Bankless - 63 - The Crypto Renaissance | Josh Rosenthal

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to bankless. We're weeks for the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. I'm Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, what an episode. I know it's an awesome podcast because as soon as we finish recording, I just want to listen to it again. That's what happened with this recording. Yeah, to me, this is the through line of crypto. If you want to figure out what crypto is, you need to go all the way back, not just back into the 70s where cryptography was created. We are going all the way back to the 1300s, the late dark ages, because that's where the Renaissance happened. That's where double entry bookkeeping happened. That's where a cultural revolution happened. And the inspiration for this podcast came when I was trying to figure out right after the NFT mania. And there was some sort of loose threat. about some connection between ether as a money, blockchain as a system, NFTs as a technology, art as new culture. And so I asked on Twitter, it's like, hey, who has a professor that is

Starting point is 00:01:20 teaching them about early European history when it comes to wealth, art, and culture? And this guy, Josh, just raised his hand, is like, I'm not a student. I am the professor. And he's got a PhD in medieval history and European history. And he's also working in the realm of crypto investments. And so Josh Rosenthal is a fantastic steward of this message that is the same underlying core advances of humanity starting in the Renaissance all the way through crypto, where we are today. And the power of what Josh was able to lay down is still ringing in my ears. David, I don't think I've heard a podcast like this ever in crypto across any podcast. I don't think anyone has looked at it through this technical, historical lens and brought

Starting point is 00:02:06 these themes out. And this is really like the first, maybe the first podcast on what we call it in this podcast, the crypto renaissance. And we talk about like all sorts of strange and interesting things. Like what was the life like for a peasant in the Middle Ages? How does that relate to our life today? How did that change in the Renaissance? How will our life change from the world we live in today into the crypto renaissance? We've even talked about demons pooping and like art and like crazy things. The Medici class, the Pope. and all sorts of things. So this is a tour to force of culture and societal revolution. I feel I feel like at some level I was in the most interesting history class I've ever attended because

Starting point is 00:02:47 it related all the most interesting things about the wheel of history to like all of the most interesting things about technology and society and the internet and cryptography today. And it was all jam-packed in like an hour and a half. So what a cool podcast, man. Yeah, I was telling a Banklius marketing guru, meme lord Michael Wong about this podcast, and he says, it sounds like some intersection of AP European history and AP Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:03:13 And I think that's exactly right. That's exactly what's going on. And I think we should just go ahead and get right into the episode. But first, a message from these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset,

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Starting point is 00:05:36 Open a free account in less than three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless. Get $15 in Bitcoin after you trade your first $100. That's Gemini.com slash go bankless. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to our next guest. This is Josh Rosenthal. he holds a PhD in medieval and early modern European history. So he's a historian. He also received a Fulbright scholarship to Sorbonne's Institute for Advanced Studies. He's worked at a think tank mixing culture, history, and technology, which is what we're going to talk about today. But he's no

Starting point is 00:06:12 longer a practicing historian. He is now a partner at Sixth Event Cataclysmic Capital, which supports early stage founders targeting cataclysmic impact, one of those impact areas. is certainly in the crypto arena. Josh, welcome to Bankless. It's fantastic to have you. How are you doing? Hey, I'm doing very well. Pleasure to be here, guys. Thank you very much. Josh, this is a lens we have not yet explored on Bankless, but David and I are super excited to do so. This is like the historical lens, but not just historical because this is interdisciplinary. This blends culture as well, socio-economic technology. So before we get into this podcast, I want to ground the listener with sort of a mental roadmap of where we're going, because I think we're hitting four important aspect areas in our

Starting point is 00:06:58 conversation with you today, Josh, and we're going to weave in and out of them. The first is we're going to talk about the Middle Ages, an era of centralization, and then the Renaissance and Reformation, an era of decentralization, and compare that to the era that we're in, call it the nation state era, and this new crypto renaissance that is upon us. That's one of the through lines here. The second is how technology is a catalyst. So we're going to talk about the communication technology that made the Renaissance happen, the printing press. We're going to talk about double entry bookkeeping, the ledger, and how those are similar

Starting point is 00:07:33 to the internet, a new communication protocol for the world and crypto, which is a ledger for the world. And then we're going to talk about how these changes affect society from an economic, cultural perspective to an institutional shift. That's number three. And fourthly, I think we're going to leave the listener. with some action items, how they can position themselves for this cataclysmic change that is upon us. You ready for all this, Josh?

Starting point is 00:07:58 I think I am. I think that's very well said. It's a lot to cover, but we'll do our best. Okay, Josh, so I'm going to hand it off to you now, and we're going to explore this agenda. So can you talk about why some of these throughlines matter, why they're important, and add anything to what I said earlier in the intro? Yeah, thank you very much, Ryan. I think that's a great summary. I'd like to take us back to a moment in time that we might not typically think about, and that's in the later Middle Ages. And, you know, sometimes you hear it spoken of as if it's the Middle Ages are a dark period. That's probably not the best word.

Starting point is 00:08:30 I think the best word to describe it is aggregated. And so I'd like to walk through two different through lines, value and information, and then look at how new technology, new financial technology and information technology essentially unraveled these power hierarchies and what happened next. So starting with the Middle Ages, if we were to describe the Middle Ages and one word aggregated would probably be a good word to use. And so if we were to think about value, value was really aggregated. And by that, I mean that wealth was concentrated. You know, wealth is fundamentally land and the Roman Catholic Church is the largest landowner, owning up to third the land in Europe.

Starting point is 00:09:08 And options for economic output are, you know, primarily agricultural. You know, there's land and animals and crops. And there's some guild-based manufacturing. But that tends to be, you know, fairly small. People tended to follow in family vocations, whether it was farming or craftsmanship. And so on the whole, wealth was super concentrated, and it tended to be displayed in precious metals. There was some patronage of the arts, but these were subject to sumptuary laws where the power structures were regulating how money could be spent. And he did have decent amount of finance, but that likewise was subject to usury laws.

Starting point is 00:09:40 Interest limited the powers that be controlling how money actually flowed. And so wealth was accumulated through generational consolidation. generation after generation, slowly concentrating wealth. And as you might expect, power likewise, was consolidated. In the Middle Ages, there was a contest for power. There were two hierarchies. One was political and one was religious. And they were at odds for a number of centuries.

Starting point is 00:10:04 And this ultimately ended up with a clear win in this contest for authority with a religious coming out on top, where the Holy Roman Emperor was ritualistically humiliated by the Pope and the 11th century. And that was largely because religion wasn't a private, affair. It was the social and cultural institutional ties that united economic power. And so when the Pope had excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor, all the economic contracts and political fidelity that was obligated to them where it was all rendered instantly mute. And so the Holy Roman Emperor begged the Pope's forgiveness. And at that point, the religious hierarchy really took dominance and achieved a type of stasis for several hundred years up until the birth of the Reformation, where it was symbiotic

Starting point is 00:10:45 stasis. And so in the Middle Ages, if you have concentrated wealth and consolidated power, naturally, as you might expect, culture was largely top-down. And so that flowed from the church and the nobility. There were a limited number of fine artists, and they're commissioned by a super-concentrated elite. It's mostly painting some music, very limited amount of text. There was definitely popular culture that was bottom-up, but it was controlled and channeled through approved means, things like morality plays and carnival. Most of the culture was extra textual, which means it was based on oral interaction. And so if that's an idea of value being concentrated where wealth is consolidated and power is consolidated and the culture

Starting point is 00:11:26 flows top down, the way that the power structures achieve that type of stasis, the way they held on to power was fundamentally by centralizing information and controlling who had access to what information and how they're able to share it. And so the other through line I'd like to look at for just a minute before we look at what changed in the Reformation and Renaissance is around this idea of centralized information. In the latter Middle Ages, just before the birth of the Reformation and Renaissance, information wasn't just centralized. It was fundamentally guarded by authority. And so political and religious entities were mutually reinforcing, creating documents that were controlled by a scribal class. They're encoded in a language that most people couldn't read. Very few people could read,

Starting point is 00:12:12 and most of them couldn't read Latin. And the documents themselves were, in a particular siglia, a type of shorthand that very few people could read. They're stored in archives. They're hard to access. They're hard to keep safe. And even if you did have rights, quote, unquote, in the documents, there's very limited remediation.

Starting point is 00:12:29 The courts were at the service of the nobles and the clerical estate. And getting access to those documents was incredibly difficult, partially because the transmission of them was limited. So, you know, if literacy is around 5%, Most people stay within 10 miles of their home throughout a lifetime. These manuscripts are incredibly rare and scarce and inaccessible. They cost more than the annual salary of a person. And typically the manuscripts are created at institutions which are centralized for their creation.

Starting point is 00:12:57 This is the rise of the university and the monasteries and the nunnery. So just to take a step back and summarize what we've talked about, in the latter middle ages, there were two particular power dynamics that served to create these hierarchies. The first was aggregating value and concentrating wealth and controlling who had access to money and how it was used. And the second was centralizing information, controlling how ideas about money, wealth, and culture could be shared. And these were fundamentally centralized. And it's against that backdrop that we can now take a turn and look at the Renaissance and Reformation and what changed.

Starting point is 00:13:32 And what fundamentally changed was the advent of two new types of technology, which gave rise to a new class and a new expression of art and identity. identity. Yeah, so Josh, let me reiterate to you the through lines that I'm seeing here, whereas it's really the church that dictated the world, right? And they were able to dictate the world because they had all the wealth. And wealth was largely defined by land. And then also, through that power, they also had a monopoly on information or what was true. What was true was dictated by the church. And you alluded to that there was some bottom-up cultural manifestations, right, like some bottom-up celebration of culture, but it was through perhaps what we would call permissioned vehicles, right? Like it was only bottom-up insofar as the church allowed that culture

Starting point is 00:14:29 to manifest. And the reason why the church was able to do that was because they had all the power. They had the wealth, they had the land, and they had all the data, if you will, in forms of knowledge. Where does physical power come into this conversation? Does might and the sword fit into this conversation as well? Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. And so, yeah, these power hierarchies are land and economic, but also military. And so that was the great tension in the early part of the Middle Ages where the political estate, which would be the Holy Roman Empire, was at odds with the church.

