Bankless - 136 - WWIII vs the Machines | Demetri Kofinas

Starting point is 00:00:06 Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, great episode today. Really good. World War III versus the machines. That's the title of this episode.

Starting point is 00:00:26 Those are two of the topics we unpack in this episode. It's a super ambitious episode, but we have Dimitri Kofinas, who is a fellow podcaster, host of the Hidden Forces podcast. Also an aggregator like David and I. There's a lot of things about a lot of things because he talks to a lot of people. So he's a perfect guest to have this conversation with a few takeaways for you on today's episode.

Starting point is 00:00:45 Number one, what's the probability of World War III? I know you're wondering, so are we. We ask that question. We get into the details. Number two, should the U.S. actually fight China over Taiwan? What would that even look like? Number three, we get into discussion about the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

Starting point is 00:01:02 Did the Unabomber actually predict the future? He had some prescient things to say about it, certainly. Number four, will the U.S. survive the rise of the machines? A lot of conversation about AI, the machines, how they are taking over. Number five, the ultimate question, I think, have we as a society lost the ability to solve hard problems? Or can we find it within ourselves to solve the hard problems that confront this decade and the generation that we're in? David, really cool conversation. I think we just talked about a lot of things that were in our hearts, on our minds,

Starting point is 00:01:36 with a fellow podcast. You're going into some heavy subjects. But Dimitri is an individual who, I think, likes to think in the same way we do, which is like, if we got something heavy to talk about, let's just dive into it. And it'll make us feel better about the subject when we can actually get into the gritty details and see if there's a way to solve it. Specifically with another podcaster, because podcasters, maybe I'm just going to chill our own class type here. But in order to be a good podcaster, you have to think at a kind of a meta level.

Starting point is 00:02:06 Because, you know, it takes people that can like zoom out very, very broadly to talk about people, like, deep down at the protocol level, and then all the way zoom back out to the macro and talk about, like, social stuff. And so, like, Dimitri does the same thing on his hidden forces. He goes and talks about the problems of ETF investing on the stock market and cross-references that with, like, the social dynamics of the United States. And so there's podcasts. do these... It's all related. But it's like podcasters that are really the people like stitching these conversations together and zooming out so far broadly that they are actually able to link very distant parts about this world. And so I really wanted to do this episode with

Starting point is 00:02:44 Dimitri is like, what happens when we get like another podcaster as a guest and like how meta can we get? And I really enjoyed the conversation that came out of it. And so the idea here was to ask some very basic questions that everyone kind of knows should be asked. but doesn't really know how to ask or who to ask or even how to take seriously the question. The question like, what is the probability of World War III? What is that stage? What would be the relevant actors and players and hidden forces to name the name of his podcast that would play in this role?

Starting point is 00:03:18 And we kind of let the conversation go from there. Of course, we talk about China and United States and Taiwan, but it quickly zooms out and gets a little bit more meta to talk about the forces that are making some of these huge geopolitical forces collide with each other. Why are we on this collision course? What about today's society is making this reality happen? And what do we do about it? And it gets back down to the social layer of the domestic U.S. politics,

Starting point is 00:03:47 who we are as a people and who we are as a society really, really quickly. And I really just appreciated this episode with Dimitri. Yeah, it's a really fun episode to do. And certainly, by the way, for bankless subscribers, stick around after the show where David and I do the debrief. That is the episode after the episode. Got some thoughts. Some of my favorite conversations happen in the debrief

Starting point is 00:04:06 where David and I just take a breath, digest, give our unfiltered raw thoughts right after the episode we just recorded. And if you want to become a bankless premium member, there's a link in the show notes to go do that so you can listen to the debrief today. Guys, we're going to get right to the conversation with Dimitri. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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Starting point is 00:07:23 to the bankless podcast. And Dimitri has just a fantastic way of synthesizing a lot of different information across a lot of different subject matters. Today we're talking about power. We're talking about geopolitics, its effect on macro. We're asking some big questions that have been in the back of my mind, in the back of David's mind, and I think probably listener, in the back of your mind as well, some of these questions were afraid to surface in other channels, but we're going to ask Dimitri about them today. Dimitri, welcome back to Bankless. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, David, for having me on. Dimitri, the name of your podcast is Hidden Forces. Can you talk about that name and kind of the subject matter of your podcast and why you decided to call

Starting point is 00:08:07 your podcast Hidden Forces? That's a good question. I think it really began with a philosophy around the noability of truth, the noability of reality, and that what we experience as reality, is really perception and that there are these, quote, hidden forces that are at the bottom of the ontological world that define what we view as reality. But we can never actually know those things with absolute certainty. And so we're always trying to get deeper down closer to the bottom of the vector to understand as well as we can what truth is so that we can develop models that are more predictive of reality, more predictive of the future. So it combines both the practical elements that are important to investors, and also just kind of the philosophical ideas that I've always

Starting point is 00:08:58 interested me as a kid. I think one of those hidden forces we've been kind of unpacking lately on bankless have been the hidden forces around macro, which drives macro markets. And as we've been digging into kind of some of the macro experts, it has surfaced that one of the biggest hidden forces, I guess, behind macro as a hidden force in it of itself, is geopolitics. I think we want to talk about that a little bit today. And I got to tell you, as we like, I guess we're two years into this crazy decade already. And it feels a lot different than the previous decade. And, you know, I think it feels a lot more uncertain, a lot more chaotic. And the potential for conflict seems to have escalated. And I can't separate, Dimitri, whether this is just sort of a internal gut feeling

Starting point is 00:09:45 I have, or it's like the books that I've been reading or the headspace that I'm in. But I think it's kind of shared with a lot of people, like this deep feeling of unsettlement. What's going to happen next? We're not too sure. I want to ask you about the stage and kind of get this question top of mind because it feels like maybe we are headed closer towards some sort of a global conflict. Maybe we'll start there. Why do you think everyone feels this feeling of unsettlement, this feeling in the air like conflict could be in the future? It's a great question. I think a big part of all of this is that the world feels increasingly out of control. You know, I don't know how old you guys are, but the world I grew up in, I'm born in 1981,

Starting point is 00:10:30 the world I grew up in, which was really the 1990s, all of that seemed settled. It was the unipolar moment, and everyone was pretty much on board. There were very few countries that weren't, and they weren't really deemed as significant, or we seemed to have inexhaustible resources to deal with those one-off cases of Iran or North Korea, or whatever, or Iraq to begin. That's really how we started the post-Cold War period. It was Iraq went rogue. We mustered an entire international coalition, and we dealt with it. And so there was a sense of unity, a sense of unity of purpose. Everyone was more or less on board with the international institutions. And it was blue skies all the way. And I think that we've come to a place now, which I think was pretty much made absolutely

Starting point is 00:11:18 clear politically. Geopolitically, I think the moment was the invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008, but politically, I think it was really with the election of Donald Trump, and that really changed the tenor and also U.S.-China relations. And of course, these are the two biggest, most powerful economies and military powers in the world. So I think that the recognition of all the uncertainty and the sense of instability, particularly in the U.S., because the Chinese political system is at least externally so stable and things here are so unstable that I think that is what is making us whole feel the sense of what's going to be the next shoe to drop because it's just been one shoe after the other after the other. And American politics in particular sort of feeds

Starting point is 00:12:06 off of that instability because both parties are able to use it in order to further their own political agendas, which is really sad. Demetri, in your answer just now, you gave off a list of things, right? Like a list of sources of chaos. or symptoms of chaos in the world. And my mind kind of just goes to the model of a binary star system versus a trinary star system. And a binary star system is famously like stable. Like these two stars just rotate and they just don't change. But then sometimes they'll run into a third star and then things get extremely chaotic

Starting point is 00:12:36 and eventually one star gets ejected. And like this is also part of the metaphor of the three body problem, right? This is that book where there's just a random set of parameters that are just very chaotic and they become chaotic until a moment happens and then they stabilize again. And I'm like, this is kind of my model for as a child of the 90s, you know, I only interpreted that stability for so long, but things have been more seemingly more and more chaotic. And this rate of chaos also seems to be accelerating. And I'm wondering if we can just kind of run through the list of all of like the different inputs that seem to be injecting instability into the like global world order.

