169 - Why We’re Dumb: How to Think in the 21st Century with Tim Urban

Society is off track. We all feel it. What’s wrong? How do we fix it without throwing out all the good parts? We brought on Tim Urban to help us answer these questions. Tim Urban is a blogger, writer, and illustrator, who is best known for his blog "Wait But Why.” Started in 2013, “Wait But Why” covers various topics, from science and technology to social issues and human behavior. Tim recently wrote a book titled: “What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies,” which Ryan and David think offers a roadmap for the tribal crypto communities battling in the Web3 landscape. ------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-tim-urban ------ ✨ COLLECTIBLES | Collect this episode: https://collectibles.bankless.com/mint ------ 🚀 Airdrop Alpha is waiting for you on Bankless.com https://bankless.cc/Alpha ------ In today’s episode, Tim covers many questions, but the overarching ones are: 1) Power Games vs Liberal Games 2) The Importance of Liberalism to Crypto protocols 3) How to find out whether your crypto tribe is a low-rung echo chamber, or high-mind idea lab 4) Why we MUST solve this problem in order to survive as a society And of course, we had to ask him if AI is going to come kill us all…? Tim’s answer puts things into perspective. ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ------ TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Intro 7:48 Why Are We Angry? 8:53 Defining Liberalism 17:09 Liberal vs. Power Games 29:45 Modernity, Liberalism, Institutions, & Norms 42:32 How Radical is Crypto? 46:29 Crypto and Tim’s Radical Levels Pyramid 51:05 Steelmanning the Liberalism Argument 1:03:31 Higher vs. Primitive Mind 1:13:51 How to Ascend the Ladder 1:19:50 Low Wrung Thinkers, Social Media, & Society 1:25:05 Tim’s Thoughts on AI 1:32:00 What Gives Tim Hope? 1:35:20 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES: Tim Urban https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy Tim’s Blog https://waitbutwhy.com/ Tim’s New Book https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Our-Problem-Self-Help-Societies/dp/B0BVGH6T1Q ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We are a survival species. We are a bunch of survivors. And that doesn't mean that there hasn't been horrible tragedies and genocides and awful things in the past. And also, we haven't ever faced full kinds of existential threat. But I do think that humanity has a knack for surviving. And that if we get scared enough, I think maybe reason will prevail out of pure fear and out of pure survivor instinct.

• 0:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan John Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Society is off track. We all feel it. What's wrong? How do we fix it without throwing out all the good parts? We have Tim Urban on the podcast today, who wrote an excellent book subtitled, "A Self-Help Guide on How to Solve Society's Problems." We're going to talk about a few of those problems today and Tim's answer on how to solve them. Number one, we talk about the power games versus the liberal games. That's one takeaway from today's episode. Number two, we talk about the importance

• 1:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  of liberalism to crypto protocols. Number three, we talk about how to find out whether your crypto tribe is a low-rung echo chamber or a high-minded idea lab. Hint: You want the second. Number four, we talk about why we must actually solve this problem in order to survive as a society. And you know, I asked him if AI is going to come kill us towards the end, because that's the new thing that I always ask.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Apparently, we do that now.

• 1:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  We do that now, ever since that episode that shall not be named. David, from your perspective, why is this episode with Tim Urban so significant?

• 1:46Speaker 00

  And just to make it abundantly clear, and Tim will also do this, liberalism, not liberals versus conservatives, liberalism as classic liberal Western values. The thing that you've heard me and Ryan talk about on the podcast, here and there, through and through, but consistently from day one, Western democratic liberal values. We are starting this podcast exploring that idea.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Head on and why if we are talking about the the layer zero of society, the layer zero of our governance systems of our blockchains, why they must be rooted in critical thinking and what Tim calls ideal labs instead of echo chambers. And so this episode is really how to fix society at the root level and also talking about all the symptoms in which society is going astray. And I think really the important thing and really the through line of this episode is there are problems in society that are clashing. You got the left and the right and they're fighting. You got, you know, political tribe one, political tribe two, and they're fighting. And in the crypto world, you have all these other tribes and they're also fighting.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  And the thing is, they're all playing the same strategy. They're all playing the same game. They're competing inside of the same arena, using the same toolsets to compete. And sometimes this competition is good. Sometimes if this competition, this competition can be productive and progressive and two high rung people of different tribes can come and debate and move society forward, or two low rung thinkers can come together and clash and move society backwards. And so whether or whether we're discussing this outside of this sphere of crypto or inside of this sphere of crypto, it's still the same game. And so hopefully, we can guide you through how these parallels exist no matter where we are, and why solving this problem at the root level can create a utopia for us as soon as we do figure out how to solve that problem.

• 3:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and I really think these lowercase l liberal values are at the core of crypto. Crypto is almost an instantiation of these values in the digital world. And so David, I'm super excited to talk to you about that in the debrief episode, which is our episode that we record right after the episode. It is included for all Bankless Citizens. So if you're not a Bankless Citizen, upgrade. There's a link in the show notes and you can get access to the premium RSS feed where we put that out every single week. Guys, we're going to get right to the episode with Tim. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our number one recommended exchange, Kraken.

• 4:20David Hoffman?

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• 5:05David Hoffman?

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• 5:48David Hoffman?

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• 6:33David Hoffman?

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• 6:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce our next guest. Tim Urban is a blogger. He's a writer. He's an illustrator extraordinary, most famous for his Wait But Why blog, which is a fantastic blog. He started back in 2013, covers a range of topics, almost as diverse, well, probably more diverse than Bankless, actually, from AI to political philosophy to like whatever Tim is interested in, science, technology, human behavior. And he recently wrote this book that we want the Bankless community to learn a little bit about. It's called What's Our Problem?, a self-help book for societies. This is a fantastic book that David and I read recently,

• 7:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  and I think provides a roadmap, an interesting set of parallels for the crypto community as well. Tim, welcome to Bankless. How are you doing?

• 7:44Speaker 00

  I'm doing pretty well. Thank you for having me.

• 7:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's great to have you. So, I just want to kick off and start with this question, which is a common observation, I think, everyone sort of sees, whether like wherever you are in the United States, whatever country you live. It seems like everybody is mad at each other all of the time, Tim. And I want to ask you, why? Why does it, why does it seem like everyone is always angry these days?

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Well, one reason is that people are more angry at each other than they used to be for lots of reasons we could discuss, social media, tribal media, stuff like that. But I think an even bigger reason is that the anger that there is, is loud and prominent and broadcast over lots of channels. And we are in contact with that anger all the time, which makes it feel Like, there's even more of it than there is. People who aren't angry with each other are not often screaming it from the hilltops about how not angry they are, while people who are, we're going to have much more likely to do that. So I think it's a combo of those two things.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Tim, we want to explore in this podcast, a concept that we have talked about on Bankless a number of times, but not yet actually dove into headfirst. And that is the topic of liberalism. And I think, understanding liberalism will be able to create a stack of understanding, a stack of knowledge, that will actually get back to that original question, why can't we talk to each other anymore? We've talked about liberalism and Western liberal values on the podcast, but we've never actually taken the time to approach that subject head-on. So I'm wondering if you can help guide us through that conversation, and starting there, because we've never, we've never actually defined liberalism on this podcast.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  So maybe we can start there and we'll build back up to talk about some of these, the way that social media influences our thinking and our mental models for things. But I want to start, start at the very deep down of how humans created this foundation that we have for ourselves called liberalism. So first, if you can help us define, what is liberalism and why, why is it good? If we could start there, if you don't mind.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, so first of all, this is lowercase l liberalism, which is different than how it's used in the US, which means, which means, you know, politically left, that's not what I'm talking about here. And that's why I don't like that we use that term. It's such an important, important term of its own. So lowercase l liberalism is, it's, you know, it wasn't invented by the US in the 1700s. It was, you know, it, the principles from it go back to the ancient Greeks and, and lots of different places and, and societies in between have, have grappled with the concepts within it. But the modern liberal democracies have kind of taken the latest crack yet at this concept. And what it is, is that, you know, if you think about, there's a spectrum of...

