Meta-Intelligence | The Pysh Series | Episode 4 (WiM075)

Summary

Episode Summary: Meta-Intelligence | The Pysh Series | Episode 4 (WiM075)

Podcast Title: The "What is Money?" Show
Host: Robert Breedlove
Guest: Preston
Release Date: November 21, 2021

In Episode 4 of "The 'What is Money?' Show," host Robert Breedlove engages in a profound dialogue with Preston, delving deep into the intersections of consciousness, neuroscience, economics, and the future of technology. This episode, part of the Meta-Intelligence series, explores how our understanding of the brain's functioning can shed light on economic behaviors and the potential trajectory of innovations like Bitcoin.

1. Consciousness and the Brain's Control Mechanisms

The conversation begins with an exploration of consciousness and its role in handling unexpected situations. Robert introduces the idea that consciousness activates primarily when faced with novel challenges, transitioning learned behaviors into the unconscious for more efficient processing.

• Robert (00:08): "Consciousness doesn't really get involved until the unexpected happens and we need to figure out what to do next."

• Preston (01:56): "It's like, the global hive mind."

They liken the conscious mind to a parliament wresting for control, constantly balancing rewards and penalties to condition behavior. This metaphor underscores the brain's dynamic interplay between conscious decision-making and unconscious programming.

2. Intelligence as Error Correction

Building on the brain's regulatory functions, Preston introduces the concept of intelligence as error correction, a notion previously discussed with Jeff Booth.

• Preston (16:06): "If you have a sensor that's turning something into binary and it's making decisions. It just gets more complex."

This analogy compares the brain's decision-making processes to a thermostat regulating room temperature, emphasizing the role of dopamine as a mediator for error correction within our neural framework.

3. Body Language and Innate Signals

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to understanding body language's role in conveying unconscious states and intentions. Preston references Joe Navarro's book, "What Every Body is Saying," highlighting how certain physical stances are innate and reliable indicators of dominance or internal states.

• Preston (09:33): "Is everybody an idiot? Or does everybody have meaning in this world?"

Examples include the "command position" stance with hands on hips and thumbs in belt loops, which signal dominance and control. These non-verbal cues are presented as subconscious yet powerful communicators of a person's perception and intentions.

4. Analogies Between Neuroscience and Economics

Robert draws a parallel between dopamine's role in the brain and price signals in the marketplace, suggesting that both function as error-correcting mechanisms.

• Robert (20:17): "It's like the price signal is doing in the marketplace. It's telling you, hey, this is a profitable space, draw in more production here or hey, this is generating losses, move away."

This comparison underscores how both biological and economic systems rely on feedback mechanisms to regulate behavior and decision-making.

5. Sound Money vs. Inflationary Policy and Innovation

A critical discussion emerges around the impact of monetary policies on technological advancements. Robert references Peter Thiel's "Zero to One," suggesting that major innovations often occur under a sound money standard, contrasting with the stimulation provided by inflationary policies.

• Preston (29:53): "I would argue that the inflationary monetary policy for that many decades has supplied these luxuries of life that I think a lot of us take them for granted."

The dialogue debates whether sound money fosters long-term, groundbreaking innovations by promoting savings and investment or if inflationary policies act as a stimulant for short-term advancements.

6. Wealth Transfer and Its Impact on Future Generations

The conversation shifts to the implications of transferring wealth across generations. Preston discusses the potential corrosive effects of handing down substantial wealth without instilling strong moral and work ethic foundations.

• Preston (55:38): "The real gift to them is the conditioning."

Referencing Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth," they debate the balance between providing financial support and ensuring future generations develop resilience and self-sufficiency.

7. Transhumanism and the Future of Consciousness

Towards the episode's conclusion, Robert and Preston explore the concept of transhumanism, contemplating the possibility of uploading consciousness to digital platforms.

• Robert (58:35): "Do you have any interest in this concept of transhumanism?"

Preston references ongoing technological advancements, such as AI-driven simulations of personalities like Tony Robbins, highlighting the ongoing experiments in digital consciousness replication.

8. Philosophical Reflections and Future Episodes

Wrapping up, both speakers reflect on the balance between abundance and challenge, emphasizing the importance of experience and conditioning in personal development. They tease future discussions, including an upcoming episode centered around Gary Zukav's "The Seat of the Soul," anticipating deeper dives into consciousness and personal growth.

• Preston (69:05): "And as I was going through the book, I was like, this is a little out there."

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Robert (00:08): "Consciousness doesn't really get involved until the unexpected happens and we need to figure out what to do next."

• Preston (01:56): "It's like, the global hive mind."

• Preston (09:33): "Is everybody an idiot? Or does everybody have meaning in this world?"

• Robert (20:17): "It's like the price signal is doing in the marketplace. It's telling you, hey, this is a profitable space, draw in more production here or hey, this is generating losses, move away."

• Preston (55:38): "The real gift to them is the conditioning."

• Robert (58:35): "Do you have any interest in this concept of transhumanism?"

Conclusion

This episode of "The 'What is Money?' Show" offers a rich tapestry of ideas connecting the intricacies of the human brain with economic theories and futuristic concepts. Robert and Preston skillfully navigate complex topics, providing listeners with deep insights into how our consciousness shapes and is shaped by the economic systems we engage with. The episode serves as a compelling exploration of the rabbit hole that is money, consciousness, and the potential future of human evolution.

Transcript

[Robert]

The author basically says that we're. You know, consciousness doesn't really get involved until the unexpected happens and we need to figure out what to do next. So I think we talked about this a bit last time, where it's your. Your conscious awareness is dealing with something novel, but it's trying to learn. Like learning is the act of taking it from your conscious awareness and putting it in the unconscious so you can just run it like a program in the background.

[Preston]

Yeah.

[Robert]

But then he makes the point too, that the conscious mind is this great. It really excels at telling itself the narrative that it's in control.

[Preston]

But it's.

[Robert]

Constantly, I guess, competing with itself. I don't know if this is his conscious awareness or what he's saying. Basically, your consciousness is like a parliament where it's kind of wrestling for who's in control at any one time.

[Preston]

Yeah, yeah. And you gotta. The thing that I toy with is, is how is it conditioning itself to allow one side or the other of those members of those voting members? And I suspect that when you have a. And it goes back to the biological value, if the reward. If the person made an action based on primarily coming from certain voting members, which are the lobes inside your brain as they're flowing it through, and there's a reward that's associated with that decision making the biological value conditions through the dopamine or whatever type of value chemical we're talking about in order to allow that vote for that particular instance of a similar situation in the future when it arises.