Starting point is 00:13:16 You know, once upon a time we had this superpower, the American superpower that seemed to be just wholly dominant, and that seems to have gone out the door. We had the election of Donald Trump. We have the rise of social media. We have the rise of authoritarianism in China. I'm wondering if you can think of the biggest sources of just like chaos that has disrupted what was once an equilibrium in this world. Yeah, it's a great observation. And it also holds some promise because historically, yes, unipolarity. theoretically, though, maybe the U.S. is the only real case of, it's certainly the only case of global unipolarity, but bipolarity is more stable than multipolarity. And so I think that does capture one of my concerns, which is that we still haven't reached a new state of equilibrium, which presumably will be a bipolar world. And so between now and when we get there, there's just an enormous amount of uncertainty. And Dimitri,

Starting point is 00:14:16 bipolar world, do you mean China and the U.S. being sort of the two stars in the star system? Exactly. But I think your question, David, just to make sure I follow it correctly, was what are some sources of instability? Was that your question? Yeah. Well, I think about this quite a bit in terms of like I wanted to, you know, going back now a year, I wanted to do episodes focused on different, either potential conflict areas or frozen conflict areas. And I think those areas, whether it's Cyprus, whether it's Greece, Turkey, whether it's Kashmir, whether it's the 49th parallel, Nagorno-Karabakh, we saw that recently flare up. These areas become more unstable in the kind of world that we're

Starting point is 00:14:57 talking about because they're like stress points. So I think there are clearly, and of course Taiwan, it's not a frozen conflict, but it's a uniquely unstable equilibrium because China and the Chinese governing elites have been very clear about their sense of ownership. over that and over Taiwan and that it's a non-negotiable issue, an existential issue for them. And clearly there isn't the same level of consensus in the United States. I mean, that's the other thing that's so interesting about all this stuff. It's so intangible, but especially for a country like China, but the U.S. does this too. So much of what happens on the international stage is actually it's not the application of force,

Starting point is 00:15:42 but it's the installation and cultivation of norms. And so for the Chinese, I think, again, I'm not an expert on this, but I think it is clear to me that they put a premium on this kind of thing, and they do cherish stability. And so their ideal with Taiwan has been to actually try and slowly, for lack of a better word, cook the situation so that the norms change, which is why the visit with Pelosi, while destabilizing, I think actually probably benefited China because there was no strategic purpose of the mission on the part of the United States, but allowed the Chinese to engage in fire exercises and to surround the island in ways that they had it up until this point. Escalating their desires. Escalating, exactly. So, I mean, for me, there are specific parts of the world that are more unstable than others.

Starting point is 00:16:36 I think also it changes the security dynamic in Europe, as we know. which all of these things, I think, will ultimately lead to a more stable world, but they increase instability in the short term. Also, I think we'll probably return to some of the other factors at play in this kind of chaotic world, but let's continue on that line of conversation of, like, U.S. and China. I read Ray Dalio's book, not too long ago. I think David, you read it too, it's called The Changing World Order, and he makes the observation. It's basically a list that kind of chronicles different world orders throughout history, whether it's like Dutch or British or different Chinese dynasties and that sort of thing. And he talks about kind of the cycle of power.

Starting point is 00:17:15 They hit their peak and then they crescendo downward. And there's always a cycle, right? It's like none of these empires last forever. And he makes observation in his book that the U.S. appears to be from a list of relative metrics on the decline relative to China on the incline. I don't know if you agree with that. But if you take his thesis and you continue that forward, he also makes the observation that something like of the last six times a reigning power declined relative to a rising power. There was conflict between the rising power and the reigning power four out of the six times. So four out of the six times. There have been some cases where that transition, that torch was handed off gracefully. You know, you might think of like kind of the

Starting point is 00:18:01 torch being handed off from like the British Empire or something to the American Empire. Like that was... Post-World War II. I don't know. I don't know what you consider that, but there wasn't war between the British and the Americans again. But this is the prospect, right?

Starting point is 00:18:12 And so you read books like this. And then you talk about kind of the, what I would call maybe like a conflict of visions in the way the two societies are organized right now, which is America has its Republican democracy, sort of, you know, a classically liberal values, at least, you know, it's best it purports to have these things.

Starting point is 00:18:29 And China is very clearly not that, much more top-down control, authoritarian you might say totalitarian others would say you know state surveillance state kind of managing things that's very important and it appears culturally important to many members of the society too so you take that backdrop and then you kind of think about the chaos of the decade and you're wondering yourself is there going to be a world war three in my lifetime like is that is that an actual threat now this decade i'm going to tell you i wasn't thinking about that in the 90s when I was growing up right Maybe this is past the Cold War. I know like earlier generations were doing the duck and cover thing in the classrooms because of nuclear holocaust, Cold War stuff, Russia in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:19:13 But it feels weird for our generation now as we've moved into adulthood to be facing a similar prospect of, wow, is there the potential of a World War III? Do you think this is all like doom porn? Or do you think that this is a real concern that like we need? need to be cautious of. What do we do about this? Yeah, I think it's a real concern, obviously, that we need to be cautious of. When you were talking, I was thinking about the different interest groups that are involved in making policy and what those different interest groups want. And traditionally corporations, multinationals, corporate America, et cetera, have wanted stability. And many corporations, many corporate leaders, founders, et cetera, supported Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. And a lot of those people support the Chinese Communist Party.

Starting point is 00:20:07 They would rather just see a stable world. And also a lot of these folks, a lot of these tech titans, for example, they don't necessarily, again, when you're so well, the truth is that like for a lot of these guys, especially as the concentration of wealth has gotten tighter and tighter, what's in the best interest of the people that are in a position to make policy doesn't necessarily jive with what is in the best interest of ordinary people. And because we've gotten to this place in American society today where there's such an extreme distribution of wealth and income, the danger is that left unchecked this kind of corporate power, for lack of a better word, and in cahoots with government, just basically folds and either develops a system

Starting point is 00:20:50 that is much more similar to the Chinese model, and maybe we don't go into war or we have kind of just proxy wars that don't mean much, or that we elect populist forces in the U.S. elect a very braggadocious, a kind of really a powerful populist figure, and that that person leads the U.S. into a destructive war. What we really want is we want, as a Democratic liberal society, to become very clear on what's important to us, and to actually craft policies that take moderate risks, but know kind of what hill we're willing to die on. So like the issue of Taiwan is a good example because you have really smart people, some of whom have been on the podcast before, like Elbridge Colby,

Starting point is 00:21:35 who put forward very compelling cases for why the U.S. should draw a line in the sand when it comes to Taiwan. Similarly, there are some other people who put forward compelling reasons for why we shouldn't and why the U.S. shouldn't expect that it should be able to maintain some level of influence over Asia. regional influence that in other words the chinese given this their size and given their ambitions should be expected to have regional hegemony over asia i don't know what the answer is there and i don't even know if there is one quote right answer because i think the right answer also depends on what people are willing to do and because of where we are politically in the united states i've said this many times i've said it to you guys too i think the single biggest risk that we

Starting point is 00:22:19 face and the biggest challenge that we face is not internationally it's not international it's domestic. We're in this period of time in our society, and the societies go through this, they go through these kind of cycles, where we're in a process of undoing and remaking our own society and becoming clear on what's important, who we are. Identity is a big thing that's going on in our society today, and it's exacerbated by the technological forces, which are changing in many ways what it means to even be a human being. You know, I think people really are trying to understand what that means to live a human life. in this world where we spend more and more of our time

Starting point is 00:22:56 intermediated between screens and also where so much of our interaction is intermediated by technologies that steer us in any particular direction, interpret the data for us. And so we're really in this kind of fog of war in addition to the larger, quote, World War III spectrum that we may be dealing with.

Starting point is 00:23:16 We're also dealing with an information war, which I think is actually primary because it risks putting us in a really dangerous place. again, understanding everything we just talked about with respect to politics and the uncertainty of American politics, if you're Chinese or if you're Russian, you're looking out at America, it can look pretty scary. We're still the biggest dog in the kennel. We have the largest military in the world, at least the most powerful military in the world. And we've fought many wars.

Starting point is 00:23:47 We know how to fight. And America is a very militaristic society. So if we don't get our act together politically, America could itself be the biggest threat for global peace. Do you mean like America could actually be the bad guys? Like that could be a real little threat vector. Yeah, dude, totally. Well, so oftentimes people act, I mean, I don't know of any case where any country thinks that it's not righteous. The Nazis thought they were acting righteously. They felt deeply aggrieved by the terms of the peace after Versailles. And they felt entitled not just as a result of what they felt they had lost and a grieved against the Democratic Republic that they overthrew, but also that they were the master

Starting point is 00:24:29 race. I mean, these are, these are like deeply held beliefs. And the United States has a tradition of exceptionalism. So I don't see any reason to believe that the United States could not elect a government that would speak to that exceptionalism. And that's a real concern. I think to tie a few threads together that you just articulated, everyone kind of understands that there's absolutely like national powers that have emerged like Russia just invaded a country the first kinetic war in Europe. China is now showing force around Taiwan. And so, you know, paying attention to these things, I think the American populace is like, okay, like there are some really hard questions that are on the table that we have to answer right now. And whether or not,

Starting point is 00:25:15 I think when you said, you know, America needs to, you know, accept some moderate risks, I think my interpretation of what that meant was like, okay, we need to actually plant a flag in the ground and say, hey, we will defend Taiwan or no, we won't. But we need to make that decision and accept that risk of it being the wrong decision, but lead and execute on that. And I think a lot of Americans are looking at these looming decisions that must be made about the future state of the globe and the powers that control it. And then we're looking internally and being like, wow, we just effed up COVID-19 so hard. We couldn't even like manage our own country. And like, wow, the 2016 election, like, has started to implode America internally. And so we're looking

Starting point is 00:25:56 externally at these massive looming clouds of decisions that must be made. And we can't even, like, help ourselves and coordinate ourselves. And I think that's starting to trigger a lot of fear internally as like, okay, the next, if COVID-19 was worse than it actually was, it would be disastrous. And so, like, throw one more, like, match into the pile. And I think a lot of Americans would say, like, yo, we couldn't deal with that. We couldn't do that. Is that a fair take? When you say, we can't do that, we couldn't do that, we can't deal with that.

