Digital Industrialization, Land, Labor, and Capital.
That's the title of the paper that we're talking about today,
a post by Jonathan Kirkwood of 1031.
He's got quite an interesting background,
driving from medicine over into Bitcoin.
As we find with many Bitcoiners, they have interesting backgrounds.
Kirkwood is a particularly coherent writer
who has taken a comprehensive view of the moment that we're in.
Title of Michael Saylor's book, The Mobile Wave,
the disintegration of the real into something,
into the digital space constrained by physics,
which makes it, interestingly enough, just as real.
to kick us off on this conversation.
As always, Mr. Grant Riker, DeskWire.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I feel like there should be a camera cut.
It's like you're introducing me
and then I'm just right here.
Like, oh, now I start talking.
Next time you can walk in.
I'll introduce myself through a dramatic walk in.
Now, this is an essay by Jonathan Kirkwood.
You said coherent writer.
I would also add eloquent.
It's very well written.
And I appreciate that.
If you're going to go through the process of really picking an essay apart and analyzing it, it's good when it's good.
It's fun when it's fun.
And this essay was good and fun.
So digital industrialization, land labor and capital.
I mean, overall, you kind of pointed to this with the title of Saylor's book.
There's a trend where things are being digitized.
Things which were real world objects or affairs, projects are being reduced to computational processes.
This has been an ongoing thing.
This essay is about how that reduction to computational process is affecting three things that were once or are key to business and industry, land, labor, and capital.
That is about how we are undergoing digital industrialization because we are digitizing land, labor, and capital.
So digital industrialization, the basic trend of digital industrialization in each of these realms, land, labor and capital, is that it makes something very abundant.
And then this new abundance causes most value to flee to a new scarce thing related to that abundant thing.
Some underlying constraint or aspect of the digitized thing, which resists being made abundant.
That's where most of the value ends up going in digital industrialization.
Two other ways to put this, industrialization decentralizes one domain of a thing while then centralizing another aspect, or digital industrialization of something causes costs to collapse while scarcity consolidates value in another realm.
The first example then is land.
And this will give us a good idea of how this dynamic of digital industrialization functions in Kirkwood's estimation.
So digital industrialization digitizes land.
How does it do that?
Through the internet.
The internet is the digitization of land in a sense.
Location used to be very important in business and industry.
You would have key ports where for their location, they were kind of centers and hubs of transport and distribution.
At a smaller scale, even, you want your brick and mortar storefront to be in the right place so the customers can find you.
And so you get there, you're visible and ease of kind of access to people you want to sell goods to.
But when land digitizes, this changes.
So last time we discussed Durjeejee's essay, Bitcoin is time.
In the digital realm, there is no space and time.
In the digital realm, everything is everywhere all at once, in a sense.
So when land digitizes through the Internet, space disappears.
Costs of distribution collapse, and we now have digital abundance.
I'll pause there before.
So I just want to see, like, is that the case that that is what the Internet does, in your estimation, causes space to disappear and introduces a new dynamic than a business and industry?
For the Internet, absolutely.
But to take it a step further, it appears that abundance always creates a new scarcity.
So abundance of calories, when we went from basically struggling for food, not having access to a whole lot of food to now everyone has access to all kinds of cheap calories.
That abundance created a new scarcity, which was physical health.
Like being fit today is now a luxury of the wealthy.
think about digitization of sex so only fans digitized you know pornographic material
obviously they weren't the first but they did it on grand scale and so they i would say
prostitution is what it digitized that yeah you're right that's probably way better and so what
became scarce now i would say is like modesty and you know and um i don't know whatever good girls
or however you want to refer to that.
Yeah.
You know, but it seems,
when we talk about Bitcoin,
we always have these like recurring themes.
There's recurring themes about proof of work
and you can see it everywhere.
The proof of work that is the Bitcoin's consensus model
is also the thing that leads you to a good life.
You know, did you work out?
Did you read?
Did you go to sleep?
Did you keep away from blue light?
Like all of these things are proof of work
that you're doing in your real life.
And another theme that we're seeing a linkage to is scarcity.
You can't escape scarcity even with abundance.
And so we're, I think, again, there's,
as we dive deeper and deeper into Bitcoin,
there are recurring themes that become deeper
and broader veins that we want to explore.
Yes, and as we dive deeper into this essay, in fact,
We're going to work out that dynamic that you've illustrated with some examples between abundance and scarcity, that the whole digital industrialization dynamic is as cost collapse for one thing due to abundance valued in fleas or consolidates in a new scarce thing.
That's often kind of a constraint on the abundance or a bottleneck to that abundance and underlying infrastructure of that abundance, but something that is not abundant.
And Bitcoin itself, I mean, maybe we can see where this essay is going, land, labor, and capital.
So we're still, though, at land here.
Cost collapse, but value then consolidates around the new scarce thing.
So let's talk about the consolidation with respect to the digitization of land through the Internet.
We now have abundance when the Internet digitizes land.
But the trend in digital industrialization is that cost collapse around something that is more abundant,
and then value consolidates around the constraint or bottleneck related to that new abundance.
So when land digitizes, costs related to the location of a business collapse.
Value then consolidates in those who control kind of the constraints of the new sources of scarcity.
When internet digitizes, value then consolidates in platforms.
These are the things that have digitized those sources of scarcity that still remain in the internet as far as internet digitizing land.
Kirkwood gives three examples of platforms that have digitized sources of scarcity relating to the new digital abundance resulting from the digitization of land via the Internet.
So compute, that was one constraint to the Internet.
People had initially to host their own servers, right?
Bill, you had to build data centers to host if you wanted to, all the data you were accumulating.
You had to back up that information.
You didn't want to do operations online.
and you had to have a server to do that.
Now, Amazon Web Services digitizes the infrastructure of Compute
by offering it as a service.
Compute is no longer a fixed hardware cost that you need to take into account
if you want to have your quote-unquote space on the Internet.
You can instead scale Compute up or down by turning a dial
on how much you want to give Amazon Web Services
or some other comparable provider.
The capital expenditure then required to get into the Internet
to move your business there, to enter the free market online, goes way down.
Another constraint is attention.
So this is another source of abundance then, or I'm sorry, of scarcity related to digital abundance.
There's only so much attention to go around.
You can only attend to so many things.
The rarity of attention, its finiteness makes it valuable, makes it scarce,
even as the Internet makes other things abundant.
Facebook then digitizes attention and converts it into a captured audience.
Like with Amazon Web Services, you can now scale that up or down the amount of attention that your business wants access to.
