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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.

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is we're doing a prep session for a talk with somebody else on software,

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which for us just means we're revisiting.

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We've talked about software, Jason Lowry's thesis,

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in depth in the past, chapter by chapter,

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going to the minutiae of each section and whatnot.

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And so now we just kind of want to revisit that

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and I think renew in our own minds,

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refresh our minds, I guess, on what the book is about

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and what we are engagement with it or something like that.

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And so, I mean, what I would do in our regular sessions is begin each conversation we had

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with a summary of what we're going to talk about, which is like a chapter,

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and then the run up to that chapter, which would just now, I guess,

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mean like summarizing the whole book.

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I don't want to do that.

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What I'll do is something different.

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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?

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And there's different ways of reading.

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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.

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Other times it's like paragraph by paragraph.

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It's like I got to put that paragraph in my own words or I get nothing.

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but like here instead of looking and like going through my own outline i mean we have an outline

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like jason lowry has a table of contents we have i bought this book by the way i got this online

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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

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more of them or something but it goes down from like a thousand dollars to like forty dollars and

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So I saw it at $40.

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I got it.

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And I think it does say like a print date of November something.

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So I think I got this.

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Like there's new printings happening for whatever reason.

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Yeah.

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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.

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But so let's look at the table of contents.

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maybe I'll start going through the chapters and the subjects,

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the subsections, unless it seems really laborious.

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And then I'll just like, like ejection,

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I'll pull a strap and we'll just get out of that mode of thinking.

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The introduction is inspiration, justification, background,

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objective and thesis structure.

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I don't know that I, I mean, the inspiration I think was

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was Jason's thought that, like his own engagement with Bitcoin

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and the thought that we don't, there is a bias,

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an analytical bias we have towards reality to not want to see

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specifically emerging technologies in a light different than

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what we've initially prejudged them to be, Bitcoin as money.

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or the analogy he gives like gunpowder as medicine,

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the Chinese conceiving of gunpowder as medicine,

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not seeing its potential as a warfighting technology.

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And so I think that the inspiration for him,

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without looking at my notes,

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I think it was just that,

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that Bitcoin is being misunderstood

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as a much smaller phenomena than it is

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because we typically look to economists,

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financial theorists,

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very constrained, not in a bad way, but people have a specialization relating to the field of

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money to tell us what Bitcoin is and its implications, instead of like Lowry, somebody

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who has a military background, from a military theory point of view, what it is.

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And so his objective, there's actually some executive orders that he cites there, I recall,

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from the Biden administration wanting to explore digital assets. And so he kind of duly mentions

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those as like his objective but i think his objective more so is to rattle our brains rattle

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the cages around our brains so that we see that bitcoin we're willing to engage with bitcoin in a

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way that is much more ample right than austrian economics and instead we're going to bring our

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own life experiences to it and i mean that brings us to the methodology right um that we this is a

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grounded theory methodology like methodology i got the book um one of the books that jason

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sites um like the basics of qualitative research um which goes into detail on how to do grounded

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theory and um what would you say um grounded theory and not analysis but how to use grounded

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theory as your methodology methodology being defined in that book as like a way to view social

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reality. And so the grounded theory, the thought is here, you're going to generate a new theoretical

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framework by not just like waiting, jumping into a new subject matter saying, I'm an Austrian

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economics, we're going to look at this from the framework of Austrian economics. Instead, you say,

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here's a bunch of interesting facts about the world. Here's a bunch of interesting facts in

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the world, right? And I have my own perspective that I bring to any situation. I'm a whole human

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being. I have a background, Jason might say to himself, in military theory, in engineering,

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and in his own personal life as the heir to a cattle farm. All of that he's going to bring to

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this world of facts about Bitcoin and begin to sort them out, put them into piles. These facts

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are kind of similar for this reason. These facts are kind of similar to this reason.

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And then he's going to go do a bunch of reading and say, okay, I've thought that these facts were

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similar because they relate to how we use power or whatever. So he does a bunch of reading about

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evolution, does a bunch of reading about biology and all these different areas. And that helps him

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to refine the piles that he's placed the facts into. And that's kind of the grounded theory

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methodology, I think in a nutshell, is data analysis without preconception. And then as you

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analyze that data, you create concepts and categories, making it more and more abstract,

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but giving it explanatory value into new situations until you reach a point of theoretical saturation

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where new facts are not really enriching your framework. So you then generate a theory from

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that you have Bitcoin as a novel form of power projection in cyberspace. So I'll just pause there.

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That's like the introduction through the methodology, I think. And there's, of course,

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I don't have my outline in front of me. So I've admitted a large portion of what he talks about.

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But is that your kind of your recollection, Lucas, about what we talked about in the introduction

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of the methodology? Yeah, it's a, that's a good way to say it. I, as you're talking,

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I'm thinking about. So for people that are listening to this, if we do release it,

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we started recording after talking for like an hour on entirely different subjects on

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kind of the reason why we started doing this in the first place, which was

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to encourage people to look into deep ideas and consider a more in-depth approach and

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get away from the Bitcoiner-centric idea of Bitcoin fixes everything, number go up,

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win Moon, win Lambo, all that stuff. And I want to kind of draw that into what the grounded theory

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methodology is, which as you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking about where do we all

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inevitably end up settling in terms of our preferences. And there's this so, you know,

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during the formative years, there's such a strong anchoring bias to the music that you listened to

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when you were 16 and 17 and 18 and the cars that you idolized when you were growing up and the

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the wardrobe that you had and even your conceptions of like beauty you'll

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you know you think about like what's the most beautiful if you're if you're a guy

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or a guy inclined to think that women are beautiful which is to like what's the most

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beautiful woman you've ever seen and it's probably someone that you were like 15 or 16 or 20 or

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something that you watched. And there's, there's this anchoring bias that we have and you see it

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in everybody. Cause you know, like I'll talk to my dad about what he really loved and it's the,

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the cars of the sixties and the early seventies. And it's the, cause that's when he was driving

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and it's the airplanes of world war two, because that's what he learned about and put models

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together. And the danger of all that is that we do get stuck in the past and that we fail to look

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at things right in front of us for not necessarily what they are, but what they do. And that's the

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first principles way of thinking. It's not, it's not what is this thing? It's what does this thing

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do. And then I can compare it to other things that do this same thing. Like a barrel is no different

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than a bowl. Like a bowl and a cup and a barrel and a dump truck are all essentially the same

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thing. They're just receptacles that hold something and they're shaped in different ways

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and their different quantities and there's some different qualities,

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but from a fundamental perspective, what they do, they can be compared.

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And so using that grounded theory methodology,

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we're able to break ourselves free of this allure and enticement of Bitcoin

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as magic internet money, as, oh, the fiat system's evil and the Federal Reserve is evil

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and everything that comes with part and parcel of going through the cycle of going from

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this is a scam to this is the greatest thing that's ever happened and everything in between.

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all the shit coins and all the rage at authority and all the, oh, now I have a low time preference

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and I'm going to be healthy and I'm going to eat carnivore and I'm going to raise up my fellow

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Bitcoiners. And it gives us an opportunity, this grounded theory methodology to just really do what

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you and I had wanted to do when we started this, which was think deeply about an idea.

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And it doesn't have to be Bitcoin. It doesn't have to be anything in particular, but just to

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think really deeply about an idea and what it means in terms of what it does. One of the things

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that we were talking about before I hit record was we're talking about virtue and how virtue

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is defined, Alex Fetzky defines it in his book or in his podcast that I listened to that you sent

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as a verb, as an action. And so we talked about like, it doesn't matter what Bitcoin,

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the number does, the buying power, how it frees you economically from repression, blah, blah,

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blah. It doesn't matter. All of those things. It's what are the virtues that it engenders?