Starting point is 00:26:25 We can't coordinate around a solution and, like, look more than just, like, our own infighting and left-first right warfare and, like, all this tribalism that we've had. Yeah. So I think, but that speaks to the fundamental breakdown of trust in society, that we have a huge part of the population, possibly, I think likely, more than half of the population, fundamentally distrusts American institutions. I don't mean has a healthy distrust. I mean categorically distrusts anything that comes out of mainstream institutions,

Starting point is 00:26:58 the intelligence community, the mainstream media. And so how do you build a coherent policy around that? Dmitri, what percentage of that trust is deserved do you think versus undeserved? Very little. Very little, so little. They're totally unaccountable. They're unaccountable with COVID too. You know, the president got COVID again.

Starting point is 00:27:21 He's like triple-freaking quintuple boosted, and he just got COVID, and I got it again. You know, and like there was so much shame around this. There was so much certainty around all the COVID ordinances and, I mean, even the social distancing we found out later. It was just a number. They threw it out there. Just like when they asked Hank Paulson, why'd you pick $700 billion for the bazook because it was a really big number. You know, and so these guys and gals. they're never held accountable.

Starting point is 00:27:47 And so, of course, that's the problem. I mean, that's, I think the single biggest reason why we have so much distrust. There are many, but it's the lack of accountability. Because every time this happens, George Carlin has like this great comedy skit from like the early 2000s or late 90s where he talks about this. Because every time you have something like this, they always say, okay, let's move past this now. Let's move past us. It's time to look forward. And they always do that because it's in their benefit to look forward because then they don't get held accountable for all the stuff they've done.

Starting point is 00:28:15 So I totally agree with that. I think where I differ from a lot of folks in the sort of, I mean, a lot of the people in my accounts are fin-twit people, but lots of people in this group of people that distrust because I'm also distrusting. But I think that where I differ is that I feel like a lot of people's reaction to that is off. It's all bullshit. I'm just going to believe whatever I want. And I'll come up some ridiculous theory. And I'm just going to stick to it because why not? I think it's totally responsible.

Starting point is 00:28:42 And that's the challenge. how many people want to get serious and put their cynicism aside and cautiously move forward. You know, the kind of the Reagan trust but verify. That's sort of my mentality. Yeah, I totally agree. I do want to get back to kind of two pieces, but like one piece, back on kind of this World War III theme and tying that out and kind of the China, like in America and kind of rising power and maybe sunsetsing power. I don't know. But like when we talk about something like World War III, right, like the stakes couldn't be freaking high. higher, right? Like, World War III could genuinely be like, not a planet ender, but like, life as we know

Starting point is 00:29:22 it, I mean, we're talking about billions of lives, potentially destroyed or impacted. No, it could be a civilization ender. That was true during the Cold War, that it could end civilization. So we've got that, these kind of stakes that we're playing with, which is like, already, how ludicrous is it to live in a world like that, where that's kind of in the back of your mind and that we could be, like, you know, life as we know it, we could be verging on the edge of existential crisis. And then, David, when you brought up, like, kind of, you know, the U.S. having to make a decision on Taiwan, does it fight over Taiwan or does it not? Does it let China do it? And I read Ray Dalio, and, you know, Dahlio says, China absolutely wants Taiwan and they're going to get it. And they're going to flex all

Starting point is 00:30:04 of their muscle. They're going to play the long game. And they're eventually going to get it. But that is a non-negotiable. And he posed the question, America, do you want to go to war over this? Of course, he does it. more eloquently in like different words, but I'm getting straight to the point. And I have to ask myself of like, I believe very much in state sovereignty and like the sovereignty of Hong Kong, sovereignty of Taiwan and citizens to like a democracy, Western liberal values. I'm a huge believer in this. Is it worth going to war and potentially ending civilization in a World War III for a conflict over Taiwan? Like these are very, like these are very.

Starting point is 00:30:44 very heavy, heavy questions. They do not have clear answers. And I don't know that we're going to get an answer on this podcast, obviously, to these things, but I don't know. I also don't know how they get resolved. Dimitri, and all of your tours of things, and the guests you've had on, like, has there been anything to, like, answer questions like these for you? And what do you think of this? Yeah, well, let me see if I can try to respond to that. So clearly, it was worth the risk over Cuba for the United States. And I think the thing that is, I think, difficult to grapple with is, one, we don't actually know what could happen.

Starting point is 00:31:26 Given how the world is structured ever since really the development of nuclear weapons and especially ballistic missiles, it's always possible to blow up the world. And so you're always dealing with that possibility. But at the same time, simply folding every time there's any. kind of conflict doesn't actually solve the problem. One, because you could fold yourself into what, becoming a subjugated state to another power? But even more likely, I mean, anyone that's ever been in a fight knows this. You know, if there's one party, that party gets pushed around enough. If it keeps submitting and keeps submitting, it itself may not know its threshold. And at some point,

Starting point is 00:32:08 it just explodes. And it shoots back in the other direction. In other words, it's in the best interest of both parties to find some kind of a stable equilibrium. And so I don't know the analyses that I've seen on this issue, and they are so tainted, because, you know, I'm speaking to a, again, there's lots of people that deal with the issue of Taiwan. I haven't had a single expert who's actually Chinese and speaks Mandarin. Actually, some of them do speak Mandarin. But, again, there's so much uncertainty around it. But I would have to err on the side of saying that, the United States has to make it really, really hard for the Chinese to take Taiwan or to set new norms so that they actually control that territory. Because what I have come to understand,

Starting point is 00:32:54 in my own reading, is that Taiwan is essential for any kind of force projection by China outside of Asia. And it's also very, very, very important for maintaining, on our part, for maintaining our existing coalition structure and alliance structure in Asia. And if the China is able to dominate the Asian landmass and have control over those economic relationships, they are in a position to then grow and project power further on. And I should also just say this, because again, I did preface this beginning with it, just kind of acknowledging just how complex this is and how I'm not an expert on it. But I'll also say that I think the U.S., we'd constantly underestimate the power of the United States because we have traditionally been such an open society.

Starting point is 00:33:42 So it's so easy to see the costs of that openness in all of our disorganization and the hot mess that America is. But at the same time, our economic model has led to much more growth than a much more sort of closed, again, for lack of a better word, totalitarian. Granted, the Chinese state capitalist model is not Soviet, but it's still much more closed. And it's not clear what kind of economic growth they would be able to have with other Asian economies with that kind of a growth model. So I don't know. There's a lot of uncertainty there. But if I had to put my foot on the scale, I would probably say that the U.S. really needs to step it up and prioritize developing a long-term strategic defense framework for Taiwan. And they need to do it urgently. Because from what I understand it, from the people I've spoken with, it's not at all clear that. the United States would be able to win in a conflict, putting aside whether or not it escalated to nuclear war. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Can you get in that really quick? Is it a quick detour?

Starting point is 00:34:47 Yeah, they do war games. They do war games in it. And the U.S. has lost some of those war games. So it's really not clear how prepared the U.S. is. The Chinese have built an entire, like the whole south of the country. They've built all these huge installations for missiles, for missile systems to attack Taiwan and they would presumably be able to attack parts of the Pacific Fleet, you know, this would not be a joke. You know what I mean? It's not like the U.S. blockading, again, like I said, I'm not an expert on this, guys, and I'm relying on the work of other experts. But I think we've gotten so used to American force projection and being able to just go in and do whatever we want that we don't understand that this is a completely different animal, and we just don't know what a war like that would look like.

Starting point is 00:35:37 And the problem, as Russia saw, is that when you bite off more than you can chew, you're in a completely new ballgame. So what were to happen if the U.S. decided to actually throw its ring in the hat, and it turned out to be much more difficult than it thought? Now it's really stuck, because if it turns tail and runs, we're now have a completely new dynamic in the global geopolitical, border. And that would also embolden the Chinese to go bigger. So, I mean, again, and in all of this, guys, we all know and think about the possibility that we could be paranoid. You know, like a declining, as you said, I don't know that the U.S. is declining. I mean, in relative terms, militarily, yes, but in absolute terms, I don't know if I would agree with that. And I still think the U.S. has many long-term advantages to it, that the Chinese economy does not. Well, one quick thought on this

Starting point is 00:36:29 when it comes to World War III and kind of the weaponry involved, right? It would become, like, the difference between World War I and World War II and the level of weaponry. It's like, like, just a complete order of magnitude. Yeah. Like, I mean, you think about from like, you know, basic kinetic bombs. Or pre-World War I and World War I. Yeah, exactly. Or like the civil war to World War I.