Turning a dial, you can buy more targeted advertisements from the provider of attention, Facebook or Twitter or whoever, right?
Facebook has then digitized a constraint upon the abundance of the Internet and so captures value.
Facebook has. One example, or another, I guess, final example, we might say we have compute attention, new sources of scarcity. Another one is discovery that Kirkwood mentions. So when land is digitized by the Internet, we can instantly teleport ourselves to some boutique store in Japan and buy a product from that store.
But the question is, how do we even discover that store in the first place?
Amongst all the other stores that now exist on the internet and that are around the world, how do we find that one store and how do they find us?
The answer is something like Google.
So Google indexes all that information online and makes discovery as easy as punching words into a box, which used to require kind of large fixed cost.
You had to get maps maybe or guides, talk to people.
So now you can, again, turn a dial, scale it up or down.
The cost of discovery is as much as you want to give Google to be discovered.
So those are three constraints upon the abundance provided by the Internet's digitization of land, compute, attention, and discovery, and how the value of these things is now consolidated on giant platforms offered to us as kind of a scalable dial-turning service.
How much of it you want, you get that from these things.
So that then, you know, it can sound diabolical or good, but it's good in a sense in that it allows new businesses to appear with abundance overnight.
You can launch a business onto the Internet.
You've removed lots of fixed cost of entry into the market.
But then those businesses are fighting for scraps.
This new abundance has kind of made it so this abundance of businesses are competing with each other.
Prices are going down.
Meanwhile, as abundance causes costs to collapse for businesses, value then consolidates in new places with platforms like Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google.
Kirkwood refers to these new sources of scarcity, those who control it, as the landlords of digital land.
So that's kind of the dynamic playing out with the Internet's digitization of land.
Does that dynamic sound correct of cost collapsing, value consolidating around new source of scarcity, specifically with these types of platforms?
Yeah, I think you can actually make the case that location has become even more important in the digital age.
It's a web address.
Yeah.
So it's a location.
The way that Kirkwood puts it is it used to be location, location, location.
Now it's access, access, access is what the, yeah.
But, well, the value, I mean, you just, you see people, Michael Saylor is one who talked about doing this in the 90s, recognizing the power of the word that was the web address, hope.com, you know, faith.whatever it was, buying all those up and then auctioning off a number of them.
And the amount of money that people pay for a web address in order to establish their business at that not brick and mortar storefront, but bits and bits and digits storefront is incredibly high.
Is address the right word once space is gone, land is digitized to the Internet?
That's kind of address is kind of a folder.
We call it a web address.
Maybe there's a better.
It's the location where it is.
Yeah.
You know, even though it is digitally, it's anywhere and everywhere.
But it is still somewhere.
Is it?
We can't stop thinking about it spatially.
But when you say it's somewhere, it's like distributed around and like it's in clouds here.
It's in servers there.
It's not any place. There's an address which will direct your attention to it via a portal to the Internet. But it's just interesting that our lexicon is still kind of pre-digital industrialization. And there's a word for that. I forget what it is when these words that we used are now just kind of metaphors in a new reality, but they've lost the sense. They're tied to the reality that created them.
Yeah, it's useful.
It's useful in a sense.
It's useful to think of it in that way.
It may not be exactly correct, but...
That usefulness, though, can obscure it, though.
To the extent that it's useful, maybe it makes people think and reason
or have mental models that are incorrect and they don't see the new reality
because they're too tied to the old ones or vocabulary that is holding them there.
They still think the Internet is a place.
Well, that, I mean, I think there is, that is kind of true because if, so the web address is now no longer near as important as how much you pay to get your web address discovered.
So you're, you know, you could be selling dog food and your web address could be, I don't know, imurderchickensinmysleep.com.
But as long as you're paying Google $30 a click, then you're able to be on the first page of the Google search results, which the joke, where would you hide a dead body on the second page of the Google search results?
No one ever goes there.
No one ever goes past the third one, to be experientially honest.
Yeah.
And so we've digitized physical location, but whether you want to call it address or location on the Internet, whatever it is, it's still the analog to that has become arguably more scarce in a way, just judging off of the prices that are paid for this.
And Booth talked about this in The Price of Tomorrow, where that price started off very small, you know, like pennies, fractions of a penny per click in order to get yourself noticed, in order to get your discovery.
And then, you know, rapidly shot up.
More businesses come in there and everybody wants a bit of that tiny, finite space.
Well, as the rent, as the well, but the access is.
Right.
The access, even though, you know, he says the access is abundant, but it's not.
Sorry, no, that's the scarcity.
Is the access has become very scarce because you have to pay for that access.
And it's not the customer paying for the access.
It's the business paying to give access to the customer.
You're paying to be accessed.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So it's yet another, you know, he refers to it as digital landlords, but, you know, it's another example of rent seeking effectively, where it's like, we're here, we're charging you.
We've got this thing.
Yeah.
This is the capital.
And so how do we remove that?
Except for to the extent that it's occurring outside of crony capitalism or political coercion, maybe rent seeking is not the exact right word.
It's like if it is a free market dynamic that does lead to the rise of platforms as gatekeepers in a sense, it's just like this is what the free market will tend to do.
It will create new monopolies.
I think it's done that since quite some time.
It tends to create new monopolies.
But the monopolies have a sense created a whole new business model, a whole new business.
And then new types of businesses arise in the orbit of the new monopoly created.
If you look at Google search results, I would say that they are not only not devoid of, you know, crony capitalism and whatever you, you know, it is absolutely not a free market.
You know, that's why people stop. That's why so many people, especially watching this, I would assume are probably using something like Brave or using something like DuckDuckGo because the search results became manipulated because of political ideals.
You know, if you want to define something, what was the one, there was one like during the presidential race, I think if you Googled Trump, like the top result was like Kamala Harris's presidential website.
Yeah. You know, candidacy website. So, yeah, I would argue that no, like that actually created probably an even more.
Even more nefarious because then it just you just literally could not find it on Google.
Yeah. It just wasn't there because of crony capitalism, because of political meddling.
What it does in kind of Jason Lowry's framework is these platforms create a honeypot for political control to then swoop in because it has access to people at their most intimate level, like ideological level.
You have the god kings of the platforms are then those who can through their platforms perpetuate an ideology if they so choose or be then honeypots for existing political movements to co them to use them as a source of control yeah you go i don know
if they've corrected it yet but as of oh just probably a couple weeks ago i think was the last
time that i you know deleted x off my phone and the last time yeah never gonna smoke again
It's the last time, man.