Starting point is 00:15:12 And so there was a question for who would ultimately control temporal or physical or military authority. And the church had claimed that they had authority to wield that temporal power. And as you might expect, the political apparatus disagreed. And so in that great contest that lasted a number of centuries, ultimately the church won that. They won that at Canassa, where the Holy Roman Empire, the head of the entire political state and all the military apparatus was in the ground on the snow wearing penitential rags, begging the Pope's forgiveness because the Pope had excommunicated him. So all the ties of military allegiance between the emperor to his knights and to everyone else and the nobles was all predicated. It was all linked in a causal chain around being a Christian and being baptized. So when the Pope excommunicated the individual, all of those contracts, including not just economic contracts, but military contracts, were rendered null and void. And so at that point, you know, most historians would say that the church took, you know, supreme dominance in terms of that hierarchy.

Starting point is 00:16:14 But then, you know, that was around, you know, the 12th century. After that for the next two or three hundred years, the church and the, if you want to call it the state, achieved a type of symbioticestasis where they're both power hierarchies and they became more and more and more inextricably linked. Can we talk a little bit about the day in the life of an average member of society? So what you just set up for us in the Middle Ages time period was kind of the life of, I don't know if I call it a peasant, let's say. The life of the average person was very much permissioned, was very much, you know, top down, was very much the opposite of what bankless preaches, which is self-sovereignty and freedom, and very much restricted in the ways you could participate in the culture.

Starting point is 00:16:59 in the ways that you could participate in the economy. I mean, no such thing, I'm sure, as an entrepreneur. What would an entrepreneur do in this era? Very hard to rise above, it seems. Paint the picture of a day in the life of an average peasant, an average family, an average unit of society. No, that's a great question. I think that's right on all accounts.

Starting point is 00:17:23 The vast majority of individuals were farmers, and it was fundamentally agriculture, or subsistence-based farming. And so you had never been more than a few miles from your farm. You probably didn't own your farm. Your farm was owned by a landowner. You might not be allowed to leave without permission. This hierarchy isn't just hierarchy in terms of economics and military,

Starting point is 00:17:45 but it's hierarchy in terms of permission around identity. What you can do, how you can move, what you can acquire, how you can use the things you acquire, how you can express yourself, what you can say, what you can think. And so in these two great hierarchies, you start off with the emperor and then go down into the various princes and cities and then into the knights and then all the way down into agricultural workers. You're at the bottom of the pyramid. And on the spiritual hierarchy, it's the same thing. You start off with the pope and then you move into bishops and various curates and then down to your local priests and down to yourself.

Starting point is 00:18:18 So the short answer is you're working in the fields from dawn till dusk every single day. And that's literally all you're thinking about. There isn't additional capital at your disposal. You know, you do have exceptions where you have, you know, some guild-based manufacturing, and you might be able to be a blacksmith or something like that, but you can't just set up shop and hang out a shingle. Your father had to be a blacksmith. Or you had to have permission from the guild to be able to set up shop,

Starting point is 00:18:44 and you had to have permission from the noble authority to be able to have a title which allowed you to actually practice. So that every fundamental junction of life, things were permission, not just economically, but also around identity. And the way they controlled that was through the permissioning of information. You couldn't share anything that popped into your head in terms of speech. And documents were the sources of control and those were carefully guarded. Those weren't at loose in the population whatsoever.

Starting point is 00:19:15 Is that helpful? It's a little difficult for us to imagine today, I think. The image that's being conjured in my brain is that there's a very strong lack of churn in this world, right? you are an aspiring young lad who wants to do something cool with your life, it's just, you're just not in the environment that facilitates such an aspiration, right? And perhaps you don't even have the, the capabilities to even think about something to aspire to

Starting point is 00:19:42 because you're just not in an environment that caters to such creative new thinking. You are kind of locked in this world that seems very fixed. And I also want to put an image of into the listener's heads because I think this is going to be one of perhaps the overarching through line for this entire podcast of the difference between the tower and the square or the hierarchy and the network, right? And where hierarchies over time grow larger and larger and more rigid and versus the network or the town square, which is a flat topology where everyone is treated equally. and there seems to be a pendulum shift that goes between these two ends of the spectrum. And right now, in the late Dark Ages, we have an extremely hierarchical religious structure that dictates the world top-down using their power of wealth, culture, knowledge, and influence. And that's where this story starts, or at least this podcast starts, which is the late Middle Ages with a very hierarchical

Starting point is 00:20:43 structure that really determines what the individual can really do with their lives. I don't want to get ahead of our story, but it's important to understand that those ideas probably wouldn't have even popped into their head, right? It was the water, the air they breathe, the water in which they swam. And so, you know, we're in a very similar situation today where, you know, political and ideological hierarchy is merged into a nation state. And we're at the subject of its permission and all sorts of facets of our life. And we, we tend not to think about that on a daily basis, just like the average, you know, medieval farmer wouldn't have been thinking about that. You know, for example, I tried to, I tried to purchase a Bitcoin conference pass for a team member, right? And, you know, I purchased that, you know, down in Miami, and the payment was declined. And when I spoke to American Express, they said, yeah, we know it's not fraudulent. We just, we don't like the subject matter, and we don't want to process that. So we won't let you spend your money in that way. That's their policy.

Starting point is 00:21:35 And so we're at the subject of their permission on that. So we're in a very similar situation, just like it didn't enter their head. It tends not to enter our head. And when we say an entrepreneur starting something, that wouldn't have been a category they had. And, you know, very similar, you know, we'll see the rise of the mercantile class where people do set up shops. It was very difficult for them to take a step back and appreciate the historical significance and say, perhaps I can do something other than be a farmer. Just like it's difficult for us to take a step back and say, perhaps I can do something other than work for a company.

Starting point is 00:22:07 Perhaps I can work for a Dow. That would have been something that wasn't quite on their mental map at that point in time. I don't know if that's a helpful analogy or not. And Josh, this was excellent foreshadowing of topics that we're going to address later in the podcast. And I hope the listener gets the sense of what it's like for the average agrarian peasant. I mean, you were illiterate, you were poor, basically every day was just trying to survive. This undercurrent that leads to elements we're going to talk about in the Renaissance and Reformation is this sense of disillusionment with power structure. Can you talk a little bit about how that was bubbling up? because you were talking about how, well, a lot of people in this situation wouldn't have known better.

Starting point is 00:22:48 It was kind of the air they breathed. They wouldn't have known there was another possibility. And yet, the seeds of the Renaissance and Reformation were starting to be planted. And there was this sense of disillusionment with the power structure. Can you talk about that before we lead into the next chapter of our story? Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely a sense of disillusionment. And, you know, death was a way of life. and hierarchy was a way of life. And so when you think about mortality rates,

Starting point is 00:23:16 you know, the primary popular culture was death is among us. It was morbid. It's Ars Moriandi, you know, skeletons dancing. And it's not just because you see, you know, members of your family dying in front of you on a regular basis. It's partially because you have a lack of agency. And so what are you going to do? What choice do you have but to accept the hierarchy?

Starting point is 00:23:36 You can revolt. And at times you did have, you know, peasant revolts. Those are quickly, swiftly, and effectively, put down. And so essentially you're operating in an ether where you didn't have information to other people in a community. And when you're isolated, that tends to create a marked sense of disillusionment. It was in everyone's best interest to keep things in a status quo. And so in some sense, it was probably fortuitous that, you know, life was, you know, nasty, hard, and brutish in that you were subsistence farming because if you had too much time to think, you wouldn't have liked

Starting point is 00:24:08 your chances for improving your situation. And as you mentioned before, or the bottom-up culture that you do have bubbling up is largely around celebration and blowing off steam around harvest and carnival. And it was very functional and very utilitarian. You know, the nature of the change, you know, there's definite cultural undercurrents where occasionally people question the hierarchy,

Starting point is 00:24:29 but that tends to be put down very effectively. And the reason why that was put down, whenever that would bubble up, it would bubble out throughout the Middle Ages, but it was put down with great precision speed and effect, partially because the power structures controlled the information, those ideas couldn't spread. They're able to quarantine them very effectively. And so that's one of the fundamental transitions that happens with the reformation. The ideas that were always latent in the latter

Starting point is 00:24:56 middle ages actually had a way to express themselves in a way that was not only permissionless, but that was very difficult for the institutional power hierarchies to put down. So I think we've set up what the Middle Ages was like for the average commoner, how the society was structured, how the economy was structured. But then came this change. And that gets us kind of to the second chapter that we mentioned, this age of enlightenment, this renaissance and reformation. So can you talk about how that change came to be and what it represented for people? Yeah, that was a fundamental change. It was absolutely cataclysmic. And I think we underappreciate the nature of that change. That's why I definitely appreciate

Starting point is 00:25:36 taking a moment and sketching out the kind of bleak, the bleak situation. of an average individual in the Middle Ages, is we take for granted now the ability to act without permission to a certain degree or to share information or to communicate value. But that was only a result of the Renaissance and Reformation. And so what happened was there was an advent of two types of technology, one around sharing value and another round of sharing information, and both of them were decentralized or distributed or permissionless. And them coming together created a situation.

Starting point is 00:26:10 that a number of individuals participated in. It gave rise to new whole class of people, a working class, mercantile class, entrepreneurial class. And that class of people, it wasn't just that they were something new. It was the idea that something could be new. After a thousand years of stasis, there was new technology which gave rise to a new community, and they expressed itself through a new type of art,

Starting point is 00:26:31 which was likewise a technology. So just to take a step back in the Renaissance and Reformation, if we follow these two through lines, value in the Middle Ages was aggregated and that becomes distributed in the Renaissance and Reformation. And that happened through around the advent of a new type of financial technology, something called double-entry bookkeeping or ledger-based technology. And for your audience, they may be familiar with this, but in the 14th century, this was radical. It was magic.

