Bro, we probably wouldn't have gotten there. We would have been killed by an invading horde. Whatever. Man, people need to read about history. Those times would have been far more terrifying than now. Even though we're dealing with like these huge seismic shifts, I would rather that. I

think the world is in an infinitely better place than it's ever been in the history of mankind. We are in a better place globally. Climate change, one issue, but it's fixable. And I'm pretty optimistic about that. These questions are going to be the important questions that come up, and we're going to need a framework for dealing with these questions. And the religions that we had don't deal with these questions because of the foundation of absolute truths and assumptive truths is a flawed foundation. We need a better foundation for these. And I think a constitution or UN Charter of Human Rights or some structure like that is the right foundation on which to build value systems and ethical systems for the future of how we think about we're going to build these things. So the challenge we've got today is much of our, if you look at how we're running the world today, much of it is either, almost all our universities came from religious universities, right? They were seminaries initially, and then we converted them into job schooling programs, and that's where they are now. So we have this old world legacy. This is why it's so hard to update them. All of our political structures are out of date today. So the reason we need web three and decentralized systems and new structures at the edge is we need to build that new, those new models to deal with all of these questions. Our existing structures in our old frameworks won't do it. So we need a complete new break for that, which is why we're so focused on this. The thing I'm trying to do with a difficult business model in it is how do you build a peace corps to transition the world from the old to the new in as elegant a way as possible? Because, you know, you've seen the Gartner hype cycle. So I think of what we're in a hype cycle of civilization, right? We did really well, and then we crashed in the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages, and then we did really well up to about the Industrial Revolution and the peak of that. And then we've come down since then. And now we're going through a big trough as we transition from scarcity to abundance. And how can we reduce the amplitude and wavelength of that period of that trough to come out of it in as elegant a way as possible? We need new leaders. We need new projects to build a future to answer these questions. Our current systems can't do it, which is why we're so excited about that. So we've been actually, so we now have a hundred, we have now 35,000 people in 150 countries operating where we give them methodologies and training on building any XOs and so on, because we're going to need all of that in the future as we come up with these questions. The old structures can't answer those questions. So we need completely new models and new structures, new value systems, new monetary systems, et cetera, to deal with these structures going forward. I think that's the work that we have to do today as an intellectual class. Tell

me more about what you mean that we've been in a trough since the end of the Industrial Revolution, which I'll peg at like 1910, somewhere between 1890 and 1910. Take the roaring

20s as a good spot. Or between the roaring 20s, ignore World War II, for example, but say this 50s, the 60s, we had this picture of life of this wonderful, bubbly, sitcom, happy, madmen-type environment. If you think about Western civilization kind of at its peak at that point, things start going downhill as we go through the 60s and we blow up the old models. And then we blow up the religion as a guiding force. Then we're stuck in, now technology allows us to scale a lot. So now we have tribal conflict that scales quite aggressively quickly. We've got these old problems we've got to clean out. We're still stuck in very old models of how we run the world, and we have to come through to a new model. So going from the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution got us one wave of positive contribution. We now need to get to the next wave, and we've got to cross through that. It's like the AI winter that we went through, or the crypto winter, which lasted this last three years. We're going through a civilizational winter when nothing makes sense right now. You've got these unbelievable chaotic things happening. The political discourse is a mess, geopolitical discourse, and all the world order is collapsing. We need to get to a new sense of new harmony, new equilibriums, new values, systems, et cetera. And the problem is it can't come from the old because it's too stuck in old models. We need to go to new systems. And we can't find them unless we build completely. One of the things we noticed when we were thinking about corporate innovation and so on was you never can, no car company could ever build a Tesla. It's always done by an outsider coming from outside with a beginner's mind, leveraging new models and building a new thing that disrupts the old, right? So Clay Christensen for the first time gave us a compelling theory of disruptive innovation. And now we figured out here's how you organize for it. And now we're kind of needing to get that into the world as fast as possible. So I'll give you one example. We're shifting the locus of power in this century from nation states to city states. So Trump and Brexit weren't about left versus right. As we mentioned earlier, Brexit was London versus the rest of the country. Because when you have to think about this, if you have solar energy and vertical farming and satellite internet, you don't need a country. You don't need the infrastructure that a country can give you. And if you have all our old boundaries for countries were typically to guard resources and mountain over here, sea over here, we have everything in the middle and it's hard to traverse those, so great, that's a country. And you evolve separate language, et cetera. But really today, the locus of a city or an urban environment is probably the best model for what the future of humanity should look like. We just have to evolve that into a decent place, as opposed to the mess that we're in in some of our cities in in different parts of the world um but as we move to that model then the nation state becomes less relevant and so we need completely new political structures and new models for how we devolve regulate so the one thing i'm totally in agreement with with the recent stuff that's happening in the u.s is the pushing down of rights down to the state level and let people self-determine at the local, more and more of a local level, right? So I'm completely there because now you have people self-directing as they feel that their value system achieves the most. You should have mobility. If I feel I don't want to live there, I want to be able to live somewhere else because my value system fits better, great, go do that. And I think evolution will, and business structures will very quickly figure out who's best and who's not, what's working, what's not working. And people move to a new model very quickly. But trying to get the nation state out of the way is a real problem today. Nation states, for example, can't solve climate change. Right, so that's a big problem. And so we're trying to figure out what are the structures for civilization to move to these new models. And it involves, A, decentralizing from nation states to at least cities, and then secondly, reinventing our institutions. Because all our institutions have to be reinvented now because they don't fit for the world that we came from. All