And then ended up redownloading it.
And when you go to the Apple App Store, you know, you put in X and you can't find it.
Oh, yeah.
You know, they just hide the results.
Yeah.
That's capitalism.
That's free market.
They don't want you on.
They're fighting for space there.
Apple and X are squabbling maybe.
It's definitely not a free market, though.
I don't know.
There's no true free market, right?
Yeah, we have one.
and I like this description a lot.
The pure ability to get things done.
Like that's what AI offers
to get things done almost instantly.
So land is digitized by the internet,
labor is digitized by AI
and then Crookwood says embodied systems,
which would just be like AI operating in the real world
through autonomous vehicles, robots,
assembly lines, whatever.
When labor is digitized, has pure competence.
It is competence that is now the new abundance.
The value of competence then collapses to the marginal cost of electricity to kind of generate that competence.
When costs collapse around the new source of abundance, as we've been talking, the dynamics of digital industrialization are such that value then consolidates on a new constraint that provides a source of scarcity, something that creates the abundance but is itself scarce.
With AI, the value consolidates then, to quote Quirkwood, where physics defends the margins.
Semiconductors, fabs, energy generation, cooling, data center, robotics, logistics, safety certification.
More generally, he says, is kind of energy, hardware, manufacturing throughput.
There's actually kind of two categories he talks about here.
One is the hard infrastructure of the provision of AI, and the other is the legal things necessary to facilitate it, provide it, get it done.
The example he gives is NVIDIA.
Competence is abundant, so need to consolidate value around a constraint or a bottleneck to the provision of that confidence, which provides scarcity.
NVIDIA, he says, controls the data center stack of chips, Ethernet switches, compilers.
digital land digitized land as we as we discussed through the internet caused a sort of gold rush
or a rush of new businesses into the spaceless space of the internet so too does digitized or
will digitized labor cause people to rush into this realm businesses to rush in to be kind of
the niche providers of the new abundance new businesses arise through abundant competence
as those people who can customize the general capabilities of confidence
to provide it in a unique context to create an AI model
that's good at a very specific thing, and then they sell that thing to people.
But as costs collapse with those kind of specialized users of confidence,
those niche providers of confidence,
value will then still continue to consolidate around those who control
the provision of digital competence,
Those who are the infrastructure providers of abundance, the fixed cost of the hard things necessary to generate it.
To quote Kirkwood, the majority of economic value accrue to those who solve the hard constraints that make abundance possible.
Chips, energy, robotics, infrastructure, while the abundance itself spawns millions of edge participants.
So that's the digitization of competence through AI.
digitization of labor as competence, rather, through artificial intelligence.
Does that sound correct?
Sounds correct.
Do you feel that those providers will be as steadfast and long-lasting as, say,
you know, Rockefeller or Ford?
um the reason i question that is yesterday i listened to a breakdown of how google is
depreciating their ai stack um the chips that are in it basically and uh michael burry made a
a bet against basically AI because he claims that, like, Google is defrauding their fraudulently
manipulating their accounting sheet by changing the depreciation schedule.
So he claims.
Well, it's no question that they are changing their depreciation schedule.
So that's not in question.
But fraudulently is a big word.
But fraudulently is his question.
Yeah.
Where they took, you know, certain chips, they changed the depreciation life scale from three to four years or from four to five or from five to six.
But when I listened to that, the thing that popped into my mind was like, that's a very short time frame.
And especially if you're still living in a world that is bound by the constraints of Moore's Law, then Moore's Law would say that, you know, basically every 18 months that what you have in that stack becomes effectively not worthless, but needs to be upgraded.
and so my question
is do you think that
NVIDIA stays on top
do you think that these
these providers these
guardians of these new
constraints
do you think that they'll have a long
lasting
sit at the top of the
mountain or will it be
continuously changing
where the upstart comes
in we're
But we're likely to move from using electrons to using photons.
And that's going to be a whole different change.
That'll change literally everything.
We'll start from the ground up.
So you said you listen to the podcast.
You can just say it.
It's our biggest competitor, the All In Podcast.
I did listen to that one.
We go head to head with them, of course, in the rankings.
Yes, we do.
So I listen to that too.
So on NVIDIA, I don't know enough about it.
And that's everybody's big question is, I mean, given its valuation, is it going to stick around or is this going to be a thing where it's not going to be the only provider or something like that?
Like NVIDIA Tesla?
I mean, I think of Tesla as somebody that's ripe for somebody else to come in and undercut.
So it's just all of these.
These are all normal questions when you have kind of an emerging market, I think, and the incipients of a monopoly.
People wonder how much control it has.
I think the big game changer, though, as far as especially the niche providers of generalized AI's power, the generalized power of AI to do things.
kirkwood's kind of discussion of this is that we're going to have specific people who um make it
make it specialize it for niche purposes right you're going to be able to sell your ai to the
carpenters guild for their specific purpose yeah narrow ai yeah but so that raises what i think is
the big issue is general agi artificial general intelligence the thought is super intelligence
in one word or two words with a hyphen i don't know but the thought is that once intel artificial
intelligence gets to a certain level you don't need specialized applications of it it is like
the thing that is it's super intelligence right i think then the big scarcity or bottleneck is
going to be people who have done a good job of siloing their internal databases and information
such that it's not part of the model of that ai or something like that so that you can't the ai
You know, it's super intelligence, but if it just lacks a certain subset of knowledge to be part of its like token database or wherever that works, I think people who have that scarcity of information that they've protected, air gapped or whatever, can then take the AI, make a local model and then provide some sort of service to people based on the information that they have cordoned off from being harvested.
I don't know if that speaks to your question.
I don't know.
The NVIDIA question, I don't have an answer to that one.
Yeah.
that's a good I think the you're talking about basically having a moat yes I'm not a moat but
also having protected whatever information you have not having let it leak onto the internet
so that it can become part of it can be scraped by a large language model if you've done a good
job of protecting your IP not just legally but just like literally not letting any of it out
then I think you're going to be able to use artificial intelligence on kind of a local model, like separated from, you know, you're going to be able to keep your information and let an AI use it to give you some sort of advantage that other people who don't have the information you have won't have in whatever business you're in.
Yeah, that's where I would probably, I'd probably be on the other side of that. I think that, I think what we're seeing is like the best models are consistently open source models, that you'll have private models that take a leap.
They basically take an open source model and then they refine it a little bit and they make a leap that lasts for three months.
