Theft of Fire with Devon Eriksen (WiM510)

Summary

In this episode of WiM510, Robert Breedlove interviews Devon Eriksen. They delve into philosophical discussions about humanity, creation, and civilization, touching on the significance of money as a reflection of what society values. Themes from science fiction and Greek mythology influence Eriksen's writing process and his novel, "Theft of Fire." They also explore future possibilities with advancements in AI, space colonization, and genetic manipulation, all tied to the potential and challenges of societal progress. A deep conversation that blends fiction with real-world implications of innovation and societal development.

Highlights

• Discussing the inherent advantages of pro-civilization forces in storytelling 🎤.
• Reflecting on the implications of money as a measure of societal values 💰.
• Delving into Eriksen's influences from Greek myths and science fiction for his novel 📚.
• Explaining AI, space exploration, and genetic manipulation as storytelling themes 🚀.
• Contemplating the cultural impact and philosophical discussions in Eriksen's work 🌌.

Key Takeaways

• Planning a garden is easier than structuring civilization; society needs a decentralized approach 🌱.
• Pro-civilization forces have the advantage of crafting exciting stories for a brighter future 🚀.
• Technological innovation, such as AI and space colonization, can profoundly enhance human life 🛰️.
• Creativity emerges when not doing, hence storytelling shapes culture and future foresight 📚.
• Free market ideas can outshine destructive ideologies with creativity and practicality 🌟.

Overview

Devon Eriksen's conversation with Robert Breedlove unfurls a tapestry of themes interwoven with philosophical musings and forward-thinking visions. This dynamic dialogue spins around Eriksen's writing journey, exploring the creative influences of Greek mythology and science fiction. These classics shape his narratives, infusing tales with both timeless and futuristic dimensions.

The episode orbits around the core concept that money serves as a reflection of what people truly value, an abstract yet universal barter system. It discusses civilization's progression through technological advancements like AI and space colonization. Eriksen argues that smart narratives and pro-civilization outlooks have the power to inspire and guide society towards exciting futures.

This insightful discourse touches on the societal potential unlocked through creativity and technological elevation. It examines the balance between chaos and control, urging a decentralized approach to development. Both Eriksen and Breedlove advocate for storytelling as a catalyst for change, championing it as a tool to drive pro-human and innovative ideologies forward.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Pro-Civilization Forces' Advantage The chapter discusses the inherent advantage of pro-civilization forces, emphasizing their ability to create good stories and envision exciting futures. It highlights the importance of questions concerning existential purpose and meaning in life, critiquing negative perspectives such as the notion that 'humans are a cancer on the planet.'
• 00:30 - 01:00: Ethical Claims and Inversion In the conversation about ethical claims and societal values, the speaker critiques the prevailing argument that suggests the majority of people are detrimental to the planet, implying a need for population control. The discussion highlights the notion of taxing the rich more heavily, questioning the morality behind it by suggesting that institutionalized redistribution undermines societal value creation. The speaker argues that using ethics as a means to justify what they see as unethical practices results in an inversion of true ethical standards, ultimately leading to a world where 'no one can have nice things' because it disincentivizes the creation of such things.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Society with Rational Animals The chapter discusses the complexities of forming a society comprising two distinct types of rational beings, particularly when one group possesses immortality. It explores potential solutions, including the innovative agricultural practices at Okioki, a regenerative community known for its sustainable farming methods. Okioki features an extensive 8,000 tree olive orchard and a large pecan orchard, producing its own olive oil and other resources.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Farm at Okioki The chapter 'Farm at Okioki' describes the rich and diverse agricultural activities at the farm, which hosts heritage animals and plants with some varieties dating back over a thousand years. Daily fresh eggs come from chickens, and the farm maintains over 1,000 beehives for pollinating its 200+ heirloom fruits and vegetables, while also producing honey. The farm is also self-sufficient, creating its own molasses, sugar, herbs, and spices. It features an herbal apothecary and a commercial kitchen, highlighting the farm's holistic and sustainable operations.
• 02:00 - 02:30: O Farm Website and Inspirations The chapter discusses why the farm is considered the healthiest place on Earth.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Influences and Inspirations for Writing','start':150,'end':180} In this chapter, the discussion revolves around the influences and inspirations behind the author's writing. Before diving into the main topic, the author mentions several science fiction authors and Greek creation myths, indicating that there are thematic elements drawn from these sources. The author emphasizes that a novel is not formed from a single idea but rather a tapestry of numerous ideas integrated into a cohesive story. This perspective is highlighted as a common insight, especially for those who might not be deeply familiar with the writing process.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Writing Process and Themes This chapter discusses the misconceptions high school English teachers may have about the writing process, specifically concerning the integration of themes into stories. The speaker argues against the notion that writers create stories with predetermined themes, such as using Christ imagery in a story about a dog dying. Instead, they suggest that this is an inaccurate reflection of how books are written.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Finding Writing Process The chapter titled 'Finding Writing Process' explains the initial stages of writing a story, emphasizing the simplicity of starting with an entertaining story. It uses the metaphor of tying a rope to a bucket to delve into one's subconscious, uncovering deeper themes throughout the writing process. This exploration reveals the underlying themes as the story develops.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Task Switching and Creativity The chapter explores an adventure story about a down on his luck criminal who is blackmailed into a high-stakes heist involving alien technology. The narrative delves into Promethean themes, gender relations, the future of technology, and existential questions about artificial intelligence and humanity.
• 04:30 - 05:00: Balancing Podcasting and Writing The chapter delves into the author's creative process, illustrating how podcasting and writing are intertwined. It highlights the concept that ideas often emerge subconsciously and are influenced by a variety of sources, such as discussions with peers like Larry and Walter John Williams, observations on current economic trends like Bitcoin, and advancements in fields like asteroid mining. The author underscores the exploration of these diverse inspirations and their role in shaping future narratives.
• 05:00 - 05:30: Continuous Revision in Writing This chapter explores the organic process of continuous revision in writing, likening it to a Jungian exercise in self-exploration. It involves digging into the subconscious and 'bleeding' onto the page, allowing personal worldview and experiences to shape the narrative as one writes. The discussion provides insights and advice for aspiring science writers to embrace this process.
• 05:30 - 06:00: Writing Advice for Aspiring Authors The chapter provides writing advice specifically geared towards aspiring fiction authors. It explores the different approaches that authors can take when planning and writing a story. Rather than having a complete story from the beginning, authors may start with a bare skeleton of an idea and discover elements from various influences, such as Greek myths, that integrate into the narrative. The chapter suggests that authors can be likened to either gardeners or architects: gardeners plant seeds and allow stories to grow organically without a rigid plan, while architects design the entire structure meticulously before beginning to write.
• 06:00 - 06:30: Challenges in Writing Regimen The chapter discusses two approaches to writing: exploratory and structured. The exploratory approach involves starting without a fixed plan and allowing the story to unfold organically. However, the author identifies more with the structured, architectural approach. The author emphasizes that planning a story is crucial, yet acknowledges that plans are guidelines and are subject to change. As writing progresses, new insights are gained, necessitating continuous revision of the original plan.
• 06:30 - 07:00: Listening to writing lectures The chapter titled 'Listening to writing lectures' emphasizes that aspiring authors should understand that there is no universal method to writing. Instead, writers can only share their personal writing processes and experiences. The chapter suggests that individuals exist in various stages of being a writer, hinting at stages such as 'pre-writers' or 'embryonic writers', as mentioned by the speaker reflecting on their own journey.
• 07:00 - 07:30: Understanding Human Brain and Multitasking Myth This chapter explores the concept of finding one's unique writing process, emphasizing that it is a highly individual journey. It critiques common myths, such as those regarding multitasking, and suggests that prominent guides like Stephen King's 'On Writing' cannot prescribe a one-size-fits-all method to achieving a complete and coherent narrative. Instead, writers often meander through incomplete ideas and processes before discovering their personal effective strategy.
• 07:30 - 08:00: Importance of Idleness and Boredom in Creativity The chapter explores the role of idleness and boredom in fostering creativity. The speaker notes that different writers have varied methods to spark creativity and suggests that individuals should listen to various writers and select methods that resonate with them personally. The ultimate goal is to reach a point where one can effectively translate thoughts into organized expression.
• 08:00 - 08:30: Planning vs. Gardening in Writing The chapter discusses the different approaches writers can take in their writing process, comparing planning (an organized, structured method) to gardening (an organic, evolving method). The transcript reflects a personal inquiry into finding a balanced writing routine, acknowledging the challenges some individuals face in sticking to a disciplined writing schedule, especially when juggling multiple tasks like podcasting and writing. The metaphor of a 'one trick pony' or 'laser beam' is used to describe the difficulty in balancing different creative outlets simultaneously.
• 08:30 - 09:00: Different Phases of Writing a Book The chapter delves into the balance between writing, podcasting, and other business activities, exploring personal journeys and discoveries. It highlights learning experiences from Brandon Sanderson's lectures on fantasy and science fiction writing at Bringham Young University.
• 09:00 - 09:30: Transition to Full-Time Writing The chapter titled 'Transition to Full-Time Writing' discusses the myth of multitasking. The speaker explains that, similar to neural networks, the human brain can only perform one task at a time. Task switching is often mistaken for multitasking. The focus is on understanding how to manage one's tasks effectively by accepting the limitations of how the brain functions naturally.
• 09:30 - 10:00: Encouragement for Aspiring Writers The chapter "Encouragement for Aspiring Writers" emphasizes maintaining focus and dedication to tasks. The speaker discusses how despite achieving popularity in writing and podcasting, it's crucial to stay committed to one's goals and manage opportunities wisely without getting distracted.
• 10:00 - 10:30: Connecting Writing with Personal Exploration The chapter explores the intersection of writing and personal exploration, emphasizing the importance of focus and the limitations of multitasking. It suggests that while individuals may have the potential to accomplish many things, they are most effective when concentrating on a single task at a time. The discussion also touches on the intrinsic motivation driven by interests such as Bitcoin, which inspires creativity and the desire to share knowledge.
• 10:30 - 11:00: Finding a Writing Practice The chapter 'Finding a Writing Practice' discusses the speaker's journey in discovering the most productive channel for their creativity. Despite being introverted, they found success in podcasting, which unexpectedly became a business. The speaker emphasizes that writing laid the foundation for this success, which began with reading, followed by tweeting and writing. This foundation eventually led them to appear on podcasts and even in front of the camera. They reflect on trying to figure out which channel is the most effective for their creative endeavors.
• 11:00 - 11:30: Cultural Mindset and Bubble Mentality The chapter delves into the concept of maintaining a business while establishing a consistent daily writing practice. It highlights the importance of spending dedicated time writing each day, emphasizing that the writer's subconscious continues to process ideas even when they are not actively writing. Through regular writing, spontaneous thoughts and insights can be captured and incorporated into the work more effectively.
• 11:30 - 12:00: Critique of Anti-civilizational Forces The narrator discusses their writing process and the challenges they face. They aim to write for one hour a day, which they find to be a painful struggle. To maintain focus, they use an hourglass to time their writing sessions, enforcing discipline by not allowing themselves to leave the desk until the hour is complete. Despite these efforts, the narrator feels they are still in the process of developing their own writing practice.
• 12:00 - 12:30: Wealth and Responsibility The chapter explores the impact of early investment in Bitcoin and its implications on wealth and responsibility. It delves into the insights shared by a knowledgeable individual, sparking multiple lines of thought about the potential directions this newfound wealth can lead to. The transcript reveals the transformative effect of such investments, raising questions about the responsibilities that accompany increased financial resources.
• 12:30 - 13:00: Human Brain as Neural Network The chapter explores the concept of wealth beyond material possessions, like buying a luxury car, explaining that true wealth is the freedom to pursue one's desires and contribute positively to the world.
• 13:00 - 13:30: Focusing on One Task at a Time This chapter discusses the importance of focusing on one task at a time to achieve meaningful goals. It explores the idea of identifying what one wants to create and how to positively change the world. The conversation connects the freedom to explore personal ideals with achieving a certain level of material success. Through this framework, the chapter emphasizes that clear focus and prioritization can significantly impact one's ability to make a difference.
• 13:30 - 14:00: Pursuit of Certain Liberties The chapter "Pursuit of Certain Liberties" explores the struggle of channeling one's ideas and efforts into productive activities. The speaker reflects on the challenge of dedicating an hour a day to writing and questions the notion of human effort being compartmentalized into hours. There is a contemplation about whether our ancestors, in their primitive activities such as banging rocks and hunting, adhered to time-bound productivity.
• 14:00 - 14:30: Task switching and mental models The chapter discusses concepts related to task switching and mental models, using metaphors like antelope on the Serengeti to illustrate attention shifts. It also reflects on the passage of time and its segmentation into blocks, particularly in the context of creative work. The narrator mentions working in larger blocks of time, such as four-hour intervals, to enhance focus and productivity during creative endeavors. Public appearances and their impact on time management are briefly touched upon.
• 14:30 - 15:00: Shift in Creativity Paradigm In this chapter titled 'Shift in Creativity Paradigm,' the narrator discusses a typical day organized into morning and afternoon segments. The speaker mentions using online platforms like podcasts to connect and avoiding extensive travel. They describe their morning routine as a time for mental preparation, while the afternoon is dedicated to concentrated creative work. The first hour of the afternoon is particularly important for getting into a creative mindset, emphasizing the need to get the 'creative juices flowing.' This highlights a structured approach to creativity, reflecting a broader shift in how creative work is approached in the modern era.
