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"text": " You are a filmmaker who decided to pursue filmmaking while studying mathematical physics at the University of Toronto. You are the host of the very popular Theories of Everything. You observe topics on theoretical physics, consciousness, God, free will, all the profound questions that we tend to outwardly ignore but inwardly wrestle with. Theories of Everything is one of the fastest growing science and philosophy podcasts."
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"text": " it analyzes the current state of theories of everything that is a surveillance of the field theories of everything pros cons and the relations of each to be a part of the discussion type theories of everything oh this is your i was reading an intro for you and it sounds like that last part is not part of what i should read so theories of everything"
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"text": " very cool podcast with a lot of interesting guests and fascinating conversations. What I thought we would do today is just talk about your experience, starting the show, running the show, hosting the show. I'm really curious just individually as one one podcast or two another. And then also, I wanted to get a sense for like how much it's changed you, you know, because I know that"
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"text": " doing this show, talking to a lot of big thinkers has certainly had an influence on me. So I wanted to get a feel for that for you. So just to get started, maybe you could tell my audience a little bit about yourself a little bit about your podcast and how your journey brought you into this field. Sure."
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"text": " My name is Kurt, as you have heard already, and I have a podcast called theories of everything. What it is, it's more of a project than a podcast. And what I mean is that I'm interested in toes. So that's the acronym for theories of everything. I stumbled upon"
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"text": " The theories of everything podcast in my effort to learn more about tells a theory of everything. First of all, well, what the heck is it? That's not easy to define because there's some controversy there. Some people take the word everything to mean everything. And then some people try to define, well, what is a thing? So that's Carl Friston's approach and Jacques Vallee has an approach like that. What the heck does it mean for there to be a thing and then every of it?"
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"text": " Well, initially what I meant was quantum mechanics and then quantum field theory and then gravity, which is general relativity, combining them is considered to be a toe. And then it's synonymized sometimes with grand unified theories, but those are actually separate. I'm interested in those as well."
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"text": " As I wanted to learn more about theories of everything, some people said consciousness is involved quantum mechanically, but perhaps even more fundamentally than that. At first, being the person who came from an academic background and just learned math and physics, I was someone who excoriated that view as being generally one of mystics who misunderstand quantum mechanics and like to use the word quantum to give some scientific credence to whatever they're espousing mystically."
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"text": " But as I started investigating it more and more, I'm less and less certain about virtually everything. You wanted to know how did it change me. Well, it put me in this void where I tumble and it's not exactly a pleasant place to be. So on the podcast, I also investigate consciousness. What role does that have to play with regard to the fundamental laws? And is the conceptualization of fundamental laws the correct conceptualization? Because that implies reductionism and maybe that's not the correct paradigm. So I'm interested in that as well. How about your podcast? What got you started with yours, man?"
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"text": " I assume it's not just about money. I looked through your guest list. Some of these people have nothing. Well, maybe tangentially have some views on money. Yeah, we definitely get into the nature of money. So it gets quite philosophical because the history of human beings and the history of humanity are pretty tightly bound. What started got me started on the show was I have an accounting and finance background."
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"text": " And I had basically started a company to work for myself. Initially, it was a CFO consulting services. But when I started that company, it freed me up to investigate a lot of new things. This was late 16, early 17. And so I started looking, learning about crypto, really. And long story short, one thing led to another, ended up way down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and then operating a hedge fund in the space for a number of years."
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"text": " And during that time, I was writing monthly updates to my investors. And I also started publishing like research findings just on the history of money and whatnot. And these things were becoming popular. My written work is becoming popular in Bitcoin circles. And I got invited on a podcast to talk about it. Those podcasts were popular. And so once again, kind of one thing led to another and people were telling me they wanted more, right? More writing, more talking."
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"text": " And so I just jumped on the bandwagon and started a podcast. Uh, I got really lucky. My first guest was Michael sailor came on for so man talk about a first guest, you know, dynamite guests and you know, I, I guess part of the interaction with him and then also just other things going on in life, I really started to want to focus on education."
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"text": " I just decided I was getting more more meaning out of that. And so the podcast is a great way to help, you know, educate people about things to learn really, I don't I don't even like to say education necessarily, because on the podcast, I'm basically learning, right? I'm learning from these other guests, we're engaging in dialogue, trying to get to truth on some particular topic."
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"text": " And you're really just letting your audience observe that dialogical process in a way. So I've called it learning out loud, you know, as opposed or as education sort of sounds like I have some final answer that I'm trying to sell to an audience, which I don't really, I'm just, you know, it's exploratory, strong opinions loosely held, as they say. But yeah, that's it in a nutshell for me. Yeah. So you went to school for finance and accounting?"
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"text": " Coming in finance, yeah. Add a bit of a background about it. Yes, we do. The other part of your question, we talk about way more than just money. You know, money is this tool that we use to like, establish consensus on the relativity of exchange values, for instance. So it's got these informational components, it's got energy components. It's got a component. When you look at property rights, I think it's something like"
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"text": " The way human beings express territoriality, you know, like all, most social animals are territorial. Humans have just enshrined it in this, this institution called private property and money is the most important form of private property. So we talk about a lot of other things. We go down a lot of rabbit holes through that, um, to get back to you. So I, I wonder, it was the title, the theory theories of everything."
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"text": " The first time I heard that term was, I think I read the book by Stephen Hawking. Pretty sure he has a theory of everything that I read when I was young. So I wanted to ask you about the inspiration for the title. And then also you were saying your, your interaction with your guests has made you less sure of everything, which is interesting, right? It's almost, I find that happening with me as well, that I've become much more, uh, I have a much greater affinity for Socrates when he said the only thing I know is that I have nothing at all."
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"text": " Yeah. I also think that he did claim to know some things. So firstly, he was a theist. He believed strongly in the gods. And there was something else that he believed. Him saying, I know nothing was popularized as his main phrase, but I don't know if that's what he truly believed. But anyway, I agree, except I don't want to know nothing. It's not a pleasure. Like I said, it's not pleasant."
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"text": " So I try to minimize that, but I just can't help but being shaken terribly from time to time. Okay, the name theories of everything that comes from the physics term. It's a physics term. And so it means what are the laws that we can write down mathematically that can predict every other observable phenomenon in a physical sense, materialist sense. You don't need to insert the word material there because it turns out science is"
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"text": " philosophically agnostic despite most scientists thinking that it proves or claims or assumes materialism it doesn't but anyway how can you predict any phenomenon or show that whatever we see here at a large scale so for instance that this is derived from something that's more fundamental and then also it'd be great if this theory could be yield new predictions and be falsifiable that's pretty much what the word theory of everything means and like i mentioned technically it's gravity and quantum field theory but but it's taken to be a bit more than that now"
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"text": " Okay, now I want to talk to you a little bit about paradoxes, if you don't mind. Yeah, one of my favorite words. So have you heard of Newcom's paradox? I don't think so. It's a money paradox. And in case you're interested, I'm writing a book on paradoxes. I'm writing a book on paradoxes slash free will and consciousness, basically the subjects of the Toe podcast."
},
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"text": " And I'm doing so because I forget so much of it, like from one podcaster to another, I study voraciously for different guests. And then I end up forgetting it about one month later, almost all of what I've studied, because it's much like I'm cramming for an exam or a test. And then I have to move on to the next course. And I don't like that. I feel like a fool. And there's so much else that I need to know. And I need to remember, I need to have the stepping stones and then constantly removing the stepping stones or they're just disappearing behind me."
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"text": " So as an effort for me to remember more, I'm writing a book. Well, anyway, who knows if this book will even be released, but either way, I'm writing a book. So paradoxes, there's a paradox called Newcombe's paradox. And what it is is, okay, imagine there's a genie. Okay. So there's genie and he has two boxes in front of you. And he says one box is transparent, made out of glass. So you can see what's inside. And the other is a safe. It's made out of metal. You can't see what's inside."
