Going Direct Conversations
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.
00:48:32 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:48:32] S2: So all this capital got raised, but the idea, I was going to go through some system-wide units of account, but the one that's most important to you is circulation. How much of a dollar or USDC or whatever the token is, how much of this capital that you formed is circulating through the system, right? Like how productive is it through the system? Because I think a lot of money got raised, but then it didn't get distributed in an effective way that would make sense. And it didn't do that because as you go down the rows or across the system, right, if it's horizontal, You're dealing with the blind man and the elephant problem where you could have, let's imagine they're all well-intentioned, they're all smart, they're all intelligent, right? But they've only got visibility of where they are. So one of them's got the ear, the other one's got the tail, the other one's got the leg of the elephant. And you're like, what the fuck is going on, guys? Oh, I've got, he's describing the tail to you, but he doesn't understand the hole. So they can't, This is why you need, at some point, I think leadership is about, like, high alignment but loose coupling. It's about saying, like, this is what we need to achieve in terms of system-wide units of account. And, like, you're here because I trust you and you're going to do a good job. But this is how I'm going to hold you accountable. And we're going to agree on this before we start. We're going to agree that these are reasonable units of account to be working towards. And you'll understand why. And then I can trust you to go and work out how you're going to deliver them, but that's where you've got to start. And the founding entities, it's not even individuals, when these Web3 ecosystems were formed, often you would have seen because of legalities they would have like an engineering company and profit, they'd have like a venture, so it would separate these powers right? And I don't think those founding entities had it baked into their what was the correct word whatever um Founding documents, right?
00:50:32 · Jordan Wolfe
[00:50:32] S1: DNA or values or whatever.
00:50:35 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:50:35] S2: And it wasn't like, we're going to give you this amount of money on the condition that you're working towards these system-wide needs of camp. And so, like, really, I think that it is inevitable, this decentralized revolution, because these have all been experiments. This has all been a sandbox. The collective... Knowledge is out there, and based on belief, based on what people believe and need to be true, especially validating their own story and who they are, right? It's possible to raise more money. It's instant global capital formation based on what people believe. And so it's where the swarm wants to descend or merge or come on. So let's go back to the sovereignty, which is like as people start to realize, oh, what you're trying to do here is take away my means of existence, my means to produce for myself, right? Whether it's state, individual or institution, intelligence, or they're going to find that when they start to lose enough of that ability, enough of that sovereignty, and it's always a power users first. I'm not saying it will be one awakening at the same time, but I think this goes back to the Enlightenment. The first enlightenment was the governance. This is an act four, by the way, where we're trying to get to that isn't published yet. But the second enlightenment was an economic enlightenment. And that's what Web3 is and was. And we're in the middle of it. And we're in the middle of it because the tools and the thinking are there, right? Governance, DAOs, decentralization, privacy tech, this kind of stuff, right? But the agentic internet is to come. And I think that you're going to find now that If we can instantly form capital around our beliefs, and as long as we all believe this is something that's worth doing, that capital will have money, value, right? Now we've got incentives that can drive behavior, and people will understand that believing in the value of that capital or token and that project It's about validating who they are and where they are in the world and their right to exist in it and not to have to pay rent and to protect their children's children's output. This is the fight that's so interesting to me. And I think that states are incentivized too. Like, why is China releasing all of these open models? Because like Sun Tzu, I can't remember which one it is, but maybe it's the other one. Who knows? Sun Tzu.