← The "What is Money?" Show
The "What is Money?" Show
Money and Memory | The Pysh Series | Episode 2 | WiM073
00:42:36
Preston Pysh joins me for a multi-episode conversation exploring two books: 1) The Brain by David Eagleman, and 2) The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav.
Loading summary
Transcript106 lines
- [00:08]
John
If the biological value system is, it's mislabeling the neurons and what they are, you know, and it takes multiple neurons to kind of that have to fire again because it's really kind of like binary. When you look at the neuron, it's just turning it into like a thumbs up or a thumbs down kind of thing. And then it, then it connects to another one that gives that type of thing. And I would tell people, if this kind of stuff fascinates you, I would highly encourage you to try to study artificial intelligence. Google has a, has a thing called TensorFlow Playground. You can just do a Google search for it. TensorFlow Playground, you can set up a deep neural net right there on your web browser. You can set up a deep neural net. So easy to do. Just a total graphical interface. You could put nine, nine neurons in layer one, you could put four neurons in layer two and just kind of build out this deep neural net. And then there's like a pattern that is put up on the screen and then you can click start and you can run a sample set of the pattern. So like, let's say it's 250 dots in like a kind of a pattern. You can take a sample, a training set of 10 dots. You can run those 10 dots through the deep neural net. You can watch the deep neural net get conditioned through a transition function at each neuron. And you can watch it actually code itself as if you'd be coding the subconscious of the brain. You can watch how it codes itself so that it can figure out what the pattern is, like the whole context of all the dots, all this in real time on this. I'm telling you, look this up. It's amazing. And it'll help you. I think it'll help people understand just at a really basic and fundamental level how your brain conditions itself as it's receiving data points via your eyes, via your taste buds, via your ears or whatever. Yeah, yeah.
- [02:14]
Mike
So it's truly amazing. And on the point of artificial intelligence, I think the main bottleneck right now it's the data sets. Right. And the training.
- [02:24]
John
Absolutely.
- [02:25]
Mike
And so that just points to what actually our brain is doing. It's just imbibing all of this sensorial input and iterating on it.
- [02:34]
John
If you're going to get into general artificial intelligence, which is like trying to replicate a human brain, I think the challenge they got there is not necessarily the training data set, it's how, like, if you're trying to replicate the brain, what is really kind of the function of all the various nodes inside the brain and then how are they wired with each other in order to try to start getting to this. And then the transition functions that are kind of turning each signal into binary, are those different in a human lobe versus another lobe. All that kind of stuff. No one knows. When you're talking General AI, I think that's the bigger challenge when you're talking artificial intelligence for like cat pictures. It's the training set, it's the data set that's that you got to get right. And then you know obviously how you construct the deep neural net and how many neurons in which layer and you know that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's an art form. These people that are AI programmers, it's an art form. The science.
- [03:39]
Mike
The difference between the two would be narrow. AI is just specialized at a specific task, whereas general is more like self programming like we're describing. We are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So interesting. I want to read another quote from the book here that I think just points to this, this fractal structure again. So it says, quote, your family of origin, your culture, your friends, your work, every movie you've watched, every conversation you've had. These have all left footprints in your nervous system. These indelible microscopic impressions accumulate to make you who you are and to constrain who you can become.
- [04:19]
John
Yeah.
- [04:19]
Mike
So just like the. We were talking about individuals sharing patterns with one another, right? From parents, offspring. That it's also happening at a neuronal level. Like it's all incorporated here is for.
- [04:33]
John
A person who's hearing this, like, what's the takeaway? And I think the takeaway is a you can accomplish so much more than you think you can accomplish. The thing that's probably preventing you from doing it is you're just not thinking big enough and setting your sights on a goal that is. And it all comes back to the five whys. Why are you trying to do that big thing that needs to make sense, but you are capable of just unbound potential. And I would say at an age probably way later than you realize, if you want to do those things, find the person or people that have done something similar and study the living hell out of them so that you can condition your brain in a manner of what they did. Right. You can do it too. You just have to try to figure out what books did these people read, who influenced them. Let me try to replicate the environment that this person might have experienced for 10 years as they were building that star. Whatever it is, you can basically take yourself and put yourself through that same type of conditioning that led to that person's ability to do it. Now can you just copy them? Of course not. But you can understand the fundamental things that allowed them to think in the way that they thought to accomplish what it is that they did.
