TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #3: Santiago Siri

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

Marty sits down with Santiago Siri, co-founder of Democracy.Earth, to talk about a range of topics including the Silk Road, liquid democracy, a trip to Cuba, Information Theory, and much more.

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt this is your boy marty bent back in the studio here at barstool sports sitting with somebody who I would consider possibly the most interesting person i've ever met in my life in person uh some of you may not know this man he's he's a political activist a revolutionary some would some would put forward he's the co-founder of democracy.earth great husband great father and again like i said one of the most interesting men i've met personally santiago siri santi welcome to the podcast i was expecting you to mention a completely different name i'm humbled man thank you oh stop that um yeah so i guess we'll start like i met santi one january is that when we first met

i think so but in bitcoin years it's like 1982 it's feel like we've known each other for at least 10 years now yeah um so yeah the way i met santi i saw he was moving i was twitter twitter stalker saw that he was moving to new from san francisco uh knew that he was into bitcoin his is working on a project that that intends to work with the blockchain and hit him up and said hey would you like to meet for beers and lo and behold we met at jg melons a week later and had one of the best conversations i've ever had in my life yeah i was just arriving to new york when we met yeah and now you're settled you're settled right yeah pretty happy here it's a great town yeah it's um i never uh it's funny

funny, I never liked New York until I moved here. I was one of those Philly kids who's like, ah, screw New York, and then you live here. It's like, all right, I understand what everybody's talking about. But the reason I wanted to bring Santi in to talk about Bitcoin and sort of what he's working on is because you have a unique perspective. Being from Argentina, you've seen a lot of shit in your day when it comes to economies and politics, and I would love for all the listeners to sort of hear your story and where you came from so i guess we could start sort of let's go back to uh el partido apart excuse me partido de red close enough partido de la red partido de la red my spanish is going to get better throughout

the podcast i promise so yeah and you know argentina etymologically argent means silver and it's a country that has been obsessed with commodities like silver and other types even since before becoming an independent nation 200 years ago. It was the way where the smugglers of the Spanish Empire used to trade. And it's still a place where there's almost a fever about money and finance, which has led to a culture that has been very unstable regarding financial and banking and governments throughout our young history. Argentina, as most people know, has gone through all kinds of financial crises that you can imagine

like extremely high hyperinflation to the banks confiscating our savings to inflation all over again and that instability, at least for the people of my generation that at least have the advantage of growing up in a democracy, a very young democracy that's 30 years old has led to the fact that when Bitcoin appeared in our country, at least among the geeks and the nerds that were used to digital technology, it was like a no-brainer. I remember when I discovered Bitcoin around 2011. In Argentina, we had 40% of annual inflation rate.

The peso was a currency that melted in your hands. You had to spend it quickly because you were not able to use it for savings. And you were forbidden to buy foreign currency. So when Bitcoin came along, it was the way out. It was an incredible no-brainer for us Argentines to start using a currency and a technology that could liberate us from the coercion of the state and the banks. Yeah, you hear those stories of people getting paychecks in Argentina and then immediately running to the supermarket to buy as much food as possible so their money didn't lose value.

There were periods when, I remember my mother telling me this, I was too young, but the price of the products during the morning were not the same as the price during the afternoon and not the same during the evening. And that kind of mentality, you know, it's very traumatic for a society. So we are always looking for these kinds of solutions. Mm-hmm. And so, when did you discover Bitcoin? I think it was around 2011. In 2009, I was already working on digital currencies. I was working on a project that did a reputation-based currency called Woofie Bank.

And since then, I was obsessed with this monetary history and how technology could disrupt currency. And when Bitcoin appeared, it was like, aha, this is the issue that we needed to address. Decentralization, avoiding the central authority. And it was an instant crash. And I find your story so fascinating because you sort of have this financial background in Argentina where the economy has had bouts of hyperinflation, sort of chaotic and unstable. And then you have sort of this political side of you where you're building a political party that represents, or modern times more, an online political party, basically. The Net Party, right?

Yeah, the Net Party. The Net Party. And sort of seeing where those two collide, what you're doing now with democracy.earth has been so interesting to watch unfold over the last, I think I've been following for the last three or four years. Let me tell you a story about how the party got started. when I discovered Bitcoin I think probably the Gawker article was happening around that time and there was this myth

whether you could actually buy drugs online and there was this anonymous currency that you could use to get drugs online so I figured if this is true this is profoundly revolutionary the fact that you are able to transact online without banks, without credit cards and I figured, well, let's check out this Silk Road thing

and see if it's real. And I remember accessing the Silk Road for the first time, downloading the Tor browser. Back then, I remember you were able to access this weird.onion site that gave you a blank page and you refresh and it wasn't a 404 or some kind of error message. It was just a blank page.

So that meant that, well, let's check the source code code, and when you look into the source code, you found instructions to create the user. And then I figured, well, I created my user, and then I logged in into Silk Road, and I saw this entire market of stuff, of knowledge, let's put it that way. Yeah, because Silk Road wasn't only a marketplace.

They had a lot of very thoughtful, philosophical conversations in the forums on Silk Road, from what I understand. Fred Byred Roberts, and like a very wild libertarian anarcho-capitalist agenda but and there were very you know fun products i remember one guy that was selling a tutorial to get where you had to click on amazon so amazon ships you a free kindle and it sold the tutorial for one bitcoin which was one dollar two dollars back then and there was a picture of the guy with a christmas trees full of kindles and there was stuff like that that was

a lot of fun so you could figure out you know a way of getting a kindle for a couple of dollars that guy must be very wealthy right now and then there were you know the substances i remember making a purchase two purchases with a difference of one hour because i wanted to check the volume between the ids of each purchase to understand the size of the and i remember the distance between the ids was a thousand purchases in in the span of one hour so made me realize like Holy shit, there's a lot of activity happening in the Silk Road thing. And I forgot about it until two weeks later I come home. I was single back then still.

And I get this envelope from the Netherlands. And I check the envelope. I look at it and I said, holy shit, this thing actually arrived to my home in Buenos Aires. Let's open it. Let's do the unboxing, man. And I started doing the unboxing. I remember it was like a couple of flyers written in Dutch about nonsense. And it had a perfectly sealed, right from the factory, of Disney stickers.

Like Walt Disney, Mickey and Donald stickers. So I opened the envelope of the stickers, perfectly sealed, and there were four stickers. Donald Duck, Pluto, and probably Mickey or Minnie. And in one of the stickers, there was a smaller sticker attached to it that had a little hologram that said, we are anonymous. And when you remove that little sticker, you had, you know, two pieces of, let's call it, lysergic acid. Some mind-altering substances. Probably. Exactly. And I remember, you know, a couple of weeks later, a friend of mine was having a birthday, you know, at his house in the in the countryside of Buenos Aires.

So I went there with a bunch of friends and this stuff that I just got from the Internet. And, you know, everyone had it that night and it was very, very strong. yeah very strong and you know with that friend exactly one month later we started together the partido de la red really really wow so you know that's a powerful trip man yeah that's a powerful trip we literally started a political party and we we started you know figuring out how to hack democracy, build the open source software that would engage citizenship to participate, and understand the processes for legally incorporating the party. And you've created the perfect segue for me.

That's exactly what I wanted to talk about. So you talk about this a lot. I was watching a lot of your YouTube videos today in prep. If you guys haven't seen Santi's TED Talks, his speeches at the World Economic Forum and other places around the world, definitely look them up on YouTube because they're incredible. And one thing you said, I forget which speech it was, but you were talking about how lawyers were the hackers of the last sort of 500-year cycle. They hacked the Constitution and the law and were able to wield the system into their vision. And now you say today's modern day lawyers are hackers who are writing code.

