Going Direct Conversations
00:00:00 · S0, Jordan Wolfe, Ben O’Hanlon
[00:00:00] S0: [music] [00:00:07] S1: Hey, my friends, Jordan here. Just a few words before we hop into today's episode. First and foremost, a sincere thank you and appreciation for all of our early listeners, readers, and supporters at Going Direct. It's really what keeps me going to do this each and every week because there's clearly a community of folks out there looking to build a Going Direct economy, which gets me super excited. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed, please do so. Our main channel and community is forming over on Substack. The link is in the show notes below. And we'll also be putting out our weekly conversations at YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. I hope you all have a great day and remember too, go direct! All right, we are live. Ben, how are we [00:00:47] S2: Doing great. I'm caffeinated and, you know, I'm always good in the morning, so you've got me at the perfect time. How are you? [00:00:55] S1: I'm good, man. I'm good. Well, people will be happy. I have a guest that I'm speaking to who has a much better accent than my American accents. So Ben and I were just chatting before, and I normally don't do this, Ben, but I think you were getting on your soapbox. So just start here with telling people what you do every day.
00:01:15 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:01:15] S2: In my work, I solve growth, adoption, distribution problems. You could probably call it developer marketing, but it's very much ecosystem growth orchestration. And I like solving hard problems and they tend to be, a lot of my work has been around relational capital and, you know, you're working with like genius developers, right? Which requires a certain kind of, what's the word I'm looking for? Not courtesan. What's the other word? I'm not a courtesan. Concierge. You know, you have to be like a fiduciary, you know, and how it gets where they want to be. And it's been fascinating. It's been amazing 10 years. And I was telling you how I got into it because I was on a... On a skiing trip with my wife and I fell out with her. So I was sulking in the, they had a literal basement in the chalet. So I'm sulking in the basement and I'm reading a book called Murray Rothbard's The Mystery of Banking. And by the time I got to the end of the book, I was like, God damn. Because you start to understand like, The systems of control. So I got stuck into that and then I was reading the internet of money. And so like by the time I got into blockchain and crypto, I was like a real believer. And so I got into crypto because I felt that the internet money argument is about how actually For individuals, our transactions and what we do ought to be opaque. We should have privacy as with sovereign individuals. And the government should be transparent. But this is, in fact, the opposite of the way that it works, right? So, you know, I got super radicalized into this. And I kind of got into privacy projects. And I was offered bounties, actually. You know, so in a lot of Web3, my experience, you're dealing with smart people. They've got illustrious careers and lots of great, like, letters after their name and stuff like that, right? Or they worked in some really impressive, you know, company, this kind of thing. But I came up through the community, right, which I think was a differentiator for me. So I'd come up through the community and worked my way through, I was director of IOHK. And that requires, it requires, you know, just, Constantly asking yourself, like, why aren't my ideas or why is what I'm doing not working?
00:03:38 · Ben O’Hanlon
But understanding that you're going to have to mea culpa, take all responsibility for every failure as to why they're not landing with people and just have this like ruthless doggedness in you to keep going back and trying to solve things. And when they don't work. It's your fault because you're dealing with genius developers, right? They don't have time to hold your hand, this kind of stuff. But with the privacy stuff in Komodo, and these guys were the team that did BitcoinDark before them. And before that, they were on NXT chain. So they'd been around a long time. And it was very privacy-focused. And out of that ecosystem came Veruscoin and Pirate Chain. But they got me involved because they gave me... So I wasn't even thinking about getting a job in crypto. Then they hired me. Then I was head of community or something. And after that, I got headhunted or I got recruited by IOHK for the Midnight Protocol, which wasn't ready. So I got seconded into Kidani Foundation, which is the not-for-profit. So that's how I got involved. I can explain my story of like the ecosystem, but fundamentally, if I was to summarize all of that, if you told me that I would have been interested in political economic history when I was in school, I would have thought you were insane, you know, but actually super interesting.