Starting point is 00:26:57 The idea of a ledger where assets equaled liabilities and equities with the left side of a book being debit and the right side credit, it was popularized in the 14th century by a Florentine merchant in the south of France. And the Renaissance is really a rebirth or a rediscovery or return to the sources, Adfantes. And this double-entry booking was used in the Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder mentions it in the 70 AD. And there's Jewish communities in North Africa using it. But essentially, the Medici family and the Medici Bank went back to the sources, discovered the technology and popularized it, and used double entry booking to completely rework the financial system. It allowed, previously, you had to stop everything and have a centralized

Starting point is 00:27:37 accounting. If you can imagine not knowing, you know, where your dollars are flowing at any given point in time, I'll leave the parallels off for now. But it was, it was like magic to be able to have an accurate accounting at any point in time. And it massively increased the power, leverage, velocity, composability, and granularity of money, preventing duplicitous books and false forks. And it gave rise to, you know, credit in a very specific system, as well as a new host of financial products. And the Medici, and not just the Medici, but the whole host of families and banks that used this really became new players on the scene. It was a new group vying for power. For a thousand years it had been church or military, political, and now there's another group of financiers.

Starting point is 00:28:23 And so they bought their way into noble estates by buying titles, and they also bought their way into ecclesiastical or church estates. But fundamentally, it was an economic rise to power, powered by this ledger-based technology, which essentially turbocharged their economic fortunes and allowed them to buy their way into status. And then following this line of value, these new players expressed their status through a new type of art.

Starting point is 00:28:49 And it wasn't just Machiavellian. I have money and I want to buy art to reshape and recraft my narrative on how I establish my money and what it means for the society. That's true, but it's a bit deeper than that. they cemented their status around using a new type of art. And so in the Middle Ages, everything was flat and symbolic.

Starting point is 00:29:08 You can think of it as 2D. People didn't look like people. They looked like caricatures. And if you're in the Middle Ages, you've never seen a window or a mirror. And so the idea of seeing a reflection of you or a representation of an image that looks realistic was unheard of. And as the Renaissance artist turned back to the Roman and classical sources, they were able to create hyper-realistic renditions. It was their VR and AR of the time where they were able to go back and paint pictures and do sculptures where it was just like being there and where you saw someone else in an image. It was like magic.

Starting point is 00:29:41 And so the Renaissance art was really an exercise in technology around this rediscovery of source material. And these are names which we still know today. It's Botticelli and Leonardo and Michelangelo. And this is how Florence becomes the cultural center of Europe. And so part of it's a flex around this new mercantile class. but part of it is a qualitative and quantitative alignment of identity around not just the idea of their status, but the idea that someone else could be new. The idea that it wasn't just church and political power as it had been for a thousand years,

Starting point is 00:30:13 but that a new player could enter the game. As we chatted about in the Middle Ages, the idea of something new when it had entered their minds. Now here was something new, and it had entered not just their minds who had manifested in the world through this technology. And so the Medici ran with that. They actually ended up taking the papacy as Leo the 10th was a Medici and took the throne of France with Catherine marrying in. So this became de facto. They essentially took over this power hierarchy, this financial class. And when they took it over, they changed the nature of what was meaningful.

Starting point is 00:30:47 Whereas in the Middle Ages, there was sacred and profane. There was holy and religious and there was everything else. With this advent of the class, you know, tied to some of the doctrines that Martin Luther and the Reformation, were espousing at the time, this new financial class rethought what it meant to be holy and to be doing God's work. It wasn't just in a monastery. It was actually doing your job, even engaging in finance in the world. And so while the Holy Roman Empire was in the fits and throws of international conflict with the Turks and, you know, seizing land across in the new world, they essentially were using this new proto-capitalism and this new financial ledger-based technology to fund them.

Starting point is 00:31:28 themselves. And as the Reformation essentially dissolved the monasteries where people were cloistered in for the transmission of these documents, this new huge, up to 10% of the population are let loose from the monasteries and they tend to be literate and they don't want to go back to farming. And so it introduced a whole new type of people into the workforce. And they found things that were good to do in and of the world itself instead of being cloistered away. So books that you may be familiar you're with or like Max Weber and the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The point is that the common itself became something worth doing and doing your job in the world, whether that was entrepreneurship or just interacting with your family and with your community, became a good

Starting point is 00:32:12 thing to do. So that expressed itself in the art of the times. These are names like Rimbant and Vermeer and Ruban. This is why you have the ubiquitous fruit bowl, right? That something as simple as a piece of fruit is meaningful in itself. And popular culture becomes significant as opposed to just say So I'll stop there. That would be the through line where we move from aggregated value to distributed value, really powered by this financial technology, which gives rise to a new class of individual who express themselves through a new type of technology endemic, through a new type of art endemic to the same technology. So the through lines that I'm seeing, I think, are so salient with what we are seeing today with the crypto world. And so I just want to rehash them and go through

Starting point is 00:32:55 them again. Humanity invents this new thing called double entry bookkeeping and it's this new technology. It's actually, it's not one thing. It's not like we discovered gold or we discovered this new item. It's an idea. It's something that we can all share. We can pass around this idea of double entry bookkeeping. And that is like, it's like a mind virus. It passes from person to person. And then all of a sudden, this technology just becomes instantiated. And this technology itself both creates value and allows for value to churn at the same time. And so we're finally seeing churn in the world. And this allows wealth to not only be created, but also to proliferate around the people who didn't previously have wealth. They were just farmers now that

Starting point is 00:33:37 they can access wealth. The other through line I'm seeing is like when there is wealth that is created, art starts to be created and culture starts to be created and specifically new forms of art. What seems to, whereas old art was 2D, new art is 3D. It's a new magnitude of what art can be. and not only can we create new art, but people can participate in that art, not only in its creation, but also its appreciation. And it was all started with double-entry bookkeeping.

Starting point is 00:34:06 And in the crypto world, we have these new blockchains, which are new ledger systems, and we also have new art forms in NFTs and digital art expression. People are, like, getting head over heels about, like, are NFTs valuable? Why are people paying for them? Are they cool? And to some degree, it just does not matter, because people are paying for them and appreciating this new art form that is just blowing the minds of people who are not yet up to speed with this new culture that is being created.

Starting point is 00:34:36 And finally, as a result of all this, the creation of all this new wealth, this creation of all this new art is really changing how people perceive their own individual role in the world. It's like, I can make a difference. I can do something for me, for myself, for I, and it fits into the rest of the world. of the world. And so, like, the drawing the connections between the Renaissance and what we are seeing come out of, you know, crypto networks, Ethereum, DeFi, I think is so incredibly strong and really made very saliently by the transition from a hierarchical late Middle Ages society into a more distributed, more networked world that we saw in the Renaissance and Reformation. Josh, is anything that you want to clarify or add on to that analysis? No, I think that's very well stated. We could go in a

Starting point is 00:35:24 couple different directions. And there's, there's even, there's even analogies and some of the details that we could go into, the type of art, you know, whether it's generative art versus, there's a bunch of different ways we could take that. But I think let's just keep it focused for the audience, because that's absolutely salient. And those are, those are the main points to make, you know, very well said. So absolutely. So that's the, that's the through line of value. And, you know, the fundamental change to that was, you know, the hierarchy, it wasn't just in stasis anymore. There's a new player in the game and, and they were expressing themselves. They're able to enter the game by engaging in finance and that created mobility and velocity. And then they fuse their

Starting point is 00:35:59 identity. They used as a lens through which to view, you know, the world and themselves around this art. And the art had a particular type of expression, which was tied to the way that they had made their money. It was a rebirth and return to the sources around double entry bookkeeping, just as it was returned to the sources around, you know, this hyper-realistic, you know, fresco-based, you know, detailed type of art versus 2D. The way that they, you know, So one question someone might ask, and this is what you had asked earlier, Ryan, you know, as this was bubbling up throughout the Middle Ages, you know, what happened, this was crushed again and again and again and again and again. And so why wasn't the Renaissance and Reformation crushed in the way that the previous attempts at this sort of reform were crushed? And part of the answer to that question is around now they have money and there's a new player in the game. Now they're able to really coalesce around identity through this art. But the third leg of the stool that's incredibly salient is there's a new type of not just financial technology, but information technology that essentially is likewise permissionless and prevents it from, prevents it from being boxed in and quarantined. And so whereas in the middle

Starting point is 00:37:05 ages, you know, information was centralized and the reformation, information was fundamentally decentralized. And it was really around this permissionless tech, which was, which was just, arguably just as important as the advent of financial ledger base tech. And so with the middle, with the 14th century, Gutenberg popularized this new type of technology which had radical decentralization. The printing press didn't have a kill switch, and it was this fundamental challenge

Starting point is 00:37:33 to the institutions of power and transformed them. It placed them in a conundrum and eventually won them over, and then generated this whole class of meme artists that happened to topple an empire. So on permissionless tech,

Starting point is 00:37:45 you know, ideas could be, could be, you didn't need permission to share an idea, whereas in the Middle Ages, information was recorded on a manuscript, which is a piece of parchment or a piece of paper where things are written by hand. It's incredibly expensive, more than a year's worth of salary. It's limited. It's slow. It's difficult to archive and protect. With the printing press, anyone could print. You know, nobles and Roman Catholic

Starting point is 00:38:10 Church attempted to regulate the industry and required people printers to register. You can think about it like KYC almost. And some people, of course, complied. But all it took was a rogue printer and a room off the grid in a few hours and somebody had documents they could they could send everywhere at such speed that they were almost redundant and you can think about it in terms of perma web and so this new culture was born with an explosion in the number of tax in it it created new formats as well where originally the print-based culture was a replication of what had been done in manuscript meaning if you know you had an academic dispute between closed doors and somebody took notes on it the first generation of printing would print that, and it would be in a very similar format. The second generation of printing and

