Never Enough

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:34Claim

   The chances of you knowing a high-value person are almost zero.

2. 01:11Analogy

   You can go to those people around you that have put down their thoughts, that have generated order in words and put them into sentences and into books, and then you can pump that straight into your brain and you can live a thousand lives in a thousand books.

3. 01:46Claim

   If it makes me a better allocator of energy then it's better for me. Every time you learn what not to do, that makes you a better allocator.

4. 01:46Quote

   You either allocate or you don't. You're better off or you're not.

5. 03:27Reference

   The book is called Never Enough. I can't remember the dude that wrote it, it doesn't actually matter because we're going to take away the lesson so you don't have to read the thing.

6. 03:27Prediction

   Bitcoiners are going to be extremely wealthy. You can't shield yourself from getting wealthier if you allocate energy towards the Bitcoin protocol, you cannot stop yourself from becoming more wealthy.

7. 03:27Claim

   Wealth is a word like money that everybody thinks they know the definition of, yet when you put them to the task of actually defining it, that's when you see almost immediate, instant struggle.

8. 04:57Idea

   Value being the reflection of the demand for the utility of a good, the more useful the more valuable. We want information, we want order, order means more energy at our disposal, things that make us more efficient as an individual and things that make the extended order more efficient have value and are therefore useful, so we want energy.

9. 06:27Reference

   Why is Amazon valuable? Well it's valuable because it's useful, the buyer is better off and the seller is better off, everyone gains energy when it's used, it's a tool for maximizing efficiency.

10. 07:57Claim · condensed

    Hydrocarbons are valuable because they allow work to be done at scale not possible without them, the energy density and the work achievable in a form factor that is highly mobile and stable across environments means they are useful at generating order. If we generate order that means more information, and more information means we can transform more energy.

11. 07:57Analogy

    Without water we struggle to generate order, we can't maintain the disequilibrium necessary to push back the entropic forces of the universe. You can't survive without water, and you need to survive to generate order, so it's valuable, but you might say water isn't expensive, you aren't wealthy just for having lots of water.

12. 07:57Quote

    You don't need water unless you need water, or water isn't expensive unless you need it, unless there isn't an abundance of water, that's when you realize wait a second, water is actually quite valuable, right, supply demand.

13. 09:27Claim

    Before Bitcoin made non-physical, digital information scarce, nobody could possess it and be sure someone else didn't also possess that same information, there could be no ownership of it in the classical sense. That's no longer the case with Bitcoin, and it really is the ultimate use case for the tool that is Bitcoin.

14. 10:57Claim

    Bitcoin also has a physical signature. The order generated by the protocol on the hard drives all around the world that run the software and keep the ledger, that is physical. We can't see it as a whole, but if you understand what to look for you can easily see it exists in the physical world.

15. 10:57Claim

    You own something so much as you are willing to allocate energy to defending it from attackers, defense requires energy, lots of it, and before Bitcoin it was a major cost, the largest cost.

16. 12:27Quote

    It's energy all the way down.

17. 12:27Idea

    To be wealthy means to control more energy than is required to meet your day-to-day expenditures. The more energy, in whatever form it comes in, that you have access to and control, and no one else can control without your explicit permission, the better off you are.

18. 12:27Reference · condensed

    Why is it good to have a low time preference, why is it beneficial? Because we can plan out further to the future, which allows us to do things that we cannot do in the present. It is the time preference equation in Austrian economics.

19. 13:57Quote

    Where there is energy there is prosperity.

20. 13:57Claim

    If you can't spend your money because you don't control the ledger, if you can't defend your money from being stolen via debasement, then that energy that you thought you had is already gone, somebody already took it and you couldn't do anything to stop it. You need a tool that will allow you to not be debased.

21. 13:57Claim

    Bitcoiners are already wealthy and they'll continue to build wealth in the future, and if you've taken advantage of Bitcoin in the last 15 years you are better off now than you were when you allocated to Bitcoin.

22. 15:27Prediction

    More and more Bitcoiners are going to achieve levels of wealth that they never thought possible, they'll be able to control more units of energy than the vast majority of the members of the extended order, by the very nature of Bitcoin's design.

23. 15:27Quote

    When I say our advantage, I really mean my advantage, you are probably nice but I don't care about you, and I don't care about your energy needs, I care about mine.

24. 15:27Claim

    Being wealthy is not the same as being able to generate value, you can be great at generating and terrible at owning, controlling, and being responsible for the allocation of energy. What generated the energy reserves will not keep the energy, you need a different skill set.