Definitely. I remember saying that a lot in the initial days of the Partido de la Red. if you look into the congress of any civilized nation quote unquote you will find that 60 to 70 percent of the members of congress are lawyers and they are the ones that get to write the law and they are the ones that they get to you know work around the law and definitely they are hackers of an old paradigm of information technology that is establishing trust through printed contracts and our speech with the Partido de la Red back then was, you know, let's bring democracy to the 21st century,

let's use the internet to build a much better social contract between the constituencies and their representatives and our approach was, you know, it was a hybrid approach where we will do the political party but the political party would have as a secret weapon or ideological basis its open source software and build an open source software that would have, as a secret component of the software,

a political party. The two things went hand-in-hand together. So we started the development of the software that was Democracy OS, the first version of the software that we did. And the political party ran for Congress in 2013, one year later after we started it. We built sort of a momentum around it

because I was in a radio show in Argentina. I was able to subversively broadcast the information about the party to millions of listeners back then. I did a tech column in a radio show. And we had these weekly meetings every Friday night where it was about alcohol, narcotics, technology, and politics. And as we approached to election day in 2013, it became a movement. And a lot of people joined from a wide range of ideological origins and social class origins like from all parts of the city and we started this you know petite revolution in buenos aires of you know having a trojan political party that will put a candidate that will respond to what everyone says online with

a with a software it it's again like i said i'm sitting with one of the most interesting men i've ever met in my life uh starting your own political party in a trojan horse kind of way and so that's where you're the whole concept behind democracy earth is liquid democracy and you yeah talk a lot about how it's nuanced it's not exactly direct democracy it's not what we have now it's sort of a combination yeah if you will and so i guess if you could explain sort of the the concept of liquid democracy how it differs from what we're doing now and how it might look in the future so you know the experience of starting the party was pretty wild there's a lot of you know beautiful stories to share about you know people being incredibly idealistic and a new generation

engaging in politics and they're you know a speech that is not the cliches from the left or the right that meant about you know let's bring and use technology to reshape our congress but there's a lot of nasty things of doing and being a political entrepreneur in latin america in argentina sadly it's a very corrupt country we had a secret service agency infiltrating our party meetings to sabotage them and really yeah really i wrote an article specifically giving the details about that they came to the meetings to to you know disincentivize people to keep coming and and they generated a lot of noise and trouble, and they were tied to secret service in Argentina. In a period where the government was doing a lot of internal spying, we had a federal

judge suggest us to pay a bribe so we could run in the 2015 election. We did not run in that election, which for obvious reasons. So, you know, discovering also a very corrupt and nasty environment such as politics in general was a bit of a disillusionment. But in 2015, we got a call from Y Combinator. And YC basically said, come think about democracy, you know, from a global perspective and build the technology for it. And there's where we started the Democracy Earth Foundation. And with Democracy Earth, what we're trying to properly understand, other than building technology for 21st century democracy, is also understanding how the Internet itself can become a planetary jurisdiction that enables borderless connections, political and economical, between people from anywhere on the planet. And I think we have the means to actually achieve that with censorship-resistant networks such as blockchains.

And the rise of Bitcoin has been an incredibly powerful influence that has led us to actually be able to think in these terms. So with Democracy Earth, we are building a liquid democracy platform. the idea is for this platform to be the idea of liquid democracy is that it's a hybrid between representative democracy and and direct democracy where you as a citizen get to directly vote on the issues you care about or delegate your voting capacity not to a representative you see on tv but actually a friend or a colleague or a or a family member that you already know and trust and you know simply build the foundations for democratic trust in a peer-to-peer network using tokens on a blockchain so these relationships are auditable by anyone and you know it plays in

a very transparent playground so since 2015 i've been obsessively coding and building this technology and it's been quite an interesting roller coaster because it's the blend of everything that we have tried in the past with the Partido de la Red and Democracy OS. And it looks like you guys are getting close to an alpha or beta, I've seen on Instagram stories. We did a soft, silent release of the 1.0 version. It's in alpha still, but it's a stable release.

It's actually, you know, this is exclusive for the listeners of this podcast. If you go to vote.democracy.earth, you will find the live app, and you'll be able to post stuff and delegate, get your votes once you register with your credentials and vote on stuff and delegate votes to other people. That's awesome.

Vote.democracy.earth. Getting in on a little secret here at Tales from the Crypt. We bring in the good guests. But one thing I wanted to touch on is sort of the censorship resistance of Bitcoin sort of makes this liquid democracy possible

because you can vote and sort of know that it's one person, one vote. How important is the censorship resistance and sort of how does it compare to what we have now? So you are, this is what I wanted to talk about, you are very vocal against Facebook and Twitter censorship specifically. They are big data hoarders that collect a ton of data and they have a lot of information on all of us.

It's something we sort of didn't know growing up with the internet, the way we built it in the first iteration, I guess I, and I'm assuming you would argue too, is that we might have done it wrong up to this point with how we control our data or how we let companies control our data. And so with Democracy.Earth and the censorship resistance movement, you're sort of pushing people to get away from these data silos. Yeah, it's very evident that the outcome of the last U.S. election, which is the most important election in the world, has led to an awakening that made us all realize how deeply influential social media actually is. by proxy in anywhere in the world, not just in the U.S., anywhere in the world,

Facebook or Twitter drive electoral conversations, drive political conversations. And their newsfeed algorithms are not accountable to anyone other than, you know, the authorities of the company. The network owners are the ones that get to benefit from the likes that we post on these networks. and then it's no coincidence that the only guy endorsing donald trump from silicon valley was peter thiel so that says a lot about the kind of power that has become centralized in these entities two billion people are using facebook on a daily basis that's more people than china more people than the islamic religion or than you know the roman apostolic church so it's a We need to address this not by, you know, reacting against it and banning Facebook or Twitter,

but actually embracing the fact that our democracy's playground now lives on the Internet. And we need to figure out how to engage in political conversation that triggers re-election, that triggers, you know, economical transactions or allocation of trust in ways that are compatible with this new arena, with these new commons that we are unconsciously have been developing for the last 20, 25 years since the internet became so popular. So we are trying to deliver a technology for that.

We are in between the fact of redefining politics on a post-nation state world and at the same time trying to open up the kinds of interactions that have been closed on the Facebooks and Twitters and traditional social media of this world. The like is a token, But the problem with the like token is that it's, you know, privately owned by the Facebook corporation.

It has infinite inflation. It's very easily subject to all kinds of civil attacks or identity manipulations of all kinds. And, you know, it's the one thing that drives advertising budgets, advertising dollars, advertising rubles. So I think that we need to disrupt the like. And with Democracy.Earth, we are trying to build a vote token. And we are very open-minded in terms of what kind of blockchain we can use for it. We can implement a ERC-20 token. We can use Satoshis as signaling votes using Lightning Network.

There are many approaches that we are open up to exploring. We have been mostly focusing on the UX side of things. But ultimately, we need to address the fact that, you know, vote is one of the main verbs of how we interact with society and how we signal decisions and preferences to society. And we need to have, you know, a crypto vote operating in this kind of networks that is able to capture political will and address, you know, multi-stakeholder decision making anywhere. and that's what's so crazy about it because these tools twitter facebook they're so powerful the the the the lines of communication that have been opened up between people all over the world it's like i touched we touched on it last week with pierre like we have these technologies in our hands we we literally our species cannot comprehend what they are doing to us right now

because our brains are reptile brains. What is the species, right? Is it us or is it something bigger than us? We can get into that later. We'll get into some crazy AI theories later. But one thing you touched on is you are preparing for a post-nation state world. What does that look like? What is a post-nation state world and how are we transitioning into it?