Starting point is 00:36:48 Like, just the differences. And so we are talking about not necessarily tanks and planes. Yeah. We're talking about, like, cyber attacks that disable power grids. We're talking about potentially biological, weaponry viruses. We're talking about, we had Bologi on a podcast recently. You talked about, like, a drone cloud of, you know, basically unmanned drones that are programmed as killboss. It's like technologies that exist now on a whole other level. Harnessing commercial drones in

Starting point is 00:37:17 foreign countries. Is that a thing to you? This is not something Bankless has done episodes on, but like, have you done anything on this? No, but I mean, yes, I have. I've done a number of episodes on cyber security and cyberterrorism. I did two with Bruce Schneier. I did one with Josh Corman. I did one with, I can't remember the other person I did one. I also did one with Chris Brose. Chris Brose is, I believe his title is, he leads business development at Audurill. Auduril is Palmer Lucky's company. Paul Merlucky is the developer of the Oculus Rift. Auduril is a military tech company. Look, I mean, again, we're now totally in a place of sort of speculating here, but if you can compromise all sorts of commercial drones and you can

Starting point is 00:37:58 create a botnet using a bunch of commercial drones, you could swarm a whole area. I mean, this is the thing about the world we live in today that I think is fundamentally different than the previous world in which we experienced total war, which is that it's kind of like when the United States went to war against the Nazis and against the Japanese, neither of those countries, none of the countries involved were in a position to harness the other country's resources and military to project force against itself. Today, we're all running the same software. I mean, I guess that's another thing we could talk about, which is to what extent are we going to begin to see segregation in technologies.

Starting point is 00:38:41 But exploits exist. If the U.S. finds an exploit and if the NSA finds a Windows exploit, there are lots of computers all over China that run Windows. Now, we're both vulnerable in this case. And that exploit can be used to attack Chinese systems. And so, like, we have to not only build technologies that we can deploy to defend ourselves, but we need to also be able to secure those technologies. And we also need to be able to secure the exploits that we themselves need to use in order to build, quote, cyber weapons to attack adversaries. And so you can see how complex this is.

Starting point is 00:39:25 And I think a lot of the anxiety that people feel is we have an awareness of this complexity, but we don't have a sense of, is there a grip on it? You know, like we don't trust the people in charge. Everyone, more and more people see that Joe Biden is not well mentally. He's not well. You know what I mean? And whatever your views of Donald Trump is, he's very bombastic. He's very aggressive.

Starting point is 00:39:51 He's not someone that makes you feel, I think, like he's not a sense. stable guy. Let's put it that way. So, and it's not at all clear to put it back to Joe Biden. It's not at all clear to me that he's going to run in 2024. I don't think he's going to run. I don't know. I don't see how that guy can run. It just seems like he keeps declining. And it's not clear to the Democrats would be able to run Camilla Harris. I don't know, guys. I feel like we're, when it comes to the politics internally in the U.S., I don't think we've seen anything yet. I don't think we have any idea of how things are going to shake out. And I don't know just talking about whether or not they're going to prosecute Trump, whether he'll be able to run, who's going to run on the Republican side,

Starting point is 00:40:29 who's going to run on the Democrat side? Are they going to have primaries on the Democratic side for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States? So I just think there's so much uncertainty. And if you guys remember, what was the political climate like when Trump was president? Like it was all the media could talk about, all the media could think about it, suck the oxygen and have everything else. Again, as the world becomes more and more unstable, the stability, or instability of American politics simply exacerbates that. You know, it's like a lever.

Starting point is 00:41:00 Right. It's a feedback loop, yeah. And I think really the point of all of that, like, you know, a army of commercial drones sweeping over Taiwan, I really like this is a, sometimes some of these conversations we're talking about World War III is like a little bit of hyperbole,

Starting point is 00:41:15 but the point is that, you know, we don't know, and it's all chaos. Maybe, maybe not. The point is that there are a bunch of unaccounted for attacks. back vectors in our technology that we aren't aware of, that if we talk about the leading powers of the world going head to head, we would discover these exploits very rapidly, and we all kind of know that they're all around us. And then going back to domestic politics is like our

Starting point is 00:41:40 domestic politics would not be able to, I think about these things. Joe Biden does not have a solution for an army of commercial drones. I can guarantee you that. Yeah, you have a comment. Go far, Demetri. Well, I was just going to say that it wouldn't even necessarily be something like that because I'm going to bring up two episodes now that I've done that I think are relevant here, directly relevant. One I did with David Kilcullen, who was special advisor to David Petraeus, and I think he was also who worked directly with Condoleezza Rice or under Condoleezza Rice, and it had to do with the transformation of warfare. And there's just one particular thing that he calls liminal warfare. I don't know if he came up with a phrase,

Starting point is 00:42:18 but liminal is that threshold between what's real and not real. It's like the surreality. And I think this is what's particularly scary because, you know, a swarming cloud of drones is very clearly you're under attack. There's no doubt about it. And then you just have to ascribe who did it, which gets a little complicated. But you can be pretty confident at that point what's going on, especially if there's a broader context of conflict. But, you know, look at what the United States did with Stuxnet, the U.S. and the Israelis did with Stuxnet in Iran. I think it was for years we were sabotaging their nuclear program, and they had no idea. They thought they were just making mistakes. The scientists were messing up. They were getting something wrong. The subterfuges

Starting point is 00:43:00 were blowing up. They thought it was all on them. They had no idea that it was actually the U.S. and Israel that were sabotaging their equipment. I think we're in a world now where people are much more attuned to that. And so the risk also is that you begin having attacks. that are conducted that are sort of under the level of perception. And that creates a lot of paranoia. So now you end up having countries being, thinking, maybe ascribing attacks and actions, foreign actions to things that aren't actually one of those things. And because, and this brings up another episode that I did, I've told you guys about this one, episode 28, where I also pulled a clip from one of my favorite movies ever, probably my favorite movie ever, or trilogy, The Matrix. And it was, I think it was the second Matrix movie.

Starting point is 00:43:47 and Neo was down in the machine room with the chancellor or whoever was the head of the high council of Zion. And the counselor made the point that while we were trying to destroy all of these machines, while the resistance was trying to destroy the machines that were enslaving humanity, they were dependent on all sorts of machines to keep the city alive and to keep them alive and to fight their resistance. And we are in a place in the world today where we need. machines. We depend on these machines to survive, and the vulnerability of those machines is greater, the interconnectivity. I mean, maybe they're as vulnerable as ever, but they're more interconnected. And that interconnectivity allows those vulnerabilities to be exploited. So we talk

Starting point is 00:44:33 about nuclear weapons, a nuclear war, but that may not be the vector of escalation that we experience in this world that we live in today. There is a brand new staking feature in the Ledger Live app today. We all like staking the assets that were bullish on, and now you can stake seven different coins inside the Ledger Live app. Cosmos, Pocodot, Tron, Algorithms, Tesos, Solana, and of course Ethereum. With Ledger Live, you can take money from your bank account, buy your most bullish crypto asset and stake that asset to its network, all inside the Ledger Live app. Through a partnership with Figment, Ledger also lets you choose which validator you want to stake your assets with. And Ledger is running its own validating nodes, offering a convenient way to participate in network

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Starting point is 00:47:01 sometimes in the chat, so I'll see you there. Demitri, I think that brings us to the second half of this podcast that we want to get to, which is the conversation of the machines. And after they, this, I'll kind of ask you about China's solution to this, but just leaning into some of the content that we've talked about prior to this and that we know we wanted to cover, you gave us this article by a Bill Joy titled, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. And I just want to read a few excerpts that I've pulled out from this article that's following along with what you just said. So the expert starts, we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power

Starting point is 00:47:31 over to the machines, nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift in a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machine's decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and the machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will result in better results than the man-made ones. Eventually, a stage may be reached at which the decision is necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that the human beings will be incapable of making them in,

Starting point is 00:48:06 intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn off the machines because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. This is skipping forward a little bit. In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans. Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves from matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. The price of, obviously, matter, energy, and space is what that alludes to. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would then be squeezed out of existence. There is probably some breathing room because we do not live in a completely free marketplace. Government coerces non-market behavior,

Starting point is 00:48:44 especially by collecting taxes. Judistically applied, governmental concern can support human populations in high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while. A textbook dystopia, and the author goes on to discuss how our main job in the 21st century will be ensuring continued cooperation from the robotic industries by passing laws to create that they be nice and describe how seriously dangerous a human can once be transformed into an unbounded super-intelligent robot. Some super cool sci-fi topics here that definitely paints a dystopian future. But Dimitri, I'm hoping you can unpack a little bit of what this last half of this was, where the machines are, and we understand this when we look at, you know,

Starting point is 00:49:21 I don't know how to navigate a city without Google Maps anymore. Spotify picks better songs than I could ever hope for. Like, I'll just give over more in my life to just some basic algorithms, but sometimes those algorithms, like, now like the interest rates, of MakerDAL, like, dictate my life, and crypto people will know what that meant. And so I'm kind of wondering, can you just, like, unpack this question a little bit more and talk about the various ways that the U.S. has tried to, like, solve this machine control problem, either implicitly or explicitly, and also China and the differing strategies there?