25. 15:27Claim · condensed

    Every form of wealth carries some kind of counterparty risk, and those risks require energy at the individual level to overcome or mitigate. Dealing in bulk beats individual inefficiency, and Bitcoin is no different, it outsources defense so holders can pay the cheapest possible rates.

26. 16:57Quote

    Being wealthy isn't a permanent state, it's in constant flux. Every decision is energy allocation, a zero or one, yes we allocate or no we don't.

27. 18:27Claim · condensed

    He tours ultra-wealthy people and becomes disenchanted by their attitudes and their lives, it's all materialistic and meaningless, they're all in competition with each other, and they become like robots in an endless pursuit of material possessions: bigger houses, more cars, private jets, yachts.

28. 18:27Claim

    Generating value or generating information is not that difficult, and you don't have to be a good person to do it, you don't have to examine your own attitudes or what you actually control, which means you're going to make some stupid decisions that leave you worse off.

29. 19:58Claim

    Those possessions are meaningless, they provide little value, not no value, little, because they are less and less useful at the pointy end. You need to burn through larger and larger amounts of energy to extract fewer and fewer efficiency gains on outlay.

30. 19:58Claim

    The author laments acquiring homes just to have them sit empty, or yachts to sit idle 99% of the time. In fiat, the inefficient behavior is the behavior that gets rewarded, it would not be eliminated on a Bitcoin standard, but it would certainly be less profitable to participate in.

31. 19:58Reference

    This hedonic treadmill that he refers to time and again.

32. 21:28Claim

    There's a limit to the amount of energy most fiat tools can absorb, a point where adding another dollar of energy won't increase efficiency because you've saturated the possible future returns. In Bitcoin you can pour as much energy into the system as you want and it only gets better, doesn't matter if it's a dollar or a trillion dollars, you get the same return on energy input at either level.

33. 21:28Claim

    For fiat billionaires, as they buy assets their energy gets pulled into managing those assets, maintaining the energy requires energy, the more you get the more you need to manage, complexity increases, and the poor behavior of the fiat wealthy can partly be attributed to faulty system-wide architecture.

34. 22:58Claim

    Having lots of fiat doesn't necessarily mean you generated a tremendous amount of energy in the physical world, because it can be manipulated, you can never know how much was real and how much was abstract power over the ledger. Someone with Bitcoin, once fiat won't be traded for it anymore, means that person provided energy to the extended order, there's no other way to access it.

35. 22:58Claim

    Bitcoiners cannot give up possession, they are rewarded for contributing to but not removing energy from the pool, and the tool that is Bitcoin allocates their energy to the highest bidder for that energy at any given time.

36. 22:58Claim

    The most responsible thing that wealthy people can do to benefit the most number of people in the extended order is nothing. In the Bitcoin world, everything is better if you transform energy and make it available to the largest number of people.

37. 24:29Reference

    Folks like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, or any hedge fund managers, can operate very, very well when they're quite small, when you're quite small you have the ability to move in and move out of markets and generate significantly more returns.

38. 24:29Claim

    In Bitcoin there is no cap to the upside, you can dump as much energy into the system as you possibly can and you're still going to get the same rewards as if you had only allocated a dollar's worth. That means only the best investments will survive, because people will realize it's more beneficial than sitting on their hands.

39. 24:29Claim

    If your ultimate goal is to make the world better across the board, it's pretty easy: you transform energy in the real world, you buy Bitcoin, you burn the keys, instant level up for all holders, doesn't matter who you are or where you are, you're an instant winner.

40. 25:59Claim

    The fiat system is designed so that you simply cannot do nothing, plug energy into the system, do nothing, and survive. If you do nothing you're penalized: inflation, taxation, entropy in the physical sense always diminishing energy reserves, always and everywhere.

41. 25:59Claim · condensed

    By the end of the book the guy decides the burden of controlling large amounts of energy is just too much for himself and his family, he doesn't want to burden those around him, so he's giving it away. He can't come up with the best allocation, so he gives it to others and hopes they'll do better, even though there's no market to test whether they're the best candidates, it just relieves him of the pressure of the responsibility.

42. 27:29Prediction

    In the long run, all of that energy this guy is talking about will eventually flow into Bitcoin and to allocators who realize what the best play is, it's just going to take time to filter through a whole bunch of different hands to get there.

43. 27:29Claim

    In the meantime there is untold suffering that could have been avoided, because the results of his actions lead to energy being wasted or misallocated, and that leaves the extended order worse off. If you have less energy than you need, you're dead.