• 15:00 - 15:30: Understanding Cryptocurrency The chapter discusses the challenges of transitioning between different tasks, such as writing and podcasting, within a limited timeframe. It suggests dedicating entire days to specific activities to overcome the initial 'switching cost' and to allow for better concentration and productivity.
• 15:30 - 16:00: Expression of Preferences through Economics In this chapter, the discussion revolves around the nature of creativity in relation to work schedules, emphasizing the concept of 'writing days' which are not chosen but rather chosen by the creative process itself. It highlights the importance of listening to one's creative instincts when one is inspired, rather than adhering to a strict schedule. The chapter begins with a reflection on adjusting workdays to better fit the needs of creativity, acknowledging the spontaneous nature of inspiration where ideas may suddenly flood, necessitating a shift to writing or creative work to capitalize on that surge of creativity.
• 16:00 - 16:30: Revealed Preferences in Economics The concept of revealed preferences in economics refers to understanding and analyzing the choices individuals make when faced with certain pressures, deadlines, or structures. This chapter explores how people often procrastinate in the absence of these pressures and how imposing self-discipline can help in maintaining a balance between structured productivity and allowing for creative freedom.
• 16:30 - 17:00: Manipulation of Economic Systems The metaphor of gardening is used to describe the manipulation of economic systems, suggesting a balance between structure and chaos. Progress in economic systems is likened to a long-term investment strategy, where continuous small efforts contribute to growth over time, akin to writing for an hour a day. The chapter may explore themes of patience and strategic thinking in economic progress, highlighting the impact of small, consistent actions in the broader system.
• 17:00 - 17:30: Counterfeiting and System Gaming The chapter "Counterfeiting and System Gaming" begins with a discussion on managing work and refresh periods to avoid getting lost in the noise. It highlights the importance of balancing work intervals appropriately. One of the individuals talks about their writing process, specifically mentioning a nine-month period for completing a manuscript. They are asked to elaborate on a typical day during the writing phase, which proceeds in a stepwise manner.
• 17:30 - 18:00: Dangers of Centralized Economy The chapter discusses the complexities and risks associated with a centralized economy. Initially inspired by a unique writing prompt involving a princess kidnapping a pirate, the narrative explores how unexpected and reversed scenarios can reveal underlying issues. The centralized economy, much like the reversed roles in the prompt, illustrates how power concentrated in one entity or area can lead to imbalances and vulnerabilities. The narrator reflects on the different phases of storytelling, indicating a progression from a simple idea to a more elaborate exposition of economic principles. Through this analogy, the chapter delves into the potential dangers of having all economic power and decision-making centralized, emphasizing the need for checks, balances, and more diversified control to prevent systemic failures.
• 18:00 - 18:30: Science Fiction Themes Overview The chapter discusses the process of developing science fiction themes. It explores the creation of characters and their motivations, such as transforming a corporate leader into a character involved in blackmail instead of hiring someone directly. The narrative emphasizes the importance of exploring various ramifications and motivations within storytelling.
• 18:30 - 19:00: Excitement in Crypto World In the chapter titled 'Excitement in Crypto World,' the discussion revolves around the creative process, particularly in the context of people who are very driven and have a strong work ethic. There is a focus on the internal struggle they face with feelings of guilt when they spend time brainstorming and generating ideas without actively writing them down or feeling productive. The narrative emphasizes the importance of allowing oneself the time for creative spitballing and idea generation, even if it does not immediately result in tangible output.
• 19:00 - 19:30: AI and Decentralized Economy This chapter discusses how idleness and boredom can lead to productivity, specifically in the context of writing and organizing thoughts. It explains the process from taking notes to creating outlines, generating summaries, and further breaking down those summaries into scenes and chapters, illustrating a structured approach towards creative and structured writing.
• 19:30 - 20:00: Virtual and Physical Realities The chapter 'Virtual and Physical Realities' explores the process of writing and storytelling by breaking it down into phases. The narrator describes their method of having a complete scene summary before writing the actual text. This preparatory step involves knowing the entire sequence of events, which allows the author to focus solely on selecting specific descriptions and dialogues. This phase-based storytelling approach ensures a structured development of the narrative.
• 20:00 - 20:30: Pro-Civilization Stories The chapter uses the analogy of building an arch to explain a concept about stability and structure. It highlights how each stone in an arch, when placed together, creates a stable formation due to gravity. The analogy implies the complexity of constructing something stable, as each individual component (or 'stone') must be aligned correctly to create a cohesive and balanced whole.
• 20:30 - 21:00: Independent Novel Publishing The chapter "Independent Novel Publishing" uses the metaphor of building an archway to describe the process of self-publishing a novel. It emphasizes the importance of creativity and flexibility in the publishing process, suggesting that just as one must build scaffolding to construct an arch, an author must allow their creative mind to explore various ideas and strategies before settling on a final path to publication. The chapter encourages patience and adaptability, emphasizing that while some initial ideas or elements might be temporary, they are crucial for developing a stable and successful independent publishing outcome.
• 21:00 - 21:30: Potential Future with Technology The chapter explores the potential future shaped by technology, emphasizing the importance of work ethic and being highly driven. It is noted that while having a high degree of agency is important, it may sometimes become an obstacle. To truly unlock creativity, it is suggested that there are times to pause and just 'be' rather than constantly 'do'. This balance between action and inaction is important for fostering creativity.
• 21:30 - 22:00: Fertility in Creativity and Science The chapter discusses the misconception of idle time as unproductive, especially for high-achieving individuals with a Type A personality. However, this seemingly idle time is crucial for building the foundation or 'scaffolding' necessary to accomplish monumental tasks. The conversation highlights the importance of setting aside dedicated time for creative endeavors amidst a busy schedule.
• 22:00 - 22:30: Importance of Storytelling The chapter explores various aspects of the writing process, emphasizing the importance of consistent practice. It highlights the magical role of the subconscious mind during the remaining hours of the day when not actively writing. The speaker mentions personal experiences with writing, where sometimes inspiration flows naturally, allowing for more productivity, while other times it requires effort to maintain the habit of writing for at least one hour every day. Overall, it underscores the non-linear nature of creativity and how storytelling thrives on consistent yet flexible engagement with the writing process.
• 22:30 - 23:00: Harnessing AI and Modeling In this chapter titled 'Harnessing AI and Modeling,' the speaker reminisces about their writing routine, indicating that some days offer more time for writing than others. The conversation shifts to discuss how the participants initially connected, specifically through a dedicated fan on Twitter who persistently urged one of the speakers to engage with the other due to the intriguing nature of their tweets.
• 23:00 - 23:30: Efforts toward System Upgrade The chapter titled 'Efforts toward System Upgrade' revolves around a conversation between the speaker and a guest on a show. They discussed various topics, with a notable question being 'What is money?' The guest provided a fascinating answer, defining money as a measure of some unspecified concept, suggesting an in-depth exploration of economic or philosophical theories related to the concept of money.
• 23:30 - 24:00: Unlearning Fear of Innovation The chapter discusses the concept of innovation and how fear of it has been ingrained in human behavior since ancient times. It draws a parallel with early human societies, where every member of a tribe had to contribute to the community. This communal contribution was monitored mentally, almost like a mental spreadsheet. The chapter suggests that overcoming the fear of innovation requires introspection and a willingness to understand its origins.
• 24:00 - 24:30: Decentralized Power in Society The chapter explores the concept of decentralized power in society, focusing on the social and cognitive limits of humans when it comes to maintaining social relationships. It introduces Dunbar's Number, a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, estimated to be around 150 individuals. This concept is used to understand how decentralized power structures might operate within the limits of human social capacity.
• 24:30 - 25:00: Technological developments fostering optimism The chapter discusses how technological advancements have contributed to a sense of optimism among people. It reflects on human cognitive limitations in managing relationships, particularly in the context of historical societal developments like the Agricultural Revolution. The conversation touches upon the necessity of formalizing relationships as societies grow, ensuring that mental resources can be efficiently utilized without becoming overwhelmed by social fragmentation.

Theft of Fire with Devon Eriksen (WiM510) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 pro- civilization forces have an inherent Advantage because we can actually write good stories and our futures are exciting money is a measure of [ __ ] given measure of [ __ ] given what is the purpose of my existence what do I give a [ __ ] about what gives meaning to my life you hear these absurd phrases like humans are a cancer on the planet they're talking about themselves exactly
• 00:30 - 01:00 they're saying all you other people are a cancer on the planet we need to cut the population of you guys tax the rich right we need to steal more from the rich as if that's an ethical claim if we institutionalize stealing we can't have nice things no one can have nice things because no one will make nice things right they're using the ethics to destroy the ethics yes it's an inversion
• 01:00 - 01:30 how do we have a society with two different types of rational animals especially when one of them is Immortal wow one possible solution is the farm at okioki is a revolutionary new regenerative agricultural Community it features an 8,000 tree Olive Orchard which they use to make their own olive oil as well as a very large pecan Orchard
• 01:30 - 02:00 all the animals on the farm are Heritage animals with some varieties over 100 years old and others thousands of years old fresh eggs are produced daily by the Farm's chickens also there are over 1,000 beehives that pollinate the over 200 heirloom fruits and vegetables and provide honey to all the residents the farm makes its own molasses unrefined sugar herbs and spices the farm also features an herbal Apothecary and a commercial kitchen these are just a few
• 02:00 - 02:30 reasons why the farm is the healthiest place on Earth to learn more about the healthiest place on Earth go to O farm.com and use discount code breed love for $21,000 off custom cabin pricing again to learn more about the farm at okoi go to OK farm.com and be sure to tell them I sent you some of the Inspirations behind work
• 02:30 - 03:00 you talked about uh you named a few science science fiction authors before we started yes and then the Greek creation myths s like there are some themes uh woven in from that as well can we can you just talk about some of your influences and Inspirations well you know a a novel isn't one idea it's it's a bunch of ideas woven together into a story and I think this is something that uh a lot of people you know particularly those
• 03:00 - 03:30 high school English teachers who I don't know if they annoyed you as much as they annoyed me but uh they they've kind of got it backwards so they people tend to think oh you know someone wants to write a story with a theme they're going to write oh he's going to write a story about uh with Christ imagery and let's make it about my dog dying where my dog is you know symbol for Christ or whatever and that's really not how books
• 03:30 - 04:00 get written MH what you do is you write a story and it starts out as a very simple story meant to entertain and you tie this rope to a bucket and you toss it into your subconscious and you dredge the bottom and you pour it out on the table and that's where you discover the themes so as I was writing this this
• 04:00 - 04:30 adventure story about you know a down on his luck criminal who gets blackmailed into a into a heist of a high stakes Heist of alien technology I discovered oh you know there's some Promethean stuff here and there's some stuff about how men and women relate to each other and there's some stuff about the future of technology and there's some AI stuff about what it means to be a human being
• 04:30 - 05:00 so it all kind of emerges from your subconscious and then you start to look at it and you say well gee I got that from Larry nen I got that from Walter John Williams I got a little bit of this from watching the Bitcoin guys and thinking about what the future of the economy is going to look like and I got it from reading about the upside potential of asteroid Mining and you get all these ideas that just sort of percolate in
• 05:00 - 05:30 your head and they they they attach to your story as you write it so it's a very organic process interesting sounds almost like a yungan type process that you're just digging into your own subconscious to see you're almost like bleeding on the page in a way right like who are you what has constructed your world view but you so so when you set out I'm trying to now I guess dredge up some advice for other aspiring science
• 05:30 - 06:00 fiction authors when you set out to write this then you didn't know the story necessarily you had kind of a a skeleton and then you started to realize there were pieces um from these other like Greek myths Etc that were attached to it how does can you can you speak to how that process actually unfolds well mechanically I guess some people plan a lot others plan very little I like to call them gardeners and Architects gardeners throw seeds in the
• 06:00 - 06:30 ground and see what comes up and Architects plan and then they build and I am very much an architect so I planned the story but even if you have a plan a plan tends to be a list of things that don't happen so when you plan and you start to implement that plan you learn something and you go back and you're continuously revising it MH
• 06:30 - 07:00 and you know if I could give any sort of advice to aspiring authors to take it back to your question um I would say that no one can tell you how to write they can only tell you how they write okay and people tend to exist pre pre- writers embryonic writers which is where I was
• 07:00 - 07:30 tend to exist in this state where they're kind of pottering around writing these little bits of things and it never really comes together into a full and complete novel length story and then what happens is you find your process you find the process that works for you and that's very individual and it can be difficult to do that because nobody can tell you you can pick up Stephen King's on writing and it won't tell you how to do that because
• 07:30 - 08:00 that's just what worked for Sten King that and a lot of cocaine but what you what you can do is you can listen to a lot of different writers and you can sort of cherry-pick the little bits that help you yeah and then hopefully get to this point where something clicks and it's like oh I know how to get the thoughts out of my head in an organized way now and so have did you go through that own
• 08:00 - 08:30 developmental process for yourself figuring out your own personal writing process could you and I'm now I'm asking selfishly I'm not I'm not an aspiring science fiction writer but I am someone that struggles to incorporate a disciplined writing regimen into my life like I for me it's I feel like I'm a one trick pony it's like I'm either podcasting or I'm writing like I can do I'm like a laser beam I can do one thing at a time but I have a hard time uh um maintaining a
