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Digital Industrialization, Land, Labor, and Capital.

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That's the title of the paper that we're talking about today,

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a post by Jonathan Kirkwood of 1031.

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He's got quite an interesting background,

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driving from medicine over into Bitcoin.

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As we find with many Bitcoiners, they have interesting backgrounds.

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Kirkwood is a particularly coherent writer

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who has taken a comprehensive view of the moment that we're in.

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Title of Michael Saylor's book, The Mobile Wave,

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the disintegration of the real into something,

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into the digital space constrained by physics,

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which makes it, interestingly enough, just as real.

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to kick us off on this conversation.

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As always, Mr. Grant Riker, DeskWire.

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Thank you.

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You're welcome.

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I feel like there should be a camera cut.

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It's like you're introducing me

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and then I'm just right here.

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Like, oh, now I start talking.

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Next time you can walk in.

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I'll introduce myself through a dramatic walk in.

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Now, this is an essay by Jonathan Kirkwood.

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You said coherent writer.

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I would also add eloquent.

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It's very well written.

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And I appreciate that.

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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.

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It's fun when it's fun.

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And this essay was good and fun.

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So digital industrialization, land labor and capital.

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I mean, overall, you kind of pointed to this with the title of Saylor's book.

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There's a trend where things are being digitized.

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Things which were real world objects or affairs, projects are being reduced to computational processes.

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This has been an ongoing thing.

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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.

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That is about how we are undergoing digital industrialization because we are digitizing land, labor, and capital.

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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.

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And then this new abundance causes most value to flee to a new scarce thing related to that abundant thing.

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Some underlying constraint or aspect of the digitized thing, which resists being made abundant.

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That's where most of the value ends up going in digital industrialization.

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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.

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The first example then is land.

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And this will give us a good idea of how this dynamic of digital industrialization functions in Kirkwood's estimation.

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So digital industrialization digitizes land.

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How does it do that?

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Through the internet.

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The internet is the digitization of land in a sense.

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Location used to be very important in business and industry.

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You would have key ports where for their location, they were kind of centers and hubs of transport and distribution.

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At a smaller scale, even, you want your brick and mortar storefront to be in the right place so the customers can find you.

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And so you get there, you're visible and ease of kind of access to people you want to sell goods to.

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But when land digitizes, this changes.

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So last time we discussed Durjeejee's essay, Bitcoin is time.

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In the digital realm, there is no space and time.

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In the digital realm, everything is everywhere all at once, in a sense.

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So when land digitizes through the Internet, space disappears.

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Costs of distribution collapse, and we now have digital abundance.

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I'll pause there before.

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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?

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For the Internet, absolutely.

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But to take it a step further, it appears that abundance always creates a new scarcity.

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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.

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That abundance created a new scarcity, which was physical health.

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Like being fit today is now a luxury of the wealthy.

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think about digitization of sex so only fans digitized you know pornographic material

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obviously they weren't the first but they did it on grand scale and so they i would say

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prostitution is what it digitized that yeah you're right that's probably way better and so what

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became scarce now i would say is like modesty and you know and um i don't know whatever good girls

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or however you want to refer to that.

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Yeah.

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You know, but it seems,

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when we talk about Bitcoin,

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we always have these like recurring themes.

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There's recurring themes about proof of work

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and you can see it everywhere.

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The proof of work that is the Bitcoin's consensus model

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is also the thing that leads you to a good life.

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You know, did you work out?

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Did you read?

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Did you go to sleep?

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Did you keep away from blue light?

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Like all of these things are proof of work

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that you're doing in your real life.

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And another theme that we're seeing a linkage to is scarcity.

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You can't escape scarcity even with abundance.

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And so we're, I think, again, there's,

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as we dive deeper and deeper into Bitcoin,

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there are recurring themes that become deeper

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and broader veins that we want to explore.

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Yes, and as we dive deeper into this essay, in fact,

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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.

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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.

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And Bitcoin itself, I mean, maybe we can see where this essay is going, land, labor, and capital.

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So we're still, though, at land here.

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Cost collapse, but value then consolidates around the new scarce thing.

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So let's talk about the consolidation with respect to the digitization of land through the Internet.

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We now have abundance when the Internet digitizes land.

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But the trend in digital industrialization is that cost collapse around something that is more abundant,

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and then value consolidates around the constraint or bottleneck related to that new abundance.

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So when land digitizes, costs related to the location of a business collapse.

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Value then consolidates in those who control kind of the constraints of the new sources of scarcity.

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When internet digitizes, value then consolidates in platforms.

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These are the things that have digitized those sources of scarcity that still remain in the internet as far as internet digitizing land.

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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.

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So compute, that was one constraint to the Internet.

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People had initially to host their own servers, right?

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Bill, you had to build data centers to host if you wanted to, all the data you were accumulating.

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You had to back up that information.

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You didn't want to do operations online.

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and you had to have a server to do that.

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Now, Amazon Web Services digitizes the infrastructure of Compute

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by offering it as a service.

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Compute is no longer a fixed hardware cost that you need to take into account

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if you want to have your quote-unquote space on the Internet.

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You can instead scale Compute up or down by turning a dial

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on how much you want to give Amazon Web Services

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or some other comparable provider.

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The capital expenditure then required to get into the Internet

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to move your business there, to enter the free market online, goes way down.

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Another constraint is attention.

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So this is another source of abundance then, or I'm sorry, of scarcity related to digital abundance.

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There's only so much attention to go around.

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You can only attend to so many things.

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The rarity of attention, its finiteness makes it valuable, makes it scarce,

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even as the Internet makes other things abundant.

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Facebook then digitizes attention and converts it into a captured audience.

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Like with Amazon Web Services, you can now scale that up or down the amount of attention that your business wants access to.

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Turning a dial, you can buy more targeted advertisements from the provider of attention, Facebook or Twitter or whoever, right?

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Facebook has then digitized a constraint upon the abundance of the Internet and so captures value.

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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.

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But the question is, how do we even discover that store in the first place?

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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?

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The answer is something like Google.

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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.

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You had to get maps maybe or guides, talk to people.

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So now you can, again, turn a dial, scale it up or down.

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The cost of discovery is as much as you want to give Google to be discovered.

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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.

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How much of it you want, you get that from these things.

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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.

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You can launch a business onto the Internet.

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You've removed lots of fixed cost of entry into the market.

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But then those businesses are fighting for scraps.

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This new abundance has kind of made it so this abundance of businesses are competing with each other.

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Prices are going down.

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Meanwhile, as abundance causes costs to collapse for businesses, value then consolidates in new places with platforms like Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google.

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Kirkwood refers to these new sources of scarcity, those who control it, as the landlords of digital land.

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So that's kind of the dynamic playing out with the Internet's digitization of land.

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Does that dynamic sound correct of cost collapsing, value consolidating around new source of scarcity, specifically with these types of platforms?

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Yeah, I think you can actually make the case that location has become even more important in the digital age.

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It's a web address.

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Yeah.

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So it's a location.

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The way that Kirkwood puts it is it used to be location, location, location.

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Now it's access, access, access is what the, yeah.

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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.

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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.

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Is address the right word once space is gone, land is digitized to the Internet?

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That's kind of address is kind of a folder.

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We call it a web address.

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Maybe there's a better.

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It's the location where it is.

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Yeah.

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You know, even though it is digitally, it's anywhere and everywhere.

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But it is still somewhere.

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Is it?

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We can't stop thinking about it spatially.

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But when you say it's somewhere, it's like distributed around and like it's in clouds here.

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It's in servers there.

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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.

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Yeah, it's useful.

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It's useful in a sense.

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It's useful to think of it in that way.

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It may not be exactly correct, but...

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That usefulness, though, can obscure it, though.

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To the extent that it's useful, maybe it makes people think and reason

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or have mental models that are incorrect and they don't see the new reality

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because they're too tied to the old ones or vocabulary that is holding them there.

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They still think the Internet is a place.

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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.

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So you're, you know, you could be selling dog food and your web address could be, I don't know, imurderchickensinmysleep.com.

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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?

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No one ever goes there.

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No one ever goes past the third one, to be experientially honest.

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Yeah.

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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.

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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.

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And then, you know, rapidly shot up.

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More businesses come in there and everybody wants a bit of that tiny, finite space.

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Well, as the rent, as the well, but the access is.

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Right.

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The access, even though, you know, he says the access is abundant, but it's not.

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Sorry, no, that's the scarcity.

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Is the access has become very scarce because you have to pay for that access.

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And it's not the customer paying for the access.

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It's the business paying to give access to the customer.

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You're paying to be accessed.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Exactly.

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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.

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We've got this thing.

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Yeah.

