Money as an Extension of Mind | The Pysh Series | Episode 1 | WiM072

Summary

Podcast Summary: The "What is Money?" Show – "Money as an Extension of Mind | The Pysh Series | Episode 1 | WiM072"

Release Date: November 21, 2021
Host: Robert Breedlove
Guest: Preston Pish

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Introduction to the Pysh Series and Selected Literature

In the inaugural episode of the Pysh Series, Robert Breedlove sits down with Preston Pish to explore the intricate relationship between money and the human mind. The discussion is anchored around two pivotal books: The Brain by David Eagleman and The Seed of the Soul by Gary Zukov. These works serve as the foundation for delving into how our cognitive processes influence and are influenced by monetary systems.

The Brain: Understanding Cognitive Architecture

Preston Pish shares his journey into studying the brain, citing The Brain by David Eagleman as a seminal work that made neuroscience accessible and engaging. He emphasizes the importance of understanding cognitive biases, influenced by his admiration for investment legends like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, who are known for their voracious reading habits. Pish reflects on how reading extensively can help mitigate cognitive biases by providing a deeper understanding of how our brains operate.

Notable Quote:

"The process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed."
— Robert Breedlove [11:04]

Programming the Subconscious: Habits and Conditioning

The conversation transitions to the concept of self-programming through habits, referencing James Clear’s Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit. Preston illustrates how repetitive actions and environmental conditioning shape our subconscious behaviors, often beyond our conscious awareness. He shares the poignant example of a man with a brain tumor who exhibited drastic behavioral changes, highlighting the profound impact of biological factors on our actions.

Notable Quote:

"If you watch a young child, age 3, 4 years old, and let's say that there's a snake in the backyard... the child will go up there and maybe have a just a perfectly fine interaction with this snake that's tame or whatever."
— Preston Pish [19:58]

Fractal Nature of Reality: From Cells to Societies

Robert Breedlove introduces the idea of fractal patterns in reality, suggesting that the structure of the human brain mirrors larger societal systems. This analogy extends to the concept that societal institutions, like banks, function similarly to neural pathways by automating essential operations without conscious deliberation.

Notable Quote:

"Civilization advances by being able to perform more important actions without having to think about them."
— Paraphrased from Alfred North Whitehead by Robert Breedlove [42:33]

Money as the Neural Network of Society

The duo explores the metaphor of money as an extension of the mind, serving as a collective neurotransmitter that conveys value and facilitates interaction within the market. They argue that when monetary systems are manipulated—such as through central banking and fiat currencies—it disrupts the natural valuation processes, leading to economic and social dysfunctions.

Notable Quote:

"We're corrupting the extension of our mind, and it seems like that reverberates backwards, reflexively into our individual minds."
— Robert Breedlove [68:37]

Bitcoin: A Solution to Monetary Dysfunctions

Preston Pish posits Bitcoin as the "lobotomy" required to reset and heal the distorted monetary neurotransmitter. By offering a decentralized and transparent monetary system, Bitcoin aligns more closely with the natural valuation processes of the human brain, potentially restoring balance and efficiency to both individual cognition and societal economics.

Notable Quote:

"Bitcoin supplies the lobotomy."
— Preston Pish [70:07]

Concluding Reflections: Nature vs. Nurture and Empathy

The discussion concludes with reflections on the interplay between genetic predispositions and environmental conditioning. Preston emphasizes the importance of empathy, recognizing that many behavioral anomalies stem from underlying biological or conditioned factors beyond an individual’s control.

Notable Quote:

"Maybe the reason I'm more emotional or I have no emotion or whatever is actually in the biological piece of how your lobes had developed as a kid, combined with the environmental factors that conditioned you to be the way you are."
— Preston Pish [51:35]

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Key Takeaways:

1. Neuroscience and Money: Understanding the brain's architecture and cognitive biases is crucial for comprehending how we interact with and value money.

2. Self-Programming Through Reading: Extensive reading and learning can reprogram the subconscious, enhancing decision-making and reducing biases.

3. Fractal Reality: The structure of individual minds mirrors societal institutions, suggesting a deep interconnectedness between personal cognition and collective systems.

4. Monetary Systems as Neural Networks: Money functions as a collective neurotransmitter, and its manipulation can lead to systemic issues akin to neurological disorders.

5. Bitcoin as Cognitive Alignment: Bitcoin presents a decentralized monetary system that aligns with natural valuation processes, offering a potential remedy to flawed traditional financial systems.

6. Empathy and Behavioral Understanding: Recognizing the blend of biological and environmental factors in human behavior fosters greater empathy and understanding of others.

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Conclusion

This episode of The "What is Money?" Show intricately weaves neuroscience with economic theory, presenting money not just as a medium of exchange but as a reflection and extension of the human mind. Through the insights of Preston Pish and Robert Breedlove, listeners gain a profound understanding of how our cognitive processes shape and are shaped by the monetary systems we create, positioning Bitcoin as a transformative force in aligning economic structures with natural cognitive functions.

Transcript

[Preston Pish]

Foreign.

[Robert Breedlove]

Welcome to the what is Money? Show. I am sitting down with Mr. Preston Pish today, and we're going to be diving into the Pish series, where our aim is to externalize Mr. Pish's mind for the world, specifically related to two books which kind of two avenues of thought that Preston and I discussed prior to the show. I read them. I know Preston had read them previously, and then we've kind of gone back and forth about really what these books are, and then we're hoping to just dive into them and get to the gist of. Of what's going on. So the two books are the Brain by David Eagleman and the Seed of the Soul by Gary Zukov. So, Preston, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Maybe we could just start out talking about those two books and why. Why we chose them.

[Preston Pish]

You know, when we were thinking about what. What we do here, my main objective was to get as cosmic as possible in this conversation.

[Robert Breedlove]

You pick good books.

[Preston Pish]

Oh, Lordy. Are we tying any of this into bitcoin as we're going?

[Robert Breedlove]

It's funny. I always find ways to tie things back into bitcoin, but this is. I'm sure we will see what happens. Yeah.

[Preston Pish]

All right. Let's just see what the heck happens.