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"text": " Transparency"
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"text": " As soon as you entered this room, I scanned your brain. I'm like a supercomputer. I'm like God. I predicted whether you will choose both. Like you're gonna have the choice. Do you want both boxes to take home or do you want just the safe? Okay, now if the genie says, I've predicted. Well, I'm not gonna tell you my prediction, but here's what the rules are. If you take both, there will be nothing in the safe. So I'm gonna punish you for being greedy. But if you just choose the safe,"
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"text": " I think the conditions are clear, but isn't it obvious that you just"
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"text": " Well, I guess if you believe the genie, you would just take the metal box. Right, right. Okay, now here's where there's some conflict. Because as a rational being who wants to maximize the amount of money you have, when you enter the room, there's two, this is why it gets into the tricky subjects of rationality, which people think is so clear cut, it's not. And same with free will, there's two different kinds of decision theory. So there's causal, it doesn't matter, there's names for these one where you want to maximize the amount of money you have. And then the other"
},
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"end_time": 882.278,
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"text": " where you just think about, well, what does the evidence lead me to believe? Okay. So the evidence leads you to believe that, hey, this genie has done this many, I didn't say this, but has done this thousands of times and is always correct. He always predicts correctly. So, and he said he's infallible. I'm going to believe him. This is the voice of God. I'm going to just choose this one safe. Okay. But then the causal decision theory says, well,"
},
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"end_time": 906.51,
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"text": " I'm all the genie has already made up his mind. The money is either there or not. So then the other point of view is look, I've entered this place, the money is either in the safe or not. So no matter what, there's either a million dollars there, or there's nothing, I may as well take both boxes. So I can get a million plus 1000. Or I can get maybe there's nothing in the box. Let me just take both. So that's the paradox. Well, which one do you do?"
},
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"end_time": 935.589,
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"start_time": 907.483,
"text": " It's interesting. The point is, if you want to maximize the amount of money, what do you do? That's essentially the question. What do you do? Yeah, so it's drawing this line between the two forms of rationality you described. One is enhancing or maximizing your expected value, which would be to take both boxes, versus what does the evidence lead you to believe? I guess the other embedded presupposition there is"
},
{
"end_time": 965.691,
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"text": " If the, it's almost like the genie already either did put the money in the box or not. Yeah. Yeah. I should have said that. That is the case. The genie has put the money or hasn't already. Oh, it has. You came in, he made that decision. Okay. And then he placed money in there without you looking. Got it. I was just saying the genie, he could make it appear or vanish based on your decision. No, it's already there. So now, now that you know that, what would you do, Robert? Well, I guess if I'm talking to a genie, I believe he's a genie."
},
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"end_time": 996.067,
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"start_time": 966.493,
"text": " I'm probably going to believe the guy, but, um, that the devil's kind of in the details for what makes you believe. Okay. So now here's a variation on that same problem. Okay. You can advise your friend. So there's still the genie, the whole setup, except now it's your friend coming in and it's not you. You're standing behind the box. So remember the box, this one is transparent and then this one is opaque. Okay. Well, you're now on this side. So you can see the transparent one, just like your friend can see the transparent one."
},
{
"end_time": 1014.155,
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"start_time": 997.159,
"text": " But on the other side of the safe, there's some glass, so you can actually see whether the genie put in the money or not. Now, you would always tell your friend, just take both boxes. Because you can see, you can see either there's money in there or there's not, so just take both boxes."
},
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"end_time": 1041.408,
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"start_time": 1014.497,
"text": " every time the decision is just take both boxes, because you can see it. Then the question is, well, why does that make a difference at all? Wow, that's a great question. Anyway, it's just for me, I think about this and I have to stop, I have to tell myself to stop and like I have OCD and these intrusive thoughts now and have to do meditation and mindfulness. So I don't think about it. That's a really interesting one, actually, because I Yeah, you. Well, I guess what so the takeaway there is always make"
},
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"end_time": 1060.145,
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"text": " always maximize expected value this is like poker right if you're trying if you're playing really high if you're playing poker to high level you're basically always trying to make positive expected value calculations so it sounds like that yeah so this case that you should just always take both boxes no matter what the genie says"
},
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"end_time": 1088.951,
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"text": " Yeah, but it's strange because the genie is right and there shouldn't be any money in the first box if you're going to take both boxes. So what's the resolution to this paradox? There is none. This is something that's been debated for I think decades and there are proposed solutions and then people find errors with those solutions and this continues on and on. So there's also the question of on the theories of everything podcast, we talk about UFOs sometimes and people are like, well, why do you why the heck do you care about UFOs and evidence and so on and so on?"
},
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"end_time": 1113.148,
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"text": " the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so on. Well, firstly, evidence is not clear cut. Secondly, it's not as if there's a difference between extraordinary evidence and regular evidence. As Brian says, it's not like he's an experimental physicist. He's like, there's no box that I tell my graduate students, okay, now let's get the extraordinary evidence put in the extraordinary evidence box. But and then there's some paradoxes when it comes to what constitutes evidence."
},
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"text": " So I don't know how to say them without seems like to though, because if you did just trust the genie and only take the metal box, but the money was not in the box and wasn't when the genie be lying at that moment, then you would have gotten 1 million. But I thought he already decided what is in there or not. He calculates as soon as you come in, he calculates he reads your brain and he knows what decision you're going to make. So if he knows that you're going to take just the safe, there will just be $1 million in the safe."
},
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"end_time": 1161.903,
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"start_time": 1139.974,
"text": " And if he thinks you're going to if he knows that you're going to take both, then he will make sure there's zero. Then he doesn't do anything. So if he knows you're only going to take the metal box and he puts the million dollars in the box and then your friend is standing on the other side of the box telling you to just take both anyways, because there's a million and one. That's where the paradox is like, I guess your friend doesn't know the rules of the game, otherwise wouldn't be telling you to take"
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"text": " Well, right then and there, if he tells you to take both, that's what's so tricky about this, is that as soon as another person observes it, does this, why does that make a difference? Why the heck would that make a difference at all? Anyway, yeah, we can continue to talk about that for like, for hours. My brain first thing in the day here. Yeah, that's a really interesting one. So your book is going to be about this then, right? Writing, exploring paradoxes, free will, consciousness, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 1222.125,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1192.824,
"text": " Yeah, I like to do that. And then secondly, well, firstly, it's fun. I'm sure you have fun on your podcast. Maybe that's the first the primary reason you do it. And for me, and I'm sure for you, you would be doing what you're doing if you had all the money in the world. Well, maybe all the money in the world, you would maybe help out different causes and so on. But you understand. Yeah, it's it's a very fulfilling occupation and one that came about pretty quite organically. You know, it's not something I ever"
},
{
"end_time": 1240.896,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1222.585,
"text": " chose myself, which is interesting. So that evolves over time. But yeah, I love to read. I love to talk about big ideas. And now I get to do that for a living. So it's it's pretty incredible. What was your inspiration originally for for starting theories of everything? I"
},
{
"end_time": 1268.865,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1241.22,
"text": " Wanted to learn Donald Hoffman's theories. So if you've heard of Donald Hoffman, yeah, okay. So I've read him on the show. He makes many claims about consciousness and people just take it as and say, wow, that's so profound. And I'm thinking, okay, but he's tying this to some mathematics. I have a background in math. So why don't I just read the papers and then interview him? It doesn't seem like anyone is doing that. So that's what I did. And then I had a great technical interview with him."
},
{
"end_time": 1296.118,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1269.224,
"text": " And people seem to like that because there seemed to be a dearth of that in the podcast space. So I was encouraged by that because I actually like to read papers and I like to not play devil's advocate or pinholes or criticize, but just talk to people and say, here's what occurs to me when you say so-and-so and listen, it's like office hours with a professor. You're allowed to ask whatever questions you like to this intellectual giant. So why don't I just do that and see where this goes? And it ended up taking off."