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This is the capital.

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And so how do we remove that?

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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.

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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.

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It will create new monopolies.

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I think it's done that since quite some time.

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It tends to create new monopolies.

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But the monopolies have a sense created a whole new business model, a whole new business.

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And then new types of businesses arise in the orbit of the new monopoly created.

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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.

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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.

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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.

217
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Yeah. You know, candidacy website. So, yeah, I would argue that no, like that actually created probably an even more.

218
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Even more nefarious because then it just you just literally could not find it on Google.

219
00:18:19,820 --> 00:18:27,820
Yeah. It just wasn't there because of crony capitalism, because of political meddling.

220
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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.

221
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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

222
00:19:02,896 --> 00:19:09,056
if they've corrected it yet but as of oh just probably a couple weeks ago i think was the last

223
00:19:09,056 --> 00:19:15,996
time that i you know deleted x off my phone and the last time yeah never gonna smoke again

224
00:19:15,996 --> 00:19:17,696
It's the last time, man.

225
00:19:17,976 --> 00:19:19,636
And then ended up redownloading it.

226
00:19:19,776 --> 00:19:28,056
And when you go to the Apple App Store, you know, you put in X and you can't find it.

227
00:19:28,136 --> 00:19:28,476
Oh, yeah.

228
00:19:28,776 --> 00:19:30,356
You know, they just hide the results.

229
00:19:30,876 --> 00:19:30,896
Yeah.

230
00:19:32,116 --> 00:19:32,976
That's capitalism.

231
00:19:33,196 --> 00:19:33,796
That's free market.

232
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They don't want you on.

233
00:19:36,256 --> 00:19:37,856
They're fighting for space there.

234
00:19:37,936 --> 00:19:39,796
Apple and X are squabbling maybe.

235
00:19:40,176 --> 00:19:41,476
It's definitely not a free market, though.

236
00:19:41,756 --> 00:19:42,236
I don't know.

237
00:19:43,836 --> 00:19:45,696
There's no true free market, right?

238
00:19:45,696 --> 00:20:15,676
Yeah, we have one.

239
00:20:15,696 --> 00:20:17,316
and I like this description a lot.

240
00:20:17,716 --> 00:20:20,076
The pure ability to get things done.

241
00:20:20,196 --> 00:20:21,736
Like that's what AI offers

242
00:20:21,736 --> 00:20:23,616
to get things done almost instantly.

243
00:20:24,176 --> 00:20:25,896
So land is digitized by the internet,

244
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labor is digitized by AI

245
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and then Crookwood says embodied systems,

246
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which would just be like AI operating in the real world

247
00:20:34,616 --> 00:20:36,596
through autonomous vehicles, robots,

248
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assembly lines, whatever.

249
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When labor is digitized, has pure competence.

250
00:20:42,396 --> 00:20:44,496
It is competence that is now the new abundance.

251
00:20:44,496 --> 00:20:52,476
The value of competence then collapses to the marginal cost of electricity to kind of generate that competence.

252
00:20:52,476 --> 00:21:08,436
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.

253
00:21:09,136 --> 00:21:15,676
With AI, the value consolidates then, to quote Quirkwood, where physics defends the margins.

254
00:21:16,696 --> 00:21:22,856
Semiconductors, fabs, energy generation, cooling, data center, robotics, logistics, safety certification.

255
00:21:23,076 --> 00:21:26,276
More generally, he says, is kind of energy, hardware, manufacturing throughput.

256
00:21:26,496 --> 00:21:28,676
There's actually kind of two categories he talks about here.

257
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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.

258
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The example he gives is NVIDIA.

259
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Competence is abundant, so need to consolidate value around a constraint or a bottleneck to the provision of that confidence, which provides scarcity.

260
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NVIDIA, he says, controls the data center stack of chips, Ethernet switches, compilers.

261
00:21:55,416 --> 00:22:03,516
digital land digitized land as we as we discussed through the internet caused a sort of gold rush

262
00:22:03,516 --> 00:22:10,516
or a rush of new businesses into the spaceless space of the internet so too does digitized or

263
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will digitized labor cause people to rush into this realm businesses to rush in to be kind of

264
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the niche providers of the new abundance new businesses arise through abundant competence

265
00:22:23,976 --> 00:22:29,236
as those people who can customize the general capabilities of confidence

266
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to provide it in a unique context to create an AI model

267
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that's good at a very specific thing, and then they sell that thing to people.

268
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But as costs collapse with those kind of specialized users of confidence,

269
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those niche providers of confidence,

270
00:22:44,276 --> 00:22:48,736
value will then still continue to consolidate around those who control

271
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the provision of digital competence,

272
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Those who are the infrastructure providers of abundance, the fixed cost of the hard things necessary to generate it.

273
00:23:00,656 --> 00:23:08,376
To quote Kirkwood, the majority of economic value accrue to those who solve the hard constraints that make abundance possible.

274
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Chips, energy, robotics, infrastructure, while the abundance itself spawns millions of edge participants.

275
00:23:14,976 --> 00:23:20,856
So that's the digitization of competence through AI.

276
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digitization of labor as competence, rather, through artificial intelligence.

277
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Does that sound correct?

278
00:23:27,416 --> 00:23:28,096
Sounds correct.

279
00:23:28,316 --> 00:23:38,016
Do you feel that those providers will be as steadfast and long-lasting as, say,

280
00:23:39,096 --> 00:23:41,656
you know, Rockefeller or Ford?

281
00:23:41,656 --> 00:23:52,096
um the reason i question that is yesterday i listened to a breakdown of how google is

282
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depreciating their ai stack um the chips that are in it basically and uh michael burry made a

283
00:24:01,256 --> 00:24:17,496
a bet against basically AI because he claims that, like, Google is defrauding their fraudulently

284
00:24:17,496 --> 00:24:22,976
manipulating their accounting sheet by changing the depreciation schedule.

285
00:24:23,696 --> 00:24:24,236
So he claims.

286
00:24:24,476 --> 00:24:30,556
Well, it's no question that they are changing their depreciation schedule.

287
00:24:30,556 --> 00:24:33,156
So that's not in question.

288
00:24:33,336 --> 00:24:34,316
But fraudulently is a big word.

289
00:24:34,316 --> 00:24:36,676
But fraudulently is his question.

290
00:24:36,776 --> 00:24:37,036
Yeah.

291
00:24:37,536 --> 00:24:48,376
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.

292
00:24:49,956 --> 00:24:55,996
But when I listened to that, the thing that popped into my mind was like, that's a very short time frame.

293
00:24:55,996 --> 00:25:15,756
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.

294
00:25:15,756 --> 00:25:18,996
and so my question

295
00:25:18,996 --> 00:25:21,476
is do you think that

296
00:25:21,476 --> 00:25:23,096
NVIDIA stays on top

297
00:25:23,096 --> 00:25:25,056
do you think that these

298
00:25:25,056 --> 00:25:26,816
these providers these

299
00:25:26,816 --> 00:25:29,456
guardians of these new

300
00:25:29,456 --> 00:25:30,076
constraints

301
00:25:30,076 --> 00:25:33,496
do you think that they'll have a long

302
00:25:33,496 --> 00:25:34,016
lasting

303
00:25:34,016 --> 00:25:37,536
sit at the top of the

304
00:25:37,536 --> 00:25:39,256
mountain or will it be

305
00:25:39,256 --> 00:25:40,776
continuously changing

306
00:25:40,776 --> 00:25:43,436
where the upstart comes

307
00:25:43,436 --> 00:25:45,116
in we're

308
00:25:45,756 --> 00:25:53,276
But we're likely to move from using electrons to using photons.

309
00:25:53,536 --> 00:25:55,956
And that's going to be a whole different change.

310
00:25:56,856 --> 00:25:58,356
That'll change literally everything.

311
00:25:58,476 --> 00:25:59,496
We'll start from the ground up.

312
00:26:00,856 --> 00:26:02,516
So you said you listen to the podcast.

313
00:26:02,676 --> 00:26:03,296
You can just say it.

314
00:26:03,316 --> 00:26:05,056
It's our biggest competitor, the All In Podcast.

315
00:26:05,396 --> 00:26:06,296
I did listen to that one.

316
00:26:06,316 --> 00:26:08,356
We go head to head with them, of course, in the rankings.

317
00:26:08,376 --> 00:26:08,956
Yes, we do.

318
00:26:09,196 --> 00:26:09,916
Yes, we do.

319
00:26:10,056 --> 00:26:11,376
So I listen to that too.

320
00:26:11,376 --> 00:26:15,756
So on NVIDIA, I don't know enough about it.

321
00:26:15,836 --> 00:26:26,256
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?

