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All right. So Lucas and I again are here today. We're talking about software, a novel theory on power projection and the national strategic significance of Bitcoin. That's Jason Lowry's thesis. We have a PDF of that. There's also a book, but we have the PDF, which is floating around online.

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We've gone through chapters one through three, and today we're on chapter four. The previous conversations are also out there. Chapter four is power projection tactics in human society. The last conversation was about power projection tactics in nature.

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So this is building off of that as a foundation of kind of general principles that are relevant to animals. Now we're in the domain of humans, obviously more relevant as we move to the general thesis of this whole work, which is something like Bitcoin is a form of cyber warfare that can be used, as we'll learn today, to possibly counter the dysfunctions of abstract power.

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Bitcoin being a form of physical power that one can project into cyberspace, it may be able to

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help alleviate some of the dysfunctions we see with something Lowry is going to call abstract

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power. So what I'll do now is, as I did last time, give kind of a general rambling introduction,

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or not introduction, rambling summary of chapter four. It's going to be so this thesis is really

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interesting, because as we learned in chapter two, over methodology, it's a grounded theory,

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is the methodology that's being used.

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And so what the grounded theory framework does

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is it encourages drawing from lots of different areas

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as you're analyzing the data

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to come up with the data with fresh perspectives

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and then be able to code the data

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based on those perspectives.

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So we see a lot of different perspectives in this chapter.

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And I'm going to build a machine here

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using the parts of the chapter,

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but I'm not going to say all of the pieces

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that go into that machine

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because that would just be me reading the whole chapter.

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There's a lot of interesting stuff in here.

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I'll hopefully get enough of the concepts on the table

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that Lucas and I can kind of click on the hyperlinked things

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that I throw out and expand as necessary.

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But in any case, so as I mentioned,

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last chapter we talked about power projection tactics in nature,

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about how organisms use physical power to settle intraspecies disputes

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regarding their dominance hierarchy.

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animals. We heard an evolutionary story last time about how animals evolved into pack animals

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cooperating in groups. Humans are now like groups of apes moving around. There's packs of wolves.

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Intraspecies disputes arrive regarding pecking order, regarding who gets property within that

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pack. And so physical power projection emerged as a way to settle those intraspecies power disputes.

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The wolves' snarl was a way to project power using watts.

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And so we learned how that helped with the systemic security of the pack because it rewarded those who were most fit and able to project power.

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It rewarded the strongest and most intelligent that they then survived, reproduced, and through evolution produced a stronger pack.

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pack. We then learned about the opposing phenomena of domestication in which a pack became weaker

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if it selected for things other than strength or intelligence as humans did when we domesticated

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wolves and turned them into dogs who are very exploitable. As much as we love them, we love them

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because they're not powerful and we can do with them as we want, make them our friends by force.

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So that brings us to today. We're talking about, again, now power projection in human societies.

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So humans are different from animals.

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We develop our intelligence is what separates us from animals.

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Abstract thinking is big for this section.

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So intelligence develops as a power projection technique.

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For humans, it ramps up very quickly and escapes that of what animals are possible of doing.

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Because humans are possible of abstract thinking.

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Our brains develop very rapidly.

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They develop a lot of, they consume a lot of energy.

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We harness fire to feed our brains by cooking meat to pre-digest it, getting lots of nutrients.

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And so we have this evolutionary ramping up of intelligence, which helps us survive.

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We develop a capacity for abstract thinking, for imagining the world not as it is, but developing ideas and concepts and beliefs that are not actually in the world.

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So one of the things we do is we develop this capacity for abstract thinking.

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we develop a theory of mind, which is us putting ourselves in the shoes of other conscious entities.

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So that helps us to model predator and prey, do hunting simulations in our head as we're evolving,

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to outsmart our prey and to further become a sort of apex predator and continue developing our intelligence.

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This sort of this type of abstract thinking we develop is a form of imagination.

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Again, we can form ideas, images, concepts that are independent of sensory input.

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So it's kind of like constructing a pattern in your head of your expectation or hypothesis about the world that we develop abstractly and then verify through sensory input.

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This abstract thinking gives us lots of kind of evolved superpowers.

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We develop storytelling and complex communication to convey to others the results of our internal hunting simulations about how we could potentially better hunt our prey.

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Through storytelling, again, this evolved abstract form of intelligence that allows us to tell stories, we can create abstract realities that evoke emotion.

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We all know what it means to tell a good story, hear a good story, to explain natural phenomena, imbue them with meaning, and also to begin defining what is good and bad, to create abstract systems like morality and ethics.

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Abstract powers like storytelling also allow us to cooperate with other humans beyond Dunbar's number of 150, the limit that we would usually have based on memory or physical interaction with others.

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We can create a shared story that shows that we all have a similar belief and so allows trust among greater numbers of people that there is this developing story of the tribe, the clan, the religion, the nation state.

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So our abstract thinking is enabling us to scale up cooperation.

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We also, our abstract thinking helps us to assuage the guilt that we develop. As part of our theory of mind, this capacity we develop with abstract thinking to imagine what other conscious things are thinking. That also helps us imagine empathically the suffering of other animals. And so we develop ways to justify our killing and exploitation of animals through elaborate belief systems, rituals, religions.

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So we have this, again, revolving a capacity of abstract thinking. This leads to us inhabiting two realities. There's the objective physical world, which is the world we have with animals, other humans, energy, space, matter, time, like the real world you can touch, see, feel, lick, whatever you want to do with it.

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There's the objective physical world, and then there's also the subjective abstract world.

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That's the non-physical world of thoughts and beliefs that our abstract thinking is creating inside of us, which we can also share with other humans through language.

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But again, now we have these two worlds.

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However, for humans, these two worlds kind of mix and intertwine.

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Again, this abstract thinking is a way to create patterns, hypotheses, beliefs about the world that we superimpose on it.

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We then update those beliefs in real time as we interact with the world. But we really can't turn off that abstract thinking capacity. We see faces in trees, you know, we see lines on the page, and they arrive in our consciousness already as words, we hear sounds arriving already as language.

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And so in that way, objective and subjective worlds intermix for humans. And we have a problem verifying sometimes what is real and what is just our abstract thinking about what is real. We can see this even like nowadays, it's tough for us to metacognitively, that is, thinking about thinking, to realize when we're actually afraid of something that's not real.

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For example, if you see a scary movie, it's triggering some sort of, you know, you have an abstract conception of what the world might hold.

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You know it's false metacognitively, and yet you still feel afraid.

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So in that way, humans, we, again, are mixing objective and subjective worlds through this evolved capacity of abstract thinking because we see our patterns onto the world that we try to verify with our senses.

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and even when we can't verify, we still sometimes hold on to our abstract beliefs and believe,

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okay, yeah, there was something on the screen there.

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It's still recording.

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It just took a blip because it said you got interrupted somehow.

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I did.

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Yeah, go back.

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So where I was at again, we have this evolved capacity of abstract thinking that leads us

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to construct a subjective world, which we mix with the objective world and oftentimes

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have difficulty telling the two apart.

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So this then leaves us with the rise of a new form of power called, which Lowry calls abstract power, and hierarchies, dominance hierarchies based on the use of abstract power instead of physical power.

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So let's get there.

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What does that mean?

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Again, we have developed a theory of mind that makes us not want to kill because we have empathy and we can imagine the suffering of other creatures.

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And so we develop abstract belief systems to help us.

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We don't want to also hurt or kill our fellow man, so we develop belief systems to help us resolve pecking order and intraspecies, dominance hierarchies without violence.

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We do this abstractly by developing belief systems where we invest some individuals with power to settle disputes. We have judges, priests, chiefs, god kings, presidents. They adjudicate and settle disputes instead of us doing it with physical power displays like snarling or physical contests.

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Instead of watts, that is, we begin to use things like rank and title, designated forms of authority that are conferred by a belief system on certain individuals.

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We, again, as we do this, as we've constructed these beliefs, these abstract belief systems and overlaid them onto the world, map onto territory, it's not a perfect one-to-one fit.

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And we begin to confuse our abstractions with real things.

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We see maybe priests as actually holy, kings as actually powerful, a person doing something

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as actually just and believe that those concepts are real things in the world, justice, holiness,

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power, the powerfulness of the king, his goodness, his divine right.

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These are all abstractions, but humans, again, have difficulty separating their belief-based

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abstractions from the actual physical world, just given some of the peculiarities of our

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evolved abstract intelligence.

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One of those, I mean, just to mention an example of that, that maybe helps us see why we sometimes have difficulty separating abstraction from reality is evolutionarily, if you see a stick and you overcorrect and believe that it's a snake because you've developed a pattern for seeing snakes in windy, thin objects, then you jump away in fear when you see the stick, but it's an error.

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But when you actually see the snake, you are likely to overcorrect and see more snakes instead of less snakes, which is good in the long run because it's better to jump away when you see a stick rather than not jump away when you actually see a snake because you haven't decided if it really is a snake.

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So again, our abstract patterns about how we see the world become confused with the world we actually inhabit.

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We have ideology-tinted glasses that we always view the world through.

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So this gets us to these dominance hierarchies, which are essential to pack animals, as we learned last time.

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In nature, there's a physical power-based hierarchies based on the wolf scenario.

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Now we see the development in humans of abstract power-based hierarchies.

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Again, these are hierarchies based on development of belief systems that designate power to certain individuals to adjudicate disputes about property, the priest, the judge, the president, the god king.

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What's the difference between a physical power-based hierarchy and an abstract power-based hierarchy?

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Abstract power-based hierarchies are based on trust.

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You have to believe in the system and you have to trust that the gatekeeper who is the one who gives permission and decides right to property and settles disputes, you have to believe in them.

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You have to convey their trust and buy into the system.

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Physical power-based hierarchies are zero trust.

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They're based on Watts.

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Watts are objective ways to dominate another thing by displacing matter, mass.

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Abstract-based hierarchies are permission-based because, again, they give permission to the priest, the judge, the god-king to determine, as a gatekeeper, to determine who gets what property and what rights are conveyed.

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Power-based hierarchies are permissionless.

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Everybody can participate and potentially access all of the resources.

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Abstract power-based hierarchies are inegalitarian because they're based on title, rank, and things that are conferred abstractly and then just given value by virtue of the system.

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Physical power-based hierarchies are egalitarian.

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Everybody has equal access to Watts and can vote with what they think the proper distribution of property should be through their deployment of Watts.

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So physical power, zero trust, permissionless, egalitarian.

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Abstract power-based dominance hierarchies based on trust, permission-based, and inegalitarian.

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And abstract power-based hierarchies do have a couple of advantages, which is why we adopt them. They are less energy intensive. You don't deploy watts. They're just based on belief. You can buy into a belief system with no expenditure of energy, which allows abstract power-based systems to scale very quickly and to allow large numbers of people to cooperate and be a part of the same tribe, clan, city-state, nation-state.

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That's one benefit of an abstract power-based hierarchy.

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Another one is that they are less prone to cause harm because we're adjudicating disputes.

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We're deciding pecking order based on designations of rank, title, conferred, privilege, and

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entitlement, and not based on physical power projection displays like snarling or grappling

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or something like that.

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Drawbacks, though, of abstract power-based hierarchies.

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There's really two, and these are kind of key to, I think, understanding the rest of

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the chapter and the later deployment of Bitcoin as a solution to the dysfunctions of abstract

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power-based hierarchies, the two drawbacks to using abstract power to adjudicate disputes or to

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kind of define the dominance hierarchy in a society. One is the possibility of oppression,

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that's abuse within the system, because again, you're conferring upon some people as priests,

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presidents, judges, the power to determine and settle disputes. And so those individuals can then

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abuse the code of society, manipulate it, do things for themselves, not correctly decide who

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should get the piece of property, the right in question. So that's oppression. That's one drawback.

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Another drawback is invasion from the outside. So oppression is like the threat from within an

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abstract power-based hierarchy. The second drawback is invasion, the threat from without.

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People outside the system. So an abstract power-based hierarchy is not decided based on physical power. We saw with animals that when a pack animal does not have a dominance hierarchy based on physical power projection, that pack then selects in the long term for characteristics that are not good for the fitness of that pack, clan, tribe, or whatever.

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And so you get a weaker thing overall, leading to threats from the outside coming in and dominating that pack. Same with humans. If humans have a hierarchy that selects for things that are things other than strength, intelligence, ability to project power, it makes them potentially subject to invasion from the outside as you have a large group of people cooperating based on an abstract power-based dominance hierarchy, amassing resources, but not also scaling their ability to protect those resources all the time.

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because they don't have a meritocratic principle that's determining who gets the resources,

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but rather something like divine right or rank or privilege, you know, something that's

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converted based on the belief system that defines that abstract power-based hierarchy.

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So Lowry's point is that, you know, so this actually leads to more war.

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We have these abstract power-based hierarchies as humans because we're skittish.

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We don't like physical power.

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We don't like violence.

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we're trying to avoid conflict, but it actually leads to more war. The oppression from within,

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that threat from within, the dysfunctions of abuse within the system encourage internal

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revolution. That's how the United States began. There's violent revolution when people perceive

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the abstract power-based hierarchy they're a part of as exploiting them. And so that encourages the

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threat from within as a result as a response to oppression in that way wars have decentralized

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power abstract power-based hierarchies tend to encourage large numbers of people to cooperate

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and so to centralize power but as they become more oppressive wars happen and tend to break them up

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national borders then emerge and we have different you can look at the map nowadays and see the

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different nation states and each of those nation states has national borders that are kind of

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separating off different abstract belief systems that govern those states.

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So we have more wars when we have abstract power-based systems because we have oppression

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that leads to revolutions.

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Also, we have invasions from without.

