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

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

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

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

is how to get started, how to get better, 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. Society is off track. We all feel it. What's wrong? How do we fix it without throwing out all the good parts? We have Tim Urban on the podcast today who wrote an excellent book, subtitled,

A Self-Help Guide on How to Solve Society's Problems. We're going to talk about a few of those problems today. and Tim's answer on how to solve them. Number one, we talk about the power games versus the liberal games. That's one takeaway from today's episode. Number two, we talk about the importance of liberalism to crypto protocols. Number three, we talk about how to find out whether your crypto tribe is a low-rung echo chamber or a high-mind idea lab.

Hint, you want the second. Number four, we talk about why we must actually solve this problem in order to survive as a society. And you know, I asked him if AI is going to come kill us towards the end, because that's the new thing that I always ask. Apparently, we do that now. We do that now. Ever since that episode, that shall not be named David, from your perspective, why is this episode with Tim Urban so significant? And just to make it abundantly clear, and Tim will also do this, liberalism, not liberals versus conservatives, liberalism as classic liberal Western values. The thing that you've heard me and Ryan talk about on the podcast here and there,

through and through, but consistently from day one, Western Democratic, liberal values. We are starting this podcast, exploring that idea head on and why, if we are talking about the layer zero of society, the layer zero of our governance systems, of our blockchains, why they must be rooted in critical thinking and what Tim calls ideal labs instead of echo chambers. And so this episode is really how to fix society at the root level. and also talking about all the symptoms in which society is going astray. And I think really the important thing and really the through line of this episode is there are problems in society that are clashing. You got the left and the right and they're fighting. You got, you know, political tribe one,

political tribe two and they're fighting. And in the crypto world, you have all these other tribes and they're also fighting. And the thing is, they're all playing the same strategy. They're all playing the same game. They're competing inside of the same arena using the same tool sets to compete. And sometimes this competition is good. Sometimes if this competition can be productive and progressive. And two high-rung people of different tribes can come in debate and move society forward. Or two low-rung thinkers can come together and clash and move society backwards. And so whether we're discussing this outside of the sphere of crypto or inside of this sphere of crypto, it's still the same game. And so hopefully we can guide you through how these parallels exist no matter where we are

and why solving this problem at the root level can create a utopia. for us as soon as we do figure out how to solve that problem. Yeah, and I really think these lowercase L liberal values are at the core of crypto. Crypto is almost an instantiation of these values in the digital world. And so, David, I'm super excited to talk to you about that in the debrief episode, which is our episode that we record right after the episode. It is included for all bankless citizens. So if you're not a bankless citizen, upgrade, there's a link in the show notes, and you can get access to the premium RSS feed where we put that out every single week. Guys, we're going to get right to the episode with Tim. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this

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Hey, Bankless Nation. If you're listening to this, it's because you're on the free bankless RSS fee. Did you know that there's an ad-free version of bankless that comes with the bankless premium subscription? No ads, just straight to the content. But that's just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you. There's also the token report, a monthly bullish, bearish, neutral report on the hottest tokens of the month.

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token report. Got a question? I've got my own Q&A room for any questions that you might have. At bankless, we have huge things planned for 2023, including a new website with login with your Ethereum address capabilities, and we're super excited to ship what we are calling Bankless 2.0 soon TM. So if you want extra help exploring the frontier, subscribe to Bankless Premium. It's under 50 cents a day and provides a wealth of knowledge and support on your journey west. I'll see you in the Discord. If you haven't yet experienced the superpowers that a smart contract wallet gives you, check out Ambire.

Ambire works with all the EVM chains. The layer two is like Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon, but also the non-Etherium ecosystems like Avalanche and Phantom. Ambire lets you pay for gas and stable coins, meaning you'll never have to spend your precious eth again. And if you like self-custody, but you still want training wheels, you can recover a lost Ambire wallet with an email and password, but without giving the Ambire team control over your funds. The Ambire wallet is coming soon for both iOS and Android. And if you

want to be a beta tester, Ambire is airdropping their wallet token for simply just using the wallet. You can sign up at ambire.com. And while you're there, sign up for the web app wallet experience as well. So thank you, Ambire, for pushing the frontier of smart contract wallets on Ethereum. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce our next guest, Tim Urban is a blogger. He's a writer. He's an illustrator extraordinaire, a most famous for his wait but why blog, which is a fantastic blog. he started back in 2013, covers a range of topics, almost as diverse. Well, probably more diverse than bankless, actually, from AI to political philosophy to like whatever Tim is interested in science, technology, human behavior.

And he recently wrote this book that we want the bankless community to learn a little bit about it's called What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. This is a fantastic book that Dave and I read recently. and I think provides a roadmap, an interesting set of parallels for the crypto community as well. Tim, welcome bankless. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty well. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you. So I just want to kick off and start with this question, which is a common observation. I think everyone sort of sees, whether, like wherever you are in the United States, whether a country you live, it seems like everybody is mad at each other all of the time, Tim. And I want to ask you why. Why does it seem like everyone is always angry these days? Well, one reason is that people are more angry at each other than they used to be for lots of reasons we could discuss social media, tribal media, stuff like that.

But I think an even bigger reason is that the anger that there is is loud and prominent and broadcasts over lots of channels. And we are in contact with that anger all the time, which makes it feel like there's even more of it. than there is. People who aren't angry with each other are not often screaming it from the hilltops about how not angry they are. While people who are, we are going to much more likely to do that. So I think it's a combo of those two things. Tim, we want to explore in this podcast a concept that we have talked about on bank lists a number of times, but not yet actually dove into headfirst. And that is the topic of liberalism. And I think understanding liberalism will be able to create a stack of understanding, a stack of knowledge that will actually get back to that original

question, why can't we talk to each other anymore? We've talked about liberalism and Western liberal values on the podcast, but we've never actually taken the time to approach that subject head on. So I'm wondering if you can help guide us through that conversation and starting there, because we've never actually defined liberalism on this podcast. So maybe we can start there and we'll build back up to talk about the way that social media influences our thinking and our mental models for things, but I want to start at the very deep down of how humans created this foundation that we have for ourselves called liberalism. So first, if you could help us to find what is liberalism and why is it good if we could start there, if you don't mind.

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

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

among the scariest kind of take over. And then there's a gang that kind of takes control of everything. And now you have a dictatorship. Right. So we have a lot of human history that's kind of going back and forth between chaos and then order. But, you know, the order can be very, you know, oppressive. And what is lost in both cases is kind of freedom, you know, freedom and security in that freedom. So liberalism is kind of a compromise between rules and individual. rights, individual freedom. It's not a complete freedom. There are rules. There are laws. If you violate them, you can end up in jail forever. And so there are very hard, serious rules. But they're broad and wide, and they basically create a big, wide fence around an area, or I like to think of it as a

big house. And the walls of the house, they are rules. And they are rules that you can't break. You can't murder someone. You can't steal, et cetera. But within the house, within those big, broad walls, pretty much you're left to your own. So the idea is that there are, it's that, you know, this emerges from philosophers like John Locke, who said,

I actually don't think that the state of nature, that human nature is necessarily like so chaotic that it needs hardcore rules. I think actually if you just build some basic rules and keep people, keep the, you know, the most aggressive among us from kind of bullying, conquering everything, actually things can work pretty much okay on their own.

And so you have, for example, instead of saying we're going to enforce equality of outcome, right, which is, you know, someone might say that, someone might say that that's equality, but it's such totalitarian version of equality that you end up with very little freedom. And so that would be that, you know, whatever you're doing, you're going to end up with the same. So liberalism says, let's go for equality of opportunity. So we want to try to do what we can to level the playing field or at least, you know, allow for upward mobility and things like that. But beyond that, kind of you're on your own. You know, that's why even the Constitution says,

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

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

And that beyond that, the individuals will run the show and they will vote for who they want and they will start the businesses they want and they will promote the ideas and start the movements they want and let the people kind of guide their own path. That's the core idea. And it seems kind of, I bet what a lot of Americans are people in Western democracies might be saying, you know, yeah, duh, right? This is just, that's how things are. But that's not, it's actually interesting because it's not, that's not an obvious thing.