Let's look at the nationalist world for a contrast. It's a world where we have a big crisis regarding climate change. We have terrorist attacks, we have migrations and refugees collapsing in the infrastructure of countries, and we have wars, proxy wars, in different locations around the world. And we have these kinds of issues that are all in the fringes of what corporations and nation-states can address, because they are competing with each other and they are tied to these political silos. The economy has been pretty much globalized, although for a few. And at the same time, you know, it's a very troubling thing that whatever you are born,

you either won the lottery in life or not. If you are born in the U.S., you probably will do very well in your life. If you are born in Mozambique, you will struggle. So I think that the fact that we have censorship-resistant networks, networks that are rewarding decentralized behavior, that have the incentives to keep building infrastructure that becomes resistant to single point of failures or any kind of sensor control,

and that we are able to build this for the fact that we have the ability to make cryptographic technology that is able to protect these kind of networks, that's an incredible possibility of modern information technology. And in this century that we get to live, and that we get to be here on this earth, I think that the great narrative to be built, if we don't want to make the same mistakes

of the fascist governments of the 20th century, all kinds of fascist governments on the left and the right, if we want to avoid that trap again, I think that we really need to address the next big chapter of the internet. The first chapter of the internet is this cultural revolution. A guy from anywhere in the world can broadcast his message to anyone at an imperceptible cost.

Great. The cultural revolution has been pretty much done since the rise of the World Wide Web and the HTTP protocols. Now the next chapter is about transforming the institutional layer. And institutions, you know, traditionally are a collection of promises that consist of leadership and authorities that enforce those promises that are written in contracts. and those contracts sometimes you know the real deals are done you know behind doors and among the few powerful influential people of an organization and you know you have a lot of decision laundering happening in traditional institutions and in government so that leads to a lot of distrust with established organizations and now we have blockchains which is this new kind of bureaucratic network where we get to store promises that are transparent auditable in a

permissionless way. In the case of democracy, every voter gets the right to audit the election without requiring any kind of special permission to access the servers or to access the infrastructure or the authority running the election. So that kind of democratization in the process of how we are able to design and build institutions is extremely powerful. Anyone with access to a blockchain anywhere in the world can create a startup that from day zero will be able to be a multinational, will be able to get funding from anyone, anywhere in the world, and will be able to, you know, tie its performance to either a token or some kind of crypto asset that will drive the incentives of the organization in very creative and new ways that, you know, ultimately

this canvas gives us a much broader continuum of possibilities on how we can create organizations and institutions than the printed era technologies of the past. So I think that the new generations need to embrace this global planetary revolution and take action. We sort of have a Matrix moment on our hand where Neo is able to sort of... Is that in the third one or the second one? Where he meets the architect and he stops what's going on.

We've basically met the architect and we're looking him in the face right now saying, hey we're we're not going to let this cycle happen again and that's what blows my mind and lewis and i were talking about this earlier it's one of the bitcoin and blockchain like what i'm trying to get through to you freaks out there is that this is one of the best the most profound inventions of humanity not just our time oh yeah definitely of humanity and this is one thing i sort of want to delve into now like we talked about this is J.G. Mellon when we when we met up with DeSantis that one time yeah and had that crazy conversation but you talk about and we

touched on it a little bit last episode but the religious undertones and sort of DeSantis is so good at he yeah he can draw parallels to that but if you talk about like the genesis block and sort of satoshi the the origin story the the genesis block is sort of like a big bang to some would argue life discovering itself um so that's one thing when we talked earlier in the year you said you were rereading the bible looking for yeah looking for uh inspiration or sort of parallels because you had hit a rut at that point is that is that correct um yeah i i started reading the apocalypse in the bible right after i moved to new york and i didn't you know probably the last time i tried to read the apocalypse was when i was a you know a little child trying to look into

this devilish book that was you know forbidden to read and i probably didn't understand a single thing but now as an adult i looked into it again right after moving into new york and it turns out that it's a book about babylon and the decadence of babylon so it felt very close to home right now And, you know, the Bible and these kinds of sources, when you contrast it with, you know, cutting edge technologies such as Bitcoin that have a very powerful creation myth, like, you know, Satoshi being this mythical figure that has, that is pretty much disrupting the entire world of finance, if not the entire world, period. I think that there's some clues that you can find in that kind of literature that it's interesting to catch yeah we were saying that the Bible is sort of a way to bootstrap society like if everything were to go to shit and Bibles were to survive

it's sort of a way to the Bible was the blockchain of its time it was a book that was it required a lot of permissions to actually write something but you knew that if you were able to get something published in the Bible it would be there for eternity, right? Because it was the most sacred and the book with the largest hashing power, right? That is true.

And that was the pinnacle of printed or written technology, of written text. And it's still here. And I think when you touch religious subjects, everyone has very strong opinions about this type of subjects. But I like to address them with an open mind because there's so much we don't know that sometimes listening to the voice of tradition can really bring insight into what's ahead of us.

Definitely. I went to a Jesuit high school, and we had to do the history of the Catholic Church, and we actually learned the history of Islam and Buddhism and stuff like that. What you learn, there's these themes throughout these religious stories, and they're, like I said, they're helping bootstrap society. So if everything ever goes to shit, you go back to these stories

and it's like, all right, this is how you be a good person. This is sort of the journey you should aim to go on. When I did my Y Combinator interview in San Francisco, just three or four days before, I came from, I made that trip from Rome where I, without expecting it, met pope francis really yeah first jesuit pope amdg baby uh let me tell you this story because it's it's not a story that i share in interviews it's a story that i share with friends and since we're with friends here i think it's a good time to share it um i you know i'm part of the world

economic forum which is you know the establishment club and i was like a young promise entrepreneur from argentina that you know somehow got into that into that place which is an interesting place to meet you know extremely influential people from around the world and the world economic forum wanted to lobby the vatican so the pope would go to davos so they invited me being from argentina the same country of the pope as a young entrepreneur to be part of that mission and i went to rome um you know in this trip to to to you know i i just wanted the excuse to get to meet pope francis he's a national hero in argentina and the forum wasn't able to actually convince the church to get the guy in davos every priest there actually they were all argentine

priests they were telling me it's good for you guys to try the guy will never go to davos and but nonetheless the church agreed that three members of the 80 members that flew there from the World Economic Forum three members were going to get the right or the opportunity to give the Pope a letter in person and those three people were a girl from Costa Rica so a woman would go a guy from Pakistan so an Islamic guy would go and an Argentine priest and when we were entering the vatican and these three guys were prepared to to meet the pope the argentine priest said oh i already know francis santi come come come you in my place and he sneaked me in and he decided not to go to the meeting and i suddenly found myself with all the bishops of

the vatican without expecting it 7 a.m in the morning i might have some weed before getting into the Vatican I don't know but I get to go to the Vatican and suddenly I realized I'm about to meet the Pope and it was quite profound for me you know I was like in awe and in shock and after that trip you know I had to fly to San Francisco for Y Combinator and we had our interview, the famous 10-minute interview, whether they tell you if you are nerd enough to be with them or not. For those of you that don't know, Y Combinator is a venture capitalist incubator fund based out of San Francisco. Yeah, pretty much the most famous one for

early-stage startups. Obviously, we knew that YC was a life-changing thing for us. If we were able to be there, we were able to build the kind of organization that we're building now and yc accepted us we did yc later on and while we were doing yc my wife got pregnant pia who is also my partner in democracy earth we have done a lot of things together so and my my little daughter was born and the name of my daughter is roma so i see this kind of very personal connection between pope francis san francisco and y combinator and my my daughter being born throughout the experience of starting up in the u.s

uh as a very you know yeah a personal religious experience of sorts because the the the causality of events definitely looks weird in my in my personal story and and you know and it looks miraculous because you know yeah having a daughter is the most beautiful thing that you can experience in my opinion it's crazy how things work out and you didn't only have a daughter you have a daughter that's going to be in history books that's someday yes roma is the first birth certificate in the blockchain in the bitcoin blockchain she is yeah so for those of you don't know santiago the day roma was born yeah he embedded her birth certificate into the blockchain using a video and testimony right you needed a couple witnesses it's gonna be two years on monday actually okay

When she was born, I did this video. This actually is an idea that Ryan Shea from Blockstack gave me. I was meeting with Ryan a week before Roma was born, and he said, you should do this. I said, I will do it, man. Yeah, you should do it. So kudos to Ryan for pointing me in this direction. I did this video the day after Roma was born, where it's me, very tired. You can see me.