right. You said that we need new monetary systems as well as new governmental systems. Do you see, have we already found the new monetary system in crypto? Oh, yeah. I think Bitcoin is a really great starting point for it. I don't know if

it's the end point, but it's definitely a great starting point. Have you talked to Jeff Booth? I haven't, but I'm very aware of who he is. So Jeff did this, wrote this little book called The Price of Tomorrow a few years ago, and he articulated a really simple problem with our monetary systems, which is that over the last 50 years, every dollar increase in global GDP has come with a $4 increase in global debt. We're growing the global economy with debt. It's a horrible statistic.

Dude, that terrifies me.

Yeah, it's terrible And the reason for this is literally Moore's law. I mean, literally is that. When we floated off the gold standard, we didn't realize that technology was deflationary. And so a debt-based system works to increase and grow the economy, as long as you don't have deflationary products and services. So if you're building product services, so if I borrow $10 million to build TVs, and two years later, I don't have enough money from the revenue from those TVs to pay you back because the TVs have dropped in value, that's a bad outcome. So I can't use debt to grow the economy in that model. So they floated the currencies off the gold standard just at the point that Moore's Law started taking impact and technology became cheaper and cheaper. So now the only answer by any central bank is to increase money printing. During the pandemic, what, we printed 40% of all the US dollars in existence during the pandemic? Why are people surprised that prices go up 40% I mean, of course they're going to go up. i think what what what um the articulation that i found to be the most compelling on crypto is that three triangles of decentralization security and scalability have you heard this one yeah so bitcoin hit the first two and then the altcoins tried to solve for scalability but compromise usually on scalability or security or decentralized FTX, Luna, et cetera. But with the Lightning Network, Bitcoin now solves for all three. And so that becomes unbelievably powerful as a medium of the future. For me, solving the Byzantine's general problem in Web3.

Yeah, I have to explain that to people.

So this is actually the rationale for the blockchain. It's the underpinning innovation in the blockchain, which is, it's actually the story of Constantinople in the 15th century. There were eight generals circling the city trying to coordinate a siege. And they were sending messages around that circle. Who's going to go first? What point, what time should we attack? How are we going to get in? They had a problem, which was one out of the eight generals was a traitor and could lose the element of surprise, send the wrong information, blow the whole operation. And that became, in computer science terms, known as the Byzantine generals problem. And in computer science, the question is, how do you send a trusted, secure, authenticated message over a network when you don't trust the network? A hard problem. 40 years of computer science PhDs have been trying to crack that problem unsuccessfully until the blockchain. And on the blockchain, when I send you a message, you have 100% guarantee that I sent it. It couldn't be revoked, can't be double entered, can't be hacked along the way, et cetera, which gives me unbelievable. In a digital world, that's a magical thing. So that innovation now allows us to decentralize authentication. Okay. So a few years ago, I got asked by the Republican party here in the U.S. to come and do a talk. They did an event called their annual Republican Leadership Conference. So they said, please come and give a talk. I said, I think you've got the wrong guy. They said, no, no, one of our donors is one of your singularity guys, and he's a big fan. He's insistent. So he said, fine. So I had a whole bunch of discussions with Eric Cantor, who was the Speaker of the House, about what would the topic be. And the topic I came up with was, how would you drop the cost of government 10x within 10 years? Right? Which you could do, because you could, if you think about most government functions as authenticating. Yes. I have a building permit. Yes. You have a fishing license. Yes. You're 18 years old. If I can decentralize that authentication, I can reduce a lot of government can focus on policy and let all the authentication happen in a decentralized way. That's kind of magical. Um, but to do this, you have to embrace technology at which point the whole thing broke down. They're like, he's like, I can't sell technology to our base. So that was the end of it. The immune system. The immune system. So Web3 and this whole decentralized world is unbelievably exciting because we can decentralize all that authentication and we can move away from new centralized systems, from old centralized systems. This puts the power in the hands of the people. Lots of issues to be solved, as you pointed out earlier, and how do we solve some of these is going to be the big challenge. But now it allows us something that wasn't possible before, but now can be done. Sovereign identity, other models like that, et cetera. It really puts the power in the hands of people, which is why though, for me, the web three builders are some of the more important constituencies in the world. And cause they've got freedom of thought to be able to operate in a clear way. Uh, so there's incredible projects like node monks and, and, and ordinals popping up to do now NFTs on Bitcoin. And that ecosystem combined with the broader Web3 community, with the tool sets that are being built, I think are going to be needed to solve for this future automatic quadratic voting governance issues, all sorts of issues come up.