That's something that is an artificial invention. We made that up. It's very different than the, you know, the natural way, which is the most powerful people make the rules for everyone else. This is a very specific kind of pretty complex and nuanced form of government that we have developed pretty recently and we're all living inside this house that is not a house that used to exist and it's been built by humans. And it doesn't stand up by its own.

You know, it stands up if the people who are actually in the country are the ones who are defending those basic principles and who are, enforcing the rules. And so, yeah, it's something that we grew up in. We think we think is normal, but it's actually not. It's pretty awesome, I think. It reminds me, Tim, of another topic we explore a lot in crypto, which is the topic of money, which is a social coordination technology that almost no one thinks about. We just sort of take for granted. Oh, yeah. But like, when you think about it, when you stop and you think about it too long, you're like, wait, this, who invented money? What backs it? And wait, you have this, like, this point system that you use to allocate labor and resources and figure out who can buy what in

society and everyone just believes in it and so it kind of works and you're like yeah that's what it is and like no one ever actually thinks about it and I feel the same way about liberalism when you pause and you think about it reminds me of the book from yvall herari which we quote so often on bankless book called sapiens where he talks about humanity's great superpower is these shared myths that we propagate basically. And liberalism is this great shared myth. And I want to contrast it with something that you were saying towards the end, which is you call it in your book, the liberal games, right? Which is in contrast to the power games. And I think you were alluding to something here, Tim, which is like the state of nature, this is a John Law concept as well, is very much like

power games, like in nature. Violence as the settlement layer for getting things done. And that's the way it has been. That's the way kind of the state of nature is. And liberalism is almost this veneer that we put over top of it. So here's this graphic. And by the way, your book, Tim, goes through all of these fantastic graphics that just help really sync mental model type concepts. But you have two circles here.

You have the liberal games. And we've got liberal laws and liberal norms on the top. And that is an overcoating on top of this other deeper in the stack system called the Power Games. Can you tell us about the power games versus the liberal games and what you're trying to get across here? Yeah. So, I mean, the power games is pretty straightforward, right? It's the rule in nature.

You know, if you go watch a David Attenborough special. There's no laws. There's nothing fair about nature. It is a very simple rule. Everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so. So if a bear wants to eat a bunny, the bear can do that if he can catch the bunny. If he has the power to catch the bunny, he can eat the bunny. It doesn't matter if the bunny has a family.

if the bunny had other plans, it's irrelevant because the bear had the power to catch him. End of story. If the bunny and all the other bunnies are too fast, they have the power to get away, they can. And the bear might starve to death. And that's just how that comes, right? And so that's the law of nature and the power games. It's whoever has the power to do what they want can do what they want. And everyone else is kind of, you know, they're screwed.

That's also been lots of human societies. Those who have power, usually violence, or maybe they have, you know, the power of everyone believes they have a direct line to God. So whatever they say goes, they found a different way to have power because everyone's scared of going to hell. Whatever it is, if you find a way to have the power to do what you want, you get to do what you want. And if you don't have power,

you better hope that the people who do are nice and believe in fairness because if they don't, you're screwed. And they can go and they can take your wife and say, that's my wife now. And kidnap here, you know, take your children and say, they're slaves now. I mean, and that's the most unfair thing we can imagine because we grew up in a place where fairness matters, right? individual rights are sacred. It doesn't matter who you are, who you are born to, or your age, or your gender, or your race. You have rights. That's at least the principle here. It's not always been kept perfectly, but it's the thing we believe we believe is right. But that's not real. I mean, outside of this house that we live in where things are supposed to be fair, there is no such thing as fairness, right? It's just unfairness happens constantly. So the reason I have it as a two-part puzzle is because you've got liberal laws, right? So that is, you know, the constitution. And,

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

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

The social contract. Yeah, the basic social contract. And you can see that a lot. If you notice, like, the times when things aren't going very well in liberal democracy, it's often because they have to have a soft spot where, you know, people who want to break the norms, they can get away with it. You know, if you try to play the power games in a liberal democracy, you can often get away with a lot, unless the place is functioning well, in which case the people in it are supposed to stand up for the liberal norms and actually say, no, that's not how we do things here and push back on it. So when you say these liberal laws, these liberal values are light touch, what that means,

I think is for all these people who live in this house have a lot of flexibility. And that's the beauty of this liberal code base that we have in this modern world is that things are supposed to enforce themselves because the society that operates on top of them and understand them to be good, which leaves a lot of tolerance and a lot of flexibility and a lot of freedom by nature of what these laws are for people to walk around this house. And in good times, that just works because the social contract manifests. But what you're saying is that there's also the bad scenario here, which is that since there's tolerance, since there's flexibility here, people can start to violate the social contract and start to live a life in ways that are just misaligned with the purpose of a liberal foundation. Is that a way

to interpret this? Yeah. So here's one example, right? So here's a liberal law is the First Amendment, right? The First Amendment says, amongst other things, it says, Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of speech. In other words, the government cannot put you in jail for saying the wrong thing, including criticism of the government or criticism of anyone else or, you know, screaming out racial slurs on the street corner. You know what? It's ugly, but it's legal. But to actually have free speech, to have an open and thriving marketplace of ideas, which is the point, right, which is that, you need more than just that. So you need that, of course. If you don't have the First Amendment, forget about it. And the countries that don't have a good equivalent

of the First Amendment, obviously, there's a lot of things that will get you and, you know, the government will arrest you for saying. But to have true freedom of speech, you also need that liberal norms puzzle piece. And what is that? Which is the culture of freedom of speech. The culture of that free speech is something that we value here. So an example could be if there's a movement that says, we're not going to, we're going to, anytime there's a debate or a talk or, or some kind of event where a certain set of ideas that we don't like are being said, we're going to show up and we're going to shout as loud as we can and drown out the ideas. Or we're actually going to kind of block the doorway.

We're going to make it very scary to enter the event and very difficult. And then we're going to scream the whole time in the event hall so that no one can hear, right? That's legal, right? You are not going to go to jail for that. it is legal, you know, to scream at the top of your lungs during kind of an outdoor event, just say. But it is total violation of liberal norms, right? So it is what I would call legal cheating. Instead of what you're supposed to do in the liberal games is say, I don't like those ideas. I think they're bad. I think they're dangerous. So I am going to hold my own event or I'm going to try to debate that person.

I'm going to hold my own event. I'm going to write my own op-ed explaining why those ideas are so bad, point by point. And I'm going to persuade people. I'm going to persuade people that they're wrong and I'm right. I'm going to create a movement that is so powerful and so persuasive that that person had no one who even want to show up to their talks anymore or might weigh fewer and they won't have much power because no one will believe them anymore because I've exposed them. Or you know what? I hate those ideas. I'm just going to check out. I'm not going to go to that talk. I'm not going to go to that event.