• 10:49Speaker 00

  You know, how people can be governed just, you know, with freedom as the metric. On one side, if everyone has total freedom, right? There's no rules, that's, you know, anarchy. And on the total other end, you have totalitarian dictatorship, where there's no freedom at all, and there's no individual rights at all. You know, whatever the dictator says is what happens, and that's what you're limited to. And the dictator dies, and his son takes over, now that son's rules, that's the new rules, and that's what everyone will be living under. Now, anarchy often turns into the other side of the spectrum, because then you have warlords, and, you know, people who are the scariest on their block kind of are suddenly writing

• 11:33Speaker 00

  rules, and then the scariest among the scariest kind of take over, and then there's a gang that kind of takes control of everything, and now you have a dictatorship, right? And so, we have a lot of human history that's kind of going back and forth between chaos and then order. But, you know, the order can be very oppressive, and what is lost in both cases is kind of freedom, freedom and security in that freedom. So liberalism is kind of a compromise between rules and individual rights, individual freedom. It's a freedom, it's not, it's not, it's not complete freedom. There are rules, there are laws. If you violate them, you can end up in jail forever.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  And so, there are very hard, serious rules, but they're broad and wide, and they basically create a big, wide fence around an area, or I like to think of it as a big house. And the walls of the house, they are rules, and they are rules that you can't break, you can't murder someone, you can't steal, et cetera. But, but within the house, within those big, broad walls, pretty much you're left to your own. And then, so the idea is that there are, it's, that, you know, this emerges from philosophers like John Locke, who said, "I actually don't think that the state of nature, that human nature is necessarily, like, so chaotic that it needs hardcore rules. I think actually, if you just build some basic rules, and keep people, keep the, you

• 12:59Speaker 00

  know, the most aggressive among us from kind of bullying, conquering everything..." Actually, things can work pretty much okay on their own. And so you have, for example, instead of saying, instead of saying we have, we're going to enforce equality of outcome, right, which is, you know, someone might say that's, someone might say that that's equality, but it's such, it's such totalitarian version of equality that you end up with very little freedom. And, and so that would be that, you know, whatever you're doing, you're going to end up with the same. So liberalism says, let's go for equality of opportunity. So we want to try to do what we can to level the playing field, or at least, you know, allow for upward mobility and things like that. But beyond that, kind of you're on your own.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  You know, that's why even the constitution says, the pursuit of happiness. In liberalism, you know, you're not entitled to happiness, you're entitled, but everyone's entitled to pursue it and to try to go for it, you know? And so this is where free markets emerge from, right? You have, instead of, you have, you have the idea of free markets, but they are, there are regulations, right? You still can't, you can't commit fraud, and you can't steal, and you can't have monopolies that, so there are rules, again, these wide walls, but beyond that, go to town. Build the products you want, as long as they pass the basic tests, you can, you can, you know, let, let the people guide their own path. And you could say the same with ideas, rather than a guiding scripture, or guiding, you know, you know, the bible or some other guiding thing that's going to be, this is the way

• 14:27Speaker 00

  of the land, this is how, what we believe here. It says that we want a free marketplace of ideas. So you can't, you know, you can't, you know, some speech, you can't have perjury, you can't do libel, you can't, you know, incite violence. Again, you have these broad rules, but beyond that, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. So it's this, it's this very kind of nuanced concept, and it really values the individual. And it says, basically, the government is there to serve the individuals, to keep, to have a monopoly on violence, but it can only be used to kind of keep these broad rules in place, and, and that beyond that, the individuals will run the show, and they will vote for who they want, and they will start the businesses they want, and they will promote

• 15:11Speaker 00

  the ideas and start the movements they want, and let the people kind of guide their own path. That's the core idea. And it seems kind of, I bet what a lot of Americans or people in Western democracies might be saying, you know, yeah, duh, right? This is just, that's how things are. But that's not, it's actually interesting, because it's not That's not an obvious thing. That's something that is an artificial invention. We made that up. It's very different than the natural way, which is the most powerful people make the rules for everyone else. This is a very specific, kind of pretty complex and nuanced form of government that we have developed pretty recently. And we're all living inside this house that is not a house that used to exist. And it's been built by humans. And it doesn't stand up by its own.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  It stands up if the people who are actually in the country are the ones who are defending those basic principles and who are enforcing the rules. And so, yeah, it's something that we grew up in. We think we think is normal, but it's actually not. It's pretty awesome, I think.

• 16:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  It reminds me, Tim, of another topic we explore a lot in crypto, which is the topic of money, which is a social coordination technology that almost no one thinks about. We just sort of take for granted. Oh, yeah. But like, when you think about it, when you stop and you think about it too long, you're like, wait, who invented money? What backs it? And wait, you have this like, this point system that you use to allocate labor and resources and figure out who can buy what in society. And everyone just believes in it. And so it kind of works. And you're like, yeah, that's what it is. Like, no one ever actually thinks about it. And I feel the same way about liberalism. When you pause and you think about it, it reminds me of the book from Yuval Harari, which we quote so often on Bankless, a book called Sapiens,

• 17:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  where he talks about humanity's great superpower is these shared myths that we propagate, basically. And liberalism is this great shared myth. And I want to contrast it with something that you were saying towards the end, which is, you call it in your book, "The Liberal Games", which is in contrast to "The Power Games". And I think you were alluding to something here, Tim, which is like, the state of nature, this is a John Locke concept as well, is very much like power games, like in nature. Violence as the settlement layer. For getting things done. And that's the way it has been. That's the way kind of the state of nature is. And liberalism is almost this veneer that we put over top of it.

• 17:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  So here's this graphic, and by the way, your book, your book, Tim, goes through all of these fantastic graphics that just help really sync mental model type concepts. But you have two circles here. You have the liberal games. And we've got liberal laws and liberal norms on the top. And that is an overcoating of on top of this other deeper in the stack system called the power games. Can you tell us about the power games versus the liberal games and what you're trying to get across here?

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, the power games is pretty straightforward, right? It's the, it's, it's, it's the rule in nature, you know? If you go watch a David Attenborough special, there's no laws, there's nothing fair about nature. It is a very simple rule. Everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so. So if a bear wants to eat a bunny, the bear can, can do that. If he can catch the bunny, if he has the power to catch the bunny, he can eat the bunny. It doesn't matter if the bunny has a family, if the bunny had other plans. Does it's irrelevant because the bear had the power to catch him, end of story. If the bunny and all the other bunnies have are too fast, they have the power to get away, they can. And the bear might starve to death. And that's just how that goes, right?

• 18:58Speaker 00

  And so that's, that's the law of nature and the power games. It's whoever has the power to do what they want can do what they want. And everyone else is kind of, you know, they're screwed. That's also been lots of human societies, that those who have power, usually violence, or maybe they have, you know, the power of everyone believes they have a direct line to God. So whatever they say goes, they found a different way to have power because everyone's scared of going to hell. Whatever it is, if you find a way to have, have the power to do what you want, you get to do what you want. And if you don't have power, you better hope that the people who do are nice and believe in fairness. Because if they don't, you're screwed and they can go and they can take your wife and say, that's my wife now.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  And kidnap her, you know, and make your, you know, take your children and say they're slaves now. I mean, and that's the most unfair thing we can Imagine because we grew up in a place where fairness matters, right? Individual rights are sacred. Doesn't matter who you are, who you were born to, or your age, or your gender, or your race. You have rights. That's at least the principle here. It's not always been kept perfectly, but it's the thing we believe we believe is right. But that's not real. I mean, out in the in, in, in outside of this house that we live in where things are, things are supposed to be fair. There is no such thing as fairness, right? It's just unfairness happens constantly. So the reason I have it as a two part puzzle is because you've got liberal laws, right?

• 20:20Speaker 00

  So that is, you know, the constitution and the, the, the kind of pretty complex set of laws that we have here. And so that is one piece of the puzzle. But the thing is, the thing is interesting about if you have a totalitarian dictatorship, you can have, you know, if you're in Hitler's Germany. You don't really need, you know, you just need the very intense set of rules and laws dictated by the, the Fuhrer. And the military is going to enforce them and the police and, um, and that's, that's really what you need. You can just use the iron fist. But if you're going liberalism doesn't have an iron fist. It's a very light touch fist and it has, again, it's very broad walls. And actually, uh, it's, it's not, and you can totally violate the liberal games and start playing the power games inside of the house. If people will let you.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  So you can, you know, I call that legal cheating when you're kind of, um, when the, when, uh, uh, you know, or to put it this way, like you, you. The, the laws are go part of the way, and then these norms go the rest of the way. You know, norms in government about how government, you know, uh, this kind of unspoken rules about how government functions. And, you know, Thomas Jefferson has a quote where he says something like, you know, more important than the, than, than, than every single specific rule is followed to the T. In, in Senate is that there's unwritten rules and understanding between people about how things are supposed to go, the norms. And so when you see, you know, like something's endlessly filibustering, you know, it's like, yes, that's legal, but it's also, um, I call it legal cheating.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Cause it's kind of actually breaking the, um. Breaking the kind of unwritten handshake that you're supposed to have in a liberal democracy. Yeah, the basic social contract. And you can, you know, you can, you can see that a lot. If you notice, like, the times when things aren't going very well in liberal democracy, it's often because they had, they do have a soft spot where, you know, people who want to break the norms, they can get away with it. You know, they can kind of play, if you try to play the power games in a liberal democracy, you can often get away with a lot unless the place is functioning well. In which case, the people in it are supposed to stand up for the liberal, liberal norms and actually say, no, that's not how we do things here and push back on it.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  So when you say the, these liberal laws, these liberal values are light touch, what that means, I think, is for all of these people who live in this house have a lot of flexibility. And that's the beauty of these, this liberal code base that we have in this modern world is that these things aren't, are, these are things are supposed to enforce themselves because the society that operates on top of them understand them to be good, which leaves a lot of tolerance and a lot of flexibility, a lot of freedom by nature of what these laws are for people to walk around this house. And in good times, that just works because the social contract manifests. And, but what you're saying is that there's also the bad scenario here,

• 23:18Speaker 02

  which is that since there's tolerance, since there's flexibility here, people can start to violate the social contract and, and start to live a life in ways that are just misaligned with the purpose of, of a liberal foundation. Is that, is that a way to interpret this?

