Robert, thanks for sitting down. Glad to be here. Mark.
You know, I consider you a good friend. I love hanging out and talking with you. Sometimes the best conversations everyone were just flowing. And then I hate how it turns into an interview.
Yeah, yeah, you know, yeah, we're all different when the cameras are on.
Yeah, I don't know. It's a human thing, I guess.
Yeah, so I hate to turn it into an interview. It's fun just to kind of risk a little bit, but I wanted to. You know, we've been next door neighbors here at the Bigcoin conference.
You've been busy over here.
I've been busy over here, and unfortunately I missed a lot of stuff that was going on. Last night. I watched some of the videos trying to catch up a little bit. You got to give a keynote presentation at the event, which is a pretty big deal.
Yeah, it was. This is the biggest conference of the year.
I might I don't know, I would guess might be the biggest keynote of your career. I think so in terms of a number of people. Yeah, yeah, number of people. I certainly want to go back and watch it. But let's talk about that yeah, so give me the high level, thirty thousand foot view of what that was.
Yeah, so I'll give you kind of the back story because I think it's relevant. You may have seen John Ravake on my show. He's a colleague of Jordan Peterson's, so he's uh.
Well that was a while ago, right, Yeah, we.
Did the John Raviki series.
He had a very popular lecture series on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It's like fifty five zero one hour episodes about I mean, he starts in the beginning of time basically and goes through all our philosophical history and builds up to why we are in this meaning crisis today.
He's just a really brilliant guy. A lot of people have.
Described Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
Yes, a lot of people have described Jordan Peterson as the gateway drug to John Ravake. So if you're into Peterson's work, I mean, Verveake's work kind of goes to another level. They're both very deep and fascinating in their own right. But Veake's very interesting guy and so he again I've had him on the show.
He's been like just.
A great guy to ban ideas off of reading recommendations. Super smart, interesting guy. It's been a very good friend in that way. When I have weird esoteric questions about the things I'm working on, I'll shooting the text and he sends me good resources. So we kind of had that dialogue going. And at one point I was watching his interview on the Lex Friedman podcast and he was describing the nature.
Of the flow state. And the flow state.
Is said to be an optimal human experience, and it's optimal in two ways. One, it's one of the most enjoyable experiences human beings can have in a way that's distinct from just pleasure, because people do weird stuff to get into flow, like rock climbing, you know, Like rock climbing is not pleasurable, it's painful actually, but it can get you into this flow state that people will do almost anything to get into flow. Like it's an optimal
human experience in that sense. It's also optimal in the sense that people in flow tend to give peak performances. So Olympic gold medalists, they'll report these like they're just in the zone, right, is what athletes say a lot.
Yeah, So I was going to ask you to define what the peak state is or the flow state. So that's kind of where everything starts going on autopilot and everything just starts clicking, and like your subconscious almost takes.
Over, Yes, something like that, but it's very enjoyable and you're typically performing at a very high level. So there's a they do a chart where it's basically like your skill set, the level of your skills on the vertical axis, and then the challenge on the horizontal axis, and flow is kind of the diagonal channel in between. Because if you've got very high skills and low challenge, you're bored. If you've got very high challenge and low skills, you're
anxious or you have anxiety. But right in the middle, where your skills are matched to the demands of the situation is the flow state.
You're working in your core competency.
Yeah, you're like you're you're pushing your skills right to the edge and so you.
Know you're.
Which is why rock climbing is one of those Yes, I've been an action sports guy my whole life growing up int Than California, and you know, meditation is this thing where they say you should kind of try to clear your mind, and I'm not good at that because my brain works so fast. But when I'm dropping in on a double overhead wave and there's razor sharp coral below, you're meditating, or I'm going eighty miles an hour on my rbrak across open desert, there's nothing that can come across your mind.
Yes, exactly right.
And actually meditation is another form of flow, right, because meditation is a skill, right, But you're matching your skill to the challenge of not thinking. It's hard to do. It's very hard to do. It takes practice. So anyways, it's this often human experience. People love to get into it, and it's also where we cultivate like skills, competence, virtue like, it's where people become better. The more often we get into flow, the better we become at whatever we're flowing,
whatever activity we're flowing within. So he was describing that, and he in the book Flow by I cannot pronounce this guy's last name. The author of Flow is me. Hey chicks sent me Hie. I think how it's his last name?