- [06:12]
Mike
That's brilliant message and inspirational and motivational, frankly to. I think we do have this predilection to maybe hold our heroes on a pedestal. You know, it's like, how did this guy ever do that? Or how did he accomplish it? But to your point. Yeah, digging. They're human, right? We're all human. And you have the same tools available to you more or less as they did. Do you advocate then for biographies or autobiographies or do you try to focus more on replicating their environments and reading what they read?
- [06:44]
John
I think the biographies help you put their environment in a context. You're never going to be able to, you know, if we're going to, like an AI kind of example, you're. You're taking something that's like high definition bandwidth and flowing it through a deep neural net and then you're comparing it to something that's binary that you're flowing through like a very, very teeny tiny sample set that you're flowing through a deep machine learning. That's the equivalent of a biography versus living it. Right. You're never going to get that same experience, but it can give you clues as to where to look, of making it higher definition, data throughput to condition yourself.
- [07:30]
Mike
Yeah, it's great advice, especially for young people. I think just the power of programming.
- [07:37]
John
Yourself, that's all it is, man.
- [07:41]
Mike
You can literally be whoever you set out to be. It takes years, clearly, and there's going to be a lot of fits and starts and errors along the way. But you point yourself in the right direction and then put in the work. I mean, in the course of two to five years you can cover tremendous ground, especially reading 20 to 50 books a year.
- [08:00]
John
And this is super fundamental to this whole idea is you will corrupt the hard drive if you blame your current conditions on the wind.
- [08:16]
Mike
That's right.
- [08:17]
John
Right. Going back to the boat analogy, if you're sitting on the boat and you're saying, dang, man, I'm trying to sail that direction in the wind. It's the damn wind stopping me. You are corrupting the hard drive. When you approach life with the mindset that there's no controls on the boat, if you convince yourself that there's no controls on the boat, guess what? You have conditioned your brain to believe there's no controls on the boat. You're going to realize that Your subconscious will figure out a way to realize what you just told yourself.
- [08:55]
Mike
Yes, yes, yes.
- [08:59]
John
But if you start telling yourself there's a hundred controls on this boat that can get me there super fast, I just got to figure out what the hell they are. Your subconscious will help you realize and find out what the hell those controls are.
- [09:14]
Mike
Yeah, it's brilliant. There's a good way to play every hand. Right. We're all dealt a different hand, but there's a good way to play it. I thought, too, this connection he went into in the book, the relationship between memory and, I guess it was a visualization or when you're, when you're visualizing something in the future versus something in your memory, they're very deeply connected. Yeah. So the way he described.
- [09:41]
John
That's what makes humans very different than all the other animals, is their ability to forecast and run models.
- [09:47]
Mike
Right. Yeah. So we can. Peterson describes this as, we're the one animal that discovered time, so we know that not only do we need to eat today, but we need to figure out how we're going to eat tomorrow and next year. And that came with the discovery of work. So we work to overcome the ravages of time, which makes us kind of different than every other animal that's more or less living for the moment by comparison. So the line he uses to describe memory says, quote, rather than memory being an accurate video recording of a moment in your life, it is a fragile brain state from a bygone time that must be resurrected for you to remember. So we think that our memories are just what happened. Right. And we just recall them. Yeah, they're completely jacked.
- [10:44]
John
And it's in. Most of what you remember is the emotional piece, the emotional valuation system is what you remember. It's not necessarily. The optical memory is jacked. You remember how people. The famous Maya Angelou quote, you'll remember how people make you feel. Not necessarily what was said.
- [11:08]
Mike
Yeah, exactly. And it's the, the, the memories themselves are just as distortable as your forward visualization. So it's really just like backwards visualization in a way. We're not recalling objective facts. We're. We're recalling what was, I guess, biologically relevant in the moment. And I know he made the point that this impacts our experience of time. You know, we always say time flies when you're having fun. If you're in some kind of traumatic situation, time slows down. I don't know if you've ever been in maybe a car?
- [11:42]
John
I have had. Yeah, I've had that happen to me in a car accident.
- [11:45]
Mike
Same. Same here.
- [11:46]
John
Yeah.
- [11:47]
Mike
T Bone and it was the Matrix, you know, just like everything completely slowed down.