},
{
"end_time": 1313.404,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1296.408,
"text": " I think this is just the story of podcasts. I don't know of many people who are successful at podcasts. What I mean is that they have a somewhat large podcast that went into it, trying to make a podcast. It's more like what happened upon it. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1341.425,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1314.394,
"text": " Yeah, I'm sure people ask you like what's the advice that you have for a new podcaster? Do you think that is there such a huge element of chance that you would just either have to stumble upon it and be successful or well essentially get lucky or you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, I think I mean my general advice is to do what is interesting to you, right? Like my litmus test for my episodes is I want to have conversations with people that I think I will find interesting and"
},
{
"end_time": 1368.541,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1341.886,
"text": " I have questions I want to answer, you know, for whatever reason. And so if I'm genuinely engaged and hopefully attaining some dialogue with my guests, that that seems to be the magic that people really get into. It's like dialogue, active dialogue about big ideas is almost like a spectator sport where, um, you know, you see two people like when I see Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris debate,"
},
{
"end_time": 1397.858,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1369.104,
"text": " You know, not that a podcast always has to be a debate, but that's one form of dialogue that is, um, exhilarating, right? You're seeing two people kind of pushing the boundaries on their mental models, kind of battling in a way. And then you're a, you're a spectator in that process of challenging your own viewpoints. And, um, you know, whether it's, whether it's a debate format or just a discussion format, I feel like that, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 1419.804,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1399.377,
"text": " that process where you're banging these things together, you're reaching for unexplored territory, you know, trying to get a misconception brought into the world of knowledge or common consensus somehow that seems to be the sport that is that is podcasting or dialogue. So I try and just, yeah, try to aim for people that I"
},
{
"end_time": 1448.37,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1420.145,
"text": " think are interesting to talk to about ideas I want to learn about. I think Plato had the first podcast. It's just before there were podcasts and he had the dialogical forum with Socrates and so on. And I think that's what podcasts are and are an extension of that. We're all just so in a sense, we're all following Rogan. But in another sense, we're all following Plato. No, that's a great framing. I've said that podcasts is like the resurgence of dialogue in the digital age, because in the 20th century, we had a very"
},
{
"end_time": 1478.695,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1449.189,
"text": " top down media model, right? When my mom was a kid, I remember saying, all we had were channels three, six, three, nine and 12. I think she said, if the president's on your fucked. So we moved from that model where there's like very few media organs, you know, propagating out to everyone. Yeah, we have this, it's like, it's like from a one mini computer networking model to a mini model. And now, you know, nodes on this distributed network of thought,"
},
{
"end_time": 1506.869,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1479.497,
"text": " I'm curious to ask you, if you don't mind, something I was thinking about is, how far does that go? And what I mean by that is, is there such a thing as too much freedom, too much decentralization? Well, I think it's a good question. And there's definitely trade-offs. You know, there's the old adage that if you want to go far,"
},
{
"end_time": 1536.118,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1508.234,
"text": " If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So if you stick to one centralized plan, right? If someone laid out a plan right now and said, Hey, we need to build spaceships. Everyone in the world needs to build spaceships just full time, flat out. That's what we need to do. That would be like one centralized plan. And if everyone did that, well, we could make a lot of spaceships really quickly, right? We could do it really fast."
},
{
"end_time": 1564.974,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1537.261,
"text": " but I don't think it's sustainable. I don't think like to adhere to a centralized plan over time doesn't seem to be sustainable because what you, what requires everyone to do is to drop their own wants or preferences and follow the central plan. Right. And that's why I think central planning historically has failed many, many times. Um, the libertarian philosopher Hayek made a great point too. He said, even if you could craft the perfect central plan,"
},
{
"end_time": 1594.224,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1566.186,
"text": " and say here's what everyone should do in the world right now to best satisfy everyone else's wants in the most profitable economically efficient way that the moment you put that plan into motion it would start to deviate from reality because reality is always changing so central planning again even if it was the perfect plan for a moment in time it would never it's hard for it to be sustainable over time because reality is always changing the opposite end of that spectrum"
},
{
"end_time": 1619.821,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1594.48,
"text": " It's really central planning versus decentralized planning, right? Because decentralization doesn't mean no planning, it just means each individual plans for themselves, or they engage in, you know, common enterprises, like companies with others, and they make collective plans. But the point is, there's no plan being imposed from on high on you. That's what I think decentralization would kind of be the spirit of."
},
{
"end_time": 1646.169,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1620.794,
"text": " And if you want something that's going to last for a long time, you know, like a mode of human socioeconomic organization, that's going to be sustainable, that's going to go far. I think you have to do it in a decentralized way. Ultimately, there's a great paper on this called the use of knowledge in society by Hayek, same guy I just mentioned. And he makes this argument that, you know, knowledge"
},
{
"end_time": 1675.367,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1647.602,
"text": " sort of emerges everywhere and at local scales and it's it it's utility diminishes right like you get local knowledge that's useful right then and there but if you had to pass that knowledge to a bureaucracy wait two weeks get approval and then finally comes back and you can do whatever the thing is that really reduces the adaptivity of the marketplace and market actors right they can't act on local fresh knowledge right so it's losing it's losing some value when it goes through"
},
{
"end_time": 1702.551,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1675.794,
"text": " the machinery of bureaucracy, for instance. So I think you want to decentralize as much as possible. Um, but that sort of leaves, leaves out the big central questions like what should we be doing as a society? What should we be optimizing for? Is it GDP? Is it some other metric of human flourishing? You know, et cetera. And,"
},
{
"end_time": 1730.469,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1703.541,
"text": " I think Bitcoin is kind of an interesting animal in that way that it's a decentralized network that doesn't have any political leaders inside of it. Yet it's centered on this motif of 21 million. Like that is kind of the central plan of Bitcoin. It's like no matter what happens, this thing stays at 21 and not 20 or not 100. It's arbitrary. It's arbitrary what the number is. Actually, it's just the fact that it doesn't change."
},
{
"end_time": 1743.558,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1730.708,
"text": " So you have a money that can't cannot be inflated or counterfeited and that's the key could be knows why I mean there's a lot of thinking about why Satoshi chose 21 million."
},
{
"end_time": 1774.599,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1745.179,
"text": " I guess my question about decentralization becomes a question about freedom. In the Marxist circles, I hear them, they also care about freedom, or at least claim to. So it seems like everyone is just pursuing freedom, but then to me, I don't know if freedom is what we"
},
{
"end_time": 1800.964,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1774.94,
"text": " like well how far does freedom go because you have skin now that's a form of a border you have constraints on you with the laws of physics and you want those there you were taught a language and so you didn't choose firstly to be born secondly to learn the values you learn to learn the language that you learned and so there is a form of tyranny of parenting and then there's the laws a fair kind of parenting and i don't like to be around those children and i'm sure most people don't including the parents but"
},
{
"end_time": 1822.329,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1801.254,
"text": " That's because people have this need or have this philosophy that no, I don't want to impose because I don't like when the government imposes, but then they constantly think about in terms of government. So I'm just curious. Well, like how far does this freedom? Do we not need constraints? Jordan Peterson? I'm sure talks about this with order and chaos. You need both. McGill Chris talks about this. There needs to be some constraints as well."
},
{
"end_time": 1849.582,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1822.824,
"text": " The fundamental constraints that none of us know how to throw off are thermodynamics, gravity,"
},
{
"end_time": 1875.623,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1850.128,
"text": " Earth's gravity, every every organisms survival strategy is adapted to Earth's gravity on Earth. Obviously, when we build cars and buildings, they're designed to stay, there's designed to have structural integrity in Earth's gravity. So there are certain restraints. So I guess the question is, what additional manmade restraint should we be placing on ourselves? And"
},
{
"end_time": 1903.541,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1876.118,
"text": " The Rothbardian argument, this is a very strong argument made from the libertarian philosophy, the school of libertarian philosophy. I'm thinking of his book, in particular, The Ethics of Liberty, is that the boundary should be private property. Now you have to understand what property means. It basically means, most fundamentally, you own yourself, you own your own body. And then the things you go into the world and justly acquire"
},
{
"end_time": 1930.657,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1903.899,
"text": " By extension, your own individual self ownership become yours. So when we talk about increasing freedom, I think that is the natural limiting principle is that you want everyone to have maximal freedom to do whatever they want with the limiting principle of other people's person and property, right? Like I should go into the world and accumulate whatever value I need. So long as I don't hurt anyone or steal from anyone."