I just don't want to even hear it. Okay. That's all fun. That's what the persuasion. It's a battle of persuasion. In the power games, what you would say is, well, I don't know if I can win the battle of persuasion. So instead I'll go the much kind of easier thing, which is I will use, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, scream brute force to make sure no one can hear the ideas. I will shut down that idea from ever

being said. So rather than try to persuade people it's wrong, I will make sure no one even hears that idea in the first place. It's total power games mentality. But as long as you're not actually physically hurting them, the law can't do anything. It's like in a totalitarian dictatorship that valued free speech, they might actually say anyone who shouts down speakers is going to be arrested. We can't do that here. We have too much freedom here for that. The government is not actually powerful enough to even step in. They're not allowed to step in. That is amongst us to work out. So the way that free speech would prosper is that people who do that would be socially shunned and socially criticized. And people would say, you know, you're a bully. And, you know,

we don't want to be friends with you anymore because you're the kind of person that screams and shouts down talks. And we're going to mock you. And we can, you know, that is the country standing up for itself saying, nope, that's not how we do things here. And you need that. Or else it'll be the people who shout the loudest, you know, get to determine what's being said. None of this violates the law. The legal piece is still fine. The First Amendment hasn't ever been violated here, but free speech has been totally curtailed. And so there's a lot of examples like this where there always will be groups that are trying to within the law because no one wants to get arrested, right? And that's a huge deterrent. Within the law, violate liberal norm parts of

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

is not just in the Constitution. It's not in our set of laws. Like, that's part of it. But that's like half of it or one portion of it. The other portion is the actual social enforcement of that value, that norm enforcement. It's interesting because we see the same thing with crypto, right? So take something like Bitcoin. We have a 21 million hard cap in the total amount of Bitcoin supply that is written in sort of the constitution and the code of Bitcoin, right? But in order for that to be maintained, the community, the social norms actually have to value that. because if the entire community decides to run a different set of code, right, that doesn't value the 21 million that maybe puts in a 1% per year inflation rate, and they choose to kind of fork,

they choose to devalue 21 million hard cap as their priority, they can totally do it, which is so funny because there is this myth in crypto that like, you know, hard caps and immutability is 100% maintained by code. And that's not true. In the same way, the First Amendment isn't 100% maintained by the Constitution. Okay? It's maintained by the Constitution plus the social contract and norms that actually carry out and enforce it. It's the parallels here are quite striking. I want to make another point here too, Tim, because this is another image, like another illustration that you put in your book, which is this idea of different levels of, I guess, civilization, maybe you call this, or human coordination. I don't know what you call this pyramid.

but at the bottom we have level one, which is modernity, science, reason, objective truth. That is the definition of modernity. And we have level two, which is what we've been talking about, which is liberalism. That is the next stack up, free markets, free speech, individualism, quality of opportunity. And then we have level three, which is where all of the other things are kind of built on top of liberalism, which is built on modernity. And level three is norms and policies and laws and institutions. I guess a few things that are straight to. I want you to maybe explain this to us in a little bit more detail. Why does liberalism sit on top of modernity and why do the norms of policies and laws sit on top of liberalism? But one broad point I want to make is like, this is relatively new social software that humans are running. For most of human existence, and you have this really cool chart at the beginning of your book that shows like of the 200,000 years of human existence, we're in sort of the late stages. Liberalism hasn't been around for very long. at all. And this is completely new software on the human time scale that we're running, modernity

even, liberalism, and institutions and laws and policies and norms around that. So this is relatively new social software. But explain this pyramid to us. What is the idea that you're trying to convey? Yeah. I think it's useful to help understand the difference between different political movements. because right now we have this kind of constrained, you know, we have these terms, you know, something can be left or far left or it can be far right or whatever. And I think we can define that a little better. And so, first of all, modernity, yeah, that is something that is new. People forget that.

In the scheme of things, it's a few hundred years old, this concept that there exists one objective truth and that science and reason are methods that we can use to discover it and to get closer to understanding what it is. Before, in the pre-modern era, there were different religions, each with their own kind of, there were different denominations of truth. So each religion would have their sacred scripture, and that was truth. And what was so cool about this idea of objective truth in science is that it was, no matter who you were, no matter what religion you believed in, no matter where you lived in the world

or what language you spoke, you could all contribute to the global project of, using science and built science to collaborate across generations and across countries to work together toward discovering an objective truth. That's something we take for granted today, but that's a pretty new thing. And of course, that notion and the spread of it is why we can do to thank or thank that for all what we know now about medicine, about space and about plate tectonics and just everything we've learned. That really has come from this global project that was born in, you know, modernity. Most of, you know, that's what accelerated this process. But anyway, so there are movements, right? So we talked about the liberal house. And within that house, in a place like the U.S.,

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

The problem is that black Americans haven't been receiving the full benefits of liberalism. The liberal house, that's a flaw in the liberal house, right? It's a glitch in the software. It needs to be repaired. We need to fix it. That's what the civil rights movement was about. Let's expose this through civil disobedience and through persuasion. Let's expose this flaw, this way that we are violating our own constitution, and let's fix it, right?

The goal was more liberalism. Meanwhile, you also have, you know, conservatives in the House, and they're more likely, rather than look at the ways the House's flaw, to look at the ways that it's good and that the ways that progressive ideas and progressive ideas for change might erode the support beams in the House. So their goal is to stand up for the kind of, in a lot of cases, the status quo or even how things used to be, and say, inevitably, some things are eroding in the House. And that's what they look for. You know, where do we not have the right values that we used to have? But they also, they have the same goal. The Constitution should be upheld and that the liberal house is good, right? And people on the center are going to have, you know, a little bit of both or going to be more moderate.

All of those people are pro-house. Okay. And that's an important thing to distinguish. Now, there are also movements right now that are outside the house with wrecking balls. These are movements who believe they're much more revolutionary. So what people call wokeness, right? I call it social justice

fundamentalism, which is fundamentally different than liberal social justice, which is the Martin Luther King style that I just described. Social justice fundamentalism is my term

for less kind of culture war baggage-laden term than wokeness, but it is fundamentally different in that it's outside the house with a wrecking ball and it stems from

and this is, by the way, all Marxists and neo-Marxist and all of its descendants, you know, all these movements, what they have in common is they say,

no, no, no, everyone in the house, you're missing the big point. The house itself is rotten to the core. Liberalism is bad. It's something that sounds good, but it's just the power games in disguise. It inevitably entrenches the power of the powerful and entrenched the oppression of the oppression. And this, what you supposedly call free markets is actually, you know, this exploitative system to keep oppressed people down, right? And it inevitably fosters inequality, blah, blah, blah, right? So that's, again, I don't happen to agree with that, but it's a totally valid. philosophical point. And so if I believe that, I would be out there with them with a wrecking ball.

It's not that they're bad. It's that they believe that we're in the house are missing the big point here. Zoom out and see that the house is bad and we need to get rid of it. And so a lot of the actual scholars of social justice fundamentalism, they say stuff like you cannot dismantle. So A, we want to dismantle what they would call the master's house, right? They believe that it is, you know, the master's house and like, you know, to use a slave term. And they say you cannot dismantle it with the master's tools. So that's specific. That means not only do we not like liberalism, but we also don't like the tools that liberalism values, free speech, all of that. We don't like that. So that's why they would say that you can't just use free speech and, you know, free markets

to defeat to actually dismantle this house. You need to shut down free speech. So there's this mentality that my opponent's speech is actually dangerous and needs to be deplatformed, right? So instead of persuasion, we're going to actually use coercion to try to de-platform, which again, if I hated the liberal house and thought it was bad, I also would say, screw the tools of it. I don't believe in liberalism or the liberal tools. And you'll see less emphasis on individuality there. You'll see much more things like, you know, you'll see the, you know, kind of treating groups as monolithic groups. So you have like the black community is a term, right, which is not a term that we would be used in the liberal house so much because it's that kind of diminishes the individual in favor

of these big kind of monolithic groups. And that's, so that's very Marxist. These big monolithic groups of the oppressed and the powerful in the U.S. social justice fundamentalism is a brand of that that would use race and gender and things like that and supposed to like the working class and the ruling class. But it's the same concept. It's outside the house with a wrecking ball. So it's more revolutionary and it wants to not just, if the first group in the house, liberals, left, right and center, they say level one and two of this pyramid. They're great. We want more of them. But we need to change the norms, policies, laws, institutions. They're arguing about level three. What can we do on level three to better uphold levels one and two? Marxist ideologies

like social justice fundamentalism, they say, no, no, no, we need to go and actually overhaul level two also. But the thing about social justice fundamentalism that's different from a lot of other Marxist ideologies, they go a step further because most Marxists actually would still say level one is good. They actually, they believe in science and objective truth. They just think that liberalism is a misguided system of government. Social justice fundamentalism merges kind of the neo-Marxist mentality with postmodernism. So postmodernism is a set of philosophies that emerged in this, you know, 60, 70s and 80s, a lot of them in Europe and France and came over to the U.S. And this is, you know, this goes a step further and says actually even what we're calling modernity, you know, science and objective truth, all of that is actually just a meta narrative.

