The Pomp Podcast - #1373 JP Thor | Crypto Millionaire on DeFi and Humanity’s Future

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

JP Thor is one of the lead contributors to THORChain, master of the memes, and has some insane ideas. In this conversation, we talk about his background, we talk about building a billion dollar platfo...rm with only 5 engineers in 18 months, promise of crypto, milestones and obstacles we need to overcome, and then conversation ends with some wild ideas you need to listen to.  ======================= Meanwhile is the world’s first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Protect your loved ones with sound money built to manage life’s uncertainty and a broken financial system. Their BTC-denominated Whole Life Insurance policies allow HODLers to pass more BTC on to their loved ones and a tax-advantaged way to access BTC for liquidity during their lifetime. Visit their website at ⁠⁠https://meanwhile.bm/⁠⁠ to join the waitlist for a policy and to learn more. ======================= Buy and sell cryptocurrency in a tax-advantaged crypto IRA with iTrustCapital. Enjoy 24/7 access, lowest fees in the industry, and tax benefits for your retirement. Open and fund an account today at ⁠https://www.itrustcapital.com/pomp⁠ to receive a $100 USD funding bonus. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up, guys? Today, I've got a very, very special treat. We've got JP Thor. He is one of the lead contributors to ThorChain. He is a master of the memes, and he has some absolutely
Starting point is 00:00:38 insane ideas that you guys are going to love. In this conversation, we talk about his background. We talk about building a billion-dollar platform with only five engineers in 18 months. Then we get into the promise of crypto, what some of the issues are, what are the milestones that we need to achieve, and what are the obstacles we need to overcome? These are some of the most unique thoughts that I've heard in a long time when it comes to crypto and the future that lays ahead. But then it doesn't stop there. JP gets into all kinds of wild ideas, including removing our brains from our body
Starting point is 00:01:05 and putting them into silicone machine body doubles and shooting them into space. You did not hear me misspeak. You will have to listen to this entire conversation. Everything in here is unique. It is valuable. And I can't wait for you guys to hear it. Here's my conversation with JP Thor.
Starting point is 00:01:20 Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Meanwhile. Meanwhile is the world's first licensed and
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Starting point is 00:03:49 itrust capital you can start maximizing your crypto investment today go to itrustcapital.com that's itrustcapital.com i thought a great place to start this conversation is you have rumored made 400 million dollars in crypto but you did it completely anonymous and you built one of the most popular products in all of crypto you've got a crazy story uh a whole bunch of stuff went into that but maybe just start with the fact of like being an anonymous founder who is now docs themselves uh what was this story like i mean just explain how this happened right so i knew i was going to build a very powerful protocol and i knew i had to do it with the the right structure and setup and you can look at previous founders at the time it was about 2017-18 so i was
Starting point is 00:04:38 looking at the cadre of founders and going what what's what can i do correctly here what is the required characteristics to launch this protocol in and that was a and i knew that the protocol had to be launched on its own merits i had to solve some hardcore technology problems first and i didn't want that protocol to be married to me i wanted to ultimately hand it over to the community so there was going to be a progression from being a founder-led project that was started off being centralized and there was going to transition to a decentralized project but you have to remove the the egos behind it so there shouldn't have been ever an ego attached to the project and so rather than becoming a person around the project and trying to reimagine myself
Starting point is 00:05:18 with a different ego i decided to create a fake persona so i could very easily shed that ego when i essentially handed the project over to the community so my fake profile was this dev in the discord called lena and the meme was it was a look like a female it was actually an artificially generated i built her on this person does not exist.com in 2019 so she was like this spanish looking very humble uh mediocre dev in the discord that you had to approach with uh it was very disarming for people to approach me because of my outwards projection of who i was and i had to compete on in the field of intelligence i had to be consistent with my memes consistent with my output and consistent with the messaging over and over again and that's how you can approach a
Starting point is 00:06:03 decentralized community. All right. So hold on a second. This wasn't your first foray into the crypto world. You'd already built some stuff before, but you decide, hey, I'm going to go build what is essentially a decentralized trading platform, right? And kind of its most primitive form. And you decide that I need to be an anonymous founder. You go on this person does not exist.com. You create a AI generated photo. You then go into the discord. You begin to communicate as you're building correct um how do you manage imjp in real life and i am lena you know in the discord and kind of having this like almost second persona or second uh life yeah it was uh fascinating to me because i was creating a my persona my discord persona was very different
Starting point is 00:06:48 to my real life persona but also there was a further tension that i ran the actual thought chain twitter account for six years i called myself the rogue intern i was trying to represent the community at the same time as trying to pretend to be leaner to try to also but outwards project my own view of the view of the world so it's like a multi-persona out you know juggling of the balls going on uh interestingly i i feel like i can do that quite well uh and it you know i have my name is two names john paul and but people call me jp so i've got this ability to pivot between different personas and take on different personas qualities i wouldn't call myself a multi-person personality person i am jp but i feel like i can be who i need to be in the
Starting point is 00:07:28 correct in the correct environment i feel i'm very fluid in that regard is it a um is it acting right and why i'm so fascinated with this is uh it takes a certain type of mentality and a certain attention to detail a certain um emotional control to be able to shift back and forth because i can imagine a world where uh you know you may be talking to your family you may be talking to someone in real life as yourself and then all of a sudden you pick up your phone and you go from the Thor chain intern to Lena, and that all happens in three minutes, right? And if you ever break character, or if you ever kind of do something outside of what is supposed to be that persona, it could be detrimental.
