Okay, so Lucas and I are doing something different. This is something that might never be released, but I'm going to give it a prologue as if it's something that might one day see the light of day and the light of other people's eyes lighting into it.
is we're doing a prep session for a talk with somebody else on software,
which for us just means we're revisiting.
We've talked about software, Jason Lowry's thesis,
in depth in the past, chapter by chapter,
going to the minutiae of each section and whatnot.
And so now we just kind of want to revisit that
and I think renew in our own minds,
refresh our minds, I guess, on what the book is about
and what we are engagement with it or something like that.
And so, I mean, what I would do in our regular sessions is begin each conversation we had
with a summary of what we're going to talk about, which is like a chapter,
and then the run up to that chapter, which would just now, I guess,
mean like summarizing the whole book.
I don't want to do that.
What I'll do is something different.
I usually have a detailed outline, which is like, and I think it's interesting to think about, how do you read something so that you get the most out of that thing that you read?
And there's different ways of reading.
Sometimes I do a quick skim because I want to get this really helicopter view generally of what it's about, get a feel for the work as a whole.
Other times it's like paragraph by paragraph.
It's like I got to put that paragraph in my own words or I get nothing.
but like here instead of looking and like going through my own outline i mean we have an outline
like jason lowry has a table of contents we have i bought this book by the way i got this online
you got it i did it's like every once in a while i've noticed um it goes i don't know if they print
more of them or something but it goes down from like a thousand dollars to like forty dollars and
So I saw it at $40.
I got it.
And I think it does say like a print date of November something.
So I think I got this.
Like there's new printings happening for whatever reason.
Yeah.
So it's nice to have the paper thing to look at instead of a screen that's like your eyes are like eggs over easy, like frying on the screen as you read.
But so let's look at the table of contents.
maybe I'll start going through the chapters and the subjects,
the subsections, unless it seems really laborious.
And then I'll just like, like ejection,
I'll pull a strap and we'll just get out of that mode of thinking.
The introduction is inspiration, justification, background,
objective and thesis structure.
I don't know that I, I mean, the inspiration I think was
was Jason's thought that, like his own engagement with Bitcoin
and the thought that we don't, there is a bias,
an analytical bias we have towards reality to not want to see
specifically emerging technologies in a light different than
what we've initially prejudged them to be, Bitcoin as money.
or the analogy he gives like gunpowder as medicine,
the Chinese conceiving of gunpowder as medicine,
not seeing its potential as a warfighting technology.
And so I think that the inspiration for him,
without looking at my notes,
I think it was just that,
that Bitcoin is being misunderstood
as a much smaller phenomena than it is
because we typically look to economists,
financial theorists,
very constrained, not in a bad way, but people have a specialization relating to the field of
money to tell us what Bitcoin is and its implications, instead of like Lowry, somebody
who has a military background, from a military theory point of view, what it is.
And so his objective, there's actually some executive orders that he cites there, I recall,
from the Biden administration wanting to explore digital assets. And so he kind of duly mentions
those as like his objective but i think his objective more so is to rattle our brains rattle
the cages around our brains so that we see that bitcoin we're willing to engage with bitcoin in a
way that is much more ample right than austrian economics and instead we're going to bring our
own life experiences to it and i mean that brings us to the methodology right um that we this is a
grounded theory methodology like methodology i got the book um one of the books that jason
sites um like the basics of qualitative research um which goes into detail on how to do grounded
theory and um what would you say um grounded theory and not analysis but how to use grounded
theory as your methodology methodology being defined in that book as like a way to view social
reality. And so the grounded theory, the thought is here, you're going to generate a new theoretical
framework by not just like waiting, jumping into a new subject matter saying, I'm an Austrian
economics, we're going to look at this from the framework of Austrian economics. Instead, you say,
here's a bunch of interesting facts about the world. Here's a bunch of interesting facts in
the world, right? And I have my own perspective that I bring to any situation. I'm a whole human
being. I have a background, Jason might say to himself, in military theory, in engineering,
and in his own personal life as the heir to a cattle farm. All of that he's going to bring to
this world of facts about Bitcoin and begin to sort them out, put them into piles. These facts
are kind of similar for this reason. These facts are kind of similar to this reason.
And then he's going to go do a bunch of reading and say, okay, I've thought that these facts were
similar because they relate to how we use power or whatever. So he does a bunch of reading about
evolution, does a bunch of reading about biology and all these different areas. And that helps him
to refine the piles that he's placed the facts into. And that's kind of the grounded theory
methodology, I think in a nutshell, is data analysis without preconception. And then as you
analyze that data, you create concepts and categories, making it more and more abstract,
but giving it explanatory value into new situations until you reach a point of theoretical saturation
where new facts are not really enriching your framework. So you then generate a theory from
that you have Bitcoin as a novel form of power projection in cyberspace. So I'll just pause there.
That's like the introduction through the methodology, I think. And there's, of course,
I don't have my outline in front of me. So I've admitted a large portion of what he talks about.
But is that your kind of your recollection, Lucas, about what we talked about in the introduction
of the methodology? Yeah, it's a, that's a good way to say it. I, as you're talking,
I'm thinking about. So for people that are listening to this, if we do release it,
we started recording after talking for like an hour on entirely different subjects on
kind of the reason why we started doing this in the first place, which was
to encourage people to look into deep ideas and consider a more in-depth approach and
get away from the Bitcoiner-centric idea of Bitcoin fixes everything, number go up,
win Moon, win Lambo, all that stuff. And I want to kind of draw that into what the grounded theory
methodology is, which as you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking about where do we all
inevitably end up settling in terms of our preferences. And there's this so, you know,
during the formative years, there's such a strong anchoring bias to the music that you listened to
when you were 16 and 17 and 18 and the cars that you idolized when you were growing up and the
the wardrobe that you had and even your conceptions of like beauty you'll
you know you think about like what's the most beautiful if you're if you're a guy
or a guy inclined to think that women are beautiful which is to like what's the most
beautiful woman you've ever seen and it's probably someone that you were like 15 or 16 or 20 or
something that you watched. And there's, there's this anchoring bias that we have and you see it
in everybody. Cause you know, like I'll talk to my dad about what he really loved and it's the,
the cars of the sixties and the early seventies. And it's the, cause that's when he was driving
and it's the airplanes of world war two, because that's what he learned about and put models
together. And the danger of all that is that we do get stuck in the past and that we fail to look
at things right in front of us for not necessarily what they are, but what they do. And that's the
first principles way of thinking. It's not, it's not what is this thing? It's what does this thing
do. And then I can compare it to other things that do this same thing. Like a barrel is no different
than a bowl. Like a bowl and a cup and a barrel and a dump truck are all essentially the same
thing. They're just receptacles that hold something and they're shaped in different ways
and their different quantities and there's some different qualities,
but from a fundamental perspective, what they do, they can be compared.