• 08:30 - 09:00 daily balance of both writing and podcasting and other business activities so what if you could just walk me through some of that journey and what what you discovered that worked for you individually and see if there's any nuggets in there that might be helpful for me or others well for me it was listening to a series of uh lectures they recorded by Brandon Sanderson at bringham Young University okay on writing fantasy and science fiction but when you talk about writing in general
• 09:00 - 09:30 and only being able to do one thing what I would say is stop kicking yourself for having a human brain yeah it's it's a neural network neural networks only do one thing at once yeah multitasking is a myth okay people who say that they multitask what they're doing is their task switching yeah and so what I do yeah what I do is is that I
• 09:30 - 10:00 you know I have a task and I'm focused on it and then I do the task and then I do another task and it can be very easy to you know oh I wrote some stuff it's become popular or oh I have a podcast it's become popular I have all these opportunities that I want to take advant
• 10:00 - 10:30 of and you can do anything you know you're a smart guy you can probably do most anything but you can't do everything you have to do one thing at once oh as as I was telling you in the kitchen earlier I think we're all very dumb in our own way yeah because we can only focus on one thing yes um I for yeah what is it the struggle here there's a lot of I think Bitcoin gives you a lot of energy to want to like share and create
• 10:30 - 11:00 but then it's figuring out which channel is the most productive and it just so happens but I'm an introvert by the way so podcasting does not come natural to me but this is the one that caught fire so to speak so it became a real business and I've I've been leaning more into that however the foundation of this was writing like it it started with me tweeting and writing well really starts with reading I guess prior to that reading and then writing that even um got me in front of the camera in the first place appearing on other people's podcast so I'm trying to figure out
• 11:00 - 11:30 almost a way to like keep running the business but also have an established Writing Practice that I'm like daily writing because I found the writing thing it's like it's like you're in that mode or you're not like when I'm as you mentioned of the subconscious when I'm writing if I spend an hour a day writing which is what I try to do then my subconscious is working on it the other 23 hours right and so it's like things will just pop in and I'm dropping notes in my phone and then I'm incorporating that into the the written piece the 1
• 11:30 - 12:00 hour day that I'm actually writing so um I don't know that's been kind of my process up until this point but I struggle to get the one hour a day of writing I find it to be very painful I have to almost force myself I bought an hourglass on my desk like once I turn The Hourglass over like I don't let myself move from the desk until the sand has completely fallen and um I don't know I still feel like I'm in that process of struggling to find my own writer's practice Yeah well you you've
• 12:00 - 12:30 definitely said some very interesting things there um I I love talking to smart people because you listen and you can think of six different directions you can take this um you know when when you when you started talking about Bitcoin I think a lot of people who who invested in Bitcoin early found themselves with a lot of like okay I have I have not just money now but
• 12:30 - 13:00 wealth yeah and wealth isn't like oh I can buy a Lamborghini I mean I suppose you whatever but wealth is is is not that it's it's I can I'm free to do what I want and you you you you get that sea change from how do I build my career how do I pay my bills to what do I want to see in the world yes
• 13:00 - 13:30 what do I want to create how do I want to change the world hopefully to make it a better place yeah and so it feels to me like when you talk about doing the podcast and writing it's like you're free to explore your ideals because of your level of material success success and it's like there's
• 13:30 - 14:00 all these ideas I could be putting out there how do I how do I Channel myself to be productive in that and you know what strikes me is is that if you're struggling to find an hour a day to write I don't really think that human effort happens in ours I don't think that when we were banging the rocks together and chasing
• 14:00 - 14:30 Antelope around on the serengetti or whatever that that we really was were like the sun has moved 10° that seems to be a reasonable block of time I think blocks of time for creativity are bigger than that you know I work in blocks of 4 hours 4 hours yeah if if I get if I get on if I make a public appearance you
• 14:30 - 15:00 know on a podcast or whatever hopefully over the Internet so I'm not you traveling all over but uh that's that's like okay that's my morning MH but then in the afternoon I have 4 hours to really get started because that first hour is just getting the creative juices flowing right and it feels to me
• 15:00 - 15:30 like and and you know I I obviously can't inhabit your head or speak for you but it it kind of feels to me like if you're just writing for an hour then you're just getting started and you have to stop you're just kind of like paying the switching cost and then you stop yeah so maybe the solution is to have okay this is my writing day bigger blocks yeah this is my writing day and and then you can forgive yourself for or okay this other day is my podcast day or
• 15:30 - 16:00 my marketing day or whatever you need to do yeah no that's great feedback and we have actually started to tilt things that direction where I have more writing days um you also there's you make you bring up a great point that you do have to just kind of listen to the creative brain sometimes because there's some days you wake up and I'm just flooded with ideas and I'm it's a writing day right I didn't choose it it chose me and you just need to sit down and and get it out um but then there's the other part
• 16:00 - 16:30 where if you don't if there's not some pressure some deadline some structure like imposing itself on you even though it's self-imposed then I might um procrastinate too much basically so it's like I want I want to let nature have its room to run and have you know Embrace those creative days when they come even though you can't summon them but I also try to have this structure in place that keeps me moving
• 16:30 - 17:00 forward and uh yeah it's like gardening I guess I guess that would be a good metaphor like there's some structure but some chaos at the same time and and you know the the progress is made over the long run I think people who when you talk about writing for an hour a day it sounds like these people who are watching their Investments and they're refreshing the page every 15 minutes you know your your your portfolio goes up in the long term right but
• 17:00 - 17:30 there's a lot of noise sure and if we if we try to make our refresh period or our work periods too short I think maybe we can get lost in the noise yeah so you said for you theft of fire I you said nine months for a manuscript nine months for a manuscript so walk me through the the typical day while you were writing this book well it goes stepwise and
• 17:30 - 18:00 because there's there's different phases of writing you have to you have to first like okay this is the story I want to tell and this is the seed of the idea and for me it actually started as a very simple writing prompt in an internet group devoted to writing prompts and I go hm somebody wrote a princess kidnaps a pirate and I'm like okay that's backwards that's interesting okay well let's do this in
• 18:00 - 18:30 space so it can't be literal royalty let's make her some sort of corporate arys so why would she kidnap well let's do blackmail why would she blackmail somebody instead of hiring him and then you you sort of explore these ramifications so for me there's a there's a process and you know I went through this in the sequel as well and I'm in other stages but of you're just
• 18:30 - 19:00 kind of spitballing ideas and I think for some people who are very driven and who have a very good work ethic they kind of struggle with this almost guilt where it's like I'm just sitting around being bored thinking of ideas and not writing them down and I'm just spitballing stuff and I'm not working but the creative process I think it
• 19:00 - 19:30 almost requires a certain amount of idleness and boredom of course so I have that several month period of idleness and boredom and then there's a Tipping Point where it's like now I'm writing notes because I want to get this stuff down and then I'm writing outlines and then I'm writing summaries and then I'm breaking the the summaries up into scenes and all the scenes and chapters have
• 19:30 - 20:00 summaries and by the time I'm writing words that readers are actually going to read I have a complete summary of the scene I'm writing and all I have to do is pick specific descriptions and specific dialogue because I already know everything's that's going to happen so you're building that story in phases mhm as
• 20:00 - 20:30 if think of it like building an arch mhm you know an arch is a stable structure of stones where the the gravity on each one of them wedges them into this stable format but if you have to lift them into place one at a time if you think about it naively you can't build an arch because no part of the arch is stable
• 20:30 - 21:00 but if you think oh well I'm going to pile up Stones where the doorway would be and then I'm going to set the stones of the arch on top of that when I set the Keystone I take that stuff away and now it's stable so you have to give yourself the the breathing room to let your creative mind build that scaffolding and a lot of the time you know you seem to me to be a very uh
• 21:00 - 21:30 to have a lot of work ethic to be a very driven person to be a very high agency person I try yeah and sometimes that high agenc that I must do at every second can get in the way a little bit because we're at our most creative when we're not doing and we're simply being so true that's a great metaphor then so
• 21:30 - 22:00 the you might perceive the idle time as nonproductive if you're very high agency or type a um but you're actually building the scaffolding necessary to put something Monumental in place basically yes you've understood me exactly it's it's you have to you you you're doing it sounds like you're doing this thing where it's like oh here's here's my writing hour that I have wrestled from my busy schedule I
• 22:00 - 22:30 should I I'm sorry to make this about me by the way I I want to talk about you but yeah it's I no this is a very interesting thing about the writing process I love this it's not it I definitely strive to get that one hour a day consistently because again I get that other 23-hour subconscious thing being applied to the written piece and I find that's where the magic really happens but some days it does I get more right sometimes there's gaps that I can write much more some days it's flowing naturally so it's it's not just like I'm uh linearly doing one hour per day
• 22:30 - 23:00 every day some days they there are uh more hours devoted to writing let's go back to how we connected originally I think I the writing s very interesting I want to continue talking about it but you have super fans basically one of them uh and I'm sorry I don't recall his name but he contacted me on Twitter and he basically harassed me was like you've got to talk to this guy this guy is so interesting interesting tweets he kept
• 23:00 - 23:30 sending me your tweets uh I think he sent me your book as well and we ultimately had a conversation on the show on Zoom which was a really good conversation and you had one of the most interesting answers to the question that is the namesake of the show which is what is money and your answer to that question it was money is a measure of [ __ ] given measure of [ __ ] given can you please I know we talked about this last time but I think it's worth
• 23:30 - 24:00 unpacking it one more time it's it's if you think back to the origins of humanity you you have these sort of hominid tribes and everybody has to contribute in some way and you're going to you're going to keep track of that you you're going to keep track of it mentally you know you don't and so what What You've Really Got is is this sort of mental spreadsheet
• 24:00 - 24:30 that human beings have of the value that others have contributed and you can get up to what we call dunbar's number you know it you're probably familiar but for the audience dunbar's number is this theoretical number of human beings that you know you can sustain a mental model of yeah yeah supposedly around 150 we
• 24:30 - 25:00 don't know but what's important is that there is a number yeah and and beyond that number groups into fragment right we kind of fork into different well either they fragment or you need ways to formalize your relationship with them so that you don't have to think about it as much you you you're limited in your mental resources so as we started to we had the Agricultural Revolution we said settle down okay there's some things that we
• 25:00 - 25:30 own now and we can use these as trade goods to keep track of you know who has contributed value we can measure it in in metal or in Grain or whatever but ultimately what we are actually measuring is you did something that I give a [ __ ] about M so I am going to do do something that you give a [ __ ]
• 25:30 - 26:00 about and if I were to if I were to somehow be able to create a society you the the currency would be the [ __ ] because it's you know that's what measures whether people give a [ __ ] or not it it's about what people care about yeah so this like ethereal spreadsheet in the sky that's tracking the favors people have rendered to one another and are then in turn owed from one another right
• 26:00 - 26:30 like I did I brought down the woolly mammoth and fed all 40 of you the 40 of you owe me something in the future for that then when I when I trip over a rock and break my foot the tribe is going to take care of me right because I have done something that they give a [ __ ] about yes and currency is basically a way of formalizing that relationship right so that we so that we can track it when there are so many human beings that
• 26:30 - 27:00 we can't sustain a mental model of it right and I find it very pleasing and amusing that the latest technological development in money goes back to it being a spreadsheet I love that yeah yeah so it really I mean just a mechanism for trading favors but it's one that allows us to offload the cognitive burden right that we don't
• 27:00 - 27:30 need to remember who who did what for who within our little 150 person Circle we can actually offload that to a mathematical system basically a spreadsheet I guess would be a mathematical framework of sorts and this allows us to increase the size of our Circle right past 150 and what that allows us to do is work on projects that require more than
• 27:30 - 28:00 150 people right like launching Rockets into space yes in some way this enables civilization yes yeah and over much longer periods of time too right because you can track obviously there's intergenerational wealth right people that have families that have created a lot of solutions to a lot of problems over a long period of time through their business enterprises they you can track that mathematically so we get this it it
• 28:00 - 28:30 becomes linguistic too because we now get the language of numeracy to discuss uh you know we go from the domain of the qualitative like what people have actually done for us but it's translated into the domain of the quantitative so you can see you know the hierarchies of wealth right who what is the net worth what is the Enterprise value of the business etc etc so what is the I guess we what are we doing here the Lo the loaded term is the [ __ ] right
• 28:30 - 29:00 it's like yes what I give a [ __ ] about what does that mean it's like what I care about yeah basically but it's being communicated in a way that's universally standardized right that's what mathematics is so I what is the linguistic there's something linguistic here like I'm trying to um this is something we wrestle with on the show a lot it's like uh one of the definitions of money the language of value or the language of
• 29:00 - 29:30 Human Action so what what is the linguistic quality of money what is it doing for us from like a communication standpoint well when I hear what you're saying here I I it all I almost want to go back to uh Thomas Soul MH and when he talks in his book basic economics he says that economics is the study of choice and it's the study of the allocation of
• 29:30 - 30:00 scarce resources that have alternative uses right so when we talk about somebody having done something that we give a [ __ ] about and that being the basis of currency what this helps us do is it helps us choose how we're going to use our efforts and direct our resources because the monetary value of something essentially
• 30:00 - 30:30 measures what a lot of people give a lot of [ __ ] about it's like if something has a high [ __ ] value what this really means is that we're this big group of hominids and a large number of people care intensely about this so maybe this is where we direct some significant amount of effort whereas if something