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so here's, here's one example, right? So here's a liberal law is the First Amendment, right? The First Amendment says, amongst other things, it says, the, you know, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. In other words, the government cannot put you in jail for saying the wrong thing, including criticism of the government or criticism of anyone else, or, you know, screaming out racial slurs on the street corner. You know what? And it's, it's ugly, but it's legal.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  But to actually have free speech, to have an open and thriving marketplace of ideas, which is the point, which is that you need more than just that. So you need that, of course. If you don't have the First Amendment, forget about it. And the countries that don't have a good equivalent of the First Amendment, obviously, there's a lot of things that will get you and the government will arrest you for saying. But to have true freedom of speech, you also need that liberal norms puzzle piece. And what is that? Which is the culture of freedom of speech, the culture of that free speech is something that we value here. So an example could be if there's a movement that says, "We're not going to, we're going

• 24:46Speaker 00

  to, anytime there's a debate or a talk or some kind of event where a certain set of ideas that we don't like are being said, we're going to show up and we're going to shout as loud as we can and drown out the ideas." Or we're actually going to kind of block the doorway, we're going to make it very scary to enter the event and very difficult, and then we're going to scream the whole time in the event hall so that no one can hear, right? That's legal, right? You are not going to go to jail for that. It is legal to scream at the top of your lungs during kind of an outdoor event, just say. But it is total violation of liberal norms, right?

• 25:30Speaker 00

  So it is what I would call legal cheating. Instead of what you're supposed to do in the liberal games is say, "I don't like those ideas. I think they're bad. I think they're dangerous. So I am going to hold my own event, or I'm going to try to debate that person. I'm going to hold my own event, or I'm going to write my own op-ed explaining why those ideas are so bad, point by point. And I'm going to persuade people. I'm going to persuade people that they're wrong and I'm right. And I'm going to create a movement that is so powerful and so persuasive that that person won't have, no one will even want to show up to their talks anymore, or way fewer, and they won't have much power because no one will believe them anymore because I've exposed them. Or, or, you know what? I hate those ideas. I'm just going to check out. I'm not going to go to that talk. I'm not going to go to that event. I just don't want to even hear it." Okay? That's all fine. That's what the persuasion, it's a battle of persuasion.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  In the power games, what you would say is, well, I don't know if I can win the battle of persuasion. So instead, I'll go the much kind of easier thing, which is I will use, I'll scream brute force to make sure no one can hear the ideas. I will shut down that idea from ever being said. So rather than try to persuade people it's wrong, I will make sure no one even hears that idea in the first place. It's a, it's total power games mentality, but as long as you're not, you know, actually physically hurting them, the law is not, can't do anything. It's like in a totalitarian dictatorship that valued free speech, they might actually say, anyone who shouts down speakers is going to be arrested. But we can't do that here. We have too much freedom here for that. The government is not actually powerful enough to even step in. They're not allowed to step in. That is amongst us to work out.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  So the way that we would have to, you know, the, the way that free speech would prosper is that people who do that would be socially shunned and socially criticized. And people would say, you know, you're a bully and you know, and, and, you know, we don't want to be friends with you anymore because you're the kind of person that screams and shouts down talks and we're going to mock you. And we can, you know, that is, that is the country standing up for itself, saying, nope, that's not how we do things here. And you need that, or else it'll be the people who shout the loudest, you know, get to determine what's being said. None of this violates the law. The legal piece is still fine. The first amendment hasn't ever been violated here, but free speech has been totally curtailed. And so there's a lot of examples like this where there always will be groups that are trying to within the law, because no one wants to get arrested. Right. And that's a huge deterrent.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Within the law, violate liberal norm parts of it, things in order to kind of use, play the power games and, and coerce their way. Instead of persuade, use coercion to get what they want. And the, that sign of a healthy liberal democracy isn't that those people don't exist because they will always exist. The sign of a healthy liberal democracy is that, that, that when that happens, the immune system, kind of the liberal immune system kicks in and, and people roundly criticize them and make it unpopular, so unpopular to do that, that, you know, people use social pressure to, to make it stop. And when, I think when we see groups that are using coercion and kind of power games tactics to get what they want, and it's working, that's a sign that something's, something's not right.

• 28:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think your point here, Tim, is that the protection for the First Amendment is not just in the Constitution, it's not in our set of laws, like, that's part of it. But that's only like half of it, or one portion of it. The other portion is actual, the actual social enforcement of that value, that norm enforcement. It's interesting because we see the same thing with crypto, right? So, take something like Bitcoin. We have a 21 million hard cap in the total amount of Bitcoin supply. That is written in sort of the Constitution and the code of Bitcoin, right? But in order for that to be maintained, the community, the social norms, actually have to value that. Because if the entire community decides to run a different set of code, right?

• 29:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  That doesn't value the 21 million, that maybe puts in a 1% per year inflation rate, and they choose to kind of fork, they choose to devalue 21 million hard cap as their priority, they can totally do it. Which is, which is so funny, because there is this, this myth in crypto, that like, you know, hard caps and immutability is 100% maintained by code. And that's not true. In the same way, the First Amendment isn't 100% maintained by the Constitution, okay? It's maintained by the Constitution, plus the social contract and norms that actually carry out and enforce it. It's, the parallels here are quite striking. I want to make another point here, too, Tim, because this is a, another image, like,

• 29:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  another illustration that you put in your book, which is this idea of different levels of, I guess, civilization, maybe you call this, or human coordination, I don't know what you call this pyramid. But at the bottom, we have level one, which is modernity. Science, reason, objective truth, that is the definition of modernity. And we have level, level two, which is what we've been talking about, which is liberalism. That is the next stack up. Free markets, free speech, individualism, quality of opportunity. And then we have level three, which is where all of the other things are kind of built on top of liberalism, which is built on modernity. And level three is norms and policies and laws and institutions.

• 30:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess a few things that are striking, I want you to maybe explain this to us in a little bit more detail. Like, why does liberalism sit on top of modernity? And why do the norms and policies and laws sit on top of liberalism? But one broad point I want to make is like, this is relatively new social software that humans are running. Like, for most of human existence, and you have this really cool chart at the beginning of your book, that shows like, of the 200,000 years of human existence, we are just in like, just like the final, we're in sort of the late stages. Liberalism hasn't been around for very long at all. And this is completely new software on the human timescale that we're running.

• 31:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Modernity even, liberalism, and institutions and laws and policies and norms around that. So this is relatively new social software. But explain this pyramid to us. What is the idea that you're trying to convey?

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's useful to help understand the difference between different political movements. And because right now, we have this kind of constrained, you know, we have these terms, you know, something can be left or far left, or it can be far right, or whatever. And I think we can define that a little better. And so, yeah, so first of all, modernity, yeah, that is something that is new. People forget that. In the scheme of things, it's a few hundred years old, this concept that there is an objective, there exists one objective truth.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  And that science and reason are methods that we can use to discover it and to get closer to understanding what it is. Before, in the pre-modern era, there were, you know, the different religions, each with their own kind of, there were different denominations of truth. So each religion would have their sacred scripture and that was truth. And, you know, and, and what was so cool about this idea of objective truth in science is that it was that no matter who you were, no matter what religion you believed in, no matter where you lived in the world or what language you spoke, you could all contribute

• 32:55Speaker 00

  to the global project of, you know, using science and building science to collaborate across generations and across countries to just to work together toward discovering an objective truth. That's something we take for granted today, but that's pretty, that's a pretty new thing. And of course, that, that notion and the spread of it was, is what why we can do to thank our, you know, thank that for all what we know now about medicine, about, you know, about space and about, you know, plate tectonics and just everything we've learned. That, that really has come from this global project that was born in, you know, modernity. Most of, you know, that's what accelerated this process.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  But anyway, so there are movements, right? So we talked about the liberal house. And within that house, in a place like the US, you've got people on the left, the right and the center, right? And you've got, and so these are all people, by being in the house, what I mean by that is that they all like liberalism. They all like the liberal house. They think the constitution is good. It's that the progressives in the house, the people on the left are more likely to look at the house's flaws and say, well, what's, where are we not keeping our promises? Our liberal promises in the constitution? So Martin Luther King, for example, he talked about, you know, that the constitution is supposed to be a promissory note, but that the country has written black Americans a bad check.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  And that, so basically, he was saying, "The problem isn't liberalism. The problem is that black Americans haven't been receiving the full benefits of liberalism." The liberal house, that's a flaw in the liberal house, right? It's a glitch in the software. It needs to be repaired. We need to fix it. That's what the civil rights movement was about. Let's expose this through civil disobedience and through persuasion. Let's expose this flaw, this way that we are violating our own constitution, and let's fix it, right? The goal was more liberalism. Meanwhile, you also have conservatives in the House, and they're more likely, rather than to look at the ways the House is flawed, to look at the ways that it's good and that the ways that progressive ideas and progressive ideas for change might erode the support beams in the House.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  So their goal is to stand up for, in a lot of cases, the status quo, or even how things used to be, and say, inevitably, some things are eroding in the House, and that's what they look for. Where do we not have the right values that we used to have? But they also, they had the same goal. The Constitution should be upheld, and that the liberal house is good, right? And people in the center are going to have a little bit of both, or going to be more moderate. All of those people are pro-House, okay? And that's an important thing to distinguish. Now, there are also movements right now that are outside the House with wrecking balls. These are movements who believe they're much more revolutionary. So what people call wokeness, right?