- [11:54]
John
He does a great. He. He better than most other books that I've read about that because having had it happen to me, I was very curious what caused that because it almost seemed like somebody hit the mute button on the simulation. And how he describes it in the book is the processing power that's being dedicated to that final moment of potentially saving your life. You're now gaining much larger share of conscious access. And because of that, it appears like time is slowing down. Yeah, it was a great. I probably didn't do it much justice of how he actually describes it in the book. But it was very interesting how he describes that.
- [12:40]
Mike
But it's so interesting that the flow of time itself, it is a conscious phenomenon. Again, we have this maybe tendency to believe that time is flowing outside of us and things are. Things are transpiring and we're observing them, but it's actually time is. It's generated almost in our mind and it changes speed based on the nature of the experience.
- [13:07]
John
Almost like a processor works on a computer. It has a clock, right. And the binary is flowing through the chamber of the processor. And it's almost like instead of the binary flowing through in a linear fashion, now it's opened up into a parallel realm where the binary is now flowing through multiple chambers as the clock continues to process in turn and basically push each piece of binary through the next chamber. It's crazy, dude.
- [13:48]
Mike
Yeah, it's amazing. It gives you, to your point, just the optimal likelihood of survival. Right. You're.
- [13:56]
John
Yeah, that's the.
- [13:56]
Mike
That.
- [13:57]
John
That was his opinion on why it exists for humans to be able to do that is to allow them that. That opportunity to potentially just move that extra millimeter to maybe miss the. The glass shard or whatever.
- [14:12]
Mike
Yeah. So cool.
- [14:15]
John
The Neo, you know, Matrix move.
- [14:19]
Mike
Yeah. So I'll read another thing here just on memory because the other relationship I think about here is that another one of these answers to the question what is money? I think money is kind of the collective memory where we've made certain sacrifices and successes across the history of economic transactions. You've rendered favors to the market and the market has rewarded you in terms of money or monetary value. And the memory of your accomplishments you can now redeem for other services from others. We're trading favors kind of thing. Clearly it's in a unperturbed free market system. That would be accurate, right? Like your rich person would be someone that rendered a lot of service to society. Whereas today it's often not the case tends to be whoever's closest to the fiat currency printer versus someone that's actually rendered useful service. So I'll read this quote about memory just to add to that he says quote, our past is not a faithful record. Instead it's a reconstruction. And sometimes it can border on mythology. When we review life, our life memories, we should do so with the awareness that not all the details are accurate. Some came from stories that people told us about ourselves. Others were filled with what we thought must have happened. So if your answer to who you are is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative. Yeah, completely so weird.
- [16:03]
John
Well, and people. And maybe it's just our ego of us thinking that we remember exactly what happened and us just having overconfidence in what it is that we think we remember or what we know when that's just not how your brain functions. Yeah, it functions more in a way to make sure that you're a protected, that you're not going to get hurt, that you have the ability to act on potential rewards. And so it's optimizing itself to be able to. It's not like a photograph stored in a hard drive on your computer. Computer.
- [16:50]
Mike
It's just not right right there. So this one's tricky to me though because you don't want to just throw up your hands and be like, well, I don't know if I remembered anything correctly. Because then you're just fully manipulable, right? Anyone? If you're, you know, you're an argument with your spouse and they're like, oh, that's not what happened. This happened. And then you just say, well, I guess so. My memory is totally, you know, mutable. So maybe you're right. There's this. We have to have this balance almost between trusting ourselves and our perceptions and our memories, but also having the humility to realize. To realize these neuro Architectural shortcomings.
- [17:30]
John
Humility comes from understanding. So when you are aware of this fact that your mind is so corruptible as far as the memories, let's say you get in an argument with your spouse and you approach it with this understanding that maybe, just maybe you're not remembering it in a similar way that maybe she remembered it. And maybe what you think you said, you didn't say at all. And so if you have that deep understanding of that potential, you Might approach the conversation with, you know what, sweetie? I think this is what I said. And maybe I didn't truly. Maybe I didn't say this at all, but in my brain, this is what I think I said to you. You kind of are approaching it with a lot of humility and understanding and just the potential that, hey, maybe you are wrong and your brain's playing tricks on you. I just find that you're probably getting a lot less arguments.
- [18:42]
Mike
Yeah.
- [18:43]
John
And maybe your life is just a little bit more satisfying because you're not in a battle over trying to prove that something that's in your brain as a historical event maybe isn't actually what happened.