},
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"end_time": 1952.944,
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"start_time": 1931.834,
"text": " hear that sound? That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person."
},
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"text": " They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms. There's also something called Shopify magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 2009.36,
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"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
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"text": " And that process, if you honor that boundary of private property, the interesting thing about that is that it creates more freedom defined as opening up of option space. So the guy that's on the desert island,"
},
{
"end_time": 2068.729,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2039.616,
"text": " There's a certain things he can't do, right? If he's just there with only his body, he can't really leave the island. He doesn't have a boat or an aircraft. Uh, he can only pick fruit with his hands. He doesn't have tools and whatnot, but what can you do? He can delay gratification, right? Spend less time consuming fish, more time building a fishing rod. And then the next thing you know, he's economized fish production, right? He can catch more fish per hour with a rod than he does with his hands."
},
{
"end_time": 2094.667,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2069.565,
"text": " And then he can spend a bit more time building a boat. All of a sudden he's increasing his option space and how far out to sea he can go. Maybe he can eventually leave the island. And so it's that process, that capitalistic process that creates more freedom in the world, creates more options. For the Marxists out there, I would again point to the Mises critique of socialism, that they basically proved that"
},
{
"end_time": 2123.66,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2095.555,
"text": " socialism doesn't work because it doesn't produce price signals so we can't allocate capital intelligently and that's why it degenerates into this game of just status rhetoric and nonsense and ultimately I would think mass murder again we're all just animals trying to do the best with the assets at hand and if you don't have a price signal and property rights to allocate these things"
},
{
"end_time": 2145.282,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2124.104,
"text": " Intelligently and nonviolently then whatever system you build on top of it degenerates is my my view on that Man, I have many philosophical questions, but I think like we should save it for When you come on my podcast, yeah, yes, I need to ask you some more questions though That's fine. I enjoy this. Well, like here's just some thoughts and maybe I could"
},
{
"end_time": 2175.998,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2145.998,
"text": " How far does that go? How far? Like what the heck does this extreme freedom? Well, we don't want freedom from the physical laws of nature. Well, then also what's the difference between you and a law of nature? Is there a separate separation?"
},
{
"end_time": 2185.93,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2176.544,
"text": " Conversation with this by this mathematician named Raymond Smullion so people can look this up. I basically read it read it aloud on my channel"
},
{
"end_time": 2212.585,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2186.135,
"text": " and it's Raymond Smullian. It's a conversation between man and God and the man is saying to God, why did you give me freedom? I find this to be a huge imposition because I have this huge moral weight to do good and it's not easy to do good and it's impossible to do 100% good. So please remove my freedom. And then God's like, well, why don't I remove the feelings of badness that you have, like the guilt. Then the guy's like, he thinks about it. He's like, well, if you remove that,"
},
{
"end_time": 2233.848,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2212.978,
"text": " then i may commit atrocities in the future and myself now would be responsible for those future atrocities because i'm removing my guilt center then i'm just mad at you for giving me freedom to begin with it's this whole conversation of back it's like a dialogue like a play dough back and forth between a man and god it's so playful raymond smullions this great writer he's dead now"
},
{
"end_time": 2257.5,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2233.848,
"text": " it's one of the people i would like to interview i can't but it then becomes all about well the distinction between you and natural law and what is free will and what is god and what is goodness and is there sin this is why when i read your description if i'm recalling it correctly i liked it because it said something like i explore what is money and the rabbit hole that entails something along the lines of that oh yeah because i think"
},
{
"end_time": 2282.807,
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"start_time": 2257.91,
"text": " that if you explore almost any phenomenon, so for instance, these headphones or this Blistex, it's a chapstick, that if you explore it and you try to understand it completely, it leads you to virtually every other question. You see this in science, where if you want to learn about a butterfly's brain, you need to learn about a lizard's brain, and then you need to learn about evolution, and you need to learn about the whole phylogenetic tree to, well, not the whole, but maybe the whole, if you want to learn"
},
{
"end_time": 2296.903,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2283.029,
"text": " about what put out a thesis on a butterfly's brain then it's extremely interesting because i was speaking to someone named chloe valdry do you know who that is chloe valdry okay well anyway she's more of the consciousness zen mindfulness eastern type"
},
{
"end_time": 2325.316,
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"start_time": 2297.5,
"text": " who was saying, Kurt, I don't like your analytical approach with Toll because it's not going to lead you to answers. You can't have an analytical answer to an experiential problem. I think that that's the case. And I also don't think that what I'm doing with Toll is just analytical. I think that there's something about this format, Robert, both you and I and you and your guests and me and my guests, that is necessarily propositional because we're just speaking. And it's not like you can have a handful of people and then meditate with them."
},
{
"end_time": 2339.735,
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"start_time": 2325.879,
"text": " But off air, I'm sure you do plenty of experiential work, and same with myself. So it's not as if I'm not exploring experientially. But then I also wonder how much of that's true. Cantor, for instance, thought he was analyzing the mind of God by analyzing infinity mathematically."
},
{
"end_time": 2369.753,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2339.906,
"text": " There are many other, historically people thought that studying physics was the same as studying God. And that's one of the reasons why there's so much writings about God from Newton. And that's one of the reasons why there's order to the universe at all, why we can do science, because God made it intelligible, at least this is their view. Did you also feel this to be the case that if we were to study anything, we incorporate everything? Yes, man, so much good stuff there. I think it was the physicist Brome that described reality as the unbroken wholeness."
},
{
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"text": " hear that sound? That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person."
},
{
"end_time": 2418.456,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2391.613,
"text": " They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms. There's also something called Shopify magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
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"start_time": 2418.456,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 2458.643,
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"start_time": 2448.063,
"text": " Go to Shopify.com."
},
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"start_time": 2461.527,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem. It's an extension problem. Henson is a family owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
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"end_time": 2501.118,
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"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business,"
},
{
"end_time": 2521.152,
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"start_time": 2501.118,
"text": " So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime."
},
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"start_time": 2521.152,
"text": " So it's in everything touches everything else, right? It's continuous throughout, but we"
},
{
"end_time": 2580.367,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2550.606,
"text": " as rational beings use language and thought to kind of draw boxes around things and we turn a perception into a conception and then so then you know so to go from rock to the idea of a rock and then we create a language that's established on it's our consensus of understanding so when i create this sound with my mouth it says rock it's like i can reliably presume you're running the same open source software called english"
},
{
"end_time": 2606.869,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2580.589,
"text": " that it conjures up roughly the same image that i had in my mind right so um it's interesting that we it's like i've said this a number of ways reality is like a stack of patterns on patterns on patterns that rhyme but don't repeat or you could look at it as like an ocean with no shore and no surface that the whole thing is just this continual fluid body that's wholly interconnected but to navigate it"
},
{
"end_time": 2635.503,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2607.312,
"text": " we have to map it right and we have to map it with these with concepts and conceptions and groupings and ideas which we then you know obviously it's a it's an abstraction away from reality like when you convert an experience into something linguistic but the linguistics and paradoxically perhaps somehow let you navigate that reality more efficiently effectively etc over time right lets you build"
},
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"end_time": 2663.882,
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"text": " Whatever a better boat car jet spaceship whatever it may be so There is something really fascinating about that and it is divine in a way I guess in that we were sort of You know if the idea of God is the creator whatever words you want to insert their nature the universe whatever that creative force is that made all this and"
},
{
"end_time": 2694.411,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2664.514,
"text": " We kind of participate in that to some extent because we know that we can create new tools and new ideas, new languages, et cetera, that actually influence our own evolutionary path. We mentioned this earlier, just the idea of private property. That's not a thing. That doesn't exist anywhere. It's this game that we've kind of imagined. Yet if we pretend it's true, if we pretend everyone owns themselves,"
},
{
"end_time": 2723.234,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2694.753,
"text": " and everyone has rights to the fruit of their own labor, then we create this very pragmatic outcome of more wealth in the world. So that's interesting to me that it's we kind of like the animal that plays imagination, but the imaginal play that we engage in has very real consequences. This is where I'm not sure. So I don't know if private property is just a social construct. I don't know if there's something like the platonic forms, which is mathematical."