[Robert Breedlove]

But so maybe if you just give us a little background, like, when did you read these books? When did you read the Brain? Which we're going to be focused on the brain today, so maybe we'll just start with that one.

[Preston Pish]

So the Brain, the exploration of all the books that I've kind of read on the brain came later than the Zhukov the Seed of the Soul book, which I read that, I think, after I came back from my first rotation in Afghanistan. So it was more than a decade ago that I read that book, the one that Gary wrote, the Seed of the Soul. But I felt like it had a tremendous impact on me, just morally, ethically. I don't know how to really, just foundationally. And then on the Brain, the David Eagleman book was not one of the first books that I've read. There's another book that I read that I really like. It's called Consciousness in the Brain. It's by Stanis. I forget his last name. But just fantastic book. One of the earlier ones that I read on the Brain and just kind of was fascinating to me. But the reason I kind of went down this path of trying to study and learn as much about the brain as possible is because investing, you're always trying to find out what your cognitive Biases are. It's something that people know. I'm a hardcore Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger fan, even though they're not the most popular guys in the bitcoin space. In fact, I might even argue they're hated in the bitcoin space. I have a lot of respect for those guys. They taught me a whole lot about so many different things in life, especially when it comes to investing. And one of the things that I noticed about them outside of just the book on the brain, is they just read like maniacs. I was at a shareholders meeting one year, and they were talking about their two replacements that are going to replace them there at Berkshire. And a person asked, how did you select these people out of all these investors on the planet that would die to come in and be your replacement to you and Charlie? How did you select these two? And Warren's response was, they were the only two guys that we could find that read as many books as Charlie and I. That really stuck with me. That was something that. And it's something that I already knew was super important. Anytime you go to the Berkshire meeting, he publishes his reading list of all the books that he read for the year. And there's probably, I don't know, 30 books on the list every year at the shareholders meeting. And he has a really short description as to why he read those books. And so he's been doing this for decades. Warren and Charlie. Some might even argue Charlie might be more well read than Warren. I learned that very early on, a decade ago. Plus, that if I wanted to be a great investor, I needed to read like a maniac. And going down that path of trying to read as many books as I can in a year, and what I shoot for is two to four per month, I would say, is kind of the pace that I'm on and have been on for a decade. Plus. What I've learned through that experience, especially when it comes to investing, is the cognitive biases are huge, a huge part of it. And so what I came to the conclusion of it was, is, hey, I can read a book about cognitive biases, biases, or however you want to pronounce that. Or I could even go a step deeper and just try to understand the mechanics of how my brain works at a fundamental level. And maybe that actually might help me understand why we have this conditioning that kind of happens in your brain that leads you to make cognitive mistakes. And so that kind of led me on this really kind of fascination of how does the brain work? How does it get wired? How does how do you condition it, this first book that we're going to talk about today? In my opinion, David Eagleman is probably one of the best authors for a book on the brain because he makes it just so accessible. And I'm sure you agreed after reading this book. He makes it really easy to understand without getting bogged down into all the difficult terminology and all that stuff. That's why I thought this was a great book.

[Robert Breedlove]

Agreed completely. He made it very simple, very accessible. I thought the book was very readable. It was just not. You would expect a neuroscience book to maybe be a little dense, but it's not that at all. It was just very, very easy read, but teaching a lot along the way. So it's. It's really good.

[Preston Pish]

Hold up the book here so people can see which one.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, there it is. Talking about Brain, the Story of you.

[Preston Pish]

Because he has a bunch of books out there on the brain. And I would tell you this is the best, overarching, just general purpose kind of introduction to it.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. And admittedly, I haven't actually read that much about the brain or neuroscience or cognitive science. I've read some about psychology, but this is more focused on the brain itself. It's neural architecture, which I found. It was new to me. And I like you. I'm a big fan of reading as well. I've kind of been a lifelong reader, but I've gone in spurts. While I will read 30 to 50 books a year, like, kind of the pace you're on now, and then I'll back off for some time. But the past, I think five years, especially getting into bitcoin, it's really accelerated. So I'm on the book a week course right now, and I just. My reading list is longer than ever. You know, it's.

[Preston Pish]

It's. Yeah, it just keeps going. And it's so important to pay attention to the recommendations of people who are heavy readers. Like, and I don't mean to sound like a snob, but, like, I have people come up to me and give me a book recommendation all the time. And not to. Not to sound like a jerk, but, like, my response is, how many books a year do you read? And if they say, oh, you know, one or two or three or whatever, I. I don't really put too much credence in the book recommendation because it's probably just something that they kind of enjoyed and they read it and so here it is. But if you talk to somebody, a person I really respect with book recommendations is Jeff Booth. Obviously, we just did A segment with him. We share book recommendations back and forth all the time. Because I know he's filtered through hundreds of books. And so if he tells me this one was really influential, it's kind of important for me to kind of pay attention to.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, there's a lot more signal if someone's been through a lot of books. What I find so fascinating about reading and this book gets into that actually is we are. It's a way of self programming. We're actually consciously deciding who we're going to become tomorrow. Like you said, you can read a book on cognitive biases or whatever, and you will just be better about not giving into those cognitive biases to tomorrow or next year whenever that new you take shape. And I agree too on the book recommendations as far as taking it from people that read a lot. The other little trick I use is I tend to be a little more biased towards the classics. I guess that's sort of a Lindy effect thing. If a book's still popular after 20 years plus, that tends to give it a little more credence in my book, so to speak. Um, so maybe with that background in mind, maybe we'll just jump in. And I just mentioned this concept of self programming through reading. And that's actually how he describes the brain itself early on in the book. Um, and I'll just read a little bit here. He says, quote, in a sense, the process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed, unquote. So it's as if we start, the brain has a lot of neuroplasticity when you're young, which just means it's got a lot of potentiality, can go any direction. But then learning is actually kind of the carving back of that potential and specializing it towards some specific aim based on your training or reading or whatever it is you've devoted yourself towards, which is, yeah, what did you. How did you see that? It's almost like the brain is a map of your experience in a way.

