Welcome back to Bitcoin Study Sessions. Today, we are doing the thing that Bitcoiners do.
We are being curious and inquisitive about the world around us. Peter McCormick talked
in a recent interview with Balaji Surnivasan about meeting me and said that the reason that
we were able to get along was that we come at the world from a Bitcoin perspective.
And the Bitcoin perspective is not just asking if the government can print endless money, then what is actually the purpose of taxing the citizens and why would they need to do that?
It's also not just asking why we need to have over 70 federally encouraged vaccines for children that are less than three days old.
it's asking questions that once we understand bitcoin and we find ourselves at the bottom of
that rabbit hole we realize that that rabbit hole is not just a hole it's the rabbit warren it is
the extension of all other things it's our health and our longevity it's the way that we interface
with the sun. It's how we organize as a society. And it gives us license to having been courageous
enough to challenge the institutions that exist, continue to ask questions and be inquisitive and
challenge the institutions that we've put in our own mind. And so in that vein, today,
we are beginning a new book, one that we're both very excited about. This book is called
Our Tribal Future, and it is by Dr. David Sampson. And Grant's going to give a fantastic
introduction on it here in a second. But the reason why we're going down this path is because
Dr. Sampson was recently a guest at the Network State where I had been for almost seven months
and he gave a talk that was in fact so popular that I believe he gave it twice it was the most
popular I would I think it's fair to say it's probably the most popular talk that's been given
at the Network State which is high praise given some of the speakers that we've had there
And so encouraged by my fellow network state denizens, we took a look into this book and we've been very excited about it.
One of the reasons why we were encouraged to look at it was because the author references Jason Lowry's work, Softwar.
And he doesn't do it in the first 140 pages.
In fact, in the first 140 pages, 150 pages of this book, there's no mention of Bitcoin.
Yet, as you'll see as we progress through this talk, the common ideals and the things that we talk about within that mindset are also pervasive here.
So I'm here again, as always, with Grant.
Yeah.
Mr. Grant Reichert, please give us a fantastic introduction.
As Lucas mentioned, the object of our Inquisition is our tribal future.
and we're going to do the part one today,
the science of tribalism,
roughly the first half of the book,
chapters one through five.
As always, I'll give a brief summary
of what I find to be kind of the salient stuff
and trying to, as always,
get the arguments out on the table
so we can have an informed discussion
about what the book says
and not what we imagine the book says
based on its title.
That title again, though,
Our Tribal Future, there's a subtitle,
How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts
into a force for good. So you might say the first part, part one we're going to talk about today,
is getting all of the science, the evolutionary history, the biology of the tribal instincts
out on the table. And then our next conversation is going to be about the subtitle, how to channel
those instincts into a force for good. The second part is praxis. The first part here is foundational.
So from the preface, we kind of begin with the problem. Who do we trust? The most basic answer,
like evolutionarily, historically has been kith and kin, those we are related to by blood and those
with whom we have very strong personal bonds of like friendship and pair bonding directly face to
face. But kith and kin, that really doesn't scale. Society is, has become much bigger than that.
Being able to trust a tribe scales us beyond kith and kin. So being, you know, part of a tribe,
being part of, we might say, a secret society with symbols to verify who is part of that tribe,
a much larger social grouping, as we'll see, than merely friends and family.
So this book, as I kind of hinted, is largely an evolutionary biological or evolutionary
anthropological description of the solution to who do we trust, how do we trust these large
social groupings, how we evolve to use tribes as a way to solve this trust problem through
tribalism and what the consequences, good and bad, of that are.
So chapter one is about that writ large.
How do we get from our genes, these things that are kind of the biological medium of the evolutionary process, to our actual behaviors, the things we as individuals actually do?
That is, what is the relationship between genes and human action?
You might even say the relationship between genetics and free will.
The specific genetically given drive Samson is concerned about is the tribal drive, the coalitionary instinct to belong to a tribe.
which is a group that uses symbols to represent a shared reality and identify members.
So there is a gene-based drive to be part of a tribe, that social grouping that's going to allow us to scale beyond kith and kin.
So this chapter, again, is about the relationship between our genes and that drive.
Our genes produce drives, like the tribal drives, which are dispositions or propensities, but not actually like causally determined necessary things.
A drive to eat something sugary doesn't force you to eat something sugary, but it does make you feel shitty if you don't.
So we also have many drives that influence us.
And so we can't say that one drive causes us to do something.
We have a drive to eat something sugary, another drive to maintain our fitness.
And so we have competing drives.
Drives are also in themselves, in their original state, we might say imperceptible.
We feel a certain way, disposed to do a certain thing.
But that just kind of feels like who we are.
If a drive causes us to fall in love, we don't feel the drive.
Say we have the drive to be in love.
We just feel like the poetic state of being in love, which feels true and natural and just like who we are.
So humans like honeybees are driven by unconscious impulses.
But unlike honeybees, we then have the power to reflect on them, make them known and override them.
This is the power of understanding the imperceptibility of drives.
Samson points out, once you understand they are imperceptible, they can become somewhat perceptible and easier to identify control.
To quote Samson, understanding a new drive is like finding a mental key to a lock of an invisible shackle we didn't know can find us.
With this new knowledge, we can take a bit more ownership of our individual and collective destiny.
So that is the relationship, roughly speaking, between our genes, our genetic drive of tribalism, and the actual choice of being tribal.
We feel the drive. We can also take ownership of it once we identify it.
That moves us to chapter two, and Samson gives us another concept that's going to help build an argument here.
So the concept we get in chapter two is that we have use in understanding our evolved tribal drive is evolutionary mismatch.
It's a very interesting concept, even beyond this book, something fun to know.
So evolutionary mismatch is the phenomenon of evolving certain adaptations due to an environmental pressure in a past environment, but then deploying those adaptations in an environment that is current, but that has changed.
So the idea is that the things are evolutionary adaptations occurred in the past, but they are used in the present and the past can differ from the present.
An example of evolutionary mismatch is a species of turtle that, when it hatches its eggs on the beach, goes toward the sea because of the moon or the sun glinting on the ocean.
The stimulus of the light draws them toward the sea.
But now there are all these coastal houses that have landside bright lights.
And so sometimes the turtles go towards the bright light of the beach houses and then perish.
So that's an evolutionary mismatch.
They weren't evolved for a world in which there are beach houses.
Humans, an example for humans, as I kind of alluded to earlier, we have a desire for sweet processed food that was mismatched for a time when scarcity led us to seek very nutrient dense foods, not nutrient dense, really calorie rich foods.
But now it just kind of leads to obesity and tooth decay.
Another mismatch relevant here to this book, suburbia, endless homes where everyone has their own segregated place far from communal centers, all individually secured so that even we get we didn't evolve for that state, essentially.
Even though now we are materially well off along nearly every axis and we live longer, we are less happy, studies show, due to a lack of social connection.
This isolation also kicked into overdrive, Samson notes, during the COVID lockdowns.
It's not really a contradiction to say that we are less happy despite material well-being because, as Samson points out, I mean, just look at the past.
after September 11th, suicides dropped,
rampage killings ceased for two years.
Israel has a low rate of PTSD
despite mandatory military service.
So he concludes basically that communities
undergoing the most social oppression
are actually the most socially resilient
because people devote themselves to the community
rather than themselves.
They're drawn out of individual isolation
into a shared project, making people less lonely.
So material well-being, as we all know,
is not necessarily a proxy for actual kind of psychologically felt well-being.
Another way of saying this is that we are a social animal at the level of our biology
because we evolved to survive in groups,
but now we live in these environments such as suburbia that encourage a lonelier life
so we get that evolutionary mismatch from our past environment to our current environment.
Types of sociality like increased online interaction are also not really good.
They've made us more mentally unstable, as Samson puts it.
So now we have this idea of evolutionary mismatch.
We also have the prior idea of how our genes and our actual actions interact.