And it's a meta narrative through which oppression flows. They actually would say we need to reject that too. We need to reject this concept. So you'll often hear kind of, you know, woke scholars and they'll say stuff like there is no such thing as an objective. of truth. They say stuff like my truth, right, your truth, and that lived experience is the only way to understand certain truths. And it almost goes back to the concept of different denominations of truth from the past, is that, you know, black Americans or women or LGBTQ people, they have a lens, they actually have access to different denominations of truth that other people can't see, right?

This is a very postmodern and actually a very pre-modern concept. So it's an explicit rejection of this idea of modernity. And so social just social just fundamentalism combines this postmodern, this Marxist ideology that wants to get rid of level two with the postmodern ideology, which actually wants to go a step further and get rid of level one as well, full overhaul of the pyramid. So when you think of what's the definition of radical, to me, the more radical, the more revolutionary, the deeper in this pyramid, your progressivism goes. So a liberal progressive is progressive about level three. They want to change stuff on level three, but they've become very conservative about levels one and two. A Marxist is progressive

about levels three and two, right? They want to overhaul both, but they're conservative about level one. And then social justice fundamentalism wants to actually, they're progressive about all three levels. And so the deeper your progressivism goes before it hits a wall of conservatism, that's the more radical. I think it's a great metric for how radical something can be. So I just think it's a useful. Once I started thinking it this way, I just clarified a lot. And again, none of this is, I happen to disagree with social justice fundamentalism. and Marxism. But none of this is to insult those things. I think a lot of people who believe those things would look at this and agree with me that, yes, they do want to overhaul a level two or maybe even level one. And I just think it can help us understand what we're even arguing about. And I think one of the issues is that right now it's confusing. And a lot of people who are very much liberal social justice, you know, Martin Luther King style people who value liberalism. They think that wokeness is part of their kind of tribe. They think that it's maybe very extreme, you know, but that it's still kind of fighting for the same thing. But it's actually, it's fundamental. the opposite. Instead of being pro-house, it's anti-house, right? That's as big a difference as you can get.

And so I think people who are pro-house actually should reject wokeness in its ideology. And people who believe in that, they should agree that they're anti-house or else they're actually kind of they're in the wrong place, if that makes sense. I think that's why this was so useful to me, Tim, is it helped me kind of map, because like I think most people that you talk to just on the street will sort of agree with the title of your book. Like, there is a problem with society. I think we all kind of feel that, right? And, you know, this stacking of levels indicates, like, how deep you want to go in the stack where you think we need to go in the stack in order to, like, fix the problems of society. And you can map this onto kind of the different social political movements,

as you just did, right? I also kind of map this onto crypto. And, you know, some people talk about crypto being sort of a revolution and being kind of a radical movement. It's actually not that radical if you look at it from the stack model because crypto is very much on the stack, sits above the stack of liberalism. It is a level three sort of social technology in that crypto, we look at this, free markets. It's crypto free market? Definitely, that's the thing. It is a free market, right? Free speech, censorship resistance. Okay, that is liberalism. Individualism, property rights, digital property rights, that's individualism, a quality of opportunity. If you, pay the fee to get your block across and transacted in the network, it gets across. It doesn't

matter who you are. It doesn't care about race, gender, geography. You just have to have an internet connection. So it has some equality of opportunity here. Where it really seeks to kind of shake up the world is the top level, level three, institutions and laws, right? Crypto has some critiques with how central banks and banks are kind of managed in general, thinks we can have a better liberal digital property rights system. So it was even useful for me to kind of map that model of the world onto crypto and sort of see things differently. So thank you for this model. That's really interesting. Yeah. No, I mean, it's a great way to put it, is that, you know, crypto, it's only trying to revolutionize level three. It actually, if anything, it's deeply liberal,

right? It is something that I bet, you know, I bet often the people who are super into crypto are also very passionate lowercase L liberals. And if anything, it's kind of like one of the best expressions of lowercase L liberalism, this concept of, you know, it's a very kind of pure form of those ideals, I think. It is. And that's why we wanted to do this podcast so much, Tim, is because I feel like we haven't talked enough as a crypto community about the values that actually undergird the system.

And in many ways, like the crypto movement is much less radical than some of the other social political movements going on in the space. Because what we're just trying to say is we're trying to take these liberal values and instantiate that in the digital. And I actually think that the nation state constitutional apparatus hasn't done that quite effectively. Like we have these analog types of rights, but how do you actually own unconfiscatable property in the digital world, on the internet, right? Well, like, I don't know.

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

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

gargantuan factions that exist in the web two world, there's many more of them. They're a lot smaller in the crypto world. But they operate on the same code and they play with the same strategies. And that's why this is so interesting is when we got into the height of the 2021 bull market. There was this one tribe, you call it, the Frog Army. There's also the Terra Lunatics with the Terra Luna blockchain. And Ryan and I actually got into fights with these people, with these monolithic, like entities. And they actually started to transcend down that stack further than just the top of the pyramid. Most of crypto agrees with a whole like liberal freedom of speech, all that kind of stuff that you and Ryan were talking about. But there were

these some tribes that played the power games that operated outside of the rules of the house. And they would come into our YouTube chats when we were live streaming and just absolutely span the chat, silencing all forms of dissent. And they would just make sure that anyone that had any dissenting opinion didn't have a platform to stand on. And so we're watching some of these power strategies operate both outside of the crypto world and also inside of the crypto world as well. And it's just interesting to see these different tribes, these different communities, matter where they exist, be it inside of crypto or outside of crypto, kind of play by the same playbook, no matter what. And the playbook is so elegantly documented in your book. And so this pyramid,

I think, is just to really answer the question to the bankless listeners, like, why are these people talking about this liberalism concept on a crypto podcast? Is the answer is because, like, some parts of these crypto tribes, we all want to re-architect society because we think that the institutions are failing us. Some crypto tribes want to go real deep. Most crypto tribes only want to stay at the surface. And I think this is really the important point that bankless listeners should really pay attention to is that we all want to re-architect society moving forward with different institutions. And the level at which your tribe in particular, whichever one you identify with, injects itself into that pyramid that we were just looking at is really important to understand. And so, Tim, I just want to kind of leave that to you because go for it. Yeah. Yeah, it's just because I think like the pyramid is almost like the biggest point here. And so if there are people who are both kind of, I don't know, really gung ho about crypto, but one of them wants to use crypto to overhaul level two or to violate level two and someone

else is passionately wants to preserve and enhance level two. It's important to realize that the liberal who wants to use crypto to make things more liberal has a lot more in common and a lot more common goals with people who hate crypto, but they're passionate liberals, than people who also their fellow crypto people who specifically want to use crypto to undermine level two. Because it's like, think of backup, zoom out, what's this all for, right? What are we all actually doing here? Crypto is an end in itself. It's a means for a lot of different things.

