Going Direct Conversations
00:34:22 · Ben O’Hanlon, Jordan Wolfe
You'll have to bring me back to our point, but let me look back to something else as well. I thought it was very interesting about the monetary supply. There's another dynamic we haven't talked about. There's a book called Democracy, The God That Failed, and that's Hans-Hermann Hoppe. And essentially, there's the governance systems that we're operating in, right? That are just these behemoths will only ever get bigger because the story he goes back to the beginning is you and I grew up with the paradigm was East versus West, right? There was the Americana, Freedom, Steven Spielberg, Empire of the Sun, you know what I mean? [00:35:02] S1: Cold War.
00:35:05 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:35:05] S2: Loved America, hoorah, you know, even in England, you know. And then there was like, you know, Russia, communism, and there was this real tension. But that dichotomy, he's like, there's actually a third power. There's a third power that we don't think about anymore, right? And the third power was actually, it doesn't have to be left versus right. It doesn't have to be democracy versus fascism or whatever. These are false dichotomies. He's like, the third power is monarchy, right? The third power is private government. And he's not being a monarchist. We're not advocating for... I know I'm English, so you're worried that I'm going to steal the tea or something. I don't know. The Queen's dead anyway. We've got King Charles now. So he's not being a monarchist. He's not arguing for monarchists. What he's saying is, if Jordan's king, he has a legacy and a long-term interest to pass down what he's inherited from... To those that are coming after him, his children. But the problem with our governance systems is it's full of short-term caretakers. So it's like the system is such that it can be bought because if we control the financial monetary supply, these people are only in power for four years. They're never held accountable anyway, right? So it's much easier to buy, right? So the issue is, and don't get me wrong, I do want to maximize freedom, you know? But the governance system as it is with democracy has been totally captured, the whole thing from top to tail. That was kind of important as a background because I'm going to make an important point here. The series really started off as these kind of axioms, which is that tech is an agent of change, like steam and mechanization that will reorganize society. And you can look at like in the north of England, how the commons were enclosed and people had long held rights of sustainability that were taken away because of another idea, which is no interface, no entry. I have to go and find her name, but I did credit her. And the idea is that before steamer mechanization, there was no way to organize those resources or that labor. But with an interface to something, suddenly new possibilities become possible. And so that's the tech is an agent of change. And then we're talking about history here. And then also tech is a conduit for coordination, right?
00:37:29 · Ben O’Hanlon, Jordan Wolfe
So the printing press that standardized information and shared ideas across America and Europe led to the Enlightenment, right? And that's how we got America. [00:37:39] S3: Sure, of course.
00:37:41 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:37:41] S2: And I think where we're going to go with this is that I think that that was an enlightenment around governance and man's ability to determine his own fate. And I think Web3 is an economic enlightenment and that basically it was built for the agentic internet. And the reason Web3 hasn't happened is prophesied is because we're in the middle of it. We're in the middle of it. So that's the second axiom. The third axiom is technologies and ecology. And I had selection pressures. And so by the time, and I know you can walk us back through to where I should be in the conversation, but the point we're getting to is technologies and ecology and the tools that we create then change us, right? And the selection pressure, I believe, is a counterintelligence revolution in information uncertainty is underway. It's inevitable because the selection pressure is sovereignty. These frontier labs are trying to harvest the intellectual inheritance of humanity. They want to set it back to you on a meter. I'm quoting Sam Altman here, by the way. I'm not just hyperbole, right? And then we're all paying rent. And the problem with this, they can decide when and where we can use that cognition. They can pull the models from us. They can limit how effective or what tokens we're getting at any point. Just the same way as the algorithm on social media. Do you see what I mean? And that's another interesting thing is you look back to these different revolutions like the industrial or the printing press or the internet, and it starts off promising freedom, greater information. Social media, remove the gatekeepers. You can own your own audience. Web3 with Chris Dixon's kind of read-write-own argument, you know. But then you start to see these centralized forces come in and capture, you know, and it's how do we create something that can prevent that, a constitution on a blockchain and immutable laws and this kind of stuff.
00:39:34 · Jordan Wolfe
[00:39:34] S1: But let Bring me back to where we should be. No, I mean, you just walked through the next three pieces, so that's completely fine for me. I'm getting to the aspect of the conversation that I really wanted to dig in with you on, which is, You've laid the foundation in these different axioms, but you came back. I want to talk about the response. The reason why I want to do that, and I think it's interesting because you've spent a lot of time in the Web3 space, and one of the things that I've seen of why a lot of it hasn't really held was because The existing incumbent monetary system and systems, right, are going to fight tooth and nail, no matter what, to hold on to their control. And I think what's interesting about what we're seeing right now is we're just at the very beginning, and we're seeing it in France, and we're seeing it in the U.S. and other countries across Europe, where there's something that's got to give. The systems are actually breaking, and it's resulting in violent populism in the country. And the vast majority of the population not being happy with their current economic life. And then on top of that, it's gonna be exacerbated by this additional wealth concentration that we're gonna see from the frontier labs In the early days of AI. And so now let's move to this response because, and you mentioned this, but I want to repeat it because I want you to tell us why you have such conviction in it, okay? Not because this might be the world you want to see or help create, but at a deep level why you have such conviction. You say the response, open source, open weight, and decentralized alternatives is a counter-revolution, with sovereignty as the selection pressure that drives people toward them. Talk to me about sovereignty as the selection pressure and why it results in this response.
00:41:28 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:41:28] S2: So at a state level, you know, people aren't going to be able to compete with the USA because of the US dollar homogeny, because everything's pegged to the US dollar. So they can just print more money. Which is taking value from those other countries and then they're able to focus that value where they want it to be. So if you and I are in any other country, we must realize that we're not going to be able to compete with that. So a coalition is inevitable and it's not about the cost anymore. It's about our survival. Either we become, like with the IMF, right? Either we basically give up all of our resources and our ability to decide who we are as a country because some third party, in this case Frontier Labs or proxies of the USA, are going to tell us. So you're incentivized to, which is why you're seeing China and Russia create these attempts at other systems. It's why you see like, you know, people get that. Yeah, and they get Gaddafied, right, if they try and get off the U.S. dollar, right? And by the way, I'm not anti-America or pro-China. I'm not pro-anyone. I'm like, let's just look at the chessboard. Let's just see how it is, right? So crypto has got some superpowers, like instant global capital formation, right? That's amazing, you know, a settlement between these countries. I think it's really interesting that it hasn't managed to have the growth that it would. My experience has been, though not anywhere I work, obviously, my experience has been people are just actually, especially in leadership positions where they're from this kind of legacy world, they're very linear, actually, in a way. So why haven't we seen growth change? In these ecosystems, and there's a few reasons, and then we'll come into why it's inevitable, but it's, or I can do it the other way around, but essentially they're trying to do it top down. So they want to make the decisions and other people have to follow them. But the power of a swarm is that it can iterate on the fly in parallel and then move on to the next thing. I think incumbents can be challenged by swarms. I think I use an analogy of a giant hornet gets swarmed by the bees, right? Because the point is that the swarm or the collective is able to iterate and try different solutions exponentially on the fly. But it needs to be able to self-organize. And it needs incentives to do it. And so...