We can move to chapter three, where we take these two concepts and we kind of put them together to the idea of the tribal drive, the genetic instinctual propensity to develop coalitionary groups.
and that with the idea of evolutionary mismatch of having evolved that drive,
that tribal drive in one environment, but then now deploying it in a different one.
So let's first kind of take a deeper look at the tribal drive.
Samson defines tribes as kind of a nested grouping,
one inside the other getting larger like a Russian doll.
So camp is the smallest, then band, and then tribe, a scaling up of social groupings.
The camp is that most nuclear unit, the people with whom you kind of satisfy
the most basic needs, shelter, reproduction, finding calories, staying safe. For hunter-gatherers,
the camp, this small nuclear grouping is around 20 to 30 adults. In that small grouping, you satisfy
those basic needs, and it also allows for what he calls alloparenting, or what is called alloparenting,
where others beside from the biological mother of a child can participate in helping care for that
child to free up that biological mother to actually have more children concurrently as one of the
child is raised to maturity so think of the camp maybe he says like a neighborhood of connected
people camps then nest into bands the band is um so we need to expand wider than the camp in order
to protect us from inbreeding we need some more genetic diversity bands tend to be up to dunbar's
number of 150. Dunbar's number, you might have heard of this, it's kind of the cognitive limitation
for processing social relations. More kind of basically stated the number of people you can
keep straight in your head and know and kind of a somewhat personal level. Basically, he notes
humans have in our minds like a channel capacity or bandwidth to store 100 and process 150 human
relations of the sort. Would you feel comfy and not awkward kind of bumping into the person on the
street, having a meal with them, a beer with them, et cetera, if you met randomly.
So camps needed for calories, stuff like that, the basic stuff, care, safety, the band needed
for genetic diversity.
Then the next scaled unit is the tribe.
These scale up from camps to protect us against bad luck extinction.
We're talking like 500 people and above.
So if something happens to a camp or a band, you know, the group is still resilient.
And although not mentioned here, we know from reading Jason Lowry, the scaling up is also a military strategy to protect from other camps and bands that are also scaling up.
You can't be the small guy on the block.
Are you going to be destroyed and consumed by a more powerful tribe?
So 500, though, this is the tribe 500.
That's above Dunbar's number of 150 beyond our scaling, beyond our channel capacity to really process and have relationships with everybody in our social milieu.
So this is in the tribe, we begin to use symbols to be able to signal to people, you can trust me, to signal coalitionary alliance with other people so that we don't have to have that face to face.
The tribe scales us beyond that through this tribal drive toward coalitionary alliance based on symbolic communication signaling trustworthiness.
So we arrive at the tribe.
And here's kind of a good definition.
It's an imagined community beyond face to face held together by symbols.
symbols being linguistic, the way we talk, the things we say, the idioms we use, behaviors, how we behave around each other, gestures, rituals.
He mentions, you know, in older tribes, there were even like physical modifications, like flattened heads, the knocking out of teeth, like incisors.
And nowadays we see, you know, tattoos and hairstyles, things like that, even certain preferred body shapes in different societies.
It's also a shared material culture in tribes, a way of dress, a type of tool that maybe is used, special artifacts.
Humans, we can process the meaning of a symbol in a much easier way than we can a complex history of social reactions with a bunch of individuals, so then we can use this shared set of symbols to scale our trust upwards.
To quote Samson,
and I just like definitions again,
so I'm going to read this definition.
We get,
a tribe is a nested group of groups,
so nested again,
camp to band a tribe,
that uses symbols as tokens
of identity signaling group membership
within a shared imagined order.
The tribal drive, Samson says,
is a cursed blessing.
Being able to identify who is in a tribe
also means distinguishing
who is not in the tribe.
We distinguish between us and them
with symbols,
which leads to something
he calls pseudospeciation, or which is called pseudospeciation rather in the literature,
believing non-related humans are subhuman.
So the tribe group develops as group gets bigger.
These bigger groups are caused by the agrarian turn away from hunting and gathering large
scale communities, politically stratified, sedentary, gathering their resources together
in big clumps in these larger groups.
As I mentioned earlier, mentioning Jason Lowry's thesis, they didn't become a target for
violence, a honeypot, having all of these gathered agricultural resources together,
pitting tribe against tribe. The author notes during this time, I thought this was an interesting
way to frame this, quote, being a male was nearly a death sentence for those who couldn't fight or
lack the skills to endear themselves politically to dominant male coalitionary alliances that
revolved around patrilineal kin groups. So, you know, be able to fight yourself or better yet,
join a group of others who can help fight with you.
So again, the tribe drive a blessed curse.
Blessed intensifies cooperation, allows scaling.
A curse increases capacity for groups uniting in conformist ways
to decide who was the out-grouped enemy and then destroying them.
So there's a paradox.
The fact that we are as peaceful as we are in group
comes at the cost of a capacity to proactively and coldly decimate groups
that are not in the in group, who do not conform to our social norms,
and who are not the humans that we identify as part of our tribe.
So that roughly is the why of tribalism.
We're about three quarters of the way down, almost there.
The next chapter, four, discusses how, how tribalism is expressed.
This looks at different levels down the level of the neuron
in the instant of having a tribal drive
and then scales back to like a millennia before
that neuronal drive happening in the individual.
We're going to leave out most of that from the discussion.
A very fascinating chapter, though.
Definitely check it out.
broadly he describes um an us brain and the them brain the us brain mirror neurons that feel empathy
allowing us to feel others pain all well and good the them brain disgust reactions directed toward
the out group and norm violations thinking that people who are not part of our tribe literally
triggering the same part of our brain as eating a cockroach a disgust reaction to those who are not
like we are. Chapter five, then the final chapter, part one, an interesting turn, I think,
into the epistemological, into the nature and the inquiry into what is true. The basic question of
this chapter, does evolution form us in ways that best enable us to find the truth? I mean,
one hypothesis might be sure evolution crafts our senses so that we are best able to find out what
is true about the environment, because if you know true things, you're more fit to survive.
Sounds very noble, but Samson disagrees, and I disagree with him.
Unfortunately, that does not seem likely.
We did not evolve to seek truth, but to survive.
And if the truth does not help us survive, then we don't need it.
We will evolve around the truth.
We'll route around that to a helpful lie that will help us hack reality and survive better.
So this is called the fitness beats truth theory.
Evolutionary fitness is what evolution selects for, not ability to derive true things through your senses.
So the tribe drive definitely seems oriented to fitness, not truth.
The other tribe is perceived with the disgust of a cockroach.
They're not actually cockroaches, right?
It's just a drive we have, not necessarily perceiving what is true, but perceiving what is useful to help one tribe survive.
The tribe has mediated life and death for centuries, so people picket over the truth. The tribe drive is based on interpreting signs that might indicate the possibility of coalition or the fact of coalition. And there are many such signs.
primary age and sex signals ability to mate or ally secondary three of these that constitute the
ethnolinguistic group language ideology and phenotype phenotype being our appearance as it
is expressed as our genes are expressed by our environment we develop a certain phenotypical
appearance um and then the third or tertiary um physical and medic and memetic codification of
symbols, the Mason ring, the Mason initiation ceremony, and all art, religion, music, philosophy,
profession, even gait and manner of idiom. All of these are ways of codifying the symbols
and then expressing those to others. In any interaction, we are always searching the other
person for signs that we will get along and maybe be able to cooperate with them, ally with them,
have coalition with them without being betrayed, resolving a prisoner's dilemma,
but looking for indicators that they're not going to defect.
Not truths about the world, again, just indicators, probabilities.
So the tribal signals arrive at us through our fitness-selecting, not truth-selecting senses.
I'll end the summary with this paragraph from Samson that I really like,
and I think unpacks a lot of that.