And then somebody else makes another leap.
But if you have super intelligence, if you have AGI, then my perception of that would be that it won't need the data.
Right.
That it'll just figure it out.
That it can just reason.
Yeah. And I don't I don't think that you'll need, you know, oh, we we loaded in 70 years worth of legal books into this thing in order for it to do law. I think it'll just be like, oh, yeah, I got this. I can figure this one out.
um so yeah i don't know i i'd probably be on the other side of that i i see and that's a tough one
because there's a lot of smart people that that agree with g uh a mod mustock is is one that i
really enjoy listening to talk about like you know he's like why do we need super a mod mustock okay
um uh uh what is the the ai model um
it's the most downloaded open source model um in the world um somebody seek is that not deep
that's the chinese one yeah that's chinese one um shoot i forgot i forgot what it's called um
But, yeah, his thing is that we'll have all these narrow AIs.
But I do, yeah, I don't know.
There's some information, though, that I don't think can be generated ex-Nylo or even from some sort of inference process by even a sufficiently super intelligent AI.
And that is going to be maybe specific proprietary or specific information about how customers have behaved in a specific context as a matter of historical fact.
If you've saved that and nobody else has, or even as a legal product, if you have generated novel legal products, including perhaps based on contingent historical facts, like the way that the judge has decided that's not public, things like that, an AI, maybe you can't generate those historical facts that you've captured and preserved and firewalled, if that makes sense.
What would be an example of a judgment that's not public other than secret warlords?
No. So in immigration court where I was practicing asylum cases, those types of decisions were not public.
You can imagine somebody seeking asylum. You don't want that to be public if you fear a foreign government.
So within immigration, a lot of that is not public because it's not in a public database and also because it's distributed across a lot of different bureaucracies and that they don't intercommunicate and they don't provide that information publicly.
You can get maybe some of it through a FOIA, heavily redacted.
But I think that just given the siloed nature of our bureaucracy, people have been interacting with it, but then saving their own results internally might have a step up on an AI that can't, again, from some general inference process, generate contingent historical facts about what actually happened.
And the sideload nature of our bureaucracy is what's crumbling because of the Internet.
It's what's – this is Balji's case for why the network state rises is because the Internet has eaten away at all of the ability for one centralized power to have a monopoly on information.
I mean, when I hear you talk about law and say like, oh, well, here's the example, I get that because that's what you're familiar with.
But also it's – I think that it's one of those things where people always say like, oh, you know, well, it can replace everything but what I do.
because everybody thinks that what they do has some sort of like special,
some sort of like unique thing about it where you've got somebody sitting next to them
that's involved in a different industry and they say, well, it can replace everything but what I do.
Yeah.
And so, yeah.
Kirkwood here talks about two hard constraints, like the time physics constraint.
And he also says regulation in here.
And there is just if a. If there is still going to be a the requirement that a lawyer sign off on something, it would be like a legal requirement, like you have to have a driver in an autonomous vehicle, which can seem ridiculous and redundant.
But that does seem like one of the likely ways we might move where a human being, you have to keep a human being in the loop in certain processes because you have to have somebody you can blame at the end of the day.
Things that involve deep issues of ethics, for example, might require that there be a moral agent in the loop.
And that's where, like, in areas like law, there's codes of ethics and you can hold an individual responsible if you have some aberrant result.
Whereas with AI, it's just like, oh, we goofed.
But we've already got multiple states that have removed the human from the car.
Yeah, no, the car is less of an example than the attorney, I think.
And certain processes, again, where it comes to—
But the ethics are more easily bound in code than they are in an individual, especially lawyers.
I disagree because you can never have a sufficiently defined set of rules to cover every possible set of instances because reality constantly generates new context that exceeds the rules.
And it takes, at the end of the day, kind of leaps of intuition or even just like judgments.
We're now going to do things this way.
the bramble bush of laws, what has been called the common laws,
a development and organic development over time guided by legal tastemakers
who kind of sniff the wind for the way things should go,
extend principles in a sense, but operate outside of.
Sometimes they have to create new rules about how things will be applied.
And so I've just heard it noted that tastemakers in every realm
will still be utilized to kind of guide AI for human purposes.
it's going to be the AI producing everything,
but there's going to be a stamp from a human that says,
we like this result of the infinite set of results you produced for us.
In the legal realm, maybe 99% of the attorneys are gone.
We still have kind of the judges or something like that,
stamping certain processes.
I'm certainly one of the attorneys that's going to be gone for sure.
I'm not saying I'm loaded, man.
I'm out of here, which is good.
I don't want to be doing the paperwork if someone.
Well, yeah, if it can be done.
As Booth's point at the end of the day, like, you know,
I think one of his points, and he doesn't say it specifically, but it's like, if most jobs are so routinized that a machine intelligence could do them, bro, do you really want to be doing that?
I mean, we have this romance around the office or whatever, but we also have office space, two different dynamics about what happens in white-collar work, and I'm on the office space side.
I want to do violence against the printer, man.
Yeah. You know, the regulation thing, that's one that I, again, I see the general trend is that areas with less regulation are thriving and areas with more regulation are suffering. And so the trend will just force, it's just a forcing function that everyone will have to have less regulation or they won't be able to compete.
because all that does is slow things down, make things more costly, make things more inconvenient,
make things work less better.
Regulation, though, I mean, regulation bad.
I agreed as a general thing.
But due process of law throughout, like that's one of the things that the United States has stood for
and I think has been a thing of value.
It was on another podcast.
I forget which one.
I don't know, it was Ross, it's interesting times, something like that.
He was talking about an author who was kind of contrasting what China offers with what the United States offer China being a land of engineers United States being a land of lawyers There something good that lawyers do despite how much they maligned which is due process the protection of individual rights
insisting that if you're going to put an innocent person in a cage,
or a person in a cage, you have to go through certain processes
where a society of engineers may be more utilitarian
and more inclined to let human rights kind of disappear
because human rights are kind of a romantic fiction
that's only preserved by law
and rely on things like human dignity and things like that.
I'm obviously getting far afield,
but that's the field where I've landed in, I guess.
It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Like, it doesn't have to be a land of one,
you know, of engineers or of law.
You know, like, the United States will fail
if they do not accept that they need to be a land of engineers
and not a land of law.
Or both, you said.
You have to have both.
Yes.
You have to have both.
Sufficiently humanized engineers, maybe.
Yeah.
And so I think that brings us neatly into the last triangle
in the trifecta.
And the picture, the graphic for this essay is a fun one.