All right. I think you've got your finger on something that is just really important. And the General's problem is not something I'm super familiar with, but that doesn't feel to me like the core problem. That feels like the core problem the blockchain solved. But when I think about as the average person, that wasn't what they were struggling with. What they're struggling with, whether they know it or not, is that you have everything existing on rails that the government can control and that you have a currency where they can literally steal your money. I want everyone to hear me. This took me so long to wrap my head around. They can literally steal your money by printing more money. That's one. It is government-backed counterfeit. Yeah. So they make more money specifically because I can't tax you anymore. You're going to freak out. So instead

I'm going to do an invisible tax. It's still literally getting your money. It's so crazy. It is crazy. So in, in, I have some of my family in Pakistan. Okay. And one day the Pakistani government ran out of money. So they just went to every bank account in the country and sucked 10% of the money out of it.

Yep. Cyprus.

Sorry guys. We just have to do that. And other governments are not the same. I think this is the huge difficulty we have. The big challenge we have, we have a big structural issue in democracy because a democracy relies on an educated population. And we don't have an educated population that can navigate the complexity and the speed to which is happening. There's a very difficult metaphor in my head that I've been thinking about for a while. It's called the ice-water dilemma. Can I describe it? Please, yeah. Okay. So think about the phase transitions between ice and water and steam. Your water molecules, they're frozen. The temperature is low. They're not that active. They don't move very far. They hold their shape. Then you add energy to the system and you have water, right? Now you can flow to the boundaries of the system, much more active, more heat in there, etc. And then you add more energy and you have steam. And now you can't control it. It's trying to, it'll burn you. It's trying to escape any container you put it in, etc. And I use that metaphor. This was developed by a colleague of mine called Malcolm Pollack. on this about 10 years ago, that we're moving humanity in many of our human domains through an ice, water, steam transition. So take money. We used to trade seashells or camels or goats, very local, didn't move very far, very fast. Then we got letters of credit. Then we floated our currencies and now we have Bitcoin. So we've gone from ice to water to steam, take messaging. We used to have homing signals or the Pony Express or smoke signals. And that was the only way to transmit information, right? Then we developed postal mail and it could go anywhere in the world, but it was slow. So that's the water state. And now we have tweets and emails and we vaporize messaging. So money messaging, social structures, clans or tribes didn't move very far, very fast. And we moved to multinational corporations and nation states. And now we have Facebook groups and online communities and web three communities and crypto communities and nation states as biology wants to get to, which I somewhat disagree with. Uh,

but network states, you mean a

network states, you know, biology's thing. So I disagree with a P a big piece of that, but, um, so we're vaporizing our social structures and, and my big question, I actually got up on the stage at Ted a few years ago and asked this question. I said, listen, as we vaporize more and more of these domains in a vapor structure, in a vapor environment, stable structures don't form. So where is the equivalent of a fridge that cools things down a bit? You can try and cut off the internet, as people have done politically to try and slow things down. But the metabolism is just increasing. And my only answer is not a great one, is we have to go from the vapor state to a plasma state, which is a whole other deal. So the metaphor breaks down. But I think in terms of what's happening with humanity as we add more and more technology is we're going from ice to water to steam, and vapor states are very hard to manage.