[Robert]

So it's like, I guess, mediating its behavior with rewards. Right. Within your rewards.

[Preston]

And penalties.

[Robert]

Yeah, and penalties. Again, we've been talking about the market as maybe like the global hive mind, but you could also look at it the. The other way around. And to say, like, there's a little market going on in here and all these exchanges of energy, thought, and feeling that. I guess consciousness just emerges from that in a way. Consciousness, just an emergent property.

[Preston]

Yes. And it goes back to what I was saying on the first show, which was the. Why do you have a brain? And we got into, like, being able to dynamically handle a complex environment. That's what's really driving why it's there. And then, you know, how you're experiencing it. Is the. Is the color blue that you label in your brain and what you see the same as me? Well, we'll never know. Right?

[Robert]

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's so true. And it makes the. Why you have a brain. He says our. Our brains are Just constantly crushing ambiguity.

[Preston]

And choices, all like way more than you think.

[Robert]

Yeah, yeah. And then is that maybe we could think about that as sort of like top down versus bottom up as well. If your active awareness is top down, trying to be in control, and then your unconscious is more of the bottom up, your encoded knowledge, in a way. I don't.

[Preston]

You're going to have to give me more on that, Robert. I'm not necessarily understanding where you're going with that.

[Robert]

Well, he just, I mean, what I was thinking about, in a market, you know, we have this do you want to control through force or through freedom? You kind of have socialism versus capitalism type thing. And then in the brain, he's just making the point that we have this one active awareness that always tries to be in control and control outcomes. And it's useful for certain things. But if you're the Roger Federer trying to knock the can off someone's head, you can't use that side of your brain. You have to have this bottom up or unconscious awareness, I guess is what you would call it.

[Preston]

Yeah, yeah. When you study which ones are more useful, what you're talking about is more like an instinctual reaction which is based on conditioning versus something that's way more thoughtful and analytical, that requires a lot more deeper thought. Typically when you have more time to make a decision, the deeper you can go into the analytics to pull it apart, the better. But if you were, let's say you were looking at a house fire and you have been a fireman for 30 years and you're just looking at it, your gut instincts are probably going to lead you way better than if you're trying to make a. A long thought, drawn out conclusion through critical thinking and analysis.

[Robert]

Right?

[Preston]

Yeah.

[Robert]

The classic analysis, paralysis type thing. Yeah, yeah. There's this. Peterson talks about this predator detection circuitry we have like really low down the brain.

[Preston]

Yes.

[Robert]

If you see, I think it was given the example of Charles Darwin, they had a cobra in like a glass case and Darwin would try to lean his face really close to the glass case until the cobra would strike. And he knew, like his conscious aware that he knew that the snake could not get him through the case, but he could not stop his body from recoiling. That's right. There was some deeper, more fundamental neural architecture taking control.

[Preston]

So there's a book called what everybody like your body is saying. And the gentleman who wrote this basically stood up the whole body language, reading body language for the FBI and just an incredible read. And what he's getting at is there are certain body language that are innate, that are way down basal ganglia level in inner core of your brain, like right there at the brain stem, that drive the way that people do certain reactions. And some of them are extremely reliable signals for understanding what's going on in the person's head or how that person's perceiving the situation. Doesn't mean they're right, but it tells you how they're perceiving and what they think this current situation is. So here, I'll give you a couple of them that I think are pretty neat. So you ever see a person kind of standing up, legs are kind of like shoulder length apart, but they've got their hands on their hips like this and they're standing there and I mean, they're just squared up on the room, right? In the military, they call this the command position. And if you ever walk into a room, and it's really funny if you ever see military officers, because if you have like five military officers all in the same room, every one of them will be in the command position standing there like this because they all think they're in charge. But if you ever go into a setting with five people and you see somebody standing there like that, that person in their mind is the dominant person of that group where they're expressing some type of dominant opinion at the moment or whatever. And this is such a sure fire kind of like body language. Now this one here is funny because it's a slight modification of that. If you ever see a male with his thumbs in his front belt loops with his hands down framing his genitalia, right? And he's there and his arms are out and he's like that. He's expressing some serious male command dominant energy at the same time. And you will see this. There's a really famous picture of Anthony Scaramucci in the White House. And he's a bitcoiner, but he's there with Rentz Prievis, and he's got his thumbs in his belt loop. And this picture came out right as he was leaving the White House. And he has his thumbs there and his belt loop and I mean, his hands are down there. He's given this look like, bring it, brother. Right? And so some of these signals are. People don't even realize that they're doing them. And yeah, it's a fascinating read. You want to read an amazing book. I highly, highly recommend it comes with pictures and everything is the coolest book. But it talks about reading body language. And some people will probably say, well, Those are really unreliable things. And in many cases it is. But there are certain signals that a person can do. Here's another one that I really like. I've been in meetings with people, and a person will be saying something, and I'll look over at maybe a logistics lead or somebody like that. And when you watch their lips, when they go like this and they close.

[Robert]

Their purse, your lips kind of thing.

[Preston]

Like a pursing their lips kind of thing, what they're really doing is they're saying to themselves, they're saying, don't say anything for whatever reason. It's a way to keep my mouth shut. And so I have seen that. And I'll point to the person, I'll say, hey, John, I'm kind of curious what you think. What's your opinion on this matter? And the person's like, well, I think maybe we should not be doing that, and here's the reason why. But they probably wouldn't have said anything if you weren't reading the body language. There's all sorts of little clues like this that people are constantly. And they're very reliable singles. Some of them are very reliable signals that you can use. And the person has no idea that they're saying something when they're actually screaming something.

[Robert]

Yeah. So interesting, especially with the pursing the lips, because you're. It looks like you're physically actually keeping your mouth shut.

[Preston]

Yeah.

[Robert]

When you're trying to.

[Preston]

I mean, I see. I see it with my son all the time. I see, like, I'll be saying something to him and his mouth will just be like. I mean, he'll just be like, oh, my God, I want to say something back to you so bad, but I'm not going to.

[Robert]

So funny. I watched this documentary on Netflix, actually a documentary series called World War II in color. I don't know if you've seen that one.

[Preston]

I haven't seen that now.

[Robert]

I think they just. They took a ton of footage from World War II and then doctored it up to be in color. So they took black and white footage and, you know, made it color vision, I guess. And then it goes through the entire history of World War II. So it's really interesting. Shows all the strategic decisions and whatnot. But this talk on body language reminds me, have you ever seen video of Mussolini?

[Preston]

Not really. At least not something that I recall.