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Again, as you have an abstract power belief system, a group cooperates more and more,

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masses resources.

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But if they don't also scale their ability to repel outsiders by rewarding strength and

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intelligence, then they make themselves subject to attack.

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In this, Lowry develops the point meticulously that he's not against war. In fact, wars provide an irreplaceable social and technical benefit to humanity. So abstract power-based hierarchies lead to more war in this way. But war in itself, he's careful to say, is not bad. War breaks up centralized power.

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And so it ensures that we don't have one world government. We don't just develop an abstract power-based hierarchy that consumes the earth. As oppression develops within such a hierarchy, revolutions happen, power is decentralized. This is a good thing.

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Pacifism, indeed, he says, is a security hazard because it makes pack animals, cooperative societies, abstract power-based hierarchies, whoever adopts it, it's a security hazard that makes them vulnerable to predators.

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so warfare

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Lowry argues

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ends up causing more warfare

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abstract power based hierarchies

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scale cooperation

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and so increase the size

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of the number of humans cooperating

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but also the benefit of attacking those humans

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because of the resources they accumulate

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and so as they scale

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these abstract power based hierarchies

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in order to survive their neighbors

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they also have to scale militarily

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And so a shelling point between scaled cooperative societies is the deployment of a military, shelling point being a point of agreed strategic arrangement between two parties in a game-theoretic competition.

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Nation-states realize if one nation-state has a military, another nation-state also is going to need to have a military.

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So because abstract power-based hierarchies can scale very quickly, it takes nothing to buy into them. They're not energy intensive. They do scale very quickly. They become ripe targets for attack. So they deploy militaries to defend themselves, and then they scale militarily. That tends to encourage war.

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Also, what encourages war is government dysfunction, decentralized power, again, under an abstract power-based system, is rife with systemic exploitation, abuse, oppression, which causes warfare. So war causes war. As societies scale up based on these abstract power-based hierarchies in these nation-states, we see wars continue to happen.

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So we, in these abstract power-based hierarchies, again, it's necessary to scale militarily because all of the other societies are scaling militarily too. So societies are deploying first, you know, cavalry and then tanks and then airplanes.

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And you can see like this arrow going up and to the right as far as deploying kinetic power, kinetic physical power, until we see nowadays we've actually reached a kinetic stalemate with the deployment of strategic nuclear weapons.

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because we have this need to keep on scaling the cost of attack, the need to keep on scaling the

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cost we can impose on others who attack us. We have scaled ourselves completely out of the

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possibility of practical warfare by developing strategic nuclear arms because those present

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the possibility of mutually assured destruction. We can't have two nuclear powers engaged in all

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out warfare. And so what's happened is these kind of small surrogate wars, cold wars, trade wars,

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where maybe in some battlefield,

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there's like a scaled down kinetic conflict

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that is kind of a surrogate war, proxy war.

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But Lowry notes that even those scaled down wars

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are going to keep on scaling up.

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Even if we don't deploy nuclear arms,

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we're going to see the scaling up

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of those smaller scale conflicts

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with the arrival of AI powered drones

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or something like that.

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He says that this is just the nature of,

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again, the evolutionarily impelled need to keep on scaling up cost of attack so that you can protect

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the resources as other abstract power-based hierarchies are also scaling up their cost of

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attack. So the trap is that it seems like, well, there is no peace because peace would require a

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world without predators and humans are simply evolved apex predators. So there will not be that.

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But stalemate, there can also not be like a perfect stalemate that will lead to peace and

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nuclear armed powers in perfect stalemate. Because as we've shown, once you have an abstract

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power-based hierarchy, you still have oppression if there's not wars to come in and break up

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and decentralize oppressive hierarchies. So we can't have a nuclear stalemate,

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and there's going to be wars. So what Lauer thinks we need then is human antlers. This goes

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back to the last chapter. Deer antlers evolved as a way to have physical power-based competition

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that reduced the potential for harm within those conflicts, deer, butt antlers, instead

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of doing something that instead would cause them serious physical harm.

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So we need a form of non-kinetic physical power that is zero trust, permissionless, and

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egalitarian to provide for competition, non-kinetic, in that it won't cause harm, but physical

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power, not abstract power.

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And we need that physical power-based competition to be able to scale indefinitely without becoming too deadly because, again, the nature of abstract power-based hierarchies as rival packs of humans is that they're always going to be in conflict with each other, defending their own resources, and so wanting to increase those resources, and so needing to also increase the cost to others of coming in and taking those resources.

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So we need to develop a form of warfare that's physical power-based, so it's not based purely on abstract power, and that also can scale indefinitely without becoming too deadly.

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That leads to his final point that he leaves us with in this chapter, is that maybe that's going to be electronic antlers, some way to compete in cyberspace with energy by moving charges along resistors rather than forces displacing mass in the real world.

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And we know, of course, that he's going to go on to argue that that's Bitcoin.

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So that was a ton. I feel like I ran through that and there's so much there and you can zoom in on any one point and it becomes very interesting because there's a lot of foundation that's laid for each of the points I said. And I hope I got it out all out coherently, but I guess help me patch any holes there that that made no sense.

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No, you did it all. We can just shut down, go home.

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Shut down, right on.

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I got Thanksgiving dinner to help make, and, you know, so we're good.

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No, that was brilliant, as always.

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I think you did an incredible job of running through kind of what Lowry is The brilliant thing about this is like I think we heard you seen the word Bitcoin like a couple times in the first 140 pages of this book right

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He's laying the groundwork.

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He is going through this grounded theory methodology in order to just walk us up to the gate and then take us on through.

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So I think it's brilliant.

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I think you can summarize this entire chapter with my favorite quote by Thomas Sowell, which is that there are no choices in life, only tradeoffs, right?

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So we as humans, we have abstract, you know, capability of abstract thought, which makes us an apex predator and separates us from all other things.

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But he goes on to make the point that not only do we have the capability to abstract thought, we can't turn it off.

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Like we are not only benefiting from it, we're also in some ways prisoners to it.

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And so we're always in this realm of seeking, seeking me.

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One thing that I wanted to point out, because I found this really interesting, this is something that I had kind of studied myself,

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was he talks about the objective versus subjective reality and how our eyes take in a visual field and our brains then make meaning of it.

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So one thing that I learned, like every other mid-30s white guy from Andrew Huberman, which is that our visual cortex is everything, right?

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We have five senses, and over half of our brain power is dedicated to the visual cortex.

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Eyes are an external part of the central nervous system, and they are prioritizing threats at all times.

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And the reason they're prioritizing threats is because of evolution, because we basically have the same brain for, say, maybe 300,000 years, maybe 50,000 years, but truly maybe only in the last couple hundred years, really, have we been able to live in a world that was not really, really dangerous at all times.

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A couple thousand years ago, you stub your toe, you might die.

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You eat the wrong, like the food is not labeled.

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The dogs are not dogs.

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They're wolves, and they're not on leashes.

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The lions are not in cages.

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This is a world that wherever you ventured to, you were constantly vigilant in order to stave off attacks.

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The most important thing was that you didn't get hurt, was that you didn't contract an illness,

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was that you didn't eat the wrong thing, step on the wrong thing, go the wrong way.

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Like it was so life and death.

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Like literally anything that you go visit your dentist for that's not a regular checkup,

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anything that you've ever been to the ER for, half of the things that I've eaten,

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I was like, expiration date, shm expiration date, right?

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Like those things could have killed you previous.

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And so it makes sense that you're prioritizing these threats.

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But then, as John Verveke talks about in his work, is that not only do we take that in through a filter, because we're prioritizing threats, but then it goes into the brain where it goes through a second filter.

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And that second filter is searching for meaning.

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That second filter is searching for symbolism.

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So every bit of reality that we experience is filtered twice before we even get to.

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And also, most people, and it's a blissful existence, I think, most people are blissfully unaware of this.

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And so when your subjective reality maps to your own definition of objective reality, great, because everything lines up in your world.

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But if you know that I'm capable of misperceiving threats, I'm capable of making judgments that are inaccurate because I'm merely, I have this brain that, God help it, it loves me.

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And all it wants me to do is get all the calories I can, but that's why I'm eating 20 Krispy Kremes at a time.

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That's why I am laying in bed telling myself I need to rest instead of going out for a walk or going to lift weights.

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It's why you avoid the things that may feel as though they can be difficult.

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The beginning of this chapter, he starts with this quote by Alex Carroll,

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man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

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What else is there to say about that?

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Yeah.

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That every, nothing great happens overnight.

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Every overnight success that you've ever heard of, be it physically or even, you know, relationship-wise or in business, every one of them was a decade or more in the making.

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You talk like some names that are like the top of the public consciousness now, especially on X, would be like Alex Hormose.

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Guy went broke twice.

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Chris Williamson from the podcast Modern Wisdom, he just, I think, passed 3 million subscribers.

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I want to say he did like 500 episodes before he ever had multiple thousands or something.

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Those aren't exactly accurate, but they're generally speaking accurate.

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It's just you must continue to suffer.

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You must continue to do the thing over and over and over again.

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Yeah.

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Because the rewards are late to come. It's the work that you do today that will be rewarded next month, next year, a decade from now.

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Yeah.

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So, yeah, I think that's – yeah, go ahead.

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No, yeah, I think it's maybe not so strange that we have abstract power-based hierarchies because people want to escape all of the ways that the world is harmful, some of which you mentioned.

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I mean, we want to create belief systems that are going to accept us from things like predation and the struggle that we all of the ways that we see animals acting.

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We want to create belief systems that make an exception for ourselves and that make it so maybe we don't have to suffer that these types of ways that are uncomfortable for us.

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Maybe we can create a belief system in which humans don't have to worry about things like that.

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And so people are then going to buy in to those things and give up the dog-eat-dog world in which suffering is normal. Humans reshape themselves as a material that feels the suffering while it's being reshaped, but that's a necessity.

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So maybe, you know, it's understandable why we begin to get into these abstract power-based hierarchies. They also alleviate some of the most existential pangs we have, like the thought of death. We see the first, Lowry notes this, kind of the first types of abstract power-based hierarchies are parallel to the observance that, like, we begin to see people buried in a way that shows consciousness of an afterlife.

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And we see them also buried in a way that shows a abstract power-based hierarchy in play because some people get more elaborate burial rites than others. And so we want to insulate ourselves from all of the terrible things in the world, the terrible evolutionary struggle we see amongst animals, the struggles we feel with our brethren, the fratricidal impulses that might arise in a feeling of anger.

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We want to will and wish these things away. And so we buy into a belief system. And we see that others have bought into that belief system, too, because they have these same, again, the same existential delays of being human and being consciousness.

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David Foster Wallace said, consciousness is nature's nightmare. We're the only animal that has that theory of mind where not only can we empathically see and feel and understand the suffering of other animals, but we recursively reflect on our own state as an entity that has a finite amount of time on Earth in which we're going to die. And what does that mean?

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And so we construct these abstract power-based belief systems in which we give certain individuals, shamans, priests, the ability to tell us what is right and wrong, give us permission slips for what it's going to take to get into paradise, right?

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And then these things rapidly get out of control.

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Lowry notes, we get things like god kings in Egypt and mass enslaved populations because they've subjected themselves to the permission slips of somebody who can tell a good story about what an afterlife consists of or what your role or meaning in this earth is.

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And so it's very understandable that we have abstract thoughts that govern the way that we operate in the world. But metacognitively, maybe it's helpful, as you know, if we can see the value in suffering and escape from those and enter a much, much harsher but realer world in which we're free from the oppression of people who are telling us a nice story.

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Yeah. Yeah. So that's like, that's the allure of the woke mind virus, right? Which was that you, if you ascribe to that theory and everyone else around you does, then you are able to have status that is solely based upon something that you identify with, not that you earn meritocratically.

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And you can see, by the way, and you mentioned this, by the way, how fast that's cooperation at scale.

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If you have this type of ideology that people, they want to ascribe to this type of abstract order because most people will not be the best.

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Like just by definition, most people will not be on top of the hierarchy.

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Almost all of them will be on the lower rungs.

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And so it's very attractive to want to join in, to want to be part of something that delineates power based upon trust or based upon this mutual signaling.

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Virtue signaling, I guess, would be the way that we talk about it.

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with the example that I'm giving.

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Yeah.

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But what happens?

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I just want to reassert that that's such a great example,

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like a woke mind virus or the woke set of beliefs in that it does,

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it conveys abstract power to people based on an idea of intersectionality

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that the number, that however many boxes you can check on the victim scorecard

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of race and unprivileged race, unprivileged gender, unprivileged class,

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that's the within that abstract power-based hierarchy it conveys power to you based on

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those things so there's somebody who has defined um a way of settling disputes in that way is based

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on an idea of intersectionality do you have a set of protect or unprivileged disprivileged whatever

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characteristics i think that's a great example of what we might see as a form of abstract power that

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is susceptible with the prick of a pen to disappearing once people realize that it's

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not based on on a real thing that physical power can supplant that exactly yeah that's exactly where

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i was going with that which was that you can like that again that all works until it doesn't work

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and when it doesn't work and you you said um one of the things you said was that there's like

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one of the downsides of this was that there's a possibility of oppression and violence down the

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road, but I would argue that there is a guarantee of oppression and that there is a guarantee

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because in these systems of abstracting based on rank, like what is rank?

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Rank is like enforced oppression, right?

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So it's this person has this thing and you dare not challenge it, you know, lest, you

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know, lest you face violence, right?

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Because otherwise you would challenge it, you know, and that's, I can't remember who

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it was.

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I heard somebody talk about like why the woke mind virus spread so rapidly throughout Hollywood.

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And they said it wasn't because people believed it.

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It was just because they feared retribution.

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And like that's violence.