And so using that grounded theory methodology,
we're able to break ourselves free of this allure and enticement of Bitcoin
as magic internet money, as, oh, the fiat system's evil and the Federal Reserve is evil
and everything that comes with part and parcel of going through the cycle of going from
this is a scam to this is the greatest thing that's ever happened and everything in between.
all the shit coins and all the rage at authority and all the, oh, now I have a low time preference
and I'm going to be healthy and I'm going to eat carnivore and I'm going to raise up my fellow
Bitcoiners. And it gives us an opportunity, this grounded theory methodology to just really do what
you and I had wanted to do when we started this, which was think deeply about an idea.
And it doesn't have to be Bitcoin. It doesn't have to be anything in particular, but just to
think really deeply about an idea and what it means in terms of what it does. One of the things
that we were talking about before I hit record was we're talking about virtue and how virtue
is defined, Alex Fetzky defines it in his book or in his podcast that I listened to that you sent
as a verb, as an action. And so we talked about like, it doesn't matter what Bitcoin,
the number does, the buying power, how it frees you economically from repression, blah, blah,
blah. It doesn't matter. All of those things. It's what are the virtues that it engenders?
And the grounded theory methodology that Lowry has used to approach this subject with
has really enlightened me in a lot of ways in terms of asking the right questions, because
we had talked in our previous chats about this. We had talked about how the hypothesis method
of doing research, which is I'm going to pose a question and then I'm going to answer it.
There's an inherent danger in that. And that danger is that you might just be asking the
wrong question and you won't know it. You won't have any idea because you'll still get an answer.
you know I had given the I had given the example before when we talked about like
OxyContin it's like if the question is does this make me feel better when I'm in pain then the
answer is undeniably yes but that fails to that fails to answer anything that really matters in
terms of is this something virtuous is this an action that I should pursue is this something
that I need to be moving my life toward. So I just, overall, the grounded theory methodology,
it meant so much to me having been slightly involved in research before to be able to consider
and pull the wool off of my eyes to view research as something that can be done
in an entirely different way with an open book and a blank easel and a blank or not a blank,
a blank canvas and an open mind and foraging into the wild of unknown thoughts in a way that is
almost dangerous and scary because you're not asking questions. You're just digging.
You're just sifting through and putting things into piles and grouping things and finding similarities between the membrane of a single cell organism and a nuclear bomb.
And to be able to draw those conclusions and view them as undeniably related.
after we got done with the book the first time I had a couple questions that I kept digging into
but after that I came away with this idea that from now on this is not an idea that
I need to be convinced of it's an idea that if it that someone needs to convince me is not like
this is now my default assumption that is that not Bitcoin, the monetary instrument,
but Bitcoin, the network, which are two separate things. But Bitcoin, the network is a force of
power projection that has been under explored. And we do need to look deeper into
The idea that we need to protect the most valuable parts of us and the most valuable parts of us are the information.
And we know that they are the most valuable parts of us because the most valuable companies in the world are information technologies that exist by extracting information from the populace.
That's their value.
So before you go too far, I want to go back to something.
I did go too far.
No, no, no.
You never go too far. You always go just far enough. But before you go even further for enough, you said something, I think, that is a common enough way of speaking, but also illustrates something very notable about grounded methodology.
You said that it meant something to you, almost in an emotional stance toward the object of study. And this is a qualitative and not a quantitative way of looking at the world.
And so the world of qualities is experiential. It has to do with our interpretation of things. It is not a matter of statistical probabilities depicted in a graph or a line or a pie chart.
All of the technical analysis of Bitcoin that you see will never get you qualitatively to what Bitcoin is as a social phenomena.
Maybe it'll enrich your ability to talk about the ramifications it might have, but it means something to you.
This is a qualitative analysis.
There's a lot of directions that I wanted to go in from there.
even just like going further in Lowry's thesis that, you know, it means something to you. And
what is meaningful to us is often the result of our subscription to an abstract power-based
hierarchy or like a bigger worldview that we have that assigns value to the things that we see,
that we come to the world already laden with concepts that we use to see the world and make
it mean to us. And the grounded theory methodology is actually encouraging us to, as much as we can,
step back away from the hierarchies of abstractly defined concepts that we're already a part of
and try to... You're never going to see the world without the concepts that you already have, but
as much as you can, try to re-describe the world to yourself. In description, you're always moving
towards new concepts. And so if you can try to talk to yourself and tell yourself what is something
like Bitcoin by considering all the facts about what it is, putting them in different piles and
describing how those different piles are meaningful to you, you're going to arrive at new concepts.
And I think to move in then to chapter three, power projection tactics in nature,
power projection is really like maybe the non-Bitcoin related thesis of this thesis.
Like in considering and thinking about how Bitcoin might be a novel form of cyber warfare,
Lowry has this much bigger conception.
Well, where does warfare come from?
Well, it comes from, it's a form of primordial economics.
It's a form of resource control that developed not just in animals, but even before animals when you saw a membrane spreading itself across a hydrothermal vent to capture nutrients.
Not even what we would call life necessarily, just the cordoning off of nutrients in a space in order to utilize them for further growth.
that is a form of like something analogical to what animals do when they seize resources and
what humans do when they protect resources it's power projection like that's the thesis of the
thesis beyond bitcoin is that power projection is a resource control protocol that has been used
primordially and that is still being used in order to allow us to determine who gets what.