322
00:26:26,256 --> 00:26:27,736
Like NVIDIA Tesla?

323
00:26:28,096 --> 00:26:36,536
I mean, I think of Tesla as somebody that's ripe for somebody else to come in and undercut.

324
00:26:37,616 --> 00:26:39,016
So it's just all of these.

325
00:26:39,016 --> 00:26:45,936
These are all normal questions when you have kind of an emerging market, I think, and the incipients of a monopoly.

326
00:26:46,176 --> 00:26:48,136
People wonder how much control it has.

327
00:26:49,076 --> 00:27:00,596
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.

328
00:27:00,596 --> 00:27:07,936
kirkwood's kind of discussion of this is that we're going to have specific people who um make it

329
00:27:07,936 --> 00:27:12,516
make it specialize it for niche purposes right you're going to be able to sell your ai to the

330
00:27:12,516 --> 00:27:18,236
carpenters guild for their specific purpose yeah narrow ai yeah but so that raises what i think is

331
00:27:18,236 --> 00:27:24,456
the big issue is general agi artificial general intelligence the thought is super intelligence

332
00:27:24,456 --> 00:27:28,916
in one word or two words with a hyphen i don't know but the thought is that once intel artificial

333
00:27:28,916 --> 00:27:35,116
intelligence gets to a certain level you don't need specialized applications of it it is like

334
00:27:35,116 --> 00:27:42,556
the thing that is it's super intelligence right i think then the big scarcity or bottleneck is

335
00:27:42,556 --> 00:27:49,816
going to be people who have done a good job of siloing their internal databases and information

336
00:27:49,816 --> 00:27:57,036
such that it's not part of the model of that ai or something like that so that you can't the ai

337
00:27:57,036 --> 00:28:19,356
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.

338
00:28:20,396 --> 00:28:21,956
I don't know if that speaks to your question.

339
00:28:22,096 --> 00:28:22,716
I don't know.

340
00:28:22,916 --> 00:28:25,596
The NVIDIA question, I don't have an answer to that one.

341
00:28:25,596 --> 00:28:25,996
Yeah.

342
00:28:26,536 --> 00:28:26,976
Yeah.

343
00:28:27,036 --> 00:28:35,076
that's a good I think the you're talking about basically having a moat yes I'm not a moat but

344
00:28:35,076 --> 00:28:42,996
also having protected whatever information you have not having let it leak onto the internet

345
00:28:42,996 --> 00:28:48,056
so that it can become part of it can be scraped by a large language model if you've done a good

346
00:28:48,056 --> 00:28:54,936
job of protecting your IP not just legally but just like literally not letting any of it out

347
00:28:54,936 --> 00:29:15,356
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.

348
00:29:15,356 --> 00:29:33,576
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.

349
00:29:33,576 --> 00:29:41,456
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.

350
00:29:42,056 --> 00:29:43,576
And then somebody else makes another leap.

351
00:29:43,576 --> 00:29:57,256
But if you have super intelligence, if you have AGI, then my perception of that would be that it won't need the data.

352
00:29:57,836 --> 00:29:58,356
Right.

353
00:29:58,476 --> 00:29:59,676
That it'll just figure it out.

354
00:30:00,656 --> 00:30:02,016
That it can just reason.

355
00:30:02,016 --> 00:30:15,576
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.

356
00:30:15,576 --> 00:30:22,316
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

357
00:30:22,316 --> 00:30:28,296
because there's a lot of smart people that that agree with g uh a mod mustock is is one that i

358
00:30:28,296 --> 00:30:36,176
really enjoy listening to talk about like you know he's like why do we need super a mod mustock okay

359
00:30:36,176 --> 00:30:42,896
um uh uh what is the the ai model um

360
00:30:42,896 --> 00:30:52,676
it's the most downloaded open source model um in the world um somebody seek is that not deep

361
00:30:52,676 --> 00:30:59,956
that's the chinese one yeah that's chinese one um shoot i forgot i forgot what it's called um

362
00:30:59,956 --> 00:31:05,576
But, yeah, his thing is that we'll have all these narrow AIs.

363
00:31:06,776 --> 00:31:09,736
But I do, yeah, I don't know.

364
00:31:10,216 --> 00:31:19,216
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.

365
00:31:19,216 --> 00:31:29,376
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.

366
00:31:29,376 --> 00:31:52,836
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.

367
00:31:52,836 --> 00:31:59,116
What would be an example of a judgment that's not public other than secret warlords?

368
00:31:59,376 --> 00:32:06,256
No. So in immigration court where I was practicing asylum cases, those types of decisions were not public.

369
00:32:06,516 --> 00:32:11,296
You can imagine somebody seeking asylum. You don't want that to be public if you fear a foreign government.

370
00:32:11,296 --> 00:32:28,096
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.

371
00:32:28,096 --> 00:32:31,596
You can get maybe some of it through a FOIA, heavily redacted.

372
00:32:32,296 --> 00:32:49,496
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.

373
00:32:49,496 --> 00:32:54,276
And the sideload nature of our bureaucracy is what's crumbling because of the Internet.

374
00:32:54,556 --> 00:33:11,116
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.

375
00:33:11,116 --> 00:33:21,976
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.

376
00:33:22,076 --> 00:33:31,416
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.

377
00:33:31,416 --> 00:33:35,276
because everybody thinks that what they do has some sort of like special,

378
00:33:35,556 --> 00:33:41,556
some sort of like unique thing about it where you've got somebody sitting next to them

379
00:33:41,556 --> 00:33:46,336
that's involved in a different industry and they say, well, it can replace everything but what I do.

380
00:33:46,336 --> 00:33:46,896
Yeah.

381
00:33:47,136 --> 00:33:48,556
And so, yeah.

382
00:33:48,796 --> 00:33:55,316
Kirkwood here talks about two hard constraints, like the time physics constraint.

383
00:33:55,456 --> 00:33:57,076
And he also says regulation in here.

384
00:33:57,076 --> 00:34:13,096
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.

385
00:34:13,096 --> 00:34:25,296
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.

386
00:34:25,716 --> 00:34:31,736
Things that involve deep issues of ethics, for example, might require that there be a moral agent in the loop.

387
00:34:31,736 --> 00:34:39,736
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.

388
00:34:39,876 --> 00:34:42,176
Whereas with AI, it's just like, oh, we goofed.

389
00:34:42,176 --> 00:34:48,256
But we've already got multiple states that have removed the human from the car.

390
00:34:48,956 --> 00:34:51,916
Yeah, no, the car is less of an example than the attorney, I think.

391
00:34:52,716 --> 00:34:55,176
And certain processes, again, where it comes to—

392
00:34:55,176 --> 00:35:01,656
But the ethics are more easily bound in code than they are in an individual, especially lawyers.

393
00:35:01,656 --> 00:35:16,036
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.

394
00:35:16,956 --> 00:35:21,956
And it takes, at the end of the day, kind of leaps of intuition or even just like judgments.

395
00:35:21,956 --> 00:35:23,916
We're now going to do things this way.

396
00:35:23,916 --> 00:35:27,776
the bramble bush of laws, what has been called the common laws,

397
00:35:27,916 --> 00:35:31,776
a development and organic development over time guided by legal tastemakers

398
00:35:31,776 --> 00:35:34,136
who kind of sniff the wind for the way things should go,

399
00:35:34,636 --> 00:35:38,256
extend principles in a sense, but operate outside of.

400
00:35:38,476 --> 00:35:41,236
Sometimes they have to create new rules about how things will be applied.

401
00:35:42,296 --> 00:35:46,896
And so I've just heard it noted that tastemakers in every realm

402
00:35:46,896 --> 00:35:53,396
will still be utilized to kind of guide AI for human purposes.

403
00:35:53,916 --> 00:35:56,656
it's going to be the AI producing everything,

404
00:35:56,656 --> 00:35:58,636
but there's going to be a stamp from a human that says,

405
00:35:58,716 --> 00:36:02,156
we like this result of the infinite set of results you produced for us.

406
00:36:02,276 --> 00:36:05,796
In the legal realm, maybe 99% of the attorneys are gone.

407
00:36:05,876 --> 00:36:08,216
We still have kind of the judges or something like that,

408
00:36:08,316 --> 00:36:09,696
stamping certain processes.

409
00:36:10,636 --> 00:36:12,916
I'm certainly one of the attorneys that's going to be gone for sure.

410
00:36:12,916 --> 00:36:14,536
I'm not saying I'm loaded, man.

411
00:36:14,796 --> 00:36:16,296
I'm out of here, which is good.

412
00:36:16,396 --> 00:36:18,096
I don't want to be doing the paperwork if someone.