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Like it's violence inherent.

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By the way, this, when I was reading this, what this made me think of was the scene in Monty Python when the king comes along.

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And he sees the two peasants and he's like, you old woman.

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And he's like, I'm not a woman.

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I'm Dennis.

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You know, like first thing, hilarious, because this was 35 years ago and somebody's making

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a joke about misgendering somebody.

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Awesome.

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But also goes on to say, you know, like, I'm the king of the Britons.

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And they're like, who are the Britons?

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He's like, we're all Britons.

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Like, I'm your king.

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He's like, I didn't vote for you.

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Like, you're not my king.

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You know, like, you know, like just because you say you are, just because you wear this

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hat, just because you have this patch, you that other people recognize, see how far that

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gets you when somebody comes in and chooses not to recognize that and chooses to instead

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enforce their own hierarchy with power.

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And it just, it is, this is, this is that imagination.

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This is that illusion.

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And it just bursts, right?

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Yeah.

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By the way, well, let me finish.

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Yeah, yeah.

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The reason why I say this is all, it's not why it's a guarantee, why it's not a possibility of oppression, it's not a possibility, blah, blah, blah.

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It's because it requires trust.

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Trust is an attack vector.

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When you trust something, then you open yourself up to that trust being broken, et cetera, however you want to put it.

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But the way that I think about this, and Jason talks about this.

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He grew up, his grandpa is a cattle farmer, cattle rancher, and we grew up with cattle.

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And one thing that I can tell you about cattle is that if you put cattle into a pasture and there is a hole in the fence, they will find it.

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It's not a possibility.

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It is a guarantee.

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They will find it and they will get out.

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And what is that?

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Like that's an attack vector.

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Like that's an escape valve, right?

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Yeah.

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Anyways, that's just like, that's the analogy I just kept thinking of when I was going through

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this part, which is like cows, cows get out.

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Yeah.

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No, I was get out.

378
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No, definitely.

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An abstract power-based hierarchy is going to have to, I mean, the rules that it constructs

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are kind of written on water in a sense, in that even if they're committed to paper, they're

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always subject to revision by whatever authority wrote the rules.

382
00:39:54,118 --> 00:39:59,838
And there's always going to be, as Jason notes in here, kind of manipulable parts of the rules

383
00:39:59,838 --> 00:40:00,538
or code.

384
00:40:00,538 --> 00:40:06,758
He's later going to go on in the next chapter to talk about software as the new form of written law, I believe.

385
00:40:07,238 --> 00:40:13,818
But in any case, the rule of law is always manipulable, exploitable, with some sort of open texture that's going to allow for a new interpretation.

386
00:40:14,118 --> 00:40:21,558
Any abstract power-based hierarchy is you state that it's oppressive, and I think that Lowry agrees with you.

387
00:40:21,558 --> 00:40:27,818
So he kind of gives like, how can you kind of generally describe an abstract power-based dominance hierarchy?

388
00:40:27,818 --> 00:40:37,518
Or how would you go about creating one if you were an innovative storyteller and you wanted to, you know, enslave in that sense a set of humans, right?

389
00:40:37,578 --> 00:40:42,278
You would first construct, delineate a desired state of being, he says.

390
00:40:42,378 --> 00:40:50,238
You construct like this category of the saved, the category of the worthy, the category of the one, the patriotic, whatever it is.

391
00:40:50,238 --> 00:40:59,098
you first define the valuable state of being. And then two, you note that there's a gatekeeper

392
00:40:59,098 --> 00:41:05,878
who can determine who satisfies the criteria to ascend to that desired state of being.

393
00:41:06,438 --> 00:41:10,758
So first, you create a gated area defined by the desired state of being, and then you

394
00:41:10,758 --> 00:41:16,078
nominate a gatekeeper who's going to let people in and out. You're patriotic, you're not. You're

395
00:41:16,078 --> 00:41:20,498
worthy, you're not. You're saved, you're not. That's, in a nutshell, an abstract power-based

396
00:41:20,498 --> 00:41:26,118
hierarchy is a gated heir and a gatekeeper. As we talked about last time, the word paradise

397
00:41:26,118 --> 00:41:31,498
etymologically means walled garden, and it is about adjudicating who is allowed in and who

398
00:41:31,498 --> 00:41:36,178
is defined as much by who's allowed in as who is not allowed in. And so you have, again,

399
00:41:36,178 --> 00:41:40,958
to your point, that all of these types of gated structures with a gatekeeper who gives out

400
00:41:40,958 --> 00:41:47,338
permission slips is inherently oppressive. Lowry says, as soon as a population nominates someone to

401
00:41:47,338 --> 00:41:52,678
be their gatekeeper, they become subservient to that gatekeeper. In parentheses, then,

402
00:41:52,678 --> 00:41:58,378
as a side note, this could be one reason why a popular mantra within the Bitcoin community is to

403
00:41:58,378 --> 00:42:04,078
slay your heroes, because they instinctively recognize this passive aggressive power projection

404
00:42:04,078 --> 00:42:08,858
technique of nominating a gatekeeper who can then give out permission slips to those who are allowed

405
00:42:08,858 --> 00:42:14,778
to ascend to the desired state of being. And so in a sense, every abstract power-based hierarchy

406
00:42:14,778 --> 00:42:19,438
is oppressive in that sense. We should be acknowledged, though, that we live in an

407
00:42:19,438 --> 00:42:24,738
abstract power-based hierarchy modified to a certain extent. We have a constitution in the

408
00:42:24,738 --> 00:42:30,938
United States that defines a set of abstract powers, who gets to determine who has what

409
00:42:30,938 --> 00:42:35,338
piece of property. All of this is underlied, finally, by the use of force in the United

410
00:42:35,338 --> 00:42:41,098
States military. And we all, we have a second amendment to this kind of this clause that was

411
00:42:41,098 --> 00:42:47,818
hard earned that allows us to potentially break up our own government if it becomes too centralized,

412
00:42:48,038 --> 00:42:51,718
oppressive and powerful. But I just want to note that we are part of an abstract power-based

413
00:42:51,718 --> 00:42:56,878
hierarchy and we can acknowledge that maybe, as you say, maybe those all are to a certain extent

414
00:42:56,878 --> 00:43:02,058
oppressive by the very structure. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, the most clear part of that is like

415
00:43:02,058 --> 00:43:07,218
So we'll get off the woke mind virus thing quick because it's gross.

416
00:43:07,858 --> 00:43:11,978
But how fast it spread, like really fast.

417
00:43:12,278 --> 00:43:18,718
You could go back maybe, I don't know, 2012-ish or something like that.

418
00:43:18,718 --> 00:43:29,258
I listened to somebody link it from Occupy Wall Street to E2 to Black Lives Matter or something like that.

419
00:43:29,258 --> 00:43:32,258
Like all these different causes where it just kind of kept accelerating.

420
00:43:32,598 --> 00:43:33,718
I found that really interesting.

421
00:43:34,038 --> 00:43:38,858
Just the apex of the woke mind virus was ideas are dangerous, right?

422
00:43:39,078 --> 00:43:46,998
Was that words, thoughts, abstract thought is dangerous because it challenges the hierarchy that exists.

423
00:43:47,598 --> 00:43:53,458
And therefore you can't, you know, we literally were living through that 1984 scenario,

424
00:43:53,458 --> 00:43:58,838
the thought police and the censorship, you know, the truth, ministry of truth.

425
00:43:59,258 --> 00:44:00,578
and all of that.

426
00:44:00,758 --> 00:44:03,318
But see how quickly it's popped.

427
00:44:03,858 --> 00:44:07,178
Like, I mean, the way that you know it was like you can look at the,

428
00:44:07,178 --> 00:44:11,738
you can look at the viewership levels of like traditional media since the election.

429
00:44:11,898 --> 00:44:17,518
Like they were already in a steep downward decline and had been for like 30 years.

430
00:44:17,758 --> 00:44:21,258
But since then, it's like gone.

431
00:44:21,578 --> 00:44:23,318
Like gone, gone, gone, right?

432
00:44:23,558 --> 00:44:25,018
It's just, it doesn't exist.

433
00:44:25,078 --> 00:44:26,578
And people are walking around.

434
00:44:26,578 --> 00:44:38,098
And this is why, by the way, I think it's so perfectly timely impression that we're having these discussions right now is because you have so many people right now that are just walking around.

435
00:44:38,598 --> 00:44:42,018
Mark Andreessen, yesterday I heard him on a podcast, you know, Morning in America.

436
00:44:42,498 --> 00:44:51,598
This is hearkening back to that day of like, let's shake off whatever it was that was this cold, dark shroud that laid upon us.

437
00:44:51,598 --> 00:45:13,358
But I wanted to go back. You made a point about the rules change. And that's really something so dangerous about dangerous. I don't know. But it's so fallible about the abstract hierarchies is that the rules can change. Did you ever read the book? What's the matter with Kansas? Do you remember that?

438
00:45:13,358 --> 00:45:23,658
Thomas Frank, that was sort of like a diagnosis of why Kansas is sometimes votes Democrat, although it's very conservative in nature.

439
00:45:23,758 --> 00:45:25,118
Is that the thought or that thesis?

440
00:45:25,978 --> 00:45:29,338
Well, I guess maybe that's maybe that's what his intent was.

441
00:45:29,338 --> 00:45:39,618
When I read it, what I got from it was he was questioning, like, come Kansas has not become more politically liberal like everyone else.

442
00:45:39,618 --> 00:45:49,778
And I was thinking, like, I remember I was like, well, if you take, like, the state and, like, the positions that they held in 1860, they were just consistent.

443
00:45:50,158 --> 00:45:52,538
I mean, they were just kind of stayed the same.

444
00:45:52,618 --> 00:45:56,318
I mean, they certainly moved left, but they just didn't move extreme left.

445
00:45:57,078 --> 00:46:08,898
And it was like, it was this weird thing because, like, that's kind of, again, part of, like, the woke mind thing, which is that it was calling out, like, hey, you didn't change with us.

446
00:46:08,898 --> 00:46:12,558
Like we changed all the rules and you didn't change with us.

447
00:46:12,658 --> 00:46:14,378
You just stayed consistent.

448
00:46:14,598 --> 00:46:16,018
And so you're the problem.

449
00:46:16,438 --> 00:46:16,518
Yeah.

450
00:46:16,618 --> 00:46:16,838
Yeah.

451
00:46:17,018 --> 00:46:20,638
You know, you're the, you're the, you're the thumb sticking up, you know, you're the,

452
00:46:20,638 --> 00:46:23,718
you're the, uh, you're the nail sticking up that must be hammered.

453
00:46:23,718 --> 00:46:32,018
But the flip side of that is war warfare is, it's just, it's merely the way that we've,

454
00:46:32,018 --> 00:46:39,338
we've always competed because there did not exist a non-lethal means of power projection

455
00:46:39,338 --> 00:46:46,018
competitions like but war has rules with you know military age males no women no children

456
00:46:46,018 --> 00:46:53,778
no elderly you respect you respect you resist using certain types of weapons certain types of

457
00:46:53,778 --> 00:46:59,458
strategies and those that break the rules like they are viewed as dishonorable they're viewed

458
00:46:59,458 --> 00:47:05,738
as criminals, they're viewed as evil, and they are. They are because they broke the rules. They

459
00:47:05,738 --> 00:47:14,638
violated this inviolable thing that measures on, I guess you call it, yeah, I mean, power projection

460
00:47:14,638 --> 00:47:26,938
is truly meritocratic. Despite the tragedy of war, few of the participants in it are ever of

461
00:47:26,938 --> 00:47:35,378
the mindset to win at all costs. And we know this because we've had nuclear weapons for 70,

462
00:47:35,958 --> 00:47:44,318
80, 80 years, 80 years. And I mean, if that was the case, then every time somebody had a little

463
00:47:44,318 --> 00:47:50,498
dispute, they'd be like, boom, like mushroom cloud, you're done, right? We respect the rules

464
00:47:50,498 --> 00:47:56,598
of the competition. And so I think warfare, I really like I'm coming to view as I read this

465
00:47:56,598 --> 00:48:06,778
book, I'm coming to view warfare as not a permanent thing, but merely the physical embodiment

466
00:48:06,778 --> 00:48:12,618
of something that we had yet to be able to put into the abstract world.

467
00:48:12,878 --> 00:48:15,038
Like, now put it in cyberspace.

468
00:48:15,258 --> 00:48:15,498
Yeah.

469
00:48:15,958 --> 00:48:21,498
And think, and he'll make this case, which actually I've been saving it, so like, I'm

470
00:48:21,498 --> 00:48:25,658
literally just reading this chapter by chapter, I'm not going all the way, but I think he'll

471
00:48:25,658 --> 00:48:31,638
make this case is that we will go that way. Like we, we naturally went to warfare because that's

472
00:48:31,638 --> 00:48:37,178
what made sense, but we also naturally had rules because that's what made sense. And we, we went

473
00:48:37,178 --> 00:48:42,498
to those things and I think we'll naturally go to power projection competitions in cyberspace

474
00:48:42,498 --> 00:48:50,178
because it makes sense because all wars are wars of attrition. Like all wars are wars of attrition.

475
00:48:50,178 --> 00:48:55,918
It's just one side quits when it no longer sees a positive or acceptable benefit-to-cost ratio.

476
00:48:56,798 --> 00:49:03,558
Wars are fought because they are beneficial because to the winner, there is a high benefit-to-cost ratio.

477
00:49:04,518 --> 00:49:13,358
There's a positive and, you know, accepted, but it's for the one who just hangs in the longest, who's there till the end.

478
00:49:13,358 --> 00:49:21,678
And the difference that we have now is that we have wars that will not be,

479
00:49:21,798 --> 00:49:23,638
cyberspace will not be wars of attrition.