[Preston Pish]

So this idea that you're talking about, honestly, is probably one of the most profound insights that I would say I've learned in the last 10 years is this idea of programming yourself. And Tony Robbins learned from a guy named Jim Rowan. And Jim Rowan was really big on this idea of programming yourself and programming your subconscious. And I don't know that they would necessarily describe it that way, but. And another fantastic example of this is There's a book called Think and Grow Rich which is a major best selling book. A lot of people don't realize that the book was actually a series of books written by Carnegie. I'm sorry, not by Carnegie. Carnegie was the influencer who actually opened the doors to 500 influencers of their times to the writer of Think and Grow Rich. And that was actually a summarized book that was kind of like an executive summary of the series.

[Robert Breedlove]

This was Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill, I think.

[Preston Pish]

Yeah, yeah, Napoleon Hill. And what's fascinating about this is it really gets at the idea of what you're talking about, which is programming yourself. And in that book, in Think and Grow Rich he talks about this idea that every night before you go to bed you read this list of things that you're going to accomplish. It's not like you think you're going to accomplish it. You tell yourself you are going to accomplish it. And you're basically telling your subconscious that this is what you are going to do. Almost like you're writing a script for a programming script. So when we start to dig into how the brain works, you have, and just so people listening, there are, there might be somebody who is professionally, you know, a doctor in this area or whatever. So I am not an expert in this. I just talk about the very high level things that I've read about in books and it's meaningful to me. So I want to preface everything I'm saying here with some of this, you know, what we're about to talk about. So you got your subconscious and then you have the conscious area that you actually have access to, which is a very small portion of everything that's happening inside of your brain. This is, you know, people would say this is in the frontal lobe of your brain. This is the neocortex area that if I tell you a math problem and you solve it in your head and I then ask you how did, what were the steps you went through to do that? You're using that portion of your neocortex to solve that. At the same time that you're thinking about that, you have all of this activity that's happening in the background that you have no conscious access to. Like zero. Like you got your brain, it's controlling your heartbeat, it's controlling the secretion in your stomach. You got neurons down your spinal cord that are controlling and making these types of decisions. You got stuff like down at the core level of Bangalore, the basal ganglia of your brain, it's controlling this flight or flight like the threats that you're feeling and how you're emotionally reacting. All of those things are happening all at the same time inside your brain. And it's making all these decisions. Like you're looking at me right now, and your visual field is processing whether there's an anomaly happening or not. And your subconscious is not flowing anything up into your neocortex to say, hey, there's some weird person standing behind Preston right now. That filtering process is happening in the background, it's happening naturally, and it's going up into your thalamus and it's not passing through a filter to trigger you to come off of whatever it is you're thinking about right now. Right. So I think that's first and foremost an important thing to describe for a person. Because if you don't have conscious access to these things, you'll never think about them even being real. Right. Like when you get in your car and you drive to your work or whatever, and maybe you're listening to an audiobook and it's a 20 minute drive and you just get there and you don't even really remember making any of the turns or any of that stuff. It's because you have conditioned your brain on the route. The first time you did that route, that wasn't the case. You were looking at various houses, you were looking at certain landmarks to help you navigate that course. But after you've done it 10 times now, you have pushed that activity, you have conditioned the neurons in your subconscious to be able to handle that entire route. And now you don't even have to think about doing it because your brain has been conditioned to do those things. So as you think about that example and you start asking yourself what else is going on in my brain that's on autopilot because I've done it so many times. When you think about the activity of just using a fork to pick up food on your plate and bring it to your mouth, the amount of neurons that have to fire in order to do that activity in a very smooth, quick, concise way, you do not think about that. That is not getting pushed into your neocortex to think about. And so let's just take that idea and talk about programming yourself. So James Clear has a book about habits, atomic habits. Highly, highly recommend this book. There's another one called the Power of Habits. Amazing story in the Power of Habits that the book opens up with. Talks about a gentleman. I'm sure everybody's seen the movie 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler where he doesn't remember Anything like the next day. I haven't seen the movie for a while, but it's something like that. Well, there's a real life example in the start of this book of a person who has this condition in their brain where they can't remember anything other than like in the now. But what's so fascinating about this person is as they're sitting there watching tv and the book opens up with the story, the person's sitting there watching TV and they stand up and they go into the kitchen and they open the refrigerator and they get something out and they come back and sit down and they're there eating their food. The person who's interviewing this or doing an analysis on this person said, how did you know which door? There's four doors in this room. Which door leads you to the kitchen? And the person couldn't answer the question. I have no idea. They just watched the person get up and go into the kitchen and get some food out of the refrigerator and come right back. It wasn't like he opened four doors and the last one was he just knew how to get there. Well, what's happening is the subconscious is running the program that he wasn't thinking about. It's just his body was telling him he was hungry. He went in there and he did it. So how is something like this possible? Well, it's because you. You have all these programs that are running in your subconscious all day long. Now think about how powerful it is if you're able to start shaping that in a way where you are actively controlling what programs are running back there. Because I think a lot of people have no idea how much their environment has already coded so much of this subconscious behavior that's running in the background. And this starts so early in your life. So here's another example. If you watch a young child, age 3, 4 years old, and let's say that there's a snake in the backyard, and let's say that you as the parent are deathly scared of snakes. Okay? This is what you'll see the child do. The child will go out into the backyard, and let's say the parent is in the backyard with the child, and the parent doesn't realize that there's a snake over in the corner. The child will go over there, they'll see the snake. They're not scared of the snake at all because they've never encountered it before. And this process is how a child starts coding its brain, its subconscious brain on its environment. The child will see the snake. It'll know that it's not normal. The child will turn and look back at the parent. And what the child is doing is they're trying to extract the program, the subconscious program from the parent. And in that moment where the kid's looking back at the parent, the parent's saying, why is the child looking at me? The parent's then looking for, why is the child acting non normal, right? The parent then sees the snake. Now, depending on what the program, the subconscious program that's running on the parent is, is now how the child's about to be programmed. Okay? So the parent, let's say the parent hates snakes. The parent screams, right? That shows this expression of fear all over their face. And the child now immediately says, snake bad, scary. And that program is now, you know, running in the subconscious of the child. Now, if you had the exact opposite, let's say the parent is a snake handler of a carnivore or something like that. And the parent maybe knows this snake, right? And the parent looks at the child with a smile on its face and kind of like this hand gesture, like, go ahead, go ahead. What's the child going to do? The child's going to go up there and, you know, some. I am not an expert at snakes. I have no idea what. What this is, right? But the child could go up there and maybe have a just a perfectly fine interaction with this snake that's tame or whatever. And now that child's going to grow up or have future interactions. The next time it sees a snake, it's going to think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And that's the start of their conditioning right now. They're going to have more interactions with their environment as they grow older. And that's going to continue to shape how those programs run in the back of the subconscious with this person. And so this is just one example of the countless examples that happen throughout a person's lifetime of how they condition their brain to run in the background.