Starting point is 00:49:51 Yeah, so that was a big question, but we can unpack it. First of all, I'm curious when you guys read that, or in the first part of the passage that you quoted was, as you guys know, was actually lifted from Ted Kaczynski's the Unabomber, his paper Industrial Society and its future and when I

Starting point is 00:50:07 first read that when I was a senior in high school I remember how remote it felt you know

Starting point is 00:50:18 it was like this is pure sci-fi I might as well have read this in a you know The Matrix the movie

Starting point is 00:50:23 a Seamov book or something but when you read it now it's like whoa this is where we are today

Starting point is 00:50:31 we can't turn the machines off. Yeah. That's, we're past that point. I'll tell you this week, so we do all of our company stuff, like content planning and stuff in a chat application called Discord. I don't know if you've ever used that, Dimitri, but it's fantastic. Sure.

Starting point is 00:50:46 We now have an active member of our team who is an AI, who is a robot, where we basically, it's called Mid Journey. And when we need Mid Journey to spin up a graphic for a content piece, we spin out. we type what we want and mid-journey is an AI tool that produces fantastic images for us graphics. And in a lot of ways, it's superior to what a graphic designer could come up with. And inside of 60 seconds. Yeah, it's natural language processing. So you just say person haircut, like short hair, riding a horse.

Starting point is 00:51:27 and mid-journey spins up in 45 seconds, four images of that. Yeah. Like, it's crazy. And then, like, we think about, like, the algorithms we serve from a content perspective, right? So, like, we're always trying to optimize how we tune things for, like, the tweet that's going to fire off. What will the Twitter algos support and propagate? What will the YouTube algos support and propagate?

Starting point is 00:51:51 Like, at a certain manner, like, these algorithms are the machines, and we are serving them aren't we? I guess someone programmed them, but they are now programming us. A hundred percent. So I have a few thoughts about that. High level, I believe that, you know, in answer to what David's question was originally about, you know, what the Chinese model, the American model, kind of what the dangers of not addressing some of the disparities in power, really, because I talked about it in terms of wealth and income, but it's really power in society. We risk, while the elites haven't really take in full control of society that the democratic levers of power will allow us to elect a populist demagogue who could blow up the whole world. At the same time, that's honestly

Starting point is 00:52:39 for me, blowing up the world versus becoming enslaved and becoming, as Ted Kaczynski writes in his paper, domestic animals, they're domesticated animals. I don't really see the difference. For me, I want to want to live as a domesticated animal. And or to live, to live. under the control of other people, the kind of control that we're talking about here. And so the real question for me is, first of all, if I'm right, and I think I am that at least those of us who live in Western liberal societies that have had a taste of freedom, I guess, freedom's imperfect, all that stuff, yes, yes. But if I'm correct in believing that people, if they really understood what was happening here,

Starting point is 00:53:19 and I think more and more people do understand that they wouldn't accept it and they would want to come up with some kind of a solution. If I'm correct in that, then I think that's where we need to focus our energy. And we need to come up with some kind of, we're talking about what's needed here is a kind of a revolution in terms of our relationship to technology and our control over it, our democratic control over technology. So I've been beating this drum for many years, which is that when it comes to platforms like Facebook and even Google, of course, but Facebook's such an easy example or Twitter, we cannot allow private corporations to be able to develop algorithms that decide not only serve us what those algorithms think they want because they get to know us so well, but actually begin to

Starting point is 00:54:12 manipulate our behavior in order to move us towards the commercial objectives that their advertisers or clients seek. Because one, that in and of itself is unacceptable because of where it leads eventually, but also eventually the governments are very powerful and governments always have relationships with the private sector. And that's just way too much control. And so we need to regulate these types of companies. These business models are the issue, in my opinion, not necessarily monopoly power.

Starting point is 00:54:43 We can talk about trust and antitrust. but the real issue is that these companies are incentivized through the ad model, through developments and knowledge in the behavioral sciences, AI, big data, to basically hijack our consciousness, hijack our will, and basically turn us into mindless serfs. And that's where this thing is going. Everyone sees it. That's why all the people that work in these companies have been ringing the alarm bells. And if we don't fix that, we're not.

Starting point is 00:55:15 going to be able to fix anything else. So unfortunately, I haven't seen people. I've had Andrew Yang on the podcast, but even, you know, Andrew, who is more technically astute than other candidates, I haven't seen him really banging the table on this issue. And I think it's the single most important one. It's more important than climate change. It's more important than nuclear weapons. It's more important than any of those things. Because without this, we don't have democracy. This is part of the reason why I think David and I are in crypto, by the way, is we see a remote chance of being sort of like building kind of a third way here, even though we're very far from what you said. But like, I want to go back to this because we opened this episode and we were talking

Starting point is 00:55:51 about how our institutions were really failing, how no one trusts them. And indeed, they haven't really earned our trust. In fact, they've probably earned our distrust, right? And so we acknowledge that. And yet we're asking or we're putting our hopes on democratic institutions to rein in our technology platforms and the powerful AIs that would govern our lives. And I was just say, Dimitri, this is like, China has a fix for this already. Yeah. Okay? China is like, no, state's going to own and control all of its major social media entities and all of its technology entities, and they are going to do our will. They are 100% regulated, right? They can't do anything outside. The machines are the subservience of the state. The machines are the subservience of the

Starting point is 00:56:36 state, right? And not necessarily of the people, mind you, but like of the state. And it's a different thing. But at least they are subservantes. Yes. So like China will tell you, oh, cool, Dimitri, like we're like two decades ahead of the U.S. Like we fix that problem. The machines now work for us, the state, and we have complete power over them. And you kind of look at, I think we were talking about this as we were preparing for this conversation. You kind of think of China as like they're in front of VCs and they're pitching a business model and they've got this slide deck and they've got really great product market fit because they're like problem statement the machines are coming they're going to dominate your lives you see it already solution we clamp down the state owns the

Starting point is 00:57:20 machines we control the algorithms problem solved our competitors by the way they're taking a different approach they're taking this decentralized democratic approach and it results in some it sucks it results in some half-assed authoritarianism as i've called like kind of the plan of the u.s right now which is like it doesn't really do anything well. And so we're going to beat them out of existence. That is the slide deck for China right now. And I got to say, it seems a little compelling. It seems like they got some product market fit here. What do you think about this? Yeah, they're like the guys pitching the VCs on being like the Uber of totalitarian. And yes, and I think that it makes sense why the initial customers that they're targeting are authoritarian countries that are threatened

Starting point is 00:58:02 by America's foreign policy, which definitely tries to export democracy. And I think we've kind of been a little too, I would agree that we kind of overdid it there. I never quite understood why we went so extreme on the Saudis. If we're going to be extreme against the Saudis, we should have been tougher on them after 9-11, given what has come out over the years from the 9-11 commission. But yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that framing. And I think that is the challenge, that they've got it together. They have a product, as you say, they have a deck, they have a working product that's out in the field, and they are developing a kind of a franchise model, certainly with their digital currency, which is a technology that a lot of other

Starting point is 00:58:46 countries are going to want to adopt. And what's beautiful about America is that we are a much messier society, even though we've become more militaristic and authoritarian. You and I talked about this as well, which is, you know, one of the reasons I love countries like Argentina is exactly because of how dysfunctional it is, but you have to strike some kind of a balance. So I recognize that, but I still think I would rather live in the balance that exists in America than in what exists in China. So that's the challenge. And I think, again, this is something else I believe for a long time. I might be wrong here. It might be too simplistic of an analysis. But I felt that ultimately this comes down to leadership. And yes, it's going to be a,

Starting point is 00:59:29 my view, it's going to be a populist leader that's going to have to solve the problem. In other words, the same pathway through which the United States could become destabilized and flip into totalitarianism or some kind of crazy dictatorship and kind of blow up the planet. That same channel is the channel that would be used to fix the system. Right. So whatever you think of FDR, he wasn't Stalin. And so FDR, though, was an extremely powerful political figure. Lincoln was an extremely powerful political figure. and again, no matter what you think of Lincoln, ultimately it took that level of power in the executive to get through a very, very difficult period in American history. In that case, the Civil War, in the case of FDR, the Depression, World War II. So I think that's where we are, and the question is,

Starting point is 01:00:16 where are those leaders going to come from? Who is going to speak to a majority of Americans, and that does it do it from a place of anger, divisiveness, who is where, is where, you're willing to speak honestly. And that's where I think the Democrats and the Republicans are currently failing is they're not speaking honestly. And there's a lot of anger and a lot of attacking and a lot of dividing by both parties. And I haven't seen a better alternative yet. And so that's what I'm hoping for, but I don't see it right now. I've alluded to this a number of times on bankless before. And it's Nietzsche's God is dead statement. And the idea here is that Niche realized that the global order was no longer coordinated by religion, as in fear of God was not the thing that made people

Starting point is 01:01:04 wake up every single day and go and harvest the fields and go get stuff done. It wasn't the force that was organizing the world because we had the Renaissance and people shed their religious, the dominant religious, like organizing force in their lives. And then, you know, instead of just waltzing into this like enlightened society that was all about science, first we had chaos and then we had order. Like, it's not, you don't just hop from order to order, you go from order to chaos to order. And so, you know, when Dichet claimed God is dead, it was in the middle of the 1800s, I think, late 1800s, and claims like, all of a sudden, like, we need a new organizing rule set to organize by or else we're going to delve into chaos. And the next thing that happened was World War I, World War II, and then we found our order again.