We start with that inorganic walling off of resources by a membrane that uses the power
projection tool of that pressurized membrane, a sort of wall to separate the resource collected
from the entropic world outside of it. If you move on to animals who, you know, predator and
prey relations Animals are seeking to get their resources in a world without becoming the resource of another animal that seeking to also accumulate nutrients and calories And they do that by the wolf stands over the carcass of the fallen caribou and growls at
some other animal that would want to take that meat. It projects power. And in humans, then,
we engage in similar forms of warfare. We project power to assert our ownership of a specific
resource. And so just to move on, I see that that's the power projection aspect of this thesis.
Do you think that that is a correct summation of that?
Yeah, power projection is obviously the main point that Lowry is trying to tie everything
to that it's not only natural from a biological sense and a completely unconscious way of doing
things but from a from a cognitively sound approach as well that power projection is
humanistic and
I'm failing on the word that I'm looking for, but it's, it's ethical. I think it is,
might even be the word that I'm thinking of. What it makes me think of is the last couple of days,
I've been, I've been doing a little bird hunting, um, pheasants. And I was walking yesterday,
carrying a shotgun and thinking about how I just read this autobiography of Red Cloud.
And in it, he describes like some hunting expeditions and some, a lot of, a lot of battles
where I can see why people who were unaccustomed to that experience, I can see why white people
that had come into that land and started to observe the way that Native Americans, Indians,
I'm going to say Indians because Native Americans is, I think you're native to the place that
you're born. And so I would feel that I'm a Native American as well. And I kind of push back on that
political correct thing because everybody's an immigrant. Nobody's forefathers actually came
from this country. But thinking about how savage, like I can see why people use that word because
he talks about like the battles that they fought and just very nonchalantly discussing how
they projected power upon each other. There was this one instance where they capture a herder,
the guy that's watching the horses. Basically, apparently, you can sum up all of that time frame
into this tribe gets together a bunch of dudes and they go out and they steal a bunch of horses
from this tribe. And if in the course of stealing horses, there's an opportunity to kill a bunch of
those guys, so be it, like all the better. But there's this one where they capture the scout
and they tell him in sign language, hey, we're not going to kill you. And he's like, oh yeah,
thank God. Like this never happens. Like everybody dies. They always die. But instead what they do
is they hold him down and they scalp him while he's alive. And they tell him to go back and send
a message that this is what we do because you are not worth killing. And that's its own method of
power projection. That's its way of making a statement that resonates without destroying
something. And I was thinking about that as I'm carrying the shotgun through this draw,
thinking about how power projection has escalated from a rock to a bow to now I've got this cannon
on my arm that I can lift up and point and obliterate anything in front of me. And
it's, it's ethical. You know, I think about, I, you know, I'm, I'm walking through this draw and
in my mind, I'm, I'm picturing like, oh, if I had moccasins, I'd be quieter. And if I had a recurve
bow, then I would be more in tune with the world. And I would be stocking up on a deer and I would
get to within five yards of it and I would draw back and I would hit it with this arrow. And in
my mind, I was like, and then it would suffer. And I know it would suffer because I've seen it happen.
And the converse of that is I've got a 270 caliber or a 308 and I'm sitting and I'm zoned in
And I've got the crosshairs on the kill zone.
And when I pull the trigger, the thing is dead before it hits the ground.
And there's part of that that feels horrible because you're like, I just wiped out a life that existed on this earth.
But then there's the acknowledgement that you do have to go through if you eat meat at all.
I feel like even if you eat vegetables, you need to acknowledge this, but that it's more humane.
And this is going in a different topic.
Can I –
Yeah, yeah, double tap.
That squeamishness is an important part of Lowry's thesis.
The squeamishness that we feel at killing is a really important thing.
So just take a step back.
Humans are pack animals, and pack animals, they operate as a pack, they cooperate as a power projection tactic because that enables them to pool their cost of attack and make them more able to resist others coming in to steal their resources and to obtain more resources for themselves.
But as a pack, then, you need a way to internally determine feeding and breeding rights.
And so power projection is used inside the pack so that the strong and the intelligent get the resources, which tends toward the systemic fitness of the pack in the long run.
Power projection tactics in that way have developed such that we have like an evolutionary squeamishness where we, even as part of a power projection tactic, don't want to kill our fellow man.
wolves when they have another wolf pinned down they don't tear out the jugular they've asserted
power enough deer and this is of course a very important metaphor for lowry develop these
intricate antler structures to allow them to project power within the pack without killing
a member of the pack and so humans we evolve this inbuilt squeamishness we don't want to
we maybe want to grapple and subdue a person within the pack show them who is the most powerful
and like be able to determine who should be the leader, who should have first feeding and breeding
rights or whatever. But we don't want to kill. And in the book, Lowry cites like the Battle of
Gettysburg, there were rifles that were packed with like six or seven rounds, people didn't want
to fire at their fellow man, that it's actually difficult to train out of people, their desire
not to kill other people. So there's that squeamishness that's evolved within us. And we
also have another evolved capacity, which is theory of mind. So we begin to be able to sense
the suffering of, like you said, that bird that you're going to shoot, like it's going to suffer
more if I impel it with an arrow than if I shoot it with a gun or something like that. And so we
have a theory of mind, like what's the bird thinking about what I'm doing to it? What's
the bird thinking about how, as it's dying? And so that leads us to be even more squeamish towards
violence. This double squeamishness towards violence that we have evolved within us and
result of our theory of mind extrapolating what other animals feel leads us to develop abstract
power-based hierarchies, which are ways to allocate feeding and breeding rights within the pack
that are not based on the projection of physical power, but rather the allocation of rank-based
abstract power. Ah, you're a member of the priestly cast. You get these resources. Ah,
you are a knight, whereas you are a serf. You get this versus this. And those ranks then are just
based upon this grand story that has been told about what value, what the society consists of,
its worldview, and its kind of founding story. So just, I thought that your squeamishness that
you noted there, directly leads us into abstract power-based hierarchies and away from the
projection of physical power to determine resource allocation, which Lowry thinks leads
us into some traps because abstract power-based hierarchies, they can be dysfunctional.