Starting point is 00:38:52 the Reformation created a new medium, which was endemic to the nature of the technology, meaning instead of just reproducing things as they were before, they created these pamphlets. They're called Flugtschrifton. It was a big broad sheet, which had an image on it and big bold type and just limited words. And even if you weren't literate, you could understand what was going on. And if you were semi-literate, you could get the gist of it and someone could read it to you. And so, you know, one way you can think about it is a shift of what happened with newspapers, eventually starting out by putting PDFs online and then moving to an interactive format. That's what happened with this print-based format where they pushed these fluk shrift under these pamphlets, which had images on

Starting point is 00:39:31 them and conveyed radical ideas. And a family could now afford one or a traveler could pack his bag full of them and share them all over. And it wasn't just that the ideas themselves are radical, which they were and we can get into, but the idea that anyone could share an idea. You didn't need permission to share this idea. That was a fundamental breakthrough. And so it posed a real challenge to the institutional power structures. You know, if you're the Roman Catholic Church or a political regime, which isn't favorable to this, and you've always claimed that you have the sole authority to create an idea, much less share an idea, and now ideas are being shared through this new print culture, what are you going to do? Are you going to just sit back and let it

Starting point is 00:40:12 gain ground and let it gain popularity? That's one option. The only other option is, is to engage in that print culture itself and to engage in the back and forth to print your own material. But if you do that, you can see the point that you're the only one who has authority to create and distribute information. You legitimize the competition.

Starting point is 00:40:28 And so that's ultimately what they ended up doing, the latter option, and thereby legitimizing the competition. And this created an explosion of information at scale, which meant it very difficult to put back in the bottle. And there's a whole genesis of audit chains and creation and transmission and a new marketplace of remixes and compendiums and copies without permission.

Starting point is 00:40:51 And so this advent of print-based technology, which was fundamentally permissionless, was one of the reasons why it was very difficult for anyone to keep the stasis that had dominated the Middle Ages. And part of that was the nature of the printing press itself, that people were generating ideas. And then part of it was the ideas they generated. And the ideas they generated were very radical. in terms of the challenging those claims of authority.

Starting point is 00:41:19 I'm going to put myself in the place of a bankless listener because if you're a typical bankless listener absorbing bankless content, what Josh is just talking about probably sent some shivers down your back, right? Because you're immediately seeing the parallels with crypto, right? So we have the Middle Ages, which was an era of centralization, top-down authority, limited self-sovereignty, very permission, not permissionless. Now we have the advent of something new. They didn't know it was going to be later called a Renaissance at the time. But there were two incredibly important technologies, permissionless technologies, open technologies, distributed, decentralized technologies that came about. The first was a value transfer protocol. We used

Starting point is 00:42:03 that term protocol as kind of a technology, sort of a shared coordination tool for society. That was double entry bookkeeping. So a new permissionless ledger technology, if you will, for value transfer. And you've got the second piece of technology that comes about at the same time. And that is a new communication protocol, a new permissionless communication protocol. Wow, interesting.

Starting point is 00:42:28 We've got this rise of the Medici, maybe a ledger native, a crypto-native class that starts to change the society from the bottom to the top, starts to gain influence, starts to influence culture in art in all sorts of ways.

Starting point is 00:42:45 And really the reason, the argument that you're making, Josh, the reason for the Reformation and the Renaissance, this new era, was actually technology in nature. And it's interesting because, look, I'm not, you know, I've gone down amateur historian. I enjoy history all of these things. But I haven't heard that argument emphasized as much that the Renaissance itself was actually the catalyst for the Renaissance was these two permissionless technologies, a new communication protocol. I mean, it sounds similar to the internet now. A new ledger protocol sounds maybe similar to crypto. I'm sure we'll get to those things. But why do you, why is your position, Josh, that it was really these technologies that brought about the Renaissance and influenced everything else?

Starting point is 00:43:33 Why were those the catalysts? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think it's somewhat one of the reasons why I'm not a historian anymore just because of the lack of a practical applicability in terms of applying the. tools of history to the current state. That's why when crypto first came on the scene and we had sold the previous company, which we did to publicly trade company and started investing crypto back in 17, I was immediately struck by the idea that crypto wasn't just a technology or new type of technology. It was a new way of social organization. And the parallels to what I had studied in

Starting point is 00:44:08 history were immediate and salient. And that was such a large transformation that I couldn't not get in on it. And I think part of it is because historians are people in their time. Sometimes we forget about that. Just as if you looked at a medieval historian at that point in time, they wouldn't have been able to articulate. They would have looked at the things on the surface of the ocean. They would have said, well, this emperor died and this next emperor took over, and this pope did this, and the next pope did that. They're looking at kind of great men in history. But underneath, with occurrence, those are fundamentally driven by what you might call transmission vectors, and those become technological in the early modern era around the Reformation.

Starting point is 00:44:50 And so it's not a trendy thing to look at in history in terms of today. But I think it's not just that it's technology. It's that it's permissionless and distributed technology. And that fundamentally changes the nature of history, and that it allows ideas to be communicated without coordination, which means there is no kill switch where previously an emperor or pope could put their finger here and stop them. movement that didn't happen this time with the Renaissance and Reformation, partially because of this technology. And in fairness, I mean, there are, we could go on, we could do philosophical or theological

Starting point is 00:45:26 kind of context or all of this, you know, in some sense, this was a return to the sources, right, Adfonte's Renaissance. The, the ledger-based technology wasn't de novo, it wasn't new. It was a return to what had been done in the Roman Empire. The art and the hyperrealism, although it had been lost for a thousand years, it was a return to what had been done. The printing press. The printing press largely was new, but it was it was popularized and met that moment at the precise time when the financial technology unlocked it. And so why do I think this drives history? Partially because, you know, rather than saying there's great men of history taking agency, I think communities actually create history. But the historical problem for communities

Starting point is 00:46:07 to actually act in a coordinated effort has been how do you achieve that coordination, both in terms of value and money and information for orchestrating it. And so these aren't just technologies for the sake of technology. So they get at the two particular things that drive history. How do you motivate people and compensate them? And how do you share ideas in a way that can't be locked? I don't know if that's a good answer to your question, but that's at least how I think about it.

Starting point is 00:46:31 It's a great answer. Oh, my God. Communities create history. That is tweetable, sir. And I think bankless listeners are continuing to see the parallel. else here. I want to, before we leave, you know, the two technologies, the new distributed ledger technology and the new communication protocol, the printing press, I want to talk maybe a little bit about how those intersect, because both of those technologies, not only are they

Starting point is 00:47:00 permissionless, but they're also unstoppable. And as you hinted at, you know, authorities did try to stop them in various ways. Like, let's try to put a restriction, AML KYC, on these printing presses, that didn't work out so well. But it was also not just one technology, but both of them together, sort of the confluence of them. And a bankless listener, if you were beginning to see the confluence of our new distributed communication protocol, which is TCPIP, which is the Internet, which is a meme and coordination propagation layer.

Starting point is 00:47:36 And that's, we've said often before that crypto and, this new distributed ledger technology would not have been possible, of course, without the internet, but also because the internet serves as a meme propagation layer and a narrative propagation layer that allows a new distributed self-sovereign money system to grow from the bottom up. And that's kind of what we're seeing with the confluence of this new distributed ledger, double-entry bookkeeping system, and the printing press, because people could communicate using modern parlance, they could communicate memes and spin narratives and distribute them to the people at a rate that the authorities couldn't stop. And so this enabled bottom-up revolutions. Let's talk about

Starting point is 00:48:24 that a little more. No, that's great. Yeah, the speed and velocity. I mean, essentially, just taking a step back, you know, we, because we're in this historical moment, we see the internet is different from crypto, right? We think, you know, oh, the internet happened and now it's coming into its legs and now crypto has started. But really, you know, one way to look at it is they're part and parcel of the same thing. I mean, the Cyphopunks wanted information without kill switches and value without kill switches. And we saw the advent of the internet, but it's always had a kill switch. And so only right now with perma web, what I mean is, you know, R-Weave or blockchain-based, you know, communication technology, which is cryptographic in nature, that really is the fulfillment of the

Starting point is 00:49:06 internet. And so in that sense, communicating bytes of information or bytes of information that represent value are fundamentally the same thing. You know, it's only been a few years. We'll look back on this in a period of history and say, this was all cryptography. The internet was cryptography when it finally came into its own right. And so, yeah, your point is well taken that allow both of those being permissionless. It allows a speed and velocity. Bottom up always wins, and self-organization always wins. It's bizarre over the cathedral every single time. Because when you have 10,000 people engaging and organizing. It's very difficult to tamp that down with command and control. And that was essentially what happened in the middle ages. The authorities weren't able

Starting point is 00:49:46 to do that. And so they couldn't ignore the mediums. They had to participate in it. And by participating in it, they thereby legitimized it. You can make all sorts of analogies for fiat and digital currency if you felt like doing that. The other thing, I guess I would say, is that the ideas that they were sharing, you know, they're definitely not just kind of memes and silliness for the sake of silliness, but memes, as we know, have this somatic function where they're, they communicate something broader and more important than themselves. And so the ideas that they were sharing, you know, we're fundamentally challenging to the power structures, right? So people like Martin Luther, they looked back and they, they used

Starting point is 00:50:26 these same tools and techniques and audited this source code of power, you know, where the Roman Catholic Church had built an economic system around penance, you know, doing penance, giving alms, purchasing indulgences, you know, Lutheran company looked back, you know, from the Latin into the Greek and, you know, penitium agite du penance becomes metanoia, which is repent. And so the power system, it isn't extant anymore. And so all the economics go crashing down around that. Or, you know, you had asked earlier, Ryan, about, you know, the political and military arm and layer in the Middle Ages. Well, the Roman Catholic Church had won that power struggle, partially because they were able to get the emperor to repent and dependence,

Starting point is 00:51:08 but partially because they had this document, and this document was called the donation of Constantine, and it was the Roman Emperor Constantine giving temporal and military authority to the church. Well, that was shown to be a forgery from the Middle Ages using these new forensic source code technologies. And when that happened, that not only caused massive instability to the Roman Catholic claim on temporal authority, but to the core claim of papal infallibility. And so if you're a farmer and you're hearing about this sort of stuff,

Starting point is 00:51:37 it causes you to say, hey, what else might I question? Or if you're a German city trying to figure out, should I join this reformation thing, and should we get rid of the monasteries and seize that land for itself, and take the money and perhaps redistribute it to the people, it causes me to question other things. And so very similar to the idea of not just speed and velocity of sharing ideas, but the nature was not only something new,

Starting point is 00:52:01 but it caused me to question the core claims of authority. And you could make all sorts of parallels to core claims of nation state authority that we're starting to see through the internet right now. But the thing I'd like to, I guess a salient point of that whole piece of context is that when we look at how these, these are profound, they're complex, they're super heady, difficult ideas. And they had always been challenged historically through closed door, academic debate and dispute.