413
00:36:18,856 --> 00:36:20,176
Well, yeah, if it can be done.

414
00:36:20,536 --> 00:36:22,296
As Booth's point at the end of the day, like, you know,

415
00:36:22,296 --> 00:36:31,416
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?

416
00:36:31,976 --> 00:36:41,876
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.

417
00:36:42,496 --> 00:36:44,516
I want to do violence against the printer, man.

418
00:36:44,516 --> 00:37:07,296
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.

419
00:37:07,296 --> 00:37:13,416
because all that does is slow things down, make things more costly, make things more inconvenient,

420
00:37:13,756 --> 00:37:15,556
make things work less better.

421
00:37:17,656 --> 00:37:21,336
Regulation, though, I mean, regulation bad.

422
00:37:21,436 --> 00:37:23,036
I agreed as a general thing.

423
00:37:23,376 --> 00:37:28,476
But due process of law throughout, like that's one of the things that the United States has stood for

424
00:37:28,476 --> 00:37:30,976
and I think has been a thing of value.

425
00:37:31,916 --> 00:37:33,736
It was on another podcast.

426
00:37:33,996 --> 00:37:35,776
I forget which one.

427
00:37:35,776 --> 00:37:39,696
I don't know, it was Ross, it's interesting times, something like that.

428
00:37:39,736 --> 00:37:54,813
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

429
00:37:55,133 --> 00:37:59,933
insisting that if you're going to put an innocent person in a cage,

430
00:37:59,933 --> 00:38:03,713
or a person in a cage, you have to go through certain processes

431
00:38:03,713 --> 00:38:07,433
where a society of engineers may be more utilitarian

432
00:38:07,433 --> 00:38:13,493
and more inclined to let human rights kind of disappear

433
00:38:13,493 --> 00:38:17,032
because human rights are kind of a romantic fiction

434
00:38:17,032 --> 00:38:18,613
that's only preserved by law

435
00:38:18,613 --> 00:38:22,233
and rely on things like human dignity and things like that.

436
00:38:22,233 --> 00:38:23,273
I'm obviously getting far afield,

437
00:38:23,473 --> 00:38:26,093
but that's the field where I've landed in, I guess.

438
00:38:26,493 --> 00:38:27,873
It doesn't have to be one or the other.

439
00:38:28,032 --> 00:38:30,473
Like, it doesn't have to be a land of one,

440
00:38:30,713 --> 00:38:33,093
you know, of engineers or of law.

441
00:38:33,873 --> 00:38:36,293
You know, like, the United States will fail

442
00:38:36,293 --> 00:38:40,713
if they do not accept that they need to be a land of engineers

443
00:38:40,713 --> 00:38:41,852
and not a land of law.

444
00:38:43,493 --> 00:38:44,193
Or both, you said.

445
00:38:44,352 --> 00:38:45,653
You have to have both.

446
00:38:45,713 --> 00:38:46,032
Yes.

447
00:38:46,453 --> 00:38:47,873
You have to have both.

448
00:38:47,933 --> 00:38:49,873
Sufficiently humanized engineers, maybe.

449
00:38:50,113 --> 00:38:50,413
Yeah.

450
00:38:50,793 --> 00:38:55,933
And so I think that brings us neatly into the last triangle

451
00:38:55,933 --> 00:38:56,913
in the trifecta.

452
00:38:57,252 --> 00:39:01,433
And the picture, the graphic for this essay is a fun one.

453
00:39:01,593 --> 00:39:05,133
It's got Link from The Legend of Zelda holding up the Triforce,

454
00:39:05,133 --> 00:39:09,653
land, labor, and capital, you see them. So it's a great job, whoever did the art direction for that.

455
00:39:10,113 --> 00:39:15,453
But the last piece of the trifecta, land, labor, and capital, this is going to get us into the due

456
00:39:15,453 --> 00:39:22,752
process realm, I think, a bit, the realm of rules and their worth. So we've seen how digital

457
00:39:22,752 --> 00:39:28,793
industrialization, that whole dynamic, operates on land and labor. The internet digitizes land,

458
00:39:28,993 --> 00:39:33,052
creates abundance of distribution while consolidating value around the platform to

459
00:39:33,052 --> 00:39:40,593
control new scarcity of compute attention and discovery. AI digitizes labor creates abundance

460
00:39:40,593 --> 00:39:46,493
of competence while consolidating value around the scarcity provided by these constraints of

461
00:39:46,493 --> 00:39:52,453
the physical infrastructure required for AI at the very least. That moves us again to the last,

462
00:39:52,593 --> 00:39:57,893
land labor and capital. What is digitized capital? Capital is so abstract. I mean, first,

463
00:39:57,893 --> 00:40:02,813
like even just beyond like step take one step outside of kirk kirkwood's piece what even is

464
00:40:02,813 --> 00:40:07,433
capital just at the most basic level let's say stuff that helps us produce other stuff

465
00:40:07,433 --> 00:40:13,873
often considered as like in our current parlance the money or value that we invest in the production

466
00:40:13,873 --> 00:40:18,552
of new stuff something that's not consumed in the moment but is used to produce future things

467
00:40:18,552 --> 00:40:24,473
more basically we might say capital in the form of investment to move back into kirkwood's piece

468
00:40:24,473 --> 00:40:26,752
is a sort of stored trust or credibility.

469
00:40:27,293 --> 00:40:30,493
It is a promise to be paid back for an investment,

470
00:40:30,673 --> 00:40:32,752
the credibility that if you invest,

471
00:40:33,252 --> 00:40:35,213
it's not going to be debased in a sense.

472
00:40:35,352 --> 00:40:36,413
The debts will be respected.

473
00:40:36,713 --> 00:40:39,352
The value returned will be equal or greater

474
00:40:39,352 --> 00:40:41,913
if the risk is paid off to what was invested.

475
00:40:42,693 --> 00:40:46,473
A promise is only as good as we trust it to be.

476
00:40:46,473 --> 00:40:49,433
Capital investment must be a credible promise

477
00:40:49,433 --> 00:40:50,893
to the people putting their capital in,

478
00:40:50,953 --> 00:40:51,653
something like that.

479
00:40:52,073 --> 00:40:54,052
Capital in this sense has been damaged

480
00:40:54,052 --> 00:40:55,933
by an abundance of easy credit.

481
00:40:56,512 --> 00:40:59,552
Credit expansion distorts market signals.

482
00:41:00,073 --> 00:41:02,473
With more and more credit entering the system,

483
00:41:02,593 --> 00:41:06,133
we can no longer trust that an investment will be paid back

484
00:41:06,133 --> 00:41:08,613
in terms of the value in which it was made.

485
00:41:09,213 --> 00:41:10,933
Debts are no longer credible.

486
00:41:11,113 --> 00:41:13,573
They are instead just kind of gambles that future money

487
00:41:13,573 --> 00:41:16,393
and credit expansion will debase or devalue those debts.

488
00:41:16,773 --> 00:41:17,913
That's the game we all play.

489
00:41:18,673 --> 00:41:25,832
Bitcoin, though, as digital capital, digitizes or abstracts trust and credibility.

490
00:41:26,233 --> 00:41:32,893
It brings into the digital realm something that has a finite supply and neutral governance.

491
00:41:32,893 --> 00:41:40,293
It provides a form of capital whose rules cannot be changed to water down previous capital investments.

492
00:41:40,852 --> 00:41:44,953
Bitcoin reduces the cost involved in trusting somebody.

493
00:41:45,073 --> 00:41:46,813
There's always cost when you trust somebody.

494
00:41:46,813 --> 00:42:05,453
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.

495
00:42:05,453 --> 00:42:11,973
so bitcoin though reduces the cost involved in trusting someone you can trust that an investment

496
00:42:11,973 --> 00:42:18,232
or debt won't be washed away by printing more bitcoin so there's just like base level trust

497
00:42:18,232 --> 00:42:23,732
right there credibility and trust are also scalable again that dial we've kind of been picturing

498
00:42:23,732 --> 00:42:32,413
to the providers of a new form of value credibility and trust are scalable down to an individual's

499
00:42:32,413 --> 00:42:38,013
savings. I can pop $5 into Bitcoin and have made a capital investment I can trust. That's credible.

500
00:42:38,653 --> 00:42:46,732
And then scalable up to nation states. Before, it is currently incredibly costly to trust your

501
00:42:46,732 --> 00:42:51,433
government, to trust the nation state, right? We try to constrain them, and this is what we were

502
00:42:51,433 --> 00:42:56,873
just talking about. We try to constrain them with policy. But all financial regulation just leads to

503
00:42:56,873 --> 00:43:03,993
The more you try to close the loopholes, you create new ones, you lead to new insiders and favoritism and exceptions.