00:05:04 · Jordan Wolfe
[00:05:04] S1: Well, no, and I think that it's funny. I think it's a good segue into, I'm kind of a similar way. I've kind of landed on this thing where it's like I just keep finding myself reading a lot about political history and economic history. And I think this is how I originally came across your work, where you're in the process of writing, which this is kind of what we're going to dig into, is a five-part series on why the intelligence revolution will be decentralized. And... As we were just, you know, we were chatting before as folks who are watching or listening now, kind of the whole theme behind the Going Direct economy is building a much, much more direct decentralized system. And the main enabler to being able to do this is that is going to be AI. And the last piece that I wrote was really kind of digging into this idea of how AI at its most basic level, deep level is a coordination technology. And I don't, I think it's a very small group of people that actually really kind of Very few people outside of the field actually think about that and what are the second and third order implications and effects of that. And also, because I'm someone who believes, I just believe decentralized systems are the best way for the greatest number of people to do the best. That's just my general view on it. I really want to help whatever I can do to make sure that this intelligence resolution Intelligence revolution is, in fact, much more decentralized and open so people can have their sovereignty, especially at a time where many of our systems are breaking down. So anyways, that's the connecting point. So I wanted to start here. So we're going to kind of walk through each one of your pieces a little bit because I wanted to kind of get in your head. It's one of my favorite things to do when I come across a substack. An author who's put a lot of thought into something like this together and allow them a way to unpack their ideas. So essay one, which is the prelude, is titled, Money is a Coordination Technology That's Been Captured. And so in plain terms, can you just kind of dig deeper into what you mean by money is a coordination technology?
00:07:17 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:07:17] S2: Money is a belief, fundamentally. So all reality is kind of internal, which is contentious. People will argue with you. And maybe there is an object reality out there, right? But I'm saying that for all intents and purposes, you know, there's that idea of as above, so below. It's like what's happening internally in someone's mind is really what's going to drive all behaviors. And so this is the interesting thing about money. You're accepting money because you believe the next person that you transact with is also going to accept it. And it's a medium of exchange. And it's a coordination technology. And it's a very interesting idea. It's a guy called Escape Key. I deliberately didn't link him in my post because his ideas are fantastic, but I didn't want to associate some of the arguments with broader conspiracy stuff. But his essential point is that if you control the inputs and the standards of a system, You don't have to come in and tell Jordan exactly what he does, right? Because you're going to be able to control the kind of macro. So think about like a desert, you know, or something like this. There are selection pressures with these standards or inputs. And this is like the monetary system. If you can control what the standards and the inputs are, you control most of the game. You don't have to own the monetary supply if you're able to control inputs and outputs, you know? So this is a really interesting idea. And the monetary supply is a coordination technology and it's civilizational management at scale because you can think about how debt's being used to wage wars like the IMF and things like this. And it's also incentives control behaviors as well. So the biggest shift that we've gone from Is essentially a commodity-backed currency, so something like gold, right? And if you're the king of Jordan land, you know, sending your men down the mine and getting the gold out, but at a certain point, the risk and the work becomes more expensive than it is to get that gold out of the mine. So there's a limit on how much gold can be in circulation because it's a physical commodity and you need to go and get it, right? The interesting thing is, I have to go and fact check my history, but like Nixon and the gold standard and moving to fiat, which is money based on nothing, based on a promise, backed by, it's basically debt, right?
00:09:43 · Ben O’Hanlon
What it's really backed by is the U.S. military, right? That's what's backing the U.S. dollar. But it's fascinating as a chessboard, right? Like we're not even having to make moral judgments at this point. We're just saying... Now that the US dollar doesn't have to be linked to how much gold or the commodity that can be get out of the ground, I'm just using that as my analogy, right? Sure. They can print as much as they want of it. And so they can go and capture the standards and the inputs of other systems as well. So this kind of coordination technology to normal people, to normies, they're just trying to have kids and get on in the world and do well. And so they're not studying these kind of things. And so money is just money. They don't have to overthink it, right? But it's really interesting the substrates that are below it because everything is organized fundamentally about an exchange of value and money is the proxy of that value. So it's sort of our time and our work that's being stolen. So I explained to my son, it's like a hidden tax. They're devaluing what's in your pocket. You can't see it. You can't see this theft happening. And the people that benefit from it are those where they are closest to the money printer. So when I print money, there's a beautiful story about the angel Gabriel. And everybody's praying. Everybody's praying. Oh, please, God, give me more money. I'm so pleased. And so he doubles the money in everybody's pocket overnight. And everybody wakes up. And the question is, who benefits first? Who benefits from that? The people that benefit are those that spend the money first because that's what everything is priced in. And as all of the money, nothing else has been doubled. The same amount of houses, cars, hours in the day, it's all the same, right? So as double that money enters circulation, what you'll find is the price of everything goes up because the relative value hasn't devalued the money, right? So this is the kind of theft of And by the way, I'm not, I'll loop back to this. It's a kind of, it's a kind of theft where you're selling future generations down the road because it's a never ending debt that can't ever be paid off, right? Without even getting into who owns debt, right? And it's future generations that have to pay it. So the other interesting thing I haven't worked in Web3 is like, What are these taxes?