• 35:51Speaker 00

  I call it social justice fundamentalism, which is fundamentally different than liberal social justice, which is the Martin Luther King style that I just described. Social justice fundamentalism is my term for less kind of culture war baggage-laden term than wokeness. It is fundamentally different in that it's outside the House with a wrecking ball. And it stems from, and this is, by the way, all Marxist and neo-Marxist and all of its descendants, all these movements, what they have in common is they say, "No, no, no. Everyone in the House, you're missing the big point. The House itself is rotten to the core. Liberalism is bad. It's something that sounds good, but it's just the power games in disguise.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  It inevitably entrenches the power of the powerful." And entrenches the oppression of the oppression. And this, what you supposedly call free markets is actually, you know, this exploitative system to oppress, to keep people, oppressed people down, right? And inevitably fosters inequality, blah, blah, blah, right? So that's, again, it's, I don't happen to agree with that, but it's a totally valid philosophical point. And so if I believe that, I would be out there with them with a wrecking ball. It's not that they're bad, it's that they believe that we're, you know, in the house are missing the big point here. Zoom out and see that the house is bad and we need to get rid of it. And so, you know, if you, a lot of the actual scholars of social justice fundamentalism, they say stuff like you cannot dismantle.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  So A, we want to dismantle what they would call the master's house, right? They believe that it is, you know, the master's house and like, you know, to use a slave term. And they say you cannot dismantle it with the master's tools. So that's specific. That means not only do we not like liberalism, but we also don't like the tools that liberalism values, free speech, all of that. We don't like that. So that's why they would say that you can't just use free speech and, you know, free markets to defeat, to actually dismantle this house. You need to shut down free speech. So there's this mentality that my opponent's speech is actually dangerous and needs to be deplatformed, right? So instead of persuasion, we're going to actually use coercion to try to deplatform. Which again, if I hated the liberal house and thought it was bad, I also would say screw the tools of it. I don't believe in liberalism or the liberal tools.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  And you'll see less emphasis on individuality there. You'll see much more things like, you know, you'll see the, you know, kind of treating groups as monolithic groups. So you have like the black community is a term, right? Which is not a term that would be used in the liberal house so much because it's, that kind of diminishes the individual in favor of these big kind of monolithic groups. And that's, so that's very Marxist, these big monolithic groups of the oppressed and the powerful. In the US, social justice fundamentalism is a brand of that, that uses, that would use race and gender and things like that. And supposed to like the working class and the, you know, the ruling class. But it's the same concept. It's outside the house with a wrecking ball. So they, it's more revolutionary and it wants to not just, if the first group in the house, liberals, left, right and center,

• 38:48Speaker 00

  they say level one and two of this pyramid, they're great. We want more of them, but we need to use, we need to change the norms, policies, laws, institutions. We need to, they're arguing about level three. What, what do we, what can we do on level three to better uphold? Levels one and two. Marxist ideologies like social justice fundamentalism, they say, no, no, no. We need to go and actually overhaul level two also. But the thing about social justice fundamentalism that's different from a lot of other Marxist ideologies, they go a step further because most Marxists actually would still say level one is good. They actually, they believe in science and objective truth. They just think that liberalism is a misguided system of government.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Social justice fundamentalism merges the neo-Marxist mentality with postmodernism. So, postmodernism is a set of philosophies that emerged in the 60s, 70s and 80s. A lot of them in Europe and France and came over to the US. And this is, you know, this goes a step further and says, actually, even what we're calling modernity, you know, science and objective truth, all of that is actually just a meta-narrative. And it's a meta-narrative through which oppression flows. And that actually, they actually would say, we need to reject that too. We need to reject this concept. So you'll often hear kind of in woke scholars and they'll say stuff like, there is no such thing as an objective truth. They say stuff like, my truth, right, your truth.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  And that lived experience is the only way to understand certain truths. And it almost goes back to the concept of different denominations of truth from the past. It's that, you know, black Americans or women or LGBTQ people, they have a lens. They actually have access to different denominations of truth that other people can't see. Right? This is a very postmodern and actually a very pre-modern concept. So it's an explicit rejection of this idea of modernity. And so, social justice fundamentalism combines this postmodern, this Marxist ideology that wants to get rid of level two with the postmodern ideology, which actually wants to go a step further and get rid of level one as well. A full overhaul of the pyramid. So when you think of what's the definition of radical?

• 40:55Speaker 00

  To me, the more radical, the more revolutionary, the deeper in this pyramid you want to, your progressivism goes. So a liberal progressive is progressive about level three. They want to change stuff on level three, but they become very conservative about levels one and two. A Marxist is progressive about levels three and two, right? They want to overhaul both, but they're conservative about level one. And then social justice fundamentalism wants to actually, they're progressive about all three levels. And so the more, the deeper you want your progressivism goes before it hits a wall of conservatism, that's the more radical. I think it's a great metric for how radical something can be. So I just think it's a useful, once I started thinking this way, it just clarified a lot.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  And again, none of this, I happen to disagree with social justice fundamentalism and Marxism. But that none of this is to insult those things. I think it's, I think a lot of people who believe those things would look at this and agree with me. That yes, they do want to overhaul levels, level two, or maybe even level one. And I just think it can help us understand what we're even arguing about. And I think one of the issues is that right now it's confusing. And a lot of people who are very much liberal social justice, you know, Martin Luther King style, people who value liberalism. They think that wokeness is part of their kind of tribe. They think that it's maybe very extreme, you know, but it's that it's, it's still kind of fighting for the same thing. But it's actually, it's fundamentally the opposite. Instead of being pro-house, it's anti-house, right? That's as big a difference as you can get.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  And so I think people who are pro-house actually should reject wokeness and its ideology. And people who are, who believe in that, they should, they should agree that they're anti-house. Or else they're actually kind of, they're in the wrong place.

• 42:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's why this was so useful to me, Tim, is it, it helped me kind of map. Because like, I think most people that you talk to just on the street will sort of agree with the title of your book. Like, there is a problem with society. I think we all kind of feel that, right? And, you know, this stacking of levels indicates like how deep you want to go in the stack. Or you think we need to go in the stack in order to like fix the problems of society. And you can map this. Onto kind of the the different social political movements as you just did, right? I also kind of mapped this onto crypto and you know, some people talk about crypto being sort of a revolution and being kind of a radical movement. It's actually not that radical.

• 43:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  If you look at it from the stack model, because crypto is very much on the stack, sits above the stack of liberalism. It is a level three sort of social technology in that crypto, we look at this, free markets. It's crypto free market. Definitely, that's the thing. It is a free market, right? Free speech, censorship resistance. Okay, that is liberalism. Individualism, property rights, digital property rights. That's individualism. Equality of opportunity. If you pay the fee to get your block across and transacted in the network, it gets across. Doesn't matter who you are, doesn't care about race, gender, geography. You just have to have an internet connection. So it has some equality of opportunity here.

• 44:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Where it really seeks to kind of shake up the world is the top level, level three institutions and laws, right? Crypto has some critiques with you know, how central banks and banks are kind of managed in general, thinks we can have a better liberal digital property rights system. So it was even useful for me to kind of map that that model of the world onto crypto and sort of see things differently. So thank you for this.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  That's really interesting. Yeah. No, I mean, it's a great way to, it's a great way to put it is that, you know, crypto is it's trying to, it's only trying to revolutionize level three. It actually, if anything, it's deeply, it's deeply liberal, right? It is, it is something that I bet, you know, I bet often the people who are super into crypto are also very passionate lowercase L liberals. And if anything, it's kind of like one of the best expressions of lowercase L liberalism. This concept of, you know, it's trying to, it's a very kind of pure form of those ideals, I think.

• 45:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is, and that's why, that's why we wanted to do this podcast. So much, Tim, is because I feel like we haven't talked enough as a crypto community about the values that actually undergird the system. And in many ways, like the crypto movement is much less radical than some of the other social political movements going on in the space. Because what we're just trying to say is we're trying to take these liberal values and instantiate that in the digital. And I actually think that the nation state constitutional apparatus hasn't done that quite effectively. Like, we have these analog types of rights, but how do you actually own unconfiscatable property in the digital world, on the internet, right? Well, I don't know, does Facebook, does Twitter sort of own my feed?

• 45:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, am I just a serf on their feudal lands? Or can I actually own something? And crypto provides almost like a, to us, anyway, a liberal alternative for digital rights and digital property is very much aligned. That's why we wanted to go deeper in this cut and why your mental models were so helpful for me when I kind of went through them is because I'm taking this and I'm like applying it to this new frontier into the digital. And, you know, when you stack it up, like, the crypto movement isn't actually that radical. It's just taking like 1700s constitutional type ideas and extrapolating that forward into the into the digital.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Before we move too far forward into this conversation, I want to make sure that we actually touch on some of the moments in crypto's recent cycle where it actually got pretty damn radical. And with that pyramid, Ryan, that you were just showing, there were moments in, like, Tim, I think the frequent conversation foundation that you have on non-crypto podcasts are going to be things that are about like the woke left versus the extreme right. And that's kind of just like in the more mainstream understanding for how to interpret this conversation. And in crypto, we have, we have different parties, we have different factions, and they appear very different.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  The patterns are the same, although they're the more larger mainstream gargantuan factions that exist. In the web two world, ours are much, there's many more of them and they're a lot smaller in the crypto world. But they operate on the same code and they play with the same strategies. And that's why this is so interesting is when we got into the height of the 2021 bull market. There was this one tribe, you call it, call it the frog army. There's also the Terra lunatics, Terra lunatics with the Terra Luna blockchain. And Ryan and I actually got into fights with these people, with these monolithic like entities. And they actually started to transcend down that stack further than just the top of the pyramid.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Most of crypto agrees with the whole like liberal freedom of speech, all that kind of stuff that you and Ryan were talking about. But there were these some tribes that played the power games that operated outside of the rules of the house. And they would come into our YouTube chats when we were live streaming and just absolutely span the chat against any, silencing all forms of dissent. And they would just make sure that anyone that had any dissenting opinion didn't have a platform to stand on. And so we're watching some of these power strategies operate both like outside of the crypto world and also inside of the crypto world as well. And it's just interesting to see these, these different tribes, these different communities, no matter where they exist, be it inside of crypto or outside of crypto. Kind of play by the same playbook, no matter what.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  And the playbook is so elegantly like documented in your book. And so this pyramid, I think, is, and just to really answer the question to the bankless listeners, like, why, why are these people talking about this liberalism concept? On a crypto podcast is the answer is because like some parts of these crypto tribes, we all want to re-architect society. Because we think that the institutions are failing us. Some crypto tribes want to go real deep. Most crypto tribes only want to stay at the surface. And I think this is really the important point that bankless listeners should really pay attention to is that we all want to re-architect society moving forward with different institutions.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  And the level at which your tribe in particular, whichever one you identify with, injects itself into that pyramid that we were just looking at. Is really important to understand. And so, Tim, I just wanted to kind of like leave that to you because, go for it. Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it just because I think like the pyramid is almost like the biggest point here. And so if there are people who are both kind of, I don't know, really gung ho about crypto, but one of them wants to use crypto to overhaul level two or to violate level two, and someone else is passionately wants to preserve and enhance level two. It's important to realize that the person, you know, the liberal who wants to use crypto to make things more liberal, has a lot more in common and a lot more common goals with people who hate crypto, but they're passionate liberals than people who also their fellow