504
00:43:04,532 --> 00:43:06,752
We saw that in the 2008 bailouts, right?

505
00:43:06,913 --> 00:43:10,813
Like that's what happens when you try to regulate your way to fairness.

506
00:43:11,052 --> 00:43:14,073
You end up with people who are on the inside of that fairness.

507
00:43:16,332 --> 00:43:19,173
The Cantalot effect in two words.

508
00:43:19,173 --> 00:43:23,373
But with Bitcoin, the costs of trust can now collapse.

509
00:43:23,373 --> 00:43:37,293
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.

510
00:43:38,613 --> 00:43:41,693
What do collapsing costs look like in this realm?

511
00:43:42,013 --> 00:43:43,593
We get rid of credit card fees.

512
00:43:43,993 --> 00:43:45,552
Square is doing this right now, man.

513
00:43:45,732 --> 00:43:49,693
There's an operation on the ground to get merchants to operate on Bitcoin.

514
00:43:50,453 --> 00:43:52,773
You get rid of financial middlemen of all sorts.

515
00:43:52,773 --> 00:43:59,393
We get rid of potentially central banks, those who predate upon all of us, manipulate the currency, operate the currency.

516
00:43:59,873 --> 00:44:00,993
The currency's rules are set.

517
00:44:01,052 --> 00:44:02,173
We don't need you guys anymore.

518
00:44:02,532 --> 00:44:05,013
You get rid of financial lobbying related to that.

519
00:44:05,133 --> 00:44:14,633
As these costs collapse, getting rid of these financial middlemen, financial overseers, value now consolidates around new scarcity relative to the use of Bitcoin.

520
00:44:14,633 --> 00:44:24,613
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.

521
00:44:25,332 --> 00:44:36,332
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.

522
00:44:36,332 --> 00:44:47,393
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.

523
00:44:47,953 --> 00:45:02,493
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.

524
00:45:02,493 --> 00:45:15,573
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.

525
00:45:16,393 --> 00:45:19,113
Two kind of two final quotes, I think, just tie the whole piece together.

526
00:45:19,673 --> 00:45:26,752
One quote, the future belongs to those who preserve rather than print, whose assets appreciate credibility as their operations scale.

527
00:45:26,752 --> 00:45:35,852
And then finally, the old economy was built on leverage against insider favors, while the new one will be built on equitable digital capital.

528
00:45:36,453 --> 00:45:41,552
So Bitcoin is digital capital, Bitcoin as consolidating value around credibility and trust.

529
00:45:41,633 --> 00:45:42,953
Does that make sense? Something like that?

530
00:45:43,613 --> 00:45:45,133
Yeah, I like the credibility take.

531
00:45:45,133 --> 00:46:05,052
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.

532
00:46:05,052 --> 00:46:09,593
You know, what do you need a real estate agent for if you have a smart contract?

533
00:46:11,352 --> 00:46:22,832
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?

534
00:46:24,373 --> 00:46:30,433
Accounting, you know, an AI will do a far better job of that.

535
00:46:30,433 --> 00:46:56,433
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.

536
00:46:56,433 --> 00:47:03,793
are willing to put that reputation on the line

537
00:47:03,793 --> 00:47:07,593
in order to be in the right place

538
00:47:07,593 --> 00:47:11,113
before everyone else discovers that that's the right place.

539
00:47:11,113 --> 00:47:15,653
And I think that's a neat little analog

540
00:47:15,653 --> 00:47:19,133
with credibility and reputation.

541
00:47:19,413 --> 00:47:22,193
Like he's using, Kirkwood is using credibility

542
00:47:22,193 --> 00:47:26,352
more in terms of the credibility of the asset

543
00:47:26,433 --> 00:47:30,313
and the credibility of the ability to pay back the debt.

544
00:47:30,313 --> 00:47:36,732
You know, like, why do I need a 32-page loan application and a business plan

545
00:47:36,732 --> 00:47:44,133
if I can show you that I have the collateral, the Bitcoin on chain?

546
00:47:44,773 --> 00:47:45,313
You know, that should—

547
00:47:45,893 --> 00:47:50,032
And then a smart contract will return it to me if you don't do a certain thing.

548
00:47:50,113 --> 00:47:50,453
Exactly.

549
00:47:50,453 --> 00:48:01,313
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.

550
00:48:01,613 --> 00:48:01,873
Yeah.

551
00:48:02,313 --> 00:48:19,293
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.

552
00:48:19,293 --> 00:48:32,352
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.

553
00:48:32,352 --> 00:48:57,293
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.

554
00:48:57,293 --> 00:49:04,933
And be very unapologetic and unapologetic about it to the point that it is labeled as toxic by people who disagree.

555
00:49:05,713 --> 00:49:12,933
Because if you can't find a logical reason to disagree, then you can just say that they're toxic.

556
00:49:13,573 --> 00:49:13,693
Right.

557
00:49:14,232 --> 00:49:17,573
You know, oh, like I it's it's the you're not wrong.

558
00:49:17,653 --> 00:49:18,593
You're just an asshole.

559
00:49:18,993 --> 00:49:19,532
Right.

560
00:49:19,893 --> 00:49:20,373
Yeah.

561
00:49:20,513 --> 00:49:24,273
To quote to quote the dude from the Big Lebowski.

562
00:49:24,453 --> 00:49:24,593
Yeah.

563
00:49:24,593 --> 00:49:34,373
Yeah. So, yeah, credibility and reputation. I think they go hand in hand. They build upon each other in this new world.

564
00:49:34,373 --> 00:49:59,953
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.

565
00:49:59,953 --> 00:50:16,093
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?

566
00:50:16,093 --> 00:50:30,313
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.

567
00:50:30,313 --> 00:50:42,232
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.

568
00:50:42,232 --> 00:50:54,513
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.

569
00:50:54,513 --> 00:51:03,073
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.

570
00:51:03,073 --> 00:51:12,893
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.

571
00:51:12,893 --> 00:51:33,252
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.

572
00:51:33,393 --> 00:51:34,293
The means of production.

573
00:51:34,393 --> 00:51:35,213
The means of production.

574
00:51:35,313 --> 00:51:36,093
You could say that.

575
00:51:36,213 --> 00:51:37,073
Yeah, it could be that.

576
00:51:37,673 --> 00:51:38,953
That's one way to define it.

577
00:51:38,953 --> 00:51:47,093
I said stuff that makes other stuff essentially and also not what you consume in the moment, but use it to get something else.

578
00:51:47,373 --> 00:51:55,153
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.

579
00:51:55,332 --> 00:52:01,373
And so to talk about Bitcoin as digital capital becomes a bit more, for me, confusing.

580
00:52:01,373 --> 00:52:11,653
Also just that, and I encountered this in reading Booth's The Price of Tomorrow, where we talk about deflation creating abundance.

581
00:52:14,073 --> 00:52:25,852
But then Bitcoin being deflationary and it's, I guess, creating an abundance of value.

582
00:52:25,852 --> 00:52:37,493
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.

583
00:52:38,373 --> 00:52:42,873
As the Internet has digitized land, there's an abundance there that's obvious.

584
00:52:43,093 --> 00:52:45,213
With Bitcoin, Bitcoin is inherently scarce.

585
00:52:45,473 --> 00:52:49,513
So the abundance that it's creating is of a different sort, if that makes sense.

586
00:52:49,693 --> 00:52:51,813
The buying power is abundant, right?

587
00:52:51,953 --> 00:52:55,052
So the Bitcoin is not abundant, but the buying power is.

588
00:52:55,052 --> 00:53:22,993
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.

589
00:53:22,993 --> 00:53:34,953
um but the to me it's actually easier to see um like right now i would say that the

590
00:53:34,953 --> 00:53:43,032
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

591
00:53:43,032 --> 00:53:49,213
the self-driving semi i can easily see the you know the the robot stalking the show

592
00:53:49,213 --> 00:53:50,793
You can physically imagine that.

593
00:53:50,873 --> 00:53:52,273
You can have pictures and images of it.

594
00:53:52,953 --> 00:53:54,852
What does capital look like in your mind?

595
00:53:55,332 --> 00:54:05,893
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.

596
00:54:06,552 --> 00:54:06,752
Yeah.

597
00:54:06,752 --> 00:54:21,373
Whereas I'm still struggling, not struggling, I'm still unsure as to when the robot is a better electrician or a better plumber.

598
00:54:21,373 --> 00:54:23,613
Like those things I'm a little iffy on.