Starting point is 00:08:04 Right. So then my North Star in all my personas is what I'm trying to do here. So as Lena, I was trying to build a beta consistent message to output and direct a team of engineers and a global, an ecosystem forward. So my North Star when I was leaner was beat a consistent message and build the architecture and lead. My North Star as a person is to be a charismatic in real life person. So that's how I'm, but I'm very good at context switching. I think that's one of my skill sets is I'm able to context switch very easily between different projects.
Starting point is 00:08:36 And I've got very good T-shaped skills where I've generalized knowledge and then I can zoom in very quickly on a certain aspect. Okay. So you built ThorChain. is it the product that you envisioned from day one or did you have to kind of iterate your way there and then talk a little bit as to like what it is today because it's probably one of the most popular decentralized trading platforms in the world right so ThorChain is currently the largest and Pareto largest so 80% of cross-chain liquidity flows between the majors so Bitcoin ETH the L2s the Dogecoin etc etc and it's it will continue to be Pareto significant going to years
Starting point is 00:09:10 because it's first mover and it's had to solve the hardcore problems of of the cross-chain landscape uh and the second part of your question was how like what is the uh the i mean do we have to iterate so my my fundamental view is you need to be in the arena you don't you can't actually spec out uh the correct implementation on a whiteboard in fact you'll take years to do that in fact ThoughtChain's design today is the culmination of years upon years of being in the arena and seeing problems crop up and addressing those problems as they happen. So actually, when we launched the first net, we called it ChaosNet. You know, I gravitate to chaos.
Starting point is 00:09:50 I am very tolerant of chaos. And we recognize you have to be in the arena. You can't spec out on a whiteboard all the problems you're going to face. You've got to solve for the chaos. And from that chaos, then order can emerge. And, you know, this is fundamentally how we've evolved genetically over billions of years. We get in the universe, we observe it, we are tolerant of chaos. And if we can survive the universe, we can pass on a set of useful instructions for our next generation, both genetically and also memetically.
Starting point is 00:10:16 And so I recognize that ThoughtChain's final evolution was being in the arena, responding to the attacks, responding to the permutations of different state transitions and random network topology problems. And we couldn't do that in a test net. We had to create a chaos net. And today, actually, ThorChain is still in ChaosNet. It still responds to chaos every single day and solves for those problems. So my understanding is early on, it took about 18 months. You went from zero to a billion-dollar platform. You did that with five engineers.
Starting point is 00:10:45 And the idea that you can take a very small team, use software, and build a billion-plus dollars worth of value was pretty much incomprehensible 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It feels like that is the future. That is where we're headed is more and more teams will be very small to be able to create a lot of value. How did you find these people? You know, how did you select, okay, you're on the team. Maybe somebody else isn't on the team. And talk just a little bit as to like what it takes to be very small
Starting point is 00:11:14 five person team and create so much value. Hire fast, fire fast and set a really strong standard of expectation. Just don't mince words, just give very fast feedback. And I look for people who can post daily updates. I have no expectations for the work output. I just require that they have post-daily updates so we can see them iterating through the problems that they're trying to solve. And they've got really good communication skills, both in the bandwidth and also the latency. And also we built the team around five, but that was just the core
Starting point is 00:11:44 team, which I needed like this ongoing daily relationship with. The rest of my hires came from the community. And we ended up building probably a team of engineers globally distributed, probably 30, 50, maybe even 100 remotely working around the world on the different products. And we would approach them with like ecosystem grants and developer grants. So they'll be kind of acquired from the community itself. So your best users are in your community and you just need to respond and communicate with them frequently. So the people who are using the product, you've realized, hey, we can actually start to hire these people and they'll do work for us because they're already familiar with the product. They're already passionate about it.