They can lead to oppressive god kings that determine who gets the resources and who doesn't.
and they can also make societies weak because people tend to self-domesticate become complacent
and therefore the mongols ride in off the step with no preconceived notion of what is good or
bad within that abstract power-based hierarchy and instead devour or invade that society as a whole
yeah the the acknowledgement of the theory of mind the lowry talks about this and it gave me
such a insight into the mind and the heart of a warrior and so much empathy for especially
like soldiers who suffer from ptsd when he discusses like what is the thing that makes
a warrior great and a hunter great it's the ability to put yourself in the place of the
thing that you're killing and if you can put yourself into the place of the thing that you're
killing then naturally you're also going to feel that fear and you're going to feel the
terror that that thing feels as it's being hunted because that's valuable information to you
to use in hunting and, and in being a efficient warrior. And so it gives me, it's, it gives me so
much empathy for, he talks about, you know, like the, the people that are most suited for
being great hunters that are the best at killing things that are the best at projecting power.
they're also the ones that feel the most they genuinely feel in a way that I think we as society
have not given them credit for which is to always just say oh you're like a cold-blooded killer
you're cold-hearted you've got eyes of eyes of you know a heart of stone and eyes of steel or
whatever and ice water through your veins and it's like no like it's in it's entirely the
opposite of that. It is in fact, the most empathetic, humane thing. And you're feeling
every bit of it. And when you, when you hunt deer, like it's a very common thing. People talk about
getting buck fever when you get a buck in the sights of the rifle and you're perfectly fine.
And then all of a sudden it's like your body starts to tremble and you're, you don't want to
pull the trigger, you see this beautiful creature and, and it's so hard to actually follow through.
And when you do follow through, there's like instant regret, even though there's joy and,
or maybe not necessarily joy, but like the feeling of accomplishment. And I think what that has
enabled us to do, which may sound counterintuitive, but as Lowry mentioned to us,
like Bitcoin is paradox upon paradox. Like everything about it is counterintuitive.
You know, the harder you fight it, the stronger it gets. The more people that have it,
the more each person has. It's a creative, it's not extractive, but it makes me think about how
humanistic and ethical it is to have that view of being, of the theory of mind, of suffering along
with the thing that you're suffering. And what does that do is it leads us to develop power
projection tactics that are overwhelming and overwhelming in the sense that
as horrific as it sounds, the people that died from a nuclear blast
died a much more peaceful death than people that were hit with stones and stabbed with swords.
Like it was, it's a much more humane way to be vaporized, even though we look at it and we're like, oh, it's horrific. Like, we do have to accept that our projection is something that is going to occur. And let me just say this one thing.
It made me think of one time I was at a conference and I heard a research presentation by a veterinarian.
And the research topic was what is the most humane way to put down a cow that is suffering?
Like what they call downer cows when they basically like pinch a nerve and they can't get back up.
and you have to kill them. Otherwise they're just going to suffer laying on the ground and
eventually starve to death and die. And so he's like, yeah, you can imagine how,
how people were pretty enthusiastic about joining my research. You know, they, they thought it was
pretty entertaining and it's like, oh, do you use a 22 caliber in the back of the skull? Do you use
a 45? Do you use this or that? And he's like, big surprise. It turns out that a 12 gauge
slug, which is like this big, is the most humane and efficient way. It's like 100% of the time,
when you put that to a cow's head and you pull the trigger, it blows a giant hole through their
brain and they die instantly. It's like a 45 caliber, which is a big weapon. They'll bounce
off the skull and it'll suffer and it'll be in worse pain. And so what I gathered from that
is that overwhelming force is ethical.
Overwhelming force is humane.
And solely for the reason that it discourages challenge.
It discourages you to challenge
and it encourages you to be collaborative and cooperative
and work with whatever that power structure is.
So that was kind of my take on it.
No, the scaling of kinetic warfare to the point of kinetic stalemate with strategic nuclear missiles is what brings us to our current kind of geopolitical state where we have large nation states that cannot win wars against each other.
At the most, they can fight small proxy wars like what may be occurring in the Ukraine or what is occurring in Ukraine, which may be a proxy war and other wars that have occurred where a large nation state goes after a smaller one, but kind of has its sights on the control or power of a bigger nation state.
so that scaling of kinetic warfare to the point where it becomes inusable we really can't we can't
have a nuclear conflict or else we would eradicate humankind um leads us to a kinetic stalemate what
so you know i mean some of the benefits of a semen kinetic stalemate is it seems peaceful
right even though on the other side of that thin line of peace lies um human extermination right
annihilation what it a negative aspect of a kinetic stalemate is and this lowry spends a
lot of time elaborating on this is that war fighting does have emergent benefits so
like the fighting of wars physical power projection
is necessary to discipline and break up abstract power-based hierarchies so once an abstract power
based hierarchy, such as a government becomes oppressive, like if a monarchy institutes an
oppressive tax on tea and other imported goods to a new colony, that colony then has the ability to
say, you know, they can argue within that abstract power based hierarchy, hey, don't do that to us.
But if it's still done, the only other option is revolution. So abstract power based hierarchies
tend to become oppressive over time because people, a ruling class,
wants to allocate more resources to them and their friends and family in their own class.
The only way to break that up, though, then is not to argue within that abstract power-based hierarchy,
but to use the neutral, permissionless, egalitarian form of power projection that is watts,
that is energy over a unit of time, joules per second, to move mass, matter,
in kinetic warfare. That's what happens in the Revolutionary War. That's what happens in all war.
So war, the emergent benefits of warfighting is it enables us to deal with abstract power-based
hierarchies. We see the world as it exists now is not one god-king ruling over the entire globe.