• 50:22Speaker 00

  crypto people who specifically want to use crypto to undermine level two. Because it's like, think of backup, zoom out, what's this all for, right? What are we all actually doing here? Crypto is an end in itself. It's a means for a lot of different things. And, and so if you're, you know, if one of the main reasons that you like crypto is because you think it makes market, you know, enhances free markets and individualism and freedom and, and it actually is, it makes, it's the best version of the house. And someone else is out there with a wrecking ball, you know, he's saying, we can use crypto to knock down the house. You guys are, it's nothing to do with each other, right? You have nothing, you're much more, you know, that is, you're, you're have to push back against that a lot more than you have to push back against fellow liberals who think crypto is bad, right? I mean, it's just because that's the bigger picture.

• 51:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's exactly right, Tim. You know, and I want to maybe address, some people are kind of questioning this idea of lowercase L liberalism again. Could you steel man the argument, though, against liberalism? So for instance, this idea, you sort of alluded to it briefly, that liberalism is just another entrenched power structure. Right, a lot of people right now are looking at capitalism. And, you know, just millennials, for example, people kind of, they can't afford a house. The economy's not so good right now. It seems like wealth inequality has exacerbated to a degree that it's just like non-recoverable for younger generations.

• 51:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so they're seeing capitalism, they're seeing the free markets that we're all talking about in crypto and liberal values, and they're saying, this is just another unequal power structure. They see equality of opportunity and, you know, they view that as worse than kind of the idea of maybe equity. And they see free speech and they look at that and they say, well, this just enables hate propaganda. And they see these concepts like individualism that a liberal holds dear, and they contrast that with like, what about the power and the value of the collective? Are you sure that liberalism, because this, your book is kind of like, lays out the models, but then I think the conclusion, it also makes the case for why liberalism is really

• 52:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  important for the United States in general and for many countries. But can you steel man the argument against liberalism before we move on from this topic?

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, definitely. I don't think liberalism is perfect. Just to approach each thing you said here, one by one, like, free speech, I feel very strongly about, that I'm very pro-liberal there. I think it's very, it's, it's pretty hard for me to steel man the case against it because the, what people have to realize is that, sure, free speech allows bad ideas to be spoken, right? And sometimes to be, to persuade people. But the only alternative, the only alternative to free speech is...

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Someone, you know, is basically some ideas are not allowed to be said. And some ideas are. Now, who decides? Ask 10 Americans even, 10 people around the world. Ask 10 Americans, what are the good ideas that should be spoken? And which ideas are dangerous? They're gonna have 10 different answers. So what ends up happening is the people with the most power, the most cultural power, or if it's, if the First Amendment goes away, the people with the biggest guns, they get to decide what's true and what's good. And everyone else has to kind of abide by that. And that's just A, it's not fair, it's not right, it's not free. But B, it's also not, it's not wise. It's, um, it's, there's no humility there. The premise is that I know, I already know what the good and right ideas are. So I know which ones should be silenced.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  The people who said dangerous ideas shouldn't be platformed. The assumption there is that I already know everything I need to know. I know what's dangerous and I know what's not. But I would use the example of interracial marriage. 96% of people thought it was immoral in 1959. Pretty recent, 1959. 4% of people thought it was okay. It was, 96% of people weren't bad people, right? They weren't racist, bad people. It's that, that's just what we all thought. That's what almost everyone thought. And almost everyone you know would have thought interracial marriage is not moral. Today, the number is 94% are, think it's fine. And 6% think it's immoral, right? So that is, the entire country has changed its mind. But if you went back to 1959 and said, you know what? Certain people, we were gonna let you decide.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  No dangerous ideas will be aired anymore. You decide which ones. Almost everyone, well, one of the dangerous ideas on their list would have been interracial marriage is good. So no one would have been able to speak that. Same with gay rights. Gay rights would have been a no-go in 1959. Almost everyone would have said, well, that we definitely don't want to be spoken. We don't want kids hearing about gay rights, right? That's, that's, that's sodomy, it's whatever. And today, I think we're pretty happy that free speech prevailed because we were wrong. And so the kind of underlying assumption when people today think, you know, free speech allows dangerous ideas to flourish is this idea that, well, all the people in the past, they had bad ideas, but today it's all clear. You figured it out. People in 50 years will not look back on us and say, wow, they were really morally wrong about a bunch of things, or just their

• 55:36Speaker 00

  knowledge was off. But actually, they'll say that, nope, they had it right. Of course, that's not true, right? So free speech, I almost refuse to steel man the case against it because I just think that the only alternative is powerful people censoring everyone else. And of course, usually what the powerful people end up deciding is offensive is any challenge to their own power, any criticism of themselves. Now, the other things, I think free markets, capitalism, there's a very strong steel man arguments against those, of course. I mean, you know, you could argue that unchecked capitalism is going to kill us all because it's going to lead to, you know, AI arms races and stuff like this, right? Weapons arm races. And of course, it inevitably creates vast inequality, which is almost

• 56:21Speaker 00

  always the sign of a crumbling society is inequality spikes, goes to crazy extremes, and then the society crumbles. So I think unmoored capitalism is a very bad idea. I think that these should definitely come, it should be a continually evolving dance between freedom and regulation, the free markets. I think we already have a lot of that. I don't think, you know, any educated liberal knows that we don't have pure free markets and pure capitalism, right? We have a lot of rules against monopoly and a lot of other things. So I think those rules are good. And I totally agree that, you know, inequality to us to a crazy extent is not good, and that we should be doing things to try to curb this. And, you know, within, again, as a liberal, I don't really think

• 57:03Speaker 00

  we should do too much. I don't, we don't want to very quickly have a, lose our ability to be productive and everything. And also, it's important to remember that the worst people, the worst off people today, the people who are in the bottom 20%, they are living way better than the best off people in the In the 1700s, in a lot of ways at least, with their access to medicine and food and shelter usually, and they have heat in the winter, you know, most people, even people in the US who are in the bottom 20%, they have a lot of their basic needs met. That's incredible revolution. And so, and the median American is living like an absolute king compared to people of the past. So I do think that's, you know, inherently, again, if you

• 57:45Speaker 00

  think about alternatives, if you say inequality at all is bad, well, what you're also saying is that freedom is bad, because inherently, just different people have different talents, different motivations, even people who are equally talented, equally motivated. One wants to go into this profession, which makes a certain kind of money, and this one goes into a different one. So inequality is inevitable if you have freedom at all, right? And so I think that it's hard to argue that we should have no inequality, because then you end up with a totalitarian communist dictatorship, which I don't think is a good idea. I think that's going to lead to mass poverty, and you're going to crush our productivity, and it's going to be unfair, and you're going to end up in a bad situation. But I definitely think that unchecked, you know, unchecked free markets and capitalism is not the right

• 58:28Speaker 00

  way at all. And so I definitely feel like that's something, you know, and then, and just in general, the idea that like liberalism itself is, I would totally agree that, I would never say that liberalism is the end-all and be-all system. I'm sure it can be improved upon. I'm sure there are better systems. I just can't think of any. I can't, I haven't seen any, right? If someone can come to me and say, look at this society in the past, you know, that thrived for a long time, that was productive, that was fair, that had equal justice before the, you know, people were equal under the law, and that was, that

• 59:09Speaker 00

  quality of life was better, I'm all ears, right? I'm totally open to the fact that our current system is definitely flawed in lots of ways. I mean, it's definitely corrupt in lots of ways. People take advantage of it. I think that democracy, the voting system is definitely not perfect. And so I think there's all kinds of flaws. It's just that it seems like the best crack yet, and that... And that there's a lot of the work we can do is to just make to make the house better. I think that the part of it is that we're not living in the best version of this house. Look at the, again, look at the history of, you know, race in America, right? I mean, black Americans have had far from a fair ride in what's supposed to be a fair country. And women too, right? There's been, you know, the women couldn't even vote until recently.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  So it's, um, I think it's very, uh, I think it's, it's, it's, there's two things to separate. One is, you know, are we complaining about the flaws in the system? Which I'm right, I'm right there with you, right? Let's, let's fix the flaws and, and, and, and let's get rid of corruption and let's keep attacking that. Or are we arguing against the system as a whole, right? So that means you're not just arguing for more regulation in capitalism or free markets. You're arguing for the end of free markets. And, um, uh, yeah, maybe I'm not doing a great job of steel manning it, but I, I, I, I think that, um, it's, you know, and, and look, I think that there is the best still man I can give is that there are always inherently going to be some stuff that we're all missing. And that, um, I feel if I went a thousand years in the future,

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  I would expect that we're in some kind of government that's very weird and surprising to me. And that has been a major improvement upon liberalism. So the general concept that this is not the necessarily the best possible system? Sure, absolutely. It's just that I'm, I don't, I haven't heard many great alternatives from people.