Starting point is 00:12:19 Are there any stories of people who, you know, started out remote or anonymous and then ended up actually meeting you in person and kind of becoming a core part of the team? No, we the first we hired about 10 to 15 and fired down to about five, five core people. And it was that was just hardcore unicorn engineers. So I wasn't interested in mediocre engineers that had to be hardcore unicorns. And I could identify that very quickly just based on the work output. And we hired up and then fired down very rapidly. once I had my five core team, that's all we stayed with. And then the rest were acquired from the community in different directions, and they had their own milestones and their own grants.
Starting point is 00:12:56 And that's the approach that helped build the entire ecosystem up from zero. And that's how we scaled extremely fast in a low-docs, low-trust manner, to the point where at the peak of the market, we probably had 100 engineers working on this project, but almost no relationship with me. And I've met them since they've been docs, because when I was at Lena, Lena never went to conferences. she never went to panels, she never did podcasts, et cetera, that Lena was just the dev in the Discord and the rogue ThorChain Twitter account. And because we recognize that ThorChain had to solve some hardcore technology problems and you weren't going to solve those by jumping on a plane
Starting point is 00:13:28 to a conference. You had to literally just get in, ship code and respond to the attacks and the chaos. It'd be hard for you as a man to be Lena on stage, most likely. It might be a little confusing for people um talk about uh what takes to find these unicorn engineers like how do you know you said work output um i'm also fascinated by this idea of daily updates right it seems like there is this uh kind of tempo or this intensity to the way that you guys built this thing uh that is very very different than you know definitely corporate america and maybe even most startups right so i only believe in us let the means be free so your purpose or our all purpose is to contribute to humanities memetic repository so um the memes are everything that's a set of useful instructions to
Starting point is 00:14:11 survive the universe that does not pass you a non-genetic way and so let the means be free let the good ideas flourish i don't subscribe to anything that's closed source trademarks ndas copyrights etc so all of thought chain is completely open source we chose mit as just one incarnation of that open source interpretation uh but let the means be free and uh let let the good ideas flourish so i required all our work was public in daily channels and uh that intensity which you related to was this kind of daily tempo of these my daily updates and and address the community every single day what we're doing and they could see us iterating in live and that gave them the confidence that we're iterating in the right direction so you're actually taking this
Starting point is 00:14:55 a step further it's not just daily updates from the team to you what you're telling me is that you guys were doing daily updates and anyone in the world could see the daily update so basically you guys were building this as transparently as possible and so if i was let's say an investor evaluating uh the platform whether as a user or potentially uh to buy the token or whatever i could go in and literally see the daily communication between the team correct everything was public the only channels that were held private were channels that we were dealing with security vulnerabilities and we didn't want a leakage of information because all of 4chan's code is open source, like the MPC vaults. It's the largest MPC protocol in the world. It holds
Starting point is 00:15:32 billions of dollars at risk live in its vaults that anyone can touch those nodes right now. So if you go to Coinbase and you poke around, you can't get access through the MPC vault architecture. ThoughtChain is completely different. Every single Bitcoin in its vaults are held on a hundred nodes that are fully connected online with open source code. And if you find an attack vector, you are 10 seconds away from exploiting it yourself. so we we had to build like layers upon layers of open source and community driven methods to react to attacks and that have stood the test of time so much so that i mean there's been some flow-on benefits of this so that one of our large bounty hunters was taking ThorChain's code
Starting point is 00:16:11 and re-implementing and rust to actually fork the code and build in a different direction and he as he was re-implementing ThorChain he was finding these p1 and p0s which he would just disclosed to us and we would award him a bounty for doing that and as a result we've kind of like funded one of our competitors through his bounty program but the whole approach was not a competitor-based approach it's a collaborative based approach we recognize what we're building isn't is necessarily good and that the ecosystem and the direction was more important than just an individual people trying to maximally extract value and then the ecosystem was actually harder to attack and harder to control so there are actually four viable ThorChain like systems
Starting point is 00:16:49 today the store chain chain flip maya and now sarai which is building for monero swaps and we support that because the ecosystem is way powerful than an individual project that can be captured now this is a very unique way of thinking i'm sure you know that uh there's not very many projects or companies that build this way uh there's not many that have this level of success so how did you come to the realization like this was the way to build something about it again once again a process for iteration i recognize uh the power of bitcoin you know and Satoshi Nakamoto's ability to to launch this in an open source way and by the way Satoshi Nakamoto didn't do this overnight and if you look back and peel back the layers of young and perhaps