},
{
"end_time": 2749.462,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2723.49,
"text": " but for any idea or any conception. So it exists. It's just not in the way that we think of existence. And then also, I know it's said so frequently in the modern and perhaps even ancient Eastern side that non-dualism is what you're at least intimidating or at least insinuating. Sorry. I wonder how much of that is strangely a left brain phenomenon on something that's a right brain issue. So what I mean by that is,"
},
{
"end_time": 2779.019,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2750.043,
"text": " It sounds like, hey, no, what are you talking about? Like the left brain is the analytical one. We're the more creative types who are the ones that are in touch with consciousness and we could see the undividedness of nature. I don't know. I know that Ian McGilchrist says that the left brain likes to categorize and place as a whole everything and see everything as the same. Whereas the right brain, the creative one is actually the one that likes to make distinctions and see this as different. I don't know. I've had experiences of oneness"
},
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"index": 110,
"start_time": 2779.309,
"text": " I've also had many experiences of dividedness and I wonder how much of it is. Metaphysically, I think the next number up from one is not two, it's three. And the reason is that if you have a vertex, then if you add another vertex, it doesn't mean anything to this vertex unless there's a connection. As soon as you have two and then the connection, then you have three objects. You have two vertices in one edge or just a single vertices. So I wonder how much of reality is a threeness or even more. And we're just saying is undivided. That's the wrong way of saying it."
},
{
"end_time": 2833.507,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2808.575,
"text": " And we're saying it's both undivided and not. That's wrong. But then am I perverting every metaphysical claim with my language is just abandonment of language, the route? Well, that's what some monks say, like just just stop. It's even a sin to speak, or at least a sin to be curious and speak about these large issues. I don't know. I've had feelings of each way. And I'm constantly yes, I think you asked me like, what have I learned from this podcast, I've just learned to"
},
{
"end_time": 2855.572,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2833.814,
"text": " Well..."
},
{
"end_time": 2879.377,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2855.708,
"text": " i agree with you about by the way i don't see it as a virtue to be like the socratic like not knowing i think it's healthy to have a a certain amount of close-mindedness and maybe that's even hearkens back to what i was saying about constraints as well as openness you need that otherwise you'll just dissolve in a pool yeah you're right yeah yeah you i think chester zinn said don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out everywhere"
},
{
"end_time": 2907.807,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2880.077,
"text": " There and it always comes back to me comes back for me to that relational aspect, you know Peterson calls it order and chaos Obviously I did this long series on metaphysics It was it was about the book Lila by Robert Persig But he's making the point that subject object is kind of a false paradigm that there's really this betweenness that is more"
},
{
"end_time": 2938.49,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2908.695,
"text": " A higher resolution depiction of reality, if you will. John, I've talked to John Verbeke a lot about this, too. He says rather than subjectivity or objectivity, the betweenness is transjectivity. Yeah, it's like there's this infinite complex system around us called reality. And then we're trying to generate different knowledge structures to map portions of it and communicate about it."
},
{
"end_time": 2968.404,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2939.309,
"text": " But we have to take all of those. I call these like a symbolic structure, if you will. This could be anything. This could be a theory. This could be force equals mass times acceleration. This could be a company. These are all just symbolic structures we've created to help us do something practical with that reality, to navigate it, or understand it, or talk about it. But we have to always understand that those symbolic structures are provisional. They're subject to change."
},
{
"end_time": 2997.398,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2968.763,
"text": " You know, Newton gave us certain laws that made a lot of sense for a long time and let us accomplish practical things in the real world. But eventually those laws were proven to be insufficient to be a deeper descriptor of reality, right? That's when Einstein came along, for instance. So I guess that's the way I look at it. Overall. Now it's not, I'm not saying the only thing I know is I know nothing at all. Knowledge serves no purpose, but I think Aristotle said,"
},
{
"end_time": 3020.452,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2998.422,
"text": " The purpose of knowledge is not knowledge, it's action. So that these structures we create need to ground out in some practical change in how we engage with the world. Otherwise, they're not useful. And then we also have to, and in that way, I would kind of think my based on all that, I kind of think maybe we can't have a theory of everything."
},
{
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"text": " hear that sound? That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person."
},
{
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"start_time": 3042.654,
"text": " They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms. There's also something called Shopify magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
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"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
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"text": " Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories."
},
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"text": " I could maybe keep reaching and always have a theory of everything, but I don't know that we'll ever hit the bottom and be like, Oh, this is a, this piece of knowledge and codes everything about reality. I don't know that that's even possible. Yeah, I agree. And there's some mathematical reasons why that's not the case. I'm sure you've heard of girdles and completeness theorem. Yeah. The question is, well, if physics is embedded in math and math is incomplete, then is the whole physical enterprise and the whole theory of everything enterprise a doomed one? Well, maybe we"
},
{
"end_time": 3168.507,
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"start_time": 3140.623,
"text": " that's why i think even defining what a theory of everything is a treacherous endeavor because maybe we just want a theory of most and that's good enough or we want who knows man who knows i'm so torn i oscillate so frequently on this who is someone historically that you would like to have interviewed okay on your top two or three list that's dead that's no longer around oh that's ten wow well mises right off the bat um you know the"
},
{
"end_time": 3193.2,
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"start_time": 3169.309,
"text": " most profound writer and thinker in Austrian economics as far as I can tell. I mean, there's a lot, but he's really, really stands out to me. Plato. I mean, that guy's after going through, I went through the Republic recently with John Breveke and this other book. Yeah. Plato is super interesting thinker. I would love, love to have talked to, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3213.422,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3194.991,
"text": " I would love to have talked with Jesus of Nazareth."
},
{
"end_time": 3225.589,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3213.831,
"text": " Or, oh, never mind. I thought it was, I was thinking of a different one. Von Neumann, you may have heard of Von Neumann machines, which is the idea that there can be extraterrestrials that send out probes and those probes self replicate and it just."
},
{
"end_time": 3255.879,
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"start_time": 3225.947,
"text": " Okay, so let's imagine you have two cars and they're going toward each other 50 miles per hour each. They're initially, let's say, 50 miles apart."
},
{
"end_time": 3282.005,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3255.879,
"text": " or let's say 100 miles apart. Okay, so there are 100 miles apart going at each other at 50 miles per hour. Then there's a fly who is at the tip of one of these cars. And he deftly moves at 200 miles per hour, like quick 200. But this is important 200 miles per hour from the tip of this guy's car to the next one. As soon as he hits the next one, he goes to this one. But then this initial one has traveled some bit. So then he goes to the next one. And that one has traveled a bit until the cars crash."
},
{
"end_time": 3305.555,
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"start_time": 3282.005,
"text": " Then the question is, well, how far did the fly travel? Okay, so you can do this infinite series where you have an infinite series, so it's a difficult one to compute. You have to use pen and paper. Or you can realize that there's a trick. Okay, these cars are coming at each other at 50 miles per hour. That's akin to one of them standing still and the other going at 100 miles per hour."