Starting point is 00:52:29 But now they could be printed. And when they're printed, as you're pointing out, they achieved this velocity. And the velocity of the spread of ideas they achieved wasn't around reproducing the old media. It was around a new form of media. And so the best way to communicate that core challenge to papal infallibility, you know, Martin Luther was, you know, was a professor of the Bible and philosophy, right? But instead of printing core academic disputations, he printed these, the only way to describe him accurately is to call them memes. there were these fluke shrift and pamphlets, which just had images, right?

Starting point is 00:53:02 And a couple of the images that he used were seared into the popular imagination. It was, you know, one was one well-known one from on the depiction of the papacy in 1534 is around, you know, peasants flatulating, that's a fancy academic word for farting in the general direction of the Pope, right? Or another one is where they're defecating or pooping into the papal tiera. And probably most wild of all is. Wait, Josh, for our YouTube listeners, I'm going to actually pull these up because you sent these to us, and I was super intrigued. These are like images of demons pooping, of peasants,

Starting point is 00:53:35 farting in the presence of the Pope. Vile. Vile, despicable. Yeah, there's, unholy. To my modern sensibility, it's quite wild. It is absolutely profane. And they're saying, hey, we know that this institution has no real power. It's making claims of authority that doesn't have. And so the whole thing comes crashing down. And the best way to express that wasn't in a fancy Latin disputation that only a few people could read. And it wasn't even in vernacular German that more people could read. It was by this woodcut or this copper etching where it shows, you know, 16th century German farmers essentially pulling down their pants and, you know, farting out clouds of gas towards the Pope basically and saying this is how we, this is how we deal with these

Starting point is 00:54:15 false claims of authority. We don't recognize these. Or another one is where they're literally pooping in the three-tiered papal tiara saying that the claims you've made are false and that's unholy. It's actually Antichrist. It's one of the reasons they thought the world was going to end. And so the best way to repay that is you're pooping almost as a holy act. You're doing that to show people how ridiculous the nature of the claim is. And then the image on the left, if you're looking at that, you see a variety of demons, and it's called the birth of the papal curia. The demons are pooping out the various bishops and cardinals. And there's one Medusa demon with snakes in her hair, and she's suckling the pope. And you know he's the pope because he has the three-tiered papal

Starting point is 00:54:55 here on there. And so this is what Martin Luther, you know, he engaged in a great deal of, you know, fancy academic disputation, but essentially he was saying, hey, this spiritual hierarchy is illegitimate. These claims of authority are not legitimate, and he flattened it with a doctrine called priesthood of all believers, which essentially said there's no mediation in this philosophical or theological realm. And so instead of making that argument in disputation, he made it with this image, with a pooping demon, pooping out, the pope. And that, as you might expect, was much more pot. Anytime you engage in like mass culture, it always degenerates

Starting point is 00:55:29 into scatology, right? And so it's only a matter time, I guess. But the point of the story is these images were wildly popular. And once, and for a reason, once they're in your head, you can't unsee them. They're viral. They're viral. And they're literally memes. So Martin Luther was like, just like printing out these images, these

Starting point is 00:55:45 memes and then distributing them to the peasant class. And the peasant class, though they were illiterate, though they were poor, they instantly caught the message that he was sending and caught the narrative. Yep, yep. And actually, he operated within a network, kind of an informal community, which had different ties of affinity and value and information. I mean, you could almost think of it in terms of a guild's not. I mean, the best historical analogy of it is a Dow. It's this informal self-organizing network around value and information. And so this was his, this was, so he was working with a printer. The illustrator was an artist that he commissioned called Lucas Cronic, the Elder. There are specific printers in the network that printed off grid and skirted KYC. They were incredibly popular. And they were, there were these. communal events, you know, people open them up in taverns and they read them, and even if you weren't literate, you got the idea. And we underestimate the individual at that time. They didn't

Starting point is 00:56:35 just get the idea that, ha, ha, it's funny to be pooping in a papal hat or that the demons given birth to the Pope. They understood the core idea that this spiritual hierarchy was illegitimate and you needed to flatten it. And sometimes you need to use profanity, even even scatology, is a very intentional weapon. That's very similar to the, I mean, the memes you see today. No one likes the unicorn because it's pretty. It means something else, right? The unicorn means, you know, Ethereum, or it means decentralized, or ultimately it means, you know, agency and autonomy. That's why people resonate with it, not just because they like the colors. If any bankless listener thinks that meme culture started with the internet, let's zoom out here

Starting point is 00:57:13 and realize that meme culture perhaps started with the printing press, right? And the reason why these little graphics of demons pooping works so well was because you didn't need to be literate. you could see the image and you could feel it. It was an emotional response. And inside of this very primitive, disgusting image was deep, deep meaning about the world that these people lived inside. And it was spreadable. It was viral.

Starting point is 00:57:40 Everyone resonated with it. And the reason that everyone resonated with it was why it worked in the first place. And when we talked about early in the dark Middle Ages, the late Middle Ages, about why revolutions were so easily stamped out is because they did. didn't have viral technologies. And the printing of these memes allowed people to ban together under a common banner of fuck the establishment, fuck the hierarchy, it's illegitimate. And it's this technology that allowed people to ban together under this shared banner, like unveiling the cloak or drawing the curtain back and showing that the emperor has no clothes, but also showing that

Starting point is 00:58:17 everyone else also sees the emperor without no clothes, which is critically important. Josh, I want to take us down a side quest real quick after this, but I want to give you the floor one last time before I do that. Oh, sure. Yeah. Let me just finish the side. And there's actually another layer to it, too, in that even these internet memes that you're talking about, you know, they're silly and it's, you know, kind of common material. That was also something, you know, if you go back to the Reformation, typically you're printing, you're printing kind of holy texts or sacred that was what had dominated the Middle Ages. You're not, you're printing things that are religious or sacred and meanings defined within that sphere. And so when you have the rise of this double-entry bookkeeping and a rise of a new class and they're sharing these ideas, the ideas they're sharing aren't just profane, but they're also common in a technical sense, meaning the job you do, the finance you undertake, the things you do in the world are worthy in and of themselves to be rendered as ideas that you share as art that you might commemorate. And so this rise of the common outside the approved was an incredibly important and powerful notion. And that was also Luther on this doctrine of vocation where you just didn't serve God by being locked away in a monastery.

Starting point is 00:59:32 You could be out in the world with your family and your friends and your community and undertaking commerce. And that was a good and honorable thing to do and worthy of being commemorated. And so as that took rise, you know, as he traced the story in, you know, throughout the 16th and 17th century, you have the rise of, the proto-capitalism and the low countries that powers the whole empire. And so likewise, again, you get art, which is endemic to the nature of the technology, these, you know, these fruit bowls that are everywhere because the common itself is worth rendering and it's holy. And so, this is all driven by the meme. And it's really important to understand that as you're, you're flattening that hierarchy, you know, that's a sophisticated argument that never took

Starting point is 01:00:12 hold before and essentially woodcuts to demons pooping did something that the emperor and all his armies couldn't do. They took down the Roman Catholic Church and each time the art and community expression is endemic to the nature of the technology. In the 14th century

Starting point is 01:00:28 you have frescoes with hyperrealism coming out of new fintech. You have meme-based woodcuts coming out of information technology and then you have rise of mercantile class with hyper-realistic common as actually being holy in Dutch realism. And so So that's sort of where the story typically ends. If this were a lecture and you started out in centralization and you've looked at these technologies

Starting point is 01:00:51 which decentralized and radicalize value and information in terms of rendering them without permission, what happens next is my real area of expertise, which is wars of religion and chaos and Armageddon breaks out for a while. And then the pendulum swings back and it swung back into rise of the nation state. and that characterizes our age down until today. And then I guess my argument or the parallel that at least I see is, instead of having separate religious and political hierarchies or cultural and religious hierarchies that are that have become, that are going to unwind over time into a period of chaos

Starting point is 01:01:29 through ledger-based tech and information tech, we have a nation state where these two things are fused together, and that's the exact parallel moment we're in now. So hopefully that kind of ties off the story and sets us up for a side quest. Just to draw one last comparison for the listeners is there are two memes for me that come to mind, two modern day memes that come to mind that are intentionally meant to make the receiver of the meme question authority. And one is Money Printer Go Burr, where that is a direct assault on the legitimacy of the dollar and the value of the dollar. Perhaps the world's largest institution these days. Money Printer Go Burr, the dollar is not sound.