480
00:49:23,838 --> 00:49:28,878
Wars in cyberspace will be wars of accretion because the participants in those battles

481
00:49:28,878 --> 00:49:34,318
will be seeking cheaper and cheaper power, free energy,

482
00:49:34,518 --> 00:49:37,598
in order to power their competition so that they can stay in it longer

483
00:49:37,598 --> 00:49:40,518
because all Bitcoin mining is is a war of attrition.

484
00:49:40,958 --> 00:49:42,778
It's power and attrition.

485
00:49:42,778 --> 00:49:47,398
Like when the price goes down and it's no longer profitable for you to mine, you have to stop mining.

486
00:49:47,598 --> 00:49:50,158
And it forces you the volatility again.

487
00:49:50,638 --> 00:50:06,376
And this is this is what Saylor is teaching the world right now is that volatility is beneficial Because volatility it shakes out the weak it rewards the strong it shakes out the inefficient it rewards the efficient

488
00:50:06,936 --> 00:50:07,096
Yeah.

489
00:50:08,116 --> 00:50:16,516
It's the game, like, this is the aim, like, the point of the game is not to win, the point of the game is to keep playing.

490
00:50:16,516 --> 00:50:20,156
Like, this is what I loved about baseball growing up.

491
00:50:20,156 --> 00:50:24,416
like so much different from all the other sports is that there's no clock in baseball.

492
00:50:24,416 --> 00:50:28,716
At least there wasn't until they ruined it and they put a clock on the pitcher, right?

493
00:50:28,716 --> 00:50:31,556
I think that the point of war is to win war.

494
00:50:31,836 --> 00:50:33,596
It's not, I mean, it's not-

495
00:50:33,596 --> 00:50:33,836
No, you're right.

496
00:50:33,916 --> 00:50:34,196
You're right.

497
00:50:34,276 --> 00:50:34,656
Yeah, that.

498
00:50:34,916 --> 00:50:35,076
Yeah.

499
00:50:35,296 --> 00:50:40,336
But I was also going to say, like, to back up a step, I do think that even the rules of warfare

500
00:50:40,336 --> 00:50:48,116
are an abstract, our attempt to impose abstractly restrictions on what otherwise, like, and so

501
00:50:48,116 --> 00:50:50,336
So war has no limitations.

502
00:50:50,556 --> 00:50:58,096
The limitation to war is only now the threat of mass extinction because we went past the kinetic ceiling.

503
00:50:58,616 --> 00:51:05,836
We now have arms so powerful that it's practically useless to use them because there's this idea of mutually assured destruction.

504
00:51:05,836 --> 00:51:09,936
If we deploy strategic nuclear arms, then other countries will do so as well, those that have them.

505
00:51:10,136 --> 00:51:12,336
And so it's just there's no reason to do them.

506
00:51:12,416 --> 00:51:15,696
They've scaled ourselves out of kinetic warfare, so to speak.

507
00:51:15,696 --> 00:51:21,176
And that doesn't mean that kinetic stalemate is always still going to be there.

508
00:51:21,376 --> 00:51:23,036
It's never going away.

509
00:51:23,036 --> 00:51:40,956
And so, you know, if we begin fighting wars in cyberspace through human out of the loop energy competitions, then which Bitcoin is could be an example of, there will still always be the need for that kinetic stalemate.

510
00:51:41,096 --> 00:51:44,136
Because humans, again, it's a winner take all.

511
00:51:44,136 --> 00:52:10,776
And if we would only, I mean, we can transpose the continuation of that war into cyberspace because we've arrived at stalemate as far as kinetic warfare go, but that stalemate's still there. And this other type of war we may fight in cyberspace will maybe be a funneling for certain types of competitions related to specifically like who is going to have the reserve currency or something like that.

512
00:52:10,776 --> 00:52:30,356
But I think, I mean, we're going to go there, I think, in the next two chapters, as far as like, how far Lowry's thesis go. Is this an end all to war? Or is it a simply a statement of a new type of war in cyberspace with, of course, kinetic warfare always still, as a nuclear stalemate and existential threat looming over us?

513
00:52:30,356 --> 00:52:47,076
And I think it's going to be that, the latter, that we're still always going to have the possibility of recourse to mutually assured destruction. And maybe it's a release valve to have wars in cyberspace that are mutually assured preservation, as Lowry entitles a chapter here.

514
00:52:47,076 --> 00:52:55,196
But there's always still going to be those forms of rules because – or those two forms of war because there cannot be any rules to warfare.

515
00:52:55,556 --> 00:53:01,896
It's simply power projection and not subject to abstract qualification, at least if you want to win that war.

516
00:53:01,896 --> 00:53:09,156
So the point of war is to win, but the point of winning the war is to keep playing the game so that your ideology can continue to live.

517
00:53:09,156 --> 00:53:29,316
And I think, I guess that would be kind of the point that I'm making, is that if you scale that out, like, yes, you want to win the war, but the reason you want to win the war is that not only are you fighting over resources, but you're fighting over resources, the perspective of different ideologies, because you're going to do different things.

518
00:53:29,316 --> 00:53:44,496
Like, you're going to, I can't verify this, I can't say this for certain, but it doesn't seem to me that different ideologies go to war with each other, or that similar ideologies go to war with each other.

519
00:53:44,616 --> 00:53:49,496
It seems to be capitalist versus communist, fascist, socialist.

520
00:53:49,496 --> 00:54:02,356
It seems to be that it's always, right, that it's always, this is our ideology, this is your ideology, we feel that we can do better with these resources than you can, therefore we're going to compete with you over them.

521
00:54:02,356 --> 00:54:14,936
I think, again, I think this makes sense because, so yes, you can disregard the rules of war, but it is becoming more and more uncommon to do so.

522
00:54:14,936 --> 00:54:22,916
Like, everybody wants to talk about how horrific Hitler was, but go back a couple thousand years and Hitler was just a dude.

523
00:54:23,216 --> 00:54:31,456
He was just your regular, average, savage, horrible person because that's what it took to survive then.

524
00:54:32,236 --> 00:54:39,496
The difference was that we had all been on this gradual trend, like of the saying that trajectory is more important than position.

525
00:54:39,956 --> 00:54:41,236
Like, where are we going?

526
00:54:41,596 --> 00:54:44,456
It doesn't matter really where we are, but where are we going?

527
00:54:44,936 --> 00:54:54,316
That's like from James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, where he talks about, you know, if you do these habits every single day, you'll get 1% better every single day.

528
00:54:54,896 --> 00:54:59,596
1% better every single day is 37% better in a year, and then it grows exponentially.

529
00:54:59,836 --> 00:55:06,416
Like, we're not capable of perceiving exponential numbers, exponential growth.

530
00:55:06,536 --> 00:55:09,836
It's just not something that our brains can do because they think linearly.

531
00:55:09,836 --> 00:55:17,016
Which is why, by the way, it's why when the debt hit a trillion, nobody can perceive that.

532
00:55:17,096 --> 00:55:19,476
We can barely perceive what a million is.

533
00:55:19,776 --> 00:55:21,056
That's pretty hard.

534
00:55:21,756 --> 00:55:25,776
And then you get a billion, and then it goes to a trillion, and it literally is just like magic money.

535
00:55:25,896 --> 00:55:26,436
It's gone.

536
00:55:26,696 --> 00:55:27,636
Nobody has any idea.

537
00:55:27,736 --> 00:55:28,276
Nobody cares.

538
00:55:28,556 --> 00:55:29,416
Like, eh, whatever.

539
00:55:30,416 --> 00:55:36,736
So we were trending on this path of more and more and more and more civilized warfare.

540
00:55:36,736 --> 00:55:40,516
And yes, there are going to be anomalies in that.

541
00:55:40,696 --> 00:55:43,796
There are going to be, you know, there's going to be a Hitler.

542
00:55:43,996 --> 00:55:48,556
There's going to be a genocide, a genocidal warlord here and there.

543
00:55:48,656 --> 00:55:58,236
But when you look in the big picture, when you scale out, it's like, yes, there really has never been a more peaceful time to live, generally speaking.

544
00:55:58,236 --> 00:56:11,136
And we continue to get more peaceful over time because we continue to find ways to project power and compete for resources that are getting closer and closer to abstraction.

545
00:56:12,096 --> 00:56:13,676
And now we're going to be able to do it.

546
00:56:13,676 --> 00:56:28,996
And so, like, think about, like, there will be this short time frame, I think, where it's not recognized of the power, but the power of proof of work, I think, will very rapid, like, right now.

547
00:56:28,996 --> 00:56:38,996
Now, Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy are very rapidly making known to the world the power of proof of work.

548
00:56:38,996 --> 00:56:45,556
As they leapfrog from a $500 million company to a $90 billion company in four years,

549
00:56:45,716 --> 00:56:51,396
and every Redditor on WallStreetBets is getting their face ripped off trying to short this thing

550
00:56:51,396 --> 00:56:54,016
because they do not understand it, because they haven't done the work,

551
00:56:54,016 --> 00:57:00,516
because they don't understand what happens when absolute scarcity meets infinite demand.

552
00:57:00,756 --> 00:57:02,836
We've never seen anything like this before.

553
00:57:02,956 --> 00:57:04,736
There are no comparisons for it.

554
00:57:06,236 --> 00:57:13,136
And so I do think that, yeah, there will be this violent, probably, objection in the short term.

555
00:57:13,476 --> 00:57:17,956
But when you look at wars in the past, especially modern war,

556
00:57:17,956 --> 00:57:42,236
Like what allowed modern warfare to become so outsized to truly have world wars was fiat money, was the idea that we could create this money out of nothing without or against the will of the people whose wealth we were taking and then mortgage the future of their children, their grandchildren.

557
00:57:42,236 --> 00:57:45,676
And, you know, God knows how many, how many.

558
00:57:46,296 --> 00:57:46,896
Yeah.

559
00:57:46,896 --> 00:57:47,396
Yeah.

560
00:57:47,956 --> 00:57:48,996
Yeah.

561
00:57:48,996 --> 00:58:01,056
In order to go into the future and pull this capital back to the present and then turn that capital into power and project it upon somebody else.

562
00:58:01,056 --> 00:58:16,736
Like that's the only thing that allows for World War II and World War I to happen in Vietnam and Afghanistan was that if you had to go to the citizens and ask them for that funding, they would not give it.

563
00:58:16,736 --> 00:58:19,516
And they wouldn't give it because they can't.

564
00:58:19,676 --> 00:58:26,396
Like they literally would have to reach generations into the future in order to pull that productivity back.

565
00:58:26,656 --> 00:58:30,816
So it's just, you know, on the money side, yes, horrifically destructive.

566
00:58:31,456 --> 00:58:32,696
I think it's awful.

567
00:58:33,056 --> 00:58:35,656
Like I think that's the true horror and the true tragedy.

568
00:58:35,916 --> 00:58:42,416
But we do have a system now that exists that you can't steal from the future.

569
00:58:43,096 --> 00:58:48,436
Satoshi buried Bitcoin in time, not in place.

570
00:58:49,156 --> 00:58:54,376
And so there's no way to reach out 30 years from now

571
00:58:54,376 --> 00:58:59,296
and pull Bitcoin from 30 years from now into now.

572
00:58:59,416 --> 00:59:02,656
Like the only thing that you can do is just tick-tock next block.

573
00:59:02,656 --> 00:59:06,436
By the way, I had never heard that quote, slay your heroes.

574
00:59:07,416 --> 00:59:09,256
And so I was kind of curious about that.

575
00:59:09,256 --> 00:59:39,236
But anyways, I've been rambled for a bit.

576
00:59:39,256 --> 00:59:41,476
in some larger story or struggle.

577
00:59:41,776 --> 00:59:44,256
Virtuous to a degree that is laudatory

578
00:59:44,256 --> 00:59:45,076
or something like that.

579
00:59:45,136 --> 00:59:47,076
But it's an abstract category.

580
00:59:47,276 --> 00:59:48,696
If you conceive of somebody

581
00:59:48,696 --> 00:59:50,136
and when you conceive of them,

582
00:59:50,376 --> 00:59:51,916
there's a warm glow, a halo,

583
00:59:52,476 --> 00:59:53,316
something like that,

584
00:59:53,376 --> 00:59:55,076
you are seeing a thing that is not real.

585
00:59:55,216 --> 00:59:57,236
You are matching a pattern onto reality

586
00:59:57,236 --> 00:59:59,096
and not verifying it

587
00:59:59,096 --> 01:00:00,536
because you can only know that person

588
01:00:00,536 --> 01:00:03,556
to the most barest cuticle degree

589
01:00:03,556 --> 01:00:05,136
of knowing them,

590
01:00:05,236 --> 01:00:06,736
only seeing what they manifest

591
01:00:06,736 --> 01:00:08,136
in the realm that you see them.

592
01:00:08,136 --> 01:00:14,396
so if you have heroes slay them slay the category that they are slay the hero from them see them as

593
01:00:14,396 --> 01:00:20,316
humans see them as people who say what they say and do what they do but are merely humans don't

594
01:00:20,316 --> 01:00:26,296
superimpose upon them something that they're not and give to them the power to grant you permission

595
01:00:26,296 --> 01:00:32,256
to enter the heroic realm if you act as they do or something like that and so just another way

596
01:00:32,256 --> 01:00:38,396
slay your heroes, I think is a perfect way to say slay the abstract ideas that you see superimposed

597
01:00:38,396 --> 01:00:43,896
on reality so you can metacognitively, so that you can step back out of your thoughts as much

598
01:00:43,896 --> 01:00:49,896
as possible and see your thoughts in reality and so see them as separate from reality.