• 1:00:52David Hoffman?

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• 1:02:21David Hoffman?

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• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  You know Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bankless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With the Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card, with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts. Or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile Wallet.

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. So Tim, I think at this point in the conversation, I want to return to the way we started it, which is with Ryan's questions, like, why are we all fighting? Why are we all angry with each other all the time? I want to actually pull in some of the graphics that you illustrated, I'm assuming yourself. But first, I want to just reemphasize the...

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  The many polarities that we find in the crypto world, we have all these different tribes, right? You have the Bitcoiners, which tend to be these decently conservative Austrian economic zealots. And then you've got the Ethereum, yeah, Austrian economics. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Hard money as opposed to Keynesian. Each different crypto tribe has their own flavor, right? You've got the Ethereum, you've got the Solonians. Then you even have like sub-communities built on top of other communities. So inside of the Ethereum community, you have the Arbonats of the Arbitrum protocol, and that's a layer two scaling technology on Ethereum. Same thing with the Optimists, another layer two scaling protocol on Ethereum.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  Then you have like the Small Brains, which is an NFT community built on top of the Arbitrum community, built on top of the Ethereum community. And so like some of these multi-polarity communities operate in conflict with each other. Me and Ryan were birthed into the crypto space, fighting with the Bitcoiners as part of the Ethereum tribe. Lately, I've been picking some fights with the Solana people. Other communities cooperate with each other. You have the Arbitrum built on top, you have the Small Brains on the Arbitrum, on the Ethereum tech stack, and these tend to cooperate pretty well with each other. And the reason why I want to like lay up all of the, all these different images here is to, or these, this part of the

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  conversation is to start to get into some of your illustrations here. And you use two different illustrations that I'm showing at once, which is the Higher Mind and the Primitive Mind. And the point I'm going to try and make here is that all communities have members of both. They have community members that operate with just the Primitive Minds, call them the Cyber Hornets for the Bitcoiners. And then the Higher Minds, you call them like the Thought Leaders, like Nick Carter of the Bitcoin Tribe comes to mind for me. And you have this idea of a ladder where you have this part of the, everyone has their Primitive Mind, everyone has their Higher Mind. And the idea is like, the more that we can operate with our Higher Mind, the better that things are. And then I've also taken this same idea of a ladder

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  and overlaid it with a political compass, which I'm sure you're familiar with. But the idea is that there's this 3D political landscape, you got authoritarians versus libertarians, the right versus the left. And in the crypto world, we have like a similar landscape of tribes. Sometimes maybe you can actually map them onto the political compass. But the point is, is that there's like this nebulous set of tribes that are spread over this landscape in the crypto world. And each and every single one operate with like this primitive mind versus higher mind. And so I'm hoping that the bankless listener can approach this next part of this conversation, identifying with whatever tribe that they come from. But, but Tim, you've identified these archetypes, this primitive mind and this higher mind that

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  I think all communities have. And I'm wondering if you can walk us through this mental model to understand how to think about these tribes that we all identify with in the crypto space and maybe identify the fact that one particular tribe that we are in might be operating with a primitive mind, whereas others might be operating with a higher mind. If you could just walk us through that part of the conversation.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. So this is, I love that you did this because a lot of people point out like, well, there's already two dimensions, right? We have the political compass. And what I would say to that is when I say the what you think axis, right? The horizontal axis, left, right, center. That is basically shorthand for just, it's, it's, it is a, it's the, it's the realm of what you think. Now, if we could always expand that into two dimensions of its own, like you did below, right? And that, and I, and I think that all of that still qualifies though, for the what you think axis. So there's lots of realms of what you think and we can discuss, and there's lots of different nuances to it. And I'm sure within crypto, you like you just described, it's not just a single axis, right? There's

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  all these different camps, and there's different camps within the camps. And that to me still though, we can, for, for this discussion, we can still oversimplify it to all within the realm of what you think, right? What, you know, what your stances are. Now, what I like to do here is add a vertical second, another axis. And if you already have two, then this is a third one. But either way, it's a separate axis entirely from all of that, which is this, what I would call like a how you think axis. It's my ladder here. And the idea is that there's like two different kind of broad, you know, you know, ways of thinking and. When I, when I talk about the, you know, higher mind, it is kind of the ideal kind of grown

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  up way of thinking. So when, when your higher mind is kind of doing the thinking, you are basically just looking for truth and you're not attached to your ideas. You're not attached, you know, you don't identify with them. You are simply, you're trying to get closer to the truth. You're trying to be less wrong. And so you inherently have some, a lot of humility because you know that people are often wrong and you've been wrong a lot in the past. And you're very open to disagreement and to challenges to your ideas because you see that as, you know, if my idea is a little machine that I've built, well, a challenger is kicking my machine. Now, I'm not going to take that personally. If my idea is as

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  strong as I think it is, they're going to hurt their foot. My machine's going to hold up strong and I'm going to say, see, I just got a little bit more confident because I saw you tried to do this and it didn't work. But if they kick the machine and something falls off and it breaks, in other words, they challenged my argument and they put out a point out of flaw and I realized, man, that was a good point. I'm not going to get offended or angry. I'm going to say, thank you, basically. Oh, wow. You just showed me that I thought I was right about something I'm not. And so you're going to be very open to changing your mind, right? This is all very basic. It sounds so obvious. Of course, if you're looking for truth, you would be open to someone telling you, pointing out flaws in your ideas. You would be open to changing your mind. You would have humility about them and you wouldn't identify with your ideas because the only identity is just you as the truth seeker. That's it, right? You know, the actual thing you believe to

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  be the truth isn't part of you. That's just something that you're trying to understand. So that's ideal, right? But of course, we don't always think with that part of our brain. So there's this other part, that primitive mind, which actually, you know, really does, you know, in fMRI studies on people having certain views challenged versus others, really does map on to different parts of our brain. It maps on to parts of our brain that are, you know, very emotional, the amygdala, the limbic system and other parts of the limbic system, the fight or flight parts of our brain, the survival parts of our brain, and also to this thing called the default mode network, which is the part that looks internally, that's introspective, that associates with our own identity. And so, when you're thinking with this part of your brain,

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  there's certain ideas that your primitive mind is going to associate with your identity and is going to basically cling on to and and spend all of its energy, rather than trying to find the truth, just trying to be right, trying to prove that they're right, trying to continue to believe with conviction, the things that they believe and trying to prove anyone else wrong. And when that part of your brain is active, we have a totally different relationship with ideas. Again, we think we're going for the truth, but we're very delusional when our primitive mind is thinking. We're not really doing that. We're full of, you know, what is confirmation bias? Confirmation bias is the invisible hand of the primitive mind in your head, which is trying to, as you're sitting there thinking you're looking for truth, the primitive mind is pushing your search in a way that will end up just where it wants it to go.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  So I'm trying to figure out what's true. Oh, look where I found out. I confirmed my beliefs. Lo and behold, right? And that's what will always happen because there's a couple, that part of our brain gets, again, it associates certain ideas with our identity and it becomes indistinguishable. So my belief in, you know, one of those camps you said, or my belief that, you know, left-wing politics is the best, or whatever it is, that is part of who I am, right? You know, or that the Bible is true, that's part of who I am. And the primitive mind has a hard time distinguishing between your identity and your physical body, which is why when you have your sacred beliefs challenged, you will, the fight or flight parts of your brain will literally light up and you will,

• 1:12:01Speaker 00

  you will not just think the people who are saying them are automatically wrong, because that's forgiven, but you'll actually think they're bad people. You'll hate them. And that's very quickly turns into very kind of base, primitive tribalism, good old tribalism, which is that, and very quickly you start to want to be friends with the people who share that, because, and then the group themselves becomes this echo chamber, where the group will collaborate, do kind of collaborative, low-rung thinking. And you will be kicked out of the group if you, if you say that the group is wrong about the sacred beliefs. The whole group sits there and just talks about how right they are, and they dehumanize the other people. So it's the us versus them mentality and all real thinking, all Truth finding, all humility, it all goes out the window. And so I had the latter because it's not just one or these, the other brain thinking.