44. 27:29Claim

    What if there was a tool that just did the best thing regardless, one allocation and it takes care of all the rest? Bitcoin eliminates any vagaries here, it will go where it is most needed, and where it is most needed is the most valuable place in terms of utility to the entire extended order.

45. 27:29Quote

    Controlling massive amounts of energy is an enormous responsibility.

46. 28:59Reference

    The book is about a guy who ends up trying to get into a deal with Charlie Munger, ends up talking to Warren Buffett, and signing the giving pledge, which is really the end result of the book.

47. 28:59Claim · condensed

    Over time your baseline switches and you become accustomed to the next car, the next house, the next piece of fine art, so you don't get any more utility out of it. But with every unit of energy plugged into the Bitcoin system, you're doing an equal amount of good for the extended order, doesn't matter if it's the first dollar or the last dollar in your trillion dollar allocation.

48. 30:29Claim · condensed

    The Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett way of allocating energy in the real world is to sit and do as little as possible, read about other people's mistakes without having to make them yourself, and try to cover every scenario that could negate the thesis that the extended order will transform more energy in the future than it has now. If that ever turns out to not be true, that's when you'd want to exit the Bitcoin system, until then you don't.

49. 30:29Claim

    We are at a very unique stage of Bitcoin adoption where early members of the network simply cannot transform the same amount of energy as simply holding Bitcoin can generate, by incentivizing the extended order at large to commit future reserves to the network. You cannot transform more energy than by doing nothing, sitting on your hands.

50. 30:29Quote

    The gap between what the fiat system has created and the abundance made possible by an economic constant that's housed in an immutable, permissionless, decentralized protocol is so large that not spending Bitcoin is the best play by far.

51. 32:00Claim · condensed

    Hoarding is distributing the energy you transformed in the real world to the largest number of people possible, while still being able to claw it back to allocate to any other project you see fit as the steward of that energy. It rewards allocators who are responsible, who will bring back more energy to the network.

52. 32:00Claim

    With Bitcoin you allocate and the process is over, no additional personal costs, no annual fees, no infrastructure that needs upkeep. The great allocators, at least at this initial stage, are going to end up mimicking the Buffett schedule, waiting for the fattest pitch while a million ideas for allocation come and go, and the waiting itself is the value add.

53. 32:00Reference

    The great allocators are going to end up mimicking the Buffett schedule, you wait for the fattest pitch.

54. 33:31Claim · condensed

    That's exactly what Bitcoin incentivizes us to do, we're inclined to build and mold characters who have just that ability, that's what will be rewarded. To say you don't want to do that, or aren't capable of explaining it to the people around you, and would rather give it away, that seems irresponsible, not the most efficient choice.

55. 33:31Claim

    The short version of the book is this: the guy transforms energy, gets lots of reserves, blows those reserves on information less useful than the inputs, feels like shit, and looks to offload the responsibility of controlling energy because he doesn't want to be burdened with the realization that figuring out the answer is too much work.

56. 35:01Quote

    I say, embrace the responsibility. If not you, then who? Who do you trust to steward this energy? You are the best person, you are the best fit for the job. Why would you give it away?

57. 35:01Claim

    All you have to do for the best outcome, any idea you have in your head, is realize that outcome is not going to out-compete Bitcoin at this stage.

58. 35:01Quote

    You cannot outrun the wave that is coming behind you, that you might as well ride it.

59. 35:01Claim · condensed

    Outside Bitcoin, the max you can juice into a single company that will still have any energy return is going to be something like a hundred million dollars, the next million you get you can't pump into that company because it comes back with less energy, you have to go look for a new idea. The Bitcoin system doesn't require that: if you're winning with Bitcoin, you keep winning by just doing more Bitcoin.

60. 35:01Analogy · condensed

    You take energy from the physical world and plug it into the system, and as you do, the wall grows higher and higher that outsiders have to overcome, and that builds trust inside the system.

61. 36:31Claim · condensed

    As trust builds up inside the system, more people plug their energy in to transact with people behind the wall, which means trust isn't necessary in the physical world, which means you don't have that energy sink, which means energy can flow elsewhere to where it's needed. You remove the friction of transaction fees and third parties, everything becomes faster and smoother, information travels at higher frequencies.

62. 36:31Quote

    You know who wins? The most people that realize this before other people.

63. 36:31Claim

    You know how you lose: you get rid of a fixed portion of this tool when you think it's time to cash out because you can do something more efficient. Spoiler alert, you can't.

64. 36:31Quote

    You transform energy and you buy more Bitcoin, that's the contribution, that's how you make it better.