I'm very tired and saying I'm Roma's father. and I filmed the birth certificate of her given by the hospital in San Francisco. I filmed Pia, you know, my wife, who's Roma's mother. Then my mother-in-law and my mother were there as witnesses and they, you know, they give their information. And then I filmed the screen of my computer that shows the last block in the blockchain, the height of the blockchain

and the nonce of the last block in the blockchain as proof that I was shooting this video at least in that moment of time. then with that video file I generate a hash I use proof of existence which is a service done by my friend Manuel Arauz from Zeppelin Manu a great programmer from Argentina and I hashed the video and it does a Bitcoin transaction that puts encodes the hash of the video in the Bitcoin transaction so now I can verify that that video actually was made on November 7 2015 and that none of the contents of that video have been corrupted or changed in any way or any copy of that video for

that matter so the video works as proof you know that the contents inside in it are legitimate and that it has been shot at least in that moment of time so it's you know in practical terms it's a birth certificate without requiring authority from the state from the city of san francisco from the argentine government from no traditional institution other than myself sovereign right ask her father to you know let the world know that she exists and i just used the bitcoin blockchain to you know demonstrate it and it's it's so ingenious my favorite part about that video is that you introduce roma as a citizen of earth oh yeah a citizen of the world so beautiful and it is it is and like we were talking about earlier with these technologies opening up lines

of communication and globalization and we really borders are dissolving whether donald trump wants to accept it or not but we we are breaking down these barriers and i think more and more people as we go forward are going to start saying hey i'm a citizen of the earth i'm just some i'm some guy i'm here trying to get through this life like you you're doing the same as me we're all going to do this together these borders i think you would argue and i would argue one day you're going to sounds silly looking back yeah and i think you know we can achieve it and we can achieve it sooner than we can expect it to happen uh and you know it's like that john lennon's song imagine it's the dream is starting to become very real more and more it is and it's

i don't want to say it's scary that the dream's coming true but it is chaotic the dream coming true is a chaotic transition you know it's scary like all changes yes it's true but i think it's inevitable and i think we have a responsibility the internet generation i hate the word millennials the internet generation the generation that is you know right from the get-go being raised up with this global consciousness uh connecting us all is um you know i think it's a generation that will surprise us in incredible new ways, as it is actually doing with innovations like Bitcoin and all the stuff that is happening.

And, yeah, again, like I said, it's crazy how fast everything's happening. Like, Donald Trump's our president. We've talked about, like, things are getting crazy, obviously, in the traditional world. And one thing that Pierre said last week when we were speaking is that, like, he doesn't even pay attention to traditional politics

or what's going on there. He focuses on Bitcoin. and that's what i think you're doing very well democracy.earth is you're like you say in your talks taking the buck mr fuller buck mr fuller and building a system outside of our existing system build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete exactly and that's another message i'm trying to get across in the newsletter i don't know if you catch this vibe and with the podcast now it's like all right we've got this technology in our hands people we could use it for good let's let's walk down this path we're at a fork in the road right now we could keep doing the

same bullshit yeah we've been doing for years or we could literally since it's open source just each person start building something yeah towards this for this huge decentralized system that could that could be better than the centralized system that we have now we have enormous power in our hands already and it's a matter of finding the right software with the right configuration the right networks the right encryption for us to break free there's no nothing stopping us there will be you know there's all kinds of entities that seek control but ultimately i think that there's a you know there's a physical phenomenon going on with the prevalence and of information in in our reality whether it's moore's law or you know singularity or you know put any

metaphor to describe what's happening but there's definitely a big transformation in human consciousness in a global scale and i i like being you know loyal to that i believe in that more than in i believe in politicians more than i believe in you know traditional power structures um and i think we have this tremendous opportunity literally in our hands and one thing i want to note is that these this the number one thing is these technologies you're doing in my mind is creating empathy yeah you create empathy you can put yourself in somebody else's shoes and and especially with twitter and live video streaming and stuff like that you could literally find people that are living in war zones this is what i found so fascinated about twitter when i

first i first got on 2011 i didn't really start using twitter a lot around until like 2012 2013 when all the serious stuff was starting and you could literally go and follow a syrian who was in raqqa or in that war-torn area and get their point of view and that was the amount of empathy that created just by able to click a few buttons and get a first-hand account was something that blew my mind and has created a twitter addiction like i'm addicted to to this empathy creation Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, technology can be a double-edged sword. Also, there's the argument on how much it leads to polarization. And you do find sometimes like endless debates on Twitter that get very nasty very soon, you know. Finding that out with the block size debate. not get not entering or not opening up that door but i think ultimately it all speaks about human

nature how we are discovering these new boundaries in the space of information you know i i read this year and if there's any recommendation i can make definitely this is a good book to recommend it to recommend called A Mind at Play. It's the biography of Claude Shannon. Claude Shannon is the father of information theory and is the guy that during the Second World War, on his spare time while he was providing services to the U.S. Army, the cryptology division

of the, I guess, the pre-NSA kind of entity that was operating back then for U.S. intelligence and working at Bell Labs, In that span of time, he came with this paper, a paper as important as Satoshi's paper on Bitcoin and electronic peer-to-peer cash system, a paper as important as on computable numbers of Alan Turing that gave the primitives that led to the creation of the first computers. and in the Magna Carta of the information theory authored by Claude Shannon he understands what information is he's the first one to actually acknowledge

the concept of the bit he actually describes what a bit is the entropy attached to how we express information he basically gave birth to the fact that we can use digital code to express any kind of message in any kind of format. And he was a very low-profile guy,

very playful guy. We did a lot of weird experiments throughout his life. But he birthed the concept of the beat and understood the reality of information space. And the thing about information is that we are starting to realize that information is as relevant, if not more, than matter when it comes to shape our conscious experience,

when it comes to shape the architecture of reality that we are embedded in. Light is a transmissor of information in three-dimensional dimension. So Cloud Channel maybe was something even as big as probably Einstein or Newton when it regards to describe a fundamental property of our universe that we thought it was an abstract concept,

the idea of information being an abstraction of reality, but maybe there's a very powerful real aspect to information in the universe. And the fact that how these technologies keep taking over the world, how software keeps eating the world, like Marc Andreessen says, is definitely very telling about the physical properties of information. It seems like there's some kind of gravitational pull that is driving us more and more to get into this new cosmovision of the world and the universe that is driven primarily by information

and then by matter. And my favorite vehicle of this information and this matter is memes. Oh, yeah. So you're talking about Claude Shannon's information theory. You couple that with Richard Dawkins' meme theory. You know what's my highlight, my best moment in Twitter history? What is this? When I exchanged tweets with Richard Dawkins.

Really? I'm not kidding. You can look for it. Just search on Twitter Richard Dawkins anti-Syria, and you will find my exchange with him. Sometime in February 2015, I was doing Y Combinator. it was 1 a.m. in the morning for me, and I asked Richard Dawkins if he ever did a psychedelic experience. Being him the champion of atheism, I always wondered, and I always look for this on

Google, and I never could find any information or any interview. So I got the chance to ask Sir Richard Dawkins if he ever had a psychedelic trip, and he actually replied and said, oh no uh i didn't but a friend of mine suggested doing lst would you recommend it and i said yeah man and if you want to go into a really insightful shit do ayahuasca i said something like that i had a buddy do ayahuasca the other night in brazil he said it was an experience um i did it in in the amazons in peru yeah that's one thing that's on my bucket list um i'm not i'm not gonna say go out and do all the psychedelics but i will say psychedelics every once in a while doesn't hurt uh i've i've been on record saying that shrooms changed my

life to a certain extent yeah steve jobs said you know lsd it changed his life um and i think you know it's a taboo for most of society this kind of conversation but i think that slowly and we need to open up about it uh there are great philosophers on youtube that are very alive on youtube like terence mckenna uh alan watts you know those those philosophers are among my favorite ones and uh we're on the right path we're getting a lot of data coming out right now that psilocybin specifically is helping with ptsd with uh with troops to come back from war when they're going through therapy they're finding that uh doing a little shroom therapy actually helps them out a little bit um and again like it's crazy they in my opinion psychedelics

just help you realize that there's many ways to view the world yeah it gives a multiple points of view at once sometimes exactly yes and you see it in the colors you know you suddenly see more colors or stronger hue or you know the colors in between the movements that you make or you know and you feel the the pulse of nature and the trees seem like more alive all those sensations that we cannot properly find words to describe them because they transcend our traditional spectrum of perception because it has been widened by the experience induced by any kind of of these substances uh you know i think these are you know interesting experiences to engage with and it's always interesting to you know get a friend that knows about it and

and take you on your first trip if you've never done it before but it definitely is the buddy system yeah definitely definitely um yeah so definitely try psychedelics if you if you get a chance with a buddy but back to the information theory of memes that's one thing that is getting crazy for me personally like sort of realizing when you break down a meme it's basically distilling as much information as possible in a picture in a couple words. It's an exploit on attention, right? Yeah.