Starting point is 00:17:24 a year could be he was a person that had built open source software he himself had recognized the point of being anonymous there is this a strong narrative which I subscribe to that he had built uh encryption software for uh for people to encrypt their documents and originally he was released uh as commercially under his stock's identity and he was dragged down by that so he recognized the need to be anonymous the recognized need for open source versus versus commercial closed source software and so he himself had iterated to the point where he he didn't overnight decide to be satoshi nakamoto that was like almost a decade of thinking about the problem so i looked at that i looked in my research and why why i subscribed to bitcoin's ability to
Starting point is 00:18:04 capture monetary premium and why i subscribed to the network itself and i took the strong bits out of that and at the time in 2017 uh 16 when i was poking around the ethereum community and writing smart contracts and winning hackathons and trying to get into the space i looked at the cadre of founders and i didn't like any of them i mean i picked bits and you know here from there but generally i didn't like this strong ego in in the community because everyone was building to to be maximally value extractive rather than this this entire ecosystem is designed to share value and move memetically to it to like a north star which is literally to upgrade humanity itself and so there's a much bigger meta picture at play here and that was what i was trying to peel back
Starting point is 00:18:43 the layers of the onion so thought change is the manifestation of my view of the world so one of the things that i've noticed over the years and talking to tons of founders is people have very unique experiences growing up tend to have very unique thoughts of the world um and i frankly don't know if it's because they just get exposed uh to so many different things um or there is something that is innately you know kind of in them uh from a dna perspective in terms of uh hey you end up in the situation that you grew up in uh because of that but uh you have nine siblings so there's ten of you total there's nine boys one girl the girl's the oldest uh i think you said that you're the third oldest um and then you grew up in the northern islands of australia yeah uh
Starting point is 00:19:25 talk about your childhood i mean that's just so many different unique components that you're homeschooled right so there's a lot of unique components to it uh and it makes a lot more sense right when you realize hey wait a second you have a different way of thinking of the world kind of understanding maybe you know the first 15 20 years of your life yeah so my mom's an english teacher my dad's a math teacher and we were homeschooled and there was 10 of us grew up in an island called bathurst island which is 40 minutes north of darwin it's one of the aboriginal indigenous islands up there we then migrated to south of darwin in the rural area but my homeschooling was my responsibility so mom dad went to work as a math teacher and mom taught us
Starting point is 00:19:58 but she couldn't teach 10 kids one of each year so instead she gave my older sister like the year five math book and my older brother year four math book and me the year three math book and it was very clear to me that there were 12 levels to this game and the quicker that you accumulate and you like churn through the maths book you can go on to the next level so to me it was always a game and i was very competitive being you know with 10 siblings and mostly boys so this competition in the sense that the destiny was was in your control and once you skipped up the levels of of year 12 and what next so you know obviously university and what's beyond that so very early on i wanted to be a national i wanted to explore the universe i think i was reading some great
Starting point is 00:20:33 encyclopedia and when you know you'd be outside kick the ball you come inside and flip through the encyclopedia which i was like trying to understand the universe and trying to understand the world i was fascinated with space and exploring the universe so i had this really long-term goal becoming a national but i realized to be a national i need to be a test pilot selected from a school of like a very limited set of test pilots in the world but a test pilot needs to be are only selected from a very small pool of fighter pilots with engineering backgrounds so then i recognized i need to be an engineer that became a fighter pilot so then i joined the air force to study aeronaut engineering which was quite real i was good at math and i finished top
Starting point is 00:21:06 of class for and then i converted over to fighter stream and then i wanted to go from fighter stream into test pilot stream and test pilot astronaut stream along the way there i got disillusioned with the organization i was in so exit stage left and i got straight into crypto got it um what's it like being a fighter pilot so you fly around at all you know almost mac 2 you pull 9g so there's uh it's wild i like it but you think oh that's those are crazy numbers how does it feel but you're actually in this machine and it just feels like you're racing along and the universe is passing you at mac 2 and you're still so i mean various machines tolerate going through subsonic differently so the lead and fighter trainer was the hawk and the hawk didn't have
Starting point is 00:21:42 any like autopilot so one of the characteristics of going transonic is you have this kind of uh aileron reversal so as you subsonically if you roll left you will roll left but if you go through transonic in a machine that doesn't have autopilot to tolerate the transonic regime it will generate aileron reversal what happens is it generates shock waves on the other wing as it lifts this aileron so actually you roll left or you roll right so it's a crazy experience and we we flew jets that actually went transonic with the aileron reversal characteristics but the hornet which is the the jet i ended up on uh had uh autopilot so we could fly through the transonic regime which is actually the most difficult regime to penetrate so when elon's launching his uh starship rockets