And so one of the main reasons that you like crypto is because you think it makes market, you know, enhances free markets and individualism and freedom. and it actually, it's the best version of the house, and someone else is out there with a wrecking ball, you know, he's saying we can use crypto to knock down the house. You guys are, it's nothing to do with each other, right? You have nothing. You're much more, you have to push back against that a lot more than you have to push back against fellow liberals who think crypto is bad, right? I mean, it's just because that's the bigger picture. Yeah, that's exactly right, Tim. You know, I want to maybe address some people are kind of questioning this idea of lowercase out liberalism again. Could you steal man the argument, though,

against liberalism? So, for instance, this idea, you sort of alluded to it briefly, that liberalism is just another entrenched power structure, right? A lot of people right now are looking at capitalism and, you know, just millennials, for example, people kind of, they can't afford a house. The economy's not so good right now. It seems like wealth inequality has exacerbated to a degree that it's just like non-recoverable for younger generations. And so they're seeing capitalism. They're seeing the free markets that we're all talking about in crypto and liberal values. And they're saying, this is just another unequal power structure.

They see a quality of opportunity. And, you know, they view that as worse than kind of the idea of maybe equity. And they see free speech. And they look at that and they say, well, this just enables hate propaganda. And they see these concepts like individualism that a liberal holds dear. And they contrast that with like, what about the power and the value of the collective? Are you sure that liberalism, because your book is kind of like lays out the models, but then I think the conclusion it also makes the case for why liberalism is really important

for the United States in general and for many countries. But can you steal man the argument against liberalism before we move on from this topic? Yeah, I mean, definitely. I don't think liberalism is perfect. to just to approach each thing you said here by one, like free speech I feel very strongly about that I'm very pro-liberal there. I think it's pretty hard for me to steal man the case against it because what people have to realize is that sure, free speech allows bad ideas to be spoken, right? And sometimes to be to persuade people. But the only alternative, the only alternative

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

so I know which ones should be silenced. The people who say, dangerous ideas shouldn't be platformed. The assumption there is that I already know everything I need to know. I know what's dangerous and I know it's not. But I would use the example of, you know, interracial marriage. 96% of people thought it was immoral in 1959. Pretty recent, 1959. 4% of people thought it was okay. Ninety-six percent of people weren't bad people, right? They weren't racist bad people. It's that that's just what we all thought. That's what almost everyone thought, and almost everyone you know would have thought interracial marriage is not moral. Today, the number is 94% think it's fine, and 6% think it's immoral, right? So that is, the entire country has changed its mind. But if you

went back to 1959 and said, you know what, certain people, we were going to let you decide, no dangerous ideas will be erred anymore. You decide which ones. Almost every, one. Well, one of the dangerous ideas on their list would have been interracial marriage is good. So no one would have been able to speak that. Same with gay rights. Gay rights would have been a no-go in 1959. Almost everyone would have said, well, that we definitely don't want to be spoken. We don't want kids hearing about gay rights, right? That's sodomy. It's whatever. And today, I think we're pretty happy that free speech prevailed because we were wrong. And so the kind of underlying assumption when people today's thing, you know, free speech allows dangerous ideas to

flourish is this idea that, well, all the people in the past, they had bad ideas, but today, it's all clear. We figured it out. People in 50 years will not look back on us and say, wow, they were really morally wrong about a bunch of things or just their knowledge was off. But actually, they'll say that, nope, they had it right. Of course, that's not true, right? So free speech, I almost refuse to steal man the case against it because I just think that the only alternative is powerful people censoring everyone else. And of course, usually what the powerful people end up deciding as offensive is any challenge to their own power, any criticism of themselves. Now, the other things, I think free markets, capitalism, there's a very strong steel

man arguments against those, of course. I mean, you know, you could argue that, you know, unchecked capitalism is going to kill us all because it's going to lead to, you know, AI arms races and stuff like this, right? Weapons arm races. And of course, it inevitably creates vast inequality, which is almost always the sign of a crumbling society. Is inequality spikes, goes to crazy extremes, and then the society crumbles. So I think unmoored capitalism is a very bad idea. I think that these should definitely, it should be a continually evolving dance between freedom and regulation, the free markets. I think we already have a lot of that. I don't think, you know, any educated liberal knows that we don't have pure free markets and pure capitalism, right?

We have a lot of rules against monopoly and a lot of other things. So I think those rules are good. And I totally agree that, you know, inequality to a crazy extent is not good and that we should be doing things to try to curb this. And, you know, within, again, as a liberal, I don't really think we should do too much. We don't want to very quickly have a lose our ability to be productive and everything. And also, it's important to remember that the worst off people today, the people who are in the bottom 20%, they are living way better than the best off people in the 1700s, in a lot of ways, at least, with their access to medicine and food and shelter, usually, and they have heat in the winter, you know, most people, even people in the U.S. who are in the bottom 20%, they have a lot of their

basic needs met. That's incredible revolution. and the median American is living like an absolute king compared to people of the past. So I do think that's, you know, inherently, again, if you think about alternatives, if you say inequality at all is bad, what you're also saying is that freedom is bad because inherently just different people have different talents, different motivations, even people who are equally talented, equally motivated. One wants to go into this profession, which makes a certain kind of money, and this one goes into a different one.

So inequality is inevitable if you have freedom at all, right? And so I think that it's hard to argue that we should have no inequality because then you end up with a totalitarian communist dictatorship, which I don't think is a good idea. I think that's going to lead to mass poverty and you're going to crush our productivity and it's going to be unfair and you're going to end up in a bad situation. But I definitely think that unchecked free markets and capitalism is not the right way at all. So I definitely feel like that's something. And then just in general, the idea that like liberalism itself is, I would totally agree that I would never say that liberalism is the end all. and be all system. I'm sure it can be improved upon. I'm sure there are better systems. I just can't think of any. I haven't seen any. If someone can come to me and say, look at this society in the past,

you know, that thrive for a long time, that was productive, that was fair, that had equal justice before people were equal under the law and quality of life was better. I'm all ears, right? I'm totally open to the fact that our current system is definitely flawed in lots of ways. I mean, it's definitely corrupt in lots of ways. People take advantage of it. I think that democracy, the voting system, isn't definitely not perfect. And so I think there's all kinds of flaws. It's just that it seems like the best crack yet and that a lot of the work we can do is to make the house better. I think that the part of it is that we're not living in the best version of this house. Again, look at the history of, you know, race in America, right? I mean, black Americans have had far from a fair ride in what's

supposed to be a fair country. And women, too, right? And there's been, you know, women couldn't even vote until recently. So I think there's two things to separate. One is, you know, are we complaining about the flaws in the system, which I'm right on, I'm right there with you, right? Let's fix the flaws and let's get rid of corruption and let's keep attacking that. Or arguing against the system as a whole, right? So that means you're not just arguing for more regulation in capitalism or free markets. You're arguing for the end of free markets. Yeah, maybe I'm not doing a great job of steel manning it. But look, I think the best steelman I can give is that there are always inherently going to be some stuff that we're all missing. And that if I want a thousand years in the future,

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takes the time to define Web3 specific vocabulary, it is still a jargon-free experience for the Crypto-Curious user. Friendly, not scary. Metamask Learn is available in 10 languages with more to be added soon, and it's meant to cater to a global Web3 audience. So, are you tired of having to explain crypto concepts to your friends? Go to learn.menomask.io and add Metamasklearn to your guides to get onboarded into the world of Web3. So Tim, I think at this point in the conversation, I don't want to return to the way we started it, which is with RETAMSKLEAN. Ryan's questions. Why are we all fighting? Why are we all angry with each other all the time? I want to actually pull in some of the graphic that you illustrated. I'm assuming yourself.