We have a meme president right now. Donald Trump is the ultimate meme. Memes won the presidency. Yeah. Yeah, and it's pretty mind-blowing. You know, you get this, you know... A four-letter meme, MAGA. MAGA.

I remember when he won, the first thing I did was like, okay, I need to really understand what's going on here. And it started going deep into the troll army behind Trump. And it was mind-blowing to me that you find these weird online personas that are flat-out painting themselves in Nazi camouflage without any kind of guilt. And it's very weird because the trick that they are able to achieve with that is that if you reply to them, oh, you're a fucking Nazi,

Yeah, I don't care. What's, you know, yeah. Thank you for the news, man. Like, there's nothing you can tell them. Whatever you come, whatever comeback, as smart as it can be, it just will, you know, automatically bounce when you deal with this kind of types. And they exploit social media in ways that are, you know, mind-blowing. The whole 4chan army behind it all, it's like an incredible phenomenon. It really is.

It is. and that's what we're seeing today. That's how Trump rose to presidency and our traditional media doesn't know how to react to it. In my opinion, the best way to react to it is to ignore it. Don't give these people any credence. Don't feed the trolls. Exactly, don't feed the trolls.

But that's what 24-7 news is right now in America, is feeding trolls. Yeah, pretty much. It's another generation, especially broadcast TV and mainstream media. You can definitely tell that they are from an old era already. Yeah, and I think conversations like this are an example of sort of new media and a transition away from that, and that's what I'm very excited to see evolve.

That's great. So technology is disrupting everything. Software is eating the world. We're talking about how it's disrupting politics, it's disrupting money, it's disrupting media. And trying to keep up with all that happening at once, it feels like we're going a little bit insane. Yeah. Is that is that just me or do you feel that as well?

No, I feel it. I feel it. You know, you you I don't know, every day you wake up, you check what's going on with Bitcoin and it's like it doesn't feel real. I was waking up to 7500 today. I was like, what the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? And you know, I remember celebrating probably New Year's Eve this year.

I remember telling Pia, wow, how cool Bitcoin is about to cross. 1000 isn't that cool you know we're back to where we were a couple of years ago and thinking well you know i i had you know like everyone i pretend to have all these uh well-thought economic theories that project the value of bitcoin and my theory back then is a hundred billion dollar market cut for bitcoin is doable and it can happen within the next two to five years you know holy fuck it happened like in eight fucking months and now it's like well let's go for the fucking trillion now like what is going on and you hear these voices you know savvy experienced investors telling you it's a bubble make sure you have all your buckets ready with your distributing your resources in a

fair way because you know i was there in the 90s the dot-com bubble and of course you know you want to take a mature approach to it and acknowledge that there's a fever that there's a lot of speculation that there's a lot of you know a fear of missing out but at the same time you know i am a big believer in fundamentals and in a world where equifax gets hacked and 155 million identities get exposed it's just a matter of time for any kind of centralized entity to experience the same thing and in the equifax hack specifically if anything should incentivize us to work harder on these decentralized technologies. I think it's probably the Equifax thing

could be argued that it's behind this last rally among the many other variables that we can put on the table. But the epiphany everyone is having is in a digital world, in an information-based universe, intrinsical technologies that understand the properties of information in order to secure value will prevail in the long term than any patch that you can apply to fiat currency

or traditional institutions. So when you weigh those things in the balance, crypto is a no-brainer. A no-brainer, because I posted this tweet on Twitter and a lot of people were freaking out at me, like, dude, why did you even say that? So theoretically, hypothetically, these hackers who hacked Equifax,

they have 150 million social security numbers, identify the addresses identify yeah identifying information what if they did like a quasi ddos of the irs and just started filing claims for people that weren't them and filed multiple claims and it just became a whole shit show where every claim that these hackers filed was was not a correct claim so the irs would have to redo everything and then going forward from there you wouldn't know what's real and what's not yeah i think there was a fake website that requested people's information uh in order to like those attacks will keep on happening uh and you know well the fascinating thing is how many of these attacks happen every day that we don't know like

banks put a lot of resources on fraud prevention that's basically you know hackers that are exploiting the vulnerabilities that are very basic ones regarding credit cards and and banks yeah They put up, like, a WordPress, like, with no SSH security on it, and it got hacked. Aubrey, Joe never checks, you know. No, no, I don't. I mean, it's because it's an extra step. It comes back to UX. But with Equifax, that's a prime example of the emperor wears no clothes.

Yeah. And that's, again, we're transitioning here. we're in power social media the power of the internet and that's another one of the huge powers is everybody's starting to realize that the emperor wears no clothes they talk a lot of shit they say they know what they're doing but at the end of the day nobody knows what they're doing exactly uh i'm all in for you know uh acquiring the capacities that we can to become self-sovereign and start thinking about the world as one. I recently was in Berlin

and I found this great book on the Whole Earth Catalog, which was this cyber culture catalog back in the 70s that inspired a lot of the digital revolution that happened after. Steve Jobs was famous for quoting it on his Stanford speech saying, stay hungry, stay foolish. That's the mindset that actually was how the whole earth catalog ended on on every issue it quoted that that phrase and the thing about the whole earth mentality is this idea that you know we now have the technology to

really think politically financially culturally the earth as one there are no excuses left anyone can broadcast who she or he or it is to anyone else anywhere in the world at almost an imperceptible cost and now we are doing that with money and we'll end up doing that with votes and with institutions and with you know we need to take this route because otherwise you know we can see it on tv very clearly it's a it's a reality show where people talk about how big their new keys and you know either it's killing each other or or outsmarting this it's a dick measuring contest for psychopaths yeah that's what the political stage of the world is oh yeah and i'm tired of psychopaths running the world and if you look at it statistically like

to have to want that not statistically but to want to have that power you have to be psychotic Oh, yeah. I learned this personally, in a very personal level, starting up a political party in Argentina. When we had to decide the candidates of the party that were going to run for Congress, you present a list in Argentina. You have the first candidate, the second candidate, the third candidate, the first one obviously being the most important one. and when we were getting close to the deadline of presenting the candidates i felt in a very personal level like the rush and the need to be the first candidate i felt the toxic greed of political power and i felt it because you had people

talking to your ears you get this poison through your ears that tells you oh you're gonna be the next president of the country you have the potential to be and you start to actually drinking your own kool-aid and you and that's where corruption begins begins with your own self and i remember throughout a week or two i slowly started becoming into this you know a political animal that wanted to be the first candidate of the party because i started the party and i did this and i did that and i'm you know the most popular guy and and i felt it in deeply inside me and thankfully i was well surrounded back then and exorcism happened where we spoke a bunch of weed they got me drunk and i

you know i wept and i said yeah this is bullshit i don't need to be a politician and you know and and i i learned to laugh about it but uh in hindsight now i look at it and i can see how easily power can corrupt the temptation of you know uh being that guy that gets the headlines and it's you have you have to work very strong with yourself to preserve yourself from that kind of temptation because it really leads nowhere because you're fighting nature at that point yes it's within our nature totally it is it is we live in hierarchies and yeah we have lived in that mindset since forever and that's the entry again like i said for we're talking to the architect we're trying to actively fight that nature yeah and so let's get into that fighting