Tribal signals are the abstract and symbolic elements emitted from our social worlds that are filtered through our senses Language and music tunnel through our acoustic sense Phenotypes that are embedded in our bones and skin and shaped by our material culture are sieved through our visual sense And perhaps most importantly ideology is filtered through
the cognitive subroutines that calculate logic and reason, which have been warped by an evolved
bias for group consensus. Because ideology is based on the replication of linguistic means
and is a discrete combinatorial process,
it can invent infinite numbers of shades,
textures, and colors to any worldview.
It is the perfect vetting system
to serve as a mental passcode
to coalition membership.
And then he ends this chapter
with this cryptic or beautiful line,
if you have no creed and no tribe to share it with,
do you have a soul?
So Lucas, that's the summary of the first part.
We don't really get into the application
of all that science,
but we can apply it ourselves.
this notion of what tribalism is.
I guess, did you have any comment
to add on to that kind of quick narrative summary?
Not narrative, but just quick summary
of the substance of part one.
Good summary, as usual.
Again, this is where I encourage people
to read the book
because you've done an incredible job there.
But there's so much depth
to what he's talking about.
And he does a great job of highlighting each of these occurrences, each of these scenarios, you know, what it means to be an alloparent and why that exists.
It exists because over the course of a child's lifetime, they will suck 18 years worth of calories out of their mother.
And so you have to have other people helping because if you didn't, then you wouldn't be able to have women who have multiple offspring.
They would just simply wither away.
They wouldn't be able to do that.
And going into the, you know, way that we live currently in this, the Levittown scenario, all of these things are beyond fascinating.
Yeah, and it's just totally rich with anecdote, but not anecdote in the sense of just some throwaway fact, but stuff that really ties into backing up what he's talking about.
He cites, I mean, a lot of literature in support of his claims, and there's just so many fascinating instances, like you mentioned.
I wanted to get your thoughts on this definition, this notion of a tribe.
So again, it's a nested group from group—I'm sorry, from camp, band, to tribe.
So I'm going to read this to you and see what you think.
This is a quote from Samson toward the end.
A tribe is not a race or even a population.
A tribe is a creed.
It is a team that is agreed upon a set of symbols, including sacred values that identify membership.
A creed is a mechanism that glues together disparate small camps and bands of cohabiting humans into a singular identity and a shared purpose.
Those who know the codes have in their possession a social passport.
What do you think of this?
Do we still have tribes according to this definition in the here and now?
I think we've talked, we've referenced this a number of times,
we've referenced the fourth turning and the talking about that
where we have the signs that we're in a fourth turning
because we have the rise of populism
and kind of increasing interpersonal violence, things like that.
And I look at it, when I look at it through that frame, what I would say is that the preponderance, the occurrence of tribes is becoming more and more prevalent because we are more and more backing into our corners.
Can you give an example of a tribe you're talking about?
A MAGA, a woke, a Yankee fan, F1, IndyCar, F1, not IndyCar, nobody thinks IndyCar is any good.
But F1, where you are being more and more identified by the things that you prefer or by the beliefs that you have, where these are becoming, it's less about, I guess, I'll make this comment.
So I'm on a dating app and looking at these profiles on a dating app, what I see is a lot less about what people actually enjoy doing, like gardening, working out, blah, blah, blah, things like that.
And more about what they identify with.
On the woke side, it always appears to be the negative, where it's like you form a coalition around the things that you hate.
So we're going to hate a Trump supporter or a MAGA.
That's like the popular thing.
So this is on the other side. It's like the signaling of like these MAGA type principles and ideals. And so, yeah, it's where it's like pride. One side's like hate. One side's like pride.
And the tribe drive that exists within that, I think when you look around, I think it is growing stronger. I think that people are looking at, if you're woke, you look at someone who's MAGA as less than human and vice versa.
and this makes me think of
when I was growing up
we had South African work exchange guys
that worked on our wheat harvest crew
the sweetest, kindest, hardest working
they would work from 7 o'clock in the morning
until midnight
and then they would still come in
and they would read their Bible for an hour
and then when you would talk to them
they would tell you stories about all of the black people
that they had killed
and they would speak about them
as though they were dogs or like not human.
And so it's no surprise that you're seeing this genocidal violence
in South Africa now that's going, you know, it's both ways.
Whites killing blacks, blacks killing whites.
It's because you can have someone who is a fully formed human
who has a soul and has a heart, but they have that,
That disgust reaction to someone who's part of the out group that makes them view them like eating a cockroach.
Yeah, and we all have that. It's a natural part of us.
It's not like some people who are defective have that tribal response of disgust.
It's, I mean, it is part of our evolved heritage of being a human.
I mean, it's interesting what you mentioned in dating profiles, these online apps, that people, I mean, as you're perusing them,
you are reading other people's tribal signaling for coalitionary alliance.
Some people are trying to signal, you know, if you want to be with me, here are the tribes that I'm a part of.
Maybe they're not even trying to signal that.
They're just unconsciously dropping those things because in any human encounter in the past, we had to quickly signal our tribal affiliations through certain symbols so that we would be processed as an ally and be allowed to live or join the group or whatever.
Yeah, because you might be murdered really fast.
Yeah, I'm not very sure.
And so at the beginning, at the first chapter of this, Samson actually talks about like he gives a tribal accounting kind of of his own past, looks at his past tribal drives or how tribal drives have affected his life.
his life and he notes that his thing called my first love and a woman a woman breaking up with
him because of an ideological difference and he has lessons for each of these the lesson is
your ideological belief system a cornerstone of tribal identity will influence will influence
whom you will love so that i mean the tribal drive at the most basic granular level it's not just
going to be like what political party you are a part of who you vote for but it's going to very
much influence who you spend the rest of your life with who you procreate with who you build
a family with as part of a camp and then a greater band and tribe so not trivial to say that through
like the dating apps give us a lot of you know we're looking at this from an evolutionary
perspective and you might say that dating apps are like evolutionary ground game like this is
what's happening in the here and now you can probably yeah the direction of the species by
This is also why Peter McCormick gave me the advice of stay away from the diggast.
It's very good advice.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
Yeah.
So I have another quote here I want to get your thoughts on.
If humanity, this is from Samson's book, obviously, Our Tribal Future, we're reading.
If humanity is to survive the 21st century, we need to become conversationally fluent in the tribal languages instinctually spoken by different coalitions within our species.
You mentioned some of those.
Maga.
Who does that remind you?
Woke.
Right.
Elucidate.
Go ahead.
what he is saying is
if we're going to survive as a species
we need to be able to talk to people
who have different beliefs
and
there is no person that signifies
that and says that
better and said it explicitly
over and over
until it
angered the people who didn't want
this enough that they killed him which was Charlie
Kirk which is
just here to have a conversation.
Yeah.
You know, here to talk with the people that I disagree with
or that disagree with me.
And then you come to the realization
that you don't really have that many disagreements,
that you have more in common than you have that's different
and that you have enough to move forward in a,
you know, it's the camp, the band, the tribe,
And then even the other tribe that you're not a part of, these are all extensions of our coalitionary drive.
And we have this coalitionary drive not just with those that are in our own stack of the tribe, but you still have a loose coalitionary similarity with people that are outside of that, with other drives.
You have things in common.
Yeah. So I and I think that that's something that, yeah, I mean, does does that not scream Charlie Kirk to you?
No, it does. Yeah. And he was trying to and this makes the violence against him intelligible.
I mean, you can just call it political violence or you can understand it as what it is, which is tribal violence.
It's people who didn't understand. You see this a lot when you watch this conversation.
People who didn't process what he was saying as an argument because they only saw tribal signaling.
They only saw outgroup. They only saw somebody who was, why is this person coming into our house who is obviously part of the outgroup to drop his outgroup symbols? Like they have, it's a norm violation. Disgust reaction is triggered. This person is subhuman. Enough of that symbol, enough of that simmers in the atmosphere and then violence erupts.