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And the grounded theory methodology that Lowry has used to approach this subject with

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has really enlightened me in a lot of ways in terms of asking the right questions, because

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we had talked in our previous chats about this. We had talked about how the hypothesis method

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of doing research, which is I'm going to pose a question and then I'm going to answer it.

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There's an inherent danger in that. And that danger is that you might just be asking the

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wrong question and you won't know it. You won't have any idea because you'll still get an answer.

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you know I had given the I had given the example before when we talked about like

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OxyContin it's like if the question is does this make me feel better when I'm in pain then the

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answer is undeniably yes but that fails to that fails to answer anything that really matters in

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terms of is this something virtuous is this an action that I should pursue is this something

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that I need to be moving my life toward. So I just, overall, the grounded theory methodology,

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it meant so much to me having been slightly involved in research before to be able to consider

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and pull the wool off of my eyes to view research as something that can be done

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in an entirely different way with an open book and a blank easel and a blank or not a blank,

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a blank canvas and an open mind and foraging into the wild of unknown thoughts in a way that is

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almost dangerous and scary because you're not asking questions. You're just digging.

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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.

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And to be able to draw those conclusions and view them as undeniably related.

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after we got done with the book the first time I had a couple questions that I kept digging into

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but after that I came away with this idea that from now on this is not an idea that

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I need to be convinced of it's an idea that if it that someone needs to convince me is not like

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this is now my default assumption that is that not Bitcoin, the monetary instrument,

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but Bitcoin, the network, which are two separate things. But Bitcoin, the network is a force of

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power projection that has been under explored. And we do need to look deeper into

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The idea that we need to protect the most valuable parts of us and the most valuable parts of us are the information.

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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.

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That's their value.

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So before you go too far, I want to go back to something.

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I did go too far.

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No, no, no.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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All of the technical analysis of Bitcoin that you see will never get you qualitatively to what Bitcoin is as a social phenomena.

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Maybe it'll enrich your ability to talk about the ramifications it might have, but it means something to you.

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This is a qualitative analysis.

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There's a lot of directions that I wanted to go in from there.

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even just like going further in Lowry's thesis that, you know, it means something to you. And

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what is meaningful to us is often the result of our subscription to an abstract power-based

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hierarchy or like a bigger worldview that we have that assigns value to the things that we see,

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that we come to the world already laden with concepts that we use to see the world and make

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it mean to us. And the grounded theory methodology is actually encouraging us to, as much as we can,

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step back away from the hierarchies of abstractly defined concepts that we're already a part of

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and try to... You're never going to see the world without the concepts that you already have, but

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as much as you can, try to re-describe the world to yourself. In description, you're always moving

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towards new concepts. And so if you can try to talk to yourself and tell yourself what is something

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like Bitcoin by considering all the facts about what it is, putting them in different piles and

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describing how those different piles are meaningful to you, you're going to arrive at new concepts.

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And I think to move in then to chapter three, power projection tactics in nature,

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power projection is really like maybe the non-Bitcoin related thesis of this thesis.

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Like in considering and thinking about how Bitcoin might be a novel form of cyber warfare,

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Lowry has this much bigger conception.

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Well, where does warfare come from?

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Well, it comes from, it's a form of primordial economics.

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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.

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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.

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that is a form of like something analogical to what animals do when they seize resources and

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what humans do when they protect resources it's power projection like that's the thesis of the

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thesis beyond bitcoin is that power projection is a resource control protocol that has been used

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primordially and that is still being used in order to allow us to determine who gets what.

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We start with that inorganic walling off of resources by a membrane that uses the power

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projection tool of that pressurized membrane, a sort of wall to separate the resource collected

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from the entropic world outside of it. If you move on to animals who, you know, predator and

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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

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some other animal that would want to take that meat. It projects power. And in humans, then,

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we engage in similar forms of warfare. We project power to assert our ownership of a specific

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resource. And so just to move on, I see that that's the power projection aspect of this thesis.

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Do you think that that is a correct summation of that?

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Yeah, power projection is obviously the main point that Lowry is trying to tie everything

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to that it's not only natural from a biological sense and a completely unconscious way of doing

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things but from a from a cognitively sound approach as well that power projection is

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humanistic and

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I'm failing on the word that I'm looking for, but it's, it's ethical. I think it is,

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might even be the word that I'm thinking of. What it makes me think of is the last couple of days,

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I've been, I've been doing a little bird hunting, um, pheasants. And I was walking yesterday,

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carrying a shotgun and thinking about how I just read this autobiography of Red Cloud.

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And in it, he describes like some hunting expeditions and some, a lot of, a lot of battles

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where I can see why people who were unaccustomed to that experience, I can see why white people

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that had come into that land and started to observe the way that Native Americans, Indians,

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I'm going to say Indians because Native Americans is, I think you're native to the place that

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you're born. And so I would feel that I'm a Native American as well. And I kind of push back on that

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political correct thing because everybody's an immigrant. Nobody's forefathers actually came

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from this country. But thinking about how savage, like I can see why people use that word because

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he talks about like the battles that they fought and just very nonchalantly discussing how

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they projected power upon each other. There was this one instance where they capture a herder,

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the guy that's watching the horses. Basically, apparently, you can sum up all of that time frame

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into this tribe gets together a bunch of dudes and they go out and they steal a bunch of horses

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from this tribe. And if in the course of stealing horses, there's an opportunity to kill a bunch of

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those guys, so be it, like all the better. But there's this one where they capture the scout

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and they tell him in sign language, hey, we're not going to kill you. And he's like, oh yeah,

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thank God. Like this never happens. Like everybody dies. They always die. But instead what they do

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is they hold him down and they scalp him while he's alive. And they tell him to go back and send

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a message that this is what we do because you are not worth killing. And that's its own method of

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power projection. That's its way of making a statement that resonates without destroying

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something. And I was thinking about that as I'm carrying the shotgun through this draw,

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thinking about how power projection has escalated from a rock to a bow to now I've got this cannon

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on my arm that I can lift up and point and obliterate anything in front of me. And

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it's, it's ethical. You know, I think about, I, you know, I'm, I'm walking through this draw and

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in my mind, I'm, I'm picturing like, oh, if I had moccasins, I'd be quieter. And if I had a recurve

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bow, then I would be more in tune with the world. And I would be stocking up on a deer and I would

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get to within five yards of it and I would draw back and I would hit it with this arrow. And in

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my mind, I was like, and then it would suffer. And I know it would suffer because I've seen it happen.

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And the converse of that is I've got a 270 caliber or a 308 and I'm sitting and I'm zoned in

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And I've got the crosshairs on the kill zone.

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And when I pull the trigger, the thing is dead before it hits the ground.

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And there's part of that that feels horrible because you're like, I just wiped out a life that existed on this earth.

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But then there's the acknowledgement that you do have to go through if you eat meat at all.

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I feel like even if you eat vegetables, you need to acknowledge this, but that it's more humane.

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And this is going in a different topic.

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Can I –

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Yeah, yeah, double tap.

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That squeamishness is an important part of Lowry's thesis.

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The squeamishness that we feel at killing is a really important thing.

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So just take a step back.

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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.

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But as a pack, then, you need a way to internally determine feeding and breeding rights.

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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.

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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.