our nature is that something like we're finally at a point where we can realize that we may need to do this yeah um so what's what if we move to like a post-nation nation state world where there's a lot of sovereign or everybody's a sovereign individual what what does that look like and how how does that uh how would that differ from sort of the hierarchical structures that we're used to today wow what a great question um i think that uh you know it's quite challenging to actually learn how to remove yourself from the temptations of power um uh at least you know democracy earth uh you know when you do the website and you have to put someone who is the CEO and the president and whatever you know you have these stupid titles and I made that mistake

myself and then I realized no no no I will put as a title whatever I like doing most for this organization and in my case is code I code every day you can check my github profile I that's what I'm passionate about I cannot live without coding and so everyone in our website is featured with their own single task you know there's the the person that does community stuff there's the person that does theory there's the person that does social media but i think that ultimately you know in a non-hierarchical world where everything is miscellaneous there are no hierarchies but everything can be everything you know it's a matter of how you tag stuff uh in that context uh i think that everyone should you know try to figure out what they like to do

and find the means to do it for the rest of your life in a way that you are contributing to society and you know hierarchical structures traditional structures of power are very uh are illusions that really don't mean nothing because once you get to be that guy the the number one guy you you get you have power then you realize you know it's still a wednesday 5 p.m and you have to feed your daughter or take her to the park lewis and i were talking about this earlier you no matter what title you have you gotta grind you like you can have any title in the world but if you're not doing the work you're not getting stuff done it's that your title doesn't mean shit it's what you produce is what is important yeah and probably the best

thing that you can produce is anything that you are passionate about and you know passion is a component of culture a component of education a component of divine inspiration maybe but it's definitely something that makes you unique because if you are good at something you get to be good at that thing because you have dedicated so much time to it for the sole reason that your entire self cannot live without doing it. And sometimes discovering that takes a lot of time. Sometimes it takes 10 years. Sometimes it takes 50 years.

But I think that you have to keep on looking for it. One of my favorite movies is Rushmore from Wes Anderson. Bill Murray asks Schwarzman, you know, the character he's playing, Schwarzman asks Bill Murray, hey, what's the secret? And Bill Murray says, just find something you like to do

and do it for the rest of your life. That's it. And in this world of self-sovereigns, I think we need to... What I like about open source is that what relevant open source technology is technology that is able to understand what hole needs to get filled

in the greater scheme of things and you build on that and you piggyback on existing open-source technologies or you find a use case for open-source technologies waiting to find that use case and you get to inject your project in the greater constellation of innovations that are happening on this space.

So that pursuit, I think, is a thing that you have to exercise every day. Identify it and go for it. This is something I can attest to. For me personally, it was a newsletter, something I stumbled into, sort of. My favorite newsletter. I read it every day. I cannot believe that you actually send it every day.

It's like I don't read the newspaper from Argentina anymore. I read Marty's newsletter, man. Thank you. I'm honored that you even think about spending some time reading it every day. But that, honestly, this whole story here freaks, I sort of got backed into a corner and had to do the newsletter out of necessity. I was unemployed for about a year. Been researching Bitcoin for five years, was getting to the final round of multiple interviews, I think six or seven, and getting shut down. And then finally one day I said, fuck it, I'm going to start this.

If people like it, we'll see where it goes. Another Bitcoin miracle. Um, but, uh, and I think, like I said, we live in chaotic times, but at the same time, there's a lot of clarity coming through as well, where, you know, for a fact that your life doesn't have to be chained to a, to a cube from nine to five. yeah and it's scary right yeah realizing like i'm you know uh i'm practically not getting a salary uh in the sense that you know i've been lucky enough to be on bitcoin very early on and it's very counterintuitive to think of my reality financially you know in this um very weird new crypto context um where you know every time i have to sell some bitcoin for survival it feels like I'm borrowing from the future.

I know that feeling. But I think that if I was lucky enough to get into this so early, I feel a responsibility to give back to it. And that's why I try to work on whatever I feel I'm best at contributing at to the strengthening of this kind of technology for the world. And you're working hard towards this. You've been a globetrotter the last few months. from what I can tell on your Instagram.

You were just in Germany, you were in South Korea, you were in North Korea, correct? Yeah, I went to the border with North Korea. That was surreal, man. What was it like down there? What's going on down there? It's so strange because it's like this ongoing war and that it's, you know, this, you know,

when I was there, a missile went over Japan and Donald Trump appears in the news every day and you talk to Koreans and say, you know, young Koreans are like, why didn't they die already? and and you go through seoul and seoul is a city that has huge avenues so tanks can move fast in the case there's a war with enormous subway infrastructure so if there's a nuclear attack everyone on the on the city can go underground uh could you imagine living in that it's like going to a chapter of evangelion like a nuclear war is about to start and you know the meccas are

going to start shooting each other and you're in the middle of that chaos and at the same time the fascination you know that north korea such a riddle uh i remember when i was 20 years old 19 i went to cuba for a full month and you know growing up as a teenager in argentina the che guevara the famous cuban revolutionary is a very powerful figure because it's this romantic guy that went to fight the revolution liberating latin america from american imperialism right and i read a bunch of biographies and instantly fell in love with the guy and so my father in shock that his son was putting the the communist propaganda on his bedroom my father said so you like Che Guevara and communism and I said yes because we need to liberate the proletariat and

fight the oppression of capitalist pigs like you my father was pretty nonchalant about it pretty cool and said okay go to Cuba I invite you I will send you there even with a friend of mine who is a Marxist professor from the University of Havana so he can show you Cuba better than anyone else and he actually did that and I went to Cuba with this extreme left-wing Marxist guy who I didn't know was a friend of my father I was totally in shock about that so but that speaks about how free the mind of my father actually is and I went to Cuba for a full month and I remember you know being there and seeing the revolution everywhere Fidel Castro was on TV every single day and I landed in laban in this house where you know it was a former fighter of the cuban gorilla

and his grandson lived there his grandson was 17 16 years old i was 18 19 20 so he was pretty much my age and he had a little dog and i asked him what's the name of your dog and he said linux What? Yes, Linux. My dream is to get on the internet and to be able to access the internet and navigate and learn about programming. And I want to be a computer scientist when I grow up.

I only get 15 hours of internet every day because 15 hours of internet per month because we bribe the telecommunications company guy and we get that time and I get to learn some stuff. And yeah, my dream is... 15 hours a month? 15 hours a month what year is this 2002 2003 uh and i was that was a wake-up call i that was like oh wait a second i'm i'm a child of the internet i am i feel blessed by the internet and here's this

this this this guy my age who loves computers who loves information technology and he's struggling to get access to this because you know there's this perfect political mess that censors free speech you know there's a lot of things that you could argue in favor of the Cuban government you know like the U.S. blockade but definitely the free speech the fact that the only book from an American author published in Cuba was from Noam Chomsky and nothing else was ever printed there that is after 1990, probably, that says a lot about how we are trying to control thoughts. And, you know, in that trip,

I started fighting the guy that was supposed to make me fall in love with Cuba. I recently read the diary that I kept during that trip, and I discovered this conversation that I had with another Cuban, one of his mistresses, because he was in Cuba to fuck around. And I remember talking with her and she said, Chico, his dreams are about the past and your dreams are about the future. Don't waste time with him.

Because we were fighting every day. And I was 20 and he was 50. But he was a revolutionary, a cliche leftist revolutionary. And I was like, this guy willing to learn about Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. And quite frankly, it was a heartbreak. My first heartbreak with politics. And I remember getting back to Argentina, desperate to see a shampoo advertising in the streets because I was fed up of fucking Fidel Castro. And the next year I was trading stock in Wall Street and I became a capitalist for a little while.