599
01:00:50,596 --> 01:00:54,096
That's not to say that you're not going to sense that other people are heroes. You're not going to

600
01:00:54,096 --> 01:01:00,916
feel that positive buzz, but step back from that and try to see reality as it is. See it in the

601
01:01:00,916 --> 01:01:08,376
most basic terms of matter and energy, of watts, of power, and things like that. That's a healthier

602
01:01:08,376 --> 01:01:14,076
way, I think, to see things. This is kind of a longer quote, but I think it's worth reading in

603
01:01:14,076 --> 01:01:18,356
this context. In that Lowry, I'll just read the quote. Maybe it's not really what I think it is.

604
01:01:18,476 --> 01:01:23,156
There are stoic lessons from which many military officers like the author have learned to accept.

605
01:01:23,336 --> 01:01:28,336
And these are the blunt logical reasoning goes something like this. Your opponent's strength may

606
01:01:28,336 --> 01:01:32,376
not be the only thing to blame for your losses. Your own physical weakness, incompetence, or

607
01:01:32,376 --> 01:01:37,136
complacency could just as easily be blamed for your losses. Your opponent's inclinations to be

608
01:01:37,136 --> 01:01:42,416
physically aggressive may not be exclusively to blame for your losses. Your disinclination to be

609
01:01:42,416 --> 01:01:46,716
physically aggressive at appropriate times and places could just as easily be blamed for your

610
01:01:46,716 --> 01:01:51,876
losses. Your fear and aversion to using physical power could just as easily be blamed for your

611
01:01:51,876 --> 01:01:58,176
losses. Your trust in untrustworthy people or your reliance on imaginary power, which doesn't

612
01:01:58,176 --> 01:02:03,516
physically defend you could just as easily easily be blamed for your losses so if you don't want to

613
01:02:03,516 --> 01:02:08,796
experience losses or become oppressed it stands to reason that you should consider taking

614
01:02:08,796 --> 01:02:14,956
responsibility for your own weakness ignorance and incompetence rather than rather than assigning

615
01:02:14,956 --> 01:02:20,436
the blame to other people if you don't fight for what you value then you will be devoured like

616
01:02:20,436 --> 01:02:27,016
everything else in nature and i think he's talking there about the need to stand up within oppressive

617
01:02:27,016 --> 01:02:32,396
abstract power hierarchies. And that, again, that's the only thing, that willingness to stand

618
01:02:32,396 --> 01:02:37,496
up is the only thing that keeps an abstract power hierarchy from becoming oppressive when the

619
01:02:37,496 --> 01:02:42,796
populace is armed, when the populace sees with clear eyes that the permission-giving structure

620
01:02:42,796 --> 01:02:49,836
is not, you know, it's not divine, not magical. It's thereby our willing it to be there. So that's

621
01:02:49,836 --> 01:02:54,996
the stoic lesson that he gives. I don't know that that relates, again, to slaying your heroes, but

622
01:02:54,996 --> 01:03:00,136
And there is, it's akin to it, I think, in the need to see with clear eyes.

623
01:03:00,136 --> 01:03:09,016
And again, just taking a step back, just being aware that we are part of abstract power hierarchies levels you up.

624
01:03:09,136 --> 01:03:24,216
It gives you a superpower because once you begin to see that you are part of a permission-granting structure, all the rights and privileges that you would want to attain to in a certain sense are granted you by society, that pulls a bit back.

625
01:03:24,216 --> 01:03:29,196
your permission granting the provision granting this to yourself because you can say i don't want

626
01:03:29,196 --> 01:03:36,456
to follow along i don't agree with that and i'm going to not feel disvalued because i don't have

627
01:03:36,456 --> 01:03:41,036
the title or rank or something like that and i'll just read one more quote and if you want to respond

628
01:03:41,036 --> 01:03:45,836
to you can because i think it's relevant here this is lowry saying by trying to create systems where

629
01:03:45,836 --> 01:03:51,296
we replace physical power with abstract power in order to reduce injury and intraspecies fratis

630
01:03:51,296 --> 01:03:56,916
fratricide, human society ended up creating a system where we fight and injure each other at

631
01:03:56,916 --> 01:04:04,376
unprecedented scale for access to abstract power. That is that, he says, with title comes entitlement.

632
01:04:04,376 --> 01:04:09,636
And so we begin to fight for things that don't matter for abstract power. Like, I mean,

633
01:04:09,796 --> 01:04:15,656
who gives an F, right? If you have title or rank, I mean, yeah, it grants you power within an

634
01:04:15,656 --> 01:04:21,736
abstract structure. But if you see clearly, if you see that you are an animal subject to

635
01:04:21,736 --> 01:04:26,436
the evolutionary struggle that all animals are subject to, and that power projection is what

636
01:04:26,436 --> 01:04:33,296
matters, then you can not buy into abstract power hierarchies and buy into real physical

637
01:04:33,296 --> 01:04:38,616
power projection dominance hierarchies like Bitcoin, right? If that's what it is, like if it

638
01:04:38,616 --> 01:04:43,516
is a proof of work is that type of real world instantiation of physical power projection,

639
01:04:43,516 --> 01:04:49,776
You can accept yourself from abstract power and begin to project power in a very real way.

640
01:04:49,776 --> 01:04:51,216
Do deadlifts, right?

641
01:04:51,576 --> 01:04:51,856
There we go.

642
01:04:51,876 --> 01:04:52,276
That's him.

643
01:04:53,096 --> 01:05:02,016
So if you can slay your heroes, by the way, what you read, like that quote from him, it made me think of Dr. Willink's book, Extreme Ownership.

644
01:05:02,456 --> 01:05:02,716
Yeah.

645
01:05:02,716 --> 01:05:13,296
And also, you know, takes you back to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which both kind of are saying the exact same thing, one a bit more wordy than the other.

646
01:05:13,516 --> 01:05:15,476
and intended for public consumption.

647
01:05:16,156 --> 01:05:19,396
But both saying, look, control what you can,

648
01:05:19,656 --> 01:05:22,996
and that which is out of your control, don't fret about it.

649
01:05:23,196 --> 01:05:27,136
And if you can slay your heroes, what you read about the first quote,

650
01:05:27,876 --> 01:05:33,116
where it's literally saying, you know, hey, maybe it was the thing you didn't do.

651
01:05:33,236 --> 01:05:34,996
Maybe it was the thing that you didn't do.

652
01:05:35,196 --> 01:05:36,796
Maybe it was the thing that you didn't do.

653
01:05:37,036 --> 01:05:38,436
Maybe it's your fault, right?

654
01:05:38,436 --> 01:05:38,676
Yeah.

655
01:05:39,456 --> 01:05:42,376
If you can slay your heroes, you can also slay your villains.

656
01:05:43,516 --> 01:05:44,856
They're the same thing.

657
01:05:45,016 --> 01:05:55,576
They are merely imaginary gods, one evil and one good that you've created that are in front of you that are dictating the way that you live.

658
01:05:56,016 --> 01:06:01,856
And if you can take them down, if you defeat the god, then what does that make you?

659
01:06:02,456 --> 01:06:10,196
It makes you, in your own mind, you don't have to be a god, but you can certainly be in control of your own future.

660
01:06:11,036 --> 01:06:12,756
So whatever it takes to do that, right?

661
01:06:12,756 --> 01:06:25,236
If it's push-ups, if it's running, if it's, you know, it's whatever it takes for you to break out of this idea that you are within the realm of someone else's power.

662
01:06:25,576 --> 01:06:31,236
It's so, like, it's so obvious when you see people break out of that.

663
01:06:31,496 --> 01:06:35,816
Like, when you see somebody break out of a toxic relationship, there's, like, they just flip.

664
01:06:36,156 --> 01:06:38,736
And they're like, oh, I'm not giving you power anymore.

665
01:06:38,736 --> 01:06:42,596
And they realize, they're like, you never took power from me.

666
01:06:42,596 --> 01:06:54,536
I gave it to you. And when I stop, when I stop giving you that power, you can no learn, you can't control me. You can't be a Lord over me. I don't recognize your authority.

667
01:06:54,856 --> 01:06:55,236
Yeah. Yeah.

668
01:06:57,696 --> 01:07:01,076
You, you exist on your own and you stand on your own.

669
01:07:01,076 --> 01:07:11,956
Yeah. Yeah. That's one way that Lowry says that we can deny power to an abstract power structure or to any structure is to just not value the resource over which it adjudicates or gives permission to access.

670
01:07:11,956 --> 01:07:21,416
So if you, for example, fiat money, if you don't want the value that that has to offer, then that whole abstract power-based structure has no power over you.

671
01:07:21,656 --> 01:07:37,336
And so if the category of villain or the toxic relationship, if you don't want what that relationship has to offer, you could just refuse to like whatever abstract power is conferred by you buying into that whole hallucination is totally dissipated.

672
01:07:37,336 --> 01:07:45,496
these abstract power hierarchies have imaginary rules with imaginary ranks they create imaginary

673
01:07:45,496 --> 01:07:54,616
gods then they use imaginary money to create real tragedy like you know real world changing

674
01:07:54,616 --> 01:08:02,136
horrific tragedy and nature is just truly undefeated like entropy is always going to win

675
01:08:02,136 --> 01:08:04,036
there's nothing that you can do to stop it.

676
01:08:04,216 --> 01:08:08,256
Following nature's rules appears to be the best way to do it.

677
01:08:08,396 --> 01:08:11,176
And again, so back to the theme of the chapter,

678
01:08:11,376 --> 01:08:13,296
there are no choices, only trade-offs.

679
01:08:13,656 --> 01:08:18,256
So we humans, we discover fire,

680
01:08:18,416 --> 01:08:20,716
and then we're able to pre-digest our food,

681
01:08:20,716 --> 01:08:24,516
which leads to an evolution of our biology

682
01:08:24,516 --> 01:08:30,436
that allows for the expansion of a neocortex that dwarfs any other.

683
01:08:30,676 --> 01:08:31,496
Yeah, yeah.

684
01:08:32,136 --> 01:08:37,296
that exists, right? But what's the trade-off of that? Well, the trade-off is that we're born

685
01:08:37,296 --> 01:08:45,056
very frail, and we require much more time to progress, but it's not only that. It's like

686
01:08:45,056 --> 01:08:50,656
that ability for abstract thought that we gained from the use, you know, that we gained because

687
01:08:50,656 --> 01:08:56,016
fire was able to pre-digest our food and our brains were able to grow, that ability for abstract

688
01:08:56,016 --> 01:09:02,736
thought makes us avoid, you know, all of these things that would otherwise make us powerful,

689
01:09:02,956 --> 01:09:08,536
you know, if you take our primate cousins. So I had this, my parents' farm, we had a rooster.

690
01:09:09,256 --> 01:09:14,316
It's incredibly, like the greatest rooster ever, incredibly violent. I called him the dragon cock.

691
01:09:14,316 --> 01:09:19,696
There was one day he attacked my mom, my dad, and me, got blood out of all of us.

692
01:09:19,696 --> 01:09:24,696
And it made me think straight up, no, no weapons, no technology.

693
01:09:24,696 --> 01:09:29,776
Like what animals, like people talk about this, but like what animals can I actually beat in battle?

694
01:09:29,936 --> 01:09:35,296
And I think the average American loses to an angry house cat and anything up.

695
01:09:35,476 --> 01:09:42,536
I think the most exceptional people in the world lose to a German shepherd and anything up.

696
01:09:42,776 --> 01:09:45,036
And those aren't wild animals.

697
01:09:45,736 --> 01:09:46,696
They're, those are domesticated.

698
01:09:47,416 --> 01:09:48,656
Like they have names.

699
01:09:48,656 --> 01:09:54,236
These are things that – people put furry jackets on things that already wear furry jackets.

700
01:09:55,276 --> 01:10:00,696
As physical predators, we are shockingly low on the totem pole of violence.

701
01:10:01,636 --> 01:10:02,656
Yet because of that –

702
01:10:02,656 --> 01:10:05,036
Of physical power, like violence.

703
01:10:05,496 --> 01:10:05,776
Sorry.

704
01:10:05,996 --> 01:10:08,956
Well, so imparting – using physical power to impart violence.

705
01:10:09,156 --> 01:10:09,316
But yeah.

706
01:10:09,316 --> 01:10:09,576
Yeah, yeah.

707
01:10:09,956 --> 01:10:10,856
No, you're right.

708
01:10:11,176 --> 01:10:12,376
That's a better way to put it.

709
01:10:12,376 --> 01:10:25,496
But because of that capability for abstract thought to plan and strategize, we have tools that project power in ways that they make hunting the most dangerous things in the world.

710
01:10:25,716 --> 01:10:27,896
Sharks, lions, gorillas, snakes.

711
01:10:28,136 --> 01:10:33,936
It's utter child's play to the point that most of them are extinct or on the edge of it.

712
01:10:33,936 --> 01:10:34,516
Yeah, yeah.

713
01:10:34,576 --> 01:10:34,676
Right?

714
01:10:34,916 --> 01:10:42,316
So, like, it is – technology is the ultimate – it's the ultimate democratizer of power.

715
01:10:42,376 --> 01:10:45,396
Like it puts power in the hands of the meek.

716
01:10:45,596 --> 01:10:56,676
And we talked about this in the last episode where I think you kind of brought up the, you know, like it's the, you know, the belief that the meek shall inherit the earth kind of thing.

717
01:10:57,136 --> 01:10:59,236
And I've heard Jordan Peterson talk about that.

718
01:10:59,236 --> 01:11:12,156
He says if you read the actual script and kind of interpret it as close as you can to what maybe the original writing was, it's not the meek shall inherit the earth.