- [18:55]
Mike
Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Right.
- [18:59]
John
And it really helps if your spouse kind of has that same humility. Right?
- [19:04]
Mike
Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's good. And we're just a little foreshadowing for the other book, the Soul. Like it. You get below maybe the facts of what happened and you get to the intention. Right. What you're intended to say or what.
- [19:21]
John
Bingo.
- [19:23]
Mike
But. But I read that book.
- [19:24]
John
I. I haven't read that book in so long. But it felt so good to hear you say that. I don't even remember everything that's in that book, but I do. I remember walking away with that line of thinking. Right.
- [19:38]
Mike
For the audience, we have about 16 pages of notes from the brain. I think the Soul is probably close to 40 pages of notes. I was highlighting like crazy.
- [19:48]
John
How many things have we gotten through on these 16 pages of notes here?
- [19:51]
Mike
I'm in. I'm on page two right now. And I'm skipping a lot, but this is great. Hey, everybody. As you've no doubt learned by watching this show, Bitcoin is the single most important asset you can own in the 21st century. And one of the most important companies in Bitcoin today is NYDIG. NYDIG's mission is to get bitcoin into the hands of as many people as possible. One of the ways they are accomplishing this mission is by empowering banks and financial technology companies to offer their own bitcoin products and services. As a true game changer in the industry, NYDIG is safely unlocking the power of bitcoin for forward thinking individuals and institutions alike. Led by Robbie Guttman, Yen Zhao, and Ross Stevens, NYDIG has absolutely exploded onto the bitcoin scene recently and has quickly become a leader in this space. So whether you are a professional investor looking for asset management services or a company looking to white label your own Bitcoin product or service. Consider Nydig your single source solution for everything Bitcoin. Oh, you know the other thing we talked about, memory and visualization. Maybe this was related to the story you told earlier with a guy. He had the brain injury and he couldn't create new memories, but he also. It's the same area. He could not imagine the future at all.
- [21:23]
John
No, I'm sorry, it isn't the same. Okay, so. Yeah, go ahead.
- [21:26]
Mike
Yeah.
- [21:28]
John
Oh, yeah. Okay. This is similar to the one from the book the Power of Habits that I was talking about. Yes.
- [21:35]
Mike
Right. Maybe this was the guy that I don't. He had a brain injury from construction work, I think. But it just, he. If I recall correctly, I'd have to pull it up. But he basically got stuck because you can't form any new memories. So he had memories prior to the accident, but he couldn't form any new memories after that. And then he was unable to imagine the future. So he basically couldn't. He couldn't do anything day to day, if I recall correctly. So just. Yeah, it calls to that point again that memory is this tool for. For planning. Right. We're both. I don't know, memory. It's. It's almost like when we visualize, we're trying to remember our future in a way. You're trying to, like, back into what you want to be.
- [22:21]
John
Here's. Here's a fun thing to talk about that's kind of in relation to what you're talking about here. What makes something funny? When somebody tells a joke, what makes it funny and it actually relates to what you're saying there about the future projections. So when a person starts to tell a joke, what everybody starts to do is immediately just like when I pose the question, everyone tries to figure out what the future is going to be at the end of the punchline. So as the person's telling the joke, they're thinking, okay, it starts off in a bar or whatever, and the person's. They're showing this array of potential outcomes of where they think this joke is going to end up. And what really kind of triggers a person to laugh at the end is it was nowhere near where they thought the ending was going to go. And it had some really clever kind of correlations to all the things, all the cues that they were telling you. You should have been clever enough to kind of understand where it was going. But it was like this left hook or right hook at the end that you realized it was super clever. And it was not what you expected. And so it's a great example of what makes a person human is their ability to be able to do these forecasts in their mind of what they think the future is potentially going to happen. People have this happen to them all the time. Maybe you have a big briefing that you're going to be giving the boss at 3 o'clock. The people are envisioning exactly how that's going to go. Is Kevin going to ask the same question that he asked last time that was in relation to risk? Is so and so going to, like, they're going through all those scenarios and they're trying to figure out the best way that they can be prepared for that outcome. And this is such a human thing that is so much different than the animal kingdom or any other, you know, mammal or being that has a brain. Because they're in the now, they're kind of processing the environment that's happening to them right now, but not necessarily thinking about future activities. And if they are doing these things where they're preparing for the future, it's most likely actually coded in their DNA or kind of hard coded into some of the way that their lobes are constructed, Right?