It's got Link from The Legend of Zelda holding up the Triforce,
land, labor, and capital, you see them. So it's a great job, whoever did the art direction for that.
But the last piece of the trifecta, land, labor, and capital, this is going to get us into the due
process realm, I think, a bit, the realm of rules and their worth. So we've seen how digital
industrialization, that whole dynamic, operates on land and labor. The internet digitizes land,
creates abundance of distribution while consolidating value around the platform to
control new scarcity of compute attention and discovery. AI digitizes labor creates abundance
of competence while consolidating value around the scarcity provided by these constraints of
the physical infrastructure required for AI at the very least. That moves us again to the last,
land labor and capital. What is digitized capital? Capital is so abstract. I mean, first,
like even just beyond like step take one step outside of kirk kirkwood's piece what even is
capital just at the most basic level let's say stuff that helps us produce other stuff
often considered as like in our current parlance the money or value that we invest in the production
of new stuff something that's not consumed in the moment but is used to produce future things
more basically we might say capital in the form of investment to move back into kirkwood's piece
is a sort of stored trust or credibility.
It is a promise to be paid back for an investment,
the credibility that if you invest,
it's not going to be debased in a sense.
The debts will be respected.
The value returned will be equal or greater
if the risk is paid off to what was invested.
A promise is only as good as we trust it to be.
Capital investment must be a credible promise
to the people putting their capital in,
something like that.
Capital in this sense has been damaged
by an abundance of easy credit.
Credit expansion distorts market signals.
With more and more credit entering the system,
we can no longer trust that an investment will be paid back
in terms of the value in which it was made.
Debts are no longer credible.
They are instead just kind of gambles that future money
and credit expansion will debase or devalue those debts.
That's the game we all play.
Bitcoin, though, as digital capital, digitizes or abstracts trust and credibility.
It brings into the digital realm something that has a finite supply and neutral governance.
It provides a form of capital whose rules cannot be changed to water down previous capital investments.
Bitcoin reduces the cost involved in trusting somebody.
There's always cost when you trust somebody.
We talked about this with Samson's piece. That's like the whole drive of our evolution of social species is the resolution of the question, who can I trust? Because the stakes are incredibly high. If you trust the wrong person or thing, you're done for. We're apex predators and we will eat each other if we're given the chance.
so bitcoin though reduces the cost involved in trusting someone you can trust that an investment
or debt won't be washed away by printing more bitcoin so there's just like base level trust
right there credibility and trust are also scalable again that dial we've kind of been picturing
to the providers of a new form of value credibility and trust are scalable down to an individual's
savings. I can pop $5 into Bitcoin and have made a capital investment I can trust. That's credible.
And then scalable up to nation states. Before, it is currently incredibly costly to trust your
government, to trust the nation state, right? We try to constrain them, and this is what we were
just talking about. We try to constrain them with policy. But all financial regulation just leads to
The more you try to close the loopholes, you create new ones, you lead to new insiders and favoritism and exceptions.
We saw that in the 2008 bailouts, right?
Like that's what happens when you try to regulate your way to fairness.
You end up with people who are on the inside of that fairness.
The Cantalot effect in two words.
But with Bitcoin, the costs of trust can now collapse.
Bitcoin, to quote Kirkwood, Bitcoin removes discretion that corrodes trust and replaces it with rules anyone can verify, thereby creating more trust than any policy regime can enforce.
What do collapsing costs look like in this realm?
We get rid of credit card fees.
Square is doing this right now, man.
There's an operation on the ground to get merchants to operate on Bitcoin.
You get rid of financial middlemen of all sorts.
We get rid of potentially central banks, those who predate upon all of us, manipulate the currency, operate the currency.
The currency's rules are set.
We don't need you guys anymore.
You get rid of financial lobbying related to that.
As these costs collapse, getting rid of these financial middlemen, financial overseers, value now consolidates around new scarcity relative to the use of Bitcoin.
Kirkwood mentions the investments that 1031, his, along with other people's, kind of venture capital or investment firm, I don't know how you phrase that.
Bitcoin infrastructure, that's going to be, again, the infrastructure that provides something of a new form of abundance is usually a source on the other models of value.
So these are things related to Bitcoin like custody, transaction speed, integration with commerce, facilitating chain auditing and transparency, the things that help us use Bitcoin better.
Another strategy, if you aren't going to be a Bitcoin builder, and most people just probably will not, you can, Kirkwood notes, exchange a small portion of today's equity for digital capital while the option remains mispriced.
So we can all at this moment buy $5 of Bitcoin, buy $10 of Bitcoin, just make the purchase of Bitcoin directly at a moment where there's still that speculative attack we can all do on a personal level, essentially.
Two kind of two final quotes, I think, just tie the whole piece together.
One quote, the future belongs to those who preserve rather than print, whose assets appreciate credibility as their operations scale.
And then finally, the old economy was built on leverage against insider favors, while the new one will be built on equitable digital capital.
So Bitcoin is digital capital, Bitcoin as consolidating value around credibility and trust.
Does that make sense? Something like that?
Yeah, I like the credibility take.
I remember when I first discovered Bitcoin and I, you know, you have this, these flood of realizations, you know, that the world is going to be able to transact freely, that you're going to be dissolving all of these extractive economies, real estate agents.
You know, what do you need a real estate agent for if you have a smart contract?
The legal system, what do you need a thousand dollar an hour lawyer for if you have a AI that you can utilize for pennies?
Accounting, you know, an AI will do a far better job of that.
And so I remember like going through this and I came out at the end of it and I remember that I had written down that the only thing valuable or that the most valuable thing in the future would be reputation, would simply be people that do what they say, that consistently are honest, that are.
are willing to put that reputation on the line
in order to be in the right place
before everyone else discovers that that's the right place.
And I think that's a neat little analog
with credibility and reputation.
Like he's using, Kirkwood is using credibility
more in terms of the credibility of the asset
and the credibility of the ability to pay back the debt.
You know, like, why do I need a 32-page loan application and a business plan
if I can show you that I have the collateral, the Bitcoin on chain?
You know, that should—
And then a smart contract will return it to me if you don't do a certain thing.
Exactly.
So why, you know, and then, of course, what that does is that removes all of those opportunities for discrimination, you know, like being in the banking industry previously.
Yeah.
There you can just even if it wasn't outright discrimination, it would certainly be, you know, we don't want to do business or some, you know, maybe your vice president had dated the guy's daughter and she broke his heart or something and he wasn't going to get a loan because of that.