It's rather nation-states that have been forged in bloodshed due to, you know, past abstract
power-based hierarchies being perceived as oppressive or inadequate to the demands of the
populace. And so we get the world that we're in now where property has been, in some sense,
at least decentralized enough where there's not a single god king controlling everything. So
emergent benefits of warfighting, it enables us to get rid of abstract power-based hierarchies
that are oppressive, and also to invade and destroy those that become too weak and domesticated.
invasion is now off the table with kinetic stalemate um but that just means that the other
problem is still on the table of an abstract power-based hierarchy becoming too oppressive
and this kind of moves us into the next part of the book where of the newest abstract power-based
hierarchies in this day and age are those based in software which are these transnational or are
these emissions of transnational entities, things like Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, whatever
software platform that has control over our digital resources, and operates on the abstract
power based hierarchy, which are those encoded forms of logic within the software that delineate
control of digital resources. So that gets so that moves us like the kinetic stalemate that we have
today due to nuclear arms and increasingly probably due to drone-based warfare and AI
moves us into this new realm where we have the risk of abstract power-based hierarchies,
all of their dysfunctions, but we don't seem to have a physical power projection-based tactic
that won't lead to our own extermination. So the question is then, what do we do now
in order to discipline, break up abstract power-based hierarchies, such as large
software-based platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.
Yeah, these are competing ideologies. And war seems to be, yes, a competition over resources,
but also a competition between ideologies to determine which one is the king, which one has the
Which one has the greatest ability To survive as evidenced By its proof Of winning a tournament against all of the other ideologies This was what Lowry really brought me around to when talking about the idea of a strategic
Bitcoin reserve of a nation state adopting Bitcoin, because I had really gone down the
path of not necessarily anarchist, but I just have seen, you see all the examples of the
oppressive things that a nation state can do and you live those things. And it, it makes you feel
as though you don't want them to hold this thing that I recognize to be so powerful because I'm,
I'm genuinely afraid that they'll use it for evil and use it for bad.
And he framed it in such a good way by saying, it's like, you know,
it's going to be this ideology or it's going to be the other one,
like a socialist ideology, a communist ideology,
which we know even in the best of instances are horrific in what happens when
they are initiated and lived out in a society. And so we're always going to have an ideology.
That's something that we have to accept. We're always going to have a hierarchy. That's something
that we have to accept. And we can accept it sad, or we can accept it enthusiastically and be
open to the idea that the ideology that is based upon principles of power projection,
which is what meritocracy is, it's based upon principles of rewarding those that are
most able and efficient and good at projecting mental power, physical power, and
in a focal direction to bring about a desired result, that is the ideology that I want to have
that thing. And I'm okay with that now. And I'm very accepting and encouraging of that idea.
And in fact, enthusiastically in support of that idea now that I want to see that happen. I want to
see, I want to see that become the overwhelming force that is able to discourage any sort of
attack or make the cost of attack so great that cooperating and working in alignment
is more rewarding. And that's, again, that takes us back to Bitcoin as the network and understanding
how the miners defend the network and understanding that the idea of trying to attack it
makes it stronger and it grows the power that is there to support it.
you could maybe overwhelm the network for a couple minutes or a couple hours, but in doing so,
you would have spent your nation's entire resources for a decade secretly building up
this network of miners that you couldn't gradually put online. You would have to
all of a sudden bring them to bear and try and overwhelm the network. And the problem is
it wouldn't work because as soon as the other miners realized what was happening,
they would just fork it and take it to a different direction. And you would be sitting
there out on an island having wasted everything when the cooperative method of simply
joining with and working in harmony would have brought you great wealth and would have
made you part of something that's growing. It's such a beautiful thing to think about.
And it gives you pause to consider that there could be something that is both a competition
and a weeding out of weaker, that is also a coalition and a building up of communal strengths.
Yeah. I think where you started that and where you went exactly tracks the thesis in that. So we have,
even nowadays, abstract power-based hierarchies in the form of competing ideologies.
The fact that they're competing, though, is a relic of warfare that has decentralized god kings.
We did not have a Marxist god king, Marx, Lenin, somebody like that, control the whole world, institute 1984's Big Brother because we had wars that prevented that from happening.
We also don't have soulless capitalist exploitation of the whole world if one of them was taken, or like a cynical look at what one might call the American system that controls the whole world.
Instead, we have this view in Europe, this view in Russia, this view in China, that view in Latin America, etc. We have like this decentralized different spaces where different ideologies exist so that no one ideology controls everything.
And so they then have to kind of be more honest with respect to each other because they have to compete with each other.
The danger, again, is that with Kinetic Stalemate, we might see the steady growth or expansion of one of these abstract power-based hierarchies to control all of the others, which might be some sort of software conglomerate or form of software-based control over all digital resources.
what that's where the the lowry comes along and says bitcoin provides a way for us to continue to
have warfare in cyberspace and to to therefore reap all of the emergent benefits of warfare
even though even though we've reached that kinetic stalemate of like mutually assured destruction
we can still continue to burn watts to project power in cyberspace through the proof of work
aspect of the Bitcoin protocol in which real world energy is used to constrain digital,
like digital information to determine what can be done with it, who owns it, etc.
That is a form, Lowry says, in mutually insured preservations, because as you know,
Like it's still a physical power based competition where all of these hash forces around the world are using real world energy to try to mine the next block and also to enable their own transactions to go through.
But by each separate nation state or entity competing with their own hash force, they're all making the network stronger. And so there's this competition, there's cooperation through competition in the form of the Bitcoin protocol for a new form of warfighting that Lowry calls soft war in that it doesn't use kinetic power based competitions that tend to leave bodies in the wake.
and instead uses non-kinetic physical power-based competitions
in the form of burning energy to do hash functions
and therefore secure digital resources.
So we still have a physical power-based hierarchy
and physical power projection is still possible in cyberspace
to secure resources and to allocate them,
but it's done in a way, again,
that doesn't lead to harm and death, and in fact has all of these new emergent benefits
of encouraging nations to build out their power grid, to use stranded energy, and to possibly,
as all warfighting does, lead to new innovations as new technologies are discovered. As we continue
to compete, we continue to make our computers better, our power grids better, to form better
alliances and things like that. So I think that brings us to the overarching thesis of the book
that software is a novel form of warfare based on physical power projection in the cyberspace
through the proof of work aspect of the Bitcoin protocol, indicating that Bitcoin is not only
money, not only a way to secure financial resources, but a way to secure all digital
assets and to allow the game to continue to go on, that game that is warfare amongst humans,
but in a way that doesn't leave bodies on the ground.