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wolves when they have another wolf pinned down they don't tear out the jugular they've asserted

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power enough deer and this is of course a very important metaphor for lowry develop these

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intricate antler structures to allow them to project power within the pack without killing

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a member of the pack and so humans we evolve this inbuilt squeamishness we don't want to

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we maybe want to grapple and subdue a person within the pack show them who is the most powerful

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and like be able to determine who should be the leader, who should have first feeding and breeding

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rights or whatever. But we don't want to kill. And in the book, Lowry cites like the Battle of

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Gettysburg, there were rifles that were packed with like six or seven rounds, people didn't want

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to fire at their fellow man, that it's actually difficult to train out of people, their desire

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not to kill other people. So there's that squeamishness that's evolved within us. And we

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also have another evolved capacity, which is theory of mind. So we begin to be able to sense

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the suffering of, like you said, that bird that you're going to shoot, like it's going to suffer

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more if I impel it with an arrow than if I shoot it with a gun or something like that. And so we

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have a theory of mind, like what's the bird thinking about what I'm doing to it? What's

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the bird thinking about how, as it's dying? And so that leads us to be even more squeamish towards

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violence. This double squeamishness towards violence that we have evolved within us and

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result of our theory of mind extrapolating what other animals feel leads us to develop abstract

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power-based hierarchies, which are ways to allocate feeding and breeding rights within the pack

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that are not based on the projection of physical power, but rather the allocation of rank-based

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abstract power. Ah, you're a member of the priestly cast. You get these resources. Ah,

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you are a knight, whereas you are a serf. You get this versus this. And those ranks then are just

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based upon this grand story that has been told about what value, what the society consists of,

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its worldview, and its kind of founding story. So just, I thought that your squeamishness that

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you noted there, directly leads us into abstract power-based hierarchies and away from the

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projection of physical power to determine resource allocation, which Lowry thinks leads

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us into some traps because abstract power-based hierarchies, they can be dysfunctional.

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They can lead to oppressive god kings that determine who gets the resources and who doesn't.

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and they can also make societies weak because people tend to self-domesticate become complacent

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and therefore the mongols ride in off the step with no preconceived notion of what is good or

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bad within that abstract power-based hierarchy and instead devour or invade that society as a whole

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yeah the the acknowledgement of the theory of mind the lowry talks about this and it gave me

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such a insight into the mind and the heart of a warrior and so much empathy for especially

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like soldiers who suffer from ptsd when he discusses like what is the thing that makes

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a warrior great and a hunter great it's the ability to put yourself in the place of the

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thing that you're killing and if you can put yourself into the place of the thing that you're

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killing then naturally you're also going to feel that fear and you're going to feel the

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terror that that thing feels as it's being hunted because that's valuable information to you

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to use in hunting and, and in being a efficient warrior. And so it gives me, it's, it gives me so

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much empathy for, he talks about, you know, like the, the people that are most suited for

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being great hunters that are the best at killing things that are the best at projecting power.

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they're also the ones that feel the most they genuinely feel in a way that I think we as society

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have not given them credit for which is to always just say oh you're like a cold-blooded killer

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you're cold-hearted you've got eyes of eyes of you know a heart of stone and eyes of steel or

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whatever and ice water through your veins and it's like no like it's in it's entirely the

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opposite of that. It is in fact, the most empathetic, humane thing. And you're feeling

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every bit of it. And when you, when you hunt deer, like it's a very common thing. People talk about

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getting buck fever when you get a buck in the sights of the rifle and you're perfectly fine.

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And then all of a sudden it's like your body starts to tremble and you're, you don't want to

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pull the trigger, you see this beautiful creature and, and it's so hard to actually follow through.

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And when you do follow through, there's like instant regret, even though there's joy and,

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or maybe not necessarily joy, but like the feeling of accomplishment. And I think what that has

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enabled us to do, which may sound counterintuitive, but as Lowry mentioned to us,

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like Bitcoin is paradox upon paradox. Like everything about it is counterintuitive.

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You know, the harder you fight it, the stronger it gets. The more people that have it,

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the more each person has. It's a creative, it's not extractive, but it makes me think about how

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humanistic and ethical it is to have that view of being, of the theory of mind, of suffering along

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with the thing that you're suffering. And what does that do is it leads us to develop power

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projection tactics that are overwhelming and overwhelming in the sense that

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as horrific as it sounds, the people that died from a nuclear blast

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died a much more peaceful death than people that were hit with stones and stabbed with swords.

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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.

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It made me think of one time I was at a conference and I heard a research presentation by a veterinarian.

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And the research topic was what is the most humane way to put down a cow that is suffering?

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Like what they call downer cows when they basically like pinch a nerve and they can't get back up.

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and you have to kill them. Otherwise they're just going to suffer laying on the ground and

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eventually starve to death and die. And so he's like, yeah, you can imagine how,

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how people were pretty enthusiastic about joining my research. You know, they, they thought it was

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pretty entertaining and it's like, oh, do you use a 22 caliber in the back of the skull? Do you use

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a 45? Do you use this or that? And he's like, big surprise. It turns out that a 12 gauge

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slug, which is like this big, is the most humane and efficient way. It's like 100% of the time,

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when you put that to a cow's head and you pull the trigger, it blows a giant hole through their

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brain and they die instantly. It's like a 45 caliber, which is a big weapon. They'll bounce

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off the skull and it'll suffer and it'll be in worse pain. And so what I gathered from that

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is that overwhelming force is ethical.

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Overwhelming force is humane.

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And solely for the reason that it discourages challenge.

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It discourages you to challenge

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and it encourages you to be collaborative and cooperative

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and work with whatever that power structure is.

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So that was kind of my take on it.

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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.

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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.

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so that scaling of kinetic warfare to the point where it becomes inusable we really can't we can't

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have a nuclear conflict or else we would eradicate humankind um leads us to a kinetic stalemate what

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so you know i mean some of the benefits of a semen kinetic stalemate is it seems peaceful

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right even though on the other side of that thin line of peace lies um human extermination right

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annihilation what it a negative aspect of a kinetic stalemate is and this lowry spends a

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lot of time elaborating on this is that war fighting does have emergent benefits so

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like the fighting of wars physical power projection

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is necessary to discipline and break up abstract power-based hierarchies so once an abstract power

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based hierarchy, such as a government becomes oppressive, like if a monarchy institutes an

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oppressive tax on tea and other imported goods to a new colony, that colony then has the ability to

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say, you know, they can argue within that abstract power based hierarchy, hey, don't do that to us.

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But if it's still done, the only other option is revolution. So abstract power based hierarchies

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tend to become oppressive over time because people, a ruling class,

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wants to allocate more resources to them and their friends and family in their own class.

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The only way to break that up, though, then is not to argue within that abstract power-based hierarchy,

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but to use the neutral, permissionless, egalitarian form of power projection that is watts,

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that is energy over a unit of time, joules per second, to move mass, matter,

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in kinetic warfare. That's what happens in the Revolutionary War. That's what happens in all war.

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So war, the emergent benefits of warfighting is it enables us to deal with abstract power-based

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hierarchies. We see the world as it exists now is not one god-king ruling over the entire globe.

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It's rather nation-states that have been forged in bloodshed due to, you know, past abstract

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power-based hierarchies being perceived as oppressive or inadequate to the demands of the

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populace. And so we get the world that we're in now where property has been, in some sense,

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at least decentralized enough where there's not a single god king controlling everything. So

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emergent benefits of warfighting, it enables us to get rid of abstract power-based hierarchies

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that are oppressive, and also to invade and destroy those that become too weak and domesticated.

