Going Direct Conversations
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...
00:43:59 · Ben O’Hanlon, Jordan Wolfe
That's essentially what I think crypto can do, is give decentralized incentives. And the instant global capital formation, it's belief, right? Look at things like Pump.fun or Hyperliquid, right, where there's huge product market fit. But the money is there because people believe the money is there. So they go in and they chase it. And actually, in some ways, Web3 has just been narrative markets, hasn't it, right? Like, where's the promise of, where's the promised goods? It's been narrative, Marcus, to a large extent. [00:44:33] S1: Sorry, I want to just jump in on that point because I think this is where I think two worlds really cross over, which is the biggest challenge I've seen of that. The problem is it never moved over into the real world, into the lives of everyday people in any way. Yeah.
00:44:53 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:44:53] S2: And my belief for that is like, so all this profoundly large amounts of money have been raised. Why hasn't it had that effect? I think there's actually, this is 10 years insight here. I'll give you my 10 years insight, right? Which is numbers come before strategy. Numbers come before strategy. And everyone's going to argue with you about it, right? If you're working in these organizations, because they're all engaged in activity therapy. They're all engaged. Let me put it like this. And I've done ecosystem mapping. I can show you some of this after the call. But basically, a role is a hat you wear, father, son, brother, right? You have different challenges and information needs depending on the hat. And you might be wearing more than one of them, right? So in an ecosystem itself, like the network layer or the governance layer, or if you're talking about developers that are building on the network and the infrastructure engineers that are building capacity, right? So all these different layers that are happening in an ecosystem. They're all optimizing locally and rationally. If we're in the USA, these families are optimizing locally and rationally according to the incentives that have confronted them. But the whole, the system as a whole, it's not necessarily rational, right? And partly that's because if you're explaining everything in text, if you're explaining your ideas and you manage people so you know it yourself, right? If you've got to sit on a call and have someone explain what they're doing every single time, It is just, you don't have time for it. You can't scale at that level, right? And not only that, there's so much ambiguity in words and language, like there's plastic words. Yeah, it's like there's plastic words, right? So what I'm trying to get at is you actually need in a system a way for... A hundred schools of thought or a hundred strategies to orientate. They need an axis around which these things can orientate, right? And that is like a system-wide small set of accounts, just small system-wide units of accounts, right, around which people can access. And the point is, like, it's not that the ideas and the talking activity therapy aren't good. That's all great. Go and do that. But this has to ladder up. To something that's going to work for the system as a whole.
00:47:14 · Ben O’Hanlon, Jordan Wolfe
So the art in these ecosystems is, and there's one idea here I think you'll like, but yeah, okay, maybe we need to, firstly, never name the game they're playing. The game that you're playing is growth, and growth is capital productivity, right, within Web3. So first of all, people don't name the game, and this goes back to the monetary system. They don't know the game that's being played, and they can't define it. And definitions are really important because language, Because language is the substrate through which identity and stories and things like this are constructed. And this is what the AI is actually controlling, right? It's controlling the language and the inputs. Because you go and ask something about Anthropics IPO in Claude, and I bet you'll be getting a more positive response than, say, you know, a competitor, right? Where was I? Sorry, I got distracted with the language thing. [00:48:10] S1: You were talking, well, I'll bring you back to the question, which was, why is this open source decentralized counter revolution inevitable? And the reason why you were saying that is there was the question, you were talking about why Web3 didn't kind of, has not thus far kind of had the effect that many people would hope.