Starting point is 01:01:52 And I kind of think we can, if we're going from this place of where we had the, you know, the stable America from, you know, 80s and 90s and early thousands to where we are now, which is a new force guiding over the world, which is the machines, we first have to go through a time of crisis and then we rebuild on the other side. That's kind of how I kind of map this out as the future. Would you agree with that general progression? Yep, I agree with that. And I think that probably for guys like you and your community, some of my solutions to this may feel a little heavy-handed. But another thing that I think that I would institute if I could would be, for example, we send people abroad to study. I'm not saying this has to be mandated that people have to be sent to other states of the union to study. But I would try and do things like that, try to incentivize anything and everything that can cause greater degrees of unity and self-exploration, what I think we need in this society is to come to two more concrete notions of identity. One, we need a more concrete notion of national identity because the nation state is still a

Starting point is 01:03:05 powerful actor. It's not going away anytime soon. I know one of your guests who's also been on my podcast, Bology disagrees with me, but I have spoken to Bology many times, both on the show and over the phone at length, and I really value those conversations. I appreciate his different point of view, but I've never agreed with it. I'm not being convinced by it. I think the nation states a very powerful entity, and it has very powerful institutions and can project force. So because of that, we need to get to a sense of common identity that incorporates those power structures that we can all be on board with. And we're not there right now. What we're doing is we're actually tearing those things down, number one. And number two, and this is not necessarily

Starting point is 01:03:46 the purview of the state, we need to come to clear a sense of our own identity as individuals. Because I think this is something else that's happening today. You see it in the transhumanist movement and other areas where people are constantly creating new forms of identity, trying to understand what it means to be a human being. You see it in terms of gender norms. You see it in all sorts of other places. And I think that that speaks to me, that speaks to some kind of internal crisis around what it means to be a human being. I think it goes that deep. And I think that has to do with technology. That's my guess. I mean, you know, you're very fair to point out religion and how religion, the slow sort of disillusionment by members of the

Starting point is 01:04:33 public with religious institutions led to a kind of crisis that Nietzsche talked about is the death of God. But I think that where it's coming from today, there is, of course, that lack of religion, there is the neoliberal sort of commercial value system that many of us grew up around, which was that, oh, the point of life is just to make more money, to develop more efficient supply chains, et cetera, et cetera, which has never been fulfilling. But I think technology has really created a kind of crisis in humanity and around a sense of meaning, which you guys know I've talked about as nihilism. So I don't know if that makes sense if I does I think that breeds like you know first kind of a comment there's also in the

Starting point is 01:05:16 bill joy article I think he was quoting someone else and I'm paraphrasing here said like at the end of the day there's nature there's humans and then there's the machines and nature is on the side of the machines and like this speaks to like basically this folding in of humanity into technology right and that bill joy article is very much about kind of the assimilation of humans and machines together and what that would look like over time and I feel very much to me to me tree like, we're in it. We are totally in it. That's what's happening with all of us. Like the amount of time we spent on screens versus previously on the internet, now serving the algorithms like that is happening. And that is having an impact existentially on our reason for existing, both at the

Starting point is 01:05:56 identity level and the societal level. And I want to go back to this, the kind of the question about values. David and I say something like turning this into crypto parlance where it's like the layer zero is people. And what we're really referring to here is like underneath the different layers of a blockchain, there's actually this social values structure of like, are people willing to run the node that has censorship resistance software or not? If they are, we have censorship resistance. If they don't, we don't. And it all collapses back to layer zero, the people. And I feel like getting back to the story of America, I don't know if the U.S. really knows what it values. use anymore. Like, I feel like there is this sense of what are our base principles and things that I

Starting point is 01:06:46 thought were base principles for society, like democracy and truth and the right for everyone to vote, or like just freedom of speech, right? It turns out that like if the person is red and you're blue, or if the person is blue and you're red, you don't necessarily subscribe to those base principles for the other tribe. And I feel. feel like as Americans maybe, and the U.S. has sort of forgotten its core value set. What do you think about this? And like, is this something that is a precursor to, as David said, getting out of this chaotic era for the U.S. and emerging with something that's free and open and maybe there's some space for the nation state success on the other side of this chaos? But in order to get there,

Starting point is 01:07:29 do we have to remember what our core values are? And like, what are those core values? Do we even know. A hundred percent, man. I couldn't agree more. So I want to say one thing before I address that specifically. And I don't remember exactly how it came up, but, you know, we have this idea where it's been put in our heads that technology is synonymous with what we have today. That, in other words, we have to just get used to not having privacy, for example, that this is just kind of part and parcel of what it means to progress technologically. And that's not true. That's a choice, and it's serves the people who are in control of these technologies. So, like, when we were growing up, you know, the back, Jetsons, back to the future, et cetera, even dystopian visions of the future,

Starting point is 01:08:14 none of those involved a version of the future until the matrix that I remember. I'm sure there might have been other ones, where that dystopian future also involved technology as a source of disempowerment for the individual. You know, because like in those other versions, people had technology. On the Star Wars movies, everyone's got, you know, these, they're almost like analog technologies. They have full control over their brains,

Starting point is 01:08:42 and they can use them to amplify their brains, but they're always in control. We're not in that situation today. We're losing control over our minds. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's a completely different situation, and we just need to be able to really understand that because our framings are off.

Starting point is 01:08:58 But I think people are more and more understand it, but it's like being caught in a spider's web. You know, eventually people might get it, but by then it's too late. And I don't think it's too late. It's certainly not too late when it comes to social media, though I do think it's too late to shut off the machines, as we were talking about before. But in terms of values, I totally agree. So let's go back to what you said about using an AI chatbot or a search bot to find pictures. I thought about this too. I thought about like, if someone gave me an application that could write all of my headlines for my shows and all of the summary text, I would take that, I would do that in a second. Because I don't enjoy doing that anyway. Okay? And then I just thought about more and more like, what would I be willing to do to offload? And then what would I actually not be unwilling to do?

Starting point is 01:09:47 And then I realized that there was this point at which I may run out of things that don't bring me joy and that then I would want to focus on, you know, what I actually like doing. But there are many of the things that I like doing that other people, don't like doing, and machines might people do those things better. And so the game theory of that kind of a situation is that we all basically, there's no room for humanity. There's no room for a human life. I drive manual transmission cars. I love driving manual transmission. If you go to any car dealership, any of these new faster cars, they will tell you, hands down, do not get a manum transmission car. It does not perform as well. But this is just a good example because it's kind of, I really mean it in other areas. It brings me joy to drive a manual car. I don't need to go faster than

Starting point is 01:10:34 everybody else. But if I'm competing for my livelihood, if I'm a professional driver, I'm not going to get a manual transmission car. And so I think that the problem becomes that in this world, we're all incentivized to out-compete one another. And so everyone wants an edge, and machines give you an edge. And in that context, we basically out-compete humanity out-of-the-ge-pool. or we basically out-compete normal people, and what you eventually get is the other, there are two possibilities in Bill Joy's article. One is the example of the matrix where machines take over, and the other one is the example where basically a set of elite controls all of these technologies, and they basically turn

Starting point is 01:11:14 human beings. They either kill off the human race in order to save the planet or whatever. You can come up with all sorts of eco-fascist ideas that actually seem to align very much with a lot of the Orthodox they live in today, or they turn them into, again, domesticated animals, where people just get pacified on SSRIs and we kind of have that. This is kind of the crazy thing. I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here. I'm not trying to be some kind of off-the-wall person, but I think most people would agree that there's something fundamentally wrong with the spiritual constitution of society. You know, like I brought up SSRIs and the prolific prescriptive.

Starting point is 01:11:55 of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. Why are so many people feeling this way? Is it just because all of a sudden we discovered this? I don't believe that. I don't believe that. I think that people are getting overmedicated. And when it comes to this particular area, I think it has to do with something else. Something's not right. I mean, people, I've done episodes on this as well. People get prescribed antidepressants all the time when they lose someone they love. Well, you're depressed, not because something's wrong with you. It's not because you have a chemical imbalance, but because you're grieving. And in the past, people saw preachers. or they saw their friend and they talked through it and they cried.