[Robert]

I had heard about him before, I guess he was an Italian socialist leader. Dictator, actually. And this is the first time I'd ever seen a video of him. Just a few months ago when I saw this. And he'd be giving these speeches, and I kid you not, he'd give a speech, he'd say his piece, and then he'd just go. He's just like aggressively rocking his head around the room. Like, almost like something we would think is a joke today to see a guy that over the top about his body language.

[Preston]

Yes.

[Robert]

And I mean, it was. The narrator to the documentary is like, this is ridiculous to us now, but this is how this guy actually was. And he was just like a dictator. Um, so there's something to that that's very. This very basic level, biological. You know, we're trying to. To, I guess, exert dominance or. Or peacock or be in an alpha medal or something.

[Preston]

That's exactly what the command position is. I mean, it's a total peacock move.

[Robert]

Yeah, right.

[Preston]

Like, when you look at that, you're trying to make yourself like a cat. The cat's hair stands up. They. They get sideways when they're getting confrontational, and when they're doing that, they're trying to make themselves look as big as possible because. And he talks a lot about this in the book. Is this fight or flight situation. When you're presented with a threat, your first reaction is to actually stop immediately and come up with, okay, am I going to run or am I going to fight Right now, the decision point. And so when a person feels threatened and so when they would be doing interrogations and they'd ask somebody a question, the way that the person would pause and if they asked a question like, so what was the murder weapon? Was it this? Was it a knife? Would you have used a knife? No. Would you have used an ice pick in the person's. No. Right. In this example, he told me. I can't remember if he told me this when we were interviewing him or it was in the book. He knew the murder weapon and he knew it was a strange thing. It was an ice pick in this, I think in the example was an ice pick. And when he asked that to the person, they had this totally deer in the headlights look of like. No, Right. Like it was a flight moment of like. So their body language told him that, like, okay, they did this with 10 people. Right? And then when they heard an ice pick, like, what the hell are you talking about? Why are you asking me this? Like, that was your typical person. But then the person who, like, was the murderer, they were able to say there was something very strange when we said this to that person right there. And then they were able to figure out the rest of it because they got such a big cueing body language.

[Robert]

So. Interesting. Yeah, there's. And the. There's no.

[Preston]

There's no way you can stop it. Yeah, yeah. Cognitively, the person, you can't suppress it. The person. They had another one that he told me that they were looking at the dilation of people's eyes and they had a camera that was looking at the person's dilation in their eyes, and they were flipping through some type of document or something like that. And when the person saw like something on the document, their. Their pupils just like exploded. And they were able to actually identify the person and get the testimony out of them that they were the person or something.

[Robert]

And this is when you were in it, you said interviewing the author of what everybody.

[Preston]

Of what everybody is saying. Yes.

[Robert]

Awesome. I think I have that book. I need to read it.

[Preston]

Oh, my God, dude, that's one of my favorite book. I love that book.

[Robert]

Really?

[Preston]

Yes.

[Robert]

Yeah, let's check it out. Yeah. So I guess one of the other things. Author makes this point too. That.

[Preston]

And it's Joe Navarro. It's Joe Navarro is the author, by the way.

[Robert]

Joe Navarro. Joe Navarro, author makes the point that we talked earlier. Well, I mentioned this, that Jeff and I, Jeff Booth, who we had the last series with, and you know really well he defined intelligence as error correction. And we went down the rabbit hole on that, which I think is just a really interesting way to sum it up, you know, which something that we think is a really complex phenomenon, really just kind of think of.

[Preston]

So let's take it not in the complex, but like, make it as simple as possible. If you have a thermometer in a house that governs the temperature of the room, and when it's between 68 and 67, it's trying to govern it between those temperature. If the temperature goes up and it senses that, it turns on the air conditioning unit to cool down the room to bring it back down within that range. Once it recognizes that it's within the range, it then kicks it off and it continues to sense. So for that intelligence, you have to have some type of sensing mechanism. You have to have some type of processor that's continuing to update what it's sensing. And then it has to have a very basic logic algorithm in order to make the decision, is it on or is it off? Right now people will tell you that's not intelligence, that's just some type of programmatic reaction. But I think that if you would compound something as simple as that, because it's turning it into binary. You have a sensor that's turning something into binary and it's making decisions. It just gets more complex. You add more and more complexity onto that, and that's what's taking place. I mean, at a very deep and crazy, insane level, though.

[Robert]

Yeah, yeah. Like we said earlier that you're. The brain is collapsing ambiguity into decisions, choices, which it's compressing it into binary effectively. You can only. You can only take action across one pathway. You know, you can't be two places at once.

[Preston]

So I guess that's my way of agreeing with Jeff that it's error correcting. Because, like, just that example, all it's doing is just error correcting. It's constantly taking an assessment of where I want to be, what is it that I'm sensing and how do I get it there, and then acting on it.

[Robert]

Yeah. And the last. I guess the last piece of that would be the actual signaling mechanism, right? From the thermostat to the air conditioner.

[Preston]

Yes.

[Robert]

And the author makes the point that in our brains, at least, that it's dopamine. He says dopamine acts as an error corrector, a chemical appraiser that always works to make your appraisals as updated as they can be.

[Preston]

That's right.

[Robert]

So it's dopamine that's actually intermediating this error correction.

[Preston]

Now, what's fascinating is how the brain manages the historical valuation of that. And then is it using an average? Is it using kind of like an exponential average where what's done more recently is more important, or like, I don't know the nuances of that, of how the neuron actually stores that, like when. When it receives a signal from another neuron, how binary that is, or how, like, whether it's a. Whether it turns it into a one or a zero. I know when the. When it fires, it does. But how is it interpreting the array of inputs from other neurons as far as triggering it, whether it's a 0.5 or is it a 0.7 for this particular neuron based on all the neurons that are firing downstream, upstream? I don't know that. You'd have to talk to a neuroscientist on how that's. And is it the same? I don't know.

[Robert]

Yeah, I'm not sure about that either. There's a great book called the Information by. By James Gleak. It's a really hard book. But by the end of that book, he lays out how a computer with just binary, you know, zeros and ones, they're little logic gates. So he explains how just something of zero and ones can basically generate infinite complexity, you know, by flipping these things. So I don't know if the, I don't know if neurons function like that, if they're just zeros and ones or, or what, but.

[Preston]

Well, I know, I know with like TensorFlow, when you get into the. It's called, I think, a transition function for the neuron that you're programming. There's different functions that you can use in order to achieve different results that, whether it's a 0.5 or whether. How, how like basically what I was describing, TensorFlow, you can, you can adjust the transition function of, of creating the binary output of the, of the signal. I don't know if that's how it works with the brain though. I'm not well versed on the biology of that.