Starting point is 01:02:06 Another meme that comes to mind is that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. That's another one where people are saying, hey, we don't know what happened, but fuck you. We also know what happened. We know that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. There are powers that be that are masking the truth and reality, and we don't know what they are, but it doesn't matter because we know something is going on here. And the reason why these memes are shared is because everyone, the populace resonates with them. And so I just wanted to drive that one last connection before we move on from memes.

Starting point is 01:02:40 I love just on the meme topic, too, that I just did a Google search for MoneyPrinter go burr. And there are so many variations. So many. So many. Permissionless homemade variations of the same meme that this cannot be stopped. It cannot be deleted from the internet. If it ever was, I mean, the people would just create new ones and propagate it.

Starting point is 01:02:59 And it's something that is completely unstoppable by authorities, even if they wanted to stop it. It's a perfect historical parallel. that's what once the, once authorities engaged in that sort of exchange, things went, they went viral, they remixed, you had compendiums. He had, once it was permissionless, everybody was doing different versions of demons pooping. I mean, essentially, money per intergover is the historical analogy of, you know, demons pooping in a papal era. It's a, it's taking a sharp knife and pricking, you know, at the source of authority. In the Middle Ages, it was the Pope for us. It's the dollar and the fiat-based dollar of the nation state. I think it's perfectly historically valid. Right. And Josh,

Starting point is 01:03:35 something you said earlier was that all of the armies of, you know, of Pope competitors couldn't do anything that a demon pooping, that a pooping demon could do, right? And like, we all know that the power of the dollars is upheld by the power of the U.S. military, yet it is pricked by a money printer go burr meme. Absolutely, absolutely fascinating. Hey guys, I hope you are enjoying the podcast episode with Josh so far. This is such a fun episode and I'm really happy that we were able to draw some of these really crazy cool connections. What comes next in the second half of this podcast is we talk about the comparing and contrasting of Martin Luther

Starting point is 01:04:17 and Satoshi Nakamoto and what happens when somebody did something without asking for permission that really questioned the ability of the establishment to maintain control and also was a very intentful political statement that took down the authorities. And then Josh does a fantastic job guiding us through the rest of these comparisons while also leaving the bankless nation with a bunch of very specific actionable items. Now, if you believe this narrative, if you believe that this comparison is true, how can you better prepare yourself to take on this revolution rather than the revolution dictating your life? What can you do to front run the revolution and have that revolution work for you rather than against you.

Starting point is 01:05:00 Really, really appreciated Josh coming on to the podcast and sharing this perspective and also leaving bankless listeners with some actionable takeaways. So stay tuned for the second half of this podcast. But first, we have to take a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Metamask is your go-to wallet for the bankless journey. If you're going bankless, you need Metamask, period.

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Starting point is 01:07:33 Dive into the balancer pools at pools. balancer.exchange today. Josh, I want to take us down a quick rabbit hole here because I think we would be remiss if we didn't finish up a conversation on the Renaissance talking about the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant Revolution, and Martin Luther's pinning of the thesis onto the church. church. And so just as a, just as a backstory, Martin Luther really kicked off the Protestant revolution by basically publicly doing something to publicly acknowledge the illegitimacy of the church, talking about how the tithes that are being paid is just, it's really just corruption. And what Martin Luther was doing was saying the church is corrupt, it's illegitimate, I'm pitting my,

Starting point is 01:08:22 I'm nailing my thesis to the door. And to me, I see a lot of parallels between Martin Luther and Satoshi Nakamoto. And so I want to, I want to drive these comparisons behind you and ask, ask you, how well do these two figures resonate with each other? And the through lines that I see is that neither Satoshi nor Martin Luther asked for permission. Both of them took it upon themselves to make a political statement and to also empower a revolution. Both sparked a process of creative destruction of old corrupt institutions in order to to create a decentralized network of new institutions where the Catholic Church is a centralized top-down hierarchy and the Protestant religion is a decentralized bottom-up organization.

Starting point is 01:09:04 And they also both created a Cambrian explosion of forks, where as soon as we forked away from the Catholic Church and the Catholic Revolution, the Protestant, one of the reasons why the Protestant religion never took over is because people forked that and then forked that and forked that and forked that. And just like how we went from three canonical television channels to three million YouTubers. And also what Satoshi did was go from one canonical blockchain or one canonical, you know, the dollar to an infinite explosion of blockchains. All of these parallels are coming together to me. How does that land with you? That's, that's, I couldn't have said that better. I think that's spot on on a number of levels. I would have, I would have, I would have taken longer to get to that point. I think, and I mean, I also, I, I also, I,

Starting point is 01:09:51 I personally, like my personal thesis is also that Satoshi, like Luther, was a deep industry insider who knew in his conscience that this had to be done, even begrudgingly knowing what deep consequences it would bring from unintended consequences as you long-term destabilize these power hierarchies. And it's necessary and exciting, but not something to be taken lightly. And so regardless of where you fall out on that, both he and Luther, you know, we're able to kickstart this network effect and really convert people and, create a zealous following, partially because the thing they unleashed had a power to itself. With Luther, no one could read the Bible. He rendered it into common vernacular, so people who actually have direct access to the source code, and that took on a life itself. The same thing with Satoshi, like by having economic value through code which doesn't require permission, that allows you, that thing has a power in and of itself. And so I think that's, I think we'll look back on Satoshi the way we look at Luther, you know, 500 years from

Starting point is 01:10:48 now, quite honestly. Maybe we'll know who, who or what? He is by then. Maybe not. The analogies are incredible, and we have already covered so much. So I'm going to return to the roadmap that we set out to at the beginning of this episode. So we talked about really this pendulum switch, where in the Middle Ages, we had this era of economic disempowerment, lack of self-sovereignty, lack of freedom, this era of centralization, top-down authority. And then the pendulum swung in the other direction, in the Renaissance, in the Reformation, to self-sovereignty.

Starting point is 01:11:21 to the rise of the Medici class, the crypto-natives of their time, if you will. And all of this was catalyzed by two really important technologies. The first was a ledger technology, double entry, bookkeeping, and the propagation of that standard, of that shared myth, if you will. And the second was the printing press protocol, this new communication protocol. And these two technologies together sort of shook the world. And I think that as we transition to the era that we're in now, which maybe we'll call this, I don't know what historians will call it into the future, Josh, but let's just call it the nation state era, the era that we're in.

Starting point is 01:12:01 I just want to take a minute to say that the nation state era is a much, it's a more centralized era. I think we've swung the pendulum in the other direction. This is a bit more like the Middle Ages than an era of decentralization and freedom. But maybe we're on the cusp of something new. and we'll get to that. But I just want to mention that we have so much to be thankful for. All of the freedoms that we now enjoy, the fact that we are not agrarian peasants with absolutely no rights, the fact that we have a bill of rights, and the fact that we have a constitution and democratic processes, we can thank the Renaissance and Reformation for those things.

Starting point is 01:12:41 So I don't want us to put ourselves in the position of, you know, a 12th century peasant. We're doing much better than a 12th century peasant. Yet at the same time, I think many who are listening to the bankless podcast, many who live life today in Western society, feel this sense of disenchantment, feel the sense of I'm not in control, feel the sense of something has to change. The power structures are illegitimate, and this is not good, right? So we feel in some ways like that 12th century peasant. So tee us up. We are now, and the pendulum has switched in the other direction, though we are building on some of the freedoms that we established in the Renaissance and Reformation. We have centralized in these top-down nation-state type structures, and we are on the cusp of

Starting point is 01:13:35 something new, a new Renaissance, maybe a crypto-renaissance. T-that up for us now, Josh. Where are we at this juncture in history? Yeah, I think that's spot on. And that's really, that's a great way to describe it. You know, it's not as overt that we have, you know, medieval lord telling us how what we can do and what we can say and what we can share. But you definitely have the pendulum swinging back and forth, and it may make, you know, ticks and talks moving in a direction. You know, the theorists talk about thesis and antithesis and synthesis. But the point of the story is that, is that, yeah, we absolutely have moved back to centralization. And so in the Middle Ages, you know, hypercentralization, Renaissance and Reformation.

Starting point is 01:14:16 this unwinding, there's a period of chaos after that, which was characterized by wars of religion and all sorts of chaos. And in that vacuum, the nation state found itself. And the nation state ultimately co-opted many of those same tools, double-entry bookkeeping and printing press. And that was how they, that was essentially what characterized the rise of the nation state. As we're here today, it's very similar. You can think of history.

Starting point is 01:14:40 It's a heuristic construct, meaning don't confuse the model with the thing itself, but it's very good in terms of explanatory power, saying that we're in a centralized period right now. It just may be more subvert or covert and not as obvious as it was before. And then even within the micro, the micro dynamic of it, where technology had started out more decentralized and is now increasingly centralized, whether it's AI or phaing, there's a micro-ticking and talking back. So I think the moment is very similar to what we saw in the latter middle ages. People didn't know what was going on.

Starting point is 01:15:13 There's a general sense of unease. They knew that things were hierarchically orchestrated and that they didn't have the agency that they wanted to have. Nonetheless, there was a burgeoning of different types of technology, which were fundamentally different than we had seen before. And I think that's the exact point we're at right now. Can we talk about those technologies then? It is still early. And I think people don't realize, to your point earlier, Josh, how early we are in the trajectory of these technologies, in the trajectory of the Internet. The internet's what, you know, two, three decades old, you know, maybe four at most and certainly

Starting point is 01:15:46 hasn't been mainstream for nearly that long. Crypto is a decade old. These technologies are just being born today, but already we see the seeds of change that they might bring. And one is, interestingly enough, a communication protocol, the modern printing press, an unstoppable, permissionless protocol that allows us to communicate all around the world. And the second is this double-entry bookkeeping solution, this immutable cryptographic ledger that they've created. What seeds of change do you think we will see as a result of these technologies?