He just go out the book. Yeah, it's it's called Flow.
It's written back in the eighties or nineties, And Verveaki was telling lex about the three informational conditions necessary for flow induction. So to get into the flow state, there's three informational things you need. One is that information must be clear, it must be unambiguous, and it must be flowing. So if you're looking in the case of the rock climber, a rock climber can only be good to the extent
that his senses are working. Right, his eyes need to be working, his ears need to be working, he needs to be able to fill the rocks, all these things. If all of a sudden he lost his sense of sight, then information is not flowing. Well, he's not going to be in a flow state, right, He's going to fall off the damn rock face.
So you have to have information that's flowing.
You also have to have tightly coupled feedback loops so such that every action you take the environment responds with immediacy. So if he know misgrabs a rock and there was no consequence to that, then he wouldn't know that he was doing it wrong. But you know, when you're rock climbing, there's an immediate consequence. You put your foot or hand the wrong way, will you fall off.
Or you feel like slipping or the rock cracking.
Right, So the point is there can't be a lag between action and environmental response. And then the third one was failure has to matter, right, there have to be consequences to failure. And so when I heard Vervaki describe these three, it hit me like a ton of bricks that he was simultaneously describing the informational conditions necessary for free market capitalism, which is, we need information that flows right.
We need clear and unambiguous price signals. To the extent you debase the currency, you distort price signals, entrepreneurs don't know is that a shift and supply and demand or is that quantitative easing that caused that price to fluctuate, and that leads to you know, capital misallocation, et cetera, et cetera. You have to have tight feedback loops, which means you need load and bureaucracy. People need to be able to act based on the knowledge that is particular
to their time and place. So if an entrepreneur is dealing with, you know, boats coming in, he doesn't need to say, oh, there's thirteen boats that came in. Let me send a message to Washington, DC and see if they approve this or not, and when it comes back, we'll make the decision. By the time that information goes and comes back, there's gonna be fifty votes there and it's just a disaster.
Right, So you need tight.
Feedback loops as an entrepreneur lead decision making, not bureaucrat lead. And then third, obviously in capitalism, failure matters, right, we don't have bailouts, bail ins, tax subsidies, zombie companies. Like in capitalism, if you're not profitable, you fail, and the capital life should be as his life. Right, It's like it's Darwinian, right. So that was the start. I was like, oh wow, there's this individual flow state that's like an
optimal human experience for the individual human organism. But we also or try to create that in markets, and they operate best when they have the same informational conditions. And then it started going down this rabbit hole where you're like, okay, in a perfect free market, people are.
Doing ideally what they love.
Right, You've turned your passion into your paycheck kind of thing, such that more people would be operating in flow day in and day out. You could think of like the division of labor, where we're each doing the thing that we specialize in. It's kind of like the opportunity to discover flow. It's like whatever thing that you like to do for its own sake and that you're good at and you get to push your skills within, Well, that's that's how you get into flow professionally and so on
the aggregate that would be a free market. So none of this was mentioned in the keynote, by the way, but that was like the lead into how we started thinking about this.
And we actually had this conversation in Wyoming, Yes, and I was just starting. I started that exactly, so I just to me asking up questions about that before we dig in on that. So in this in the flow state. So if we think about this, you're applying this through the overall market economy hundreds of millions or billions of people. But on a personal level, we would want to access flow state because that's where we're optimizing our performance, like as you said, based off of that vector.
And part of it.
Like, personally, I would want to get into that because at that point, when I'm in that flow state, things become almost effortless. So I read a book. I didn't read flow, but I read a book called deep work, which is very similar in a sense where we want to have periods where we get into deep work, giving yourself, you know, one hour minimum, but two to three four
hours sometimes. And then they talk about where like time just gets away from this, everything just starts coming, you know, whether you're writing or researching, whatever you're doing.
And so.