And in fact, again, Samson, when he's giving accounting of his own life, he talks about participating in some sort of sporting match or something, a football game.
Played football.
Yeah.
Cut punches the dude.
Right.
So there's a moment of violence.
Yeah.
And the lesson he draws from this is, and the violence feels good, the lesson he draws from this is enacting socially sanctioned physical violence on behalf of one group over another can be intoxicating, thereby reinforcing an addictive quality to the behavior.
So it's not just that political violence, tribal violence erupts.
It is that people are driven to it by a biological drive that feels good when they do it when it happens.
You can imagine somebody who in our kind of evolutionary history kills a member of an encroaching other tribe.
They go out and kill them.
They are celebrated.
There's a potential threat eliminated.
The stranger who came into our territory, we celebrate this person.
He's given calories and reproductive success for what he did.
And then we then develop this evolutionary urge to seek this out.
And then it's also just socially sanctioned within the community.
that tribal community. We unfortunately saw this too with Charlie Kirk, that there was a lot of
celebration of within a certain community of the fact of his murder because people like he had
remedied in their mind a norm violation for their group. And so they were doing what felt natural to
them too, to express social approval. It was just like, it felt so natural for them to do that,
that, you know, it's very unfortunate to see our tribal impulses playing out in this very dark way.
But it's also good to, again, remind ourselves the line good and evil runs through every human heart, right?
That this is part of all of us, these tribal impulses.
And this is an example of what the author talks about.
This isn't, I mean, so killing Charlie Kirk was a premeditated act, obviously, right?
You had to plan that out.
That's an example of the proactive aggression that he elucidates that has been bred into society because reactive aggression has been bred out of society.
And if you want to give the – do you want to kind of give the background on the reactive versus proactive?
Right. This kind of rhymes with Jason Lowry as well.
He's talking about the way that – so chimpanzees are incredibly aggressive, violent animals, and they're a very close evolutionary relative of ours.
But if a rival or a chimpanzee who's not a part of a group goes into another chimp's territory, they chimp out and there's extreme violence and a chimp is torn apart, evidently.
I don't know.
Something like that.
Right?
So – but humans are not like that.
We're a default aggressive species from our evolutionary history, but we seem to be not as aggressive.
And so what is the case here?
Well, there's actually two types of aggression.
Reactive aggression, fight and flight response caused by anger, adrenaline, quickened heartbeat, red hot anger that happens and violence occurs.
There's also like a violence served cold, proactive aggression, premeditated, deliberate, low arousal, taking care of surgically somebody who's perceived as a threat or part of the other tribe.
We came, we evolved to develop this proactive, aggressive power that also requires language because it requires planning.
It requires a conception of the future because you have to plan something that's going to happen in the future.
So it's also part of our kind of cognitive advantage, so to speak, over other animals.
We move away from reactive aggression by enforcing norms with proactive aggression against people who are too reactively aggressive to be part of a band or a camp.
People that don't fit well into any society, they're kind of murdered in their sleep. The tyranny of the cousins is something that is sociologically a phrase to speak of those who enforce norm violations within a community.
And they're going against the perceived tyrants, those people who are too blatantly reactively physically aggressive all the time.
This is a process, a sort of self-domestication.
Lowry talks about this, too, because you are breeding out a certain type of reactive aggressiveness, even as we move towards, in Lowry's terms, abstract power-based hierarchies that allow for abstract power over large groupings of humans through what seems like peace.
But it's really a piece that's controlled by proactive aggression towards anybody who would dare violate the norms of this abstract power-based hierarchy that has been constructed usually for the benefit of the few at the top.
And that type of aggression is the type of aggression that leads to the killing of Charlie Kirk because it is this, he mentions that proactive aggression is a type of violence that when you measure it like with an fMRI, it does not give this spike.
It does not give this like emotional rise. There is something that, you know, he literally describes them as the reactive being hot and the proactive being cold in terms of the emotional outlay that occurs.
um what this makes me i'm trying to rectify my mind so we have selectively bred reactive
reactive aggression out and it has been replaced by proactive aggression
not completely out not completely out not completely but we trend that way and i'm trying
There's a quote in my mind by Jordan Peterson who says the reason it's so dangerous and difficult for women to choose a mate is because deep down what they really desire is they want the monster, but they want the monster who's a monster to everyone but them.
And so there is this very fine line that they have to walk where I want this protector figure, but a protector is also an aggressor.
And so I'm just trying to think about it.
You're trying to figure out why you want the monster on your dating profile.
It's fine.
You're trying to work this out in your head.
Yeah, I should put the guns on.
No, what I'm trying to understand is how did we breed the reactive aggression out?
Well, I guess it actually makes perfect sense.
Like if you are optimizing for the monster who can control his impulses, then you are optimizing for the proactive aggressor and not the reactive aggressor.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, there's a few different ways.
I'm like what he mentioned, socially sanctioned violence is rewarded when you do violence on behalf of the group.
Proactive aggression is often done on behalf of the group to enforce a norm violation.
Somebody who's reactively aggressive, they're sitting there, they wander into the camp.
There's a piece of buffalo meat they want, so they go up and punch somebody.
And are we still recording?
Because my eye has dropped out.
If you see, okay, that's fine.
I just have a trouble thing.
If we're still going, that's cool, though.
So, again, the reactive aggressor—
We're good.
We're still recording them right on.
We're going to be not reactively aggressive to this fact either and just hope that it's going well.
We're going to proactively—not proactively do any violence in the future related to this either, but we're going to proactively deal with it in the future.
But, no, to answer your question, again, it's just that we've always gotten rid of the reactively aggressive individuals through proactive aggression.
And that's rewarded by the tribe. And so it becomes an evolutionary part of our, I guess, history. And we have drives related to not being too reactively aggressive. But then he talks about like there's honor cultures where people within an honor culture.
The South is a typical example where you do – you are, I guess, socially sanctioned to react aggressively when certain things happen, certain norms are violated.
Someone flirts with your partner or something like that.
Then you have to – like the situation contextually triggers an impulse in you that you need to use violence to rectify the norm violation.
And it makes perfect sense to the people involved.
I spent eight and a half hours one time sitting next to Hannah Hatfield of the Hatfields and McCoys on a transcontinental flight from the United States to Heathrow in England.
And I was just so fascinated to hear her explain that.
I asked her about like the family history and she talked about it.
You know, it's still going on today, obviously, at a much, much less, you know, outwardly violent level.
But the hatred is still there. The classification of the other side as, you know, outside, you know, less than subhuman type of thing is still pretty much there.
And so it continues down through the generations.
So Bitcoiners are a tribe, are they not? Bitcoiners have tribal symbols that we use to signal coalitionary alliance with other people.
What would you say?
How do Bitcoin use?
That's a good morning.
The GM, that's like a signal online.
But that's not specific to this.
Maybe it more broadly crypto or even more broadly like Twitter even Some of these symbols happen in one community and then they spread out But just to say how do Bitcoiners know each other
We go to Bitcoin meetups.
We go to conferences because we know when you go there, that's a signal that the other people you meet there are going to share certain ideals.
You're going to more easily be able to form a coalition, a friendship with the people in those spaces.
It satisfies some tribal impulse we have to seek out those with whom we know we're going to have some basis for exchange, agreement, some shared common ground.
Are you talking about like a physical?
It can be anything.
Or like an outward thing?
So yeah, they can be all these things.
Linguistic, they can be physical, they can be ideological, they can be spiritual.
all of these things are symbols that may go into an identity constructed tribe like bitcoin what are
like what does bitcoin have any or all of these aspects to it to make it a coherent tribe
uh i mean if i look at if i look at bitcoin as a whole and what they
what they signal like the signal is like it's the guy who's driving the 25 year old truck who's got
three million dollars it's the guy who's living in a um small apartment because uh it makes more
sense to rent than it does to own these are like our saints these are heroes yeah yeah yeah these
are the these are the people that we look upon right we're like yeah the these are the guys that
are doing it right which is really different than the fiat saint because like exactly we have our
in the mercedes in the driveway the tin tin room the bitcoiners signals their in-group affiliation
not through conspicuous consumption, but through conspicuous, you know, anti-consumption,
restraint, conspicuous time preference for a future that they're looking forward to.