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invasion is now off the table with kinetic stalemate um but that just means that the other

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problem is still on the table of an abstract power-based hierarchy becoming too oppressive

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and this kind of moves us into the next part of the book where of the newest abstract power-based

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hierarchies in this day and age are those based in software which are these transnational or are

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these emissions of transnational entities, things like Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, whatever

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software platform that has control over our digital resources, and operates on the abstract

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power based hierarchy, which are those encoded forms of logic within the software that delineate

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control of digital resources. So that gets so that moves us like the kinetic stalemate that we have

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today due to nuclear arms and increasingly probably due to drone-based warfare and AI

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moves us into this new realm where we have the risk of abstract power-based hierarchies,

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all of their dysfunctions, but we don't seem to have a physical power projection-based tactic

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that won't lead to our own extermination. So the question is then, what do we do now

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in order to discipline, break up abstract power-based hierarchies, such as large

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software-based platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.

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Yeah, these are competing ideologies. And war seems to be, yes, a competition over resources,

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but also a competition between ideologies to determine which one is the king, which one has the

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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

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Bitcoin reserve of a nation state adopting Bitcoin, because I had really gone down the

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path of not necessarily anarchist, but I just have seen, you see all the examples of the

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oppressive things that a nation state can do and you live those things. And it, it makes you feel

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as though you don't want them to hold this thing that I recognize to be so powerful because I'm,

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I'm genuinely afraid that they'll use it for evil and use it for bad.

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And he framed it in such a good way by saying, it's like, you know,

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it's going to be this ideology or it's going to be the other one,

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like a socialist ideology, a communist ideology,

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which we know even in the best of instances are horrific in what happens when

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they are initiated and lived out in a society. And so we're always going to have an ideology.

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That's something that we have to accept. We're always going to have a hierarchy. That's something

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that we have to accept. And we can accept it sad, or we can accept it enthusiastically and be

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open to the idea that the ideology that is based upon principles of power projection,

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which is what meritocracy is, it's based upon principles of rewarding those that are

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most able and efficient and good at projecting mental power, physical power, and

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in a focal direction to bring about a desired result, that is the ideology that I want to have

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that thing. And I'm okay with that now. And I'm very accepting and encouraging of that idea.

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And in fact, enthusiastically in support of that idea now that I want to see that happen. I want to

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see, I want to see that become the overwhelming force that is able to discourage any sort of

395
00:45:11,169 --> 00:45:21,329
attack or make the cost of attack so great that cooperating and working in alignment

396
00:45:21,329 --> 00:45:28,849
is more rewarding. And that's, again, that takes us back to Bitcoin as the network and understanding

397
00:45:28,849 --> 00:45:40,229
how the miners defend the network and understanding that the idea of trying to attack it

398
00:45:40,229 --> 00:45:46,229
makes it stronger and it grows the power that is there to support it.

399
00:45:46,229 --> 00:45:55,709
you could maybe overwhelm the network for a couple minutes or a couple hours, but in doing so,

400
00:45:55,709 --> 00:46:04,329
you would have spent your nation's entire resources for a decade secretly building up

401
00:46:04,329 --> 00:46:10,249
this network of miners that you couldn't gradually put online. You would have to

402
00:46:10,249 --> 00:46:18,189
all of a sudden bring them to bear and try and overwhelm the network. And the problem is

403
00:46:18,189 --> 00:46:24,050
it wouldn't work because as soon as the other miners realized what was happening,

404
00:46:24,050 --> 00:46:28,050
they would just fork it and take it to a different direction. And you would be sitting

405
00:46:28,050 --> 00:46:36,429
there out on an island having wasted everything when the cooperative method of simply

406
00:46:36,429 --> 00:46:43,929
joining with and working in harmony would have brought you great wealth and would have

407
00:46:43,929 --> 00:46:50,849
made you part of something that's growing. It's such a beautiful thing to think about.

408
00:46:50,849 --> 00:47:02,129
And it gives you pause to consider that there could be something that is both a competition

409
00:47:02,129 --> 00:47:16,629
and a weeding out of weaker, that is also a coalition and a building up of communal strengths.

410
00:47:17,389 --> 00:47:22,589
Yeah. I think where you started that and where you went exactly tracks the thesis in that. So we have,

411
00:47:22,749 --> 00:47:27,450
even nowadays, abstract power-based hierarchies in the form of competing ideologies.

412
00:47:28,209 --> 00:47:33,970
The fact that they're competing, though, is a relic of warfare that has decentralized god kings.

413
00:47:33,970 --> 00:47:43,869
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.

414
00:47:43,990 --> 00:47:54,909
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.

415
00:47:54,909 --> 00:48:11,830
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.

416
00:48:11,830 --> 00:48:16,970
And so they then have to kind of be more honest with respect to each other because they have to compete with each other.

417
00:48:18,530 --> 00:48:39,069
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.

418
00:48:39,069 --> 00:48:47,769
what that's where the the lowry comes along and says bitcoin provides a way for us to continue to

419
00:48:47,769 --> 00:48:54,330
have warfare in cyberspace and to to therefore reap all of the emergent benefits of warfare

420
00:48:54,330 --> 00:49:00,790
even though even though we've reached that kinetic stalemate of like mutually assured destruction

421
00:49:00,790 --> 00:49:07,429
we can still continue to burn watts to project power in cyberspace through the proof of work

422
00:49:07,429 --> 00:49:16,810
aspect of the Bitcoin protocol in which real world energy is used to constrain digital,

423
00:49:17,510 --> 00:49:23,649
like digital information to determine what can be done with it, who owns it, etc.

424
00:49:24,209 --> 00:49:29,349
That is a form, Lowry says, in mutually insured preservations, because as you know,

425
00:49:29,349 --> 00:49:48,970
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.

426
00:49:48,970 --> 00:50:17,869
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.

427
00:50:17,869 --> 00:50:22,709
and instead uses non-kinetic physical power-based competitions

428
00:50:22,709 --> 00:50:26,569
in the form of burning energy to do hash functions

429
00:50:26,569 --> 00:50:29,709
and therefore secure digital resources.

430
00:50:29,950 --> 00:50:35,069
So we still have a physical power-based hierarchy

431
00:50:35,069 --> 00:50:38,970
and physical power projection is still possible in cyberspace

432
00:50:38,970 --> 00:50:43,530
to secure resources and to allocate them,

433
00:50:43,990 --> 00:50:46,249
but it's done in a way, again,

434
00:50:46,249 --> 00:50:51,749
that doesn't lead to harm and death, and in fact has all of these new emergent benefits

435
00:50:51,749 --> 00:50:58,649
of encouraging nations to build out their power grid, to use stranded energy, and to possibly,

436
00:50:59,330 --> 00:51:05,169
as all warfighting does, lead to new innovations as new technologies are discovered. As we continue

437
00:51:05,169 --> 00:51:10,970
to compete, we continue to make our computers better, our power grids better, to form better

438
00:51:10,970 --> 00:51:16,729
alliances and things like that. So I think that brings us to the overarching thesis of the book

439
00:51:16,729 --> 00:51:22,950
that software is a novel form of warfare based on physical power projection in the cyberspace

440
00:51:22,950 --> 00:51:30,369
through the proof of work aspect of the Bitcoin protocol, indicating that Bitcoin is not only

441
00:51:30,369 --> 00:51:36,069
money, not only a way to secure financial resources, but a way to secure all digital

442
00:51:36,069 --> 00:51:42,490
assets and to allow the game to continue to go on, that game that is warfare amongst humans,

443
00:51:42,609 --> 00:51:44,810
but in a way that doesn't leave bodies on the ground.