As humans, if we're going to be doing big things, big work, we should be trying to achieve these deep work states or these flow states, because that's where this big stuff gets done. And of course, modern technologies and just you know, you know, we've been try a brain for distractions and that constantly pulls us out of the flow state. So I understand from that point why we'd want to understand this and achieve it as a personal level.
But if if you take that to a larger level, like a market economy, would the economy also work more effortless instead of trying to force it?
Yeah, I think that's right.
So it's it's hard to say, like chicken or egg, because you know, the less you force the market economy, the more free the market is, the more free individuals are to choose their own profession, right, And I mean it's kind of intuitive in a way. Don't you want a world in which people are creating the goods and services that they are passionate about creative, right, rather than being forced into a job because inflation's destroying their savings or.
Whatever and they yeah, and so instead of like, I hate my job, but I have to do it, as opposed to doing what they.
Want, which is another I mean, because you can't force a flow state. I can't put a gun to your hood, and getting flow states doesn't work right out of it, like you have to be left to your own curiosity to there's another progression here. So it starts with curiosity, right, Like you're just curious about the world. Children are really good at flow states, by the way, They're just naturally curious. If you're left to be curious and you're uncoerced, you
might develop. You might find something you're interested in, and that thing might become a passion for you. And a passion pursued long enough can become a purpose.
Right.
People decide that hey, this thing that I'm into, I want to commit my life to it. And then if purpose becomes to pursue purpose, well, you have to develop autonomy, right, because typically the thing you're trying to do almost by definition doesn't exist in the world because otherwise you would just someone else will be doing it. So purpose leads you to develop autonomy, and then in the development of
autonomy you can ultimately culminate in self mastery. And self mastery is possession of those skills, self authorship, self sovereignty, and virtue. Really, so there's this element of freedom or spontaneity, or you cannot coerce it into existence, right for the freedom's a necessary ingredient to the whole thing that's both the free market and that's the individual flow state.
So that was the.
Lead in and then I guess where bitcoin comes into the picture is that bitcoin makes coercion less profitable basically, right, like inflation doesn't really work on a bitcoin standard. You can't print the money. Taxation is more difficult because people have this hyper portable form of capital. So if I'm living in a jurisdiction that's mistreating me, it's much easier for me to vote with my feet or vote with my wallet. I can just take my bitcoin and exit
to a jurisdiction that treats me better. And so, and this gets into a bit of the sovereign individual thesis, where we think the long run outcome of that is a world in which governments are incentivized to be accountable to the preferences of citizens, right versus today not so.
Much, and not just not just accountable, but actually I would argue the even more than that, because to your point, now, it's easy for them just to steal, that's right. And if they can't steal, then they're accountable, but they're not really accountable. The only way they can get what they want is actually to provide value, that's right, which is actually the opposite.
So they become more of a free market enterprise in that way.
They encourage and help it.
Yeah, well the market enterprise, yeah.
Yeah, whereas state's going to just steal from you because you're immobile, right, Yeah, my capital is locked up in the FIAD system. I'm stuck here. If I wanted to get capital out, there's capital controls, and you know they'll they'll de authorize your bank account, freeze your assets.
All these things.
Right, you have no autonomy actually over your assets, right, that's a real problem. But with bitcoin, you have full autonomy over your assets. So there's the idea that bitcoin would lead us to a world where coercion is less profitable. You could also say people have just have by virtue of having more autonomy over your assets, you are more capable of going through that progression, that flow progression from curiosity to passion to purpose to autonomy to self mastery.
We've kind of had like in the West, you know, we have a high degree of autonomy. We have relatively strong private property rights, relatively stable rule of law, like bank accounts work, you know, especially in Florida and Texas and Tennessee. You know, these states are business friendly for the most part. But we've been lacking the full autonomy over money, right like as we've seen in the Canadian truck protest and many other bank issues before.
You don't own your money.
That's in a bank, right, the bank owns the money. Therefore you don't have autonomy over those funds.
There's that, and then the bigger one was the consequences. So there's no feedback mechanisms and the feedback that there's you said, feedback loops, and then consequences matter, and the feedback the consequences matter is feedback yeah right.
Yeah, and so it is information flowing. They're all connected.