• 30:30 - 31:00 is is has less of a less Fox given then maybe it means that a lot of people care about it less intensely or maybe it means that a smaller amount of people care about it intensely so you know as Apes with tools there's so many things that we can spend our day doing MH we can spend our Day writing
• 31:00 - 31:30 you know we can spend our day brewing coffee and serving it to other people we can spend our day running a nuclear reactor but and we have to decide what is the most valuable thing that I can do and these this this currency is a language through which other humans can speak to us and tell us what they care about no that's wonderful the uh language of economists comes to mind
• 31:30 - 32:00 where they would say that the pricing system is that through which consumers reveal their preferences so you're actually telling people what you want right when you for instance buy a car well then you've taken a car off of the market so you've reduced the supply and therefore you you know put upward pressure on the price of that car which is signaling to all the producers of cars in the world well people give a [ __ ] about Transportation I guess in this case yeah let's produce more of those uh and the opposite is obviously
• 32:00 - 32:30 true as well when you sell something it's putting downward pressure and then producers are producing less um it so language like we we connect to each other we're doing it right now obviously we almost are connecting our the Interior Space of our minds to one another but that's not enough to reveal preferences in a way that's trustworthy but when you do it with money it's more
• 32:30 - 33:00 there's more of like this human energy component right so we have these phrases in our language like talk is cheap for instance um could we say that money is something like an energy language like it's telling us what what we have done or what we should be doing based on the preferences of other people something like that yeah well what with what you're getting at here I think the way I would put it is that it sort of Eli the process of lying to others and the
• 33:00 - 33:30 process of lying to ourselves you know when we say talk is cheap it it it's literally true it's it's free to say something it's very very low effort so we can express preferences that are performative like I don't actually want to spend my day going to the enim and appreciating great art because maybe I actually find
• 33:30 - 34:00 that boring and I would much rather watch science fiction movies but I want people to think of me as a sophisticated person so I'm going to lie about my preferences either to them or to myself but because currency requires effort I'm going to direct my
• 34:00 - 34:30 efforts towards the things that I actually care about so if other people if if money becomes a language of fxck given then other people can look at my economic activity they can look at how I spend my money and they can discern my real preferences and so we can we can cut through through this whole practice of
• 34:30 - 35:00 deception and self-deception and social politics and look at our actual priorities both as an individual and as as a group of people living and working together and we can we can direct our efforts in ways that are actually relevant to what we care about rather than just this sort of spin-off result of how we're trying
• 35:00 - 35:30 to present ourselves how do you think about the Distortion in the field of [ __ ] given that occurs when money is monopolized and printed or counterfeited so if there's I'm referring here specifically to the central bank obviously if there's one organization that can print money or produce it without effort as you said what how does that create distortions in this field of [ __ ] given in your well
• 35:30 - 36:00 in your view they're doing something that nobody cares about MH you know nobody wakes up in the morning you don't wake up in the morning I don't wake up in the morning and say gosh I wish somebody would spend 30 seconds writing a larger number in imaginary column MH and that is worth
• 36:00 - 36:30 $5 trillion to me it's not but the problem it's it's a hack in the system because if we have something else that's worth $5 trillion like a lot of this sort of wonderful Florida real estate that I drove to to come visit you um that's also worth5 trillion dollars we care a lot about that cuz people
• 36:30 - 37:00 actually give a [ __ ] about living on the land eating having shelter yeah yeah living around you know nice trees and near water and being able to go out sailing and so what we have is is a counterfeit [ __ ] we have a we have a fake expression of caring that nobody actually cares about so so people are doing things that
• 37:00 - 37:30 nobody wants and they've found a way to infect the system to to make it appear as if people care a great deal MH [Music] and you know counterfeiting was like this and the only distinction between counterfeiting and currency manipulation is whether you are the government and you can give yourself a permission slip to do it MH
• 37:30 - 38:00 but anytime you have a system for measuring value anytime you have a system that motivates people to do things that you care about there's going to be incentives to game that system and so a society is healthy when it's harder to game the system than it is to participate the system and sick when
• 38:00 - 38:30 it's easier to game the system than participate in that that's all and I think the the you know the driving motivation behind Bitcoin in particular cryptocurrency in general and this idea that we need a new wave of money is that we want to live in a society where it's easier to create than to cheat and steal because we would
• 38:30 - 39:00 rather be surrounded by creators than thieves absolutely that's wonderfully said you want to then create a spectrum of rewards and punishments that reward productive activity and punish anti-pr or non-productive activity right so if someone steals from you obviously they didn't create anything they they stole something that you produced we want legal penalties in
• 39:00 - 39:30 place to disincentivize that activity but we want uh like the profit motive for instance to motivate producers to solve problems that people want solved and so that that is the if I hear you correctly that's the game you're describing right that we were creating this economic the economy I guess use the broad term it is a game and we're wrestling with how to properly instantiate the rules such that we
• 39:30 - 40:00 operate productively and not uh self-destructively I guess if in the case of stealing and killing all destructively toward the acting in ways that destroy value yes in order to get some of the value for ourselves right so so to in Game Theory terms to tilt it further towards a positive sum game and further away from a zero sum game right yeah well this was actually something I played with in the the fictional
• 40:00 - 40:30 Universe of theft of fire and the orbital space series is that one of the trends I see is is uh the way to eliminate Warfare and the way that Warfare is eliminated is a a gradual move away from Warfare being efficient so if you think about and this this will become relevant in a moment um if you think about what
• 40:30 - 41:00 people fight over what has been the valuable resource has changed over time I mean in under primitive conditions it was land and it was it was physical resources and while things like land remains Val remain valuable we now have a condition where like okay technology
• 41:00 - 41:30 and technological knowhow are becoming a greater and greater source of value sure so you have you you can you can hope for and try to work for a world where where the things that have the most value are the things that it is not necessarily very efficient to steal like if we start becoming a multiplanetary species and we
• 41:30 - 42:00 colonize the solar system then all of a sudden you know here's these asteroids that are worth 60 quadrillion dollar on today's mineral market and of course what happens is the bottom falls out of the value of some of these material resources so it makes less and less sense to fight over them so
• 42:00 - 42:30 certainly you can set up rules where you punish people who steal MH and that's that's a thing that we want to do but I think as we've looked at the behavior of governments we've also seen that those who we put in power to punish stealing MH the thieves are incentivized to take
• 42:30 - 43:00 over that structure and I would say that's what we have going on with the United States federal government now we have a kleptocracy yeah where a government Run for the purpose of stealing but one of the things that technological progress can do for us is that it can move the greatest stores of value to things that are harder and harder to steal you you know designs technological ideas and that
• 43:00 - 43:30 technology can make the things that are easier to steal material resources land more and more plentiful right so it becomes you know if you can colonize all of Mars then maybe land is less valuable if you can mine all these asteroids gold is less valuable the store of value
• 43:30 - 44:00 becomes more and more who has the best technological ideas who has the designs who has the who has the expert population that can design things you can't steal any of that so there is some hope here simply in technological Trends but obviously we want to try to do everything we can voluntarily in our own
• 44:00 - 44:30 lives to try to reward creators and either punish thieves or simply make theft more trouble than it's worth right right right so yeah it this is an economics I guess the game boils down to the economics of stealing versus ucing in a way right like everyone wants more
• 44:30 - 45:00 of any whatever the thing is obviously there's uh a gradient a value gradient on all these the the morus however uh to produce something requires work to steal something also requires work in a way depending right depending how safeguarded it is the thre what I'm saying is you want to make the stealing take more work than the producing yes exactly and this I guess the the the Central pillar to this game Dynamic is
• 45:00 - 45:30 this institution of private property which we talk about a lot on this show right the idea that each person that expends the energy to create something of value has the right and the responsibility the right to enjoy it and the responsibility to take care of it if they wish to continue to enjoy it yeah they have the right to control it to control it exactly and when that social institution becomes violated I think you said about the US government's a great example right it's become a kleptocracy
• 45:30 - 46:00 well what are they doing they're violating people's private property rights through taxation through inflation through lockdowns even right through other forms of Fiat regulation where they say do this or else you know you will suffer the consequences all of these are encroachments on individuals control over their assets and thus their lives so so how do we how do you frame this up then because
• 46:00 - 46:30 I often uh I go to Hoppa definitions where he says socialism is aggression an institutionalized policy of aggression against private property and capitalism is an institutionalized policy of respect for private property forget multivitamins and other supplements animal organs are the most nutrient dense foods on the planet you can get 100 times more nutrients from organs than you can from muscle Meats but the problem with eating organs is
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• 47:00 - 47:30 heartand oil.co today and use discount code breed love to get started on your journey to Optimal Health and vitality again that's heartand soil. discount code breed love have you ever wanted to start a business in the Bitcoin space if so then the wolf startup accelerator could be for you wolf is the first startup accelerator dedicated exclusively to businesses developing in the Bitcoin
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• 48:00 - 48:30 again that's wolf WF nc.com I know you have some some different views here but I'd love to hear you elaborate on private property socialism and capitalism oh yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm I'm absolutely twitching to get at this I like to frame it in in a slightly different way I mean obviously I agree with you because what you're what you're talking about implies a little bit of a moral angle where it's
• 48:30 - 49:00 like if I create it I have I have the right to control it and that is absolutely true but when we talk to people in moral language about private property we are pushing against what they're used to we are pushing against this idea that they're used to paying a 30% tax on income or whatever and that's normal and
• 49:00 - 49:30 we're paying things with it you know oh you need to pay your fair share you know and there's a lot of this sort of distorted language used by thieves to pretend that it's selfish to keep what you made and it's somehow un not selfish to to steal what other people have made and I agree with all that but I think there's another angle to look at this which really provides
• 49:30 - 50:00 additional Clarity and that is that taking what somebody else has produced and removing their control of it is not simply morally wrong it's more importantly an anti- civilizational force it tears down yeah because what civilization is what separates us from our
• 50:00 - 50:30 beastial state of nature is that we have this massive pile of stuff and we built that stuff with effort and that effort is invested by individual human beings in the hopes of controlling what they build and improving their lives and if you create an environment where someone can come along and take it from
• 50:30 - 51:00 you whether it's a man with a gun or a man with a legal document or a man with powerful friends then there is no longer an incentive to to expend that effort to build and we stop piling up that stuff MH that those resources that that
• 51:00 - 51:30 infrastructure that technology that separates us from chasing the antelopes with sharp sticks and so this is this is this is how private property is not just a moral imperative it's a survival imperative it's a civilizational imperative it's if you if we
• 51:30 - 52:00 steal if we institutionalize stealing we can't have nice things no one can have nice things because no one will make nice things right now that's wonderful yeah the the pile of stuff that separates us from being Cav men and women basically uh I guess economists would call that like the stock of goods right consumer goods and capital goods all of this wealth that we've created across
• 52:00 - 52:30 generations and accumulated right we've accumulated all of these Goods again consumer and capital goods and that is civilization in a way right I mean I I obviously there's other things that we get we get these these Norms we get um uh obviously our language improves we get social institutions we have these other sort of intangible things that come along along with that but the intangibles are made possible like we
• 52:30 - 53:00 have the luxury to discover or produce the intangibles by virtue of having accumulated the tangible goods yes so this is when So when you say to attack private property or to violate private property it is literally a decivilizing force you're you're almost like pulling that thread right because the general expectation amongst people in a civilized society is that right like whatever you earn you get to
• 53:00 - 53:30 keep and you can trade it with other people but if you start to pull that thread and all of a sudden you don't get to keep what you earn whether it's 10% 20% 30% uh again HOA makes this point is like you start to to unwind that process that pile of goods capital and consumer goods that's growing ever larger and further separating us from our animalistic ways start there can reach a point where it starts actually we start to draw down that stock of
• 53:30 - 54:00 goods and therefore we start regressing as a civilization yeah and it and it's not impossible for that to happen basically yeah oh yeah yeah you're chipping away at the base of the pillar yeah and you said something that I want to sort of repeat and emphasize because I think it's so important all of these intangibles that go with civilization are luxuries and I think you are 100%
• 54:00 - 54:30 correct about that and I you people a lot of people think of history in terms of social progress and they say oh you know well we used to live in caves and eat each other and then some somebody said you know o think it wrong to eat other people and everybody goes wow oo brilliant and then we have progress and that's not how it
• 54:30 - 55:00 works Justice is a luxury Notions of justice and ethics and social progress are luxuries and this is not that they're not important this is not that they're not necessary to a civilization but it's important to understand that they were purchased with material Goods right because if you want to have something like the rule of law
• 55:00 - 55:30 mhm if you want to have a justice system you need police officers and you need courts and you need lawyers and you need all these people who are spending their entire day doing something than other than whacking at the dirt with a stick to feed themselves we have to have all these people in employed in in in giving us this stuff so we need to have a a