Starting point is 01:16:25 Are we at kind of a junction point in history where we're about to enter a new thing, a different kind of renaissance, a digital renaissance, a crypto renaissance, if you will? Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely the case. And so that points very well made. That's historians will look back, you know, 500. When we think of the early modern air, we think of the printing press, and that's what characterizes that age. And we think that's what gave us a number of the liberties and individual rights we have.

Starting point is 01:16:55 And that was the high point of technology. And up until recently, up until a couple decades ago, that still was the high point of technology, right? The printing press, it lasted for hundreds of years and characterized the ability to share information and engage information. mass media, you know, the newspaper for hundreds of years. And so historians a thousand years from now or 500 years from now will look back and say things changed fundamentally with two different distributed technologies, just like they did in the Renaissance and Reformation, coming into

Starting point is 01:17:24 finding their feet in the early 21st century. And they'll have academic debates and conferences trying to parse out the exact year. Was it 2021 or was it 2020? Maybe it was 2019? We don't exactly know. But no, that's absolutely the case that being able to share information in mass, we did that previously through printing things on paper. You know, the internet itself, you know, I think RWeave is a great example of this, right? Like this perma web where, you know, the Arab Spring won't happen again because there's kill switches on that. That's not the case with this next generation of communication protocols which are cryptographically hashed. And so we've never had, from a historical perspective, the opportunity or technology that allows the rise of the sovereign individual as a sovereign unit of value, much less information, that hasn't ever been the case before. We approximated it in historical analogy in the Reformation.

Starting point is 01:18:22 But this time, I think we're going to do it at scale and in a magnitude of order. The change from the latter Middle Ages to what we have today is it's going to be a magnitude of order larger, the change that we're in. in the middle of now between what's going to come when we look back. And that sounds kind of odd to say, but ironically, paradoxically, historically, when you're in the middle of a middle change, the bigger the change, the more difficult it is to understand the significance of it at that point in time until you reach a breaking point. And so I think we're in a massive change,

Starting point is 01:18:56 and that's why we only have these kind of hints and riddles about that. General disillusionment, an idea that value can be, communicated without permission. In our gut, we know it's important and we know it's big, but we can't yet imagine the societal transformation, its transformative impact, just like the medieval farmer couldn't yet imagine the idea of bookkeeping and what a mercantile class would actually mean, and et cetera, et cetera. I don't know if that's online with what you're thinking. I think there's one significant difference that I see between the Renaissance. Now we have to differentiate between the Renaissance. So the Renaissance is in the 13 and 1400s in Europe,

Starting point is 01:19:33 and the crypto renaissance that we believe that we are embarking upon is that the original renaissance, the Renaissance of Italy and Florence, that had an epicenter where it bled out from. The ripples bled out from Europe out to the rest of the world. With the crypto renaissance, there is no epicenter. It exists on the internet. You can tap into the renaissance wherever you are on the world, which means that the magnitude is perhaps greater, but also the velocity and speed of this revolution. can happen instantaneously because we don't have to wait for this renaissance to ripple out to

Starting point is 01:20:10 the rest of the world. Everyone can access it equally from across the whole entire world. Now, that's absolutely a great point. I mean, in the, in academic circles, you can actually map out the nodes on the network with the printing press and how ideas are disseminated, and you see it geographically kind of spreading slowly over time year after year, decade after decade. Yeah, that's a great point. The velocity this time is hyperbolic. It's a, yeah, magnitude of order faster, greater velocity, and I think fundamentally societal impact as well, where previously you had the rise of a new class, and that's great, but the majority of the population is still agricultural, but at least you could do something new if you wanted to. This time

Starting point is 01:20:47 literacy isn't just 5%, it's much more significant. So I think we, you know, if the Reformation was this crucible where you had all these pieces in the pot at the right time, you know, powered by technology, which prevented it from being tamped down, I think we, you know, have a very similar situation just with, we're doing it with plutonium this time. So, Josh, I'm hoping you can paint a picture for the bankless listener and perhaps even specifically the younger people who are part of this digital revolution. I think most of this digital crypto revolution are younger people, but specifically talking about the zoomers and the millennials who feel more specifically rejected from modern

Starting point is 01:21:25 institutions and are specifically looking for optimism and opportunity in a world where there doesn't seem to be churn. And so if we can extrapolate what it was like to be like a farmer in the dark ages versus a Renaissance man in the 1400s and extrapolate that into, you know, young people coming out of college who are looking to find their place in the world and they're not seeing the opportunity that they really want to see, how can we give these people this optimism about the future that I think is coming with this whole crypto renaissance, drawing the parallels back from the old Renaissance, of course. Yeah, no, I think that's, I think they're right. to rely on institutions of the time, the people who made out the best during our last Renaissance

Starting point is 01:22:05 and Reformation were those who intentionally broke from the institutions of power and forged out on their own way and embrace the technology, both communication and financial, to improve their own social situation. They essentially opted out of the system of hierarchy. That was the first time they had the opportunity to do that. So it's always, it's always difficult and scary any time you're in that situation and you're breaking away from what has happened before and what your and family are doing, but those who moved first had a disproportionate and asymmetric advantage to do so. So the overall optimism would be that it's very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

Starting point is 01:22:42 Historically, once these types of technologies are out in the world, they tend to unravel power hierarchies. It's just how it works over time. And so you want to be on the right side of that. By all means, don't latch yourself to one of these power hierarchies, particularly at this moment in time, step out and engage with the technology. itself and explore the frontier as we say on the bankless podcast yeah explore the front and there's some very specific things that they can do around that rather than just being like totally philosophical around

Starting point is 01:23:10 it um you generally want to lean into it so let's get into them josh because i think a lot of people at this point in the podcast might be persuaded they you know they've listened to enough bankless they've seen enough that's going on in crypto they know the current situation um they're they're believing this story right that we are in this junction uh in history, this point in history where we are transitioning from an old set of institutions and a centralized set of institutions to a new set of institutions that are decentralized. And so they're wondering how to be ready for that, right, how to position themselves in the Medici group rather than, you know, those that are kind of left behind by the technology.

Starting point is 01:23:54 Yeah. So we want to be part of Martin Luther's crew and part of the future and not part of the past. So you put together some action items for us. And this is the last piece of our roadmap that we want to run through, which is some concrete ways that people can get involved and get ready for this crypto renaissance that might be coming. The first that you mentioned is engaging in crypto art. And it's so interesting that you put art as number one. Talk about what people can do and why engaging in art, crypto art is important. No, that's, yeah, that's absolutely right. And back to your earlier point about, you know, optimism on this. In case I didn't hammer this clearly enough, all three of these action items kind of flow from the idea that, you know, rarely do you get an opportunity to participate in something, you know, so meaningful on a historical scale where all the cards are being reshuffled, right? And so take advantage of the opportunity by all means. And so I know you guys like action items. So here are some, here are some particular ideas. So crypto art, so if, if, you're

Starting point is 01:24:57 you believe this historical narrative, then you would conclude that NFTs are real and they're here to stay and that really art is the culmination of, and actually the culmination of popular art using distributed technology. And historically, each culture expresses its identity as an art endemic to the nature of that transformation, right? And so, you know, AKA New Tech goes hand in glove with cultural transformation and emerging art. And so in the 14th century, you had this ledger-based tack, you know, finding its feet with a version of AR and VR, this hyper-realistic Renaissance fresco. 16th century information tech found its identity and using this art in a version of

Starting point is 01:25:36 me morpher, the demon-pooping flugstrifton, right? 17th century financial trades and rise in mercantile and proto-capitalism found beauty in the mundane around the sacred with Dutch masters doing these fruit bowls. At each time, the art seems odd, it just seems odd to the powerholders, right? But they eventually adopt and then appropriate it. And so you want to get in on the right side of it, not just for a rallying. around community, but purchase it, participate in it, you know, buy early. It's not, it's not something to be taken lightly as silly as some of the things may seem.

Starting point is 01:26:09 It's very funny. David and I on one bankless podcast weekly recap actually just replayed sort of the reaction from the Good Morning America crew. They were trying to describe what NFTs were, and they were laughing about it. So somebody is purchasing an image on the internet. How ridiculous is that? This is a fad. This is kind of just going to go by the wayside. You're saying, ignore that noise. Ignore the old legacy media institutions, because if this crypto renaissance is coming, this art is going to be important. It makes sense that BEEPLE art NFTs would sell for millions of dollars. And you're encouraging people to get involved and figure out this crypto art movement. Yeah, the art actually might be more important than the

Starting point is 01:26:51 finance, which sounds crazy to say. But I think there might be something to that, or at least they might be the same thing at the end of the day. If crypto is really a mean societal transformation, you know, the value access and information access is important, but being able to communicate that object of value, not as a byte representing a mark on a ledger, but as something that has meaning in and of itself might be more important. You know, said differently, like, look, if you're, you're millennial, you're a zoomer and you're like, what am I going to do, right? Maybe I'll buy some stock. Okay, I'll have a fidelity account, a Robin Hood account. once you realize you don't actually own that stock anyway, but you just have an IOU,

Starting point is 01:27:32 then what am I going to do? Maybe Coke or GE? No, Tesla might be more interesting. Well, maybe instead of Tesla, I can use these NFTs and cross-clateralize them, right, and actually yield from that. Well, now I can find whatever floats my boat. I can do that with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles if I want to. And so finding... Maybe an NFT about Tesla and Elon Musk.

Starting point is 01:27:51 No, exactly, right. So now I'm finding something, if it's all arbitrary anyway, and turtles all the way down, and it shared consensus, and this is the technology that allows you to do it, why not find something that has meaning for you and for the community? So it actually might be the same thing, particularly when you start doing things like NFT-Fi and you're able to cross-collateralize off an NFT instead of a protocol. I think this just might be a historical aberration where we see these things as different things. I think NFTs actually might be the real thing itself, long-term, long-dure.