599
00:54:23,613 --> 00:54:34,213
Um, but as far as Bitcoin being better capital, um, I, I think when I listened to strategies,

600
00:54:34,413 --> 00:54:44,552
uh, Q3 earnings call and listened to again, the description of how, um, stretch the product that

601
00:54:44,552 --> 00:54:52,413
Michael Saylor is going all in on. Um, you know, it's a direct competitor to the treasuries,

602
00:54:52,413 --> 00:55:02,533
to the bonds, to this income market, and it's doing it four times, you know, it's paying

603
00:55:02,533 --> 00:55:05,133
four times as much, four to five, four to six times as much.

604
00:55:05,133 --> 00:55:08,752
But even the terms in which you're explaining that now, treasuries and bonds, these are

605
00:55:08,752 --> 00:55:10,252
also abstractions in a way that-

606
00:55:10,252 --> 00:55:10,953
For most people.

607
00:55:11,053 --> 00:55:17,153
For me, certainly, and they're not in the way that, again, I can easily picture as literally

608
00:55:17,153 --> 00:55:21,033
create a mental image of an autonomous driving vehicle.

609
00:55:21,033 --> 00:55:23,732
Like you just imagine the vehicle driving without a person.

610
00:55:23,933 --> 00:55:31,033
I can, you know, comprehend visually in internal space what a digital electrician is going to look like.

611
00:55:31,113 --> 00:55:31,813
I've seen the Jetsons.

612
00:55:31,893 --> 00:55:32,813
I know how this works out.

613
00:55:32,893 --> 00:55:47,493
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.

614
00:55:47,493 --> 00:55:52,232
And so to understand it becomes difficult in a good sense.

615
00:55:52,313 --> 00:55:56,173
I mean, this is like, it's something that we need to seek to educate ourselves on.

616
00:55:56,852 --> 00:56:06,393
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.

617
00:56:06,752 --> 00:56:09,493
Kind of related to the fact that I chose to go to digital capital.

618
00:56:09,752 --> 00:56:10,513
What did I do?

619
00:56:10,793 --> 00:56:12,113
How did I visualize this?

620
00:56:12,113 --> 00:56:17,513
I duct taped a keyboard to my chest and wrote autonomous capital on the duct tape.

621
00:56:18,073 --> 00:56:24,873
So part of embarrassment about my own inability to visualize autonomous capital, I did not go to this party.

622
00:56:24,993 --> 00:56:35,513
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.

623
00:56:35,653 --> 00:56:36,793
It would probably be something different.

624
00:56:36,793 --> 00:56:49,909
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

625
00:56:50,089 --> 00:56:53,089
And so tying it back to credibility and reputation helps.

626
00:56:53,089 --> 00:57:12,869
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.

627
00:57:12,869 --> 00:57:30,269
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.

628
00:57:30,269 --> 00:57:39,929
I don't think that the struggle is in understanding capital in terms of the future sense.

629
00:57:40,069 --> 00:57:43,289
I think the struggle is that no one understands capital in the current sense.

630
00:57:43,449 --> 00:57:43,789
For sure.

631
00:57:43,989 --> 00:57:50,809
Because no one has an understanding of how the current dollar system works, how fiat money works.

632
00:57:50,809 --> 00:58:09,189
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.

633
00:58:09,189 --> 00:58:20,189
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.

634
00:58:20,189 --> 00:58:27,649
And then side by side, I put up a graphic of how the Fiat system works.

635
00:58:28,189 --> 00:58:41,969
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.

636
00:58:42,149 --> 00:58:43,509
And those are just the puzzles we know about.

637
00:58:43,569 --> 00:58:43,909
Exactly.

638
00:58:43,909 --> 00:58:44,249
Yeah.

639
00:58:44,249 --> 00:58:44,689
We don't even know.

640
00:58:44,809 --> 00:58:44,949
Yeah.

641
00:58:45,049 --> 00:58:46,549
The shadow banking system.

642
00:58:48,089 --> 00:58:50,009
Everything that's involved with that.

643
00:58:50,189 --> 00:58:54,349
You know, it is impossible to comprehend.

644
00:58:54,349 --> 00:59:12,809
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.

645
00:59:13,469 --> 00:59:20,029
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.

646
00:59:20,189 --> 00:59:26,929
thinkers. And they're going in there with an engineering mindset. And they are doing what

647
00:59:26,929 --> 00:59:32,469
Elon says to do, which is, you know, remove the part. Like, first, you know, don't optimize the

648
00:59:32,469 --> 00:59:37,609
part. Question why it exists in the first place. And if there's a way to get rid of it, get rid of

649
00:59:37,609 --> 00:59:45,129
it. And keep pulling these things out. So, yeah, I think that the fuzziness around capital is not

650
00:59:45,129 --> 00:59:49,029
to be laid at the feet of Bitcoin or digital capital.

651
00:59:49,109 --> 00:59:53,989
I think it's to be laid at the feet of the current system that no, literally no one understands.

652
00:59:53,989 --> 01:00:02,949
Like one of the ones I played was I used to play this video of one of Biden's, he was

653
01:00:02,949 --> 01:00:05,269
like Biden's chief economic advisor.

654
01:00:05,529 --> 01:00:10,809
And it is a really famous clip, but they ask him to explain how, you know, how the dollar

655
01:00:10,809 --> 01:00:11,229
works.

656
01:00:11,229 --> 01:00:17,169
and he just stutters and stammers and he questions himself and they huh and they huh and you just

657
01:00:17,169 --> 01:00:22,889
cannot answer it has no idea and that's the guy that supposedly is the dude that's you know the

658
01:00:22,889 --> 01:00:31,369
mechanic of the car that you're driving down the road yeah so yeah yeah in fact one of um the

659
01:00:31,369 --> 01:00:37,089
investments that 1031 evidently is part of or a source that they've given some money to or

660
01:00:37,089 --> 01:00:41,649
something like that is mempool and so it's a visualization of the blockchain that's maybe

661
01:00:41,649 --> 01:00:49,109
going to remedy for people like me for whom mathematics is just a blank space into which

662
01:00:49,109 --> 01:00:54,469
thought cannot enter that will provide something to put in that space if you can visualize certain

663
01:00:54,469 --> 01:01:02,689
operations of the blockchain it becomes a more real thing i can um see how blocks are you know

664
01:01:02,689 --> 01:01:07,109
processed how the transactions go into them and then suddenly it's like now it makes sense

665
01:01:07,109 --> 01:01:14,189
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

666
01:01:14,189 --> 01:01:18,529
in so what mempool is like yeah literally the mempool structure for bitcoin right where the

667
01:01:18,529 --> 01:01:23,729
pending transactions are that are going to be added to blocks yeah so you can see that so it's

668
01:01:23,729 --> 01:01:30,309
basically like being able to like again we're all comparing this to something that is not that is

669
01:01:30,309 --> 01:01:37,289
imperfect, but it would be like if you could just tap into a website and you could see all of the

670
01:01:37,289 --> 01:01:42,709
pending transactions in the world for the dollar. You know, like here's a guy in Italy that just

671
01:01:42,709 --> 01:01:48,349
bought a coffee and here's a dude in Miami that just bought a Lamborghini. And all these things

672
01:01:48,349 --> 01:01:58,749
are pending to go through and waiting to be confirmed. And so this is where Jason Lowery

673
01:01:58,749 --> 01:02:05,649
again comes into play because he talks about the importance of establishing a hash force so that

674
01:02:05,649 --> 01:02:14,749
you have the mining power and the hashing power to ensure that transactions go through um i guess

675
01:02:14,749 --> 01:02:21,049
unadulterated yeah or you know it's miners can pick and choose what the nodes or other that are

676
01:02:21,049 --> 01:02:26,209
compiling the block can choose what transactions they're going to include in that can they they can

677
01:02:26,209 --> 01:02:31,009
do that right yeah that's why there's the fee structure they can choose but um it's always like

678
01:02:31,009 --> 01:02:36,069
it's always a default to whatever the highest fees are right i don't know how that operates i mean i

679
01:02:36,069 --> 01:02:41,309
suppose there's some background software determining what transactions are going to put into it because

680
01:02:41,309 --> 01:02:45,129
there's not like a human guy picking and choosing they probably do default as a decision mechanism

681
01:02:45,129 --> 01:02:50,189
to highest fees because you're i mean as a the thing is like as a minor you're you're agnostic

682
01:02:50,189 --> 01:02:55,469
to the transactions that are going through and maybe some might not be some might have ideological

683
01:02:55,469 --> 01:02:57,689
reasons for not wanting spam, something like that.