[Robert Breedlove]

It's so damn fascinating, frankly, because you start to see. And Jordan Peterson talks a lot about this, actually, where we think today that most of our actions are like, I think a thought and then I carry out an action. But if you zoom all the way back to caveman times, it's like we were sort of taking action based on impulses, right? To eat, to reproduce, to find shelter, whatever it may be. And it's those patterns of action get passed from person to person, you know, as you said, predominantly from parent to offspring, but also from one another, right? People, you May work with your friends, whatever. And you tend to run with dogs.

[Preston Pish]

Run with dogs. You get fleas.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Birds of a feather kind of thing, right?

[Preston Pish]

Yes.

[Robert Breedlove]

And we, we pick up these programs whether we consciously realize it or not. We'll pick up these patterns of action and they become incorporated into our own behavior, our own patterns of action over time, such that each of us ends up being this plurality of personalities. We have all these sub personalities or programs running in us at all times. 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 Gutman, Yin 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. So there's a saying that we end up with this plurality of sub personalities running in all of us at the same time. And this is what Peterson refers to these as spirits, essentially. So you may be inhabited by the spirit of your father and your father may be running the spirit of his father. We're all passing around these programs with one another. And it's just a really interesting way to think about human interaction and relation is that it's not all. And we may not be conscious of these, to your point. May not be conscious. We're often not conscious of these programs. We're really just. We have these patterns of action that have been etched into our mind.

[Preston Pish]

I think that's, I think that's the key point, which is the, I think that these programs that are running in the background are way more like significantly more influential on our behavior and how we interact in our environment than what we think our conscious portion that we're playing around with and interpreting on the fly is. And if I was going to say a percent, I'm like 20% to 80%. I think it is so much more powerful than people realize. Even if there's no way to know the percent. Whatever it is, I would tell people listening to this to really don't take your subconscious for granted or underestimate how powerful it is. Explore what that might be. I think what you're going to find is just fascinating and. And maybe even a little concerning how powerful it is.

[Robert Breedlove]

This calls to mind too, that the. I think it was a Tim Ferriss quote where he said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Yeah. So we have to be selective. Yeah. About what patterns we are adopting. And then so to tie this back into the reading piece. We do have this power though, to consciously reprogram ourselves so we can conscious. The visual I have is like a little nozzle or aperture that we get to consciously direct that feeds information or patterns into this subconscious that accumulates over time. The subconscious ends up running the show. Right. That dictates most of our action. But it's through the selective placement of this conscious awareness that we can actually reprogram the unconscious over time. And that's where something like.

[Preston Pish]

It's super reflexive.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes.

[Preston Pish]

So let's just say you come up with some goal or objective in your life. And when you're looking at essays that people write when they're going to college, I think one of the reasons a lot of colleges focus on the essay a lot is because they know that if somebody had an event or some type of circumstance in their past that has shaped their worldview and then it aligns with some type of mission or objective that they're trying to accomplish in their life, they know that there's going to be this reflexive loop. Well, maybe they don't know, but evidence would suggest that these types of people go on to do and accomplish these things because there's this reflexive loop where they've set their sights on something and they can't get it out of their head because they've had this emotional reaction or event that's shaped them in their life that's led them to want to do this thing or accomplish this mission. And then it sets up this massive reflexive loop of what they do have conscious access to what they're programming their subconscious to do on a daily basis. And then it has this. This feedback loop that just keeps compounding on itself.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. And they get. The better they get at the thing, whatever it is, they tend to be more rewarded in the marketplace for that thing. So then they're getting External feedback to. Yeah, it's very, very reflexive. I think it's a great point. And I think too of the. Say you're learning to play piano or, you know, at first it's a. It's a very conscious effort. It's very slow, very deliberate, and you're. You're actually in training those pathways to do these things more effortlessly. And then over time, you get a little faster, a little faster, a little faster. And then eventually it's just second nature, right? You don't have to think about anything. So there's this. There's a deep principle here, I think, where we're trying to make important operations. We're trying to push them into the subconscious so that we can free the consciousness up to focus on other things. And we stuff this unconsciousness with more and more programs, which makes us more and more versatile and competent in the world.

[Preston Pish]

So a couple things I want to talk about here. So I don't know if in the book that you read, did they talk about the Sea Squirts? Is that something that I can't remember which book this is from?

[Robert Breedlove]

I don't recall.

[Preston Pish]

So the Sea Squirts is an example of why do you even have a brain? Right? Because it's such a fundamental question that if you can arrive at some type of answer, it also sheds a significant amount of understanding of all the various lobes and why they're there and all that kind of stuff. So the one book that I read, it talks about this sea squirt, which is a really unique animal in the sea that at the first part of its life, I think it's a larva or some sort, it has a brain and it is mobile and it. It tries to find a site where it will set up shop and attach itself to coral or whatever to never leave again. It will set up shop there for the rest of its life. Once it arrives and it sets up shop on the coral or whatever, it's. One of its first acts is to eat its brain. Okay? First thing it does, it sets up and then it literally eats its brain. And so this is a really unique situation that really isn't found throughout nature, anywhere else in nature. And the conclusion, at least by neuroscientists and some people that have written these books is that when you think about a brain in an animal or human or whatever, it's to allow them to have dynamic programming beyond what the DNA can satisfy so that it can handle a dynamic environment, okay? So think about a human being, like, I don't know where you were born and raised, but I suspect that's not where you're at right now.

[Robert Breedlove]

That's right.