444
00:51:45,810 --> 00:51:51,349
Yeah. I think you can think about software as something that's been going on for quite a while

445
00:51:51,349 --> 00:52:00,010
now in a bit of a rudimentary form. And the only difference is that it wasn't proof of work,

446
00:52:00,010 --> 00:52:12,149
is that digital economies and digital marketplaces are definitionally winner-take-all.

447
00:52:12,409 --> 00:52:21,429
Because if you do the best thing digitally, there are no borders, there are no obstacles of entry

448
00:52:21,429 --> 00:52:32,869
for someone in Azerbaijan or Canada or in a submarine in the Mariana Trench or on the

449
00:52:32,869 --> 00:52:39,030
International Space Station, there's no barriers to entry for people to join that.

450
00:52:39,689 --> 00:52:48,269
And so you create this natural winner-take-all system where you have monopolistic winners,

451
00:52:48,269 --> 00:52:57,769
Amazon, Facebook, X, you know, these in their own specific realm.

452
00:52:58,049 --> 00:53:06,729
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.

453
00:53:06,929 --> 00:53:13,269
And I literally thought about that sandwich for two decades.

454
00:53:13,530 --> 00:53:15,269
Like it was so incredible.

455
00:53:15,269 --> 00:53:36,649
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.

456
00:53:36,649 --> 00:53:52,769
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.

457
00:53:52,769 --> 00:54:03,450
And there was reward initially just on attention and later kind of in a quantitative way in like likes or views.

458
00:54:03,450 --> 00:54:20,470
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.

459
00:54:20,470 --> 00:54:30,470
there is that hierarchy that defines itself. But the problem is it's proof of stake. And the stake

460
00:54:30,470 --> 00:54:36,649
is just where you stand. Like the problem with Ethereum and all the other proof of stake protocols

461
00:54:36,649 --> 00:54:43,669
is that all you have to do is form an alliance and you can change things to benefit you. And that's

462
00:54:43,669 --> 00:54:49,549
not how you want systems to work. Because if you can change things to benefit you,

463
00:54:49,689 --> 00:54:54,589
that means that you can change things to disbenefit other people. And that means that

464
00:54:54,589 --> 00:55:03,349
other people can change things to disbenefit you and take away. It was that woke argument,

465
00:55:04,010 --> 00:55:09,310
the argument against the woke thing that people kept screaming from the rooftops, which is like,

466
00:55:09,310 --> 00:55:16,830
hey, it's great that you can just obliterate someone from existence of the internet by

467
00:55:16,830 --> 00:55:21,429
canceling them and destroying them. That's wonderful that you can do that. However,

468
00:55:22,269 --> 00:55:27,030
somebody else is going to have that power eventually, and they're going to turn it on you.

469
00:55:27,030 --> 00:55:34,030
You need to be able to see that, that you can't hold this power forever because stake is such a

470
00:55:34,030 --> 00:55:42,310
fleeting thing because the desires and the wants of the populace are, they're moving and they're

471
00:55:42,310 --> 00:55:53,349
ever adjusting. And so we've had that for a long time. And I think it has proven to not be beneficial

472
00:55:53,349 --> 00:56:00,049
to us. You and I were talking before we hit record about the experiences that we've both had in the

473
00:56:00,049 --> 00:56:09,010
last couple of days, being removed from social media, being removed from screens, being in touch

474
00:56:09,010 --> 00:56:18,709
with nature in a way that feels spiritual and indulgent and maybe foreign and almost even guilty,

475
00:56:19,269 --> 00:56:28,450
but that we are discussing as what is probably far more natural. It's that we have moved into

476
00:56:28,450 --> 00:56:35,589
a realm of existence that is so unnatural that the natural now feels unnatural, that

477
00:56:35,589 --> 00:56:38,490
it feels indulgent, that it feels panicked.

478
00:56:38,490 --> 00:56:46,849
And this is why we have an anxiety epidemic of people that are constantly moving towards

479
00:56:46,849 --> 00:56:54,950
productivity and efficiency and constantly doing something that if you zoom back out,

480
00:56:55,049 --> 00:56:57,950
it might not need to be done.

481
00:56:57,950 --> 00:57:16,990
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.

482
00:57:16,990 --> 00:57:24,990
He's like the problem that most people have as engineers is that they try to optimize something that shouldn't exist.

483
00:57:24,990 --> 00:57:32,450
and God, like look around and think about all the over optimization of things that

484
00:57:32,450 --> 00:57:39,149
we have all these products. We have all these things that they are possibly handy,

485
00:57:39,149 --> 00:57:46,349
but it goes back to that grounded theory methodology of just because we can do something

486
00:57:46,349 --> 00:57:54,490
doesn't necessarily mean that we should because there are knock on effects that second and third

487
00:57:54,490 --> 00:58:01,209
order effects that we don't think about. I was, uh, it was in my mom's bathroom yesterday and I

488
00:58:01,209 --> 00:58:07,830
saw that there's like saline solution. And I just remember thinking, I was like, saline solution is

489
00:58:07,830 --> 00:58:17,769
salt in water. That's it. Like that's all it is. And we now have an industry that is based upon

490
00:58:17,769 --> 00:58:25,929
people selling two things that are incredibly abundant and always available and insanely cheap.

491
00:58:26,749 --> 00:58:36,349
And we pay money for this and we use storage space to keep this around when we could very simply

492
00:58:36,349 --> 00:58:44,269
on need, as needed basis, put a little salt in water when we need a saline solution and create

493
00:58:44,269 --> 00:58:50,229
our own and not have the waste of the bottle, not have the loss of the storage space, not

494
00:58:50,229 --> 00:59:00,609
have the wasted cognitive effort of knowing where that is and just simply remove all of

495
00:59:00,609 --> 00:59:01,010
this stuff.

496
00:59:01,010 --> 00:59:04,769
We have optimized something that didn't need to exist.

497
00:59:05,149 --> 00:59:07,749
And so I know that was, again, roundabout.

498
00:59:07,749 --> 00:59:32,609
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.

499
00:59:32,609 --> 00:59:35,490
That's what abstracted power hierarchies are.

500
00:59:35,649 --> 00:59:36,569
It's proof of stake.

501
00:59:36,569 --> 00:59:42,490
Like where can where can we get the most people or the sorry, the most powerful people?

502
00:59:42,689 --> 00:59:50,990
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?

503
00:59:52,009 --> 01:00:03,810
Oftentimes at the loss of our own morality, our own ethic, our own soul, our own natural tendency of living in harmony with things.

504
01:00:03,810 --> 01:00:08,990
when it's just at the benefit of being with the powerful.

505
01:00:09,889 --> 01:00:17,209
And yeah, it's overcoming something that I think has been so damaging to society.

506
01:00:17,589 --> 01:00:19,810
There's good things about social media.

507
01:00:20,009 --> 01:00:20,729
There truly are.

508
01:00:20,729 --> 01:00:25,229
But I don't think that on the whole, I don't think that 20 years from now,

509
01:00:25,330 --> 01:00:30,290
we look back and we think about people posting duck face selfies

510
01:00:30,290 --> 01:00:37,569
and taking pictures of their food and poking each other and hearting things and liking things

511
01:00:37,569 --> 01:00:42,310
and asking whether or not these are the heated mittens that you guys use,

512
01:00:42,350 --> 01:00:43,870
because I'm not sure what I should get.