684
01:02:58,089 --> 01:03:06,149
But you're agnostic to it because if you choose to include transactions that all the rest of

685
01:03:06,149 --> 01:03:10,689
them are not, this is where the greed part comes into play, where greed is good, where

686
01:03:10,689 --> 01:03:15,129
if all of the miners are just looking at it and they're like, oh, we're just going to

687
01:03:15,129 --> 01:03:18,949
process the block with the highest fees, you know, then that makes sense.

688
01:03:19,029 --> 01:03:23,049
But if you choose to insert your ideology in there and you say, well, we're just not

689
01:03:23,049 --> 01:03:27,549
going to process this one because that guy's black or he's a Yankees fan.

690
01:03:27,709 --> 01:03:30,369
Yeah, the incentives definitely will pull you in that direction.

691
01:03:30,469 --> 01:03:33,829
You're going to go ahead and you're going to mine a block that no one else will validate.

692
01:03:34,689 --> 01:03:34,949
Right.

693
01:03:35,129 --> 01:03:36,809
And so you're just going to waste your money.

694
01:03:36,969 --> 01:03:38,149
You're just going to waste your power.

695
01:03:38,149 --> 01:03:45,349
And so this is where it's interesting because in the current setup, if you're George Soros,

696
01:03:45,389 --> 01:03:51,129
if you're Elon Musk and you're throwing your money behind your ideology, then there is a

697
01:03:51,129 --> 01:03:52,269
monetary gain for that.

698
01:03:52,269 --> 01:04:00,729
But in the mempool, if you're throwing your money behind your ideology, then there is guaranteed really a loss.

699
01:04:01,129 --> 01:04:03,709
Like you're just – all you're doing is just pissing in the wind.

700
01:04:03,889 --> 01:04:04,209
Yeah.

701
01:04:04,429 --> 01:04:07,369
A loss in terms of the money, the Bitcoin you could have.

702
01:04:07,369 --> 01:04:10,609
And the processing power that you use in order to mine a useless block.

703
01:04:10,829 --> 01:04:21,829
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.

704
01:04:21,829 --> 01:04:27,829
The other thing is the website mempool.space, which is like the visualization of what is the abstract process.

705
01:04:28,829 --> 01:04:32,849
And my understanding, like that's what 1031, I guess, is like funding.

706
01:04:32,989 --> 01:04:37,449
It's not funding the literal operation of the mempool and the Bitcoin protocol, just to be clear on that.

707
01:04:37,509 --> 01:04:39,349
It's funding this visualization of it.

708
01:04:39,589 --> 01:04:44,809
Yeah, because the operation of the transactions is self-funding.

709
01:04:45,049 --> 01:04:46,769
Yeah, it's part of the Bitcoin protocol.

710
01:04:47,189 --> 01:04:51,209
Yeah, and I just think these visualizations are so important.

711
01:04:51,209 --> 01:05:01,309
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.

712
01:05:01,649 --> 01:05:11,289
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.

713
01:05:11,989 --> 01:05:17,029
But there's people like me who that they're just not speaking the language I understand.

714
01:05:17,029 --> 01:05:30,389
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.

715
01:05:31,349 --> 01:05:33,669
And so that's like 1031 if you're listening.

716
01:05:34,149 --> 01:05:36,109
What you should be doing is finding a Christopher Nolan.

717
01:05:36,589 --> 01:05:44,749
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.

718
01:05:44,749 --> 01:05:47,929
Like that would be the biggest investment for the future of Bitcoin there could be.

719
01:05:48,069 --> 01:05:51,689
I don't know if Christopher Nolan's the right example because no one's ever understood any movie he made.

720
01:05:52,009 --> 01:05:56,649
He is at the right nexus of good movies and mass movie.

721
01:05:57,569 --> 01:05:58,349
I understood Tenet.

722
01:05:58,509 --> 01:06:05,309
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.

723
01:06:05,369 --> 01:06:10,709
You don't have to – you're removed by Interstellar even if you don't understand the mechanics of how it functions.

724
01:06:10,709 --> 01:06:22,949
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.

725
01:06:23,169 --> 01:06:24,789
That's what Bitcoin needs.

726
01:06:25,089 --> 01:06:31,709
It needs, like, real artists operating at the nexus of unique vision, but also popular consumption.

727
01:06:33,529 --> 01:06:36,409
Yeah, so somebody buy Christopher Nolan.

728
01:06:36,689 --> 01:06:38,709
Like, I don't know how much one of those costs, but...

729
01:06:38,709 --> 01:06:39,529
And he's Villeneuve.

730
01:06:39,829 --> 01:06:40,769
Do him, man.

731
01:06:40,909 --> 01:06:42,549
That's 100%.

732
01:06:42,549 --> 01:06:44,089
That dude's an engineer.

733
01:06:44,589 --> 01:06:58,129
I just saw yesterday, I saw a picture of the paper that he hand drew out the logical steps of the dream levels.

734
01:06:58,129 --> 01:06:58,529
Yeah.

735
01:06:58,789 --> 01:07:01,129
And not Tenet, but what's the—

736
01:07:01,129 --> 01:07:01,989
Interstellar?

737
01:07:02,129 --> 01:07:02,309
No.

738
01:07:02,669 --> 01:07:03,029
Inception.

739
01:07:03,229 --> 01:07:03,589
Inception.

740
01:07:03,709 --> 01:07:03,909
Yeah.

741
01:07:04,209 --> 01:07:05,129
Where it's just down.

742
01:07:05,249 --> 01:07:06,829
And it's just logic all the way through.

743
01:07:06,969 --> 01:07:07,149
Yeah.

744
01:07:07,189 --> 01:07:08,149
It's so cool.

745
01:07:08,709 --> 01:07:15,589
Um, and comedians are that way too, you know, talking about art, like comedy is inherently,

746
01:07:15,589 --> 01:07:21,489
um, logic because what you're doing, like you're, you're, you know, today's comedians are, are merely

747
01:07:21,489 --> 01:07:26,289
the, the children of the court jester, which the court jester was just pointing out the logical

748
01:07:26,289 --> 01:07:34,869
fallacies of the king. Um, and, um, so it's all logic based because do you cannot, um, the best

749
01:07:34,869 --> 01:07:43,529
comedy comes from noting the absurdity from noting the um departure from logic or for you

750
01:07:43,529 --> 01:07:53,329
know like the um you know uh rules rules for the and none for me type of thing yeah um yeah so i i

751
01:07:53,329 --> 01:07:58,389
agree like i'm good with it let's have a christopher nolan bitcoin movie yeah i think and one important

752
01:07:58,389 --> 01:08:03,489
aspect of that there there is fantastic bitcoin art right now but it tends to be art made for

753
01:08:03,489 --> 01:08:08,069
Bitcoiners. Yes. They understand it. It's legible to them because they understand the symbols and

754
01:08:08,069 --> 01:08:15,649
the inside means that kind of make it artistic. There needs to be normie art or just art as such,

755
01:08:16,069 --> 01:08:21,509
but that has an underlying Bitcoin message without being corrupted by that message,

756
01:08:21,509 --> 01:08:25,289
because art needs to be non-instrumental in a certain sense. It needs to be art for art's sake

757
01:08:25,289 --> 01:08:28,909
and not art because you want some that's propaganda. If you want art to tell somebody

758
01:08:28,909 --> 01:08:36,389
something. And so if you have money and want to fund something, fund a real artist who is making

759
01:08:36,389 --> 01:08:45,249
something that speaks to all people, but that also comes from a space that is based in Bitcoin

760
01:08:45,249 --> 01:08:49,309
or values, right? Hi, I'm Lucas and I make music about Bitcoin that you wouldn't know was about

761
01:08:49,309 --> 01:08:54,209
Bitcoin. This is very true. This is a great example. Literally, you have a song that it

762
01:08:54,209 --> 01:08:57,509
It doesn't mention Bitcoin at all, but it's about Bitcoin.

763
01:08:57,649 --> 01:09:00,189
It's about the underlying principles of Bitcoin.

764
01:09:00,189 --> 01:09:07,569
So, like, I think of, like, Taylor Swift music where, like, people can appreciate Taylor Swift music as art.

765
01:09:07,929 --> 01:09:09,249
They can just like the music.

766
01:09:09,549 --> 01:09:16,229
But then you have the people that are the Bitcoin Maxi equivalent of a Taylor Swift fan, the Swifties.

767
01:09:16,229 --> 01:09:33,029
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.

768
01:09:33,629 --> 01:09:36,509
It's 30, you know, it's Christopher Nolan level deep.

769
01:09:36,509 --> 01:09:36,989
Yeah.

770
01:09:36,989 --> 01:09:57,849
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.

771
01:09:58,109 --> 01:09:58,349
Yeah.

772
01:09:58,469 --> 01:10:00,409
Maybe would be the way to say it.