[Preston Pish]

Okay, so you've lived all these experiences, you've gone to all these different places, you've been confronted with situations that have been life threatening situations. I know I have. And I have a brain that has allowed me to handle that dynamic input of data to the senses that I'm equipped with. Eyes, ears, nose, the cochlea in your ears, right? You've got so many more senses than five senses. You can just go into the stomach alone. And you got so many dang senses down there sensing the types of food, the molecules. Do I need to secrete this type of acid or this type of base to decompose? I mean, dude, it's just insane. The amount of sensors that are happening inside your body, constantly processing this and then feeding it to all these neurons, clear down your spine up into your brain. And then your brain is making all these decisions to do this and you have no access to any of this. So when we think about that and why do we have to be able to basically write dynamic code on the fly? And more importantly, as we're living this environment and anytime I see a red light, I just immediately stop subconsciously. Whether I was actually even realizing I was coming to an intersection or not is because my brain is optimized. Everybody's brain is optimized to push as much as possible back into the subconscious so that I can handle in the front frontal lobe, more capacity for dynamic data that could potentially be an opportunity or a threat to my body so that I can continue to dynamically operate in my environment. Right? That's why we've got our brain. So when you understand that, when you understand that why, which is the big why, right? If we're going to zoom out to like a 50,000 foot view, that's the real why you can understand how a person is equipped now to make mistakes. Because in this process of trying to push everything and anything into the subconscious so that it can just dynamically do those tasks while you're trying to do the new stuff that's constantly coming through your environment feed, you can understand why a person might see something. Like a perfect example, I'm sure many people have seen this YouTube video where they make you count the passes of the basketball. Have you ever seen this?

[Robert Breedlove]

Oh yeah, the selective attention experiment.

[Preston Pish]

The selective attention, right. And so a person is watching that and they don't see that there's a gorilla that's walking right in the background. Of the video feed. And so why is that happening? Because the person was told to count the passes. And your brain is optimized, especially in the part that you have conscious access to, to only have when you're really paying close attention to things, that you're turning off this flow of data that the subconscious is trying to feed through the thalamus up into the area, up into your neocortex, it's trying to flow this data up there. But where you're doing the conscious access, you're pushing back and saying, no, I have to stay hyper focused on this. I got to count the number of passes. Right. And so you can see how these hiccups and these mistakes can happen in the way that you're processing the data feed.

[Robert Breedlove]

And that is precisely where incentives determine not only what we're looking at, but also what we see. Right. At a neurological level, we will not see the six foot gorilla waving his arms in the middle of the frame. If you haven't seen the video on YouTube, it's incredible.

[Preston Pish]

Yeah, People need to look it up.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. And it's an experiment that's been repeated several times. So it's fascinating that we think. I mean, the intuition would be like, wherever I look, I'll see everything in my frame. But it is in fact, heavily contingent on the goal. Right, the goal that you're seeking. I guess your goals actually determine what you see in the world. And which again, jumping back to Peterson, again, I'm a big fan, but he's saying that if you determine in your life you're not where you want to be, one thing could be, hey, maybe you took a wrong turn, you did something wrong. Another thing could be maybe you're valuing the wrong things. Maybe you're actually aimed the wrong way. You've got the wrong goals in life that can also create, that can cause you to get lost, let's say, or not be perceiving the world correctly.

[Preston Pish]

And a great test for what you just described is ask yourself why five times. So if you say because, and I've used this example, I think, on a couple other shows, and this is a big Jim Rowan example, He says you're on a boat and you're sailing it to a destination, Right? And a lot of people get confused by the wind, which they have zero control over. And whether that's their controls, whether they're controlling the rudder or adjusting the sail, those are the two things you control. You don't have any control over the wind. So if the wind's blowing directly, directly in your face. But your mission and your goal is to sail directly into the wind. You can do it if you attack into the wind. You gotta attack into the wind. But most people, well, not most, but a lot of people, what they'll do is they'll say, this is impossible. The wind's blowing in the exact opposite direction of where I'm trying to go, right? And therefore, I give up, I can't do this. So if you're trying to make a business and you hit a roadblock, some people say, I give up. Other people start frantically looking around on the boat like, all right, well, I can't control the dang wind, so what is it that I do control? Here's this rudder. Let me move that thing around. Okay, here's the sail. And then they naturally figure out if they go at a 45 degree angle of the wind and then zigzag towards the destination, they can actually sail straight into the wind, right? Now here's what you were getting at with your point. And this is why I'm saying, ask yourself why five times. Because you might have set your destination sailing straight into the wind. And you arrive at the destination only to say, why the hell did I sail here? I just spent the last five years of my life sailing here to this island that there's nothing on, there's no food, there's no nothing. But I did it. But why did I do it? So if somebody's listening to this, here's a common goal that in my opinion is pretty meaningless if you're not asking yourself why five times, I want to make a million dollars. Okay, well why? Why do you want to make a million dollars now when you have to come up with the answer to that question? Well, I want to be financially independent. Well, why? Why do you want to be financial? Because then I can go off and go do something like whatever. Right now, if the why at the end of that is because I really want to spend more time with my family so that I can help them. And it's something that is giving to another person, it's probably going to be something worth your time. And then when you arrive at the destination, you're going to feel pretty dang good that that was the milestone that you were trying to achieve. But if it ends with you serving yourself at the end of those five whys, because I want people to love me or I want influence or I want this or that, it's like self serving crap, you're going to end up probably being insanely dissatisfied with that whole process that you just went to to arrive at the destination.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. And this, I would argue this is where wisdom, traditions, religion, mythology often point. Because science can never tell us what we should do. It can tell us, it can describe what is. But in terms of setting our values and setting our aims, that's left to this other domain. And yeah, if you engage in pursuits that are intended to self satisfy, that's. That's what sin is. Right. If we lay out, you know, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, lust, greed, envy, pride, whatever they are, they're all selfish behaviors at the end of the day. And they're inherently meaningless.

[Preston Pish]

So they're consuming of energy.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes, Right.

[Preston Pish]

At the core level, it's consumption of the environment's energy.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right.

[Preston Pish]

And then the other is supplying energy to the environment.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. Helping people somehow. Right. Creating something valuable.