513
01:00:43,870 --> 01:00:47,729
I don't think we're going to look back at that as a creative to society

514
01:00:47,729 --> 01:00:51,810
and growing the human condition in a soulful way.

515
01:00:52,409 --> 01:00:57,629
I think we'll look back on it in a way that you look back on a hallucination that you've exited

516
01:00:57,629 --> 01:00:58,950
as something that was not real.

517
01:00:58,950 --> 01:01:15,470
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.

518
01:01:15,470 --> 01:01:30,189
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.

519
01:01:30,189 --> 01:01:42,669
although in its guise attempting to convince us that it is real it is a veil through which beyond

520
01:01:42,669 --> 01:01:50,749
which an engineer is collecting all of our data to learn how to better control us by manipulating

521
01:01:50,749 --> 01:01:55,470
the parameters of the dream in which we're operating that we believe is real so the proof

522
01:01:55,470 --> 01:02:05,330
of work protocol is a way to bring that proof of real verification mechanism, pinching yourself,

523
01:02:05,490 --> 01:02:11,790
exerting Watts into the digital, the virtual, the cyberspacial realm. It is a way that

524
01:02:12,350 --> 01:02:21,669
proof of work, real world power is a real thing. Once it constrains bits, once there is an orange

525
01:02:21,669 --> 01:02:30,629
checkmark on social media, to use sailors' terms, I believe, in which you have to transfer a sat

526
01:02:30,629 --> 01:02:36,609
for some sort of interaction, then the hallucination becomes more grounded in reality.

527
01:02:36,850 --> 01:02:43,850
Bot farms disappear. Misinformation becomes costly. The thing that is, maybe you don't post

528
01:02:43,850 --> 01:02:49,629
all of the duck face selfies because it's costly to do that. The things that you do post are things

529
01:02:49,629 --> 01:02:56,389
that have some sort of tangible relation to what you believe is actually valuable because

530
01:02:56,389 --> 01:02:57,729
data is now costly.

531
01:02:58,350 --> 01:03:05,609
Digital bits are also now permanent and transparent because they are inscribed on a public blockchain.

532
01:03:06,409 --> 01:03:13,330
So all of these negative aspects of the dream that we've entered, the hallucination that

533
01:03:13,330 --> 01:03:18,450
is social reality, not all of them, but some of the things may be constrained by the proof

534
01:03:18,450 --> 01:03:26,290
of work protocol as proof of realness. That's another aspect of Lowry's thesis in that the

535
01:03:26,290 --> 01:03:32,109
world computer that is Bitcoin is reverse optimized because you had mentioned over

536
01:03:32,109 --> 01:03:39,810
optimization as maybe a design flaw we're not focused on. What Bitcoin does is it reverse

537
01:03:39,810 --> 01:03:53,384
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

538
01:03:53,384 --> 01:04:03,324
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,

539
01:04:03,384 --> 01:04:11,124
rather than some projection of a dream we have that we're not entirely committed to, but that is easy to replicate.

540
01:04:11,124 --> 01:04:41,104
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.

541
01:04:41,124 --> 01:04:50,684
you were truly interested in, in order to sacrifice for, to optimize for a short-term

542
01:04:50,684 --> 01:05:03,904
result of a paycheck. And I think the, this, this damaging thing that exists of the current

543
01:05:03,904 --> 01:05:09,804
system that is being replaced and we're seeing it being replaced and we're seeing authenticity

544
01:05:09,804 --> 01:05:22,484
as a repetitive theme of what people are not seeking, but being drawn towards.

545
01:05:23,524 --> 01:05:34,024
And there are always going to be the insightful people and the people that give you

546
01:05:34,024 --> 01:05:44,464
opportunity to tag a meter of being upset and rising, rising your blood in order to get an

547
01:05:44,464 --> 01:05:50,944
interaction. But I think those people and that method disappears because

548
01:05:50,944 --> 01:06:02,984
in that world of permanence and in that world of work, that reputation becomes the most valuable

549
01:06:02,984 --> 01:06:11,944
commodity that someone could ever have and authenticity and being true. And it's not

550
01:06:11,944 --> 01:06:21,844
always being the best. It's being the person who, this was the conversation we were having last

551
01:06:21,844 --> 01:06:28,644
night, which is that like people change. And if you don't change, then, Oh God, have mercy upon

552
01:06:28,644 --> 01:06:38,824
your soul. Because if you are the same at 16 and 23 and 38 and 52, then you haven't learned anything

553
01:06:38,824 --> 01:06:47,184
and you haven't adopted and adapted to your environment and made the changes necessary to

554
01:06:47,184 --> 01:06:58,624
be more resilient and to seek a more virtuous way of living. You realize as you get older,

555
01:06:58,644 --> 01:07:07,324
older, that those are the important things, that it really is that authentic thing. And the

556
01:07:07,324 --> 01:07:15,344
thousand likes on the duck face selfie are so far less important than the time spent changing out a

557
01:07:15,344 --> 01:07:21,204
lock for someone who's unable to do it themselves and seeing that you've brought pleasure to them

558
01:07:21,204 --> 01:07:26,524
and giving them a moment of shared humanity and joy.

559
01:07:26,804 --> 01:07:36,104
So I just wholeheartedly agree with all of that idea that proof of work is,

560
01:07:37,104 --> 01:07:38,944
it brings us more into the moment.

561
01:07:39,184 --> 01:07:42,744
It makes us more present in our everyday lives.

562
01:07:42,744 --> 01:07:48,824
But in the power projection game, it removes the dangers of proof of stake.

563
01:07:48,824 --> 01:08:13,024
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.

564
01:08:13,024 --> 01:08:21,304
it's difficult to see that you've lost it after you did like it's hard to go back because

565
01:08:21,304 --> 01:08:30,544
once you remove that part you also seem to remove the memory of it and it's hard to even

566
01:08:30,544 --> 01:08:39,604
imagine that feeling of sitting in the sun nothing to do being peaceful in the moment

567
01:08:39,604 --> 01:08:47,684
with the warm breath and the kiss of the sunlight upon your skin and feeling the little hairs on

568
01:08:47,684 --> 01:08:57,164
your arm move just ever so slightly as the breeze comes by and sitting so peacefully and quietly

569
01:08:57,164 --> 01:09:04,984
that nature starts to envelop you and invite you into the moment that you're living in

570
01:09:04,984 --> 01:09:13,464
and allow you to become again, part of the thing that you came from. It's not that you're entering

571
01:09:13,464 --> 01:09:19,144
something that is unknown. It's that you're going back through the door that you exited,

572
01:09:19,144 --> 01:09:27,284
that you never realized you walked out of until you turn back into it. So it, it takes,

573
01:09:27,284 --> 01:09:36,884
it takes a faith and a conscious effort to return yourself to that feeling and that existence

574
01:09:36,884 --> 01:09:43,004
of being in that moment. This is getting philosophical, but it is such a philosophical

575
01:09:43,004 --> 01:09:49,564
thing to think about that it takes into account so much more than just,

576
01:09:49,564 --> 01:09:57,404
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.

577
01:09:57,404 --> 01:10:05,204
Like if you can use the Bitcoin network in order to protect your most valuable information,

578
01:10:05,504 --> 01:10:12,804
which is your reputation and your thoughts and your creations that you put out into the world.

579
01:10:13,744 --> 01:10:17,904
If you can use it to protect that, then you're using it to protect your soul

580
01:10:17,904 --> 01:10:31,804
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.