[Robert]

Yeah, I loved the parallel. To me though was just stunning. Again, back to money being like a neurotransmitter or vice versa. And that the dopamine's acting as this error correcting agent in the brain and it's effectively what the price signal is doing in the marketplace. It's telling you, hey, this is a profitable space, draw in more production here or hey, this is generating losses, move away. Or if the price of a commodity goes up, it's automatically propagating the incentives to either mine more of it or use substitutes as a consumer. So it's just this medium that's transacting incentives back and forth. And it's like it occurs here and it occurs in the global brain as well.

[Preston]

Another good book on the processing thing that you were talking about. I asked myself, this was years ago, I was like, how the heck does a processor work? Because when you just think about it, it's like, how does that mechanism. There's a really good book it's called But How Do It Know and the author, it's amazing book. The author is so good at just making it really accessible and like. And you can see how it compounds and gets bigger and bigger and then how computers are able to do the just amazing things that they do.

[Robert]

Yeah, highly recommend that book, man. Whoever listens to this show is going to have a reading list as long as they want. I thought this was cool too. So he actually was describing how our brains process what Austrian economists would call time preference, saying that the seduction of the immediate satisfaction pulls so strongly on our decision making that we have to override this biological impulse towards immediate gratification. And then he's Making the case that the housing bubble can't only be understood as an economic phenomenon, but also as a neural phenomenon. But as you and I know, fiat currency contributes directly to the housing bubble and it contributes directly towards raising our time preference. So where he's drawing this, what he says, a connection between an economic and neural phenomenon, I mean, that is the connection. It's manipulation of the money that hijacks our brains.

[Preston]

The collective is being neurologically conditioned to spend as fast as possible. And it's happened not for one year, but it's happened for lifetimes. And so you're going to get. And so it's easy to say, oh, everybody in the world's just so dumb, they're making these stupid decisions. But I would push back on that and say, no, we've been neurologically conditioned to act this way because we've been incentivized to act this way. And we've been rewarded to act this way. And now you're introducing this system that is the polar opposite. And so it's going to be a very hard transition for people that have been neurologically conditioned to not act that way. Because in their mind, if you don't understand some of the nuances of what's playing out, you're just going to have a hard time believing that there's a reward to act in that way. Because everything that you've been led to believe up to this point. Point has suggested that it's not. It's the opposite. It'd be like it rains every single day and all of a sudden you need to start going out without a raincoat. Don't make any sense. It's rained every day. Of course I'm going to carry a raincoat.

[Robert]

Yeah, we've been conditioned this way, but it's conditioned in a harmful way. Right, because to actually think longer, if.

[Preston]

The environment's about to change and it's supposed to be sunny for the next year, then yes, I agree with you.

[Robert]

Well, I guess what I say, when I say harmful, I mean it's counterproductive. Literally, the more long term thinking you are, the more you save and invest, the more productive you become as a society.

[Preston]

Let me push back just a little bit. So when we look at what has been the result of these policies, for 80 years, we have had the biggest technological boom ever. The speed is how much technology. So I can order a pizza right on my smartphone. It take me literally seconds because I could just click on previous order, reorder, double click the side. It scans my face, it puts the Order in. My money comes out of my account and immediately goes to Pizza Hut or wherever you buy it. And then I just drive or I can even have it delivered straight to the house. Some random person gets their smartphone, they pinged, they go over there, they grab the pizza, they deliver it straight to my house. And it literally took me like less than a minute to go through this technological feat.

[Robert]

Right.

[Preston]

I would argue that the inflationary monetary policy for that many decades has supplied these luxuries of life that I think a lot of us take them for granted because we don't know what it was like to have an outhouse out back. You go to the bathroom in an outhouse for a year, like I did in Afghanistan, let me tell you, you have an appreciation for running water in a toilet.

[Robert]

Right?

[Preston]

So when you look at all these luxuries that we have, I would tell you that a large part of that is based on that incentive structure and that policy that was in place globally for decades. Now when you overdo something, there's going to be a price that's paid for pooling. Because I think of it like this. Google was created back, what was it, 2005 or something like that? I don't know, 2000, I don't know. But imagine if we didn't have an inflationary monetary policy and we've had sound money throughout this whole 80 year period of time. Google might not have been invented until the year 2070. Okay, so is that bad or is that good? I don't like to really say one way or the other. I just want to say that manipulation to pull productivity in the future forward to the left was done, can't be undone. It was done by people that were making decisions that in their mind were probably out of self interest. A lot of the times when you're doing manipulation, it highly involves self interest over some other group, greater good of the group. And so these decisions were made, it led to what we've been served, and now we're getting ready to pull back the power levers and not go ludicrous speed, and we're going to transition into that type of world. This is what I ask myself, Robert, let's say we have a successful monetary policy that is sound money for 80 years into the future. Let's just say hyper bitcoinization happened right now. We're now dealing with sound money. And now we live through that environment for 80 years and every person in the world has slowed down their productivity to a snail's pace. Was bitcoin bad? I don't know, relative to all the advancement, technological advancement, landing people on the moon, doing all this kind of stuff. Like maybe you're not even doing those things because that incentive structure is getting so different and warped in the exact opposite direction of what we're seeing right now. That could play out, I don't know. But is that bad or is that good? I don't think those are the proper words to be using.

[Robert]

Yeah, this recalls to me when we actually did our first episode together. I think you and I diverge on this point too, because I'm more in the camp of have you read the Bitcoin standard? Okay, so he makes reference to Peter Thiel's book Zero to one at one point where he's saying that most of the zero to one innovations occurred on a hard money standard and most of what we've seen on a soft money standard or an inflationary standard are these one to many innovations. So I don't. I mean, clearly you can use inflation to.

[Preston]

So when he says sound money, is he saying we were on sound money from the 40s to the 80s? Because I would totally disagree with that.

[Robert]

No, he's arguing late 19th century and he's saying that most of the 20th century was one to many innovations. So tracing back roughly here, like the telegraph to the telephone to the Internet, so it's not a zero to one. The zero to one was getting the telegraph, like figuring out how to move information wirelessly. And granted, we're generalizing a lot here. You can't just black and white any of this clearly. But it would seem to me, just thinking through the Austrian economics lens, that when you inflate the money supply, you are deprecating savings, you're disincentivizing savings. Savings underpins investment. The more savings and investment you have, the longer and more complex chains of production you have or production processes, you have a lower time preference. You can engage in 30, 50, 100 year projects. I think that in my mind, just thinking about it that way would be the key to generating, not generating, at least nurturing the environment where major zero to one innovations could occur. Whereas inflationary monetary policy is a great tool for just getting everything active. It's like a stimulant. It is a stimulant, right?