- [25:01]
Mike
Yes. So we were like telling the story or the joke. There's this realm of possibility opening up in front of it. Everyone's trying to kind of guess the answer, but then if you can deliver the punchline, which is a coherent answer to the joke, to the cues. Yeah, but they didn't see it coming. Right. The distance between, I guess, the coherence to the narrative and distance from what they choose saw coming would be how funny it is.
- [25:28]
John
Yeah.
- [25:28]
Mike
Which is interesting to think about. So, yeah, there's. Have you. Maybe you've. You may have heard of this book. I don't know if you've read it. The Case Against Reality by Hoffman.
- [25:43]
John
In fact, I just read this book and this was the. I probably finished this book two days ago. Well, I think I read it because I saw you take a picture of it on Twitter.
- [25:56]
Mike
Really?
- [25:57]
John
Did you post a picture?
- [25:58]
Mike
I did. I just read it two months ago. Probably. Yeah, I just read this book, man. Well, I don't want to derail our current book, but what did you.
- [26:06]
John
I mean, I thought it was good. I thought it was good. A lot of the ideas I kind of felt like maybe I'd picked up in other books about the brain. Yeah. But, yeah, I thought it was a good book.
- [26:22]
Mike
Yeah. The maybe this line is what made me think of it, which is in the brain. He said you don't perceive objects as they are, you perceive them as you are. So we're.
- [26:34]
John
He was talking about like the whole three dimensional space and he's just kind of like, is that even real or is that how your brain isn't? It was, it was a neat read. I really like this reading. Yeah, right. It kind of relates to what Eagleman saying here.
- [26:48]
Mike
So do you think. How would you describe the thesis of that book? And then do you think it's accurate? I mean, do you think it's consistent, I guess, let's say with the brain?
- [26:59]
John
Yeah, kind of. The whole time I was reading the book, I guess I was asking myself the so what? Like, why is it important whether this narrative is true or not? And how does that shape the way that I'm going to act in my environment moving forward? I didn't feel like I really got the so what? Right. It's just like, hey, I'm making this opinion that maybe everything is just one giant simulation. I'm thinking, okay, sure, I can buy that. But so what? Right. And I don't know that I was necessarily able to get anything actionable out of that.
- [27:47]
Mike
Yeah. Because he's.
- [27:48]
John
And none of it's provable. Right. So like it's fun. It was a fun read to kind of. Well, I see you're pushing back. And he tried to make it provable, but I guess it was a. You go ahead.
- [28:03]
Mike
I don't know. I don't know. Actually, I don't know. It just. So the general thesis, I'll try and do it justice here, is that, yes, roughly, space and time is not objective reality.
- [28:16]
John
Yeah.
- [28:17]
Mike
And that it is actually this biological interface. So we all see the world similarly, but not the same.
- [28:26]
John
Can only. That's right. We see it similarly, it's not the same. And we're only sensing a sliver of the amount of data that is in the environment. When you think about your brain and what it actually can sense in the spectrum of all the electromagnetic energy and molecules that are out there, because that's pretty much the two binary things. You either got wave energy or you got particle energy. And all of that is supplying some type of input to the sensors of your body. Those sensors are minuscule in the grand scheme of all the things that you could be sensing for. So like a perfect example is like a bee, right. Like they can see the pollen in the flowers because they're seeing outside of, you know, the, the light energy, the visible light spectrum that human beings are seeing. And that goes for many other animals. And like, when you think of pigeons and how they're able to navigate, well, they're picking up on, you know, a different spectrum of the electromagnetic spectrum in order to carry out these feats that look completely unbelievable to human beings because we have no sensory input for those. For that data that's constantly being broadcast at all times. So that's some of the things that he was talking about a little bit in the book. And how when we think about our brain and how limited, and not only the brain, but the sensors and how limited they are to provide sensory input of all this environment. I don't know. It was an interesting read.
- [30:14]
Mike
Yeah. He makes a point that we're more attuned. We are wired to see fitness payoffs, not see reality as it is.
- [30:24]
John
That was a huge theme. Yes.
