Bitcoin Tech Talk #368
Interesting Stuff
Locklin on Huberman - One of my favorite tech writers (whose article on quantum computing should be required reading for anyone that asks any questions about it) takes Huberman to task about the various supplements that he recommends. What I find fascinating is the breadth of the recommendations for all kinds of things that our ancestors had no trouble with. In a sense the supplement industry is a symptom of a much bigger problem: that of wanting easy fixes to detrimental and complicated lifestyle choices. This is how the pharmaceutical industry sells itself and sadly, it’s at core a laziness created by fiat money.
Gatekeeping Talent - The article starts with a complaint about the current state of book publishing, which, like most fiat industries is dominated by 5 big players. What this post points out is that new writers have a very difficult time getting their foot in the door to the big publishers as these publishers get a flood of submissions. The phrase that struck me from this article is the reduction of the denominator. It’s near impossible to read 12,000 submissions, especially for the staffs that these publishers have. But it is reasonable to read 100. The key is to make these companies small to let the market work. Without knowing it, the author gets to the heart of why many industries, particularly creative ones, do not and should not scale, but have anyway due to fiat money.
Fisking Michael Lewis - This is a brutal review of Michael Lewis’s newest book about Sam Bankman-Fried. The author of the review takes Lewis to task for selling out as he defends SBF with a strange tenacity. The main conclusion is that truth has little to do with a book’s success and as is usual in a fiat economy, the incentives, not the truth, drive the narrative. I’ve noticed this about non-fiction art in general, as many of them sacrifice the truth for better narratives. This one, though, is not even a very good narrative. A villain story would have been a lot more entertaining to read. I still suspect that Lewis got paid in the FTX scandal and that’s the reason for his scarcely believable defending of SBF.
What I'm up to
Food - I talked to Brett and Harry from the Meat Mafia podcast to talk about food. We touched on a lot of topics like how a lot of nutritional studies are manipulated by big food companies, the geopolitics of food and how the IMF uses structural adjustments to prevent developing countries from being able to feed themselves and the subsidization of farmland by fiat money to produce really terrible food. There was a lot of discussion about farming and how high time preference behavior has debased food.
Blox Interview - I talked to this news outlet from the Netherlands about the new book. We focused on companies and why 4 or 5 dominate every industry and why they continue debasing products to keep up in a fiat economy because of sticky prices. We also talked about Dunbar’s Number, savings and venture capital.
Cross Politic - I talked to this popular Christian show to talk about my book. We talked about how fiat debases families, technology and how it’s not really progressing and about the shortcomings of gold. I also talked to them about how Bitcoin is making a difference in the missions field and how financial censorship and rent-seeking are ways governments prevent organizations from doing what they want.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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