[Preston Pish]

Yeah, that's right.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. It's a great, great way to look at it. There's this quote, I'm going to just paraphrase it. I think it's Alfred North Whitehead. I think this is very pertinent. So we're describing this conscious pursuit to move programs into the unconscious so that we can free up our conscious aim to focus on other things to learn. And I think there's a parallel. My thought on reality is that it's fractal. Right. It's kind of self similar at multiple layers. And I think that civilization is sort of a fractal of the individual mind. And so his quote is that, and I'm going to paraphrase here, it's common to think that society advances by thinking before acting. But he's. But the precise opposite is true, that we actually. Civilization advances by being able to perform more important actions without having to think about them.

[Preston Pish]

Yeah.

[Robert Breedlove]

So we. This is what institutions are, for instance. Right. There's an important operation that needs to take place. Maybe it's a bank you need someone to hold, traditionally to hold your money because of what's gold, it's not informational. And you need to store that operation in a trusted pattern of action embodied in ritual and legal structure that allows you to accomplish that aim without having to reinvent the wheel every time. So there's. It's almost like the U.N. we could say maybe institutional forms in the world are kind of the externalized form of the unconscious. And if you go before that, you know, we're talking about an economic institution in that case. Prior to that, prior to the industrial age, let's say that tended to be more like mythology where people didn't know how to act in the world. So you consulted the collective unconscious, which was your wisdom, tradition or your religion. So I wonder if that's, that's a real interesting parallel to me is that we individually are trying to do more things without having to think about them. And then us collectively, we're also trying to do more important things without having to think about them. And that is in fact how we advance. We become more productive in that pursuit.

[Preston Pish]

Totally agree. And what I would tell you is you were talking about zooming out. If you would zoom in and then go into the biology of how a cell just processes the flow of materials that comes through the bloodstream and how your transport proteins on that, on the outer membrane of your cell allows nutrients to come in and the processed nutrients to go back out. And then you look at how it signals these proteins to then unwrap themselves, the histones, unwrap the DNA so that a transcription protein can then run down the DNA and cut off the code to then take to a ribosome and pump it through so that it can then manufacture a protein. Like when you look at this whole process, it's exactly what you just described at the macro level, but it's happening at the mini microscopic level inside of the billions of cells inside one person's body all day long. It's just mind blowing.

[Robert Breedlove]

It is absolutely mind blowing. I've seen YouTube videos about this where they're, they're tiny molecular machines. Effectively. You know, there's a few molecules, but it looks like a robot. It looks like someone built this very intelligent robot splicing and dicing DNA and doing all these all types of things. And so it's as if we have, you know, these hyper specialized little machines within us.

[Preston Pish]

Yeah.

[Robert Breedlove]

And in a way, we're kind of, each one of us is a market in and unto ourselves that the whole, like we're, we're a city of organisms. Right. Each of us.

[Preston Pish]

If a person takes the time to really dig into this and try to understand the big picture of just how a cell functions and the queuing and the chemical reactions that are taking place that are reflexive again at this level, you would look at that and say, that's alien technology. There's no way in hell that is even possible. Even at the mitochondrial level. Right. As it's manufacturing ATP. Right. The building blocks of the currency of the body, the energy currency of the body. And you're just looking at that process inside a mitochondria which has its own DNA, which is different than your personal DNA. It's just. It's totally mind blowing, dude.

[Robert Breedlove]

It's not. Yeah. I just can't help but think in this fractal pattern where you see it at the biological level, you see that's individual level and then we see it at this collective level as well. And so I just.

[Preston Pish]

Here's the cosmic part. Here's the cosmic. What happens if it's outside of. Of.

[Robert Breedlove]

Right.

[Preston Pish]

In a universe? Yeah. A universal level. And here, how does that fit in?

[Robert Breedlove]

This is a great quote by. I think he, I'm not sure what his role is. His name is Carl Friston. He has a number of really great talks online. You can look it up. But he has this quote, and this is in regards to if you've ever seen a picture of a brain up close, the neural pathways. And then you see a photo of the cosmic microwave background, which is the echo of the Big Bang. It's basically the furthest reaches of the universe. They look almost identical. Right. It's, it's truly scary. And he has this quote, and he goes quote, the anatomy of any system has to contain within it a model of the environment in which that system is immersed, unquote. So it's as if our brain, I mean at a very fundamental level, looks almost exactly like the universe at the most macro level, a level that we've never, we could never see, we could never hope to see before the invention of, you know, modern telescopes and whatnot. So there's, there's a deep connection here. It's like this, this, I don't know what you call it, a fractal pattern to sort of bubbling and repeating itself. And we are a part of it. We are part of that pattern.

[Preston Pish]

Yes. I mean, you could look at every human being on the planet and almost treat them like one neuron in the brain. And so when you look at Google and you see what people are searching for and you're looking at all those things, it's like one giant brain activity. And here's where I could throw in the Bitcoin thing. When you study the brain, you know that there's this biological value process that's taking place in order to code the various nodes in the brain in order to have a normally functioning human being. There's this amazing story, I don't know if it was in this book or not, that we're talking about, but I think it was in this book. But there was a gentleman out in the west in the United States who was a stand up individual, had pretty much done everything right in his Life was a model citizen. And he went on a shooting spree later on in his life and killed a bunch of people. Was it in this book?

[Robert Breedlove]

Yes. Yep, I think so.