And then I guess I balanced myself. But that's the problem with fanatism. That's the problem when you become ideological, when you become like you have this perfect theory about reality. And then you become a useful idiot. And we need to constantly fight against that because that's what they want. That's what the people in power want. They want to keep us fanatized with them or with their ideology or with whatever device they can find to manipulate the masses. And they are not shy about it.

So keeping a free mind matters a lot. And now we get the chance to have a technology that rewards, you know, a kind of freedom that avoids any kind of financial or political coercion. And that's Bitcoin. And that's an incredible story. Going to Cuba as a Marxist, leaving as a pissed off former Marxist. My sister always tells me that when you came back from Cuba, you were like so depressed. and it was the fact of realizing my mistake

swallowing my pride and saying this is bullshit it's something we all go through I was a crazy liberal in college in high school, college and you go through life you start getting paychecks I think that's when every liberal

becomes a conservative but you have to go through that process you have to test those ideas you have to explore everything and you can't be afraid to explore everything that's like you said the people in charge want everybody to be complacent and that's what i would argue so in cuba the complacency was sort of forced on people via communism here in america i would argue we got complacent in the last three decades three four decades and it happened via consumerism and people getting not confused but

distracted by short-term short-termism that's that's what i'll say it is there's a saying in spanish that i say if you're not a leftist when you are 20 you are insensitive if you're not a conservative when you're 50 you're stupid there's there might be some truth to that but you know the bottom line is you know figuring out what what really helps improve people's lives and And I think that I'm a big believer in the power of technology, of technology for good, for social transformation, for improving what makes us fall in love with life and contributing to society in positive ways.

But yeah, sometimes learning this stuff takes experience. Definitely. And would you argue that we're sort of in like a Luddite type of time where the new age, like Bitcoin, decentralized systems is butting heads very heavily with the old age sort of centralized financial system? And that's why things seem chaotic, I think, to everybody, because you're seeing two diametrically opposed systems sort of butting heads. The movie is unfolding with the expected cliches, like the week that Jamie Dimon was trashing Bitcoin and the Chinese central bank was banning exchanges. It was like the perfect storm. And I remember being in South Korea in those days and thinking, fuck, man, this story all over again. And then, you know, in those moments when Bitcoin, I think it went from $4,500 to $3,000,

in those moments you get tested again, whether you believe it or not. Will I buy again or not? But, you know, I think Jamie Dimon is playing the perfect Lex Luthor role in this story. And, you know, it seems so obvious. he can't he can't I mean he's actually interested

in seeing Lloyd Blankensfein Blankensfein is that his name the CEO of Goldman Sachs he's come out and actually been pretty

pretty open minded he sees the opportunity of his competitor you know saying very stupid shit yeah and that's what

that's what it was interesting to see this week with Lloyd it was like alright here's somebody who's sort of

open to this disruption that if it plays out will destroy his revenue stream and his business to some extent um but you want to see stuff like that you want to see people maybe i would argue

capitulation is what you want to see going forward because you you want to convince these people that hey this is a better system yeah um but maybe it's definitely not going to happen overnight maybe that's a good thing so we have time to build that system parallel takes time yeah i i'm learning as i discover my high school friends suddenly texting me about how to buy bitcoin now after five years of me telling them to do it, I guess sometimes it takes time to actually be able to learn about it and to find the time to acquire a skill. So getting convinced about the nature of money is very hard because you don't want to think that the US dollar is a fraud.

You really don't want to believe that because it's a very scary place to be at. But once you develop the balls to actually acknowledge the fact that any kind of fiat system is a fraud, well, then you can take action. And those ideas take time to mature. We have a responsibility of being pioneers in this space to help teach our family, our friends, our colleagues in the best possible way what these technologies mean and how they can benefit from it. And that's the beautiful part of the incentive system set up in these decentralized systems is that they're feedback loops. So if you are an early adopter or adopted at any point, making more people use the technology makes it more useful, gives them more utility, makes it more valuable. And if it's a technology that's actually better than what we're using now, even better. and that's what I try to do with the newsletter

with this podcast is try and educate you guys about this like we've said plenty of times already innovation that comes once in humanity so it's going to take time to transition but

no better time than now to start educating people it's a great purpose it's a great mission and you know this is probably the reason we are alive now in the sense that this is one of the zeitgeist technologies that are shaping

the years to come and hopefully if we are able to leave any legacy in the direction of helping people embrace a world that is more connected, less divisive more able to

bring us together as as you know the one humanity we are actually we actually are um i'm a big optimist in you know i always been and and i think that uh you know great things are ahead as as as these technologies start to unfold and start impacting the world in even greater and more more transformative ways than before and that's like the most interesting part to think about when you think about this stuff is once we get to that point where we are a global society and we realize that like and we start going outside of this world yeah that's when things start to get well

very interesting let me tell you a theory of a good friend of mine who has pretty interesting theories about humanity and he he has me thinking about this one that ultimately whatever code seems to be operating in life in this planet whether it's dna or you know the emergent properties of dna within culture and you know within technology and everything we seem to create seems to point in the direction that we will end up creating some kind of vessel that gets out of this planet and goes into another planet with as much as as much information as we can put in that other planet that other planet could be mars right now but could definitely be any other planet in any place in the universe in the long term and maybe that's the way life uh you know tries to

expand throughout the cosmos and you know it's this this thing that uh you know you know this This thing that goes through molecules and then through biology and then through animals and then through humans and then through society and culture and technology until it reaches the point of generating some kind of rocket that is able to go into as many other, you know, virgin planets as possible. And then the whole thing begins all over again, anywhere else in the solar system or anywhere else in the galaxy or in the planet or in the cosmos. So there seems to be that pull of life trying to perpetuate itself in the universe. We haven't found anyone else so far, but maybe Satoshi. Maybe Satoshi.

This is one of our favorite theories here on Tales from the Crypt, is Satoshi as an alien or an AI. And that's what our conversation with DeSantis, when he was describing how you could use the blockchain similar to what you did with Roma's birth certificate, but embed DNA information and send out radio waves. I think we must not discard the theory of Satoshi as alien AI. I think it's one of the most fun,

but yet interesting theories to actually look at as long as we don't know who Satoshi is. Let's dive into it. So how would you describe this theory? so look when this let's let's look at human history when the european conquistadors took control of the american continent the american natives they subverted the natives by giving them these shiny mirrors and this you know these things where the natives could see their reflections while they all completely overtook their you know power structure and

and they conquered their gold and their precious metals, which for the natives were not that valuable. But economic subversion goes a long way to conquer a civilization. And Satoshi Nakamoto emerges as an entity on the internet that we cannot attract to a biological entity as far as we know, and proposes this technology that suddenly sacks 100 billion plus dollars out of the financial system in less than a decade. So if there's any alien species trying to conquer Earth,

that kind of financial economical subversion certainly is a very good tactic. Bitcoin could be the mirrors. Bitcoin could be the mirrors. Bitcoin, I would not deny the fact that this could be a possibility. There are other theories. There's the famous 1996 paper from NSA that describes how to do electronic cryptographic mint. And it's a paper that describes a lot of the techniques that are being used in crypto. And some people point out to the NSA being behind it all.

or maybe a rogue actor of the NSA. But regardless of the authorship behind this idea, this is an inevitable idea. The idea that we can structure blockchains in information space is as inevitable as the idea that we can build computers in information space. Computers, the internet, and blockchains are architectures that live first in information and then get expressed in matter. You can literally build a computer with carbon

or with any, you know, physicochemical material. These are architectures that are information-driven. It turns out that silicon is probably the best material to build computers and to build networks and to build blockchains. But these are inevitable ideas that emerge out of the intrinsic properties of mathematics and information.