Starting point is 01:12:28 And that was okay. You know, but it's not efficient today. If you're suffering, that's not efficient. You've got to get through that. And I just think we've lost all of that. And we don't know how to talk to one another. And that's a real crisis in our society and we have to address it. Because if we don't address that, we can't address anything else.

Starting point is 01:12:45 And that's been my concern, the way we talk to one another, the lack of good faith in each other's conversation, the cynicism, the anger. that stuff needs to be addressed and you can't expect Joe Biden or Joe Manchin or whoever other else or Nancy Pelosi. Don't expect all those people to solve your problem for you. Democracy is about taking responsibility for yourself. You can't just expect them to do it. If they're not going to hold themselves accountable, you have to hold them accountable. You have to hold themselves accountable. And so, you know, as you can tell, I feel very strongly about that. And I think it's just one of those things where we have to grow up and we have to take responsibility. And that also, that begins by really trying to have constructive relationships with one another and having empathy and caring.

Starting point is 01:13:28 And yeah, so I don't know if that resonates. You opened up a door that I want to dive down, actually. And just to explain to listeners, SSRI is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. This is going back to my psychology days. Basically, it allows for serotonin in your brain to be not reuptaked as in reuptake inhibitor, which if you don't reuptake it, it passes on to the neurons. Basically, it's a way to... closing the dam and causing a build-up of chemicals on one side of the river and dousing your neural receptors with that chemical.

Starting point is 01:13:58 So it makes a single molecule of serotonin more effective, basically. And so to me, the way that you described is trigger the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and that drug, Soma, where like this very docile populace would take this soma drug and they would just be happy and they would also would not do anything and they would be extremely unoffensive and they wouldn't cause any problems. And so, like, you can also apply this to, like, alcoholism is on the rise. Like, male suicide is at all-time highs. Like, our consumption of carbohydrates is at all-time highs, and our obesity is at all-time highs.

Starting point is 01:14:34 And so we have all of these, like, ways that the psyche of the West is manifesting in these very, like, maladaptive patterns. And it's because we are not exhibiting, like, very basic normal, normative basis. behaviors of just like, you know, hugging your mom and, like, talking about your emotions. And I live in an apartment with 24 other units. Don't know a single neighbor. Like, haven't said hi to them yet. And so, like, there's all these behaviors that are causing these, like, pent-up psychological stress. And it's not from one particular source. Like, everyone has their own. Everyone knows their own, like, deficiencies, whether they don't go to the gym enough, they don't get enough sunlight. They

Starting point is 01:15:12 don't, like, hug their mom enough. They don't have enough social interaction enough. But, like, the meta of Western and maybe also Eastern society, I don't know, is that we're losing our humanity. And I'm wondering if this is running in parallel with the establishment of these machines. I'm wondering if that's the connection that you see. Is this back to the old meme of like we're either headed towards a Brave New World Future or a 1984 future? Yeah, perhaps. I mean, like, it seems like this is what we're saying. Yeah, more of a Brave New World Future than a 1984 future. I mean, I totally agree. I think we are losing our humanity and many people are giving up their humanity. And I think that a lot of this is pretty simple. You know, people don't have a framework

Starting point is 01:15:53 for thinking about who they are. You know, like, I think the frameworks that they have in their heads are like some of those that we talked about. One is kind of like be a good consumer, be an entrepreneur, make a lot of money. I'm always amazed that how many people chase more and more money as though, I mean, one, I understand the chase, I understand the satisfaction of attainment. I understand, and this is something that I think is also very important, it speaks to this point about AI and what is a human life worth if AI does everything, which is something that also Ted Kaczynski talks about in his paper, which is the power process. You get satisfaction from solving problems. You get satisfaction from doing things. A hole needs to be dug. Digging that hole, even though it

Starting point is 01:16:40 takes time, energy, there's a sense of satisfaction that comes from having done that as opposed to just paying someone to come do it, right? If you have an infinite amount of money, which are the equivalent of a machine. So the frameworks that we have that tell us what life is about and what the point of life is about, and kind of those are many of the frameworks that the Europeans relied on increasingly as they sought to go into deeper and deeper amounts of integration. It's kind of like a lot of the stuff that comes out of the World Economic Forum. It's based around this sort of like greater living standards and, you know, more efficiency. But like, that doesn't satisfy people. That doesn't give people a sense of meaning in their lives. And I think that is also from the

Starting point is 01:17:22 political point of view, I think it's destabilizing because I think people want something more, which incidentally, it's why dictatorships always invest in sports and athleticism, because that's not just a way to get the testosterone out of the male population, but it's also a way to actually give people a sense of accomplishment that they did something. People need that on a very visceral level, and they also, I think, need a way to address the spiritual questions of life, which science cannot address. Demetri, one of the biggest reasons why I appreciate your podcast, it tends to be macroeconomics, finance-related. You definitely also tap into some social conversations as well, but when I listen to you and what you very clearly get animated about, it goes back to what I think

Starting point is 01:18:08 me and Ryan try and also emphasize in our podcast, which goes back to what Ryan was talking about with the layer zero, where the only stable society is built on top of a stable populace. And our structures, our democracies, or even the Chinese nation is ultimately built on the people that it governs over. And so I'm reminded of this phrase, we've talked about the fourth turning a few times on bank lists, but like the idea that hard times creates strong men, apologies for the accidental male dominated idiom here. like hard times creates strong men, strong men creates good times, good times, create weak men, weak men create hard times. And it feels like this America has been in this like, my childhood,

Starting point is 01:18:50 it's pretty easy. Like, I didn't really like struggle too much. And like now I feel like a lot of my cohort were about the same. And so like now accidentally we were raised in this good time. And now the wheel turns and all of a sudden there are these hard problems that no one really wants to tackle head on. And now it just creates a worse problem triggering a crisis. There's also an attack on the male archetype, the strong male archetype. We all know this. And I think people are becoming increasingly comfortable talking about it. You know, for a while, they were terrified of getting canceled.

Starting point is 01:19:20 But that's also happening. And that fits back into what I said about this thing where we're tearing down institutions, we're tearing down archetypes, we're tearing down values. But they're not being replaced with anything. Nor are they being replaced with anything that people find compelling. You know? And I think that's the thing that's very difficult. because like this isn't necessarily an argument for a natural form of identity or a natural order.

Starting point is 01:19:46 So many of the things that we view as natural are just conventional. They've become practice over a very long time, but they were adapted to particular environments. You know, so certain types of values don't work in an agrarian society versus a migratory society, people that are moving hunter-gatherers. different types of society require different things, but we don't have something that's actually adapted to the current time while we're destroying what has worked for us. So I couldn't agree more. And by the way, that thing that you said about weak men, the Chinese and the Russians use that domestically in their propaganda to attack the United States. They attack us as weak. They think that we're soft, specifically that notions of our masculinity. So, yeah, I mean, I agree with that.

Starting point is 01:20:33 Also, I guess getting back to kind of the values piece of this, it almost seems like we've just opened up the curtain, the window of all of these existential issues that we're going to face. And we are facing, right? The prospect of World War III, we didn't even get into U.S. politics, but like the prospect of civil wars in the back of my mind as well. You know, it's like what's going to happen in 2024. And then the backdrop of like the machines are kind of taking over. And we've forgotten our reason for why we're here and like what we're doing. But the last piece that I think really stuck out to me is like we're tearing things out without replacing them with something new. And I think that has been very crucial for our journey in crypto, which is we are trying to build new systems bottom up like that are new. It's just like we said from the beginning, it's not about like burn it down. It's about build it up because this is what I get so frustrated with. You probably call it nihilism in hidden forces and like, you know, so do we.

Starting point is 01:21:32 but it's this apathy or it's just this like learned helplessness where we've got these institutions that are broken and like circumstances that we don't like and what do we do? Like nothing matters and as if we can't take control and build our future and build our way out. And so I feel like as we get to the end of the podcast, you probably agree with us, Dimitri,

Starting point is 01:21:53 that like the way forward is we have to build better systems. Right. Like the way we get out of this mess is actually inside of us all and collectively. And we do have power and we do have autonomy to change the future. And part of that is adopting systems that we want to promote. Part of that is adopting the values that we want to promote. Part of that is having conversations like this.

Starting point is 01:22:17 I'm wondering, Dimitri, if you have anything else actionable for us, like, what should we do with the prospect of all of these existential issues and kind of like the 2020s and the 2030s and this entire century that we're going to have to live through? Do you have any advice for us or things that we should do? I don't know if I have advice, but to your point about building better systems, I think it's always important to build better systems. But I also think our democracy, the systems that we broadly call democratic governance, actually are pretty intact.