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  A lot of times these are both fighting kind of for the controls in our head. You have some part of you that really just wants to find the truth. And then another part that really just wants to be right. And so it's kind of a tug of war, which is what I have with that rope in those drawings on the right. But I think what you're describing with the different camps, this is an important axis to add on to it. Because you can actually not just say, look at all those camps you mentioned. You know, okay, you can map them out in what they think, but then you can also say, which of these camps or which of these voices is, you know, deep down, they're willing to change their mind. And they're actually just trying to figure out what's true. And they attack ideas, they don't attack people and they don't get offended or angry. When someone says they're wrong and which are doing it the primitive mind way.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  And they attack people, you know, they will actually try to punish people for saying the wrong thing. And they, and they are, and you know, a sign of a, of someone thinking with their primitive mind is you know, there's nothing you could say or show them. No piece of evidence that would make them say, you know what? I guess I'm wrong about that. I need to rethink that. So it's important to just, it's nice once you have that in your head. You can start to notice this axis alongside the, all the what you think axes of the world.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  Anyone who's just been through the last crypto bull market knows that these things are very emotional experiences. Especially when there's a lot of money to be made, there's a lot of wealth that's on the line. And you know, when we say money and wealth, like think scarce resources, which is the same thing that the people of the, the political sphere, the trad political sphere are also fighting over. Everyone is ultimately fighting over scarce resources. And we're inside of a crypto bull market, it just happens inside of like two years. It happens in a very short consolidated experiment, if you will. And so, well, we have all of these tribes running through this, this moment in time in which there's a lot of money to be made, but everyone kind of knows that there's only, it's only going to be good for like two years.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  A lot of scarcity mentality and the sympathetic nervous system gets like turned up to the max. And so that's where a lot of like this tribalism comes from, in, from the crypto. Space because it's really, really easy to use your primitive mind in the crypto world and a lot harder to use your higher mind. Because it's easier to find the tribe that chants louder and because if you can find the bigger tribe that's chanting the bigger chant. That tribe makes money because that makes the number go up, at least inside of that like short time of frame that we have this bull market. And so we have this like this fight in the crypto space where we have the OGs.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  Who are by definition of the higher mind because they've made it through the cycles. And then you have the newbies who are always of the primitive mind because that is what it is to go through a crypto bull market in its first cycle is like everyone's kind of using their primitive mind, the first site, the first go around. And it's also like why we again, why we wanted to have you on this podcast and obviously like why we try and do bankless is because. The idea of going on the bankless journey is about ascending the ladder is about getting to the higher mind and learning to reflect on. When you are using your primitive mind and when it's time to come to use the higher mind and Tim, I'm wondering if you have just. Any thoughts for like how to, how to ascend the ladder, how to identify when you are in a primitive mind state?

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  And how to actually make it easier for bankless listeners to climb up into a higher mind state. Do you have any thoughts or advice for us on that?

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  Well, I think partially is just being like even just having this ladder as a concept in your head. Because no one wants to be on the low rungs, right? When you're on the low rungs, you're delusional.

• 1:16:21Speaker 00

  You are letting kind of primitive emotions make your decisions. You're completely blocked from learning new things. You will continue to make the same mistake over and over because of stubborn kind of insistence that you're right. So it's not good for it's the person who suffers most from low rung thinking is the low rung thinker. And so I think, you know, there are signs, of course, when you're doing this, if you can ask yourself, is there anything? That would make me say I'm wrong about this. If the answer is no, okay. I think I'm like caught up in kind of like a religious fervor here. I think I am caught up in like a tribal craze at this moment. And you can also say, you know, is, do I get kind of irrationally angry when someone disagrees with me on this?

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  When I see something, you know, that sells me, you know, the people who disagree with me, do I hate them? You know, these are all signs that you are doing that thing that all humans do, right? It's not, doesn't mean you're a bad person, doesn't mean you're a dumb person. Everyone does it, right? And it just means, oh, I've slipped down on the ladder. And just having that thought right there, boom, you're already up a few rungs. Just having that thought, because when you're really down on the ladder, you don't know you're doing it. You are totally lost in it. And so a little bit of self-reflection can go a long way. And then, of course, what's one, you know, what's the best way to help yourself here? Is surround yourself with other people that value high-rung thinking, even if they don't use that term. They just happen to be that. So there, again, as a group, you still will sometimes slip down.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  But if it's, you will find that like it's a, it's a kind of, it can be like a support group. If you have people that tend to not identify with ideas, where the group itself likes to disagree, right? If the group is always agreeing on everything, I think you've fallen into a low-rung echo chamber, which is, again, collaborative, low-rung thinking. A high-rung group, which I would call an idea lab, is kind of the opposite of an echo chamber, is just a place where people attack ideas, but not people. It's a place where disagreeing is cool, where humility, where saying, I don't know, makes you seem smart, not wishy-washy, you're dumb, where people change their minds and where people disagree for sport. An argument doesn't mean you're in a fight. And when you're in an echo chamber, you can see it where it's like, wow, everyone agrees.

• 1:18:33Speaker 00

  And we're having way too much fun agreeing and talking about how bad the other people are. And if I, if I went and disagreed right now, it would really kill the vibe in this room. And the people would like me less and maybe I wouldn't even be part of the group anymore. Okay, so now what you're doing is you've fallen into a low-rung group that is going to, if anything, bring out your low-rung thinking side. It's gonna be, it's, you know, it's like if you're trying to recover as an alcoholic, it's like surrounding yourself with, going to an alcohol, you know, drinking party every night. And so I think, yes, so I think, first of all, just have the ladder in your head and try to stay aware and notice the signs that you're doing it. And then try to remind yourself that this isn't good for me, that I'm gonna, this is making me stupid.

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  And then try to surround yourself with other people that tend to be on the high rungs and kind of keep that as a core value in the group.

• 1:19:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this is great advice for how to exist in a modern society where we have all this low rung thinking, kind of junk food, and you've just extolled the benefits to the individual. And I would say for any truth finding exercise, whether you're like in pursuit of science, or in pursuit of like, a better way, a better system, or you're an investor, you definitely want, don't want to fall prey to low rung thinking, because you'll be wrong much more often. And if you're looking, as Tim said, to be less wrong, then you have to pursue higher mind thinking. That is the only way. But let me add a little wrinkle to this, Tim, because you just made the case that it's better for individuals to pursue high mind thinking, rather than, and high rung thinking, rather than lower

• 1:20:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  rung thinking. However, there's like this, this kind of exception that I've noticed. And I'm almost wondering if this kind of contributes to the erosion of liberalism. And this is this idea of like, web two, social media technologies, which actually, I know you're an experienced Twitter user, as am I, as is David, as are many like bankless listeners, of course. I gotta tell you that our media engines, our media curation engines, like YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook, or anything else, actually don't reward high rung thinking. They reward dunking. If I can have the hottest like tweet, if I can

• 1:20:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  enter the arena, and like, just dunk on my opponent, doesn't even have to be true. It just has to be viral. It has to be interesting. It has to catch on. Or if I'm a content creator, and I want to create content, guess what the algos reward? Sensationalism. They do not reward truth. And I'm wondering your thoughts about this, because if I'm an individual tweeter, or a content creator, or you know, anything involved in, in social media, there's actually net benefit for me to be a low rung thinker, because I'll accrue more attention, I'll become more popular, I'll be able to influence more people. And I'm wondering if

• 1:21:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  this is kind of a pernicious problem that we are facing now, and maybe the reason for some erosion of liberalism. What do you make of our web two curation algorithms right now, and how they're affecting society?

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  I think you're absolutely right that these algorithms and the way the incentive structure is set up encourages lowering content creation, lowering mentality publicly. For any individual, what I would say is that when you're creating content, when you're putting stuff out there, you're kind of creating a magnet, you're turning yourself into a magnet. And the magnet is going to attract people who think the way you're talking, who like the way you're talking, and it's going to repel people who don't. So if you get out there and you start saying, "I'm just gonna be really politically aggressive, and I'm gonna just kind of be really tribal, I'm gonna dunk on the other side," you're gonna get a bunch of followers, that's true, but you're gonna get followers who love people

• 1:22:26Speaker 00

  who dunk on the other side, who are thinking that way themselves, who are really tribal. And you're gonna repel people who are thoughtful and nuanced and who want to find the truth. And so what happens now, you've gotten a bunch of followers doing this. Now, but say you say, "That's not actually who I am, right? I was just trying to manipulate the algorithms and get followers. Now I'm gonna write something nuanced. I'm gonna write a nuanced tweet, or a post, or make a YouTube video." You're gonna get a ton of hate from your followers, because you're gonna have attracted the exact kind of people who don't like that, and all the people who would've loved that, they don't follow you. They're long gone. They left a long time ago, because you really bored them, or you repulsed them. So I would say, as a content creator of any kind, whether it is in thought leadership,

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  or in writing, or in music, or anything, make the kind of stuff that is true to who you are, because you will then attract not just followers, but friends, right? You'll attract people who want more of that, and who like that, and who agree with you. Maybe, yeah, maybe it's a slower road, because the algorithm isn't gonna just totally help you as much. But it happens over time, and now, you know, you're gonna be encouraged to do more of that. And the alternative is you surround yourself with a bunch of people who you don't actually like, or you don't really actually, you know, who won't appreciate the nuanced part of your brain. So I would say for an individual, it's a no-brainer to, you know, if you are super tribal, and that's who you are, and that's who you like to be with, sure, go for it.

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  Then, you know, go do that, and surround yourself with that. But I would say if you're not, I think it's a huge mistake to try to go for just followers, because the question is, which followers? And, you know, you want that to be the right answer. But yes, on a macro scale, I totally agree this is a problem and I wish that algorithms over time would adjust instead of just going for pure engagement, which is going to inherently then go for outrage and anger, would actually tweak themselves a little bit and maybe in a more macro sense, change the incentive structure.