719
01:11:12,156 --> 01:11:32,816
It's more along the lines of you shall become a monster and then you shall learn to tame that monster and be able to walk through the world with your sword sheathed so that you appear to be like, even though you are capable of great violence, that you retard your ability to do so.

720
01:11:32,816 --> 01:11:45,336
And I think it's Lowry makes this point where it's like the greatest warriors are also like those who are capable of imparting the greatest violence.

721
01:11:45,516 --> 01:11:50,756
They are also the ones who are most empathetic to the pain that they inflict.

722
01:11:50,976 --> 01:11:54,076
And it makes sense because they know what it is like.

723
01:11:54,596 --> 01:11:56,236
They know what that violence is.

724
01:11:56,236 --> 01:12:16,396
And so, you know, these tortured lives that the great warriors live, you know, doing this thing that they must do and then living with the results, I think it goes perfectly in line with what Lowry talks about, which was the, you know, the rise of religion.

725
01:12:16,396 --> 01:12:34,156
Like, why did religion come? And it was a justification for us to, you know, basically set the blame and the guilt that we feel for killing things, be it animals or other humans, because I don't think that there is a natural killing instinct to humans.

726
01:12:34,156 --> 01:12:38,596
I could be wrong, but I have my felt experience.

727
01:12:38,956 --> 01:12:42,336
My felt experience as somebody that grew up on a farm,

728
01:12:42,556 --> 01:12:47,336
and I've put down cattle, and I've butchered chickens,

729
01:12:47,636 --> 01:12:51,236
and I've hunted deer, and I've hunted pheasants and stuff.

730
01:12:52,196 --> 01:12:59,956
The wet thwack that a bullet makes when it smacks into the meat of a deer,

731
01:12:59,956 --> 01:13:06,456
I have never, and I've probably harvested, you say harvested, I've probably killed.

732
01:13:06,636 --> 01:13:08,516
I've probably killed 15 or 20 deer.

733
01:13:09,376 --> 01:13:13,796
When that happens, without fail, every single time, I feel something.

734
01:13:13,976 --> 01:13:16,956
And it's something very primordial.

735
01:13:17,776 --> 01:13:20,696
It's something very deep and doesn't feel good.

736
01:13:20,916 --> 01:13:25,256
They talk about buck fever that people get, you know, when you get a big buck in the sights

737
01:13:25,256 --> 01:13:27,916
and you're looking at it and you're getting ready to pull the trigger

738
01:13:27,916 --> 01:13:29,836
and you just for some reason you can't.

739
01:13:30,036 --> 01:13:35,276
And it's because you're, you know, and you'll see it so close and so up front

740
01:13:35,276 --> 01:13:38,996
when you get to the body, when you kill that deer and you go

741
01:13:38,996 --> 01:13:43,016
and you're standing over and looking at this thing that is just perfect.

742
01:13:43,376 --> 01:13:45,016
Like it doesn't have a bad haircut.

743
01:13:45,296 --> 01:13:47,796
It didn't forget to tie its shoes.

744
01:13:47,936 --> 01:13:53,076
It's muscular and it's beautiful and it's laying there cold dead

745
01:13:53,076 --> 01:13:55,016
with its tongue hanging out of its mouth.

746
01:13:55,536 --> 01:13:56,536
And you did that.

747
01:13:56,536 --> 01:14:11,816
And the only way to continue to be able to do that is to kneel down and look up and say, thank you for giving me this sacrifice that you created.

748
01:14:12,056 --> 01:14:12,356
Right, right.

749
01:14:12,736 --> 01:14:13,676
Or something like that.

750
01:14:13,796 --> 01:14:14,216
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

751
01:14:14,816 --> 01:14:16,656
It makes a lot of sense.

752
01:14:16,656 --> 01:14:17,316
It makes a lot of justification.

753
01:14:18,076 --> 01:14:19,196
Yeah, yeah.

754
01:14:19,296 --> 01:14:20,876
I mean, I don't know.

755
01:14:21,136 --> 01:14:22,776
I haven't thought that deeply about it.

756
01:14:22,776 --> 01:14:26,036
No, that's right on with what Lowery's...

757
01:14:26,036 --> 01:14:26,756
Makes a lot of sense.

758
01:14:26,916 --> 01:14:27,316
It does.

759
01:14:27,676 --> 01:14:43,956
And that, you know, as we, I mean, we didn't mention this aspect of chapter four that Lowery talks about the progression from kind of a hunter-gatherer Neolithic type of human to an agrarian society.

760
01:14:43,956 --> 01:15:00,354
And with the agrarian society we see domestication the mass exploitation use and killing of animals who we have kind of brought into the fold brought into the household It one thing to kill a deer tough enough another thing to kill the animal that you

761
01:15:00,354 --> 01:15:07,294
have domesticated over years to have kind of more empathetic traits. And so, yeah, religion develops

762
01:15:07,294 --> 01:15:13,074
as a permission granting abstract power structure so that we can give ourselves permission to do the

763
01:15:13,074 --> 01:15:21,654
violence that we want to do need to do in order to gain resources and yeah that's that's pretty

764
01:15:21,654 --> 01:15:27,954
fascinating and pretty dark cognitive dissonance yeah i mean it's to be able to and that is so

765
01:15:27,954 --> 01:15:33,794
interesting that the apex predator is in order to become the apex predator you need to get the

766
01:15:33,794 --> 01:15:42,094
ability to run like mental simulations of the behaviors of the thing you're tracking so that

767
01:15:42,094 --> 01:15:47,034
from that animal's perspective, you can see the future because how does this predator know that

768
01:15:47,034 --> 01:15:52,954
I'm running this way next? And how does he know to, you know, act this way so that I can't ram him?

769
01:15:53,014 --> 01:15:56,954
How does he know to get in the tree or to get on the high ground? From the prey's perspective,

770
01:15:57,134 --> 01:16:02,454
the apex predator sees the future. And that's our ability just, that's just our ability to run

771
01:16:02,454 --> 01:16:08,714
simulations in our head. But that, that power is also like this recursive curse in that it are,

772
01:16:08,714 --> 01:16:14,454
that power is the power to imagine ourselves as that animal. But once we can imagine ourselves

773
01:16:14,454 --> 01:16:20,494
as that animal moving around, evading us, we also imagine ourselves as that animal dying once we

774
01:16:20,494 --> 01:16:26,514
kill it, deal the killing blow. And then morality develops from that. We need some way to grant

775
01:16:26,514 --> 01:16:33,314
ourselves permission to do that. And so the abstract world begins to overlay over the real

776
01:16:33,314 --> 01:16:39,274
physical world become intermixed. And I mean, it goes that deep into our evolutionary history,

777
01:16:39,714 --> 01:16:47,274
nation states being only like the most recent outgrowth, this scaling up of abstract power,

778
01:16:48,494 --> 01:16:53,394
dominance hierarchy, because they have this ability to create belief systems that people

779
01:16:53,394 --> 01:16:58,094
can buy into. They're not energy intensive, anybody can adopt them, we can use language to

780
01:16:58,094 --> 01:17:04,414
convey them, they just scale up so rapidly under Metcalfe's law. As more people enter into these

781
01:17:04,414 --> 01:17:09,674
belief structures, the value of the whole network increases because people, again, are now

782
01:17:09,674 --> 01:17:14,914
cooperating. They're getting mutual benefit, defense, and things like that. And we just see

783
01:17:14,914 --> 01:17:20,234
this kind of explosion in humans as the apex predator that not only simulates animals in its

784
01:17:20,234 --> 01:17:28,854
minds, but cooperates with other apex predator humans and uses an invisible glue called abstract

785
01:17:28,854 --> 01:17:35,474
thought to scale up to unimaginable degrees, creating systems that then recursively oppress

786
01:17:35,474 --> 01:17:39,654
the humans that are part of them. This is one really interesting thing to mention, so I want

787
01:17:39,654 --> 01:17:45,774
to say it, that there are systemic predators. There are humans who have storytelling powers

788
01:17:45,774 --> 01:17:48,873
that can then exploit other humans.

789
01:17:48,873 --> 01:17:51,414
Once you realize that humans need stories,

790
01:17:51,554 --> 01:17:54,794
that humans need belief systems to assuage their guilt,

791
01:17:55,534 --> 01:17:57,094
kind of this original sin thing

792
01:17:57,094 --> 01:17:59,574
that we need some way to tell us that we're good,

793
01:17:59,634 --> 01:18:01,994
even though we're doing this bad thing of killing animals

794
01:18:01,994 --> 01:18:04,314
and exploiting them through domestication.

795
01:18:04,554 --> 01:18:07,014
Once you, yeah, believe all that,

796
01:18:07,094 --> 01:18:08,314
I totally lost my train of thought.

797
01:18:09,594 --> 01:18:11,414
Grifters and politicians, but I repeat myself.

798
01:18:11,414 --> 01:18:12,734
That's what it was, the systemic predators, right?

799
01:18:12,734 --> 01:18:17,034
Once you open yourself up to needing a belief system to assuage guilt.

800
01:18:17,354 --> 01:18:19,034
I knew I was going somewhere, but I lost it.

801
01:18:19,214 --> 01:18:20,014
That's a great point.

802
01:18:20,174 --> 01:18:20,254
Yeah.

803
01:18:20,594 --> 01:18:23,274
You open yourself up to storytellers as a predator.

804
01:18:24,134 --> 01:18:24,354
Yeah.

805
01:18:24,554 --> 01:18:24,734
Yeah.

806
01:18:24,873 --> 01:18:34,734
Like once you open yourself up to – once you absolve yourself of responsibility, you open yourself up to the worst things in the world.

807
01:18:34,734 --> 01:18:46,094
Like you open yourself up to being led towards your inevitable destruction by someone who is telling you a story that benefits them more than it does you.

808
01:18:46,674 --> 01:18:47,234
Yeah, yeah.

809
01:18:47,234 --> 01:19:02,754
And, yeah, I had a thought when you were talking about this, like, you know, we're talking about the religion, you know, religion, the justification, which is just that the closer you are, yeah, those closest to the killing are closest to God.

810
01:19:02,754 --> 01:19:09,414
that those who are doing that actual thing.

811
01:19:09,694 --> 01:19:11,914
So here's my justification for that.

812
01:19:12,914 --> 01:19:14,394
Is that a quote from somewhere,

813
01:19:14,514 --> 01:19:16,373
Those Closest to the Killing and Closest to God?

814
01:19:17,254 --> 01:19:18,094
I just made that up.

815
01:19:18,194 --> 01:19:19,294
That's a nice quote, man.

816
01:19:19,934 --> 01:19:24,454
You put that on a shirt or in some dark existential novel.

817
01:19:24,574 --> 01:19:25,054
That's really good.

818
01:19:26,134 --> 01:19:29,314
Okay, so think about the populations that we have,

819
01:19:29,454 --> 01:19:30,734
urban versus rural.

820
01:19:30,734 --> 01:19:34,434
and you take the rule that are living closer to nature

821
01:19:34,434 --> 01:19:39,854
that probably would more likely be engaged in hunting and killing their own food,

822
01:19:40,094 --> 01:19:41,074
raising their own food,

823
01:19:41,494 --> 01:19:46,594
and then think about where is the population of atheists

824
01:19:46,594 --> 01:19:48,574
and where is the population of believers.

825
01:19:49,114 --> 01:19:52,194
They call it the Bible Belt for a reason.

826
01:19:52,954 --> 01:19:56,134
It's this rule, like people vote for Jesus.

827
01:19:56,134 --> 01:19:58,434
urban people vote for

828
01:19:58,434 --> 01:20:00,814
I don't know

829
01:20:00,814 --> 01:20:02,034
whatever the woke

830
01:20:02,034 --> 01:20:04,094
I don't really know

831
01:20:04,094 --> 01:20:06,494
that wasn't a very well trained thought

832
01:20:06,494 --> 01:20:08,394
I've had a few of those

833
01:20:08,394 --> 01:20:11,054
but I mean that's what I'm saying

834
01:20:11,054 --> 01:20:12,014
that's what I'm saying is

835
01:20:12,014 --> 01:20:14,914
the closer you are to the killing

836
01:20:14,914 --> 01:20:16,014
the closer you are to God

837
01:20:16,014 --> 01:20:17,294
and people that are out here

838
01:20:17,294 --> 01:20:18,894
like I grew up

839
01:20:18,894 --> 01:20:20,873
we both grew up on farms

840
01:20:20,873 --> 01:20:22,274
did you guys have animals?

841
01:20:23,014 --> 01:20:23,954
we did have animals

842
01:20:23,954 --> 01:20:31,494
We were engaged in the brutal domestication, the end stage of the domestication of the Arak into the ox, into the cow.

843
01:20:31,614 --> 01:20:32,294
Is that how it goes?

844
01:20:32,774 --> 01:20:33,214
Yeah.

845
01:20:33,514 --> 01:20:42,594
And so from like – I mean like my earliest memories are like the – like you become very aware of the circle of life at a very young age.

846
01:20:42,714 --> 01:20:42,934
Yeah.

847
01:20:43,034 --> 01:20:48,054
That things are born, that they come into existence, that they are then slaughtered and that they feed us.

848
01:20:48,054 --> 01:20:51,854
and you learn not to give names to animals

849
01:20:51,854 --> 01:20:55,674
because you don't like to eat a hamburger that has a name.

850
01:20:55,833 --> 01:20:57,214
It doesn't feel good.

851
01:20:57,934 --> 01:20:58,914
Sometimes it does.

852
01:20:59,074 --> 01:21:04,333
If it was a particularly boisterous or antagonistic animal,

853
01:21:04,554 --> 01:21:06,333
you're like, ah, it tastes really good.

854
01:21:06,494 --> 01:21:07,954
I'm glad I killed that bastard.