I did, yes. But first, I want to reemphasize the many polarities that we find in the crypto world. We have all these different tribes, right? You have the bitcoins, which tend to be these decently conservative Austrian economic zealots. And then you got the Ethereum. Interesting. Yeah, Austrian economics. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Hard money as opposed to Keynes. Each different crypto tribe has their own flavor, right? You got the Ethereum's, you got the Salonans. Then you even have like sub-communities built on top of other communities. So inside of the Ethereum community, you have the Arbinots of the Arbitrum Protocol. And that's a layer two scaling technology on Ethereum. Same thing with the Optimus, another layer two scaling protocol on Ethereum. Then you have like the small brains, which is an NFT community built on top of the Arbitrum community, built on top of the Ethereum community. And so like some of the multi-polarity communities operate in conflict with each other. Me and Ryan were birthed into the crypto space fighting with the Bitcoiners as part of the Ethereum tribe. Lately, I've been picking some fights with the Salana people. Other communities cooperate with each other. You have the

small brains on the Arbitrum, on the Ethereum tech stack, and these tend to cooperate pretty well with each other. And the reason why I want to lay up all these different images or this part of the conversation is to start to get into some of your illustrations here. And you use two different illustrations that I'm showing at once, which is the higher mind and the primitive mind. And the point I'm going to try and make here is that all communities have members of both. They have community members that operate with just the primitive minds, call them the cyber hornets for the bitcoiners. And then the higher minds. You call them like the thought leaders, like Nick Carter of the Bitcoin tribe comes to mind for me. And you have this idea of a ladder where everyone has their primitive mind, everyone has their higher mind.

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

But Tim, you've identified these archetypes, this primitive mind and this higher mind that I think all communities have. And I'm wondering if you can walk us through this mental model to understand how to think about these tribes that we all identify with in the crypto space and maybe identify the fact that one particular tribe that we are in might be operating with a primitive mind, whereas others might be operating with a higher mind. If you could just walk us through that part of the conversation. Sure. Yeah. So this is, I love that you did this because a lot of people point out, like, well, there's already two dimensions, right? We have the political compass. And what I would say to that is when I say the what you think axis, right, the horizontal

axis, left, right, center, that is basically shorthand for just, it's the realm of what you think. Now, we could always expand that into two dimensions of its own, like you did below, right? And I think that all of that still qualifies, though, for the what you think axis. So there's lots of realms of what you think, and we can discuss and there's lots of different nuances to it. And I'm sure within crypto, you, like you just described, it's not just a single axis, right? There's all these different camps and there's different camps within the camps. And that to me still, though, for this discussion, we can still oversimplify it to all within the realm of what you think, right? You know, what your stances are. Now,

What I like to do here is add a vertical, another axis. And if you already have two, then this is a third one. But either way, it's a separate axis entirely from all of that, which is this, what I would call like a how you think axis. It's my ladder here. And the idea is that there's like two different kind of broad, you know, ways of thinking. And when I talk about the, you know, higher mind, it is kind of the ideal kind of grown-up way of thinking.

So when your higher mind is kind of doing the thinking, you are basically just looking for truth. And you're not attached to your ideas. You're not attached. You don't identify with them. You are simply, you're trying to get closer to the truth. You're trying to be less wrong. And so you inherently have a lot of humility because you know that people are often wrong and you've been wrong a lot in the past.

And you're very open to disagreement and to challenges to your ideas because you see that is, you know, if my idea is a little machine that I've built, well, a challenger is kicking my machine. Now, I'm not going to take that personally. If my idea is as strong as I think it is, they're going to hurt their foot. My machine's going to hold up strong, and I'm going to say, see, I just got a little bit more confident because I saw you tried to do this and it didn't work, but if they kick the machine and something falls off and it breaks, in other words, they challenge my argument and they point out of flaw, and I realize, man, that was a good point. I'm not going to get offended or angry. I'm going to say thank you, basically. Oh,

wow, you just showed me that I thought I was right about something I'm not. And so you're going to be very open to changing your mind, right? This is all very basic. It sounds so obvious. Of course, if you're looking for truth, you would be open to someone telling you, pointing out flaws in your ideas, you would be open to changing your mind. You would have humility about them. And you wouldn't identify with your ideas because the only identity is just you as the truth

seeker. That's it, right? You know, the actual thing you believe to be the truth isn't part of you. That's just something that you're trying to understand. So that's ideal, right? But of course, we don't always think with that part of our brain. So there's this other part, that primitive mind, which actually, you know, really does, you know, in fMRI studies on people having certain views challenged versus others, really does map on to different parts of our brain. It maps onto parts of our brain that are, you know, very emotional, the amygdala, the limbic system, and other parts of the limbic system, the fight or flight parts of our brain, the survival parts of our brain.

And also to this thing called the default mode network, which is the part that looks internally, that's introspective, that associates with our own identity. And so when you're thinking with this part of your brain, there's certain ideas that your primitive mind is going to associate with your identity and is going to basically cling on to and spend all of its energy rather than trying to find the truth, just trying to be right, trying to prove that they're right, trying to continue to believe with conviction the things that they believe and trying to prove anyone else wrong. And when that part of your brain is active, we have a totally different relationship with ideas. Again, we think we're going for the truth.

But we're very delusional when our primitive mind is thinking. We're not really doing that. We're full of, you know, what is confirmation bias? Confirmation bias is the invisible hand of the primitive mind in your head, which is trying to, as you're sitting there thinking you're looking for truth, the primitive mind is pushing your search in a way that will end up just where it wants it to go. So I'm trying to figure out what's true. Oh, look where I found out.

I confirm my beliefs. Lo and behold, right? And that's what will always happen because that part of our brain gets, again, it's associates certain ideas with our identity and it becomes indistinguishable. So my belief in one of those camps you said or my belief that, you know, left-wing politics is the best or whatever it is. That is part of who I am, right? You know, or that the Bible is true.

That's part of who I am. And the primitive mind has a hard time distinguishing between your identity and your physical body, which is why when you have your sacred beliefs challenged, the fight or flight parts your brain will literally light up and you will not just think the people who are saying them are automatically wrong because that's forgiven, but you'll actually think they're bad people. You'll hate them. And that's very quickly turns into very kind of base, primitive tribalism, good old tribalism, which is that very quickly you start to want to be friends with the people who share that. And then the group themselves becomes this echo chamber where they group will do

kind of collaborative low-wrung thinking. And you will be kicked out of the group, if you say that the group is wrong about the sacred beliefs. The whole group sits there and just talks about how right they are. And they dehumanize the other people. So it's the us versus their mentality. and all real thinking, all truth finding, all humility, it all goes out the window. And so I had the latter because it's not just one or the other brain thinking. A lot of times these are both fighting kind of for the controls in our head. You have some part of you that really just wants to find the truth and then another part that really just wants to be right.

And so it's kind of a tug of war, which is what I have with that rope in those drawings on the right. But I think what you're describing with the different camps, this is an important access to add on to it because you can actually not just say, look at all those camps you mentioned, you know, okay, you can map them out in what they think, but then you can also say, which of these camps or which of these voices is, you know, deep down they're willing to change their mind and they're actually just trying to figure out what's true. And they attack ideas. They don't attack people and they don't get offended or angry when someone says they're wrong and which are doing

it the primitive mind way and they attack people. You know, they will actually try to punish people for saying the wrong thing. And you know, a sign of someone thinking with their primitive mind is you know there's nothing you could say or show them. No piece of evidence that would make them say, you know what? I guess I'm wrong about that. I need to rethink that. So it's important to just, it's nice once you have that in your head, you can start to notice this axis alongside all the what you think axes of the world. Anyone who's just been through the last crypto bull market knows that these things are very emotional experiences, especially when there's a lot of money to be made. There's a lot of wealth that's on the line. and when we say money and wealth, like think scarce resources, which is the same thing that

the people of the political sphere, the trad political sphere, are also fighting over. Everyone is ultimately fighting over scarce resources. And inside of a crypto bull market, it just happens inside of like two years. It happens in a very short consolidated experiment, if you will. And so we have all of these tribes running through this moment in time in which there's a lot of money to be made, but everyone kind of knows that there's only going to be good for like two years. a lot of scarcity mentality and the sympathetic nervous system gets like turned up to the max. And so that's where a lot of like this tribalism comes from in from the crypto space.