• 55:30 - 56:00 material wealth enough to feed this system so all of the ethical progress we have had in Civilization is simply a side effect of the material progress and if the material progress is taken away by people chipping at the base of the pillar then we will go back to Bandit
• 56:00 - 56:30 kingdoms and Warlords and this sort of thing and and so we need to understand this this anti-pry forces as not just being anti-civilization and not just being personally unethical but as destroying the very thing that
• 56:30 - 57:00 allows us to have an ethical and Cooperative Society that's so [ __ ] good and I'm I'm I'm seeing now the um the hypocrisy is becoming more emphasized of say a modern uh liberal for instance right where they're saying tax the rich right we need to steal more from the rich as if that's an ethical claim stealing from the rich and giving to the poor presumably which is not what
• 57:00 - 57:30 they actually do that that is somehow an ethical action that needs to be taken but what you're describing is that's again it's hypocrisy right if you're advocating for theft to steal from someone you're actually reducing the incentives for anyone to be productive and to add to that stock of goods and services which is the substrate for all the ethicality and morality and all these other tangibles we have on top they're actually saying let's draw down
• 57:30 - 58:00 that material base which draws down the intangible yes intangibles but they're asserting it as if it's an intangible good using the ethics to destroy the ethics yes it's an inversion and it's it's an inversion in another way as well because who are the rich people the rich people are the rich people people who got rich because they somebody gave a lot of [ __ ] about what
• 58:00 - 58:30 they're doing right so when you say we want to take this measure of [ __ ] away from the people who are doing the things that people give a [ __ ] about and give them to people who AR doing things that people don't give a [ __ ] about then we are a essentially subverting the revealed preferences of
• 58:30 - 59:00 our entire population we're saying oh you know if you want I we want we want to tax the people who are we want to take we want to take the value away from the people who are doing things you care about and give it to people who who are doing things you don't care about right and this is uh my my agent is over there in the corner waving her hands at me reminding me to this is something that I
• 59:00 - 59:30 call a death morality okay have you heard me use that term no please okay a death morality is any morality that destroys the individuals or systems who embrace it okay like a nihilism of sorts well even more than a nihilism because nihilism I would Define as as believing in no value system okay this is belief in a value system anti
• 59:30 - 60:00 system that that destroys you so that your ethics no longer exist got it like I'm going to be too broadminded to take my own side I'm going to be anti- bigoted anti-racist and prefer people from outside my culture to people in my culture and this is going to tear down my civilization and then my ethics will no longer exist because I no longer exist it's a self- swallowing morality
• 60:00 - 60:30 yes this is the self-destructiveness of evil too right that that quote came to mind I don't know if I can say this exactly right maybe it's Mark Twain that a fine is a tax for doing wrong and a tax is a fine for doing well or doing right and this this idea of just eating the seed corn right where you're you know oh people are hungry feed them the seed corn right it's this
• 60:30 - 61:00 short-termist sort of thinking that that I I is it just born of ignorance I guess we're just one of the the hypothesis I have is that we're sort of emerging from the economic Dark Ages largely than to thanks to bitcoin eclipsing the central bank that we're going to wake up to these the obvious reality and hindsight that political machinations cannot improve economic reality at all actually all political activ is anti-economic um is this is this just a
• 61:00 - 61:30 process of that that we're Awakening to economic reality well if we if we look at this from a different angle if we take sort of a different slice through the Apple what occurs to me when you say this is there there is a certain sort of bubble mentality because when you create civilization
• 61:30 - 62:00 when you create value you're creating a bubble you're creating an area virtual or physical where the the ordinary condition of nature which is poverty disease and death does not apply right so the garden again right yeah yeah the garden and the garden has a wall and when you create the bubble and people live in the bubble long
• 62:00 - 62:30 enough they start to disbelieve in the existence of the bubble they start to think that the bubble is is normal life yeah and so what you get with these people who you describe as eating the seed corn or advocating eating the seed corn their their concern is with how do we share the resources MH
• 62:30 - 63:00 because they have lived in a bubble for so long that they on some level believe that they live in a post economic Society yeah and scarcity no longer exists they use that term too post scarcity world the the garden covers the world and now all we have to do is share so there there's this belief that the problem of generating wealth of
• 63:00 - 63:30 advancing civilization of creating technology is already solved and nothing we do to redistribute is going to mess with that yeah because it's all sewn up already and I think that's the reason that you get Super Rich socialists in the Jet Set mhm it's maybe some of it's manipulative but a lot of it is is based
• 63:30 - 64:00 on their reality they live in a bubble where scarcity doesn't exist and they mistake the conditions of their bubble for the place that the tech stack has brought the entire universe to this is uh schopenhauer is coming to mind here that every man takes the limits of his field of vision for the limits of reality yes right the people are just in the as you said the bubble or the the garden and
• 64:00 - 64:30 they are so well insulated from the poverty disease death of of nature entropy of nature that they forget that that's what's real um what so I we talked about private property but this other aspect of the planning right so it's like okay well to build a garden requires some planning how should we be thinking about who's doing the planning for the construction of this Garden like should
• 64:30 - 65:00 is this something that needs to be done centrally or is this something that needs to be done uh in a more decentralized fashion well so that's a bit of a leading question yeah I mean obviously everyone who's listening knows the answer because they're smart enough to have at some point opened up a history book yeah and they realize that
• 65:00 - 65:30 every every time someone has said we're the smart people and we're going to make a plan to do it better it always gets worse M you know sometimes worse to the point of mass Graves sometimes just measurably worse right and so you know when when we talk about a garden you know maybe that's not the best metaphor
• 65:30 - 66:00 because a garden is something that's small enough that one person can plan it but a civilization isn't so maybe if we think about it as a bubble we can say okay we're we're expanding this bubble of peace and prosperity by pushing the boundaries little by little out into the world
• 66:00 - 66:30 but because our brains are limited by dunbar's number there is no human being however intelligent whose mind can Encompass the holy economy that's why we use this this price as language to this is what a a vast amount of people care a lot about well th those are the components of the bubble
• 66:30 - 67:00 like if if if it's profitable to make air conditioners that means that okay there's there's a lot of people living in hot climates and they want to be cool and that's part of that bubble of nice things that we get to have and if we start ignoring those price signals then we don't even know what the bubble is is we don't know what civilization is we don't know what the
• 67:00 - 67:30 niess the distinguishes the bubble from the chaos outside is yeah we don't know what we have nor what we want in a way right because those preferences are not being revealed yeah uh adequately at least so what how does in in your book then you said you sort of looked into the a a possible future I guess for this bubble what does it look like like what does government
• 67:30 - 68:00 look like what does I don't want you to spoil the book at all but I'm just curious like how where we are today versus the a better vision for the future is that something that you paint in this book oh yes yes yes well this is this is definitely sort of your old school science fiction where you're going to talk about you know how can we become more powerful and in the future technologically and Implement a a society that is Advanced over what we
• 68:00 - 68:30 have today and I looked at this and I I looked at sort of some of the things I see happening and one of the things that you see is that Frontier societies tend to be tremendously libertar mhm and they TR tend to be tremendously
• 68:30 - 69:00 productive and one of the things I thought about here because in this fictional setting you know orbital society that which exists outside Earth does not have a central government or large governments or perhaps anything that can be described as a government at all they have a lot of contracts they have some rulle rules based on private property ownership where you know I'm I own this station
• 69:00 - 69:30 I'm going to set up some rules for conduct on it but there's nothing that can be described as a government and where I saw this going is that if you look at Frontier societies if you look at the American West it was or America at all colonial America it was very lightly governed MH and the reason was is
• 69:30 - 70:00 that when you have a certain a certain population average of high IQ and high agency pro- social people you maybe need a little bit of contract dispute settlement but they tend to cooperate they tend to use their words to settle things and so you really just need to get out of their way and let them get on with it MH so I
• 70:00 - 70:30 envisioned space and the gravity well as being the next great filter where people who can't get their lives together aren't going to be able to get out of the gravity well into space so what does it look like when you have a Society full of people with technical Specialties whose average IQ
• 70:30 - 71:00 is 115 or 120 or whatever it would be it's like okay now you don't need a lot of governments now you don't need a lot of regulations now you can focus on cooperating to build your Tex stack instead of using the legal process to Wrangle over resources and I actually focused on three technologies that I thought would be very exciting in the future space
• 71:00 - 71:30 colonization um computer science in the sense of artificial intelligence you know both true artificial intelligence and developing better expert systems for doing tasks and biotech genetic manipulation and these all have very very very very high almost unimaginably high
• 71:30 - 72:00 potential upsides but right now they're at risk from this sort of knee-jerk possibility of Regulation where the progress can be interrupted by government so I drew a future where the centralized regulatory role was occupied by Earth and the decentralized unregulated
• 72:00 - 72:30 role was was taking place in orbital space and you know my goal was not to create a Utopia where this is good and this is bad and I'm going to preach to you it's let's explore the ramifications in both ways where you obviously have some some unintended consequences of this sort of unrel unregulated Technology but you have a vast expansion
• 72:30 - 73:00 of wealth whereas the the centralized sort of planned economy governed societies tend to be held back but you have much more ability to sort of predict the future because you're controlling the future and I think that's that's a big he of Regulation that statists go to it's like
• 73:00 - 73:30 we want to know what's going to happen so we're going to create restrictions right yeah I'm the visual for me is going back to that bubble actually because there is some well let's see the you want the core of your bubble to be sort of stable and predictable and controlled right but you want the the edges to be able to adapt to changes in the
• 73:30 - 74:00 environment um I I don't know what am I trying the tendency towards centralization would tend to be stronger in as you said you in your book it's on earth right so in the older civilization there tends to be a larger uh tendency towards centralization whereas in the frontier orbital space it's much more libertarian right it's a it's a it's a free-for-all basically well it's it's based on people sorting yeah is you know you have the risk averse
• 74:00 - 74:30 people yes staying in the safe place right and this this causes them to this causes a concentration of people that that favor a risk averse policy right where they think a lot about potential downsides and then you have the very risk tolerant High agency people who are going to go take the risks and then you have this other area where you have a
• 74:30 - 75:00 high concentration of people who like Risk because they think about the potential upside and obviously since this this this show we're doing right now is very Bitcoin adjacent obviously we're talking in front of an audience of risk-takers you know people who said all this this uh this cryptocurrency stuff that's kind
• 75:00 - 75:30 of interest I'm I'm going to put 10 $20,000 in that and see what happens you know yeah yeah people that are yeah it's a a good framing right you're looking at risk in a way that you're seeing the upside not just the downside but people that see it the other way would tend to almost Retreat towards the center right where things are stable and F You' got higher predictability
• 75:30 - 76:00 stability L risk but also less reward whereas people that are more attracted to risk-taking will operate near the edges where there is less stability less predictability but therefore more potential upside and downside for that matter yeah and that sorting function is a good thing yeah because it's revealed preference right we would like to have people people be able to to live in places or in in Societies in
• 76:00 - 76:30 conditions that match their preferences and we would like to not be ruled by people who don't have preferences that match ours right and one of the things that we're experiencing right now is that we as a species we don't have a lot of Frontier territory right now so those of us who are very
• 76:30 - 77:00 comfortable with risk and are very focused on the upside of risk are having to live alongside those who are not very comfortable with risk and having to share political units with them and having to have arguments about them about whether certain risks should be allowed MH and I think what space colonization does is it allows us
• 77:00 - 77:30 to leave those people in a place where they can set a whole bunch of policy and mitigate the risks they're afraid of or at least they they think they are and socialism has its own risks but try telling them that and like okay we can we can establish Societies or social units or
• 77:30 - 78:00 physical areas that are free to be populated just with more risk tolerant people where we can cooperate to say okay we're now we're we're going to build something and so you know that you get a lot of you get a lot of socialist types talking about oh you're you're trying to escape to space to you know to escape the global warming and yeah no what
• 78:00 - 78:30 we're trying to escape is you what we're trying to escape is is you you know risk averse Central planning resource redistributors that are the reason that we can't have nice things which is maybe part of that sorting function as well right like maybe we need to be annoyed by them enough to want to go and conqu the the oceans and the stars and all of these things yeah um what so you mentioned AI
• 78:30 - 79:00 space colonization and biotechnology SL Gene manipulation are you able to talk about those themes uh oh sure how they manifest in the book without giving anything away like I'm just curious what type of sci-fi is going on in this book I actually I actually have three major characters and each one of them is tied in with one of those technological there's there's a uh a failed asteroid
• 79:00 - 79:30 minor whose business is circling the drain and he gets blackmailed and and and his his expertise his Tech stack is all about space travel and asteroid Mining and space exploration and doing physical stuff in space and then the second character The ays Who blackmails him is so Gene manipulated that she is essentially posthuman oh wow so a lot of what
• 79:30 - 80:00 her character presentation talks about the kinds of things that we can do and the kinds of things that people will do you know with ourselves the moment we have the capability and you know it's it's not all deep-minded stuff some of it's revealed preference rather than you know the the philosophical stuff people say they like let's make ourselves smarter MH okay great yeah they we're also going
• 80:00 - 80:30 to try to make ourselves cuter you know we're going to do it doing that you know um and then the third character who is revealed somewhat later so I won't say too much about her is a is a prototype artificial intelligence oh okay and her character explores some of what does it mean when we create something that is essentially a