Yeah.
Meat eaters.
That's one of the, like, I talked about, like, what is the Bitcoin stack when I was at the network state?
Because we were trying to figure out how we could get less shitcoiners there.
and uh it was uh like you know they eat meat they lift heavy things they get sunlight they get their
sleep they avoid screens yeah they get in the cold punch they get in the sauna um these are all these
are these things you mentioned now in that list are actually things that i don't think does bitcoin
any favors like that you eat meat there can be bitcoin vegetarians that you of course they of
Of course they can.
Yeah.
But when I, when you look broadly speaking across the, like, across the, and I mean, to say that it doesn't do them any favors is almost as it's, that's akin to saying that it is a detraction, I would say.
Right.
To, what do you detract you to?
To say that identifying the group by those things doesn't do them any favors is basically saying that it's bringing them down or that it's not doing –
Yeah.
And I would disagree with that.
I mean what – so I guess – well, what would it be?
What would the other signals of the Bitcoin tribe be?
No, I agree that due to Bitcoin's particular past – there's a term for that.
It's not something dependent.
Yeah, past dependent.
Path dependence. Due to Bitcoin's particular path dependence, it arose in certain internet sub-communities. Libertarian, cypherpunk, and these, for whatever reason, have trended towards meat consumption.
All the neckbeards trading, what was the card game?
Pokemon.
No, the one that.
Magic.
Magic, yeah.
All the neckbeards trading in the magic card game stuck in the basement.
Like, they weren't the guys out getting the sun, eating the meat, you know, stuff like that.
That's evolved as part of the culture because of the direction that people go when they realize that they want to live longer.
When they realize that they do have a low time preference.
because the longer you live, the richer you get.
The better life is going to be from that resource acquisition perspective.
Yeah.
No, it's just interesting to see the tribal signals that you're dropping.
When you talk about the out-group, they're neckbeards.
But when you talk about, I assume, the beards are in-group, that they're well-groomed.
They're not necessarily well-groomed.
It's just that they're big and full.
Yeah, they're less neckbeard.
Of course, our group has very full beards.
The out-group, they are neckbeards.
Dude, you can tell, though, like, you know, being in Kansas City, like there's there's like this quintessential meme of what a Kansas City guy is.
And it's a five foot eight white guy who's thick, but thick in the way that's kind of fat and also and has this like unkempt full beard with a flat brim hat that's covering up the bald spot.
Like that is the Kansas City dude.
You are a tribal.
You are a reader of tribal signals.
I am a tribe.
I am a tribal guy.
But I'm just a human.
You are a human.
Yeah.
I appreciate you bringing your human and tribal perspective.
Yeah.
Because that's an honest way.
Like whether other people will say, you know, that type of thing that, oh, the typical type of person in this community typically has these sorts of social and material symbols that they're dropping.
That happens in every community.
And so when people don't say that, it's really them ignoring, you know, something that's actually a type of social processing that's happening in their mind.
We always process based on these symbols.
He talks about this later in part one where he talks about, you know, like stereotypes are they can be dangerous, but over time or they can be dangerous because for each individual, they might not say what's accurate.
But for the group, they actually do.
Yeah.
They become more truthful over time because they are refined in the public consensus.
And so they are, you know, that was the thing like stereotypes are wrong, but they work.
Yeah.
They often do.
Yeah.
Like if somebody's going to rob a store, you're not looking for, you know, a 72-year-old blue-haired grandma.
Right. Yeah.
Right.
So here's – that's an interesting thing.
Like we all know the stereotypes are bad and we all know the stereotypes work quite a bit.
And so we know – and these are not inconsistent statements.
You need – a person needs to be able to understand when and why they're stereotyping and then to assign that type of thinking a status relevant to that nature of thinking, that it's probabilistic and not a statement of truth about the world.
This is the fitness beats truth aspect of our evolved cognitive machinery.
We are finding things that have helped.
Our thoughts are things that arise within us based on our evolutionary history.
They are things that have helped us survive in the past.
They're not true perceptions of the world the way it is.
So a person who is in control of themselves, who is a mature adult, needs to be able to reflect on that.
Here's a quote I want to read, and this is about getting rid of tribal bias.
This is from Samson.
Anytime you are confronted with a statement from someone else that you vehemently and emotionally disagree with, ask yourself if your identity is at stake and whether or not that is the source of the emotional reaction to the statement.
So here's one way, a sort of scalpel, we can begin to remove some of the tribal biases, some of the ways that our stereotypes may unfortunately not capture the truth of the world. We can just use our human capacity to reflect on them and ask ourselves specifically, you know, this requires self-knowledge.
What is my identity? You have to acknowledge, OK, I'm more of a MAGA person. When this person talks to me, all I hear is woke, but they're actually trying to say something. I need to really think past my initial disgust reaction, see what they're trying to say.
Yeah, the stereotype is really most useful when you apply it to yourself.
No, that's a good point.
And you listen to, you know, what are my predilections?
What are the things that I am most likely to do as a result of the beliefs that I have, which, you know, the beliefs that you have help form your identity.
And Tony Robbins talks about this in his approach, which is that the strongest drive that you have is to maintain your identity.
And so if something challenges that, if it challenges your belief, then you react violently against that because you, you know, it's shattered.
Like your identity is your worldview.
Yeah.
And it comes crashing down if you change those beliefs.
You know, perspective is the thing that you don't know you have until it changes, until it's in the past.
And you can never go back to it.
And so there is a huge cost to that where that is the, you know, the cost of that is that once your perspective changes, you can never unsee the things that you're seeing now.
And so that is like Tony Robbins talks about, like, you know, people don't change until the pain of changing is less than the pain of staying the same.
And so you have to experience some sort of pain. Is that pain in the, you know, within your social circle because you are pushing out these beliefs that other people are rejecting? Is that pain financially because you are engaged in a system that is not rewarding you and you're staying loyal to, oh, my 401k and my company match?
um you know it's free money yeah uh you know that type of thing where you've got you know then you've
got the guy over here that's just hodling his bitcoin and outperforming you by nine thousand
percent you know no that's i really like that i just want to go back and just highlight that line
you gave it's a really good one our stereotypes can be most effective when they when we apply
them to ourselves that's such a great way to look to understand the value and the negative aspect
of stereotypes because when you apply it to yourself then you go oh i understand that this
is both negative but also potentially valuable.
So I wanted to read the same quote to you,
but I'm going to put some new words in it.
Anytime you're confronted with a statement
from a shitcoiner or somebody else
in the Bitcoin community
that you vehemently and emotionally disagree with,
ask yourself, Lucas,
is it your identity as a Bitcoiner that is at stake?
And whether is the source of this emotional reaction
relative to that statement
due to your identity as a Bitcoiner?
No, so I'm really comfortable in my beliefs as a Bitcoiner.
I just look at other people as, like, if you say shitcoiners or whatever.
I just, you know, and I just—
The shitcoiner is an out-group statement right in there.
We're embedding in this.
And the way that, you know, that's how you jest.
I think you can jest with people, and I think you can do that.
But I refer to them, and I did this when we did the Network School of Rock,
when we had the Solana group there.
We had the Bass group there.
We had all these shitcoiners there.
And I heartedly welcome them as Bitcoiners and future Bitcoiners because that's all we are.
There's either Bitcoiners and there's future Bitcoiners.
And you just haven't got there yet.
You haven't experienced enough pain.
And that's, by the way, that's why there's no NFT crazies right now.
That's why there's no ETH crazies right now.
It's because they haven't – like they got washed out in the 2022 cycle.