[Preston]

It is a stimulant.

[Robert]

So if you've got something going, you can make it go a lot faster. But to your point, you're drawing energy from the future because you have to service that at some point. So I don't think inflation contributes to innovation. And I'm not sure that. How would you substantiate the claim that Google may not be invented till 2070? I mean, that's a hard one.

[Preston]

What I'm saying is that you have created an incentive structure to invest as much as fast, get the money out the door, put it into innovation, go out. I mean, look at where we're at right now. I mean, it's at such peak insanity as far as venture capital and everything. It's like, get the money out the door, get it invested, I don't care if it fails. I'll spread it across 10 different investments. That is a function of the policies that have been carried out for decades. And here we are.

[Robert]

Right.

[Preston]

So I'm of the opinion that I don't agree with. I think Thiel's book is really good. I read it when it first came out. It's been a while. But for me personally, when I look at the technological advancement that's happened in the last 80 years relative to the last 2,000 years, it's a little hard for me to not think that a majority of all technological advancement has kind of happened in the last 80 to 100 years when we've had these policies. Now. I personally think that with sound money that's not being manipulated, you are going to have a much healthier environment for all market participants. Not this combative. I like to compare it to the body. Your body's currency is the ATP that the mitochondria produce, which is the energy packets. Can you imagine if the liver had its own currency and whatever energy chemical, and the heart had its own energy chemical and the brain had its own energy chemical and they had to do these exchanges with each other in order for one in the blood to flow to the other. Like that's crazy talk.

[Robert]

Right? Right, right, right, right.

[Preston]

Crazy like your body. Can you imagine the frictional churn of performing those exchanges between the organs in your body? It'd be insane. So when I think about a world where there's all these different currencies between the different organs, which are the nation states doing this, I'm just thinking to myself, okay, that is disaster. And then you think about, let's say the liver was creating energy and it was exchanging it to one of the other organs, but it was doing it in a way where it wasn't a one to one value proposition for the other organs. The liver was pulling the wool over the eyes on other organs and it wasn't giving them a 1.0 value of energy, it was giving them a 0.7, but it was selling it as a 1.0. That's what you have going on globally right now between nation states. So when I look at a system that is producing ATP and the mitochondria are basically your miners and the whole protocol and the whole bit, the nodes, they're producing this system of valuation that the entire globe can use as a standard unit of account. So you can perform economic calculation and you can determine what the value of a business is and you can determine what the value of lumber is. Dude, it's just so obvious.

[Robert]

Yeah.

[Preston]

When you compare it to a biological example.

[Robert]

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And you know, it eliminates.

[Preston]

So that was my way of saying I kind of agree with you a little bit. Right.

[Robert]

Well, I was just going to say that. Well, first I was going to say that it eliminate. Would also eliminate foreign exchange markets, which are purely parasitic. Right. Yeah, it's just switch. Yeah. Just friction. But then it's kind of like, I don't know if I'm right necessarily. I don't know if you're. And it's impossible to disentangle. This is one of the things about economics, is that you can't rerun the experiment. You know, it's not like we can be like, all right, back it up to 1900, let's try it again with sound money and see what happens. You just can't. We can't do it.

[Preston]

So I'm just looking at it and saying, hey, I think it's the best solution today relative to the system that currently exists. But I'm not going to go and ride the high horse. Like, the thing that I support today is going to continue to be this white knight thing 80 years from now. We have no idea what it's going to morph into or what kind of incentive structure it's going to create after decades of use. Assuming that it becomes the new standard.

[Robert]

I think. Excellent point. And again, important to stay humble. Let me ask it this way then. Clearly we don't know where it's going to go. There could just be some Bitcoin 2.0 in 50 or 100 years that takes us to some other new innovation nobody saw coming. But absent that. So ignoring that possibility, do you think there would ever be a point that we'd be like, okay, we've been on sound money for 50 or 100 years now. There's some reason we need to inflate the money supply again, we'd flip back to a fiat standard for some reason.

[Preston]

I think you'd have to have it turn into some type of deflationary force. Because I think the deflationary force would supply the same detrimental incentive structures as an inflationary force. It'd be a positive charge versus a negative charge. But if you have something that's dead set neutral in the middle, well, then you're not going to run into those issues. It's a calm pond. If you think about a currency being a calm pond, it's easy to understand the value of it. But if you have this disruption, and let's just say it's a positive wave inflation, or you have a deflationary wave, I think it could have a incentive structure for people to not do anything.

[Robert]

So you think of those.

[Preston]

And Bitcoin's not deflationary. It's not meant to be deflationary. If people are losing coins that is deflationary after you get to a point where they've all been issued. If I would say that there could potentially be an issue years and decades later, it's going to be maybe a deflationary force, that would be the issue.

[Robert]

And you mean money supply deflationary, not price deflationary. Okay, yeah. This is another question I think about a lot. I put it out on Twitter a long time ago. But there's this old saying by Sophocles. He says nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. And I'm like, okay, if Bitcoin is what we think it is, it's certainly vast. I mean, you could argue that it's already vast.

[Preston]

Yeah, that's where I'm going with this. Because if there's one thing that I've noticed about how nature and reality works, it's almost every opportunity has a seed of misfortune attached to it. Every. Every misfortune has a seed of opportunity that's attached to it. This is why you have your Yin Yang, right?

[Robert]

Yin and Yang. Yeah.

[Preston]

And so Bitcoin supplying. What I would tell you is the white dot or the black dot to the opposite system right now. And it's almost like there's this force in nature that has to supply the counterforce to something that is overwhelming. And so when I look at the current situation that we're seeing globally playing out through this inflationary monetary policy, I'm saying nature will supply a force to this. Now, what it is, we think we know what it is. Right. And I think I'm right. But something that I would tell you that I feel like I know for sure is that a force will be supplied. I'm not as sure of myself to say it's going to be this. I am confident there is a force that will be supplied. There always is. And it makes me think that when it helps me. Well, I don't think it helps. I think when I try to understand how does this all work. It almost seems like when you see something that can't. What are those things called that I forget what these shapes are. When you take a piece of paper, like a chain, origami, like an origami paper chain, but then you put a twist in it and you connect it, it's a one surface.

[Robert]

It'S like a one dimensional shape or something.