581
01:10:32,724 --> 01:10:34,844
Yeah. What do you think about that?

582
01:10:34,844 --> 01:10:45,144
it recalls to me the part of lowry's thesis where

583
01:10:45,144 --> 01:10:51,004
in the evolution of mankind we move from upper paleolithic to

584
01:10:51,004 --> 01:10:57,504
upper paleolithic hunter gatherers to neolithic agrarian people which is kind of our current

585
01:10:57,504 --> 01:11:03,944
state of consciousness in being and in doing that that occasion to shift in consciousness

586
01:11:03,944 --> 01:11:08,984
and the shift in theological consideration of ourselves and our relationship to the world.

587
01:11:09,764 --> 01:11:19,324
The upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers had, it's tough to describe, but you might say a more holistic, pantheistic,

588
01:11:19,324 --> 01:11:25,184
God or spirits in everything sort of view, where spirits are not separate from the natural world.

589
01:11:25,324 --> 01:11:26,244
They are natural.

590
01:11:26,244 --> 01:11:32,784
um the you know religious conceptions can be used to explain natural phenomena because everything

591
01:11:32,784 --> 01:11:38,584
is spiritual and spirits the spirit of the river explains the operation of the river i think that's

592
01:11:38,584 --> 01:11:45,384
an upper paleolithic type of conception whereas moving to the neolithic agrarian and into what

593
01:11:45,384 --> 01:11:50,724
is called even the axial age you begin to have monotheistic conceptions centered around an

594
01:11:50,724 --> 01:11:57,664
afterlife a continuity of our consciousness in its almost bodily form into the next life

595
01:11:57,664 --> 01:12:05,064
and afterlife um and so there's a way this is going very far i think from now departing from

596
01:12:05,064 --> 01:12:11,204
the aris thesis but choosing it as a jumping off point the neolithic

597
01:12:11,204 --> 01:12:20,784
a neolithic and agrarian form of consciousness where it's centered around an afterlife

598
01:12:20,784 --> 01:12:26,344
gives itself lends itself to abstract power-based hierarchies one formulation that

599
01:12:26,344 --> 01:12:33,184
lowry gives for an abstract power-based hierarchy is you create a walled-off state of being that

600
01:12:33,184 --> 01:12:39,364
people that is desirable in order if you get into this garden that is walled off you are happy if

601
01:12:39,364 --> 01:12:46,004
you attain the state of being that is defined as within this gated area such as this an afterlife

602
01:12:46,004 --> 01:12:52,924
then you're you're happy the abstract power-based hierarchy is centered around defining a walled

603
01:12:52,924 --> 01:12:59,024
space and then denominating designating oneself as the gatekeeper to that space and saying you

604
01:12:59,024 --> 01:13:04,044
are allowed entry because of x reason you are not allowed entry so it allocates power for abstract

605
01:13:04,044 --> 01:13:10,124
reasons. It allocates an afterlife if you are good according to the dominant morality,

606
01:13:10,324 --> 01:13:16,324
that dominant morality being something designed to constrain people. That's a Neolithic conception.

607
01:13:16,324 --> 01:13:23,004
If we get back to the upper Paleolithic conception, where we see the world itself

608
01:13:23,004 --> 01:13:29,164
as pregnant with spirits and embodying a morality just in the operation of nature,

609
01:13:29,164 --> 01:13:36,644
there is it's almost like proof of realness because like the spiritual world is the material

610
01:13:36,644 --> 01:13:44,344
world it's all bound together um we're not looking into the afterlife or into cyberspace to find our

611
01:13:44,344 --> 01:13:50,604
gods we're looking into the world as it is it's sort of an immediate proof of power protocol where

612
01:13:50,604 --> 01:13:56,065
spirits are just as bound as we are um by the operation of the world because the world itself

613
01:13:56,065 --> 01:14:02,664
as a spirit. So that's maybe getting sounding a bit woo woo and kind of hokey or whatnot. But I

614
01:14:02,664 --> 01:14:10,884
think that it does remind us that our religious conceptions are themselves manipulable, abstract,

615
01:14:10,884 --> 01:14:16,464
power-based hierarchies. And what does it mean to discipline those religious conceptions

616
01:14:16,464 --> 01:14:22,884
with a proof of realness protocol? Not to say that Bitcoin, I don't, you said that Bitcoin maybe

617
01:14:22,884 --> 01:14:27,404
saves our soul or protects our soul. I don't want to go too far. Bitcoin is a novel form of

618
01:14:27,404 --> 01:14:31,644
power projection. I think proof of work. I think proof of work. Or even proof of work.

619
01:14:31,644 --> 01:14:35,004
Not necessarily Bitcoin. It's just the instantiation of it.

620
01:14:35,524 --> 01:14:39,704
Yeah. No form of technology is going to save yourself, you know, save you. You need to save

621
01:14:39,704 --> 01:14:45,224
yourself. You still have to do it. Yeah. Right. Right. Absolutely. And so maybe one thing though,

622
01:14:45,224 --> 01:14:53,924
that proof of work as a metaphor can help us reconsider is our own relationship to ground

623
01:14:53,924 --> 01:15:00,104
level reality. What is ground level reality? And how do we inhabit that? And did the hunter

624
01:15:00,104 --> 01:15:06,864
gatherers have a better way of inhabiting ground level reality than Neolithic agrarian farmers did

625
01:15:06,864 --> 01:15:14,004
and that we do? One of the works that Lowry cites is Charles Foster's Being Human. I think the

626
01:15:14,004 --> 01:15:17,484
subtitle is something like 40,000 years in human consciousness or something like that.

627
01:15:17,784 --> 01:15:23,884
And I would definitely recommend that read. It was formative for Lowry in his talk of upper

628
01:15:23,884 --> 01:15:28,664
Paleolithic and Neolithic and the development of consciousness through religious rights and the

629
01:15:28,664 --> 01:15:34,404
nature of the afterlife. And I think reading that might individually help a person consider their own

630
01:15:34,404 --> 01:15:40,744
relationship to the world and the relationship of the spiritual to that world and to themselves,

631
01:15:40,744 --> 01:15:49,244
and maybe how to unite those? Yeah, I think we are coming to the realization that separating

632
01:15:49,244 --> 01:15:58,724
spiritual from real may be doing a disservice to both. And it makes me think about psychedelics

633
01:15:58,724 --> 01:16:09,044
and the use of them is constantly reported by people as an experience that feels realer than

634
01:16:09,044 --> 01:16:22,065
real and more, more real than reality. And it may sound woo woo to those who haven't experienced it,

635
01:16:22,065 --> 01:16:30,404
but to those who have, it lines with what you're discussing as this pantheistic view of there is

636
01:16:30,404 --> 01:16:40,184
like there's like a soul or or god or there is spirit in like everything in in the trees and

637
01:16:40,184 --> 01:16:48,024
in the soil and in the animals and in yourself and in the inanimate objects that are surrounding us

638
01:16:48,024 --> 01:16:58,344
that there is something that is a common line being drawn through them and it may be something

639
01:16:58,344 --> 01:17:07,264
that we discover where right now we have this anchoring bias of science and, um, it must be

640
01:17:07,264 --> 01:17:12,184
quantified and it must be proven. And there, and maybe, maybe we're able to do it. You know,

641
01:17:12,184 --> 01:17:18,184
we talked about this before the, the beauty of science is that nothing is ever true. It's just

642
01:17:18,184 --> 01:17:26,204
things that aren't false. And, and there is, and that, and that not falseness, it drives us closer

643
01:17:26,204 --> 01:17:34,544
and closer to the truth. And it's doubtful that we can ever know anything to be true,

644
01:17:34,544 --> 01:17:39,704
but we can asymptotically approach it and get closer and closer to

645
01:17:39,704 --> 01:17:51,065
the beauty that exists in aligning ourselves with proof of work, with

646
01:17:51,065 --> 01:18:03,004
meritocracy, with presence, with meditation, with the affluence of time and having moments that are

647
01:18:06,004 --> 01:18:15,684
uninvolved with efficiency and production and just being live. One of my favorite

648
01:18:15,684 --> 01:18:26,084
quotes of myself from our first or second talk on software was that the money that we've had for

649
01:18:26,084 --> 01:18:35,584
the entire existence of humanity has been dead money. And Bitcoin is live money. It's live energy.