• 80:30 - 81:00 person but not a human huh and how do we deal with that as a species and how does that new organism coexist with us and I had a lot of fun with that because every almost every science fiction treatment of true artificial intelligence you know where it's not just like the the ship says the oxygen levels are falling it's just a plot
• 81:00 - 81:30 device they always seem to fall into one of two tropes they're either Pinocchio and they want to be a real boy yeah or they're the Terminator and they want to exterminate the organic meat bags yeah and I was like neither of these things is going to happen right you know of all the things that are going to not happen those two things are going to not happen the most so this is going to be something
• 81:30 - 82:00 entirely new when we create software life it's going to be something new and maybe it will be resemble ourselves cuz we'll copy off ourselves and we'll create ourselves and you know maybe we'll maybe we'll have some success in translating people into software so we can not die of old age which would be nice yeah But ultimately this is going to be a new form of existence with its
• 82:00 - 82:30 own rules and principles and those people whether they were human or they're entirely new are going to have to figure out their place in the universe and it's not going to be gosh I wish I were organic and can die in hundred years and and it's not going to be I want to mindlessly kill every organic thing so that we can have a
• 82:30 - 83:00 fight plot it's going to be what is what is the purpose of my existence what what do I want what do I give a [ __ ] about what gives meaning to my life and this character has to has to answer those questions fascinating uh don't give it away if it does but I'm just curious I would imagine this gets
• 83:00 - 83:30 into kind of the ethical status of this new oh certain form of life like is it human is it not human like how does it fit into our views of one another like imagine there's some tension there oh yeah yeah well that was that was something that was first explored by by William Gibson in Neuromancer which I don't know you've read I would highly recommend it it's it's probably one of the simal science fiction works on AI
• 83:30 - 84:00 okay yeah he talks in this one scene about how the uh the uh the the hardware and the the the database are the property of the corporation that made it and but the AI is considered a citizen and somebody remarks gee I own your brain and what you know but your thoughts have Swiss
• 84:00 - 84:30 citizenship yeah great deal lots of luck Ai and there's there's going to be some tension in the future there I mean right now the what we create that we call artificial intelligences are basically just neural Nets mhm that serve a purpose and they're tools and there's no real ethical consideration there but
• 84:30 - 85:00 eventually we're going to reach a point where somebody is going to create something that is clearly understandable as being a person but the effort of having created them is going to represent a very large investment H and you know this is a question that we have grappled with in ancient
• 85:00 - 85:30 history because of you know what are the rights and responsibilities of parents with respect to children but this is going to be a whole new form of that and it's going to be unfamiliar so we're going to have to renegotiate that question at some point wow that's going to have repercussions on legal systems ethical systems moral
• 85:30 - 86:00 everything yeah yeah you know right now we talk about human rights yeah and that's absolutely a fair thing to do because we are humans and I don't think we should be too broadminded to take our own side and you know I'll stop eating animals when you persuade them to stop eating each other so you know we're not going there but we can we can we can shape the discourse about rights and
• 86:00 - 86:30 individuality and the ability to own property around Humanity because right now all of our sentient members of society are human we're the only rational animal that we know of but when we introduce a new rational animal how do we we then we have to say okay how do we have a society with two different types of rational animals especially
• 86:30 - 87:00 when one of them is Immortal and can be connected to potentially unlimited amounts of processing power wow and so you know one possible solution is well if we have a superior way of being sentient then maybe maybe we try to become that MH you know maybe maybe we can as a
• 87:00 - 87:30 species transcend our meat substrate and you know that's something that's been talked about recently and there's there's a lot of push back on that because it feels sort of Egghead the transhumanism thing yeah yeah yeah you know it it's it's it people have objected to sort of the tech bro Vibe of that but I think that that in the long run you know when we when we really
• 87:30 - 88:00 develop the ability to control who and what we are we won't be deciding these issues with well that's unnatural or or or these sort of these sort of vibe judgments like that we'll be able to look at what it what it's actually like to be a software intelligence versus to be a biological human being so right now we don't have we don't have that choice
• 88:00 - 88:30 yeah we don't have the choice about what to be we are what genetic accidents make us yeah but I think that developing artif independent artificial intelligence is going to be a preview of the the choices we have to make when we develop the ability to manipulate our own own essential genetic nature I was just going to what do you
• 88:30 - 89:00 call that we are what genetic accidents make us I was curious about the line really between we use this term artificial intelligence but if we do it correctly then it's basically we're probably reproducing natural intelligence in a way right like one one emerges as a series of accidents but then that series of accidents that led to the emergence of us then led to the emergence of this AI thing so this L like where maybe this
• 89:00 - 89:30 is a philosophical question where is the line between the artificial and the natural right is it is it just having gone through the hands of man or like that is that is a very astute question and a lot of people they use the term natural very casually MH to mean oh you know this this swamp is natural and you know this this Miami
• 89:30 - 90:00 condo is not but what they really mean by that is this was built by a human and this wasn't because if you show them a termite Mound yeah right or if you show them a bat Colony they will say this is natural mhm and they will often use this term term natural as sort of an intellectual bludgeon to advance an anti-human
• 90:00 - 90:30 agenda like whenever a human being does something or builds something that's not natural we need to cut down on that whereas any anything that else that happens in nature oh that's natural and that's good [Music] and you know it's it's like saying things are made out of chemicals well everything is made out of chemicals you know everything is in some sense natural
• 90:30 - 91:00 so often when people use this word natural what it really is is just an appeal to an appeal to the basic fact that we kind of like trees better than concrete you know they're prettier and I think that's important an aesthetic appeal that's important but we need to we need to understand that that's what we're saying yeah we're not we're not saying oh the the actions of man upon the
• 91:00 - 91:30 environment are morally bad right what we're saying is I like trees I like to live around trees let's not build concrete hives to live in because that is unpleasant yeah but we also like concrete right I mean it's I think revealed preference yeah revealed preference right it's one of the most abundant things on earth I think maybe the most abundant man-made thing on
• 91:30 - 92:00 earth is or close to it I imagine well again this is this is a scale of revealed preference you know my uh agent over there who who helps me do all these shows you know she loves Chicago if she had her way she would live in Chic in a in a walk able neighborhood in Chicago and bike everywhere and you get everything from
• 92:00 - 92:30 Little shops and this is this is a high preference for having a lot of your environment consists of humans and human byproducts and if I had my way I would live somewhere on a Mountaintop by a lake with lots of trees and you know a good internet connection but this is a high preference
• 92:30 - 93:00 for living with relatively few with relatively little of your environment shaped by humans and a lot of it shaped by nature and so again just as as we like to have people be able to sort by risk tolerance preference we would like to have people be able to sort by population density sure preference yeah
• 93:00 - 93:30 so and I realize that I'm taking this question of uh of that what is natural yeah in an aesthetic Direction but I think I think there are some parallels because there are people who will not accept artificial intelligences As Natural life forms and they will not want they will not want to associate with with them yeah and some other people will want to marry them right and
• 93:30 - 94:00 it's like allow people to sword on their preference right yeah now that's fantastic um the PE the using it as an intellectual bludgeon to advance the anti-human agenda right you hear these absurd phrases like humans are a cancer on the planet and it's a human espousing that opinion mhm it just death morality it is a yeah the death morality and simultaneously I
• 94:00 - 94:30 think a performative contradiction CU like you are a human sitting there articulating this opinion like yeah they're not talking about themselves exactly they're saying all you other people are a cancer on the planet we need to cut the population of you guys yeah so that I can inhabit my Utopia right you know people who talk about sustainability ignoring the fact that
• 94:30 - 95:00 that you know steady state sustainable environments are never how human beings have done anything and they are not how we have succeeded we have always innovated our way into larger and larger worlds and there is in space in the universe to do so forever but people who talk about sustainability and how we need to cut
• 95:00 - 95:30 down and cut back are are never volunteering to be the ones who cut down or the people who get cut back but this invalidates what they're saying right it's like if I hate to be so brutal about it but if someone's saying that the only thing if they actually meant it the only way they could prove that they actually meant it to me it's like suicide on the spot it's like if you actually thought that was a thing and you need it was a pathogen on the planet
• 95:30 - 96:00 and I think you're not being brutal enough I think it would be an excellent idea if they would do that and get out of the way of the rest of us what how I mean how does this particular mind virus penetrate people like how how how is the performative contradiction not evident to others it seems so abundantly obvious to me I can't like it's like The Shining son right in your eyes how does this work on other people's rationality how what is this what is this hijacking of the human
• 96:00 - 96:30 rationality that's occurring when you get these death moralities or performative contradictions that we're talking about I think we have to reexamine our our assumption that objectivity is the default condition you know when we talk about objectivity and we talk about philosophy these are conversations that are held throughout history between people who like to write
• 96:30 - 97:00 things down in books and have IQs of 130 and above MH and that is not your typical human being yeah it is how small of a subset is that the 130 and above is 10% 5% uh quite small yeah I five one sorry interrupt I was just curious um I think I think I think maybe 125 is 1% I'm not really sure um
• 97:00 - 97:30 but the point is that a number exists the point is that a boundary exists [Music] and the comparing all of your beliefs for consistency is not a default human activity mhm and having all your beliefs be consistent is not a default human state
• 97:30 - 98:00 if you talk to a a great number of people you find things like they are unable to imagine what they would do in a different emotional state than they are now in MH you know there are a lot of people who have trouble with the breakfast test how would you feel if you had not had breakfast this morning so there are these basic basic basic
• 98:00 - 98:30 cognitive tasks of objective thinking that are Beyond a lot of people and if you add to that the number of people who are smart but they're their social and material purposes are served by not being aware of something M you know the the the forebrain is a storytelling engine that's why we like stories you
• 98:30 - 99:00 know we we invent stories to explain things and so a lot of the time we'll have something that we want and you know this frontal cortex will get busy writing a story about how it makes s this is default human activity this is how we contend for social status and resources so when you ask how can people be
• 99:00 - 99:30 completely unable to do this what what you're really looking at is that this is a special capability which only a small percentage of humanity has so small percentage of humanity can generate the story or ideology large percentage can install it or adopt it whatever the term is here what then
• 99:30 - 100:00 is the motivation of the small percentage of people producing such antihuman ideologies like what is to be gained is it just control over people I don't necessarily always think that this is deliberate because when you write a story you know when you write these Just So Stories you can be persuading other people but you can also be persuading yourself and it is a great advantage to a con man to believe his own lies right
• 100:00 - 100:30 okay so post Haw rationalization yeah yeah what I'm saying is that post Hawk rationalizations Just So Stories you know AR priori reasoning all of these are the default mode of human functioning right and so so asking why people don't do this is like asking why people are
• 100:30 - 101:00 poor poverty is the default condition you want to ask why are people wealthy what creates wealth so what you what you really want to ask is is why are why are some people able to assemble a a a consistent set of beliefs that help them understand the universe
• 101:00 - 101:30 yeah I'm I'm back and how can we have more of that I'm back to this whole relationship between the material as the kind of the substrate for the you know the intangibles right the cerebral or the ethical and so it's it's maybe C well I guess through the accumulation of goods right capital goods consumer goods that we gave people the freedom to sit around and philosophies and a few of those people happen to be 125 IQ plus whatever right
• 101:30 - 102:00 place right time wrote the right book that had the right distribution that then becomes uh permeated into the the you know what do we call this accumulation of knowledge over time and then the other 99% of people that aren't capable of producing that then install that and so this is not only are we up I are we upgrading our physical capital but we're upgrading our non-physical cognitive Capital over time as well through this process it
• 102:00 - 102:30 sounds like so then are more people capable of you can get bad installs like this anti-human ideology but obviously and if you look at the whole Arch like or the the whole Arc rather of human history like it's overwhelmingly positive right we've moved towards more abundance more Prosperity more freedom more population all of these things like we're we're being fruitful and multiplying but there's definitely if you zoom in you know periods of yeah progress regress Etc so
• 102:30 - 103:00 what I I think I think I see a little bit where you're going with this the the I don't know where I'm going with this so I hope you do well well I'll I'll have a stab at it um one of one of the the I think one of the first and most powerful human inventions and it's probably prehuman in its basic Origins is language yeah agree and what
• 103:00 - 103:30 language allows us to do is that Humanity has has like a very small percentage of people who are innovators but since we have language these sort of Genius innovators we can make a much larger segment of our popul tion you know like implementers or in imitators yeah right able to functionally be that Genius Like
• 103:30 - 104:00 You Don't Have To Be Tesla to plug in this microphone you just have to have somebody who understands what Tesla is talking about right and can use that to make microphones yeah so we have essentially a population that is able to in some ways function on the level of our best Geniuses right
• 104:00 - 104:30 despite being nowhere near that and so naturally we we sometimes develop some silly beliefs but all of these sort of ways of looking at the world and belief systems and thoughts about you know how to connect membranes to electromagnets and ways to bang the Rocks together can all be thought of a little bit like
• 104:30 - 105:00 investments in a capitalist Market where you're trying economic experiments or you're trying you know cognitive experiments and then everybody imitates yes the winners and these things are subject to Evolution as well and the danger of course is that sometimes you generate ideas that are so