Yeah. I think you can think about software as something that's been going on for quite a while
now in a bit of a rudimentary form. And the only difference is that it wasn't proof of work,
is that digital economies and digital marketplaces are definitionally winner-take-all.
Because if you do the best thing digitally, there are no borders, there are no obstacles of entry
for someone in Azerbaijan or Canada or in a submarine in the Mariana Trench or on the
International Space Station, there's no barriers to entry for people to join that.
And so you create this natural winner-take-all system where you have monopolistic winners,
Amazon, Facebook, X, you know, these in their own specific realm.
It makes me think about when I was like 16, I visited New York and I had the best sandwich I'd ever had at the Carnegie Deli in New York.
And I literally thought about that sandwich for two decades.
Like it was so incredible.
But if I were to say, and even if it were objectively and qualitatively and quantitatively agreed upon that that was the best sandwich in the entire world, still the only people that would experience it are probably people within a 10, 20 block radius of that restaurant.
And so when we created this digital landscape and Facebook came out and MySpace came out, we immediately instituted hierarchies as soon as there was reward.
And there was reward initially just on attention and later kind of in a quantitative way in like likes or views.
And then even later on in the pittance of extracted value that Facebook or Instagram or X or YouTube gives back to the people who are giving their being creators upon that.
there is that hierarchy that defines itself. But the problem is it's proof of stake. And the stake
is just where you stand. Like the problem with Ethereum and all the other proof of stake protocols
is that all you have to do is form an alliance and you can change things to benefit you. And that's
not how you want systems to work. Because if you can change things to benefit you,
that means that you can change things to disbenefit other people. And that means that
other people can change things to disbenefit you and take away. It was that woke argument,
the argument against the woke thing that people kept screaming from the rooftops, which is like,
hey, it's great that you can just obliterate someone from existence of the internet by
canceling them and destroying them. That's wonderful that you can do that. However,
somebody else is going to have that power eventually, and they're going to turn it on you.
You need to be able to see that, that you can't hold this power forever because stake is such a
fleeting thing because the desires and the wants of the populace are, they're moving and they're
ever adjusting. And so we've had that for a long time. And I think it has proven to not be beneficial
to us. You and I were talking before we hit record about the experiences that we've both had in the
last couple of days, being removed from social media, being removed from screens, being in touch
with nature in a way that feels spiritual and indulgent and maybe foreign and almost even guilty,
but that we are discussing as what is probably far more natural. It's that we have moved into
a realm of existence that is so unnatural that the natural now feels unnatural, that
it feels indulgent, that it feels panicked.
And this is why we have an anxiety epidemic of people that are constantly moving towards
productivity and efficiency and constantly doing something that if you zoom back out,
it might not need to be done.
And it really makes me think about hearing Elon Musk talk about he's got five steps for approaching an engine, like being an engineer to create a product and solve something and optimizes the final step.
He's like the problem that most people have as engineers is that they try to optimize something that shouldn't exist.
and God, like look around and think about all the over optimization of things that
we have all these products. We have all these things that they are possibly handy,
but it goes back to that grounded theory methodology of just because we can do something
doesn't necessarily mean that we should because there are knock on effects that second and third
order effects that we don't think about. I was, uh, it was in my mom's bathroom yesterday and I
saw that there's like saline solution. And I just remember thinking, I was like, saline solution is
salt in water. That's it. Like that's all it is. And we now have an industry that is based upon
people selling two things that are incredibly abundant and always available and insanely cheap.
And we pay money for this and we use storage space to keep this around when we could very simply
on need, as needed basis, put a little salt in water when we need a saline solution and create
our own and not have the waste of the bottle, not have the loss of the storage space, not
have the wasted cognitive effort of knowing where that is and just simply remove all of
this stuff.
We have optimized something that didn't need to exist.
And so I know that was, again, roundabout.
But my main point of saying that was that the proof of work is overcoming proof of stake, which has been in existence really for the entirety of human organization in civilization, where it was that abstracted power.
That's what abstracted power hierarchies are.
It's proof of stake.
Like where can where can we get the most people or the sorry, the most powerful people?
How can we get the most powerful people to move in a certain direction and be involved with that and try to stay in that river?
Oftentimes at the loss of our own morality, our own ethic, our own soul, our own natural tendency of living in harmony with things.
when it's just at the benefit of being with the powerful.
And yeah, it's overcoming something that I think has been so damaging to society.
There's good things about social media.
There truly are.
But I don't think that on the whole, I don't think that 20 years from now,
we look back and we think about people posting duck face selfies
and taking pictures of their food and poking each other and hearting things and liking things
and asking whether or not these are the heated mittens that you guys use,
because I'm not sure what I should get.
I don't think we're going to look back at that as a creative to society
and growing the human condition in a soulful way.
I think we'll look back on it in a way that you look back on a hallucination that you've exited
as something that was not real.
And this is what the proof of work protocol does. It is in Lowry's other descriptive terms, proof of realness. So it's the way that you pinch yourself to come out of a dream is you physically pinch your body and you exert watts and then watts ground you in what is real.
And so physical power projection is a way to ground a hallucination, to dispel a hallucination, to wake you up from a dream. There is a dream now that is cyberspace, completely unmoored from reality.
although in its guise attempting to convince us that it is real it is a veil through which beyond
which an engineer is collecting all of our data to learn how to better control us by manipulating
the parameters of the dream in which we're operating that we believe is real so the proof
of work protocol is a way to bring that proof of real verification mechanism, pinching yourself,
exerting Watts into the digital, the virtual, the cyberspacial realm. It is a way that
proof of work, real world power is a real thing. Once it constrains bits, once there is an orange
checkmark on social media, to use sailors' terms, I believe, in which you have to transfer a sat
for some sort of interaction, then the hallucination becomes more grounded in reality.
Bot farms disappear. Misinformation becomes costly. The thing that is, maybe you don't post
all of the duck face selfies because it's costly to do that. The things that you do post are things
that have some sort of tangible relation to what you believe is actually valuable because
data is now costly.