Like, there's just ridiculous stuff, you know. And so if you remove that and it's faceless and the credibility is certainly is just based upon the underlying asset, there's that aspect to it.
But then there's also the other aspect of it, which is people like Sailor, people like Jack Mahler, people like Jack Dorsey that are putting their personal reputation on the line in order to endorse and promote and build upon what they believe is right.
And be very unapologetic and unapologetic about it to the point that it is labeled as toxic by people who disagree.
Because if you can't find a logical reason to disagree, then you can just say that they're toxic.
Right.
You know, oh, like I it's it's the you're not wrong.
You're just an asshole.
Right.
Yeah.
To quote to quote the dude from the Big Lebowski.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, yeah, credibility and reputation. I think they go hand in hand. They build upon each other in this new world.
Yeah. Reputation will always be finite. And also it has a particular sort of finiteness in relation to any individual human. It's something that can disappear. They can go to zero with a pinprick. You can lose your reputation instantly by engaging in any sort of surreptitious insider dealings, not living up to your promises, things like that.
And so the people we trust in the Bitcoin realm tend to be people who have not deviated into shit coining, who have not taken an easy payout in some sort of way, whose predictions more or less, even if they haven't panned out, at least were made publicly and in good faith, right?
It's not that we demand that everybody be right. It's just we demand kind of that you do it publicly and that you, you know, you do it in good faith. You're not doing it because you want to make money on some insider deal through some polymarket shenanigans, something like that.
Yeah. Yeah. And so Bitcoin then as capital, I really like this, too, because and I I hope Kirkwood listens to this and I hope he can correct us if we're wrong.
This part was, I think, the most, I don't know if speculative is the right word, but I had the most trouble being certain that I was getting exactly what Kirkwood was saying, not through any fuzziness of writing.
But again, we're talking about how Bitcoin, it's like with the internet, we've already seen that trend play out as far as digitizing land.
With AI, then it becomes a bit more speculative as to how it's digitizing labor, but also I think it's kind of easier to see.
With Bitcoin as digital capital, we're already land and labor, concrete things, capitals, this again, it's a term that is more ambiguous, more vague, more abstract because it can be both, I think, the investment you make, but also the capital, like the factory, capital.
The means of production.
You could say that.
Yeah, it could be that.
That's one way to define it.
I said stuff that makes other stuff essentially and also not what you consume in the moment, but use it to get something else.
So there's also just that capital kind of has this, not amorphous, but I think a different sort of concreteness than land and labor.
And so to talk about Bitcoin as digital capital becomes a bit more, for me, confusing.
Also just that, and I encountered this in reading Booth's The Price of Tomorrow, where we talk about deflation creating abundance.
But then Bitcoin being deflationary and it's, I guess, creating an abundance of value.
What I'm getting at is Bitcoin seems to have a different relationship to scarcity, whereas like as AI digitizes labor, AI just becomes more and more abundant.
As the Internet has digitized land, there's an abundance there that's obvious.
With Bitcoin, Bitcoin is inherently scarce.
So the abundance that it's creating is of a different sort, if that makes sense.
The buying power is abundant, right?
So the Bitcoin is not abundant, but the buying power is.
And so that's where you're focusing on now is like, and I think you're right to be fuzzy about this because I think the knowledge and understanding of capital and what capital is, capital markets and how to utilize it, I think that that has been intentionally obfuscated from the majority of the world in order to kind of keep the facade going.
um but the to me it's actually easier to see um like right now i would say that the
i don't know none of it's very hard for me to to to comprehend you know i can i can easily see the
the self-driving semi i can easily see the you know the the robot stalking the show
You can physically imagine that.
You can have pictures and images of it.
What does capital look like in your mind?
So capital, what capital looks like to me, and that's where I see, that's where I would say that this one's easier to see because this one to me has already come to fruition.
Yeah.
Whereas I'm still struggling, not struggling, I'm still unsure as to when the robot is a better electrician or a better plumber.
Like those things I'm a little iffy on.
Um, but as far as Bitcoin being better capital, um, I, I think when I listened to strategies,
uh, Q3 earnings call and listened to again, the description of how, um, stretch the product that
Michael Saylor is going all in on. Um, you know, it's a direct competitor to the treasuries,
to the bonds, to this income market, and it's doing it four times, you know, it's paying
four times as much, four to five, four to six times as much.
But even the terms in which you're explaining that now, treasuries and bonds, these are
also abstractions in a way that-
For most people.
For me, certainly, and they're not in the way that, again, I can easily picture as literally
create a mental image of an autonomous driving vehicle.
Like you just imagine the vehicle driving without a person.
I can, you know, comprehend visually in internal space what a digital electrician is going to look like.
I've seen the Jetsons.
I know how this works out.
It's like as far as creating an internal mental movie in a model in that sense, picturing Bitcoin, a digital protocol, an abstraction in that sense as digital capital and another abstraction for me is very difficult.
And so to understand it becomes difficult in a good sense.
I mean, this is like, it's something that we need to seek to educate ourselves on.
Relatedly for Halloween, my costume was autonomous capital to a long story I won't recount to a Halloween party I didn't end up going to.
Kind of related to the fact that I chose to go to digital capital.
What did I do?
How did I visualize this?
I duct taped a keyboard to my chest and wrote autonomous capital on the duct tape.
So part of embarrassment about my own inability to visualize autonomous capital, I did not go to this party.
Had I been able, like you, to more concretely imagine to myself what autonomous capital would look like, probably not a keyboard, a computer keyboard duct taped to a man's chest.
It would probably be something different.
So having these the difficulty to visualize the argument or rather as you understand the pieces of what Kirkwood is saying here we have to kind of use metaphors and analogies
And so tying it back to credibility and reputation helps.
I think hearing you talk about this, I think the reason why it's difficult to understand is that we have very easy to understand analogs for the digitization of land because we knew what land and location and digital storefronts were.
And now we're applying that to the Internet. And it's very easy for us to comprehend the digitization of labor because we know what labor is. And, you know, there's the guy scooping snow and there's the guy fixing the car and we can apply that over there.
I don't think that the struggle is in understanding capital in terms of the future sense.
I think the struggle is that no one understands capital in the current sense.
For sure.
Because no one has an understanding of how the current dollar system works, how fiat money works.
I put up a, when I taught my, when I taught the course on, I think it was on money or it might have been on Bitcoin, but either way, I put up a graphic of how Bitcoin works, the proof of work protocol and the consensus and the Merkle tree and everything.