The 20 – actually in the 20 – yeah, the 2022 cycle.
They got washed out in the 2022 cycle and now it's the Solana Group's turn because they haven't experienced that.
Oh, we had everything and now we're going to lose it.
And they'll get there.
They'll lose it.
They'll learn.
They'll feel the pain.
Yeah.
And then they will become a current Bitcoiner instead of a future Bitcoiner.
If they can, if people can deal with their identity being challenged.
Some people double down on, you know, anti-Bitcoin.
But hopefully, you know, people do learn from hurt people, hurt people, really hurt people, hopefully become Bitcoiners.
Yeah, those double down people, they sort of –
Double downers.
Yeah.
Are you a Debbie double downer?
Yeah.
They self-select themselves out of the group.
They're just not going to be around.
Right.
Okay, so here is – this is something that maybe I'm reading into this book, something that is not there.
Good, excellent.
But this is – we've read in a lot of the Bitcoin books that we read, we get a history of money.
We get a statement of where money began in the historical record, what its use was, why it had the characteristics it did.
A lot of – it's social and cultural functions.
So there's a point in this book, in the first part, where Samson is trying to isolate the point where humanity scales beyond friendship as a form of coalition.
So this is, you know, we have these Kith and Ken groups, and then at some point we get the tribal coalitionary alliances that are much bigger.
What is the historical point? Can we put kind of a somewhat of a pin on that?
And so to do that, he's looking for that approximate point in time where humans start embedding themselves with an identity beyond mere face-to-face network into larger us-versus-them networks.
So I'm going to read a portion here and then we'll see if this and I'll kind of explain why I think it's relevant.
So we can see it in the remains left behind by humans of this epoch.
Outside of one's own group, another kind of evolution was occurring with the use of symbols.
Paleo archaeologists have uncovered evidence of symbolic behavior and social intensification that really ramps up by the Middle Stone Age, 60 to 90,000 years ago.
Examples range throughout the East and West Africa from Namibia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Morocco, and Algeria.
By this point, the humans that were living in these societies had full possession of modern human language capacity.
The typical territory size for hunter-gatherers is not greater than 30 kilometers.
Therefore, a smoking gun level of evidence comes from the earliest silcrete stone tools 77,000 to 80,000 years ago,
transported more than 150 kilometers from their site of origin across the Kalahari Desert.
To restate the deductive logic, if you have a rare resource that has behavioral signatures of a specific group embedded in it and it is transported beyond the typical band geographic regions, then the people transporting it were an us going to trade with them.
So what I was reflecting on as I was reading that is maybe an early point of money was not just to resolve spot transactions, not just to allow us to complete a trade on the spot so that we don't have to extend credit to a people we don't trust.
Maybe another part is to possess an item that has symbolic signaling power, like a bat signal that we're part of a larger meta tribe in some sense, a tribe of traders.
and so you could be trusted to come to the table and begin negotiating in order to arrive at a spot transaction
before you even start bargaining.
That is that maybe money is not just about completing the trade,
but about good faith signaling of the possibility of trade.
That sound money, for example, might signal to somebody,
I can come and sit down at the table with this person and talk about what I'm going to give in exchange for the thing they have.
They possess a resource that I see symbolically them signaling that they're open to trading something of real value and scarcity for something that I might have of similar nature.
Does that make sense?
Kind of.
Yeah.
The trading of tools.
Right.
But.
Or beads or just scarcity.
Right.
Scarce things.
Exactly.
But what that implies, like anything scarce, like a tool or the bead, which requires work of a specialized nature to do it.
Like those all speak to specialization, which is something that we, I think that we are fairly confident in saying that specialization in civilization is an outgrowth of money.
That because we had money, then we could take advantage of trade and specialize and to create a tool that does a specific job speaks to the idea of I am going to spend my time fashioning this whatever it is, this axe or this shovel or something.
because I'm going to do this one job.
And the reason why I can spend the time doing this one job
and spend the time making this tool to make this one job easier
is because there already exists a network
that allows me to trade whatever my produce is
from this specialized job in order to get the rest of my needs.
Yeah, that already existence of a network,
I guess that's what I'm saying,
that maybe, you know, we presuppose that now
You can go to the store and there's somebody there waiting to give your product. But there was a point in our evolutionary history where there was no market except for like tribes that might interact. And what is going to be the stimulus to allow a tribe to interact with another tribe in a way that's not warfare?
um maybe one symbol one signal um of a meta tribe of traders is the production of a scarce thing
to indicate that we have something of value that we're willing to part with if you'll give us
something of value i don't know there's a great quote i can't remember what the quote is but
there's something it's something about like if if trade doesn't flow then bombs will drop or
something like that. You know, like if, you know, you, you meet up with this tribe and if they have
something of value and you have something about, like, I think that this is what you're, I think
this is the point you're making is that if you meet up with somebody who's not a trusted part of
your tribe and they have something of value and you have something of value, then that's a signal
to each other that there is an opportunity for interaction through trade that makes you
both better.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
Like you're bringing something to the table and that thing that you're bringing to the
table is a signal of the seriousness.
There's also an opportunity, of course, for violence and taking.
But I think that an underlying point, too, is that money talks, maybe literally, maybe
money is a symbol, money is language.
It begins as a token indicating, you know, a willingness to trade or something.
I don't know.
This is all kind of just.
That was one of the first, wasn't that like the first essay in the Satoshi papers was the like, you know, Bitcoin as the language layer of value or something like that.
It was the social layer that Bitcoin.
Yeah, the social layer.
Yeah. And maybe, you know, I've heard references to this that, you know, Bitcoin is a language or that has linguistic properties and maybe money itself.
If you have the idea, if one of your ideas that money or that language is a, I think this is the idea that Derrida had, that money, that language is about referring to an absence or something like that.
That's going a bit far afield, though.
we could dig into that when I've actually read something that has substance to it and I'm not
just speculating just nakedly so everyone loves naked speculation we could change the nature of
the show let's not do that okay get a lot more views yeah we're a lot less and that'll be a
terrible indictment charge a lot more for it too there's websites that do that for sure definitely
do that just speak which brings us to our next point the loneliness epidemic there was a key
there's a part of that i wanted to know so um the loneliness epidemic in the context of part one
is that idea of the evolutionary mismatch again that we evolved to be part of a tribe
and yet we now live in a culture where the only tribe so we're really part of like these
internet communities of like fighting people online regarding naked tribal affiliation
um and i there was a one there's a lot in there of course one thing i just wanted to bring out
that I thought was interesting.
As a part of that, he mentions evidently something
part of the literature that evaluates loneliness
called self-determination theory.
And the idea is that humans need three foundational elements
to live satisfactory lives.
One, we need to feel competent in our work.
Two, we need to feel that life,
that our life is being lived authentically.
And three, we need to feel socially connected,
that all of these things are more important
than money, status, beauty,
feeling competent in your work, living authentically,
and being socially connected.
Does that seem like a recipe for a happy life?
Yeah, it resonates with,
I think this is something that Peterson talked about,
which is like the three,
if you look at like very successful people,
they have three similarities
and it's that they want to stand out of the group
and that's like being competent.
Like I want to have a signal that I'm good at whatever
that's standing out.
They also want to be included, which is at odds with standing out.
Yeah, interesting.
Right?
Yeah.
And so, like, this creates the conundrum and the juxtaposition.
And then I can't remember what the third one was.
But yeah it makes perfect sense This evolutionary mismatch that occurs not just when we presented with unlimited processed sugar while living in a body with a brain that for 1 million years was driven
to seek that because of the caloric density.
Samson gives this example a lot in his podcast.
It's the hundred minute movie, right, where it's only within the last.
If you look at the entirety of human existence as a movie that lasts for a hundred minutes, it's only within the last millisecond, less than a second, that we've had access to this sugar, that we've had access to these screens.