650
01:18:35,984 --> 01:18:44,664
It's live protected by electricity that is constantly flowing. And it seems to be bringing

651
01:18:44,664 --> 01:18:51,404
a wellspring of life to everything that it touches, both in the economic world and in the

652
01:18:51,404 --> 01:19:01,004
soul, in the sense of the spirit of those who are able to move past the win-moon, number-go-up,

653
01:19:01,384 --> 01:19:07,644
win-lambo, we're all going to make it, have fun staying poor type of community.

654
01:19:07,644 --> 01:19:15,784
it gives us something that was always there. It doesn't give it to us. It reveals, I suppose.

655
01:19:15,784 --> 01:19:20,884
It reveals something that was always there because it feels natural when it's revealed to us.

656
01:19:21,065 --> 01:19:26,364
And it feels familiar and it feels like something that you've known. And to take that back to

657
01:19:26,364 --> 01:19:34,444
psychedelics, that's the experience of psychedelics, which is to have this experience that

658
01:19:34,444 --> 01:19:42,384
is more real than real that feels like something you've known forever and when you come out of it

659
01:19:42,384 --> 01:19:52,244
there are just revelations that you have which seems so obvious in hindsight but looking forward

660
01:19:52,244 --> 01:19:57,404
prior to they were they were hard to find and you you don't have to use psychedelics you can use

661
01:19:57,404 --> 01:20:03,404
exercise and you can use cold plunge and you can use meditation and you can use all kinds of things

662
01:20:03,404 --> 01:20:13,904
to reach this, but in ritualistic life, you can do all these things, but to reveal to yourself

663
01:20:13,904 --> 01:20:18,524
something that has always been in front of you, I think is so much more

664
01:20:18,524 --> 01:20:30,444
glorifying than to discover something that you didn't know. It's like you're coming home.

665
01:20:30,444 --> 01:21:00,164
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

666
01:21:00,444 --> 01:21:09,964
so natural growing up, um, before the institution of the ability to be constantly connected and

667
01:21:09,964 --> 01:21:17,964
constantly, um, bothered, I guess. Yeah. I've kind of, I've, I've rolled this. I've, I'm kind of,

668
01:21:18,004 --> 01:21:22,944
I feel like I need to be off that topic now, but it's just, yeah, it's so impactful to think that

669
01:21:22,944 --> 01:21:31,504
way. That podcast that you shared with Alex Fetsky discussing, you know, like, I'm not a

670
01:21:31,504 --> 01:21:38,184
Bitcoiner. I've realized that I'm not a Bitcoiner. I am a person of virtue and virtue is a verb. And

671
01:21:38,184 --> 01:21:45,904
the people that I've surrounded myself with as a result of pursuing these verbs of virtue are my

672
01:21:45,904 --> 01:21:50,544
people, even though they are not Bitcoiners. So what does that say about me? And what does that

673
01:21:50,544 --> 01:21:57,964
say about them. It says that we are, you know, we are what we repeatedly do. We are the virtues

674
01:21:57,964 --> 01:22:04,384
that we pursue. And we can align with those people in a way that does not mean that we have to be

675
01:22:04,984 --> 01:22:12,444
ideologically aligned. As previously, we may have thought like you need to go be amongst your

676
01:22:12,444 --> 01:22:17,684
people. The network state idea of biology kind of promotes this idea of like, oh,

677
01:22:17,684 --> 01:22:22,384
the plumbers are going to have their own, um, their own state or the,

678
01:22:22,624 --> 01:22:26,604
or maybe it's just going to be the anarchists. And, you know, it's, it's an,

679
01:22:26,724 --> 01:22:31,644
it's like an ideological, um, ideological, uh,

680
01:22:31,764 --> 01:22:33,684
aligning of people to form societies.

681
01:22:34,204 --> 01:22:37,444
And I do believe that that is very much true,

682
01:22:37,444 --> 01:22:42,344
but I think that we need to remember that

683
01:22:42,344 --> 01:22:46,804
ideology is,

684
01:22:46,804 --> 01:22:55,624
only useful when it is grounded in virtue um that you believe not not that you believe in the same

685
01:22:55,624 --> 01:23:01,144
things but that you act in the same things that you act in the same direction that's what creates

686
01:23:01,144 --> 01:23:10,924
um that's what creates something sustaining yeah now that's the chapter six is the

687
01:23:10,924 --> 01:23:16,124
key takeaways. I think we took away a lot from software. I think we could have,

688
01:23:16,824 --> 01:23:22,844
as this conversation shows, you can traipse through the concepts in software

689
01:23:22,844 --> 01:23:28,924
many different times. And each time you're going to draw a different constellation from the points

690
01:23:28,924 --> 01:23:36,864
that you touch upon. And you, I mean, the points that are touched upon are grounded out in some of

691
01:23:36,864 --> 01:23:40,184
the most meaningful and important things in our lives.

692
01:23:40,264 --> 01:23:43,604
So I think that all of those sentiments that you expressed

693
01:23:43,604 --> 01:23:50,664
are very to the point insofar as software is about

694
01:23:50,664 --> 01:23:54,604
how to ground ourselves back, even in cyberspace,

695
01:23:54,744 --> 01:23:56,544
and what is real.

696
01:23:57,104 --> 01:24:01,224
And it's a great book, and it has very powerful concepts

697
01:24:01,224 --> 01:24:04,504
that can help a person think through their own life

698
01:24:04,504 --> 01:24:11,704
and think through what is meaningful as one does piece together the thesis that Lowry has expressed.

699
01:24:12,084 --> 01:24:12,964
So, yeah.

700
01:24:13,684 --> 01:24:23,544
The expression of virtue through action delivered by power, I think, is a wonderful takeaway.

701
01:24:25,284 --> 01:24:30,004
Cool. Well, let's take ourselves away to other places, away from screens and whatnot.

702
01:24:30,244 --> 01:24:31,164
Let's wrap it up.

703
01:24:31,644 --> 01:24:32,164
Fantastic.

704
01:24:32,164 --> 01:24:36,184
In case we do put this up, everybody, my name is Lucas Matty.

705
01:24:36,304 --> 01:24:37,264
That's Grant Reichert.

706
01:24:37,424 --> 01:24:39,464
I'm at Lucas Matty on X.

707
01:24:39,784 --> 01:24:41,065
He is at the whole frame.

708
01:24:41,704 --> 01:24:47,264
We really appreciate you guys taking time to delve into something and removing yourself

709
01:24:47,264 --> 01:24:55,824
from the world of instant gratification and constant perturbance in order to think deeply

710
01:24:55,824 --> 01:24:59,364
on a subject that could have some benefit to you.

711
01:24:59,364 --> 01:25:02,164
So thanks for joining us and we'll talk to you again.