And you can logically follow that through. And, you know, some of these terms are foreign, but when you when you talk about what they do, then it's easy to understand.
And then side by side, I put up a graphic of how the Fiat system works.
And it looks like somebody took 30 jigsaw puzzles and messed up all the pieces and then tried to put a puzzle together with all the different pieces from all the different puzzles.
And those are just the puzzles we know about.
Exactly.
Yeah.
We don't even know.
Yeah.
The shadow banking system.
Everything that's involved with that.
You know, it is impossible to comprehend.
And I think that it's no wonder that the people that are, I don't want to say destroying that system because it destroys itself, but the people that are shedding light upon how inefficient that model is are all engineers.
They're, I mean, not all, but by and large, they're either engineers or they're people that are just straight up first principles.
thinkers. And they're going in there with an engineering mindset. And they are doing what
Elon says to do, which is, you know, remove the part. Like, first, you know, don't optimize the
part. Question why it exists in the first place. And if there's a way to get rid of it, get rid of
it. And keep pulling these things out. So, yeah, I think that the fuzziness around capital is not
to be laid at the feet of Bitcoin or digital capital.
I think it's to be laid at the feet of the current system that no, literally no one understands.
Like one of the ones I played was I used to play this video of one of Biden's, he was
like Biden's chief economic advisor.
And it is a really famous clip, but they ask him to explain how, you know, how the dollar
works.
and he just stutters and stammers and he questions himself and they huh and they huh and you just
cannot answer it has no idea and that's the guy that supposedly is the dude that's you know the
mechanic of the car that you're driving down the road yeah so yeah yeah in fact one of um the
investments that 1031 evidently is part of or a source that they've given some money to or
something like that is mempool and so it's a visualization of the blockchain that's maybe
going to remedy for people like me for whom mathematics is just a blank space into which
thought cannot enter that will provide something to put in that space if you can visualize certain
operations of the blockchain it becomes a more real thing i can um see how blocks are you know
processed how the transactions go into them and then suddenly it's like now it makes sense
can we define mempool no it's like a it's it's the it's a bit it's a transactions that are coming
in so what mempool is like yeah literally the mempool structure for bitcoin right where the
pending transactions are that are going to be added to blocks yeah so you can see that so it's
basically like being able to like again we're all comparing this to something that is not that is
imperfect, but it would be like if you could just tap into a website and you could see all of the
pending transactions in the world for the dollar. You know, like here's a guy in Italy that just
bought a coffee and here's a dude in Miami that just bought a Lamborghini. And all these things
are pending to go through and waiting to be confirmed. And so this is where Jason Lowery
again comes into play because he talks about the importance of establishing a hash force so that
you have the mining power and the hashing power to ensure that transactions go through um i guess
unadulterated yeah or you know it's miners can pick and choose what the nodes or other that are
compiling the block can choose what transactions they're going to include in that can they they can
do that right yeah that's why there's the fee structure they can choose but um it's always like
it's always a default to whatever the highest fees are right i don't know how that operates i mean i
suppose there's some background software determining what transactions are going to put into it because
there's not like a human guy picking and choosing they probably do default as a decision mechanism
to highest fees because you're i mean as a the thing is like as a minor you're you're agnostic
to the transactions that are going through and maybe some might not be some might have ideological
reasons for not wanting spam, something like that.
But you're agnostic to it because if you choose to include transactions that all the rest of
them are not, this is where the greed part comes into play, where greed is good, where
if all of the miners are just looking at it and they're like, oh, we're just going to
process the block with the highest fees, you know, then that makes sense.
But if you choose to insert your ideology in there and you say, well, we're just not
going to process this one because that guy's black or he's a Yankees fan.
Yeah, the incentives definitely will pull you in that direction.
You're going to go ahead and you're going to mine a block that no one else will validate.
Right.
And so you're just going to waste your money.
You're just going to waste your power.
And so this is where it's interesting because in the current setup, if you're George Soros,
if you're Elon Musk and you're throwing your money behind your ideology, then there is a
monetary gain for that.
But in the mempool, if you're throwing your money behind your ideology, then there is guaranteed really a loss.
Like you're just – all you're doing is just pissing in the wind.
Yeah.
A loss in terms of the money, the Bitcoin you could have.
And the processing power that you use in order to mine a useless block.
And just to create – just to draw a distinction why I said – so mempool, one thing is the actual operation of the Bitcoin protocol, having transactions in a thing that I guess is referred to as a mempool.
The other thing is the website mempool.space, which is like the visualization of what is the abstract process.
And my understanding, like that's what 1031, I guess, is like funding.
It's not funding the literal operation of the mempool and the Bitcoin protocol, just to be clear on that.
It's funding this visualization of it.
Yeah, because the operation of the transactions is self-funding.
Yeah, it's part of the Bitcoin protocol.
Yeah, and I just think these visualizations are so important.
That's why I'm bullish in a sense on like art as in culture as the next explanatory, the next adoption stage of Bitcoin.
You noted that kind of engineers are the first wave of people pointing out the flaws in the monetary system and therefore also kind of how Bitcoin is a solution to those flaws.
But there's people like me who that they're just not speaking the language I understand.
And artists, those people who create culture and can translate those things into metaphors and narratives and compelling images, that's where you get more mass adoption.
And so that's like 1031 if you're listening.
What you should be doing is finding a Christopher Nolan.
If there was a movie that was from a great director, if I had all the money in the world, I would definitely have Christopher Nolan make a Bitcoin movie.
Like that would be the biggest investment for the future of Bitcoin there could be.
I don't know if Christopher Nolan's the right example because no one's ever understood any movie he made.
He is at the right nexus of good movies and mass movie.
I understood Tenet.
You don't even have to understand him to just be overwhelmed by the aesthetic vision that he's putting forward and how compelling it is.
You don't have to – you're removed by Interstellar even if you don't understand the mechanics of how it functions.
And the fact that he can take Oppenheimer, a biography, and then turn it into this compelling, imbricated structure of a movie that's narratively complex, but also filled with characters.
That's what Bitcoin needs.
It needs, like, real artists operating at the nexus of unique vision, but also popular consumption.
Yeah, so somebody buy Christopher Nolan.
Like, I don't know how much one of those costs, but...
And he's Villeneuve.
Do him, man.
That's 100%.
That dude's an engineer.
I just saw yesterday, I saw a picture of the paper that he hand drew out the logical steps of the dream levels.
Yeah.
And not Tenet, but what's the—
Interstellar?
No.