But right there all so information flowing, feedback, loops, consequences, and when I think about going to bitcoin, if you think about just today with the existing monetary system that we have, people want to compare bitcoin transaction to visa transactions, for example, which is a horrible comparison because visa transactions probably happen on like a fifth layer of settlements where
it's settlement. Bitcoin is final settlement. But even in regards to that, So if you think about the time a free flow of information between the arbit charge, between transaction time and settlement time. So I can go online right now, I can pull up Amazon, I can scan this, I could buy it. The transaction happens instantly, But when does the settlement happen?
Never months months later?
Well, I mean I could charge my credit card back up to what six months? Yes, and so maybe visa batches, that sends me a report tomorrow, doesn't hit my money, doesn't hit my bankcount first three days, maybe a week, depend on what type of transaction it is, and then there's six months where it's like not immutable, and so that transact. So technology has gotten disiplined where the transaction times have sped up in the old days, I would have to travel to your general store and we would
transact and settle right away. And now technologies gotus to where transaction times have sped up. Its settlement hasn't.
Deferred settlements very fast. But final settlement, I would argue, actually occurs never in a fiat.
System because gold is not changing hands.
So you think about it, even when those banks you do the Amazon transaction, your bank settles with Amazon's bank probably T plus sixty sixty days later, those banks still have liability to the FED, right right.
The FED can.
Always just print more money into base and all that. So I would argue that you never have final settlement and a FIAD system like it's an internal confidence game.
Yeah, but with bitcong game.
You're conya. With bitcoin, you fully reunite. There's no deferred settlement, right, I'm just sending you specie if you will physical bitcoin over the internet, And so that cuts out a lot of that in that gap where systemic risk and all these things fester. Bitcoin just kind of closes that gap.
So there's a lot of reasons we could say why that's good or bad. Mostly good, But in context of our discussion here, if it needs to be free flowing information with a feedback loop, then we need that gap to be closed.
Yes, and failure again for the failure mattering is very important. Central banks and governments, right, they create these programs that are unprofitable, which means no one actually wants them. That's what unprofitable means. No one's paying you for the fucking thing. It wouldn't be there unless you could steal from taxpayers,
taxation and inflation to pay for the thing. So you end up with all these You know what, did a freedman say that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government solution.
Yeah, exactly.
We had the I think safety and talks about the I think it was Lebanon. The train Authority is still a government organization thirty years after they've had any train tracks in the country.
I might have the country wrong. You get.
All this misallocation of capital essentially, and it's all rooted in the theft, right, the ability to steal from productive market actors and fund whatever kakamane scheme you want, and so that it destroys the flow of information. Price signals get all screwed up, feedback loops go awry. Right, business owners now instead of just going to market and solving something for consumers. I got to go through all this red tape. I gotta get a business license. I gotta wait,
I gotta pay the fee. I gotta do this. I have to get permission.
By the time you get through that, the market might have changed.
Right, so feedback loops are eft, and then failure doesn't matter as much.
Right.
The name of the game and fiat is to get too big to fail or die trying, basically, because once you're too big to fail, well, you live on that taxpayer subsidy forever you can't. You're literally deemed too big to fail, which is totally crazy if you look at it through a lens of nature.
What does that mean?
Do we have any animals that are too big to fail? Is like an animal gets so big, like, let's keep that guy alive forever. Yeah, it's like no, nature naturally dies and the resources go back into the soil.
And the resources back into the soil is the big piece. And so what happens is, you know, in a free market, capitalist system, then people should be able to move.
Up the ladder.
But if people aren't leaving the top positions and falling backs around then there's no room at the top, and so we need a system where people can go up and down.
That's right.
And it's maybe a little worse than that too, because people that get into these positions inside of the state or near the FIAT spigot can now extract resources from those lower down. And so what you tend to see is like an evisceration of the middle class. So the rich getting way richer and the poor getting way poorer.
Yeah, this might be a going into a tangent. But in regards to that specifically, I was having a conversation last night. We're talking about AI, right, and AI is going to replace all these jobs. And one thing that I did agree with a lot of people in regards to this is they think that it's going to replace so many jobs and all these people, all these jobs we wiped out, and then we're gonna need UBI for this.