• 105:00 - 105:30 pernicious that they can wipe out the substrate that you have ideas in what I call death morality communism Marxism yeah right yeah it's like Marxism is a bad idea and in a free market of ideas you would like to say well you know let's just let the Marxism die out but what the Marxism does is it tries to destroy the free market of ideas itself
• 105:30 - 106:00 it tries to destroy everything so sometimes you have to take a more active role of intervention you know we can't just we can't just let the Socialists be wrong and let history prove the Socialists are wrong because we're unwilling to AC accept the mountain of corpses and the technological and civilizational collapse that the the process of failing
• 106:00 - 106:30 on its own involves right right right yeah the the term mutation came to mind but it's as if you know Marxism right from each according to their ability to each according to their need it sounds wonderful in a way if you just don't think about it too much yeah it's like oh well abilities needs match them up we're all good right but as soon as you apply some thinking like wait a minute who
• 106:30 - 107:00 determines yeah what's the incentive to produce there who determines need who arbitrates this thing you're sort of you're you're you're implying centralized power right well if you look at if you look at the the German and I'm not I haven't done this in a while so I may not be completely correct here but if I'm remembering correct ly a better translation would be from each according to his abilities to each according to his
• 107:00 - 107:30 labor except that is a dangerous idea in of itself because isn't that what private property basically is like how does you no no no no no no well I mean it's the labor theory of value the labor Theory value is very dang okay you're right it's got to be [ __ ] given has to be attached to the labor it has to be attach you know it labor that people give a [ __ ] about yeah yeah it has to [ __ ] are given about results not efforts otherwise we could all just dig
• 107:30 - 108:00 holes in the desert and fill them up again right of course yeah no so that's great I was yeah from each according to their abilities to each according to their labor that other people give a [ __ ] about that would be what we actually want but that is not the abolition of private property that's the perfectional private property from from according to their abilities to each according to their results yeah results right yeah we we want to
• 108:00 - 108:30 reward yeah know a lot of a lot of people get stuck on this idea of oh you know in capitalist societies you know there are these people who get filthy rich by barely working at all well good good because that means we are Mass we are massively rewarding somebody who figured out how to how to do something
• 108:30 - 109:00 people give a [ __ ] about without expending much effort that's exactly what we want right yeah yes we we want we want wealth inequality wealth inequality is good because it means you are rewarding rare Innovation events yes exactly yeah the question is not you know what is What is the gap between the rich and the poor it's you know what is the absolute measure of wealth
• 109:00 - 109:30 inequality it's it's how much does the Baseline person have yes what is the absolute wealth of the Baseline member of your Society that's what you want to raise yes exactly yeah standard of living and it's almost IM immeasurable in a way because the qualitative dimension is very difficult to account for right like having access to Refrigeration or antibiotics or whatever it's like the
• 109:30 - 110:00 that's hard to to quantify in a way you have to quantify it through revealed preference number of [ __ ] given yeah we do it through yeah like GDP I guess would be kind of the thing right uh more people living longer lives producing more stuff and then we create this metric called GDP but but the real the qualita lived experience is we're back to that thing of civilization right like it's a whole another world we've literally created we're sitting in it
• 110:00 - 110:30 right now right surrounded by paintings and lights and cameras and microphones and all this specialization that's accumulated in knowledge over time like I don't know how to do any of this [ __ ] I can't make anything in this room no one does but we're benefiting from it no one does there is there is no single person alive that knows how to build everything that is in this one room that we are sitting in it requires that cooperation yeah the Fantastic essay on this I don't know if you ever read it I
• 110:30 - 111:00 pencil it's a great economics essay just talks about constructing a pencil and how much collaboration is involved it's really wonderful do you want to give your kids a foundation of Freedom an understanding of Bitcoin and a healthy skepticism of government then you should try Tuttle twins Tuttle twins is a cartoon tune about a grandma with a time traveling wheelchair who takes her grandkids on hilarious Adventures to learn about economics and freedom think the
• 111:00 - 111:30 education of Magic School Bus meets The Comedy of The Simpsons with Tuttle twins your kids will learn about Bitcoin from Satoshi Nakamoto Civil Disobedience from Harriet Tubman natural rights from John Lock and how to destroy the economy from Carl Marx today Hollywood greenlights a lot of woke content or mindless garbage each episode of Tuttle twins is parent funded parent vetted and only released when it is parent approved because Tuttle twins is fanf funded it was the
• 111:30 - 112:00 world's first kid show to teach about Bitcoin that episode alone has been seen by over 40 million people and was tweeted by Michael sailor you can watch episodes of Tuttle twins for free right now and if you like what you see you can watch dozens of Tuttle twins episodes when you subscribe to the angel Studios app so go to angel.com breed love to discover Tuttle twins today one of my highest health priorities is keeping my brain in top
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• 113:00 - 113:30 mindlabpro tocom Breedlove so Innovation is inherently uh uncertain it's an uncertain process right like well it's it's disruptive disruptive yeah it it disrupts the status quo and I think that is maybe one of the main sources of anti- innovation
• 113:30 - 114:00 because imagine imagining that which does not exist MH is a lot harder than Imagining the loss of that which does exist right so anytime you have some potential progress It's it's very easy for people to say well the buggy whip manufacturers the horse whip manufacturers will be put out of business by this new you know motor
• 114:00 - 114:30 velocipede thingy the Horseless Carriage and that is and that is bad because it's it's easy to imagine the downside and it's not and it's not easy to imagine the upside yeah but also the uh that which exists has people who who benefit by it and that which does not yet exists only has people who hope to benefit by
• 114:30 - 115:00 it right so there's always this sort of inherent fearfulness on the part of certain parts of the population where where they think they're focusing on a specific negative change right but they would have that same negative change Focus for literally any change that that looked like it was going to happen yeah yeah the this people fear what they do not understand yeah um the other thing
• 115:00 - 115:30 that came to mind was the the scene versus the Unseen right there's the scene right the buggy Whip and the buggy manufacturer and all the jobs and all the integration and food on the tables and roofs over their heads that those jobs are providing people but then there's the Unseen which is just this possible future of doing things differently right having Horseless carriages right automobiles rather rather than having the horse buggy and the whip like that is a challenge of
• 115:30 - 116:00 imagination right it's unseen it's never been seen it started in whoever Henry Ford's imagination and then that had to be uh produced for people to I guess then actually engage with that that new reality so there's this there's an asymmetry there I guess and then the last part you were saying too is those existing economic interests have they're entrenched right they have they will defend their Turf yeah they have a
• 116:00 - 116:30 budget they have a budget they have yes exactly they have resources um so how do we is this another mind virus thing that we need to learn from history not to fear Innovation that you know although it can be destructive or disruptive to jobs in certain jobs as you were saying with a buggy whip manufacturer and the in the broader scope of consideration it improves human productivity and standards of living so we should just embrace it rather than be scared of it
• 116:30 - 117:00 uh and the current example of course would be AI that everyone's scared that it's going to destroy jobs yeah well this is this is what these kinds of cultural conversations are are about and I think there's a couple of important points to understand here here first of all you don't no one has ever been able to put Tech Innovation back in the bottle
• 117:00 - 117:30 right because you don't you may be able to set policy but you can only set policy over a certain percentage of humanity right you if if you decide not to innovate and you make a policy that the percentage of human that you can make policy over will not innovate in this way then there will be some other segment of humanity that will
• 117:30 - 118:00 innovate in this way and they will become dominant over you and their culture will prevail and yours will not so there is no option for the Do Not innovate button mhm there is only the how do we steer our innovation button and but the Do Not the the temptation of the Do Not innovate button is always
• 118:00 - 118:30 this this huge threat precisely because the the scene is easier to understand than the Unseen right and I believe I mentioned this earlier but if I may go off on a bit of a tangent there are asteroids out there that are worth 60 quadrillion in today's money in in minerals and so forth now obviously if you mine these you don't
• 118:30 - 119:00 get $60 quadrillion dollar right what happens is that the the the bottom drops out of the market for all of these rare substances they become less rare and more cheap yeah you start making bullets out of gold yeah but what that does is it means that all of the technological processes that have been bottlenecked
• 119:00 - 119:30 behind the difficulty of extracting this stuff on earth now suddenly that blockage is cleared and you can do all sorts of things and create all sorts of possibilities that you couldn't before so you know right now it's like okay you want to make electric cars you need all this infrastructure you need all these batteries you need you know to strip mine certain parts of the Earth for
• 119:30 - 120:00 Cobalt and so forth and what people don't necessarily understand is that Earth is is a gravity well and gravity well you can literally imagine it as a well it's like it's a deep hole where the heavy stuff falls to the bottom MH so here on Earth most of the heavy stuff is at the bottom most of the heavy elements are at Earth's core where we can't get them we're just
• 120:00 - 120:30 scrabbling around on the surface compared to some of the other parts out in space where all these heavy elements are crushed up in little Pebbles that are orbiting all over the place and all of the neat stuff is really there available to grab m now right now with our current technology we would go broke doing it right now if Fort Knox were sitting open on the moon
• 120:30 - 121:00 we would go broke trying to bring the gold back but the whole point of the technological progress is to change that and enable further technological progress so when you when you are able to lift your tool chain out of the gravity well and start doing your Mining and extraction doing your manufacturing out in
• 121:00 - 121:30 space then you have a Second Industrial Revolution which eclipses the first Industrial Revolution and I don't think there's any way you know I I tried to write about this but I may well have underestimated it but by many orders of magnitude I don't think there's any way for us to really understand just how much that changes
• 121:30 - 122:00 lives for the better any more than a 15th century agrarian farmer could have understood downtown Miami exactly no it's fantas and again back to that excellent point you made earlier of just the capital the physical Capital stock supporting the ethical and moral it's like who knows what we can discover or create or become or second order intangible effects yeah this the civilization that we could be with you
• 122:00 - 122:30 know Unlocking The Next Step change in human productivity we don't it's it's unimaginable but I guess it's imaginable but we don't know it's just like it's so it's overwheling profound not only make war you know economically Absol obsolete but be able to exist in a a condition of such abundance that it would be ethically Unthinkable as well yes exactly um yeah it's it's fantastic to
• 122:30 - 123:00 think about I actually saw a tweet I actually I put out a tweet this is a a clip of Elon talking about robots he was saying that he thought the demand for robots was on the order of 10 billion units basically cuz he said basically every person on Earth would want one plus you need some for production processes Etc and he go and he was trying to figure out what the total addressable Market was and he
• 123:00 - 123:30 figured you know 10 billion of these things uh I guess the price point was $220,000 each I might be wrong with this but the total adjustable Market equaled $200 trillion for these robots if he sold 10 billion units that's twice Global GDP right so that's 2x what the world puts out every year and he was struggling to understand this he's like the money doesn't even make sense at that point like how could the market be that large but I think it's one of these
• 123:30 - 124:00 type of events you're describing because if you assume there's 5 billion productive people on the Earth and we produce 10 billion robots that work 24 by7 well then we have at a minimum tripled human productivity right just by producing those robots yeah and they don't stay costing $20,000 exactly so what what the way I looked at this is like well that fits perfectly if he thought it was a $200 trillion Market because that means we if you add that to existing Global GDP you'd have a$ 3300
• 124:00 - 124:30 trillion do market like well we tripled human productivity so from 100 to 300 trillion that makes perfect sense how that would actually be expressed assuming we're on a sound money system now if you have inflation then a lot of these gains get stolen to inflation and all these things but if you're on like a Bitcoin standard then the price general price level of goods and services would go down 67% yeah that would be the gain for everyone yeah um but I it was just interesting to watch him go through the mental gymnastics of trying and then
• 124:30 - 125:00 being like overwhelmed with the outcome he like how could that be that doesn't make any sense I'm like no actually I think it makes perfect sense yeah well we need to have the understanding that when when we calculate economic impacts in this fashion we're only ever looking at the starting point yeah we're only ever looking at the initial conditions of a self-reinforcing process because if we really if we really say okay
• 125:00 - 125:30 we how maybe what we need to do is say okay how many robots could we actually use MH like assume we can build a robot that can do simple repetitive physical tasks as well as a human how many of those could we put to use and then we start to think well okay when we start building them you know the first one is going to cost $100 million
• 125:30 - 126:00 MH the second one is going to cost $500,000 and that's just with what we learn from building them and then we move to production and moving to production is very expensive hundreds of millions of dollars again but eventually we're using the robots to build the robots right you're advertising those fixed cost over more more units yeah so
• 126:00 - 126:30 they're getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper so people always always always always underestimate the value of learning to do something new mhh like the the True Value that Henry Ford achieved was how do we make automob meals on an assembly line MH you know the the true value of these technological innovations is the
• 126:30 - 127:00 Innovations themselves it's not just oh we built this product now we have the product right we built this product now we know how to build the product and we build it cheaper and this was something the Tesla did very well because they they made the very wise decision to start with the Roadster mhm like okay we cannot make this thing cheap because we're just figuring out how to do it we're going to make $130,000 Rich band's toy and we're going
• 127:00 - 127:30 to make it sexy and then we're going to learn from that how to make a mass Market product and when people look at this Innovation they're like who the hell wants a you know a $50,000 robot that can do simple repetitive tasks in my kitchen well if you look at it that way