855
01:21:09,634 --> 01:21:13,454
But yeah, anyway, so yeah, the closer to the killing, the closer to God.

856
01:21:13,614 --> 01:21:15,474
And the people that are the closest to the killing,

857
01:21:15,474 --> 01:21:17,594
I think it's backed up by the rule.

858
01:21:17,594 --> 01:21:18,394
They need the most permission.

859
01:21:18,394 --> 01:21:20,873
So they need the most permission to do what they're doing.

860
01:21:21,054 --> 01:21:26,614
So they need that permission granting structure to take out their guilt, one-shot it out, definitely.

861
01:21:27,554 --> 01:21:28,174
Yep, yep.

862
01:21:28,474 --> 01:21:31,854
And these are more – I would say that they're more stable.

863
01:21:32,094 --> 01:21:37,294
Like what is something that you say about small-town America is that it never changes.

864
01:21:37,534 --> 01:21:38,594
Like it's always the same.

865
01:21:38,594 --> 01:21:46,074
You know, the sidewalks roll up at 6 p.m. and, you know, everything's done in the same way that it was done a couple hundred years ago.

866
01:21:46,174 --> 01:21:48,174
And things in the cities, they're always changing.

867
01:21:48,314 --> 01:21:49,034
They're always different.

868
01:21:49,373 --> 01:21:54,034
And the reason maybe could be that it is closer to nature.

869
01:21:54,354 --> 01:21:56,574
It is closer to the natural hierarchy.

870
01:21:56,833 --> 01:21:57,974
That is not abstract.

871
01:21:58,354 --> 01:22:00,774
That is a power projected hierarchy.

872
01:22:01,854 --> 01:22:03,554
That's, I think you could make that case.

873
01:22:03,654 --> 01:22:04,474
I'm not willing to.

874
01:22:04,694 --> 01:22:05,254
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

875
01:22:05,474 --> 01:22:07,494
You know, I think you could make that case.

876
01:22:07,494 --> 01:22:07,914
Oh, no, no.

877
01:22:07,914 --> 01:22:09,494
You're in a big city.

878
01:22:09,634 --> 01:22:10,354
You walk around.

879
01:22:10,574 --> 01:22:12,494
What do you see when you step out on the street in New York City?

880
01:22:12,574 --> 01:22:17,074
You see class and wealth and all of these things that are abstract in the way that people are

881
01:22:17,074 --> 01:22:17,954
Celebrity.

882
01:22:18,174 --> 01:22:20,634
Yeah, you see abstract power being projected for sure.

883
01:22:20,774 --> 01:22:22,634
Yeah, but often false power, right?

884
01:22:22,814 --> 01:22:23,694
Oh, no, it's all false.

885
01:22:23,814 --> 01:22:26,774
All abstract power is false power if you don't buy into the system, definitely.

886
01:22:27,614 --> 01:22:31,873
Like the fancy clothes, the fancy shoes, the fancy car.

887
01:22:31,873 --> 01:22:36,574
These are things that are meant to give you the impression of power.

888
01:22:36,994 --> 01:22:37,074
Yeah.

889
01:22:37,074 --> 01:22:40,174
But they may or may not actually be.

890
01:22:40,354 --> 01:22:42,214
They could just be a facade.

891
01:22:42,594 --> 01:22:44,774
But 80-pound deadlift is power.

892
01:22:45,314 --> 01:22:46,294
Like, that's power.

893
01:22:46,554 --> 01:22:48,074
And there's no arguing over that.

894
01:22:48,314 --> 01:22:51,734
There is, you know, there is, hey, is that Porsche?

895
01:22:51,934 --> 01:22:52,614
Is it on lease?

896
01:22:52,814 --> 01:22:53,854
Or do you own that?

897
01:22:54,014 --> 01:22:55,373
Or is it daddy?

898
01:22:55,534 --> 01:22:56,274
You know, like all that.

899
01:22:56,394 --> 01:22:57,634
Like, there's question there.

900
01:22:58,054 --> 01:23:02,534
But the power that is projected through physical power, it's always definite.

901
01:23:02,534 --> 01:23:06,754
And physical power, like you mentioned the deadlift, but intelligence is physical because,

902
01:23:06,754 --> 01:23:13,454
again i mean that it's immensely physical like we evolved as you mentioned this energy consumptive

903
01:23:13,454 --> 01:23:19,074
brain because we could use fire to pre-digest our food and take in more energy like intelligence

904
01:23:19,074 --> 01:23:24,954
this brain we have is a very energy intensive thing so as far as watts go i think intelligence

905
01:23:24,954 --> 01:23:30,614
this light bulb we have burning bright up here definitely is is a show like a power projection

906
01:23:30,614 --> 01:23:37,434
tactic for sure. Yeah, I am. Okay, I want to read this one. I don't really have anything to say

907
01:23:37,434 --> 01:23:43,434
about it. But I just love this, this excerpt from from the from the thesis here. This is in I think

908
01:23:43,434 --> 01:23:51,654
it's in two, all reality is subjective is sapiens, unlike any other animal can and will subject

909
01:23:51,654 --> 01:23:58,074
themselves to a great deal of struggle, suffering and personal sacrifice for reasons which don't

910
01:23:58,074 --> 01:24:04,694
exist anywhere except within their collective imaginations. They will adopt belief systems and

911
01:24:04,694 --> 01:24:12,394
participate in population scale consensual hallucinations. Great, grateful for the opportunity

912
01:24:12,394 --> 01:24:20,074
to labor their entire lives over imaginary things and even to die for them. This is a defining

913
01:24:20,074 --> 01:24:25,474
feature of the human experience. Yeah. A necessary feature too.

914
01:24:25,474 --> 01:24:29,994
It is, right? Because it is necessary for cooperation.

915
01:24:30,594 --> 01:24:31,294
Yeah, exactly.

916
01:24:31,734 --> 01:24:34,414
Without cooperation, we're stuck at Dunbar's number.

917
01:24:34,734 --> 01:24:41,654
Without cooperation, we can't get any further than 150, 160 people.

918
01:24:41,654 --> 01:24:43,394
We can't have specialization.

919
01:24:44,054 --> 01:24:53,954
We can't have people that specialize in only doing facelifts on the right side of a face for someone over 40 that's been exposed to the sun multiple times.

920
01:24:53,954 --> 01:25:00,674
I mean, just, you know, the ridiculous kind of specialization that exists in this world.

921
01:25:00,794 --> 01:25:07,754
We can't have somebody that is a mechanic that only works on carburetors for 1972 Honda.

922
01:25:07,873 --> 01:25:11,534
It's like it just doesn't exist without the ability to cooperate.

923
01:25:11,534 --> 01:25:17,654
But in order to have that level of cooperation, we must engage in a mass scale hallucination,

924
01:25:17,794 --> 01:25:23,434
which is another way of saying that we must collectively believe in something together.

925
01:25:23,434 --> 01:25:34,834
Yeah. The story of what America is at some base level, if we consider yourself an American, you bought into a story. I mean, there's some story implicit in what that means.

926
01:25:34,834 --> 01:25:40,954
Yeah. So I love thinking about this, by the way, because a, so by the way, the, you know,

927
01:25:41,214 --> 01:25:48,094
boiler alert, right? The, the, the thesis of this book, right? Is the, this PhD is the United States

928
01:25:48,094 --> 01:25:53,094
should immediately adopt Bitcoin as a power projection tactic and use that, you know,

929
01:25:53,094 --> 01:25:58,734
create the hash force. I'm kind of on the fence about it, right? I'm not, you know, I was really

930
01:25:58,734 --> 01:26:04,154
into the Balaji Srinivasan, you know, church state to nation state, now to network state.

931
01:26:04,474 --> 01:26:09,134
And, you know, do I really want my government, which has done all of these horrific things,

932
01:26:09,214 --> 01:26:16,354
which has consistently betrayed my trust, which has chosen itself over the people again

933
01:26:16,354 --> 01:26:22,554
and again and again and again at the cost of millions and millions of lives and untold

934
01:26:22,554 --> 01:26:22,934
suffering.

935
01:26:22,934 --> 01:26:28,554
Do I really want to give them the most powerful thing that's ever been created, which I would

936
01:26:28,554 --> 01:26:33,554
say is Bitcoin. They're not giving them. They're participating in a decentralized protocol. So,

937
01:26:33,873 --> 01:26:39,294
I mean, that's good. Yeah. Well, and actually, so yeah. And so that's where I came around to,

938
01:26:39,534 --> 01:26:42,674
you know, I'm like, I'm on the fence thinking about it. And then I come around to like,

939
01:26:42,754 --> 01:26:47,873
so first off the United States was kind of one of the first, if not the first network state,

940
01:26:47,873 --> 01:26:52,554
like it was, we didn't care who you were. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.

941
01:26:52,554 --> 01:26:57,174
Well, take them all, just as long as you believe in the same collective illusion.

942
01:26:57,814 --> 01:27:01,734
And traveling around the world, like I lived in Morocco, I lived in Colombia,

943
01:27:02,314 --> 01:27:07,534
I lived in Europe, and the thing that you notice there is that everybody's pretty much the same.

944
01:27:07,714 --> 01:27:09,494
Like everybody in Morocco is Moroccan.

945
01:27:09,674 --> 01:27:11,094
Everybody in Colombia is Colombian.

946
01:27:11,434 --> 01:27:12,773
I was in Colombia for three months.

947
01:27:12,854 --> 01:27:14,214
I never saw another white person.

948
01:27:14,373 --> 01:27:15,514
I saw two black people.

949
01:27:16,074 --> 01:27:17,414
Everybody else was Colombian.

950
01:27:18,354 --> 01:27:21,014
Here, it's just this insane melting pot.

951
01:27:21,394 --> 01:27:22,514
Insane melting pot.

952
01:27:22,554 --> 01:27:28,814
all of these different people. And what are we here for? We're here because we believe in the

953
01:27:28,814 --> 01:27:34,594
same type of thing. It's not because we have the same DNA. We have the most varied DNA. And so

954
01:27:34,594 --> 01:27:43,154
I've come around to the idea that the United States having Bitcoin is not a way to perpetuate

955
01:27:43,154 --> 01:27:51,434
the nation state. It's a way to strengthen the network state. And I also think that just in my

956
01:27:51,434 --> 01:27:57,474
own experience and looking at other people that are within the Bitcoin ecosystem is that

957
01:27:57,474 --> 01:28:07,574
when you opt out of the system that rewards misaligned incentives, that rewards doing

958
01:28:07,574 --> 01:28:13,174
the wrong thing because the punishment is less, when you opt out of that and you go

959
01:28:13,174 --> 01:28:14,694
into Bitcoin, what do you do?

960
01:28:14,814 --> 01:28:15,934
You act morally.

961
01:28:16,154 --> 01:28:17,394
You take care of your body.

962
01:28:17,494 --> 01:28:19,154
You take care of the people around you.

963
01:28:19,154 --> 01:28:20,734
You're being to respect the real world.

964
01:28:20,854 --> 01:28:22,674
Power projection is a real thing, right?

965
01:28:22,873 --> 01:28:24,674
You're out of the hallucination into the real world.

966
01:28:25,594 --> 01:28:32,554
Yeah, like I guess I'm of the belief that people are not inherently good or bad, that people are inherently logical.

967
01:28:32,894 --> 01:28:39,574
And when you live in a system that has trusted third parties, which our security holds, then people are going to do the things.

968
01:28:39,974 --> 01:28:46,674
Like when you put people into a pasture and the pasture has a fence that has a hole in it, they're going to get out.

969
01:28:46,894 --> 01:28:49,074
They're going to take advantage of the system.

970
01:28:49,154 --> 01:28:57,554
They're going to sell drugs that harm people because the punishment for selling those drugs is less than the profit that they make off of that.

971
01:28:57,954 --> 01:29:07,954
They're going to fight wars that destroy entire countries and entire generations because the profit is greater than the punishment.

972
01:29:08,214 --> 01:29:11,074
The chance of being punished is so little in those systems.

973
01:29:11,694 --> 01:29:17,254
When you go and you get into a power projection system, it's just meritocratic.

974
01:29:17,254 --> 01:29:17,934
Yeah.

975
01:29:18,414 --> 01:29:24,254
People like the best people that I've ever met in my entire life are Bitcoiners.

976
01:29:25,194 --> 01:29:33,014
Like I used to would have said musicians, but musicians, we're a lazy and shiftless lot regardless of where we're at.

977
01:29:33,373 --> 01:29:45,254
But we're usually pretty respectful because we respect everybody's, you know, liberal libertarian is becoming a very popular phrase and way to describe people.

978
01:29:45,254 --> 01:29:51,514
people, I think, popularized by Javier Malay, not popularized, but I mean, he's talking about it a

979
01:29:51,514 --> 01:29:57,814
lot and people are listening and they're going, oh yeah, that's kind of what I am. Like liberal,

980
01:29:58,014 --> 01:30:03,974
I don't mind what you do. Libertarian, I don't want you to mind what I do. I just want to do

981
01:30:03,974 --> 01:30:09,674
what I'm going to do. And when you leave people to their own devices without imparting the impression,

982
01:30:09,674 --> 01:30:15,174
the oppression of an inherently evil system upon them, they make better choices.

983
01:30:15,454 --> 01:30:16,894
They do better things.

984
01:30:17,034 --> 01:30:21,994
And so I think that my government winning Bitcoin and standing up for Bitcoin and doing that,

985
01:30:22,094 --> 01:30:25,114
I think it might actually whip things into shape.

986
01:30:25,354 --> 01:30:30,954
I think it will give them a different time preference and they'll make different choices.