No, I agree, I agree, I agree with your disagreement, right.
And well, but here, but here's where the rub is and and is that you know, as as animals, back to kind of this animal example, the lion's king of the jungle.
It's free, but it's not an easy life.
It has to fight it could be killed, it could starve to death, but it's free. Now I could move it into a cage and I could give it its one mili day and antibiotics, and now that's safe. But it's not free. The problem with an animal is if that lion's born into captivity, I can't put it back into what maybe ever, I don't I don't know, maybe, but we're not animals, we're humans. And so my dad told my mom and I didn't want eat my vegetables,
that if he's hungry enough, he's gonna eat. And so if you're hungry enough, you're gonna dig a hole like whatever it is, you're gonna do it if you're gonna adapt. But so in regards to that, every time there's been a new piece of technology, people said, hey, we're gonna wipe out all these jobs, and we do. But because humans can adapt, they've adapted. So when the Destrial Revolution took five thousand jobs, they did medicine and science. But the problem is when we do UBI, we incentivize people
not to adapt. That's right, and so in this case, yes, yes, AI will get rid of all those jobs, and instead of those people finding new jobs, will just let's incentivized do nothing.
That's right, and you're penalizing those who are the most productive, the taxpayers that are getting stolen from to fund UBI. So you're disincentivizing productive action and incentivizing non productive action.
Yeah, exactly, and this is what destroys the world.
You're paying people to sit on their ass, like, what do you think is going to happen?
Yeah, So yeah, it's it's a really good point.
And the other So to take it back to the keynote, we tried to get because obviously this is rather abstract.
You know, we're talking about.
How information moves and how market economies work and how flows like these are the flow states a little less substract because most people have experience once or twice. But when you map that onto a market economy, that can be pretty abstract. You're basically saying the individual is like a fractal of the market, and so that can be a leap. We try to and that type of content lends itself better to an essay format, So for the keynote, we try to bring it down to embodied experience to
make it visceral for people. So one of the things and the punchline there with bitcoin is like bitcoin enables more of a market economy, so it's more of a flow state market economy, but it's also allowing people to self select jobs that they get into flow more often with like.
I assume you like what you do.
Sure, you probably get into flow a lot in these conversations and doing your like it's a job that's satisfying. Right, that's great. Right, You've got to choose something that the world pays you for, that you're good at, and that you enjoy. The ideal world is when we have as many people as pop doing that, finding their thing. So bitcoin becomes this instrument that enables more people to discover
flow by making coersion more expensive essentially. So to try and embody these like the difference between Bitcoin and let's say central banking or the Federal Reserve, we use an analogy from Terminator too, and we're saying, imagine if there was a cyborg programmed to defend your family and loved ones, and now the first cyborg is programmed in the spirit
of the Federal Reserve Act of nineteen thirteen. It's like if you've seen Terminator to the liquid Metal guy or using images of him, it's like he lies to you every day. He's coercive and manipulative without remorse. He'll borrow borrow your resources without your permission. If he borrows and too much and runs out of resources, he will conscript your kids to go and die for his debts. So we're analogizing this entity central banking. It said, Okay, that's
pretty grim. So let's imagine another cyborg that's programmed with the values and virtues of bitcoin, and he'll never tell a lie.
Can't tell a lie because bitcoin is truth.
It would have perfect integrity and that it will only ever do what it says it will do. Just like bitcoin, it would perfectly preserve energy or purchasing power into the future for your kids forever. No watt would be expended wastefully, like all the energy in bitcoin goes towards preserving private property, so it would be totally unwteful.
It would encourage, motivate and incentivize want your kids and your family to grow and be the best they could be exactly.
So, which gets back to that flow state, because we're talking about kids. It's like, if we want to build this world, this flow state, free market capitalist world, well we better start with the kids obviously, right, like a start with a kid.
You can't teach an old dog new trick, so to speak. Like, sure, we can improve ourselves and.
We can all try to be better, but the real future we're talking about is in the kids and in their kids and so on.
And the kids are under attack today.
That's right.