Starting point is 01:28:22 So fascinating. Okay, that's number one. get involved in the crypto art scene, the NFTs scene, if you will. And of course, all of these technologies combined. So NFTs as finance are the same as defy as well. You can get involved through a Dow. There's all sorts of ways to plug in. All of these things have a certain amount of confluence. Let's talk about number two. This is super interesting. It's something we also preach on bankless, which is your action item is for people to prep with crypto. What do you mean by prep? Yeah, this is, this is a, you know, in a nutshell, just expect some serious upheaval, cultural and geopolitical. And on one hand, you know, that seems like an easy prediction to make, but it's especially salient in, from this historical perspective.

Starting point is 01:29:06 Each time you see a technological and cultural shift from aggregation to disaggregation, things get really interesting, really dicey. You know, it's not just forth-turning type of stuff, but this long deray or these megacentury trends or super trends colliding. It's not based on generational turning or calendars, but on technological impact with which the pendulum swings from aggregation to disaggregation and then back centralized again. And during that swing back from chaos to co-option, things tend to get really dicey. And so, you know, I'm based in Kentucky. And so prepping is kind of a way of life here, I guess. But the point is, you know, prep with some digital assets instead of just canned corn this time. So, you know, get some digital assets, put some in cold storage.

Starting point is 01:29:51 Make sure your NFTs are on perma web, right? This is a way to get ready for political, upheaval, societal upheaval, is having these assets in a place, being in control of your private keys. That's what you're talking about here. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even taking it as far as being able to hash things out with paper and remember a seed phrase, I mean, it's a, I want to, I know it sounds kind of crazy and tinfoil hat-ish,

Starting point is 01:30:15 but I definitely give some serious thought to that. It's a side bet, which I think you'd be on the right side of history making. especially if you're a Zoomer and you're talking about the next 30, 40 years, yeah, I'd expect some serious upheaval at that point. So I definitely use crypto as the means of prepping. That is definitely not a fringe idea on bankless. Thank you for articulating it in the way you did with it. Concrete Action Step.

Starting point is 01:30:38 I hope people are listening. Let's get to the third. This is important as well. And this is working for crypto, maybe working for Dow's. Are you talking about, yeah, what are you talking about here, Josh? Yeah, so essentially find a new way to make a living. And so if you think about the late Middle Ages, you're a farmer, maybe you're a monk, and then when the monasteries are dissolved, everybody's, meaning the cities take back over them and the Reformation takes it back over,

Starting point is 01:31:03 and they're opened back up and people go back into the workforce. You know, what are you going to do? Some people went back to farming, but some tried to find new ways to make living and essentially availed themselves to the new technology of the day. They became printers, or they engaged in that double-entry bookkeeping and became financing. years. And so, you know, if this mega trend is aggregation to disaggregation, the mini trend is really around financialization versus disintermediation of things. And so, you know, Gen X doesn't know what a 401k is, and millennials never left elementary school without one. So the basic idea is that the dialectic between social acceptance of building wealth versus Dadaism of sharing experiences is kind of a false

Starting point is 01:31:42 construct. You want to do both at the same time and try to do it without relying on an institution. So find a new way to make a living endemic to the new technology. So work for protocol, create NFTs or get good at appraising them. There's things coming online now around just knowing subject matter and being in appraising. And if you don't own that stock anyway, you know, find something that you find interesting and get good at that, whether it's game-based price discovering or if you can't code, you know, work for a Dow, right? Or, you know, if you aren't timely enough for poker markets, then, you know, listen to Audius or run a helium node. or you get the idea, we're going to start seeing crypto moving from entities like

Starting point is 01:32:19 Dow's that employ people around finance to being core business models around things in the real world. And so if Web 2.0 is about rendering people as products, this crypto turn is about turning people from community members into co-owners of the things. And so when you see things like Audius and Helium, I think it's a, that's kind of a foretaste of what we're going to start to see. If you're listening to music, do it on a platform where you own part of the platform through a token, right? Or if you're running a node, you might not just a hashing node, but running a Wi-Fi or Lorowan node,

Starting point is 01:32:54 run a node or set up a little side business around doing that as a side hustle where you're playing around with things. I guess the overall point is you don't just have to code and you don't just have to stake. Yes, you can work for a Dow and you should absolutely do that. That's like working for a financial house for the first time, like part of the Crypto First Medici. but also explore these other things in the real world that are backed by crypto. You guys talk about a defy mullet. There's also a real world mullet where crypto is the back end, the business model of these other things,

Starting point is 01:33:24 whether they're music or IOT notes. My big takeaway from this is that I first got into crypto just as a side gig along my normal job, right, where I could keep my foundations. I didn't have to just wipe the floor clean and commit to something that was risky. I was able to build out my first podcast, P-O-B crypto in parallel, just like how Ryan started actually the bankless newsletter in parallel with his main gig. And then we actually started the bankless podcast again in parallel. And all of a

Starting point is 01:33:49 sudden, bankless became ready for us to commit full-time, right? And we never actually had to commit to it full-time originally. And so you don't have to jump in with two feet. You can put a toe in first and go from there. And the other takeaway that I've gotten from these three action items, you know, engage in crypto art, prep and work for crypto, is that you could actually do all of these things all at once, right? There are some platforms that really cohere all of these things together. It's just like you were talking about like with Audius, for example, if you like to make music and deploy it on Audius, not only are you just doing the thing that you like to do if you like to make music, but you're also earning tokens for

Starting point is 01:34:22 doing so, and you can hold onto those tokens, and therefore you are both working for crypto and prepping with crypto and also doing something that inspires you. The amount of surface area there is for people to figure out how to do these things is almost infinite, right? And it's just a matter of you figuring it out. And thankfully, the bankless newsletter puts out tactics Tuesdays every single Tuesday. So you, just go into the bankless archive and find something that works for you because the reason why the bankless newsletter exists is to help democratize access before we even knew how to articulate it, democratize access to undergoing this new crypto renaissance rather than having it undergo you. No, that's great. Absolutely. Well said. Well said. Do you know what it feels like

Starting point is 01:35:05 Josh is, this is not in your action item, but it feels like the worst thing you could do is just like bet that the past will be the same as the future and just go with the flow of what the institutions and those generations who came before you say is the path. That seems like it could be particularly hazardous at this juncture in history. Oh, that's so good. No, that's absolutely right. if you widen your gaze, I mean, the problem with history is that you're always subject to your own experience, right? So you're a Zoomer and you're saying, hey, this is all I've known and it's going to be this way in the future, so I continue to be disillusioned, blah, blah, blah. But if you widen your gaze back and say, no, no, this tends to happen historically. These institutions become undone, a new opportunity opens up and people benefit from that, and it's a very bright future. That's what the past actually teaches us. One of the other things that teaches us is that, change doesn't happen all at once. It's a slow culmination that reaches a breaking point, right? And it happens very quickly.

Starting point is 01:36:09 And so when you're in the middle of something where water's flowing very quickly around you, it might be a fad, but it actually might be something fundamental on societal transformation. And so that's what happened last time in the Renaissance and Reformation. We talk about it over the period of 100 years,

Starting point is 01:36:22 but it was immediate. It was one year after another year, after another year. FinTech was coming on at the same time. Printing press was coming on, and Luther was nailing the, this up and, you know, the monasteries were dissolved, that's, it happens very quickly. And so you always want to be asking yourself, is this something fundamental or is it a little fad? And I believe you have more than enough evidence now to look back and say, this pattern fits a historical

Starting point is 01:36:46 pattern where the pendulum swings back. And so, you know, even if you think, even if you don't believe a word of this podcast, you know, you say all these guys are cracked, it's still worth making a sidebed on it, right? Because it's like asymmetric returns. If you're wrong, you're silly, you learn a new technology, you think differently about the way you work and about art and identity. But if you're right, getting in early on something at this scale is fundamentally transformative to your position as well as your community. So don't miss the opportunity. Josh, this has been phenomenal. We just, I think, I told a story that has never been told in crypto, at least I've never heard it, this techno-historical perspective on the crypto-redict.

Starting point is 01:37:30 this new movement. Maybe that's the title of the podcast, David. We haven't talked about that yet, but this is such a pivotal time in human history. And I really appreciate you articulating this and even leaving us with some action steps. So people don't feel like helpless, like just victims of the next thing that's going to happen. There are actual concrete action steps that we have in this episode to help you. Thanks so much for spending your time with us and sharing this story, Josh. No, this is an absolute pleasure. And if I could leave the listeners just with one thought, it'd be that, you know, a thousand years from now, historians are going to look back on this point in time today and say, this was, this is the

Starting point is 01:38:08 moment the world that was was changed into the world that is to become. And it's going to be a date, just like 1492, everybody knows the year. We're going to look back on 2020 or 2021 and say, that was the moment at which our horizons fundamentally broadened to include this new world. So, so thanks for taking a breath and appreciating the moment, guys, really appreciate it. Josh, I think people who. Yeah, thank you. And I think people who listen this podcast might be hungry for some more information or more thoughts from Josh. Where can they follow you? Where can they keep up with your work? Are you even publishing this type of work? What are you involved in these days? No, this was new. So we've been doing a, you know, crypto investment.

Starting point is 01:38:43 This is things that have been rattling around since my dissertation a number of years ago as it's been unfolding in real time. So I haven't really clarified the thought outside of this conversation with you guys. But I, I do dabble in it here and there. Twitter at Joshua Rosenthal is probably the easiest way to get a hold of me. Fantastic. Well, thank you, Josh. Bankless listeners, the action items were actually included in the show this time. So we don't have to go over them once again. Just re-listen to that last section where we talked about the three action items that Josh left us. What a fantastic episode.

Starting point is 01:39:14 Of course, risks and disclaimers, crypto is risky, ETH is risky, Bitcoin is risky. So is DFI. But staying with the status quo also seems like it could be risky. Of course, you could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but thanks for joining us on the bankless program.

Bankless - 63 - The Crypto Renaissance | Josh Rosenthal

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