[Preston]

Yeah. What are these things called? Oh my God.

[Robert]

I don't know what they're called. But there's the artist, MC Usher, he has the ant walking around the shape and he's always on the same side, even though he's going around and around. I don't know the name of it though.

[Preston]

Yeah, I forget the name of it. I'm looking it up right now, talking. But anyway, when you think of that shape and you think about what. Well, maybe the fabric of reality is actually this one dimensional shape. But depending on where it's at, if it's on the outside, it's positive, if it's on the inside, it's a negative. But the reason that we have this flip flopping, anything in nature has this vibrational aspect to it. They think string theory works this way and whatnot. So when you, when you think about, well, what if the fabric of what all of this energy is moving on is actually a 1D shape? And the way that it looks like it's oscillating is whether it's on the outside or the inside in the way that it's going around this thing. And so imagine this 1D shape that's never ending. It's an infinite loop and it's a single surface. If it's on that and it's moving, you can't stop it. It has to keep moving in one direction or the other around this 1D shape. So to me that seems a lot like code. It seems a lot like an operating system that has code that's running. I forget where we were even going with this. What were we talking about?

[Robert]

No, yeah, we're just talking to the.

[Preston]

Point why I'm bringing this up the.

[Robert]

Yen to the bitcoin yang at some point.

[Preston]

So this comes back to this idea that if this surface is a 1D surface, there has to be this reaction that inverts it or flips it to be the polar opposite of what it was before or providing some type of remedy to what induced the initial force.

[Robert]

There is. That's funny, we're talking about yin and yang because there's a saying in Daoism that the way of the dao is in reversal. And the dao is supposed to be like the dao, roughly. You can't actually talk about it, it's beyond words. But it's the force that mediates between yin and yang. If you look at the yin and Yang symbol, that little sliver of an S between the two is what represents the dao. It's the, the dynamic quality that, you know, you can't even categorize with something static. But it's funny that what you're saying, like you're saying there has to be this reversal, it has to keep oscillating and reversing. And that's actually what the ancient Daoist said.

[Preston]

It's called a Mobius strip. Look up a Mobius strip. And if I was going to explain somebody how to make one, take a piece of paper, cut the edge off of the piece of paper so that you would be like, you know, like these chains that you make you hang on a Christmas tree. So you just take that sliver of a piece of paper, It'd be like 1 inch by like 12 inches. And instead of just curling it over and taping it together, when you curl it over to tape it into a chain shape, what you do is you put a half twist in it and then tape it together. And if you take your finger on that, on that shape and you run it around it, what you'll find is you never come to one side. It's one sided, it's a one sided object. And so when I think about, well, how do electrons circle around an atom? Maybe the fabric of what they're moving on is maybe in a shape like this. So that stopping it is nearly impossible because it's just continuing to travel around itself in a one dimensional like surface of some sort.

[Robert]

Right.

[Preston]

Which, which leads us to this idea that there has to be, you know, and when it's on the outside, you think that that's like the yin. And when it's circling on the inside, the quote unquote, inside, it's all one surface. But yeah, it appears like it's the Yang.

[Robert]

Yeah, it's, I mean, yeah, I don't even think we can really, like this.

[Preston]

Is what I would tell some, you know, and I wanted to get cosmic with you. So.

[Robert]

No, no, I love it. I love, I love where you're at. But it's like to try and put your head around it. It's like we're still trying to get our head around bitcoin, you know, and it's like what this is how I.

[Preston]

Think it's useful for the person listening. How it's useful is what we said initially, which is for every setback, there's a seed of huge opportunity for you in that setback. And for every strength or advantage that you're just perfect example, if you were in bitcoin for the last year, you made 400% that strength or that windfall or that advantage, advantage has a seed of potential setback and destructive force inside of it for you. What that is, I have no idea. But you need to have an appreciation for what it is. And if you can understand what it potentially could be, then you can shape your environment by understanding the yin and the yang of your environment in order to make sure that you continue to be centered and have the humility to look for these things that could end in disaster after having such an amazing situation or windfall or positive thing that.

[Robert]

Happened in your life. Yeah, no great points. And bringing it full circle. Hats off to you on that one. A couple of things come to mind is Steve jobs, he made $100 million by the time he was 25 or whatever the number was. And he said he had a determination in himself to never let the money ruin him. That really he thought was one of the best commitments he ever made to himself. And then Taleb writes a lot about how humans, as humans, we have a much harder time dealing with abundance than we do. Scarcity actually like it's, we're load bearing creatures, we can, you know, the going gets tough, the tough get going kind of thing, we're good at doing that. But when we're super just wealthy out of our mind, living in opulence and luxury, that can be very corrosive to the soul if your value systems aren't properly set.

[Preston]

If you're just, I think it's extremely corrosive. Imagine playing a video game where let's just your typical video game. When designers make games, they want the person to be able to progress through the game at a kind of a steady pace. And that's enjoyable to the person who's participating in it. There's a challenge, there's something to look forward to. They're seeing their score go up, that has a little bit of volatility which then makes it addictive. Now let's think about a game that is so easy and you're just crushing it the whole time and you just play the whole game straight through and never had any setbacks and just crushed it. That's a pitfall. Especially if the person goes on to go play another game and they think it's as easy as the last one that they just won handedly. So there's a little bit of game design and game theory in the way that a person is wondering, wired to have an enjoyable and meaningful life. I feel bad for people that have a windfall, to be honest with you.

[Robert]

Especially if it's super young.

[Preston]

Yeah. Because I think that it can be ruining for the person because they don't have any type of sense of contribution. They don't have any sense of going through the levels and the challenges and the hardships and the meaning.

[Robert]

Yeah.

[Preston]

Meaning it's all whitewashed.

[Robert]

Yeah. This is probably why generational wealth tends to be squandered by the third generation. Right. It's like the.

[Preston]

Yeah, of course. Yes.

[Robert]

The patriarch makes a ton of money. He teaches his son how to do the business who does it pretty okay. But then by the third generation, the son's son, he's so spoiled and accustomed to it, you know, he loses it.

[Preston]

Yeah. The opportunity has a seed of destructive force associated with it and exactly what you're describing.

[Robert]

Yeah. So what do you think? I mean, what is the again, I'm just thinking about like advice to young people. How do they steel themselves against that seed of misfortune?

[Preston]

There's a really good book. I'm trying to remember the title. Oh, I can't believe I can't remember this.