Starting point is 01:22:50 They can work. So, like, we have the ability to use those systems to make really positive changes. Look, Donald Trump got elected president of the United States with zero political experience, okay? Granted, he was a celebrity and he had the role in the apprentice and that gave him, you know, that created in people's minds a, again, a template of framework that they could understand. They could see him as becoming president. They could see him as a leader. But I firmly believe that we have the ability to elect somebody who is less divisive, who isn't a compromised hack,

Starting point is 01:23:26 and especially because of social media, because of, I guess, how quickly you can scale a message in society today, I think it's easier than ever to elect a candidate on a populist wave that can actually reach a broader part of the population that can address some of these things. I know that that scares a lot of people that word populism, but I don't really see any of the way of doing it because you're not going to get somebody that's going to come through the Democratic Republican Party. So I just wanted to say that. I think we can't, we can't give up on that, but I also get, when I say that, that, well, there's, where, where are they? It's like Fermi's paradox, but for politics, right? It's like, where the fuck are the aliens? You know, like, where are the candidates? You know, is there a giant filter out there and they all just filtered out? I don't know. Yeah, I think, look, man, you said advice. I mean, nobody's perfect, especially like those of us who work really hard, compete with one another. It takes an enormous, when I'm talking about podcasts,

Starting point is 01:24:25 thing, as you guys know, it takes a lot of work and effort and drive and ambition and vision to build a show, to build an audience, to monetize it, et cetera. But we all, I think, need to where we can try and devote more of ourselves towards a greater cause, whatever that is. I mean, for me, the way I do it is I try genuinely to use my podcast to help move positive conversations forward. When I find interesting new people, I try to bring them on the podcast. You know, again, I try to filter out people who I feel are kind of self-motivated or kind of primarily motivated for themselves or their egos. I really want to try and help build up this sort of a culture of empathy, communication, and that addresses the issues that we talked about

Starting point is 01:25:19 today because we all kind of know on the one hand, these are all problems, but on the other hand, we all kind of default to what's best for ourselves, you know, like what's in our own best interest. And I understand that tendency, but I think we have to fight it. And I believe that we have to fight it each on an individual level. I don't think that's something that, you know, government's going to do for us. So I don't know if that's advice. Demetri, as we all move forward in the next few years, what would be the things that you would look for to happen on the global stage or in the domestic stage? And you could look at that thing that happened to be like, okay, we're on a good path. That was a good thing. Or like perhaps

Starting point is 01:25:58 in also in the opposite direction. Like what are the signals that you're looking for that we are improving and what signals are out there that we're actually continuing to break apart? Yeah, before, I'm so sorry. I can't help this. This happens to me sometimes. It's like, once I see it, I can't unsee it. I started laughing because when I was transitioning from my question about advice, I thought about, I just did an episode with Alex Lee Moyer, who is the documentary filmmaker behind Alex's War, which is a documentary. in Alex Jones, which have been really popular. And if you ever see Alex Jones, you know, he always takes opportunities to be like,

Starting point is 01:26:30 because I was going to say, like, well, they should listen to Hidden Forces, by the way. That's a piece of advice I have. And Alex is always like, info wars.com, prison planet dot TV, blah, blah. So he's always throwing that out. So, yeah, what kind of signals would I see to make me think that things are getting better? Well, first of all, we have seen some things. People like Tristan Harris. You know, Tristan Harris really has done a lot of work to kind of raise people's awareness.

Starting point is 01:26:58 He's spoken intelligently about the kind of issues of surveillance capitalism that we talked about before. I just think it's like that. If you see more people, look, I'm not going to, this is not the best example because comedians are always truth tellers. But I think also, while I don't agree with everything Joe Rogan says, I think Joe Rogan's, you know, he seems to have his heart in the right place. He has a huge platform. He tries to have good conversations.

Starting point is 01:27:25 You know, you may not agree with everything he says, but that's not the point. I think the more people that do that, the less ego, the more, if you begin to see, I guess, evidence of a common identity forming and a sense of common humanity, I think that's what I look for. That's what I feel like I want. You know, like, because we all talk past one another so often, you know, and especially with technology and having more of these like disembodied conversations on text. You know what I mean? Like I have so many open threads in my brain. And that changes the way we think, too. You know, we lose patience.

Starting point is 01:27:58 We have shorter and shorter attention spans. So I think seeing anything where there's more of an embrace of our common humanity, a willingness to talk to people's souls, their spirits, I don't mean that in a religious sense. I just mean the mystery of life, the things that, you know, are unknown and that speak to some common humanity. I think that's something that I look for. And I feel like I've seen more of that. But I also see a lot of confusing. and a lot of anger.

Starting point is 01:28:24 And, but I, look, I am fundamentally hopeful on this. I mean, we have, we've made it like how many millions of years. You know, it depends on where you start at the clock. So I agree we have some really destructive technologies today. And there's a lot of doom porn out there. But I think we can still make it. Humanity has strong Lindy, I guess, as we might say in crypto. Dmitri, it's been a pleasure, man.

Starting point is 01:28:46 Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Dimitri. I enjoyed it too, guys. Thank you so much for having me on. Of course. Some action items, guys. One thing is through this podcast, Dmitri mentioned a whole bunch of Hidden Forces podcasts. We're going to get those from his brain after the episode and include those in the show notes.

Starting point is 01:29:02 Also, Dmitri, what's this Alex Jones podcast you got coming up? Like, where can people tune into that? What is this about? So you can check out our entire episode library at hiddenforces.io, where you can also subscribe to our premium tier, and that will give you access to the full two hours. We usually record for two hour long podcast. Sometimes they're premium-only podcast, in which case whatever it is, it's on the premium feed. So the episode with Alex Jones, which again, they can find out at hidden forces.io or any major podcast platform, is with a girl named Alex Lee Moyer, who actually made this wonderful film, I think in 2017, it came out called TFW, no GF, which you guys will know stands for that feeling when, no girlfriend.

Starting point is 01:29:46 and it kind of covered what a lot of reporters at the time called the quote, in-cells. But I actually didn't like that. It talks about WoJack. It talks about Peppa the Frog. And it really, what I found it to be was I found it to be this really great, almost like a, I don't want to call it anthropological because that would kind of dehumanize it. But it was a kind of cultural exploration of people that grew up during a certain period of time where they were pretty much always on the internet.

Starting point is 01:30:16 I mean, my generation is unique in that I grew up without the internet up until the early 1990s when we had AOL. So by the time it was in middle school, I started getting on AOL and AIM. But, you know, a lot of kids pretty much grew up with the internet right from the get-go. And a lot of these folks, we know this particularly among the male demographic, a lot of young men really are lost. And so this documentary, the first one that she has chronicles a lot of this and what that looks like, speaks to the nihilism, speaks to a lot of the stuff. talked about today. So this is the filmmaker and she did a second documentary on Alex Jones. She spent two years following Alex all over the country. And really, I found it to be an excellent

Starting point is 01:30:54 documentary. It's really not a judgmental documentary. It is just, it's really kind of like an exploration of the person. I found it fascinating. I mean, I've watched hundreds, maybe up to a thousand hours of Alex Jones content because I got, quote, red-pilled. It's true. After the 2008 financial crisis as someone that had been studying Austrian theory of the business cycle and was following and reading people who were telling me and explaining to me compellingly why we were going to have an economic recession crisis of some sort, how bad it was going to get out or no. But what I didn't see was the government intervention. And so that kind of broke my brain, just dramatically upended my sense of reality. And it sent me down all these rabbit

Starting point is 01:31:39 holes back then. Of course, there was Peter Joseph Seidgeist, the American Zykeist movie. I don't know if you guys ever saw that. That was the first thing that pulled me in, and I just started watching Alex Jones, David Ike, you know, Webster, Griffin Tarpley, all these different people he had, this guy, Alan Watts, different guys. Anyway, all these different people. And I started reading all these different books and et cetera, et cetera. So I'm very familiar with Alex Jones.

Starting point is 01:32:03 And so anyway, I think it's fascinating to explore him because so many people have sort of really buy into so much of what Alex says. And I think that while I disagree with so much of what Alex says, the conspiracies that Alex comes up with exist and are compelling because of the vacuum that's been created by the lack of trust in society, the lack of trust in institutions like we discussed for good reasons. So long-winded response, I hope that didn't lose listeners on that one. No, that's good. Yeah, I think that is a symptom, right?

Starting point is 01:32:35 It's like everyone is looking for the easy answer to the very complex problem. Anyway, a lot of good stuff in there. Between Dimitri's podcast, I probably one of my top three podcasts, at least for me, or it's like Lex Friedman. It's fantastic, Hidden Forces with Dimitri and Sam Harris. These are my go-toes outside of crypto. You like Sam. He's great, man. You know, Sam's a great example. More people like Sam. More people like Barry Weiss, too, same thing. Sam was a huge inspiration for me when I started this show. I didn't disagree. I don't agree with Sam on every position he has, but I love his intellectual honesty, you know, and how he tries to hold himself accountable to his ideas. So I'm so glad that you listen to Sam. He's great. Yeah, the ability to talk to anyone is something I highly value. And I think we want to enshrine that in bankless as well. Dimitri, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, man. Thanks so much. much for dropping by. Thanks, guys. Infowars.com, prisonplanet.com. All right. Take it easy. Risk and disclaimers, as always, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. So is infowars.com. You could lose what you put in.

Starting point is 01:33:37 We're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - 136 - WWIII vs the Machines | Demetri Kofinas

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