So one could argue that the fact that we get awoken about these possibilities, that these ideas are embedded in light, which is the main carrier of information. And, you know, there's a great book about Alan Turing, the best biography ever written about him. It's called Turing's Cathedral. And in Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson, the author of the book, right at the end of it, really dares to explore this theory where he says the most intelligent or the most adaptive way for intelligence to move across the universe is in the form of information and because information can move at the speed of light it does not care about the kind of vessel whether it's a you know

a super spaceship or whatever it doesn't care about form it doesn't care about form so information goes through time and space and you know if you want to put any kind of revolutionary idea out there in the universe you will put it in the form of information when people were building the first computers they were building those computers to calculate the astrophysical configuration of the stars that they were witnessing for the first time with the first you know electromagnetic telescopes So the information to build computers literally came from outer space. Holy crap. So we humans, we give credit to our egos for everything, and that's fine.

And I admire hard workers like Alan Turing that literally saved humanity from the Nazis. But, you know, if we are more open-minded about it, I think that the argument that, you know, the epiphanies that led to the creation of computers or the creation of blockchains came from natural properties of information embedded in light that travels across the universe through time and space is a very solid argument about how, you know, it's not about aliens. It's about how intelligence gets stored in this universe we inhabit. It's the universe discovering itself. Exactly. Awakening. It's so crazy to think about when you break it down to that level. That's why we should push people to do what you love, because it is a miracle that we're here.

The only truth is love. That's true. God is love. I'm a big believer in that. Absolutely. Hell yeah, man. That's why I end every podcast, so I'm peace and love. That's all it comes down to. You know, I was in this Halloween party last week, and I tweeted stuff. Next day, I figured out my tweets, and one of the tweets was,

whatever you find it, love is the answer. And, you know, it's very true, but we tend to forget all that. We humans. We do. We do. And it's because the ego gets in the way. Oh, yeah. and like we were talking earlier with psychotic politicians and stuff like that we have to realize

is that the fact that we are alive is a gift the chances of us being here is beautiful on this pebble flying through space and able to have a conversation where we're talking through microphones that's recording that we're going to post to the internet it's going to get sent out later the chances of us being here right now are so infeasible that so small that it is it's miraculous enjoy it people let's just enjoy it yeah yeah um all right so we just got deep into the woods there with the universe and life theory the theory of love let's bring it back towards bitcoin a little bit um i guess what do i want to touch on i don't really want to touch on the politics of anything right

now i want to talk more about philosophy and how it can help us and how it will help us going forward so i guess like pierre said we're at we're at the end of the beginning right now he would say where we have all this institutional money getting ready to come in um and i guess my biggest question and what i really am trying to get across with this podcast and newsletter again is education and i'm a strong believer in that everybody should hold their private keys and do you see a world in which we evolve or which we move towards where people aren't storing their coins on exchanges and are sort of own their private keys do you think there needs to be hardware that needs to be developed going forward what needs to happen you think like i was telling pierre this dude

neil would find based out of he's not based out of uh or he's not based out of hong kong he's based out of beijing but he was saying that bitcoin if it's successful will usher in the next enlightenment and i sort of agree with that and do you think people will find out on them by themselves like how how to secure their their wealth via bitcoin or you think we're gonna have to have like a massive massive education push you know when i was in in london sometime a couple of years ago and on an official trip actually the government of the uk invited me there and they put me in front of very interesting people and among them was like the number one guy of british intelligence

and i asked him about you know what what was the philosophy of the uk government regarding you know the privacy of users and you know encryption and whatnot and he gave me an answer that is very common in in crypto but i learned it back then that was you know he said that the philosophy that they had as a government was to try to teach people about digital privacy in the same way they taught people about hygiene when they were installing potable water in the British sewage system back in the 19th century. In the 19th century, they had to teach people

to actually take a bath, to wash their hands, to take care of their private parts and develop that kind of education so society would be more hygienic and more healthy. And with information technology, it's the same thing. You need to develop your hygiene regarding your data and your private information. And I think that we need to explore a path that helps people learn and become alphabetized regarding how to protect their data. I think that, you know, hardware wallets or any kind of technology is always useful in the sense that, you know,

one day you die and you need your family to take care of your stuff. So in that sense, developing technology that can be trusted and that can be secure enough to prevent any kind of theft or loss and build the right protocols really matters. Companies like Trezor, I think, and Ledger and all these new emergent crypto hardware wallets, I think, are going to be very relevant players in the short term because they are really talking about that practice

and making that usage more commonplace. And this sort of brings us back to the conversation of Internet 1.0 versus Internet 2.0. Do you think we have to start it from scratch? I think that there's always legacy that you have to deal with. A reset, you know, it's not that easy to actually make happen. But, you know, I think that definitely on this new wave of the internet, identity is the browser. We are definitely putting our right to control our private information back in the hands of the user

rather than in the hands of Facebook or Google. and you know my sensation is that you know a lot of people are looking for the next app that is similar to the web but now using a blockchain based technology and the difference between web-based successful web-based technology and blockchain-based technology is that any technology that is relevant in the blockchain universe has to be geopolitical it makes no sense to make a snapchat for blockchain if it's not driving some kind of institutional transformation on a global scale and successful blockchain technologies like bitcoin are geopolitical because the nature of blockchains impact bureaucracy and institutional realities and you know aiming for anything less

than that is a waste of time so in that regard i think that we need to acknowledge the the relevance the political and economical relevance of these technologies that you know they won't be competing against the record labels or the hollywood corporations they will be competing against nation states uh the imf major banks that's the the the next you know big enemy to beat in this new wave of the internet and uh you know if i have to bet on a winner on this on this battle i think it's a no-brainer again you know i'm pretty much vested on that bet so so yeah no but it's crazy seeing seeing the pushback from from like social media uh one example i like to

um go back to is syria in 2012 like i was saying when i got very into twitter around then what fascinated me the most about it was when john kerry and the state department was thinking about bombing syria after that youtube video came out of chemical weapon attack and at the time it was very uh it wasn't it wasn't very like nobody was certain if that that video was authentic or not and there was a good chance that the state department was going to try to convince obama to go bomb syria and there was a lot of heavy talk about it but people got on twitter they got on facebook and they said no like what are you talking like let's not getting to another another war here and the powers that be sort of took a step back from that and and and and wound

up not bombing them but it was interesting to see that sort of just being vocal on these social networks and and showing up and being like all right no this sort of direct sort of like a direct democracy like voting on twitter with your likes and and retweets like don't do this and i think that one of the greatest things to figure out in this world where you have bombardments of information happening in front of our screens every day is really developing the kind of systems that can tell truth from bullshit. And that's not easy. You get to see these CGI demos that can suddenly put George Bush or Barack Obama speaking

and you cannot really tell the difference between the simulated one with the real one. You know, these kind of attacks to our attention and to our perception will keep increasing as artificial intelligence keeps mastering, you know, the uncanny valley. um so i think that the the great political frontier that we'll be discussing in the 21st century is this frontier between what's real and what's not what's artificial intelligence and

what's human consciousness and we have to be very hyper conscious about this again because the whole fake news meme that's been going around yeah we cannot we cannot create gatekeepers that decide what is true what is not you have it is a personal responsibility you have to do your research you have to you have to make it a personal responsibility to determine what is true what is false and you cannot rely on these third parties to do it for you it's as simple as that going forward personal sovereignty personal sovereignty and that's what it's all about and i think this is a perfect end point here it's been a great conversation santiago it's always a pleasure it's been one of the best conversations i ever had period oh stop it stop it no it's been a lot

of fun and yeah it's a you know good conversation if there's a do you have a word of i don't want to say a word of wisdom a word of advice for the freaks and a parting note if you will for bitcoin specifically speaking of bitcoin for people that are new to it like lewis and huddle huddle huddle and huddle you'll be rewarded i i that's the best advice that's ever been given on this podcast it's early in the it's early in the podcast's history that's the best advice we've given out so far just huddle um Again, Santiago Siri One of my favorite people on earth

Find him on Twitter At Santi Siri Si hablas espanol Compra el libro de Santi Activismo Puedes encontrarlo En Amazon.com That's right

Again It's all about love All about love All about love All you need is love We're gonna end it there Peace and love, people Wow, dude

That was insane What a trip Thank you.