[Preston Pish]

So correct me if I'm misstating any of this. So anyway, when they went, everyone was just did not understand it. The neighbors, the family. Like, what? It makes no sense that this person would go on a shooting spree. Well, they go back to the person's house, and the gentleman had literally written letters and he said, I know there's something wrong with me that was not here three years ago. I'm having these desires to kill people. And nothing like that had ever been a desire of mine ever before. And I'm scared that I'm actually going to start acting on this. If I would ever act on this and if I would ever die. Please examine my brain to try to understand if maybe there was some type of disease or tumor or something that has caused me to act, function differently. Well, lo and behold, they did do this. They analyzed his brain. He was killed, I believe, in the shooting that took place, and there was a tumor in the section of his brain that would cause a person to have poor signaling and chemical reactions and how their biological value is being managed. And so for me, I'm reading this and I'm thinking to myself, how many other people on this planet right now do I pass? And maybe they're a little bit different, maybe they're a little strange or whatever, or maybe they're just somebody just begging for money on the street. And I walk past that person in the past and I would say, what a bum, right? What a loser that person does. They don't deserve my money. Or. And I'm not saying that people need to go out there and start incentivizing this type of giving money to people. I'm not saying any of that. I guess all I'm saying is people need to have some empathy. Because I really think that at a fundamental level, there's a lot of people out there that probably do have some terrible biological value. Signaling that's happening inside their brains that's not allowing them to make maybe as sound of decisions as the people that might be listening to this conversation. And it just makes you think about yourself, like, hey, maybe the reason I'm more emotional or I have no emotion or whatever is actually in the biological piece of how your lobes had developed as a kid, combined with the environmental factors that conditioned you to be the way you are. And it just, I think the whole thing for me, as I'M as I, as I was studying all this was just like, you just have a much deeper empathy for other people and just maybe a little bit more patience with, with other people that are around you.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, agreed, completely. And it gets very murky between the nature and the nurture. Right. Because it's like what you experience as a child could have reformed your architecture in a certain way that sent you down a certain path or gave you a certain predilection. And yeah, it, I don't know, for me, it's, it makes it more and more difficult to try and disentangle these things. It's like everything is connected ultimately. Talk about getting cosmic. I mean, that's kind of what all, you know, a lot of philosophies of old would say, that everything is mind or everything is connected. There's some unity beneath the surface here. And I think modern neuroscience, at least in this book, starts to get at that. And so the.

[Preston Pish]

Think about it, Robert, like, if, if I'm. Like we said earlier that the five people that you hang out with are the ones that you're going to most likely become like. Well, all those people have, have experienced an environment that has coded their brain to act in a certain way. And then I am interacting with that other person and part of my coding is now becoming part of their coding. And my goals and objectives are somewhat becoming their goals and objectives. I mean, you see this with any teen that goes off to college and they come back after year one and they're like a completely different person because they're getting coded by other kids that have very different mindsets, goals, they're not in the house anymore.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, it's key to the maturation process too. Right. For the kids to separate from the parents and start to, I guess, assimilate these new patterns and programs. And I'm just going to throw this out there. It's probably like a general background for the rest of our conversation here is that if there is this fractal structure to reality, which I guess we're kind of making an assumption there is. But if you look at it mathematically, there is in many aspects of nature. And for people that aren't familiar that word, I would say fractal geometry is kind of like the geometry of nature. You know, there's no straight lines or triangles or perfect circles in nature or very few of these things. Nature tends to be jagged. It has this self similar repeating pattern. And there's a lot of work done by Mandelbrot on this, who originally introduced me to fractal mathematics, which is a super interesting space. But so if that is the case, then the socioeconomic whole, the market that we are, of human beings interacting and exchanging with one another, would that then mean that prices are like neurotransmitters? Or maybe money is the neurotransmitter that we're actually signaling to one another what we value in the world. So money becomes an index for our valuations and our aims.

[Preston Pish]

Yes. And so when you would look at where we are today with a completely broke monetary system to the nth degree broke, on a global scale, because there's no peg, there's no unit that is pegging labor data. That's how I look at. People are familiar with the dollar, People are familiar with a bitcoin. It's labor data. If you have one of those, it represents stored labor that has been performed. And if I then hand that over to you, it means something. But if the value of this stored labor is diminishing at a breakneck pace, what happens is just like in your brain, if the biological value system is off, well, now you got somebody who's out in public and they're howling at the moon and doing these strange behaviors that don't make any sense to people that have a normally functioning biological value system that's functioning inside their brain. And that's how I view financial markets today, is if you are constantly manipulating the cost of capital down to nothing, to zero. You're saying, if I borrow money and it doesn't cost me anything to do, that, that doesn't make any sense. And that's what central banks have been doing by bidding the bond market and stepping in and manipulating the fixed income market. Now they're starting to manipulate just money into the hands of anybody and everybody, which further compounds the need for the fixed income market to have more quantitative easing. All of those things have this reflexive loop which involves the money just getting further and further debased. And then you talk about it being competitively done on a global scale between nation states, and you start to understand real fast, we need a lobotomy globally. And bitcoin supplies the lobotomy.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah. So the, the collective mind has become corrupted because we've poisoned the neurotransmitter or distorted the neurotransmitter or whatever you want to call it. And it's at. So there's this, the yin yang thing I'm seeing in the brain here is we have conscious, unconscious control. Conscious, it's much more yang. It's assertive. It can Go different directions. It's controllable and controlling. But the unconscious is yin. It's very. It's dark, it's mysterious. We can't access all of it. It contains. It's much more encompassing than conscious awareness. You know, you can maybe store a phone number in your head. And your conscious awareness, your unconscious, stores everything else, like just infinitely more basically. So is it then in that collective domain, it's almost as if the conscious aspect, maybe that's the state where it actually tries to consciously contradict the market at times, where it's like the market's selecting this, but the state has to be.

[Preston Pish]

Yeah, that's kind of a good example, because the state is kind of like directing the body, the human body, a collective body of where it's trying to go.

[Robert Breedlove]

And the literal bodies. On a military standpoint.

[Preston Pish]