Because it's really, really easy to use your primitive mind in the crypto world and a lot harder to use your higher mind because it's easier to find the tribe that chants louder. And because if you can find the bigger tribe that's chanting the bigger chant, that tribe makes money because that makes the number go up, at least inside of that like short time of frame that we have this bull market. And so we have this like fight in the crypto space where we have the OGs who are by definition of the higher mind because they've made it through the cycles. And then you have the new peas who are always of the primitive minds because that is what it is to go through a crypto bull market in its first cycle is like everyone's kind of using their primitive

mind the first go around. And it's also like again why we wanted to have you on this podcast. obviously why we try and do bankless is because the idea of going on the bankless journey is about ascending the ladder. It's about getting to the higher mind and learning to reflect on when you're using your primitive mind and when it's time to come to use the higher mind. I'm wondering if you have just any thoughts for like how to ascend the ladder. How do identify when you are in a primitive mind state and how to actually make it easier for bankless listeners to climb up into a higher mind state? Do you have any thoughts or advice for us on that? Well, I think partially is just being a, like even just having this ladder as a concept in your head,

because no one wants to be on the low rungs, right? When you're on the low rungs, you're delusional. You are letting kind of primitive emotions make your decisions. You're completely blocked from learning new things. You will continue to make the same mistake over and over because of stubborn kind of insistence that you're right. So it's not good for the person who suffers most from low wrong thinking is the low wrong thinker. And so I think, you know, there are. are signs, of course, when you're doing this. If you can ask yourself, is there anything

that would make me say I'm wrong about this? If the answer is no, okay, I think I'm, like, caught up in kind of like a religious fervor here. I think I am caught up in like a tribal craze at this moment. And you can also say, you know, do I get kind of irrationally angry when someone disagrees with me on this? When I see something, you know, that tells me, you know, the people who disagree with me, do I hate to them? You know, these are all signs that you are doing that thing that all humans do, right? It doesn't mean you're a bad person. Doesn't mean you're a dumb person.

Everyone does it, right? And it just means, oh, I've slipped down on the ladder. And just having that thought right there, boom, you're already up a few rungs. Just having that thought because when you're really down on the ladder, you don't know you're doing it. You are totally lost in it. And so a little bit of self-reflection can go a long way. And then, of course, you know, what's the best way to help yourself here is surround yourself with other people that value high-wrung thinking, Even if they don't use that term, they just happen to be that.

So again, as a group, you still will sometimes slip down, but you will find that, like, it can be like a support group. If you have people that tend to not identify with ideas where the group itself likes to disagree, right? If the group is always agreeing on everything, I think you've fallen into a low-rung echo chamber, which is, again, collaborative low-rung thinking. A high-rung group, which I would call an idea lab, is kind of the opposite of an echo chamber, is just a place where people attack ideas, but not people. It's a place where disagreeing is cool.

We're humility. We're saying, I don't know, makes you seem smart, not wishy-washy, you're dumb, where people change their minds and where people disagree for sport. An argument doesn't mean you're in a fight. And when you're in an echo chamber, you can see it where it's like, wow, everyone agrees. And we're having way too much fun agreeing and talking about how bad the other people are. And if I went and disagreed right now, it would really kill the vibe in this room.

And people would like me less and maybe I wouldn't even be part of the group anymore. Okay. So now what you're doing is you've fallen into a low-run group that is going to, if anything, and bring out your low-wrung thinking side. It's going to be, you know, it's like if you're trying to recover as an alcoholic, it's like surrounding yourself with going to an alcohol, you know, drinking party every night. And so I think, yes. So I think, first of all, just have the letter in your head and try to stay aware and

notice the signs that you're doing it and then try to remind yourself that this isn't good for me, that I'm going to, this is making me stupid. And then try to surround yourself with other people. tend to be on the high rungs and kind of keep that as a core value in the group. I think this is great advice for how to exist in a modern, you know, society where we have all this low-wrung-thinking kind of junk food. And you've just extolled the benefits to the individual. And I would say for any truth-finding exercise, whether you're like in pursuit of science or in pursuit of like a better way, a better system, or you're an investor,

you definitely don't want to fall prey to low-rung thinking because you'll be wrong much more often. And if you're looking, as Tim said, to be less wrong, then you have to pursue higher mind thinking. That is the only way. But let me add a little wrinkle to this, Tim, because you just made the case that it's better for individuals to pursue high mind thinking and high rung thinking rather than lower rung thinking. However, there's like this kind of exception that I've noticed. And I'm almost wondering if this kind of contributes to the erosion of liberalism. And this is this idea of like web to social media technologies, which actually, I know you're an experienced Twitter user, as am I, as is David, as are many bankless listeners, of course, I got to tell you that our media

engines, our media curation engines like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or anything else, actually don't reward high rung thinking. They reward dunking. If I can have the hottest, like tweet, if I can enter the arena, And like, just dunk on my opponent. It doesn't even have to be true. It just has to be viral. It has to be interesting. It has to catch on.

Or if I'm a content creator and I want to create content, guess what the algos reward? Sensationalism. They do not reward truth. And I'm wondering your thoughts about this. Because if I'm an individual tweeter or content creator or, you know, anything involved in social media, there's actually net benefit for me to be a low-rung thinker. because I'll accrue more attention. I'll become more popular. I'll be able to influence more people. And I'm wondering if this is kind of a pernicious problem that we are facing now. And maybe the reason for some erosion of liberalism, what do you make of our Web 2 curation algorithms right now and how they're affecting society?

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

But you're going to get followers who love people who dunk on the other side who are thinking of that way themselves, who are really tribal. And you're going to repel people who are thoughtful and nuanced and who want to find the truth. And so what happens now, you've gotten a bunch of followers doing this. Now what say, you know, but say you say, that's not actually who I am, right? I was just trying to manipulate the algorithms and get followers. Now I'm going to write something nuanced. I'm going to write a nuanced tweet or a post or make a YouTube video.

You're going to get a ton of hate from your feelings. followers because you're going to have attracted the exact kind of people who don't like that. And all the people who would have loved that, they don't follow you. They're long gone. They left a long time ago because you really bored them or you repulse them. So I would say as a content creator of any kind, whether it is in thought leadership or in writing or in music or anything, make the kind of stuff that is true to who you are. Because you will then attract, not just followers, but friends, right? You'll attract people who want more of that and who like that and who agree do you maybe yeah maybe it's a slower road because it's not the algorithm isn't going to just

totally help you as much but it happens over time and now you know you're going to be encouraged to do more of that and the alternative is you surround yourself with a bunch of people who you don't actually like or who won't appreciate the nuanced part of your brain so i would say for an individual it's a no brain or two you know if you are super tribal and that's who you are and that's who you like to be with sure go for it then go you know go do that and surround yourself with that but i would say if you're not i think it's a huge mistake to try to go for just followers because the question is which followers? And you know, you want that to be the right answer.

But yes, on a macro scale, I totally agree this is a problem. And I wish that algorithms over time would adjust instead of just going for pure engagement, which is going to inherently then go for, you know, outrage and anger, would actually tweak themselves a little bit and maybe in a more macro sense change the incentive structure. Guys, there's so much more here to unpack. And it's all included in Tim's book, which I totally recommend. It is called What's Our Problem? We'll include a link to it in the show notes, but the mental models here.