773
01:10:00,409 --> 01:10:12,649
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.

774
01:10:13,069 --> 01:10:13,089
Yeah.

775
01:10:13,149 --> 01:10:13,409
Yeah.

776
01:10:13,809 --> 01:10:14,089
Yeah.

777
01:10:14,309 --> 01:10:15,469
Now, this was a fun essay.

778
01:10:15,689 --> 01:10:18,469
Again, fun in the sense of very well written.

779
01:10:18,469 --> 01:10:23,409
I gave a couple of quotes here, but Kirkwood's a very good writer.

780
01:10:23,689 --> 01:10:24,289
I don't know.

781
01:10:24,529 --> 01:10:30,249
Maybe I wouldn't expect it of a former doctor, but doctors are usually very intelligent people, so I don't know why.

782
01:10:30,409 --> 01:10:31,549
I wouldn't expect it.

783
01:10:31,749 --> 01:10:32,429
Well, if he'd handwritten it.

784
01:10:32,569 --> 01:10:33,689
Yeah, right.

785
01:10:33,749 --> 01:10:34,429
Then you can read it.

786
01:10:34,429 --> 01:10:39,349
But as a doctor and investor, he's also a rhetorician and a really good writer.

787
01:10:39,489 --> 01:10:43,969
Check out the essay because it's also, we spent an hour and change here talking about it.

788
01:10:44,189 --> 01:10:45,769
But the essay is actually very short.

789
01:10:46,229 --> 01:10:47,409
Yeah, it's like three pages.

790
01:10:47,449 --> 01:10:47,649
Yeah.

791
01:10:47,769 --> 01:10:53,549
And so it's not gilded with a bunch of like rhetoric that's not necessary.

792
01:10:53,549 --> 01:10:56,929
But what is put in there in the argument is well written.

793
01:10:57,269 --> 01:10:57,389
Yeah.

794
01:10:57,509 --> 01:10:57,789
Yeah.

795
01:10:57,789 --> 01:11:05,049
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.

796
01:11:06,069 --> 01:11:07,829
But he's like this is the ad.

797
01:11:07,949 --> 01:11:08,109
Yeah.

798
01:11:08,289 --> 01:11:12,249
I also think that like this is almost like the price of tomorrow.

799
01:11:12,409 --> 01:11:13,709
This reminds me a lot of the price of tomorrow.

800
01:11:14,209 --> 01:11:14,389
Yeah.

801
01:11:14,569 --> 01:11:15,769
It's the condensed version.

802
01:11:16,029 --> 01:11:16,309
It's somewhat.

803
01:11:16,469 --> 01:11:17,809
It's kind of a condensed version.

804
01:11:18,109 --> 01:11:18,549
It's unique.

805
01:11:18,649 --> 01:11:23,349
It makes different observations that, you know, are not found in the price of tomorrow, but they're kind of in the same vein.

806
01:11:23,349 --> 01:11:28,129
And so if you liked Booth's The Price of Tomorrow and who didn't, definitely check out this piece.

807
01:11:28,329 --> 01:11:29,269
Yeah, absolutely.

808
01:11:29,569 --> 01:11:29,749
Yeah.

809
01:11:30,989 --> 01:11:31,709
I don't know what else, man.

810
01:11:32,009 --> 01:11:32,709
Random question.

811
01:11:32,829 --> 01:11:34,049
Did you understand Interstellar?

812
01:11:34,129 --> 01:11:34,669
I did not.

813
01:11:34,969 --> 01:11:36,309
It's been a long time since I saw it.

814
01:11:36,809 --> 01:11:39,789
Understanding it is less important than being moved by it.

815
01:11:39,909 --> 01:11:45,369
What it is to understand is the human dynamics in it of how we deal with love and absence.

816
01:11:45,669 --> 01:11:51,669
Because if you're trying to get it Interstellar by trying to understand quantum dynamics or quantum mechanics or whatever,

817
01:11:51,669 --> 01:11:56,569
you totally missed the point of the movie it's not about whatever science that makes it like

818
01:11:56,569 --> 01:12:04,149
plausible quote-unquote it's about human relationships yes and no so um i understand

819
01:12:04,149 --> 01:12:09,529
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

820
01:12:09,529 --> 01:12:17,269
think of fineman talking about how um you know he was asked like you know doesn't doesn't knowing

821
01:12:17,269 --> 01:12:21,429
how everything works kind of take the magic away from it he's like no no no that adds a

822
01:12:21,429 --> 01:12:27,269
greater level of, adds a greater level of beauty when you, when you can look at a flower and you

823
01:12:27,269 --> 01:12:33,489
can see how, um, you know, how the pedals are arranged and why they're arranged that way and

824
01:12:33,489 --> 01:12:38,969
note the geometric pattern and things like that. And, um, there's, there's more beauty in it that

825
01:12:38,969 --> 01:12:45,029
way. You think about like a baseball fan watching a baseball game and understanding all of the

826
01:12:45,029 --> 01:12:51,129
hidden dynamics of, of how the game works and all the tiny little things that everyone's doing to

827
01:12:51,129 --> 01:13:00,589
gain an advantage. I just watched the movie F1. It's about, you know, F1 racing with Brad Pitt in

828
01:13:00,589 --> 01:13:10,789
it. And it's a great movie because it takes you into the kind of like the hidden strategy of how

829
01:13:10,789 --> 01:13:17,629
you can sort of manipulate the field in order to push one teammate to the front while maybe

830
01:13:17,629 --> 01:13:19,749
sacrificing the other and things like that.

831
01:13:19,889 --> 01:13:23,849
So, but in order to do that, you have to understand the mechanics.

832
01:13:24,029 --> 01:13:25,149
You have to understand the physics.

833
01:13:25,329 --> 01:13:28,709
You have to understand the underlying science and the nature of how those things work.

834
01:13:28,709 --> 01:13:29,849
But as a viewer, you don't.

835
01:13:29,989 --> 01:13:32,969
What is compelling to the viewer is the aesthetics of competence.

836
01:13:32,969 --> 01:13:38,349
When you watch that movie, it's compelling to see competent people doing competent things.

837
01:13:38,449 --> 01:13:39,889
That's an enjoyable thing to watch.

838
01:13:40,149 --> 01:13:45,689
I don't have to understand how a carpenter is really good, is able to do what they're

839
01:13:45,689 --> 01:13:49,989
doing but i watch a video of them doing it and it's an aesthetic experience because humans

840
01:13:49,989 --> 01:13:55,769
appreciate competence and so even to think about baseball as something an object you watch it's not

841
01:13:55,769 --> 01:13:59,829
because of the statistical operation and probabilities that somebody can decode it's

842
01:13:59,829 --> 01:14:04,789
because of the romance of babe ruth pointing in calling a shot and it's because of like the drama

843
01:14:04,789 --> 01:14:08,969
of what's happening also the competence again the aesthetic experience of competence of seeing

844
01:14:08,969 --> 01:14:14,369
like moneyball if you saw that like where they decode the probabilities that's really not about

845
01:14:14,369 --> 01:14:20,909
the statistics at all it's about again the human experience of that and so art doesn't need science

846
01:14:20,909 --> 01:14:27,049
is what i'm saying except as like background to display what is of human interest the phenomenon

847
01:14:27,049 --> 01:14:32,729
of competence things like that it's definitely about the statistics about in the most attenuated

848
01:14:32,729 --> 01:14:37,409
sense about the most you would not read a book about statistics and have the same experience you

849
01:14:37,409 --> 01:14:43,109
get watching a narrative of human beings applying that in a certain realm is what i'm saying i can't

850
01:14:43,109 --> 01:14:49,049
have one without the other by the way that entire field called sabermetrics which is the statistics

851
01:14:49,049 --> 01:14:54,489
of baseball at that type of level where you're instead of focusing on like runs and stolen bases

852
01:14:54,489 --> 01:15:00,909
you're focusing on launch angle and exit velocity and things like that uh created by a dude from

853
01:15:00,909 --> 01:15:06,169
kansas which is a which is of course of interest to our audience broadly speaking because everybody

854
01:15:06,169 --> 01:15:11,909
looks at kansas as kind of the the spiritual center of the universe as they should as they

855
01:15:11,909 --> 01:15:17,969
should i don't know man not good no that's fantastic yeah um anything else for you on the

856
01:15:17,969 --> 01:15:23,729
way out that's all i got um you know what do you just hit like and subscribe and then we point at

857
01:15:23,729 --> 01:15:30,349
the button look check out our sub stack which we publish once every when we feel like it

858
01:15:30,349 --> 01:15:35,569
yep and uh stick around we've got more coming up that's right that's it