One of the things she talks about with like the reason for Dunbar's number that 150 people is that caring is emotionally exhaustive and is calorically draining.
And so now we can have these massive online communities of millions of people and we don't have to expend the same amount of effort in order to become part of that group, in order to develop that relationship.
Like developing a relationship should be difficult. It should be hard because it's valuable. And when you don't have to expend that type of energy, when you have that instant connection that's available online, then it's no surprise that you've got people that have 50,000 friends and they feel completely alone.
Yeah. And they're lost in the world. It's no different than I've got access to unlimited sugar. And I, because that's what I want, just like having the connection with people is what I want. And I feel like shit.
Yeah. Because I because I've I've imbibed basically in that thing.
You know, it's it comes back to the, you know, the the Bitcoin ethos of proof of work, that proof of work needs to exist in your relationships.
It needs to exist in your diet. It needs to exist in your fitness regimen, your sleep approach.
you know this if if there is no proof of work then it will be empty and it will be
yeah soulless and easily taken advantage of and corrupted no there's an interesting corollary
work like comparison similarity between proof of work and costly signals so he talks about costly
signals in this that like a very effective tribal signal is often a very costly one because
you can have lots of imposters if all your tribe is is somebody who you know puts like berries on
their face or something like that smears some berries on their face to make them look purple
anybody can do that well the modern example is i've got my ukrainian flag yeah and i've got my
i've got my rainbow flag and i've got my israel flag you know it's just all i have to do is just
so that's an easy signal so a costly signal then is not i'm going to knock out one of my incisors
so you can see that i'm part of the knockout my incisors tribe what is a cost like i'm going to
make my head square like the Japanese do with watermelon do I don't know that example but yeah
it was that was it was in I thought it was the Peruvian face it's face flattening I thought the
face lining was yeah in Africa it was I don't know where it was because they do I went down and did
the tours of Machu Picchu and they they did some sort of I think head modification there like um
but yeah I know it's a interesting way and it's just a costly signal it's just like if you're
willing to do that it both it takes time to get that done so you can't just immediately fake it
And also it just like, yeah, you're investing a lot in that and evolutionary evolutionary history is full of that.
But I mean, the point is just like, that's a type of proof of work.
You know, how can you instantly determine what is the correct time chain or whatever?
It's like the one that has the most like proof of work in it.
And so like the costly signal is also how do we recognize what is to be trusted around us?
It's the people who have invested a lot into our lives, not somebody who always smiles at us and is friendly in that way.
but the person who's there for you when you need it, right?
Like that's a costly signal that, oh, you need to move.
I'm there with my truck or whatever.
It's not just like, oh, nice.
How are you doing?
So he talks about the size of the sympathy group, like about a dozen people.
And he gives an example of like how do you define the sympathy group?
It's effectively how many people would you feel devastated by their death?
Yeah.
And it's about a dozen.
But you could actually use that same thing.
It's like how many people would I go help move?
Right.
There's probably about a dozen.
Yeah.
You know, that's, and that's probably about right.
You know, I think that, yeah, anybody else would be like, hey, you can rent and call.
Or there's descending levels.
I'll let you borrow my truck.
Yeah, exactly.
Something like that.
Yeah.
That, I have a couple more things.
I think.
I wanted to talk about, like, so the Levittowns.
Yeah.
I don't know if you've, so there was an episode of Channel 5 with Andrew Callahan where he
He goes – he talks about the fentanyl epidemic in – or it's – yeah, is it fentanyl?
Yeah.
The fentanyl epidemic in Philadelphia with the open-air drug markets.
But in the second half of the episode, he talks about – is it called redlining or bluelining?
Redlining.
Redlining, which was this segregational practice of not allowing black people into neighborhoods that occurred.
And within these Levittowns, and the Levittowns were, I think it's Jim Levitt and apparently his brother. I didn't realize he had a brother involved in it.
But after World War II ends, we have all of these soldiers that are coming back and they have – the government realized that if they allowed them effectively to live in these tight community clusters, that they would be uncontrollable, that they would rise up, that they would rebel.
They would organize.
They would organize, yeah.
And so they design using using the manpower of the military and the planning ability and the execution ability of the military.
They laid out these suburban areas called Levittowns, which were intentionally designed to discourage organization, which were, you know, hey, you're going to have your lot and there's going to be identical lots everywhere.
and there's not going to be restaurants.
There's not going to be the YMCA.
There's not going to be these places that you would go in order to bond and organize around.
It's fascinating.
I think it's – because they're everywhere.
Like the Levittown, Kansas City was a very popular place for it as well, right?
or that practice of racial discrimination through neighborhood planning.
But I just, yeah, I find that really interesting because it's such a recent occurrence in humanity.
You know, it goes, again, it's like, this is like a millisecond of the hundred minute movie.
Yeah. I mean, but so the phenomenon is interesting and one, it can have conspiratorial vibes of, you know, these things are planned as a way to keep us apart.
I don't think it's conspiratorial. What's conspiratorial?
So let me just offer another, like maybe people choose the Levittown because we are an individualist society and one of our ideals is everybody's the king of their own acre or land or whatever.
Like that's a deep part of our national history too. People went west because they wanted a homestead. They wanted something where they had their own land. They were the sovereign of that land. And so, you know, it's not bad to be an individualist society. It just means that maybe, of course, you need to be aware that you need to take care of your social impulse too and all these other things. But I don't think there's anything bad with the Levittown concept in itself. There's nothing bad with Serbia.
I wasn't making any, I wasn't saying anything bad about it.
I was just saying this is the reason why they did it.
And by the way, if that was a natural outcropping of being an individualist society, then we would have seen that occur in nature on the frontier.
And we didn't.
Right?
Why don't we still homesteaders have their own like 40 acres and a mule or whatever?
You got your 40 acres and a mule and then you have your church and you have your place that you all go congregate.
Yeah.
where the tribe goes to meet and organize.
And, you know, I think that, you know,
because I was one of the,
that's like one of the things
that the Levittowns were devoid of,
which was churches.
Were they devoid of churches?
I believe so.
I don't know that.
I think so.
Maybe they were.
It would seem odd that there would be devoid of churches
because considering how religious it was
at that particular time.
I mean, I think that they were like not designed
for like walkable spaces
that would bring us naturally
into like community and stuff like that.
I don't know enough about history though, so.
Yeah.
I mean, you look at them, they look great.
Until you see the alternative of like, oh, you could actually, you know, live in a place that is, I do get a little bit confused on, because to me, a Levittown, that's a dense community compared, like, compared to what I grew up in, right?
Where, you know, my closest neighbor was three miles away.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, yeah. But we also had like, you know, you have the common congregational points, the Friday night football game and the Sunday morning church. And, you know, that's where the people get together and they, that's where the ideas are formed and the revolution is born.
Right. And I think, I mean, community is going to spontaneously arrive, arise. We do have this tribal impulse. There's another concept here that's relevant. We have physical homeostasis. Our body comes into stasis with our environment through things like thermoregulation, and our body just has this ability to regulate itself.
we also have we regulate socially that our it's like sociality is a biological phenomenon we i
mean we should never forget that it's part of our animal nature we are drained physically when we're
in isolation when you're with people um you are you can be filled with an energy you didn't know
like you're like oh man i thought i was exhausted but now i'm with my friends and like i am a new
person and so like social cravings are like food cravings that you know and we kind of hinted that
The desire for sugar is analogous to the desire for social connection through Facebook or Twitter or something like that.
And there are people that when you're around them, they bring you energy, right?
The Energy Bus book talks about, you know, don't be an energy vampire.
You know, be the person that brings the energy, not the person that sucks the energy out.
And that's very evident.
And, you know, if you're the person that wants to charge your social battery, you can think in your mind of, like, who you want to hang out with.
Oh, for sure.
You know, like, who's going to give you energy.
And you mentioned there's so many interesting kind of stats, anecdotes, facts in here.