We only got through half of the agenda. Yeah, it's just like we have so much more left in the book. So, guys, this is all about how you can, you know, think better in the society and how you can make sure you are a high rung thinker, how you can avoid echo chambers. Echo chambers, I got to say, they're powerful in the short run, but they are long-term bearish, okay, if you want to accomplish something over the long run. But Tim, I know we don't have too much time, but I really need to pick your brain on this. before we leave. We're just talking about algorithms and kind of Web2 and how, like, you're hopeful

that we can start to reward high-wrung thinking with our algorithms. I just heard Max Tegmark make some comment. I think he was maybe quoting someone else that basically the Web2 algorithms were like our test show for AI, right? And we've kind of failed that. Like, we have these algorithms that are causing all of these ripple effects and unintended consequences. And we're falling into moloch traps as a result of this. And that was just our trial run, because now we have these super powerful algorithms that are just starting to hit the scene in the form of artificial intelligence. And David and I here have been doing a series lately on AI alignment, existential threats, Elyzer Udkowski, like, you know the roster of these people talking about it. I know you've had

some thoughts in the past about AI alignment in general. This is beyond the scope of your book, but it seems like it's another problem that's going to affect society in the short run. And then in the long run, maybe we have this tail risk of existential destruction ahead of us as well. What are your thoughts on AI these days? Are you planning to write about it more? Just give us your TLDR. Yeah, no, I definitely want to write more about it. I need to kind of, I'm in the middle of kind of just inhaling a lot on it

and hearing about what a ton of people are saying and looking at a bunch of the new tools that are out there. But yeah, I think that we should be scared of existential risk here in that, you know, I have in one of my posts, I have a term called the human colossus, which is, you know, if you think about ancient tribes, you have a little, you know, everyone can put their knowledge into the kind of group's consciousness, and it's a little knowledge tower that's kind of in the center of the tribe. And then as people moved into the cities, you know, during the agriculture revolution and after, you have a lot more people. And so the knowledge towers get larger. And then you have the invention of writing and people can compare what people are saying through time and

space and the towers get, you know, just skyscrapers. You know, and eventually that tower of knowledge and know how and power eventually, you know, turns into the industrial revolution, which puts the whole thing on steroids. And I think of it as this giant colossus that our species has created, that is kind of like Godzilla tramping around. And it is building, building, building. It is making, it is producing and it is created in vast wealth and it has made quality of life way better and it's reduced poverty and it's and all these great things but it also does not have a conscience it doesn't actually have a compass about where it's going it is just kind of a product of you know billions of in people's individual self-interest you know and that giant is the thing that is

making AI. And if we let that human colossus kind of now create something way smarter than itself, you're taking your chances, right? And again, that thing doesn't really have a moral compass. It's not necessarily wise, right? It's only as wise as kind of the systems that it is incentivized by. And if the only system is incentivized by is pure capitalism, this is talking about steel manning, you know, the argument against, if the only system it has is pure kind of capitalism, I actually think that that is kind of a classic mollick situation where you're going to, you know, build something that is incredibly powerful that was not created with wise, you know, with wisdom. And that's why, you know, we have to not create this thing the way we've created all the other

things. You know, the other things you want to create the best software. Let self-interest go at it. And everyone will try to make the best, most appealing software. And V1 will be buggy. And V2 will be buggy. And by V10, the software is better. And now we'll compete with all the other V10s. And eventually the consumers get the benefit of that. We'll all end up with really great apps on our phone that won the competition and got iterated and proved over time. AI is just so different than that. If V1 is buggy, we now have a buggy god on the planet that probably will not let us. They will not let us go change in and updated because it doesn't want to be change and updated.

And it's kind of, oh, actually, that's not how we wanted it to be incentivized. Too late. This thing is now more powerful than we are. And that's pretty scary. And likewise, you know, competition. Well, no, whoever gets their first, maybe they can shut down all our other efforts. And so maybe it's, you know, the first V1 is now our God, as opposed to the 10th V10 is the best app, the first V1. So, you know, that's the worst case scenario.

And I don't know if that's actually what will happen. It's hard to, this is all very unprecedented. I think anyone who is confidently pessimistic or even or confidently optimistic, either one, I don't believe them. I think we really don't know. But, of course, if we don't know, then let's be cautious, right? Don't make it the dumbest experiment in history to build this thing and see maybe it won't be, you know, actually as scary. So I think we cannot treat it like we normally do and say, let's just get out there and build and innovate and, you know, and we'll improve it over time. We have to have some kind of other mechanism here that is kicking in.

So I do hope people are listening to the AI safety people and that we get properly scared. The thing that worries me most is that I just think it's hard for people to believe something that's not in front of their eyes that they've never seen before that's totally unprecedented and be scared of that. I don't think you're scared until it's too late. So I think somehow we need to spread enough fear, not so much that people think it's the apocalypse, but enough that people start saying it is the only way to build AI is to do it ethically and to do it with a ton of AI safety research alongside. And so, yeah, I'm not sure. I'm glad I'm not in charge of this problem, but it is a little bit concerning.

Well, I mean, you're certainly not in charge. And yet we all are in charge because it's all of our problems here. And I think, you know, the title of your book, like what's our problem, self-help for society, right? This is one of the areas we need help with. And we've got a lot of low-wrung thinking. We've got this abandonment maybe of liberal ideas that have driven so much good and value in our world.

And we have these existential threats ahead. And we very much have to keep our wits about us as a species if we're going to like survive the next hundred years. I want to ask you this as we close out, Tim, in spite of all of this, what gives you hope? Yeah. Why do you think we can make it on the other side? Well, a couple things give me hope.

I mean, one, we are a survival species. We are a bunch of survivors. And that doesn't mean that there hasn't been horrible tragedies and genocides and awful things in the past. And it also, we have never faced full kinds of existential threat. But I do think that humanity has a knack for surviving. And that if we get scared enough, you know, I think maybe reason will prevail out of pure fear and out of pure survivor instinct. So that's one thing.

I also believe in the liberal house. I think it's a great way to produce emergent wisdom. I think that no one of us is smart enough to figure this out. But, you know, just like no one of us can figure out, you know, how to build particle colliders or how to understand black holes, but together with collaboration of thousands of people over time and geography, we can figure out stuff that's way above us. We actually have a super intelligence, kind of a super wisdom that we can do. We also can combine together for mass stupidity, which is why I think the reason I wrote this book is that I think it's kind of what's our problem, the concept of the liberal

house working and us being able to have high rung discourse is the limiting factor on everything else. If we can do that, it gives us the best shot to proceed wisely. It can be a compass into the future. if we can do this. If on the other hand, you know, low-wrung thinking and tribalism gets the better of us, it's like we're running ahead blind like a bulldozer right off a cliff, I think. So to me, it's like all the other problems, including AI, the foundation, the root of all of how, you know, whether things will go well or not, is this liberal house functioning well? Because I think it gives us our best shot. And groups that are outside with the wrecking balls, I think they're very, very dangerous. And I think that the concept,

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

concerning kind of trends that need to be curbed. And we need to kind of, yeah, like you said, have our wits about us. As we go into this future of exploding technology, and, you know, God-like power gives the species. You know, we need reason to kind of prevail. And bankless listener, if you're wondering where to start, oftentimes the answer is to start with yourself. I know after reading Tim's book, I was more conscious of the way I respond on Twitter and what the incentives are. And you know, like, you can start by not being an asshole on social media. And when you have the opportunity to score those points and to dunk and to take the,

you know, the low-rung thinking path, you can take the high-rung thinking path. I'm not always perfect at this. I do try and post Tim's book. I think I've been better about it. So, Tim, thank you so much for expressing these mental models for the bankless community and for societies. We really appreciate you coming on today. Thank you for having me.

combo. Bankless listeners, the blog is Wait But Why. Go check it out. We'll include a link in the show notes. And then the book is What's Our Problem, a Self-Help book for Societies. Got to let you know as well, of course. None of this has been financial advice. It's not even societal reconstruction advice, although we dabbled today. You could definitely lose what you put in in crypto, but we'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.