And we went into state schooling. The author John Taylor Gatto wrote two books, Weapons of Mass Instruction and Dumbing Us Down. And I was talking about the Western educational system and where it came from. And so these two cyborgs, basically, you know, you get the bad liquid metal Federal Reserve cyborg, and you get the Arnold Schwarzenegger, a bitcoin cyborg that actually defends your family and also defends the rest of the neighborhood, like he's open to taking care of everyone.
That was kind of like, I guess, a way of anthropomorphizing bitcoin and saying like, we should try to be like that for our kids, be you know, and using bitcoin to defend their purchasing power, telling the truth, exhibiting integrity, and in doing so, you would nurture your children's curiosity.
The young and most precious minds among us, which are our kids while they are the future if you nurture their curiosity and give them the opportunity to discover passion, and give them the opportunity to figure out purpose and then develop autonomy and then ultimately pursue self mastery. These are the things parents want for their kids, right. If you don't want it's also the things central planners don't want in their population. Like, I want you dumb and addicted and conforming.
So you can be a cogno, will.
Trust the Yeah, So like that can't be a coincidence, right, Like, these are things good parents want in their kids, and the exact opposite of those things is what central planners want their population. Right, And so it's about moving away from It's really just getting the state out of our affairs, and that gets us back towards this progression that we can discover flow and hopefully just build a better world.
I listened to this interview with the Mike Pompeo, who was previous Secretary of State, used to be with the CIA. I think he was talking about potentially running for a president and this was a couple of months ago, and in the interview they asked him who do you think the most dangerous person in the world. Is is it putin right now? Would you say it's z Like, who's the most dangerous person in the world at this at this time? And he named a lady. I can't remember
her name off the top of my head. I was trying to think about it. And she said she's the most dangerous person in the world. Like, who's this. It's the head of the Secretary of Education in the United States. Okay, more dangerous than anyone else in the world. Well, why would you say that, Because she's educating the kids and she's not educating them properly. We'll just say that that's right.
And so to the point that you're making, right, I mean, they're driving them down the wrong path and everywhere you look unfortunately. I mean we can kind of talk about the but politics works against our best incentives, right, And is that a feature of them wanting to centrally plan and manage or is that just a symptom of as things grow that's how it turns.
So.
For example, in order to get food to more people, food production has been centralized so it can become more efficient, more cost effective. But to become more efficient, cost effective, then they've lowered the quality of the food, which works against what I want. So some of this like that or is it more to like I said toes centrally plan, they need everybody to be dependable, reliable and a cog and a wheel, and they can't have you being a free thinker.
Yeah, that's a great question, and I mean my admitted tunnel vision, right. I think a lot of it's rooted in the money. Like, once you start to centralize the money, well, what does money do? It's like it's one of the primary things that moves humans in the world, Like people wake up, how do they in most of their days, like the.
Average person chasing money, going to.
Work, trying to get money so they can eat and have shelter and all these other things. If all of a sudden, one organization can just print money out of thin air, then that's like the power to control people, like to control human action to a large extent. So it doesn't surprise me at all that we see government centralize in tandem with the centralization of money. So you know, as far as like the sequence, and I'm not saying this is like purely linear, obviously there's feedback between them.
But I think technology essentially dictates how we interact with the world, Right, Like if we're hunters and gatherers, well typing fast doesn't really matter, right, you know, you better be able to throw a spear or whatever it is today, where digital people were all stuck on our phones, homeless people to billionaires, all spending their time on basically the
same device, yeah, every day. So it's like technology I think actually drives economics in that it's determining what we do every day, what jobs we're doing, right, that we're operating within a specific technological paradigm, and those jobs typically have to do with those technologies, right, Like we all work on computers today, we all.
Work on the internet.
Well that wasn't the case fifty years ago, and so on and so forth. So it's in terms of going downstream, it's like technology then economics, and then economics influences culture because culture is just how.
We interact, how we interact, how we organize ourselves.
Obviously there's different features of like food and religion and ritual and all these things kind of mixed into it, but even those things have to do with technology and economics. Right, It's like, well, what churches are we building? Are we in a hut Are we in a cathedral?
Right?
It depends on what paradigm you're in, And so you get cultures kind of emerging from economics to some extent. I'm not saying that culture is economic necessarily, It's just that cultures influenced.