Digital bits are also now permanent and transparent because they are inscribed on a public blockchain.
So all of these negative aspects of the dream that we've entered, the hallucination that
is social reality, not all of them, but some of the things may be constrained by the proof
of work protocol as proof of realness. That's another aspect of Lowry's thesis in that the
world computer that is Bitcoin is reverse optimized because you had mentioned over
optimization as maybe a design flaw we're not focused on. What Bitcoin does is it reverse
optimizes and says how do we make bits costly Maybe making bits increasingly less and less costly has been a problem because it has led to this proliferation of false dreaming
Whereas once bits are provably costly, they begin to approximate reality more and more because they become a reflection of what is actually valuable to us,
rather than some projection of a dream we have that we're not entirely committed to, but that is easy to replicate.
Yeah. I was having a conversation yesterday with someone we're talking and reflecting back upon our youth, you know, the years of misspent youth and 2 a.m. Chinese food and tequila shots and Red Bull and vodka and sleeping in late and not taking care of the body and not pursuing intellectually and academically the things that we're doing.
you were truly interested in, in order to sacrifice for, to optimize for a short-term
result of a paycheck. And I think the, this, this damaging thing that exists of the current
system that is being replaced and we're seeing it being replaced and we're seeing authenticity
as a repetitive theme of what people are not seeking, but being drawn towards.
And there are always going to be the insightful people and the people that give you
opportunity to tag a meter of being upset and rising, rising your blood in order to get an
interaction. But I think those people and that method disappears because
in that world of permanence and in that world of work, that reputation becomes the most valuable
commodity that someone could ever have and authenticity and being true. And it's not
always being the best. It's being the person who, this was the conversation we were having last
night, which is that like people change. And if you don't change, then, Oh God, have mercy upon
your soul. Because if you are the same at 16 and 23 and 38 and 52, then you haven't learned anything
and you haven't adopted and adapted to your environment and made the changes necessary to
be more resilient and to seek a more virtuous way of living. You realize as you get older,
older, that those are the important things, that it really is that authentic thing. And the
thousand likes on the duck face selfie are so far less important than the time spent changing out a
lock for someone who's unable to do it themselves and seeing that you've brought pleasure to them
and giving them a moment of shared humanity and joy.
So I just wholeheartedly agree with all of that idea that proof of work is,
it brings us more into the moment.
It makes us more present in our everyday lives.
But in the power projection game, it removes the dangers of proof of stake.
And proof of stake has proven to be not just damaging, but violently damaging in a way that has really extracted not just our physical well-being, but our mental well-being and our soul in a way that is really difficult to.
it's difficult to see that you've lost it after you did like it's hard to go back because
once you remove that part you also seem to remove the memory of it and it's hard to even
imagine that feeling of sitting in the sun nothing to do being peaceful in the moment
with the warm breath and the kiss of the sunlight upon your skin and feeling the little hairs on
your arm move just ever so slightly as the breeze comes by and sitting so peacefully and quietly
that nature starts to envelop you and invite you into the moment that you're living in
and allow you to become again, part of the thing that you came from. It's not that you're entering
something that is unknown. It's that you're going back through the door that you exited,
that you never realized you walked out of until you turn back into it. So it, it takes,
it takes a faith and a conscious effort to return yourself to that feeling and that existence
of being in that moment. This is getting philosophical, but it is such a philosophical
thing to think about that it takes into account so much more than just,
this is a new way to fight and this is a new way to do battle. It's a new way to protect your soul.
Like if you can use the Bitcoin network in order to protect your most valuable information,
which is your reputation and your thoughts and your creations that you put out into the world.
If you can use it to protect that, then you're using it to protect your soul
And you're using it to protect your very tenuous relationship with reality and become more engendered to the beauty and the harmony that exists in that.
Yeah. What do you think about that?
it recalls to me the part of lowry's thesis where
in the evolution of mankind we move from upper paleolithic to
upper paleolithic hunter gatherers to neolithic agrarian people which is kind of our current
state of consciousness in being and in doing that that occasion to shift in consciousness
and the shift in theological consideration of ourselves and our relationship to the world.
The upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had, it's tough to describe, but you might say a more holistic, pantheistic,
God or spirits in everything sort of view, where spirits are not separate from the natural world.
They are natural.
um the you know religious conceptions can be used to explain natural phenomena because everything
is spiritual and spirits the spirit of the river explains the operation of the river i think that's
an upper paleolithic type of conception whereas moving to the neolithic agrarian and into what
is called even the axial age you begin to have monotheistic conceptions centered around an
afterlife a continuity of our consciousness in its almost bodily form into the next life
and afterlife um and so there's a way this is going very far i think from now departing from
the aris thesis but choosing it as a jumping off point the neolithic
a neolithic and agrarian form of consciousness where it's centered around an afterlife
gives itself lends itself to abstract power-based hierarchies one formulation that
lowry gives for an abstract power-based hierarchy is you create a walled-off state of being that
people that is desirable in order if you get into this garden that is walled off you are happy if
you attain the state of being that is defined as within this gated area such as this an afterlife
then you're you're happy the abstract power-based hierarchy is centered around defining a walled
space and then denominating designating oneself as the gatekeeper to that space and saying you
are allowed entry because of x reason you are not allowed entry so it allocates power for abstract
reasons. It allocates an afterlife if you are good according to the dominant morality,
that dominant morality being something designed to constrain people. That's a Neolithic conception.
If we get back to the upper Paleolithic conception, where we see the world itself
as pregnant with spirits and embodying a morality just in the operation of nature,
there is it's almost like proof of realness because like the spiritual world is the material
world it's all bound together um we're not looking into the afterlife or into cyberspace to find our
gods we're looking into the world as it is it's sort of an immediate proof of power protocol where
spirits are just as bound as we are um by the operation of the world because the world itself
as a spirit. So that's maybe getting sounding a bit woo woo and kind of hokey or whatnot. But I
think that it does remind us that our religious conceptions are themselves manipulable, abstract,
power-based hierarchies. And what does it mean to discipline those religious conceptions
with a proof of realness protocol? Not to say that Bitcoin, I don't, you said that Bitcoin maybe
saves our soul or protects our soul. I don't want to go too far. Bitcoin is a novel form of
power projection. I think proof of work. I think proof of work. Or even proof of work.
