Going Direct Conversations
00:12:11 · Ben O’Hanlon
Why are we all paying taxes? Because you could, me and Jordan can go and create a currency and we could have a low level of inflation that would represent taxes with which we're going to do things like fund the government. Where's my roads? We're going to build roads. Don't worry. So we'll use that inflation to go and build some roads and whatever else it is that we need. And we'll be transparent about it. And we'll say, well, you know, the currency is going to be inflated a little bit because we're going to need to spend some more money here and here. But We transpound, right? But that isn't what happens. So, like, why are we all paying taxes? It's because we're in a feudal system and we're servants on the land, right? And they want you to know, jordan, you're paying us taxes because you owe us, we're your lead. You owe us a fidelity, this kind of thing. So, I think, like, part of, like, and the reason I wrote the series, by the way, is I was talking to a mum, actually, at my kid's A birthday party my son was at. And my experience, and I'm not saying I'm super smart, but I think maybe some developers would recognize this. It can be very lonely if you're smart or clever because you'll often try and communicate things that people are not, they're just not able to meet you where you're at. And so for a long, long part of my life, I thought that I was really bad at communicating. I was oversharing. I was, you know, always taking this feedback on board. And so the point of this series is I'm just going to write this out so that I can release this like real just, oh, fatigue in trying to explain some ideas to people, you know, like, so I wanted to write it out because I wanted to set out the argument, as you put so well earlier, where we're going to is an inevitable counterintelligence revolution and an information insurgency. I'm fucking here for it. I'm here for it. You were made for it. I was born for this. I was born for it. I constantly think about that. But just to unlock one point before I wrap up on that, it's like there's two things going on, right? There's the material world. We talked about the monetary system, the commodities, this kind of stuff, right? But there's people's beliefs. This is like an epiphany I had. There was a song that was playing and it was about a superposition.
00:14:35 · Ben O’Hanlon
And where I'm at now is there's this distributed cognitive field across everybody's minds. We'll just take America for sake, everybody's minds, right? And these minds are made up of probabilities and uncertainties. And in fact, they may even be massively modular, right? So you're dealing with Many co-occurring minds that have these beliefs and probabilities. Let's just call them models. They have these models of the world, right? Math is not the territory, right? And there's this latent charge across all of it, right? This kind of like superposition across all of these minds. And it is a superposition because... It's beyond time. It's all of the generations that live before you, everyone that passed a torch to get Jordan to the point that he's at today, right? That all exists because there's the genetics, which is your DNA that's been passed down, but there's the mimetics, which is your culture and the ideas and even the value systems and, you know, the words we're using here, right? So this superposition exists and then, and I think about it and it's almost like a metaphysical thing as opposed to like material. And it's interesting because in a paradigm that we're in now where there's so much fear, uncertainty and doubt, where like this existential threat that everybody is facing, which I think is kind of coordinated to some extent, right? All these hacks that are happening now and all the mass papers got released at the same time. It's like, okay, yeah, maybe this is all just happening, or maybe this is a theater, a story, and we're being introduced to whatever, the new world order, whatever's All right. Superposition is simply that field, that entanglement of all of those hopes, fears, and certainties. And all these individuals are looking for certainty. They want to resolve this tension. And I think there's a huge opportunity In being able to collapse the superposition. And I'm being mercenary here as well because I have to go and, you know, earn a class, right? So I think about these things both from the point of view of like the common good and also how I can navigate and be more effective in these things. So why are people early? Why do they seem to be early, right?
00:16:52 · Ben O’Hanlon, Jordan Wolfe
I think you're early when you're Engaging in that superposition and collapsing it to your benefit one way or the other, whether you're a state or whether you're an individual or whether you're a business, right? And so what you're trying to do is not, let me, I'm almost touching on this. It's very costly as a business to try and go and deal with an industry where everything is known and calcified and you're going to go and try and take what you're doing to market, right? It's much easier, in some senses, much lower cost, to be able to get in early before there's a consensus. [00:17:29] S1: Sure, before markets form inefficiencies.
00:17:31 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:17:31] S2: Right, and so I think that's why I think about that superposition a lot, because where we're going to go in this argument is this counter-revolution is inevitable. And one of the things that we're going to say is, The field wants to be resolved. There's this tension. And so that is, in fact, selection pressure. With Web3, why didn't the revolution happen as we wanted to? Well, I'll go into why, but I don't think it's over. And at that time, you and I would have known, people were like, well, it's first world problems. It's like, this is really needed in, I don't think we're saying third world, are we? Developed world, whatever we're saying is correct. But what I'm trying to get at is, In Africa, for instance, you could have come in and maybe countries would be more open to trying different technology and there'd be a greater need for sovereignty over the monetary supply. But in the first world, it was to calcify. It's very difficult to do that. With AI, there's going to be this sovereignty selection pressure across individuals, institutions, and states because they're going to have to form coalitions. And it's not even about the money anymore. It's about like Either you realize this is a fight for survival or you're going to be paying rent. You're going to be living on someone else's cognitive infrastructure. And if they don't like you, if Trump decides to put export controls, good luck because your means of cognition and production is gone now. And then one last thing and then I'm done. Not only the means of cognition, but when people are operating with AI, we talked about it being a coordination technology. There's a salesman's If I say it, you doubt it. But if you say it, it's true. If I say it, you doubt it. But if you say it, it's true, Jordan, right? Because you're smart, right? So people will resist other people's ideas far more than they will resist what they think are their own ideas. And there's a bunch of research you can look up on X, right? About like when people are engaging LLMs, they're going on what they think is a self-determined journey of exploration. And they're going to come. I was having my hair cut. The woman's like, I've built this website with Grok. They believe it because they've been on that journey. They've done that thinking. So they think it's of them.
00:19:47 · Ben O’Hanlon
But I don't think that it necessarily would be if these tools are used in the same way the monetary system is being used as a tool for like civilizational control and management.
00:19:57 · Jordan Wolfe
[00:19:57] S1: So I think... To wrap it back to this, at the beginning of the conversation, or when we started talking about money as a coordination technology has been captured, and I think your world, your interests, and how you see things in helping other people see things, we're at a very important point in time. As you were saying, I find a similar thing where most people don't pay attention to this, they just want to live their lives and do their thing, and they're not thinking too much about much. And, you know, we're seeing it all around us, obviously, but understanding money and then actually how debt works and then the problem that most Western governments, that problem that they have and then now they have an interest problem and as they're printing more and more money for everyone out there that doesn't pay attention to stuff or don't really care that much. As you print porn more money, your money gets inflated away. And so you're kind of sleeping at the wheel. And part of my hope, kind of similar to what you're saying, is we can help more people wake up and say, hey, no, like, you need to pay attention to this. And I think it's important, especially as AI starts to diffuse through our lives and the economy, that we need to fight for much more decentralized, distributed intelligence for all the reasons that you just said. So I want to go over to the kind of the transition into the next essay. Okay. As we're kind of moving from money to cognition, I pulled a quote from like the end of the first, the first piece. Okay. It's a little bit long, but folks can hang with us. AI, like money before it, is a coordination technology that reorganizes society. But it sits a layer deeper. Money captured exchange and through it, governance. AI reaches the layer beneath both. Cognition where belief itself is made. Capture that and everything built on belief comes with it, money included. It is being rapidly deployed by a handful of private companies to capture the 21st century. Okay, that's a deep, deep excerpt. So you say that AI sits a layer deeper than money. So why is cognition deeper than exchange?