More by economics than the inverse.
And then downstream from culture as politics, right, which is people fighting over the rules essentially.
And then that example I gave about, like food being mass produced so they can bring cost down and become more efficient, but then they're serving less quality food. If the money supply wasn't broken and they weren't forced to try to make it more economical because one people could afford to pay a higher price, then it wouldn't be working against it. So it kind of does.
Go back to the money in that respect, that's right, and the tax subsidies. Right, So they subsidize corn, sugar, et cetera. They're stealing from productive market actors and then subsidizing a specific crop which rewards the largest and most centralized providers of that crop at the expense of.
Smaller, more boutique operations. So what do you get.
You get centralized money leading to centralized food, and when you get to centralized food, which is also centralized wealth, they're also going to via the lobby mechanism, vote themselves favorable regulations, and then we get fucking seed oils and industrial sludge and it.
Just, yeah, it destroys the world.
So yeah, so kind of like we talked about the other day, where like this system of government politics is just not compatible with the world anymore because the world has moved and it hasn't and so kind of going back to that kind of ai UBI type of example, that's only going to continue to exaggerate the problems and not make them better. And so the only way that we're going to get better, I guess one of two ways.
Either one the world culture technology goes back to the way it was or which is never gonna happen, which is never gonna happen. Or the political system has to change, that's right. The monetary the political and monetary system has to.
Change, that's right. Yeah, And I think.
Eric Winstein said this well earlier, that technology has always chased people into higher value add activities, right, So it's always scary when it's without UBI, without UBI exactly, so all the it's creative destruction right where. Okay, your job, you're an Italian shoe merchant, and all of a sudden the factory got installed down the street. Pretty scary, Like I've been making shoes for three generations. Now they're printing them out by the thousand. I'm probably out of business.
That sucks, right, So people resist that they used to destroy factory. So these people protest against it. But that's so dumb because that factory actually increases aggregate wealth and productivity.
But he has to go now find a new skill that's right in the market.
He has to adapt.
And so this is people need to understand that, especially in times of great upheople and change like we're living through, it's humility and adaptation that are at a premium.
And think about I mean, if we want to go way back to like early days like hunter gatherers, once you've exhausted all the food supplies in the area, what do you do?
You move?
You move to the next area, Like this is just human nature. This has always worked.
Yeah, So it's and it's almost like the argument that oh, if AI is successful, that means we have to have UBI. It's not thinking properly because what you're saying is if AI is successful, then by definition it's a profitable enterprise, which means it's increasing human productivity. So it's a net benefit for everyone in needing to increase UBI by the jobs that are displaced, right, the accountants, lawyers, whoever else
that get laid off by AI. No, you don't need to steal from whoever's succeeding in the market and fund those people. Those people need to go and develop new skills. That's the process of the marketplace we're adapting, right, And so Winsign said, it chases you up the value stack. So if we don't need attorneys and accountants and all this stuff in fifty years because of AI, great, go do something that people want, right, figure out what the market demands, which you can get paid for what you're
good at. Hopefully that you can enter into flow and doing and do that.
Yeah yeah, yeah, I think that's a good place to break. Will probably stop there, unfortunately, I just maybe we could just finish on this piece. So like, what does this mean for the future? And so I think ultimately the thesis is then that if something doesn't change, then we continue to exaggerate this problem, and no government is going to be willing to change this on their own, and so bitcoin could force that change essentially.
Yeah, technology, you know, solve an individual, right, Yeah, I said the four mega political variables that shape human society, climate, microbiology, topography, I think is the other one, and then the most important one is technology, right, because technology affects all the other ones. Right, Like, as technology changes, well we inoculate ourselves against microbiology, and we fly so we don't have
to worry about topography and all these other things. So technology seems to be the prime thing, you know, like it changes how we interact with the world. It's upstream from economics, culture, politics. As I described earlier, we should embrace that it makes life better. Now, it's not always purely good necessarily, we also develop things that are terrible, like nuclear bombs and things like that, so it can
be a double edged sword. But in general, if a technology is successful in the marketplace, that is a signal that it's improving people's lives in an economic way.
So we should embrace that. Yeah. Cool,