Not necessarily Bitcoin. It's just the instantiation of it.
Yeah. No form of technology is going to save yourself, you know, save you. You need to save
yourself. You still have to do it. Yeah. Right. Right. Absolutely. And so maybe one thing though,
that proof of work as a metaphor can help us reconsider is our own relationship to ground
level reality. What is ground level reality? And how do we inhabit that? And did the hunter
gatherers have a better way of inhabiting ground level reality than Neolithic agrarian farmers did
and that we do? One of the works that Lowry cites is Charles Foster's Being Human. I think the
subtitle is something like 40,000 years in human consciousness or something like that.
And I would definitely recommend that read. It was formative for Lowry in his talk of upper
Paleolithic and Neolithic and the development of consciousness through religious rights and the
nature of the afterlife. And I think reading that might individually help a person consider their own
relationship to the world and the relationship of the spiritual to that world and to themselves,
and maybe how to unite those? Yeah, I think we are coming to the realization that separating
spiritual from real may be doing a disservice to both. And it makes me think about psychedelics
and the use of them is constantly reported by people as an experience that feels realer than
real and more, more real than reality. And it may sound woo woo to those who haven't experienced it,
but to those who have, it lines with what you're discussing as this pantheistic view of there is
like there's like a soul or or god or there is spirit in like everything in in the trees and
in the soil and in the animals and in yourself and in the inanimate objects that are surrounding us
that there is something that is a common line being drawn through them and it may be something
that we discover where right now we have this anchoring bias of science and, um, it must be
quantified and it must be proven. And there, and maybe, maybe we're able to do it. You know,
we talked about this before the, the beauty of science is that nothing is ever true. It's just
things that aren't false. And, and there is, and that, and that not falseness, it drives us closer
and closer to the truth. And it's doubtful that we can ever know anything to be true,
but we can asymptotically approach it and get closer and closer to
the beauty that exists in aligning ourselves with proof of work, with
meritocracy, with presence, with meditation, with the affluence of time and having moments that are
uninvolved with efficiency and production and just being live. One of my favorite
quotes of myself from our first or second talk on software was that the money that we've had for
the entire existence of humanity has been dead money. And Bitcoin is live money. It's live energy.
It's live protected by electricity that is constantly flowing. And it seems to be bringing
a wellspring of life to everything that it touches, both in the economic world and in the
soul, in the sense of the spirit of those who are able to move past the win-moon, number-go-up,
win-lambo, we're all going to make it, have fun staying poor type of community.
it gives us something that was always there. It doesn't give it to us. It reveals, I suppose.
It reveals something that was always there because it feels natural when it's revealed to us.
And it feels familiar and it feels like something that you've known. And to take that back to
psychedelics, that's the experience of psychedelics, which is to have this experience that
is more real than real that feels like something you've known forever and when you come out of it
there are just revelations that you have which seems so obvious in hindsight but looking forward
prior to they were they were hard to find and you you don't have to use psychedelics you can use
exercise and you can use cold plunge and you can use meditation and you can use all kinds of things
to reach this, but in ritualistic life, you can do all these things, but to reveal to yourself
something that has always been in front of you, I think is so much more
glorifying than to discover something that you didn't know. It's like you're coming home.
There's a familiarity to it. I'm riffing now because I'm just enamored with the idea that I had the last couple days experiencing this, like walking through the prairie by myself, extracted from the world, absent of my phone, absent of worry and care, and living among the world in a way that was
so natural growing up, um, before the institution of the ability to be constantly connected and
constantly, um, bothered, I guess. Yeah. I've kind of, I've, I've rolled this. I've, I'm kind of,
I feel like I need to be off that topic now, but it's just, yeah, it's so impactful to think that
way. That podcast that you shared with Alex Fetsky discussing, you know, like, I'm not a
Bitcoiner. I've realized that I'm not a Bitcoiner. I am a person of virtue and virtue is a verb. And
the people that I've surrounded myself with as a result of pursuing these verbs of virtue are my
people, even though they are not Bitcoiners. So what does that say about me? And what does that
say about them. It says that we are, you know, we are what we repeatedly do. We are the virtues
that we pursue. And we can align with those people in a way that does not mean that we have to be
ideologically aligned. As previously, we may have thought like you need to go be amongst your
people. The network state idea of biology kind of promotes this idea of like, oh,
the plumbers are going to have their own, um, their own state or the,
or maybe it's just going to be the anarchists. And, you know, it's, it's an,
it's like an ideological, um, ideological, uh,
aligning of people to form societies.
And I do believe that that is very much true,
but I think that we need to remember that
ideology is,
only useful when it is grounded in virtue um that you believe not not that you believe in the same
things but that you act in the same things that you act in the same direction that's what creates
um that's what creates something sustaining yeah now that's the chapter six is the
key takeaways. I think we took away a lot from software. I think we could have,
as this conversation shows, you can traipse through the concepts in software
many different times. And each time you're going to draw a different constellation from the points
that you touch upon. And you, I mean, the points that are touched upon are grounded out in some of
the most meaningful and important things in our lives.
So I think that all of those sentiments that you expressed
are very to the point insofar as software is about
how to ground ourselves back, even in cyberspace,
and what is real.
And it's a great book, and it has very powerful concepts
that can help a person think through their own life
and think through what is meaningful as one does piece together the thesis that Lowry has expressed.
So, yeah.
The expression of virtue through action delivered by power, I think, is a wonderful takeaway.
Cool. Well, let's take ourselves away to other places, away from screens and whatnot.
Let's wrap it up.
Fantastic.
In case we do put this up, everybody, my name is Lucas Matty.
That's Grant Reichert.
I'm at Lucas Matty on X.
He is at the whole frame.
We really appreciate you guys taking time to delve into something and removing yourself
from the world of instant gratification and constant perturbance in order to think deeply
on a subject that could have some benefit to you.
So thanks for joining us and we'll talk to you again.