},
{
"end_time": 3332.244,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3305.811,
"text": " How far were they initially? 100 miles apart. Okay, so it takes them one hour to collide. This fly travels at 200 miles per hour. So then it's only traveled for one hour. So it's traveled 200 miles. There's a trick. Okay, so someone said this to von Neumann. And then von Neumann said, almost like in two seconds, he's like, Okay, 200. The answer is 200. They're like, Oh, you know this trick. And then he's like, What trick? I just summed the infinite series. And you're like, Oh, gosh."
},
{
"end_time": 3347.927,
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"start_time": 3334.616,
"text": " She's cheese cheese. People would say they'd be working on problems for like weeks or days and he would come in and just offhandedly say the answer. So he's someone I would just like to speak to. That's funny that the heuristic you could maybe make it even simpler in that."
},
{
"end_time": 3373.916,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3348.217,
"text": " You know, the cars were traveling for one hour, you know, the fly goes 200 miles an hour. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just hilarious that he's like, oh, I just summed it. That's incredible. I could see that in that series in my mind, but there's no way I could ever sum that up. And then as for a third person, I don't know. I don't know. So what about so of guests that you've had, are there any particular conversations that really stand out to you that"
},
{
"end_time": 3400.094,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3374.923,
"text": " that I don't know have been especially popular or impactful for you. Yeah, I think most of them are and that it's more difficult like they're just a few that haven't been so it's easier to me to point out that these ones were just home drum conversations but then that's rude for me to say oh yeah these five people I don't know I don't know how to I just say most of them are how about for you do you find that almost each one is extremely impactful or they're just a few"
},
{
"end_time": 3429.718,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3400.35,
"text": " Well, there's so I mean, it spans. It's a wide spectrum for me. But again, I'm trying to have conversations that are fascinating. Sometimes. Like, especially when we get into the political dimensions of Bitcoin, I'm less I'm just less engaged politically. I kind of think. Well, the way I see it is. So what do we have in and you have to be clear with your definition of politics?"
},
{
"end_time": 3453.848,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3430.913,
"text": " One definition is it's kind of like the ethics of distributed cognition. So we have, we're solving a lot of problems in the world through by connecting our minds to other people. You know, a lot of this is the marketplace itself. There's an argument to be made. Well, okay. That distributed computing system needs an ethical component, obviously to be, you know, to serve humans."
},
{
"end_time": 3480.947,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3454.531,
"text": " So if you mean politics in that sense, I'm I'm sympathetic to that like yeah, of course we need ethical systems, you know legal systems and whatnot but The over emphasis on the political dimensions of our characters individually and collectively I this idea that you know your views and my views are different so we need to go like shout it out on Twitter to try and"
},
{
"end_time": 3511.101,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3482.108,
"text": " one of us emerge victorious to then create the rules that the rest of us need to follow. I think that is a product of the fiat currency complex. Like we're trying to get way too many competing interests under one umbrella. Whereas in reality, these people should just live in separate states. They should just, you should have more optionality in terms of locating yourself within a jurisdiction. But the reason we don't have that is because of"
},
{
"end_time": 3538.404,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3511.681,
"text": " federal government overgrowth, which is rooted in the corruption of money itself, that we can keep printing more money to fund these programs that otherwise could not exist. So that's why I'm not like, I think in a Bitcoin eyes world, and this is a whole rabbit hole conversation, we moved from a world today, we have like almost 200 nation states. I think we move into a world that has something more like 20,000"
},
{
"end_time": 3568.609,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3539.002,
"text": " Have people said you need to have on more socialists or more Marxists?"
},
{
"end_time": 3595.828,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3569.565,
"text": " I should talk to some, because what I've never heard a socialist or Marxist do is refute the Austrian argument that you can't compute price signals. So if you can't do that, then how do you allocate capital? I've never heard even a slightly viable response to that question. Instead, it just spins off into these epic fantasies of, you know, if I was the one in charge,"
},
{
"end_time": 3626.186,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3596.578,
"text": " I could somehow make the socialist utopia a reality. We never had real socialism before, but I think that is just hubristic to the maximum. You're somehow the special individual that can solve the human organizational problem that no one's ever been able to solve. By, you know, concentrating power into the hands of a few, just don't think that works. Yeah, though, interestingly enough, there are some anarchist socialists. So for instance, well, anarchist syndicist or syndicalist,"
},
{
"end_time": 3639.821,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3626.578,
"text": " is chomsky and someone that i know i'll try and tiptoe around this someone i know closely is as radical left uses the term radical left so i'm not disparaging as you can be"
},
{
"end_time": 3669.838,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3640.094,
"text": " And she was saying, yeah, no, it has to be anarchistic. Like our whole enterprises has to be anarchistic. And I was thinking, how the heck, what are you talking about? As far as I know, it's all, it starts with a larger government or it starts by you petitioning to the government to do so and so. So if you're anarchistic, shouldn't you be reeling from that and align yourself a bit more with the libertarians? So I don't know, but I haven't studied this much. And when I put out on Twitter, I said, I would like to do a podcast on the potential of a large upcoming recession slash crash and what that even means."
},
{
"end_time": 3693.951,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3669.838,
"text": " And what to do about it, practically what to do about it for people who are of the 99% and so on. Someone said, yeah, but are you going to get on someone who challenges this capitalistic system? And what I think is much of the time they have this idea of a capitalist who if they were to speak to that capitalist would say, we don't have a capitalist system. You're telling me that I like the status quo. They have this idea, but then also the capitalists have this idea of what a socialist is."
},
{
"end_time": 3717.125,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3693.951,
"text": " and then you have people like Richard Wolff who said that's not like me and here's actually what I believe. It's all so complex and I'm just like here with my pen and paper and just like give me some, let me stick to the partition function and Wilson loops and so on. It's much more simple, at least it's much more simple in terms of these are variables I can control. Yes, well I try and transcend that debate by just talking about statism"
},
{
"end_time": 3744.957,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3718.404,
"text": " versus i've been calling it sovereignism like you could historically call this capitalism just pure capitalism but we've never had that there's never been pure capitalism because capitalism basically means it's life liberty and property right you you own yourself you go into the world and create things that a value that you also own other people do the same thing and then you trade with people to create more wealth but the problem is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3774.019,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3745.879,
"text": " violence and theft has always been a viable wealth acquisition strategy. So you can never have that idealized world so long as there's any form of violence or coercion. And so I think the real trick in the world is to create systems that make violating property rights more expensive. And if you get more expensive than you're making, you know, theft and violence, a less viable wealth acquisition strategy,"
},
{
"end_time": 3804.292,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3774.838,
"text": " and that leaves people the only other option that leaves people with them is long-term trade cooperation innovation all these things that we engage these modes of engagement that are consensual versus non-consensual like you know taxation theft war all these things are non-consensual forms of exchange and so yeah i i'm very partial to the capitalist that would say no this is not a capitalistic system because if you understand what a central bank is"
},
{
"end_time": 3834.377,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3805.52,
"text": " The central bank is an anti-capitalistic organization. It does not emerge on the free market, right? It's forcefully inserted by the monopolist on violence, which is the state and it's used to control monetary policy, which is the same thing as saying it's used to steal from people. It's used to steal from people through inflation. So anyone that says this is late stage capitalism doesn't understand central banking at all."
},
{
"end_time": 3861.084,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3834.633,
"text": " Central Banking actually comes straight out of Marx's 1848 manifesto to the Communist Party. Measure number five centralized state monopoly over cash and credit. It's not capitalistic, does not emerge on the free market. No one consensually accepts it. So yeah, this is not, we've never seen, and I hate to say this because it's the same argument socialists use."