- [30:26]
Mike
Yeah. And for me, I agree with you this. So what it's like, okay, we can't even see through any other aperture than our own biological interface. So what does that mean for action? I agree with you on that. But what it did do to my. I had this understanding of, like, astrophysics and the Big Bang, and I felt comfortable in this. I'd read about it for years, so I thought I kind of knew this whole structure of the universe, how we got to now, you know, from 13.7 billion years ago to now. But it made me question that. It's like, what is maybe that. What is the Big Bang and the universe itself? It's maybe we're just seeing it the way. Seeing it in a certain way that's relevant to us. Right. When we see stars in the night sky, the light to those stars could just represent fitness payoffs instead of actual objective reality. Like big balls of burning gas.
- [31:20]
John
See, I guess I've always kind of been very suspect of the whole Big Bang, theoretical physics and everything else. How we got to here at this point in time, I've been very skeptical of that. So I guess when I was reading the book and kind of going through it, I was like, yeah, that'll make. I can totally buy this.
- [31:40]
Mike
You already had it intuited. That's awesome.
- [31:42]
John
Well, I don't know. I wouldn't give myself that much credit. It read to me like, yeah, I could just buy that. Whether it's true or not, who the hell knows? I could buy it. Right?
- [31:54]
Mike
Yeah. I don't know. It's a trip of a book. Now I look at the world a little. It just makes you question the way you perceive the world, I guess. But I thought it paired nicely with this one.
- [32:06]
John
I Think that's the one thing you get from reading? Once you read a lot of books, you just have a deep appreciation for. You pretty much just don't know anything. What you know is pathetic.
- [32:18]
Mike
Yes.
- [32:18]
John
Right. It's just like there's so many more things. Like you haven't even scratched the surface.
- [32:26]
Mike
Right.
- [32:27]
John
Nothing. I think that's the. The thing. You just start to like, oh, yeah, I could see that. That we're living in a simulation.
- [32:34]
Mike
Sure works. Yeah. You start to get much more like Socrates. So the only thing you know is you know nothing at all.
- [32:42]
John
That's right. I had a guy tell me one time in the military. He was in the Navy, and he was. He was landing on a carrier, and he said right out of flight school, it was so much fun. And I was like, this is awesome. I'm landing on a carrier. He's like, then I got a thousand hours of experience, and I was the pilot in command and I was landing on the carrier. And it was scary as hell because I then understood all the things that could go wrong when landing on a carrier. And I think it's kind of similar with all the books and stuff. You start to realize, holy hell, I literally know nothing. I'm super clueless here in this realm of all these things that are happening. And you just have a deep appreciation for how much the world collectively knows and how much of a pittance, you know, in that grand scheme of things.
- [33:46]
Mike
Absolutely. Do you think that that has to do with people becoming generally becoming more conservative as they age as well? You just.
- [33:56]
John
I think a lot of people, they really haven't done too much else with their life past, like, 30, 40. Like, they're. They're in the do loop of just letting their subconscious just totally dictate them for the rest of their lives. And they really don't have too much. I don't want to phrase it as they don't have much to offer because I think the relationships that they have with their family and everything are extremely profound and valuable to the world. Right. But as far as their contributions beyond family and to the rest of the human race is probably pretty minimal. They aren't learning and try to. They're not trying to expand their knowledge set and then kind of leverage that to do something for very impactful. Beyond their immediate family. And that's fine. I'm not saying that in a negative way. Hey, that's fine. It's all, hey, where are you sailing the ship? If you're happy at the destination you're at right now? Well, then why sell somewhere else?
- [35:04]
Mike
Yeah, a great point. But I think it's my greatest fear probably to ever get stuck in that loop. I don't know.
- [35:13]
John
Yeah. And here's the bigger question. Like when you think of why are you happy at that destination and why do you not want to do anything else? Is that because your subconscious is comfortable in that space and is that really where you want to end up? I mean, it goes back to this whole reflexivity. Are you the one calling the shots? Or is your subconscious calling the shots because it's comfortable in its space and it's not having to work hard to figure out a new environment? Because that's work. When you have to learn a new environment, you move to a new house, you got to learn all your new routes and all this. It's effort, it's work, it's. Do you enjoy that? Well, why do you enjoy it? Why do you not enjoy it? You got to ask yourself these questions. Because maybe 80 comes along and you look back at the last 40 years and you say, I hadn't done nothing and I'm just really not satisfied with my life at this point. Well, too late, man. Things to think about when you're 40.