987
01:30:31,954 --> 01:30:39,214
We'll get to that in the next chapter is talking about, I think, software and scaling us into

988
01:30:39,214 --> 01:30:43,214
the cyber spatial realm and then Bitcoin is a solution.

989
01:30:43,434 --> 01:30:45,694
And this chapter after that is the recommendations.

990
01:30:46,214 --> 01:30:49,873
And one of those, I think, is the strategic reserve, that idea you have of a nation state

991
01:30:49,873 --> 01:30:50,174
owning.

992
01:30:50,454 --> 01:30:54,574
I think today to get us to kind of bridge over into what I think the next chapter is

993
01:30:54,574 --> 01:30:57,894
going to be about, I'll read a quote here and give my spin on it.

994
01:30:57,994 --> 01:31:00,114
I think this will kind of help us wrap up.

995
01:31:00,394 --> 01:31:04,414
And then you can let me know if you have any additional thoughts based on it.

996
01:31:04,674 --> 01:31:08,474
So this is kind of early in the chapter, but I think it does still bridge into the next

997
01:31:08,474 --> 01:31:16,014
chapter, Lowry says, trapped in an inescapable and imaginary world behind their eyes and

998
01:31:16,014 --> 01:31:18,674
continuously spammed by abstract thoughts.

999
01:31:18,674 --> 01:31:19,594
That's us humans.

1000
01:31:19,714 --> 01:31:21,273
Again, we're trapped behind our eyes.

1001
01:31:21,994 --> 01:31:23,794
The objective world is outside of us.

1002
01:31:24,114 --> 01:31:26,294
The abstract world is inside of us.

1003
01:31:26,694 --> 01:31:30,834
And that's all we really have access to is that mixture of abstract and objective that

1004
01:31:30,834 --> 01:31:31,954
is processed in our brain.

1005
01:31:32,114 --> 01:31:37,654
So trapped in an inescapable and imaginary world behind their eyes and continuously spammed

1006
01:31:37,654 --> 01:31:45,614
by abstract thoughts produced by an overpowered, oversized, and overclocked neocortex, proof of

1007
01:31:45,614 --> 01:31:52,334
power serves as a reliable signal for the human brain to identify what is physically and objectively

1008
01:31:52,334 --> 01:31:59,734
real in an otherwise imaginary world. So humans use a proof of power protocol. We interact with

1009
01:31:59,734 --> 01:32:04,334
the outside world by touching it, by pinching ourselves to see if we're dreaming, by touching

1010
01:32:04,334 --> 01:32:09,474
an object to see if it's physically real. You touch a hero and you realize they're just a human being.

1011
01:32:09,974 --> 01:32:17,474
Bitcoin is the same way. Cyberspace is spammed by all of these imaginary, by the spam emails,

1012
01:32:17,714 --> 01:32:24,134
the AI slop, all the copy paste things. Cyberspace is full of spam, right? In the same way that our

1013
01:32:24,134 --> 01:32:29,934
mind is spammed by abstractions that are not real. Previously in cyberspace, there was no way to

1014
01:32:29,934 --> 01:32:36,594
cross-reference those spamming objects with something real to determine what is spam and

1015
01:32:36,594 --> 01:32:43,074
what is real. But Bitcoin is the first thing that's going to get us out of our brain, in a

1016
01:32:43,074 --> 01:32:48,654
sense, in cyberspace and touch ground, touch grass and see what are the real things in the cyberspacial

1017
01:32:48,654 --> 01:32:54,614
realm in the same way that the real world gets us out of our mind, gets us out of the hallucination

1018
01:32:54,614 --> 01:32:57,814
and allows a proof of power that is a proof of realness

1019
01:32:57,814 --> 01:33:01,873
and helps us verify that this abstraction that we think is a real thing,

1020
01:33:02,154 --> 01:33:03,034
whether it is or is not.

1021
01:33:03,814 --> 01:33:05,574
I've got to add a couple of things to that.

1022
01:33:06,434 --> 01:33:09,854
So first, yeah, I had a quote that I wanted to throw up too.

1023
01:33:11,134 --> 01:33:12,514
Where am I at?

1024
01:33:13,794 --> 01:33:16,414
I lost it.

1025
01:33:16,414 --> 01:33:20,794
The pinnacle of humans using symbolism to assign semantically

1026
01:33:20,794 --> 01:33:24,814
and syntactically complex meaning to physical phenomena

1027
01:33:24,814 --> 01:33:28,234
in order to connect their neocortices together

1028
01:33:28,234 --> 01:33:32,373
to form a single shared consciousness is machine code.

1029
01:33:32,634 --> 01:33:36,794
So I had to, by the way, look up the meaning of what semantics.

1030
01:33:37,494 --> 01:33:40,174
Semantics is abstracted into symbolic meaning.

1031
01:33:40,773 --> 01:33:42,994
Syntactics is a formal structure.

1032
01:33:43,314 --> 01:33:46,273
But why would that be the case?

1033
01:33:46,273 --> 01:33:54,094
Why would it be that the pinnacle of symbolism to assign meaning to physical phenomena,

1034
01:33:54,894 --> 01:33:59,334
physical phenomena, meaning to physical phenomena using symbolism,

1035
01:33:59,814 --> 01:34:01,654
why would it be that that's machine code?

1036
01:34:01,754 --> 01:34:05,194
And it would be that it cannot be misinterpreted, right?

1037
01:34:05,273 --> 01:34:09,834
That when I tell you a story, you can interpret that in many different ways.

1038
01:34:09,834 --> 01:34:15,514
But machine code, when it is fed to something, it's not interpretable.

1039
01:34:15,514 --> 01:34:20,054
Well, I guess it is kind of interpreted, but it's fed, so it's consistent.

1040
01:34:20,214 --> 01:34:22,114
It's the purest form of language.

1041
01:34:22,873 --> 01:34:24,914
The pin is mightier than the sword.

1042
01:34:24,914 --> 01:34:26,294
I thought about this.

1043
01:34:26,474 --> 01:34:30,754
Again, I went back to the network nation-state book, Bibology.

1044
01:34:31,034 --> 01:34:35,614
We went from a bipolar world to a unipolar world to a tripolar world.

1045
01:34:35,834 --> 01:34:40,654
In that time frame, we discovered that the pin truly was mightier than the sword.

1046
01:34:40,654 --> 01:34:46,914
The media effectively hosted a president in the 70s.

1047
01:34:47,494 --> 01:34:51,354
So we're seeing that right now.

1048
01:34:51,634 --> 01:35:00,314
We're seeing that fall because the pin was always mightier than the sword.

1049
01:35:00,314 --> 01:35:14,234
But previously, when we didn't have read-write, when we didn't have the ability to self-publish, we didn't have a beach with platforms like X, the pen was controlled.

1050
01:35:14,454 --> 01:35:15,514
The pen was centralized.

1051
01:35:15,854 --> 01:35:20,894
The pen was used against or used in order to forward an ideology.

1052
01:35:20,894 --> 01:35:30,454
and I think last just a couple other things that just these are kind of random that I was thinking

1053
01:35:30,454 --> 01:35:38,634
but so again meritocratic power projection and what does it mean to have the ability to have

1054
01:35:38,634 --> 01:35:45,334
abstract thought and be able to plan and strategize and build and create technology

1055
01:35:45,334 --> 01:35:50,773
it made me think of this song this guy named Todd Snyder who's an incredible songwriter

1056
01:35:50,773 --> 01:35:54,873
he has a song called If Tomorrow Never Comes

1057
01:35:54,873 --> 01:35:57,914
which he wrote in response to Garth Brooks

1058
01:35:57,914 --> 01:36:01,734
and some other people kind of stealing another one of his songs

1059
01:36:01,734 --> 01:36:03,174
called Beer Run

1060
01:36:03,174 --> 01:36:06,894
so they stole his song so he stole theirs back

1061
01:36:06,894 --> 01:36:09,534
If Tomorrow Never Comes is a Garth Brooks song

1062
01:36:09,534 --> 01:36:12,254
but the last line in that song is

1063
01:36:12,254 --> 01:36:14,854
if worms had daggers birds wouldn't fuck with them

1064
01:36:14,854 --> 01:36:16,674
and it's just like

1065
01:36:16,674 --> 01:36:19,974
when you arm something

1066
01:36:19,974 --> 01:36:23,914
when you give something power, when you have technology,

1067
01:36:24,074 --> 01:36:25,674
you know, the dagger is a technology,

1068
01:36:26,094 --> 01:36:29,534
offsets natural hierarchy of power.

1069
01:36:30,154 --> 01:36:32,314
The unnatural hierarchy, yeah, the abstract power.

1070
01:36:32,314 --> 01:36:32,794
Yeah, sorry, yeah.

1071
01:36:33,714 --> 01:36:37,934
And the very last thing is another song that this made me think of.

1072
01:36:37,974 --> 01:36:39,773
I was in a good song mood tonight,

1073
01:36:40,014 --> 01:36:42,674
which is there's a song by John McConnell,

1074
01:36:42,934 --> 01:36:44,434
incredible songwriter.

1075
01:36:44,754 --> 01:36:46,054
Gosh, I'll have to think about.

1076
01:36:46,054 --> 01:37:01,954
As you're thinking, I'll just note for anybody still listening who doesn't know that Lucas is a musician. And so as far as the Bitcoin and Bitcoin and Bitcoin and philosophy, Bitcoin and agriculture, Bitcoin and banking, Bitcoin and music, Lucas definitely has a perspective on this.

1077
01:37:01,954 --> 01:37:11,214
so this there's this um so lowry in this section and this has been my favorite section so far he

1078
01:37:11,214 --> 01:37:17,534
goes deep into the power of storytelling you know and we've talked about that power that storytelling

1079
01:37:17,534 --> 01:37:24,514
allows us to cooperate beyond dunbar's number and it allows us to join together in a shared

1080
01:37:24,514 --> 01:37:28,074
belief structure, group hallucination ideology.

1081
01:37:29,373 --> 01:37:33,054
One of the things that storytelling allows for,

1082
01:37:33,294 --> 01:37:36,254
it allows for us to pass wisdom and pass knowledge

1083
01:37:36,254 --> 01:37:41,414
without having to have the lived experience of the suffering.

1084
01:37:41,554 --> 01:37:44,754
Like, I can save you this suffering if you'll just listen.

1085
01:37:45,773 --> 01:37:49,234
None of us listen until it's too late.

1086
01:37:49,234 --> 01:37:52,914
But yeah, the line from the song by Sean McConnell,

1087
01:37:53,654 --> 01:37:58,734
Is there any way to learn from what you've been told or do you really have to hold the experience?

1088
01:37:58,994 --> 01:38:01,314
Because you can heed me now and come out clean.

1089
01:38:01,814 --> 01:38:04,134
Trust me, I can spare you the consequence.

1090
01:38:04,534 --> 01:38:08,254
And that took me kind of into the, I was thinking about just stories.

1091
01:38:08,254 --> 01:38:12,254
There's only seven basic plots of all stories.

1092
01:38:12,454 --> 01:38:16,094
And there's only six parts of a story, the structure.

1093
01:38:16,094 --> 01:38:29,694
If you can listen to those things, if you can listen to what nature is trying to tell you to the natural order, to the natural hierarchy, then it truly can spare you great consequence.

1094
01:38:30,174 --> 01:38:35,454
It truly can give you something more enlightening and better.

1095
01:38:35,454 --> 01:38:55,214
We've kind of, I feel like, not we, I have certainly strayed just from the writing today, but this chapter, like it just really, I don't know, it really spoke to me because of the parallels and the examples and the analogies and the metaphors that I could find within power projection in society.

1096
01:38:55,214 --> 01:39:00,554
And so, yeah, I guess that's probably where I could leave it.

1097
01:39:01,074 --> 01:39:02,734
Look up Kenny the Talking Gun.

1098
01:39:03,114 --> 01:39:06,734
He's quoted in here, and I don't know.

1099
01:39:06,854 --> 01:39:08,614
Like, that's going to take me down a rabbit hole.

1100
01:39:09,994 --> 01:39:18,514
But, yeah, the last thing that I'll say about abstract hierarchies is that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

1101
01:39:18,694 --> 01:39:19,773
That's from Monty Python.

1102
01:39:20,094 --> 01:39:21,834
That's very apt and right on.

1103
01:39:21,873 --> 01:39:23,134
I can't add anything to that.

1104
01:39:23,773 --> 01:39:24,254
Awesome.

1105
01:39:24,254 --> 01:39:24,834
All right.

1106
01:39:24,834 --> 01:39:27,574
Well, the next time we'll talk about chapter five.

1107
01:39:27,654 --> 01:39:28,214
And what did you say?

1108
01:39:28,294 --> 01:39:29,014
What's chapter five?

1109
01:39:30,074 --> 01:39:31,574
I wish I had the title handy.

1110
01:39:31,794 --> 01:39:32,154
Put you on the spot.

1111
01:39:32,414 --> 01:39:33,814
It's about software.

1112
01:39:34,273 --> 01:39:39,654
And I think it's about software as code and an abstract power hierarchy and how Bitcoin

1113
01:39:39,654 --> 01:39:46,273
cures the dysfunctions of typical abstract power-based hierarchies, including coded

1114
01:39:46,273 --> 01:39:47,214
ones, something like that.

1115
01:39:47,294 --> 01:39:47,814
We'll see, though.

1116
01:39:49,034 --> 01:39:49,474
Brilliant.

1117
01:39:49,694 --> 01:39:50,174
We'll be there.

1118
01:39:50,354 --> 01:39:50,614
All right.

1119
01:39:50,714 --> 01:39:50,894
Yeah.

1120
01:39:50,994 --> 01:39:51,214
Good.

1121
01:39:51,494 --> 01:39:51,773
Nice.