[Robert]

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[Preston]

In short, what the book talks about is when you hand down a massive amount of net worth or even it doesn't even have to be a lot, what you're doing is you're screwing up your family genes. Not your genes, but the genealogy within your family. Because what you're doing is you're giving them a head start. You're giving them this destructive seed to the lineage because like I just described with the game, they're learning how to play something and they're being duped into thinking that it's them and it's really not. It was the buying power that was left for them. And so you have to really kind of consider how much you're. This is really important for a lot of bitcoiners because I think there's bitcoiners that are probably going to have tremendous wealth in their life and how they hand that down through their generations afterwards is probably going to be one of the most important decisions they can make for their family and their kids. Kids.

[Robert]

Yeah, Buffett, he's part of the 99% billionaires club or the giver away 99% of their wealth, I think.

[Preston]

And you know what? That's. That he was highly influenced by this book that I'm trying to remember. That's the impetus for why he manages his wealth the way he's going to manage it when he passes.

[Robert]

Yeah. Do you know what he's doing with it? Is it just a contribution to charity?

[Preston]

Yeah, well, it was going to the Gates foundation and here's the name of the book. It's called the Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie.

[Robert]

Gospel of Wealth.

[Preston]

Yep. And it's not a long book. It is actually, I don't know how many pages, probably 30 pages long.

[Robert]

Awesome.

[Preston]

Highly recommended for anybody with a high net worth.

[Robert]

Yeah, it's. I don't know, I guess I haven't put a lot of thought into it, but it seems like, I mean, me, I'm a young man, 35, so it's like I'm playing this game, trying to accumulate more wealth. Got a child would like to, you know, see her have a good life and good opportunities coming into adult life. So you want to hand that on, but you, there's some balance there. You can't just, you know, assuming you have a high net worth, you can't just make it too easy for them. They like, they need to have some struggles or some trials to fortify themselves. Right, yeah.

[Preston]

The real gift to them is the conditioning. I know I'm hitting on this brain stuff a lot, but it's the conditioning that you provide them for the first 18 years. They live for 18 years. It's the first 18 years of their life, especially the first, like six, seven, eight years, because that's where they're really kind of developing their moral foundations through seeing you and how you interact with your spouse and with other people and how do you treat every person you pass? Is everybody an idiot? Or does everybody have meaning in this world? And then when they in their teens and they're ornery and different, difficult, are you there to show them unconditional love and tolerance, but still showing them and demonstrating to them what right looks like, that's the biggest gift you can give them, and work ethic and all these things you're indirectly teaching them. And the best teachers don't tell. They show through their actions. And that's the real gift to your children. It's not how much money you're going to leave them. I mean, I would probably make a very strong argument that that's probably the most corrosive thing that you could do for them is leaving them a bunch of money.

[Robert]

Wow, that's interesting.

[Preston]

But think about it. Think about it, Robert. If. If you went out and picked all these apples and that's your currency and you just give it to somebody else, how is that helping them? That's making them reliant on you and it's your kids.

[Robert]

Yeah, it's the old give a man a fish versus teach a man a fish.

[Preston]

Exactly. That's exactly what it is.

[Robert]

But then your child, or probably adult by the time that's taking place, clearly they're going to probably make the opposite case to some extent. Like, come on, pops, leave a little bit of stack.

[Preston]

Don't you love me? Well, I think it's funny. You look at Warren, and, I mean, he's given his kids millions. Millions. Now, is it more than two or three? I don't know. But he's given them, in my opinion, a decent amount of money that far exceeds what normal people get from their parents. And you know what? His son. His son wrote a book. I didn't get a chance to read it, but his son wrote a book, and he's a farmer. He's done amazing with his farming work that he does. He does nonprofit work, going to other countries and teaching and educating other people on how to get higher crop rates.

[Robert]

Wow.

[Preston]

Yeah. And just, you know, it's really amazing to Kind of see how his son has done so well and has really contributed to society. And you're. And he's in the shadow of a person who is, who is just like massive, you know, as far as what he's accomplished and the value that he's captured through the year. So, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing to talk about and to think about and, and hopefully my ideas. I'm sure people totally disagree with some of my thoughts on this, but if it helps challenge maybe their thinking a little bit, I think that's a win.

[Robert]

Yeah, I think too. I mean, you definitely got to think about it. There's got to be some balance there. It's not black and white. It doesn't seem like. I wonder too how much this is. Yeah, there's no right answer. It's not one size fits all. I wonder how much this technology will transform that decision as well. Will there be a way to lock your Bitcoin into a smart contract that pays out a little bit every year or fund some certain foundation that maybe your children work for? I just wonder what the optionality will look like down the line because it's not going to be just a simple hand off your estate, pay a tax and then move on. There's going to be more programmability, I would imagine, in this wealth transfer.

[Preston]

The people that run the trust, especially if it's one that runs into decades, boy, that can get quite interesting, how that's managed and how that's distributed. Right. Political, maybe even so, I agree with you. I think it's a little exciting to think about what programmable, decentralized trust on a network can do with respect to that.

[Robert]

Yeah, that'd be interesting to watch. And so just to tie this one off, we're talking about future generations and the book concludes with talking about transhumanism. Actually, he makes a point, says, quote, we could exist digitally by running ourselves as a simulation, escaping the biological wetware from which we've arisen, becoming non biological beings. That would be the single most significant leap in the history of our species, launching us into an era of transhumanism. Further, he goes on and says, unless your simulated experiences changed the structure of your simulated brain, you'd be unable to form new memories and would have no sense of the passage of time. Under those circumstances, would there be any point to immortality? So I think he was making the point that consciousness is this change that we undergo, this error correction like that. The, the conscious experience we have is that process unfolding and if you somehow uploaded your consciousness to this cloud that had unlimited sensory data, there wouldn't be as much change going on. Do you have any thoughts on, I mean, this is a crazy thought to think that we could maybe step into semi immortality by uploading our consciousness to a synthetic cloud or something.

[Preston]

Yeah, I don't have too many thoughts on it. I think that it's a fun little thought experiment. But I think that for me, when you get way out there like that, it's not anything that's going to happen anytime soon. And it's not something that like you're ever going to be able to know whether that thing is actually thinking or acting in a manner that is sensing the environment the same way I am right now or that you are right now. So I think it's just a fun little thought experiment and I think he throws that out right there at the end of the book to kind of just wet the beak on just critical thinking and just fascination and creativity.

[Robert]

Yeah. Do you think, I mean, maybe that's the extreme example for like uploading Preston into the cloud and now you feel like you're living forever from the cloud. But it seems like maybe a less extreme example would be possible if we're.