- [36:30]
Mike
Yeah. Sounds like the makings of a midlife crisis right here. Um, yeah, I don't. There's something. I mean, I guess a lot of people have this. But just the, the never ending learning thing, you know, I never. There's a lot of older people that I've interacted with. This goes back to bitcoin, the Bitcoin Denier syndrome. Right. I'm 60 years old. I'm super successful in this fiat currency game. I don't care what you have to tell me. I'm not open minded to it at all. They just deny it because it's super inconvenient. Yeah.
- [37:11]
John
Because if you're right, it's going to make things very inconvenient for them.
- [37:15]
Mike
I love my aunt Carolyn. She comes to mind here. She's an amazing woman, but when I talked to her about bitcoin, she's very reticent. She's like, no, we love the US dollar, we have to protect the US dollar. She's very stuck in her belief system on the US dollar. And I just don't want to end up like that. About that is my point. I want to always be open minded. Even with bitcoin, I don't want to be the 80 year old guy that's still. It's all bitcoin. And there'd be some Other earth shattering technology that's come around the corner that I'm blind to.
- [37:47]
John
It's so funny you say this because I have this exact same fear. I'm looking at Charlie Munger, okay, And I'm saying, how is it possible for me to never become what happened to him when he's 80, he's in his 90s. But like when I get later in my life, what can I do to guard and protect against that? And I have no answer for that. I have no idea how a person can guard against that. Because again, think about all the conditioning that has happened on his brain for 90 years, right? And you think that all of a sudden you're going to show him something that's, that's going to undo some of that.
- [38:30]
Mike
Right.
- [38:32]
John
I mean, good luck.
- [38:35]
Mike
Yeah. So that, that intellectual inertia just keeps growing as you age and at some point you just can't resist it, I guess.
- [38:44]
John
Yeah, yeah, I think so.
- [38:46]
Mike
And he still reads a lot, right? I mean still, of course he's.
- [38:52]
John
So they talk about this idea of challenging your beliefs and I mean you would think that he would be reading books about it and really trying to challenge it. Especially as something achieves a trillion dollar market cap. You'd think you'd be saying, all right, well any other thing that achieved a trillion dollar market cap, I've read up on it and tried to understand it. Maybe they are, maybe they are. I don't know if they are, but I know they've never talked about reading any type of bitcoin book. And I think when a person cognitive biases. There's a great book called Superforecasters. Have you read that? This is a really good book. And it talks about these people who are experts at forecasting, why are they so good at forecasting? And one of the big things that was my takeaway is A, they're constantly updating their opinion, B, they're totally open to either outcome if it's a binary outcome, they're totally open to the idea that it could be either binary outcome. And then finally they try to balance their content consumption, their data throughput, back into their brain equally for both potential outcomes. If we're talking about a binary outcome, so that they can allow themselves the ability to not have a cognitive bias as they're assessing what the potential outcome outcome would be. And so I think people that would be listening to this that are maybe skeptical of bitcoin, they'd be looking at the two of us and saying, well, you all are describing yourself right now in a major way that have a massive cognitive bias towards bitcoin. I think it's a little bit of a fair assessment. If I was going to try to push back on it, I would tell you one of the main reasons I'm on Twitter talking about it so much is to find somebody who can just shellack me.
- [40:59]
Mike
Yes.
- [41:00]
John
Comes to a counter argument. I mean, how many times have you heard the same arguments and various. I mean, you could talk energy, you could talk. You've heard it relentlessly. And I think if I was going to describe the people with laser eyes, not all of them, but the ones that I would really respect in the space, if somebody can bring a really strong argument to something, they want to hear it. They really do want to hear it and they want to try to pick it apart.
- [41:32]
Mike
Absolutely. Actually, that is the foundation of my overall bullishness, is I have tried to look at those counter arguments and the fud, and what I see happening is the FUD keeps drying up. The arguments, to your point, they get repeated, actually, from cycle to cycle, the identical counter arguments. There's no additional Heather. Yeah, the same articles get reprinted. It's incredible. But then on the bitcoin side, I see this network that just keeps growing and becoming more feature rich and the community is growing, the narratives and the education. So it's like, yeah, you just kind of put those things on a scale and see which way it's going. But it's a valid criticism because if you just read my Twitter, I look like some kind of religious zealot for bitcoin.