Inception.
Yeah.
Where it's just down.
And it's just logic all the way through.
Yeah.
It's so cool.
Um, and comedians are that way too, you know, talking about art, like comedy is inherently,
um, logic because what you're doing, like you're, you're, you know, today's comedians are, are merely
the, the children of the court jester, which the court jester was just pointing out the logical
fallacies of the king. Um, and, um, so it's all logic based because do you cannot, um, the best
comedy comes from noting the absurdity from noting the um departure from logic or for you
know like the um you know uh rules rules for the and none for me type of thing yeah um yeah so i i
agree like i'm good with it let's have a christopher nolan bitcoin movie yeah i think and one important
aspect of that there there is fantastic bitcoin art right now but it tends to be art made for
Bitcoiners. Yes. They understand it. It's legible to them because they understand the symbols and
the inside means that kind of make it artistic. There needs to be normie art or just art as such,
but that has an underlying Bitcoin message without being corrupted by that message,
because art needs to be non-instrumental in a certain sense. It needs to be art for art's sake
and not art because you want some that's propaganda. If you want art to tell somebody
something. And so if you have money and want to fund something, fund a real artist who is making
something that speaks to all people, but that also comes from a space that is based in Bitcoin
or values, right? Hi, I'm Lucas and I make music about Bitcoin that you wouldn't know was about
Bitcoin. This is very true. This is a great example. Literally, you have a song that it
It doesn't mention Bitcoin at all, but it's about Bitcoin.
It's about the underlying principles of Bitcoin.
So, like, I think of, like, Taylor Swift music where, like, people can appreciate Taylor Swift music as art.
They can just like the music.
But then you have the people that are the Bitcoin Maxi equivalent of a Taylor Swift fan, the Swifties.
And they, you know, to look into if you ever are unfortunate enough to have one of these pop up in your feed where somebody is explaining all of the Easter eggs and all of the hidden things that she puts into her music.
It's 30, you know, it's Christopher Nolan level deep.
Yeah.
But that is exactly what you're what you're talking about is that what we need is something that the surface level can be appreciated where it's not it's not all the way down at the maxi level that we have to extrapolate upward towards the ignorant, I suppose.
Yeah.
Maybe would be the way to say it.
Yeah, it moves people literally, emotionally, and then also kind of moves them towards a space where they're more disposed to understand or accept something like a decentralized digital currency.
Yeah.
Now, this was a fun essay.
Again, fun in the sense of very well written.
I gave a couple of quotes here, but Kirkwood's a very good writer.
I don't know.
Maybe I wouldn't expect it of a former doctor, but doctors are usually very intelligent people, so I don't know why.
I wouldn't expect it.
Well, if he'd handwritten it.
Yeah, right.
Then you can read it.
But as a doctor and investor, he's also a rhetorician and a really good writer.
Check out the essay because it's also, we spent an hour and change here talking about it.
But the essay is actually very short.
Yeah, it's like three pages.
Yeah.
And so it's not gilded with a bunch of like rhetoric that's not necessary.
But what is put in there in the argument is well written.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's one of those people that you can take this and you can make it into a book and add the requisite 260 pages of fluff.
But he's like this is the ad.
Yeah.
I also think that like this is almost like the price of tomorrow.
This reminds me a lot of the price of tomorrow.
Yeah.
It's the condensed version.
It's somewhat.
It's kind of a condensed version.
It's unique.
It makes different observations that, you know, are not found in the price of tomorrow, but they're kind of in the same vein.
And so if you liked Booth's The Price of Tomorrow and who didn't, definitely check out this piece.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I don't know what else, man.
Random question.
Did you understand Interstellar?
I did not.
It's been a long time since I saw it.
Understanding it is less important than being moved by it.
What it is to understand is the human dynamics in it of how we deal with love and absence.
Because if you're trying to get it Interstellar by trying to understand quantum dynamics or quantum mechanics or whatever,
you totally missed the point of the movie it's not about whatever science that makes it like
plausible quote-unquote it's about human relationships yes and no so um i understand
that i get that or i don't know i don't understand it but i get what you're saying um but it makes me
think of fineman talking about how um you know he was asked like you know doesn't doesn't knowing
how everything works kind of take the magic away from it he's like no no no that adds a
greater level of, adds a greater level of beauty when you, when you can look at a flower and you
can see how, um, you know, how the pedals are arranged and why they're arranged that way and
note the geometric pattern and things like that. And, um, there's, there's more beauty in it that
way. You think about like a baseball fan watching a baseball game and understanding all of the
hidden dynamics of, of how the game works and all the tiny little things that everyone's doing to
gain an advantage. I just watched the movie F1. It's about, you know, F1 racing with Brad Pitt in
it. And it's a great movie because it takes you into the kind of like the hidden strategy of how
you can sort of manipulate the field in order to push one teammate to the front while maybe
sacrificing the other and things like that.
So, but in order to do that, you have to understand the mechanics.
You have to understand the physics.
You have to understand the underlying science and the nature of how those things work.
But as a viewer, you don't.
What is compelling to the viewer is the aesthetics of competence.
When you watch that movie, it's compelling to see competent people doing competent things.
That's an enjoyable thing to watch.
I don't have to understand how a carpenter is really good, is able to do what they're
doing but i watch a video of them doing it and it's an aesthetic experience because humans
appreciate competence and so even to think about baseball as something an object you watch it's not
because of the statistical operation and probabilities that somebody can decode it's
because of the romance of babe ruth pointing in calling a shot and it's because of like the drama
of what's happening also the competence again the aesthetic experience of competence of seeing
like moneyball if you saw that like where they decode the probabilities that's really not about
the statistics at all it's about again the human experience of that and so art doesn't need science
is what i'm saying except as like background to display what is of human interest the phenomenon
of competence things like that it's definitely about the statistics about in the most attenuated
sense about the most you would not read a book about statistics and have the same experience you
get watching a narrative of human beings applying that in a certain realm is what i'm saying i can't
have one without the other by the way that entire field called sabermetrics which is the statistics
of baseball at that type of level where you're instead of focusing on like runs and stolen bases
you're focusing on launch angle and exit velocity and things like that uh created by a dude from
kansas which is a which is of course of interest to our audience broadly speaking because everybody
looks at kansas as kind of the the spiritual center of the universe as they should as they
should i don't know man not good no that's fantastic yeah um anything else for you on the
way out that's all i got um you know what do you just hit like and subscribe and then we point at
the button look check out our sub stack which we publish once every when we feel like it
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