• 1:24:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, there's so much here, more to unpack and it's all included in Tim's book, which I totally recommend. It is called What's Our Problem? We'll include a link to it in the show notes, but the mental models here-

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  We only got through half of the agenda that we've prepped, which means there's so much more left in the book.

• 1:24:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you know, so guys, this is all about how you can think better in this society and how you can make sure you are a high-rung thinker, how you can avoid echo chambers. Echo chambers, I gotta say, are, they're powerful in the short run, but they are long-term bearish, okay? If you want to accomplish something over the long run. But Tim, I know we don't have too much time, but I just, I really need to pick your brain on this before we leave. We were just talking about algorithms and kind of Web 2 and how like you're hopeful that we can start to reward high-rung thinking with our algorithms. I just heard Max Tegmark

• 1:25:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  make some comment, I think he was maybe quoting someone else, that basically the Web 2 algorithms were our test show for AI, right? And we've kind of failed that. Like, we have these algorithms that are causing all of these ripple effects and unintended consequences and we're falling into Moloch traps as a result of this. And that was just our trial run, because now we have these super powerful algorithms that are just starting to hit the scene in the form of artificial intelligence. And David and I here have been doing a series lately on AI alignment, existential threats, Eliezer Yudkowsky, like you know the roster of these people talking about it. I know you've had some thoughts in the past about

• 1:26:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  AI alignment in general. This is beyond the scope of your book, but it seems like it's another problem that's going to affect society in the short run. And then in the long run, maybe we have this tail risk of existential destruction ahead of us as well. What are your thoughts on AI these days? Are you planning to write about it more? Just give us your TLDR?

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I definitely want to write more about it. I need to kind of, I'm in the middle of kind of just inhaling a lot on it and hearing about what a ton of people are saying and looking at a bunch of the new tools that are out there. But I think, yeah, I think that we should be scared of existential risk here in that, you know, I have in one of my posts, I have a term called the human colossus, which is, you know, if you think about, you know, ancient tribes, you have a little, you know, everyone can put their knowledge into the kind of group's consciousness and it's a little knowledge tower that's kind of in the center of the tribe. And then as people moved into the cities, you know, during the agricultural revolution

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  and after, you have a lot more people and so the knowledge towers get larger. And then you have the, you know, invention of writing and people can compare what people are saying through time and space and the towers get, you know, just skyscrapers. And, you know, and eventually it's that tower of knowledge and know-how and power eventually, you know, turns into the industrial revolution, which puts the whole thing on steroids. And I think of it as this giant colossus that our species has created, that is kind of like Godzilla tramping around and it is building, building, building. It is making, you know, it is producing and it has created vast wealth and it has made

• 1:28:00Speaker 00

  quality of life way better and it's reduced poverty and suddenly all these great things. But it also does not have a conscience. It doesn't actually have a compass about where it's going. It is just kind of a product of, you know, billions of people's individual self-interest, you know, and that giant is the thing that is making AI. And If we let that human colossus now create something way smarter than itself, you're taking your chances, right? And again, that thing doesn't really have a moral compass.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  It's not necessarily wise. It's only as wise as the systems that it is incentivized by. And if the only system it is incentivized by is pure capitalism, this is talking about steel manning, the argument against. If the only system it has is pure capitalism, I actually think that that is a classic Moloch situation where you're going to build something that is incredibly powerful that was not created with wisdom. And so that's why we have to not create this thing the way we've created all the other things. The other things, you want to create the best software, let self-interest go at it.

• 1:29:25Speaker 00

  And everyone will try to make the best, most appealing software, and V1 will be buggy, and V2 will be buggy, and by V10, the software is better. Now we'll compete with all the other V10s. And eventually, the consumers get the benefit of that. We'll all end up with really great apps on our phone that won the competition and got iterated and improved over time. AI is just so different than that. If V1 is buggy, we now have a buggy god on the planet that probably will not let us. They will not let us go change it and update it because it doesn't want to be changed and updated. And it's kind of, "Ooh, actually, that's not how we wanted it to be incentivized. Too late. This thing is now more powerful than we are." And that's pretty scary. And likewise, competition. Well, whoever gets there first, maybe they can shut down all our other efforts.

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  And so maybe the first V1 is now our god, as opposed to the 10th V10 is the best app, the first V1. So that's the worst-case scenario, and I don't know if that's actually what will happen. This is all very unprecedented. I think anyone who is confidently pessimistic or confidently optimistic...

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  Either one, I think, is, I don't believe them. I think we really don't know, but of course, if we don't know, then let's be cautious, right? Now, don't, no, don't make it the dumbest experiment in history to build this thing and see, maybe it won't be, you know, actually as scary. So I think we cannot treat it like we normally do and say, let's just get everyone, get out there and build and innovate and, you know, and we'll improve it over time. We have to have some kind of other mechanism here that is kicking in. So I do hope people are listening to the AI safety people and that we get properly scared. The thing that worries me most is that I just think it's hard for people to believe something that's not in front of their eyes that they've never seen before that's totally unprecedented and be scared of that. I don't think they're scared till it's too late. So I think somehow we need to spread enough fear, not so much that people think it's

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  the apocalypse, but enough that people start saying it is the only way to build AI is to do it ethically and, you know, to do it with a ton of AI safety research alongside. And, and so, yeah, I'm not sure. I'm glad I'm not in charge of this problem, but I, it does, it is a little bit concerning.

• 1:31:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, you're, you're certainly not in charge and yet we all are in charge because it's all of our, our problems here. And I, I think, you know, the title of your book, like, what's our problem? Self-help for society, right? This is one of the areas we need help with and we've got a lot of low rung thinking. We've got this abandonment, maybe, of liberal ideas that have driven so much, much good and value in our world, you know, and we have these existential threats ahead and we very much have to keep our wits about, about us as a species if we're going to like survive the next hundred years. I want to ask you this as we close out, Tim. In spite of all of this, what gives you hope? Why do you think we can make it on the other side?

• 1:32:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do, how do we correct these things? What's hopeful about the situation we're in?

• 1:32:21Speaker 00

  Well, um, a couple of things give me hope. I mean, one, we are a survival species. We are a bunch of survivors. And that doesn't mean that it hasn't been horrible tragedies and genocides and awful things in the past. And it also, we haven't ever faced full kinds of existential threat. But I do think that humanity has a knack for surviving. And that if we get scared enough, you know, I think maybe reason will prevail out of pure fear and out of pure survivor instinct. So that's, that's one thing. I also believe in the liberal house. I think it's a great way to produce emergent wisdom.

• 1:33:05Speaker 00

  I think that no one of us is smart enough to figure this out. And, but, you know, and just like no one of us can figure out, you know, um, how to build particle colliders or how to understand black holes, but together with collaboration of thousands of people over time and, and geography, we can figure out stuff that's way above us. We actually have a super intelligence, kind of a super wisdom in it that we can do. We also can combine together for mass stupidity, which is why I think, the reason I wrote this book is that I think it's kind of the, what's our problem? The, the concept of, um, uh, the liberal house working and, and us being able to have high rung discourse is, is the limiting factor on everything else.

• 1:33:49Speaker 00

  If we can do that, it gives us the best shot to proceed wisely. It can be a compass into the future if we can do this. If on the other hand, you know, low rung thinking and tribalism gets the better of us, um, it's like we're, we're running ahead blind, like a bulldozer right off a cliff, I think. So to me, it's like all the other problems, including AI, the, the foundation that need, that, that, the, the root of all of how, you know, whether things will go well or, or not is, is, is this liberal house functioning well? Cause I think it gives us our best shot. And groups that are outside with the wrecking balls, I think they're very, very dangerous. And I think that the concept that, you know, you know, that, that Young kids aren't being taught civics as much.

• 1:34:33Speaker 00

  Think that's or isn't aren't being taught the value of free speech or how to argue or how to, you know, seek truth or how to be persuasive. And instead, they're being kind of indoctrinated to believe in a certain ideology and to silence people who disagree. That is incredibly dangerous because you're training people to basically break down the house as opposed to training them to uphold it. And to me, in if this this house being sound and sturdy is gives us the best shot of getting it right. I don't know if we can do it, but it gives us the best shot. So I do, I, I, I, I wouldn't say I feel confidently optimistic, but I also, if I had gun to my head, I think, I think we can do it. But I do think that we, we, there are some very concerning kind of trends that need to be curbed and we need to kind of, yeah, like you said, have our wits about us as we

• 1:35:17Speaker 00

  go into this future of exploding technology in, you know, and godlike power it gives the species, you know, we need reason to kind of prevail.

• 1:35:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Bankless listener, if you're wondering where to start, oftentimes the answer is to start with yourself. I know after reading Tim's book, I was more conscious of the way I respond on Twitter and what the incentives are. And, you know, like you could start by not being an asshole on social media. And when you, when you have the opportunity to score those points and to dunk and to take the, you know, the low rung thinking path, you can take the high rung thinking path. I'm not always perfect at this. I do try and post Tim's book. I think I've been better about it. So, Tim, thank you so much for expressing these mental models for the Bankless community and for societies. We really appreciate you coming on today.

• 1:36:11Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. Great combo.

• 1:36:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless listeners, the blog is Wait But Why. Go check it out. We'll include a link in the show notes. And then the book is What's Our Problem? A self-help book for societies. Got to let you know as well, of course, none of this has been financial advice. It's not even societal reconstruction advice, although we dabbled today. You could definitely lose what you put in in crypto, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.