[Preston]

Oh, it's already happening. So. Peter Diamantis, the X Prize founder, friends. I didn't realize this, but friends with Michael Saylor. I interviewed him probably, I don't know, a year ago or something. And he was telling me about in VR how they have taken Tony Robbins and they did all these extensive interviews, they got all this video footage of him answering questions and they have AI'd Tony Robbins and how he responds to certain questions. And then they're using VR to basically allow people to put on a VR headset. And I think Peter told me they were gonna do it for him as well, so that you could interact and have a conversation with Tony Robbins and he will give you the responses and the replies that would be sort of what it'd be like, talk to him in person. Wow, that already exists.

[Robert]

So mind bending. And then my, my thought was that then if you've got Tony Robbins uploaded and then you've got Preston uploaded and you've got these other great thinkers uploaded, is it, I mean, do we then start synthesizing all of these synthesizing intelligences together and you just have this one meta intelligence that you're. I don't know what it's doing. You're talking to it, asking it questions. Maybe it's writing books, I don't know.

[Preston]

Then they have infinity stones in their heads. They're shooting laser beams out of their eyes. I think that. I think it's, it's. It's a really interesting thought experiment. Now, how well does it work? I don't know. And yeah, it's getting weird, man. And it's getting very fascinating to kind of see what's capable when you start pulling the thread. Well, what does that mean? And you start looking at all the different technologies that are out there that are enabling this, and it just gets wild. Peter's book was really good. I can't remember the title. Can't remember the title of any of these books. But he has a really good book. And if you like this type of conversation, man, go out and read Peter's book. It's awesome. I want to say it came out like a year and a half ago here. I can look it up.

[Robert]

Yeah. And then would you like. Do you have any interest in this concept of transhumanism? I've heard a few. I've been to some of these events where people are talking about cryogenics or solving death or these other things. Do you have for you personally, is that something you'd ever even entertain?

[Preston]

I've never even given it thought. The name of his book is the Future is Faster Than youn Think I've read it. It's really good book.

[Robert]

Yeah. I'm putting all these on a list, so I'll get them on the show. Notes.

[Preston]

Yeah. Great.

[Robert]

Yeah. I was at this Summit LA conference a few years ago, and they were just. There's this whole presentation about how we. We had to solve death. Like we needed to overcome. It was this like the war against death kind of thing. And the whole time I'm on, I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, death is so essential to evolution, you know, like, the individual needs to die so that the next generation can adapt. That's how the collective grows.

[Preston]

I think David Sinclair out of Harvard has kind of really challenged that whole idea. Like you just said, it's normal. Hey, you're 100 years old, you should die. And David Sinclair, he wrote this book called Lifespan. Why We Age and why we don't have To. And he's doing just. All of his research is on how to extend the life experience. How can we push Life out to 150 years per person? And I think it's kind of generated this whole discussion around how do we live longer lives, how can we upload our consciousness into computers and all kinds of stuff. But it's A really good book. I don't know if you've read it, but it's kind of interesting how he gets into epigenetics and how the epigenetics are getting thrown off. And so when you think about how your DNA works, you have these epigenetic settings that allow the genetic code to be read for certain parts of your cells. So you have heart cells, you got brain cells, you got all these different types of cells, and they have different epigenetic settings. Well, the longer that the person lives, the more that these epigenetic settings get off. The wrong DNA code basically gets opened up in your DNA strands. Think about your DNA is in all of your cells. But for my skin cells, there's only certain portions of the code that are opened up to be read so that it can continue to produce those skin cells or the heart or whatever. And so those settings, which are basically controlled by histone histone tails that open up the genetic code, they get turned on by accident, and then the cells start producing and you get cancerous type activities, and then you die. Because over a lifetime, these settings get messed up. So it's not the genetic code that's messed up, it's the epigenetic settings that are messed up.

[Robert]

Hmm.

[Preston]

And so he's doing a lot of research on, well, how do we reset those. And he's come across chemicals like NMN that a person can take. He's doing it with rats. He's extended the lifespan of rats by, I think, 400%.

[Robert]

Wow.

[Preston]

Yeah. So it's. It's pretty fascinating stuff.

[Robert]

Now, that's a little more interesting to me. Like if it was a supplement regimen or some modality that you could just extend life. Like, we've already extended the life expectancy a lot throughout the course of human history. That's something I might be willing to engage in. You know, you don't. You never want to be the person living way longer than everyone else. Right. If everyone's doing it and you're. Everyone's now living to 150, that, okay, no problem, maybe. But look at Captain America.

[Preston]

Look at Captain America.

[Robert]

He went. Captain America.

[Preston]

Couldn'T take it.

[Robert]

Captain America.

[Preston]

I'm just trying to work in our laser eye.

[Robert]

Well, that I think is a great place to put a button on it. And thank you again for joining me. And I guess next time we're going to go down the real rabbit hole.

[Preston]

Yes, we are. Hang on to your hats.

[Robert]

The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zhukov will be our next book. And yeah, man, it's a trip. Are you gonna. You said you're rereading it right now.

[Preston]

Well, after we talked the first time, I was like, you know, I need to go back and reread this book, because I read this book a long time ago, and I know it just had a. Just an enormous, enormous impact on me personally, in my opinion, in a really favorable way. And I just had to go back and reread it out of nostalgia purposes. And as I was going through the book, I was like, this is a little out there. I can see why Robert had his reaction that he had, and I'm looking forward to go through that with you. I'm really looking forward to that.

[Robert]

I am really looking forward to it as well. And I honestly have to thank you because I had the same reaction where it's like, I'm reading the book, sometimes I'm confused. Sometimes it's like, way out there. But other times, I'm really loving it. But after getting through it, something. Did it change something in me? And we'll get into it when we talk about the book, but it's for the better, and I really appreciate that.

[Preston]

Well, I can't wait for that one.

[Robert]

I guess we should thank Oprah, too. I think she's the one that got that on the radar, right?

[Preston]

Hey, man, she's the one who's championing that book. It's her favorite book of all time. That's why I read it, because I was like, you know, what if this person says that this is. And that's how I pick books, I find somebody who, for me, I think is really inspirational or who has had a really dynamic change in the trajectory of mankind or has created an amazing business. I just want to. I like to read about them, but I really like to find out the books that influence them the most, and then I like to read those. And so that's how I get my reading lists of what I read is I try to find these really influential people, and then what is it that they read? And I want to read that.

[Robert]

That's brilliant strategy. All right, man. Well, thank you so much.

[Preston]

Till next time.

[Robert]

Yeah, see you soon.

[Preston]

All right, see you.

[Robert]

All right, see you, Preston.