• 127:30 - 128:00 you're not really understanding what's being proposed here you're not understanding that you're looking at a fundamental transformation in How We Do economy yeah and this is why I write science fiction right because you have to make people understand or they'll regulate the they'll regulate Utopia out of existence
• 128:00 - 128:30 right yeah it's almost like the change from animal powered tilling of the soil to Industrial agriculture right like you just yeah the whole energy the while the the agent that's doing the work is a whole new agent right it's not even human anymore it's we've now created a artificial robot artificial a robot to do the work that humans had to do therefore freeing up
• 128:30 - 129:00 the human to do other things yeah yeah and the fear is always that the human won't have anything to do and we always find something to do I don't I I don't know that's so strange and eventually you know what we will find to do is you gosh I'm going to go and play Yeah I'm going to create art I'm going to make podcasts where we have conversations about these things because we don't have to whack at the dirt with a stick
• 129:00 - 129:30 anymore right right yeah there's some kind of maybe this is a bad there's an implicit I'll use the word bad because I think it's bad I don't know if it's bad but this idea that humans need to be employed in something otherwise they'll do something wrong or be wasteful or destructive whereas maybe we're back to this these life philosophy things right these maybe I don't know this is a death morality per se but this would be the
• 129:30 - 130:00 idea that humans with more freedom are somehow dangerous but in fact it's history tells us the opposite is true I I think I think the fear is is severalfold first of all there's the fears about economic distribution mhm like right now I do a thing and I get paid and that's how I put food on my table right and I don't know how I'm
• 130:00 - 130:30 going to survive if that task is automated away right and it becomes very difficult to imagine how everything becomes cheaper and where before I needed to earn the equivalent of you know say $60,000 a year driving a truck where now if if the if the a if the neural network drives the
• 130:30 - 131:00 truck and everything is cheaper and I need I need less I need less yeah I need less to buy the things I need so I can I can have another kind of job that affords me more Leisure Time and maybe I'm being paid less in some sort of inflated inflation adjusted dollars but everything is is cheaper and the the second fear I think
• 131:00 - 131:30 is more philosophical mhm and it's something that's held by you know smarter and more philosophically inclined people is what will the meaning of my life be if I don't have productive work to do but that one the strikes me as very strange yeah and I can I can see people that mostly want more freedom like see your eyes rolling and I completely agree
• 131:30 - 132:00 yeah because we find when we are freed from brute labor we find things to do and those things feel more meaningful yeah you know I was for two decades I was a software engineer which was a vast Improvement on my previous careers but when I quit software engineering and started writing science fiction novels it's something that's maybe less
• 132:00 - 132:30 necessary for our survival it's more of a luxury maybe maybe but it felt so much more meaningful to me because I was creating something out of my own yeah mind with my own hands and you know that this is something that people with corporate jobs really I don't know how to explain it how it
• 132:30 - 133:00 feels when you when you make something yeah when you have an idea in your head and you make something whether it's a book or it's like a a piece of handcrafted Furniture where you're going to cut all the lumber and fit all the corners and sand it down and varnish it so it's really nice and you can sell it and it pays your bills and you don't have to be sitting in an office somewhere going to
• 133:00 - 133:30 meetings where you have to you have to say oh this is Meaningful because people pay money for it and you get to substitute no this is Meaningful because people come up to me and tell me that they love it right right right where you don't have to rely on that abstract [ __ ] given signaling mechanism of money where people will just come up to you and say I love this you know what I'm talking about oh yeah dude it's so funny like
• 133:30 - 134:00 yeah to see the [ __ ] being given face to face is like magical because especially if you get to do something that you give a [ __ ] about right like you enjoy writing the book right and then someone comes to you having read the book and said thank you this improved my life I love this you're aligning the [ __ ] given so beautifully and viscerally yeah alth although you need to do it abstractly reduces that signal Distortion that we
• 134:00 - 134:30 have in the modern money system right and maybe there will be less signal Distortion if we're able to move to less gameable currencies but there's always some real value in just doing making something that comes from you yes and I feel like there is just a tremendous upside in in
• 134:30 - 135:00 moving human beings out more and more out of the work out of the cubicles into the entrepreneurship out of the work that is required to sustain life yeah and into the work that is required to make life enjoyable and Rich and fulfilling yes you know it's it's it's more satisfying to make people
• 135:00 - 135:30 happy yeah yeah and you know it's it's it's maybe it's maybe very fulfilling to be like I'm I'm a farmer I grow food and that keeps people alive but you know if you're a farmer with a with a legion of robots and you're feeding a million people instead of 2,000 maybe that's maybe that's more meaningful too yeah
• 135:30 - 136:00 and again to try to bring this into a modern setting there is a lot of fear in the creative SL professional occupations right uh let's say animators attorneys accountants fear of AI displacing their jobs but but in reality it's it's Liber like that is the idea of technology automating away drudgery right I mean i' I work with a
• 136:00 - 136:30 few different attorneys it's like I I don't think they love their job I mean maybe there's some attorneys that are really good at what they do and they've had a meaningful career and all of that but if you could do some of this stuff it's you already see AI starting to impact the legal profession if you could do some of that stuff without so much human touch it would be be better obviously if we could resolve disputes over private property through some kind of automated mechanism that would be a lot better than chains of emails and back the AI is coming up from the bottom
• 136:30 - 137:00 yeah it's coming up from the most basic and dull and boring human capabilities so when I look at AI as it exists right now you know I'm not talking about the technological singularity because that's by definition unpredictable but as AI exists right now the the parts of every T of each
• 137:00 - 137:30 task that it automates away are the dullest and most boring Parts you know read this 900 page report and summarize it for me yeah yeah yeah so there's it's embrace it right there's nothing to be afraid of actually it's freeing people that's why I was rolling my eyes earlier because it's like freedom is staring people in the face and yet they're
• 137:30 - 138:00 scared of it it's like the same thing you're pursuing when you go to work right you're pursuing money why do you want the money you want the money to be free freedom is scary because freedom is responsibility right if you are free and by freedom I mean that your that outcomes to you are determined by your choices yeah that you have control over your life then that is scary because people are people think well what if I fail
• 138:00 - 138:30 yeah what what if if it's all up to me then I might drop the ball yeah it's it's it feels less scary to be in a system where you're insulated from the consequences of your actions yeah and the outcome is predictable back to that bubble right where people Hing near the center what people don't understand
• 138:30 - 139:00 I think and this is this has been such a an an overwhelmingly joyful experience becoming an author and Publishing my debut novel independently out of my home in East nowhere Tennessee and you know just like one novel you know and I can pay my mortgage off I mean I'm not getting rich but I'm paying the bills off one book that I wrote and you
• 139:00 - 139:30 imagine what the future looks like and so people think oh God that's so scary it's like no you don't understand you can get on the internet and sell something and people will actually pay you money and you will you will survive it can be done it's not as hard as you think I have to ask you that so as you were saying that the we're back to that talk earlier right where the uh the Sorting of people right the people that want
• 139:30 - 140:00 more stability more predictability go to the center of the bubble and the Frontiersman go to the exterior of the bubble people like us if I may be so presumptuous that have PR life pro- civilization I'll say not pro-life that's been that term has been Pro progress Pro Pro Humanity Pro civilization life philosophies and outlooks we're embroiled in this culture War thing now how can we win that War uh
• 140:00 - 140:30 it seems like especially in social media world that it's the if it bleeds it leads has become Amplified and so what we're saying here is so sort of inherently optimistic how do we compete in this culture war and win uh on behalf of human civilization itself well to win the culture War you have to fight
• 140:30 - 141:00 it and I think that's what people think that that's incredibly difficult because team Western Civilization has not been fighting the culture War what team Western Civilization has been doing is saying oh those crazy artists over there they're just a bunch of commi lunatics I do real
• 141:00 - 141:30 work because I'm a truck driver or a firefighter or you know I'm a farmer or whatever and that's great but culture matters because culture is Upstream of everything and I think right now we have we kind of have the pundits we deserve sort of on the right where you get you get these guys who who
• 141:30 - 142:00 performatively try to describe themselves as being hard-nosed realists who are interested in the Practical and not in the Fantastical MH and I had this realization when I was watching some right-wing conservative YouTube type and he says he says he doesn't read fiction he mentions this in some kind of conversation he says he doesn't read
• 142:00 - 142:30 fiction and then he does this sort of mocking satirical voice tell me a story daddy implying that people who read stories are essentially children and they're frivolous and they're not doing serious stuff MH but stories are the DNA of our culture and it's like you talk like this and you're complaining that you lose the culture
• 142:30 - 143:00 war and you know we think oh we might be tempted to think oh you know winning the culture War for pro- civilization forces is so hard because look at all the negativity and fear out there and this must be the way the terrain is slanted no absolutely not pro- civilization forces have an inherent Advantage because we can actually write
• 143:00 - 143:30 good stories and our futures are exciting nobody is actually getting excited about the idea of living in a world where they can only run their air conditioners two hours a day because you know all the power plants are shut off and you know nobody is excited about ration chits nobody is
• 143:30 - 144:00 excited about putting solar panels on the roof of their grass Hut M the reason they have to fight the culture War so hard is that what they are selling is so UNP palatable right the future that we offer is exciting we're the ones with the flying cars we're the ones with the space exploration we're the ones with the robot butlers you know the the Jetson that old
• 144:00 - 144:30 cartoon that's that's our vision of the future not theirs the only reason they are winning is that we're not promoting our story you know and that is why I write science fiction that is why I wrote theft of fire that is why I'm writing the entire orbital space series that is why I'm
• 144:30 - 145:00 going to keep writing stories until I die because stories make people imagine worlds that are not and we need to make the Unseen seen in our fiction so that people can lust for it in reality so that they can say I want my flying car I want my robot Butler I want
• 145:00 - 145:30 my I want to colonize the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy and have my own planet that I can terraform any way I want you know I want to live in a world that is better you have to show people the world that is better and so you know a lot of the we have allowed the
• 145:30 - 146:00 institutions that used to promote this this positive vision of the future in our art and in our stories you know Manhattan traditional publishing and Hollywood we've allowed them to be subverted by anti-il Marxist forces and when I came to the point where okay I'm going to launch a career of telling a different kind of story because I wanted different kind of story to be told I said well okay I have to bypass
• 146:00 - 146:30 these people but the wonderful thing is you can I didn't need anybody's permission to sit down and write and because we have Amazon and we have print on demand and we have ebooks I didn't need anyone's permission to publish and you know now I've taken the next step with this first novel as I'm working on the second is I'm doing a full cast audio book which is the next
• 146:30 - 147:00 sort of more accessible media where I found some voice actors and we're recording it with different voices for all the different characters and you know we're launching the kickstarter to fund it later this month but it's accessible because you don't need a big Studio you just need a hope to get a bunch of people together and just do it yeah and it's become
• 147:00 - 147:30 cheap enough that you can raise the money and it doesn't stop there because the future of these AI tools of these better computer tools is that in maybe 5 to 10 years you're going to see Animation Studio in a box where like now you don't need to you don't need to uh oh I'm I'm being
• 147:30 - 148:00 told that when while this airs the kickstarter will be running so I've been I've been tripped up by the temporal magic of pre-recording we will link but uh the the next step is that you know these independent off is that now you have these these better animation tool kits and so forth where 10 years from now maybe you in order to
• 148:00 - 148:30 make a miniseries in order to make a movie you don't need to get optioned by Hollywood where you know they're going to devote a $200 million animation budget to make your movie and you have to gravel on your knees to these weirdos like Weinstein or whatever mhm you know have you seen Godzilla minus one I haven't it is an excellent film it is not just a big Stompy monster movie it is a it is a it is just a great story
• 148:30 - 149:00 with a plot that has a big Stompy monster but the real the the important thing about it is that they made a Hollywood B Blockbuster quality movie on a budget of guess how much I have no clue $16 million wow it's called Godzilla minus one Godzilla minus one yeah it's a Japanese production they made it for $16 million they they absolutely did a better job than these 200 million 300
• 149:00 - 149:30 million 400 million you know Cape stuff Hollywood MH you know slop yeah and so think what that's what the technology is going to be like in 5 or 10 years now it's like oh I just need some computers and to hire like five or 10 animation guys now it's like okay I
• 149:30 - 150:00 need two three four million do to do an entire animated miniseries of my book well if you have a wildly successful novel you can go to some of these like you know people investors and you can say hey hey we're making a movie you know do you want in look at how well the book sold yeah yeah there's
• 150:00 - 150:30 there's an almost unlimited upside for using these advances and Technology to fight the culture War so that we can promote further advances in technology so you know we could we can use the technology to to to you know postize like a positive feedback Lo because the technology itself well well they say science fiction precedes science fact yeah right so as we get the fact and we get better technology you use the technology to paint the picture of newer
• 150:30 - 151:00 future better technology wash R repeat you have you just have to get that spiral running we have to we have to tell the stories that get people excited about the future instead of afraid of the future that's a beautiful place to bring it to a close I think Devin thank you man this has been a heck of a conversation we covered a lot of grounds yeah thank you for inviting me it's it's been wonderful to actually get to have the second conversation in
• 151:00 - 151:30 person in your lovely Studio it's so much richer in person so thank you for inviting me let's go have some dinner uh thank you again for doing this thanks for watching if you enjoyed this episode click here to find more just like it and here to find our most recent episode also make sure to like this video to help shine light on the corruption of money and be sure to subscribe to this channel to stay and connected