Yeah, I think that's probably a kind of a close parallel. And then in the background you have all the people that are providing those signals now. So when you study the brain, one of the really important, the grand central station of the brain is the thalamus. And this is such a cool story. I've got to tell you this story. So there's a toilet paper test. I don't think this was in the book that you read. There's a toilet paper test where if you take two toilet paper tubes and you put them up to your eyes so that you can only see whatever picture would be displayed in one, and you could put another picture in the other one. What they found is, let's say you take two very different pictures. One could be a picture of a house with a white background. And let's say the other picture could be of a basketball with a white background. And you put those toilet paper tubes on. So that when the person's looking at these two images, all they see are those two images, but they're different images in each eye. And so what do you think the person sees when they're looking at something that has total rivalry like that? Okay, well, if the pictures are somewhat meaningless to the person, what happens is the person will only see one of the two images. That's all they have conscious access to. So I would just see a house. That'd be it. I don't see any basketball whatsoever. It's not even there. And then like five seconds later, it almost seemed like somebody had changed the picture over to a basketball. And then I'll see the basketball for five seconds, and then it'll flip back to a house for five seconds. And in my brain, I'M interpreting. I am seeing both of these images. When they do imaging of the brain, what they see is that the brain is processing, the subconscious brain is actually processing both of those images simultaneously with equal magnitude. But the thalamus is only allowing one of those images to proceed forward into the neocortex, where the person has conscious access. Now, this is really neat. If they take those pictures and they actually display them on a video screen so that there's a refresh rate, like 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second, and they swap out one of the frames, and I think for 30 or 60 frames per second, if they swap out one of the 60 frames and you were looking at a screen that just was displaying, let's just say a basketball image in one of the 60 frames was something completely different. Right? If a person looks at that screen, they cannot notice that. Right. They'll just tell you, oh, yeah, there's a basketball on the screen. Did you see any flash? Did you see. No, I didn't. It's just a basketball. Right. That's what the person will tell you when they see something like that. So now, going back to this toilet paper tube test, they've got two different images in each eye, and they put one frame, one frame out of 60 or 30. I can't remember if it was a 30 or 60. They swapped one frame on one image, and then the person looked at both of those images, you know what happened? The person would only see the one image, and it was the one that had the messed up frame. Okay. It wasn't oscillating back and forth between the pictures. It was just the basketball. That's all you'd continue to see. Because the brain was picking up, your subconscious brain was picking up and saying, there's something off about that image on the left. And I'm going to continue to display that because it's not right. There's something wrong. And the thalamus is controlling that input and saying, I don't know why, but there's something off with this and you need to continue to see it. Okay? So now you have to ask yourself, what the hell is this thalamus that I have no control over, feeding my conscious access that's happening in the background from my subconscious when maybe I have a hundred different things that are being sensed in the body right now? And what is it allowing through that bottleneck choke point to gain conscious access to? Good luck with that one. It's insane, right? It's just fascinating to me.

[Robert Breedlove]

Then it's drawing attention to the anomaly or the error. Is that right?

[Preston Pish]

Yes. Well, a. It shows you how sensitive your subconscious is.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah.

[Preston Pish]

Okay. That what you're telling yourself, that you're seeing your body as a whole, as a collective, your brain as a whole, as a collective, is processing way more than what you think you know, period. Right. Because that wouldn't be possible. So your subconscious knows that there's something off there, even though your conscious access would continue to tell you there's nothing different about that.

[Robert Breedlove]

This calls to mind, actually the definition of intelligence I got from talking to Jeff Booth and he said that intelligence at its most basic level is just error correction. And that we are again, when that conscious mind is trying to perform a specific operation, it's trying to identify any errors in the process and correct them so that it passes that, I guess back to the unconscious. Error free maybe, but the sounds like the conscious and unconscious mind are working together to identify and resolve errors, which is a really interesting definition of intelligence or consciousness, because that's exactly what a market does too. A market is trying to resolve errors.

[Preston Pish]

That's right.

[Robert Breedlove]

The classic earthquake in Chile. Copper is disrupted. The price goes up. Everyone gets the signal to either use substitutes, produce more copper, or it's resolving errors through the price.

[Preston Pish]

So here's a pet peeve of mine. You'll hear people argue about the idea of efficient market hypothesis. We can look at the brain and in the example that I just provided, if you believe in an efficient market hypothesis, you say, well, that's impossible. The brain can't make that mistake. But we know it's making the mistake. We know for a fact it's making the mistake. I would say, as we jump over to the example that you just provided, a person that's subscribed to the efficient market hypothesis is going to say it's impossible for the market to misprice this. Well, let me tell you. And people know, because I keep bringing this up and I'm not doing it in a braggered way, but hey, I had an opinion before the halving happened. You and I were on the 11th of May talking about it and I put my money where my mouth was. I went out and bought options and all those things, just like a lot of other people. Because my opinion was the market was not efficient and it didn't have a clue as to what the heck was about to happen.

[Robert Breedlove]

That's right.

[Preston Pish]

Now we're saying that we were right. There's no way to prove that we were right definitively because you could make the argument that it wasn't any of those factors that we were considering back then and it was some other external factor. Right. That's how a person could argue the opposite side of that. But I just don't buy the efficient market hypothesis. I think in most cases it is very valid, but there are instances and opportunities where it is not. And those are the instances I'm looking for.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, I agree completely. Especially as it relates to something like Bitcoin being assimilated into the marketplace. It's just never been seen before. Had there been multiple monetization events throughout human history, maybe the market would be better at pricing in Bitcoin havings for instance. But when there's no corollary that all the information is not priced in, it's just not possible, I think. So. The other thing that comes to mind here is that the reflexivity that you mentioned between money and mind, the money is almost an extension of the mind in a way. We're all wiring our minds together through the price signal, through money. And then if we consciously corrupt the money, which is effectively what we're doing with central banking, we're taking by declaration of fiat, I'm going to overturn what the free market has selected or would select as money and dictate that this fiat currency is money instead of gold or Bitcoin or anything else. We are corrupting that. We're corrupting the extension of our mind. And it seems like that reverberates backwards, reflexively into our individual minds. And so this is where you get into all the fiat food and fiat behavior and fiat business models that pervades in the modern age.

[Preston Pish]

Well, think about it in the biology context. If the biological valuation system in the brain is off in one area, that will have a reflexive impact on the other lobes over time. And so when people were talking about the fiat food and that kind of stuff, it just makes sense that that would be what would come out of a broken monetary valuation system. That totally makes sense that the education system shouldn't cost $200,000 plus to go get a four year education from a majority of classes that you could just learn online or on the Saylor Academy for free. Right. It all starts to really click together and make sense if you subscribe to this fundamental idea that we're talking about.

[Robert Breedlove]

Yeah, this is where again the name of the show here is the what is Money? Show. Because it has so many damn answers that question what is money? Now if we call it an extension of our mind or reflexive tool for the mind, these other pieces start to click together. It's like, why has the world gone so far off the rails the past 50 years? Well, maybe it's because we broke the economic neurotransmitter we call money.

[Preston Pish]

Yeah.

[Robert Breedlove]

And we're just lost now, so.