},
{
"end_time": 3891.51,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3861.783,
"text": " We've had enough socialism to know that price signals can't be generated, capital cannot be allocated intelligently, and then you're left with just might is right, basically. That's what socialism devolves into. It doesn't have the distributed computing and allocation capabilities that capitalism does. But capitalism has been so beat up, that term, you can't use it or you get into this endless"
},
{
"end_time": 3921.459,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3892.278,
"text": " dance so i try to just i've been writing this series called sovereignism or you just honor the life liberty property of the individual and then let everyone else self-organize so you never bring coercion to bear other than to protect life liberty and property and this is not a new idea this is this was what king john signed in 1215 when he signed the magna carta they said life liberty inviolable property this is the scope of government anything beyond this is"
},
{
"end_time": 3950.879,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3922.329,
"text": " Is nonsense for government to be involved with so yeah, it's extremely complex extremely complex and it gets into the economics of Violence and force really it's like we're it's physics. Ultimately if if you can project power Physical power in a certain way to steal someone else's wealth Then you're gonna do that, right? That's what states do. That's what that's what militaries are and"
},
{
"end_time": 3967.619,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3951.425,
"text": " Inversely, if you can make it really hard to take someone's wealth by force, then we pour ourselves into a new incentive schema where the best way to acquire wealth is through trade and cooperation. The big hope of Bitcoin is that it pushes the world"
},
{
"end_time": 3982.125,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3968.302,
"text": " in that direction, because it's very expensive to steal Bitcoin."
},
{
"end_time": 4011.8,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3982.329,
"text": " Well, uh, making something expensive is a disincentive to use it or an incentive to use substitutes, right? So you don't use the word disincentive because the word disincentive is broader than making it expensive. Expensive implies disincentive, but disincentive doesn't imply. Okay. Yes, correct. Yeah. Yeah. There are different types of disincentives other than cost, but you can also put it all under the rubric of risk, you know, make it risky to violate property. That's in terms of"
},
{
"end_time": 4041.357,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4012.432,
"text": " It's either going to cost you more or there might be retribution, you might get hurt or it might backfire or whatever it is. So making property more risky to violate is a big push for humans towards productive cooperative behavior and away from destructive behavior. I don't like, well, not that I don't like, but I have issues when people say everything is political."
},
{
"end_time": 4062.722,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4041.817,
"text": " And that tends to come from the activist side. I don't hear it much on the activist right side. I hear it on the activist left side, though maybe they say just as much. Well, the last thing I'll say about the politics is what I see in the world is a lot of people yelling and fighting amongst themselves. But what do they like zoom it all the way out? What are they doing? They're saying I think these rules"
},
{
"end_time": 4092.961,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4063.456,
"text": " should be the rules in play. And I think money that the state is stealing through taxation and inflation should be used to fund the imposition of these rules on others. So if you're like, okay, wait a minute, if it really happened in that situation is the people you're trying to impose rules on, they should just fork off and be their own other society, right, then you don't have the cost of enforcing these rules. And there's nothing there's no political"
},
{
"end_time": 4112.841,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4093.456,
"text": " Is there a connection between cryptocurrency"
},
{
"end_time": 4126.067,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4113.285,
"text": " not bitcoin in particular but cryptocurrency and consciousness or physics well uh i look at all cryptos that are not bitcoin as basically a scam okay then choose bitcoin it doesn't matter to me i just want to know is there a connection"
},
{
"end_time": 4144.65,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4126.527,
"text": " Is there a connection between Bitcoin and consciousness? And the reason is that I would like to learn more about cryptocurrencies and explore it on the podcast. But I have such a let's paradoxically call it a narrow view of a theory of everything. So like I'm narrowly focused on everything. And so that means that I, I spent all my almost all my time thinking about"
},
{
"end_time": 4172.995,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4145.35,
"text": " Well, what are the different toes and how do they relate and consciousness and so on that if I'm to investigate Bitcoin in particular on the podcast it would need to be it would need to have some direct maybe even causal relationship with consciousness and it does have a relationship with math clearly because it's based in math but also physics like like is there something about the laws of physics or the way that cryptocurrencies work that can be used as a machine learning model for the way that the universe may have began and so you understand you understand I don't know so"
},
{
"end_time": 4202.534,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4173.404,
"text": " It's a hard question for me. I think consciousness is one of the most mysterious words there is. We, as a species, don't seem to have much idea what it is. I have no clue, frankly. The way I will try to answer your question is money is at least a really important perceptual apparatus. I've brought up the term price signals a lot, but we think through money."
},
{
"end_time": 4225.043,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4203.114,
"text": " Alright, it's almost like we when you see and this is stock markets, right? You're looking at the prices of things changing. You don't know the story behind that. You don't know the natural disasters or the new production utilities or the new trade agreements that led to that price. All you know is the price and you know, often in markets, they say price is truth. So it's like the ultimate"
},
{
"end_time": 4249.121,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4225.794,
"text": " Economic telecommunications device, the pricing system, and this is again what allocates capital intelligently in a capitalistic marketplace, a thing that socialism cannot do. Well, all of that communication is occurring through money, right? We're speaking through dollars or whatever currency it is. So I don't know that there's a relationship between money and consciousness per se, but there's at least one between money and perception."
},
{
"end_time": 4272.91,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4249.616,
"text": " like it radically, it lets us see the world through the eyes of others. Yeah. There may be a relationship between perception and reality. Yes. So everyone involved with the, the cotton price goes up. That's interesting. Seeing the world through all the eyes of cotton producers and consumers and where the market is clearing up. That's extremely interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 4301.852,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4274.087,
"text": " data compression mechanism, right? You can see the eyes of so many people in one number. Okay. So when you say price, I'm translating in my head to worth, but you're, you, you say, no, don't price is an exchange ratio. So instead of saying this house costs 11 cars, right? Because everything trades at some ratio of everything else. You say house is $440,000."
},
{
"end_time": 4331.357,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4302.551,
"text": " Okay, I don't think I should have used the word worth. What I meant was"
},
{
"end_time": 4346.578,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4331.63,
"text": " Where should one spend their attention? Spend. As soon as you say the word spend, then you think of it as a commodity. As soon as you think of it as that, you think of it as something with a number and that some are valued higher. So you think of it on an ordered number line."
},
{
"end_time": 4373.865,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4346.869,
"text": " So something with an echelon, so then you can decide what to pay attention to some things and not others, and that's influenced by price. I need to work through this. But it's extremely interesting. I never thought about that before, about how price influences perception. But perception, to me, I'm not convinced of this, but there are arguments, convincing arguments, or let's say potentially convincing arguments, that there's a relationship between perception and reality. There's certainly a relationship between perception and consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 4403.302,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4374.036,
"text": " So thank you for giving me that man. Happy to do it. And there's, it's, again, there's reciprocal feedback, though, because all this, this distillation of market actions gets compressed into the price. But then the price is also informing all those market actors what to do, right? So if the price is up, then I'm going to consume less, produce more, and vice versa if it's down. So it's this feedback"
},
{
"end_time": 4431.613,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4403.575,
"text": " You're talking about centralization, decentralization earlier. It's like everything centralizes to the price, but then it informs the decentralized actions of all those market participants. And so it's really, it's just like a never ending feedback loop. And that's probably how cognition works in some way. I'm not, you know, I'm not super familiar on this, but again, I would call that distributed cognition. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 4447.125,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4432.5,
"text": " I would imagine the individual cognitive network works some"
},
{
"end_time": 4474.48,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4447.705,
"text": " in some ways similar to that. We also certainly sexual selection works like that. Have you heard of assortative dating? No. The studies on it where you put a number on your head and no one knows their own number, but they're all looking at each other. You've seen studies like this or you've heard of this? Okay, so you get people in a room and general and you say like, who do you want to make out with something like that, like choose a partner that you're willing to make out with. We're not going to get you to make out with them, but choose someone you're willing to make out with. Generally, the people who are best looking pair up with one another. And then it just goes down to"
},
{
"end_time": 4489.565,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4474.48,
"text": " the worst-looking people."
},
{
"end_time": 4510.691,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4489.565,
"text": " If your number is three, you look at someone else and you're able to judge unconsciously the way that they look at you and someone else who is a ten would look at you as a three and not want to join you. Somehow they unconsciously know their own number and then they pair up with numbers that match each other even though you don't know your own number. Wow."