Another, when talking about social homeostasis, this is something, it was just such a tender thing to put in here.
I thought that he observes, of course, well, he observes that we experience less pain in a painful scenario when we're around like our kin, our kith and kin, right?
He also notes that literally holding the hand of having someone you care for and who cares about you hold your hand while you're in pain causes you to subjectively experience less pain.
Not even like being with you, but just like that.
The act of handholding is a part of our evolutionary history or whatever.
And, you know, it's an analgesic.
Yeah. Yeah. We talked about this last night and I gave the example of like we've all watched the football game or the soccer game or baseball or whatever.
And you see somebody just get utterly waylaid, laid out, just appeared to be knocked out of their soul.
And they're laying there and their teammates come and they slowly get to their feet and they slowly make it off the field.
And they come back like three plays later and they're perfectly fine.
And everybody in the crowd is like, oh, it's faking it.
They're just trying to milk it, you know, this guy.
But in all actuality, like what we should be saying about that situation is, oh, like these are great friends.
Like these friends heal pain.
And they literally, like we know that pain is a mental, it is a mental thing.
And that it's something that is nothing more than neurons firing and connecting up here as a result of some outward stimuli.
And so, you know, that outward stimuli could be a bone snapping in half, but it could also be someone gingerly breaching their hand towards yours and clasping your hand in a, you know, holding it in a brace.
No, definitely, yeah.
And transferring that, you know, that that has a stimuli effect as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it kind of really this is what kind of my not what I wanted to end on.
But the last thing I had, if you have anything else, you can get out of that for this.
But one of the points of this first part is that communities undergoing some form of oppression are the most socially resilient.
Right. That's an ad for an enemy can bring us together or a bad circumstance can bring us together.
Because in those moments, people then devote themselves to the community rather than to themselves.
It begins, people begin to think for and about others.
And that is very healthy for us.
So Bitcoiners, I mean, we can also, we're not, I don't think, under some vast regime of social oppression.
But there's enough of an adverse community where if you feel shitty, maybe it's because you shouldn't be stacking alone.
But you should be giving something back to the community of Bitcoiners.
You should be doing something.
And if you feel alone, that maybe you haven't found that the tribe of Bitcoiners is a very in real life phenomena.
There's a Bitcoin meetup likely near enough to where wherever anybody's living that they can.
I was talking to one person who lives in Jordan.
There's a Bitcoin meetup where he lives in Jordan.
I mean, like around the world, there are communities of people that you can find who we're going to share certain tribal.
You're going to be able to feel satisfy that tribal drive if you meet up in real life with Bitcoiners.
I feel certain if you got this far into an episode like about Bitcoin or about Bitcoin in this tenuous fashion, just because you love Bitcoin that much, then you are part of the tribe.
And if you go to a Bitcoin meetup, you're going to meet other people who are part of the tribe.
Also, you know, read a book and talk about it with us.
Like, this is a high-cost signal.
If you read a book and drop a comment that shows that you read a book, that's a high-cost signal that shows that you're part of a very specific tribe.
Yeah, well, and that's what I think you did a great job of talking about that.
It's a process where you can take small steps, and maybe the first step that you take is you make a comment or you share.
Like, that's a signal.
That's a costly social signal, right?
Yeah, it is costly to put yourself out there.
Exactly.
And then maybe the next step is that you start to read along. And obviously, this is not us advertising. This is just like giving an example of what you can do in order to feel better about being part of a group without focusing on the out group in order to give you the feel.
Not the fiat enemy. It's the Bitcoin friend that you're seeking. Exactly. Yeah. You're not avoiding. You're seeking. Yeah. Yeah. Where it's, you know, the and again, I will define out groups here by saying this. But one of the the the thing that I notice is Mark Andreessen, I think, said this best when he talked about like, why did woke culture basically die?
and it is dying off and it's because it is a culture that's based on hate and you kept expanding
who you had to hate because you ran out of people first you know first you hated the rich then you
hated the white then you hated the men then you hated the straight then you just like and at a
certain point you ran out of people to hate and you could no longer be inclusive you actually made
the group smaller. Um, and the opposite of that again is, is the love. Like how can you show love?
How can you show love first, by the way, to yourself, right? You, you have to do that first.
You have to show love to your, um, you know, to your sleep and to your body and to your soul.
Um, you know, through a connection with something spiritual or a connection with something natural
that really brings you more in alignment with the way that,
I'll say the way that we're meant to live,
but what I mean is the thing that makes you feel good.
You know, like we went out yesterday,
we went and worked out outside in the sun,
and it's exhausting, and then there's a cost to it,
and it just feels great.
Yeah.
You know, it feels fantastic.
So, yeah, maybe the first step is, you know,
you made it this far, that's a cost.
Drop a comment, that's a cost.
Read along, that's a cost.
Talk to a friend about it, that's a cost.
Go to a Bitcoin meetup.
You know, all of these things are just accelerating.
It's so tough, man.
It feels so tough to walk into a group of people
who you don't know and you're like vulnerable
and you're hoping that they're going to like you
and that you're going to fit in.
But when you grow into a group of Bitcoiners,
like I had this experience viscerally
when I went to the KC Bitcoin Summit
that is like, you know, I sat in my truck or my car outside,
and I was like, I don't really want to go.
It's like, what's am I going to sit with a bunch of strangers?
And then I went in there, and they weren't strangers.
They were part of a tribe for sure, and it was great.
And so, yeah, just do it.
It's instant connection.
You know, like that was like being in Malaysia with the network school,
that was instant connection of like your signaling.
Like that's a huge cost.
Like I'm going to go around the world and live in a hotel.
Like that's a huge cost that you're signaling.
And, you know, it turns out that there was, you know, there was no conflict.
Every once in a while there was people that got pissy during the sports competitions, which was hilarious.
But that's what you're supposed to do.
And you're supposed to have it on that.
Like that's the field where you have it.
You know, there's a high social cost to it.
And this ability to, you know, I think don't discount the things that just feel natural, like the movement of body, the expression through voice and through song and music.
One of the things that I, you know, I was really drawn to was he talks about the September 28th, 1991 was the Metallica Monsters of Rock concert in Moscow.
1.6 million people that, and I went and I watched the video. And when they zoom out and there's 1.6
million people going like this, it looks kind of terrifying. But anytime that there was like a close
shot, you would see like 20 people within that group. And it just looked like they weren't raging.
They weren't violent. They were, you know, they were like, yeah, we're just into this. We're just,
We're just together and we're experiencing this together. So yeah, go and do the things that allow you to experience things together and find your tribe.
Cool. I mean, well, next time we're going to really apply what we learned today, see what the author's vision for part two, the practice of tribalism is. So it's going to I'm really excited for this. I mean, he's going to put all this to use. And if you're wondering how to build a tribe, how to be part of a tribe. And I think we're going to see also we're going to see his discussion of Jason Lowery software specifically how he talks about Bitcoin. It doesn't go in depth, but it's mentioned. And so it's going to be interesting.
Hey, define something. When you were doing the introduction, you said like part one, I think, is the praxis.
Yeah.
What's praxis mean?
It's a pretentious word for practice. P-R-A-X-I-S.
Right, right. I know that. I mean, I know what the word is, but it's a pretentious word for what?
Practice, essentially doing.
Practice?
Yeah, yeah.
They're that close in the way that praxis and practice?
They're that close, Lucas.
That's hilarious.
I know. And it's just, that's how close we all are to being pretentious.
It's like an urban way of saying practice.
I'm a praxis.
I'm going to go practice guitar after this.
One's accent might make them a praxis, sir, even if they don't want to be a praxis, sir.
Oh, that's awesome.
It's a good word.
I'm an ax.
You can upgrade immediately, you know, yourself to a potential level just with some small linguistic amendments.
Pinky out.
Yeah.
All right.
Pinky out, everybody.
Thanks for joining us.
Have a good one.