},
{
"end_time": 4538.234,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4511.118,
"text": " and the reason i was saying that i forget there's a point to this well anyway the fact that you're evaluated as a number and then that has such meaning that means that well price is there's a relationship between price and value i know that you didn't want to say price and worth and but there is a relationship there is there so austrian economists would say that all value the process of valuation it's always a matter of"
},
{
"end_time": 4559.326,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4538.746,
"text": " we're"
},
{
"end_time": 4587.961,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4560.094,
"text": " like something in pricing is something you can compare and say, this is $50 to $5. It's not ordinal. So the pricing system is converting ordinal value expression into a cardinal numeral system. And so that's very useful that you're kind of converting qualitative, something qualitative, right? Which is just preference into something that's quantitative, which is a price. And so it lets us engage in this distributed compute."
},
{
"end_time": 4604.189,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4588.763,
"text": " Okay, so we'll just leave it with one big question here. Is there a guess or conversation that took you down an unexpected path that you are currently going down and if so, what is that path?"
},
{
"end_time": 4625.742,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4605.418,
"text": " Well, I guess thinking about a lot recently. Yeah, like I mentioned, they're easier for me to find people who were dull than that were engaging. But the last two, so Ian McGilchrist and Tim Maudlin. So Tim Maudlin, I talked to him about interpretations of quantum mechanics."
},
{
"end_time": 4653.251,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4625.742,
"text": " and that made me he doesn't call this interesting he doesn't call what physicists study in undergrad or graduate studies or even phd level he doesn't call that quantum theory he calls that quantum mechanics or quantum field theory but he doesn't like to use the word theory because to him theory means that you have to know what you're talking about it's not just the mathematical description you need to have an ontology as well or show how this math relates to what is so"
},
{
"end_time": 4680.469,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4653.558,
"text": " That's why he includes, as soon as you have an interpretation of quantum mechanics on top of quantum mechanics, then you have a quantum theory. At least this is his terminology. Okay, so that's interesting. And I personally, I like mathematics. And I think that much can be gleaned from the well, not much, plenty can be gleaned from the mathematics to the interpretation. Speaking with him, I'm less certain about that. And I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 4701.544,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4680.794,
"text": " Much more interested now in interpretations of quantum mechanics. And so maybe I'll dedicate an entire section of the book to interpretations of quantum mechanics, because I'd like to understand them more. Okay, so that's a rabbit hole I'm going down that I thought I had explored, but I'm realizing it was vacuous. So I'm interested in that."
},
{
"end_time": 4724.718,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4702.039,
"text": " Then with Ian McGillchrist, well, he just bangs on all cylinders of my consciousness, philosophy. See, I think that there are these people who label themselves as skeptics. I don't think you should label yourself as a skeptic. I think that you should be an open-minded investigator of what is, and not a skeptic. That includes some paradigm-agnostic inquiries. You're open to other definitions of what is, is."
},
{
"end_time": 4747.961,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4725.538,
"text": " so sometimes they have these self-evident truths i don't think being or what is simple and also when people talk about god i'm super interested in in different definitions of god and i happen to think that whenever anyone says god is so-and-so like they come up with a definition i think it's false i think that anything that you place into that blank of god is so-and-so will automatically demean it and it's akin to constructing an idol"
},
{
"end_time": 4778.2,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4748.456,
"text": " But anyway, so Ian McGilchrist banks on all of those cylinders. I'm just wrestling with those. It's super, super fun. And it's super destabilizing as well. So it's not fun. Like, geez. Fun and not fun. Yeah, it's not fun. Good paradox. It's right. I want to tell you one more paradox, if you don't mind. It's just one that I heard the other day and I thought, this is super fun. So it's called, I don't know what it's called, like the surprise paradox. It goes like a teacher says there's going to be a surprise test."
},
{
"end_time": 4808.046,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4778.524,
"text": " You will be surprised. That's the condition. It's a school teacher. So it's Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, not the weekends. Okay. And it's next week. You're going to be surprised next week. There's a test coming up. So the students then confer with each other. They're like, oh shoot, when, when, when is it going to be? They think, you know what, if it is going to be a surprise, it can't be Friday. Why? Because by Thursday evening, if we hadn't had the test, we know it's tomorrow. So we're certain it's tomorrow. It's no longer a surprise. Okay. Now we've ruled out Friday."
},
{
"end_time": 4834.224,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4808.422,
"text": " By that same logic, we can rule out Thursday. And then by the same logic, we can rule out Wednesday. By the same logic, we can rule out Tuesday. By the same logic, we can rule out Monday. There's not going to be a surprise test next week. It's impossible. Then the teacher comes. So that's already interesting. But then the teacher comes and at noon on Wednesday, they get a test. And she's like, surprise. So everything the teacher said came true. There was a surprise test."
},
{
"end_time": 4860.316,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4834.377,
"text": " because they had ruled out the fact that there would be a surprise and the question is well how is this all possible like where's the flaw in this logic and this apparently has been debated again for decades and decades it's something that i i'm thinking about too so that's what i'm thinking about so there's something about expectation in these paradox in the last example too i don't know well it's"
},
{
"end_time": 4878.319,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4860.708,
"text": " Quite the trip to think about, to say the least."
},
{
"end_time": 4896.596,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4880.043,
"text": " Yeah, I don't know how much of what we're doing even here is like a sin because we're just muddying the waters by speaking. I have intimations of that, but I also am not fully convinced that there's two routes to go. I'll end with this. There are two routes. You can make the case that"
},
{
"end_time": 4918.831,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4897.159,
"text": " Languages just pragmatic is just use. And that's the Wittgenstein case. And I think to me, that's the easiest case to make. I'm of the position that the easiest case to make is, well, the Primrose path is usually one that has that's false in some manner. So I don't, it could be the case, like sometimes there's just an easy answer. It's like Lockham's razor, right? Just languages for utility."
},
{
"end_time": 4944.343,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4918.968,
"text": " Yeah, and there are issues with Occam's Razor, too. We can talk about that another time. But anyway, like people love, Tim Modelin talks about this. He's like, if you think there's a single adage that can get you to choose between two theories, like you're mistaken, that's not how the world works. And also, then you wonder, well, what's an assumption? If you just put an and between two assumptions, is that now one assumption? If I say God did it? Is that one assumption? Or is that like 50 assumptions? Is God one or 50? Like, who knows what an assumption is? Anyway,"
},
{
"end_time": 4954.002,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4944.343,
"text": " So there's the case to be made that language is just for use and that it's not meant to investigate these metaphysical questions or there's the case that we need more"
},
{
"end_time": 4978.336,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4954.07,
"text": " Explicit language a more explicated language. So more differentiation rather than more unity And I don't know as the analytic part and the experiential part of me are torn in different directions And I think maybe there's a third option or fourth like we just keep breaking it down analytically experientially Are those the two? Is there a third? Is there a multitude? Is there 12? There's something holy about the number 12. So I tend to like that. So just mystically it's fun 12, but"
},
{
"end_time": 5000.486,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4978.336,
"text": " i don't know anyway it's good good talking with you man oh yeah and if people are interested in the sorts of questions that i ask here or the sorts of topics that we raised here then visit theories of everything type that in into youtube into spotify itunes and so on and you'll browse through the guest list there's quite a few there's chompsky he's been on seven times eight times he's coming up again"
},
{
"end_time": 5021.032,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5000.486,
"text": " And then there's Tim Maudlin and Stephen Wolfram and Eric Weinstein and Jordan Peterson though Jordan Peterson interviewed me much like you that was that must have been like must be like oh man this is so cool yeah it's like the largest platform I've been on so I was super nervous during that but anyway thanks man yeah Kurt thank you so much really enjoyed this conversation hope we do it again"
},
{
"end_time": 5042.108,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5021.22,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked on that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 5062.483,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5042.108,
"text": " It shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting theoriesofeverything.org. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes"
}
]
}No transcript available.