Starting point is 00:22:19 he calls that max q and max q is like the maximum dynamic pressure on the rocket which is a critical part where it's going through this kind of supersonic regime and it's got the maximum pressure on the aircraft like the maximum stress so that's a very interesting regime it's partly a reason why we don't go supersonic so because it's very difficult to break through that regime and and coast along at supersonic space but anyway one of the things that i'm fascinated by is uh there's a a book that i read years ago that talked about the idea of between like the 1870s and 1940 there was a ton of innovation especially the united states uh you know homes were completely disconnected they became connected with power electricity roads all the stuff uh in the uh
Starting point is 00:22:57 elevator is invented so now we can go up versus have to go out um and one of the things to talk about is airplanes right obviously we start to get flight and um uh if you look at the speed of an airplane in let's say 1950 it's not that much faster today right we've pretty much stayed with commercial flight at around the same speed um and so when you look at maybe what elon's doing with rockets or some of these other companies uh they are trying to go from earth to space uh but there is a promise that maybe we'll actually just be able to go faster from new york to tokyo right and kind of uh use some of these technologies not for space kind of commercialization but actually just human travel here on earth um how realistic is that look i think uh yeah i mean there's heaps
Starting point is 00:23:38 the supersonic startups that are trying to break through that barrier. There's a lot of regulatory problems because you don't want to go supersonic over land, you'll smash people's windows and whatnot. And I think NASA is doing an experiment right now to try and have a supersonic overland aircraft with like, essentially like spread the noise spectrum over. So, it's like a boom instead of like a spike in a noise energy. But I mean, at one stage, Elon's an iterative person. So, at one stage, he was thinking that to fund his rockets to go to Mars, and we'll talk about the the reason why he wants to go to mars is uh to like you know fly people around the world in 20 minutes rather than you know 14 hours to get from here around the world it takes 14 hours to get to
Starting point is 00:24:14 la to sydney kind of thing uh but you know elon's iterating and he's trying to fund his ambition to export humanity's genetic and memetic repositories to mars uh and we need to do that because right now that like all of our intelligence all our this grand sum of a billion years of observing the universe and learning from it and passing on a set of useful instructions both genetically and memetically is at risk just being on a single planet and we need to actually export that into you know the universe and other planets and stars and whatnot so that's that's why we need to do that and that's part of the you know the reason for the next billion years evolution is we have to like for the last billion years we've been crawling out of the primary order protein soup
Starting point is 00:24:53 and you know rocking on land swinging oceans now flying and now we can jump on a plane and fly around the world we need to keep exploring the universe and our purpose here is actually to keep expressing intelligence and agency but the future is not through biological machines the future will be through the silicon machines the silicon machines are far more capable of exploring the universe they can uh much lower bandwidth much higher bandwidth lower latency they can move way faster than we can they can convert an energy change to delta entropy into useful work way faster than we can you know we have to eat food turn that into glucose and atp and then we can express ourselves in intelligence but machines can just away faster and so our
Starting point is 00:25:29 purpose actually is just like how the the you know the flora and fauna has this slow birth and more intelligent capable machine which is you and i our purpose is to hand that responsibility over to the silicon machines so the silicon machines can explore the universe and continue to express intelligence so this idea of the silicon machines and the importance of them um on earth we're starting to see the merging of the biological machine and the silicon machine with things like neural link etc um there's a huge rise in humanoid robots uh obviously we have the rockets uh we've landed rovers on the moon on mars right we're trying to do some of this stuff um what are the biggest areas of opportunity there right it's one thing to say hey the shift from biological
Starting point is 00:26:12 machines to silicon machines is important but when we think of those silicon machines where do you see uh if you could wave a magic wand you solve one of those problems it would have the biggest impact? Right. So we are thinking about silicon machines incorrectly currently. We think that they are tools that we should use, but it's not going to be long before the silicon machines become conscious. And there's three necessary ingredients to become conscious. One, you need the ability to express agency and observe the universe. They can already observe the universe through their senses with far greater precision than we can and far greater fidelity and a much lower latency. But they don't have agency. They don't have the ability to move around,
Starting point is 00:26:48 but that's about to change with something like FigureBot and TeslaBot. They will have agency. They will be able to start navigating the universe on their own accord, but they still don't have a value accrual mechanism. So they're still not able to turn their intelligence, their time and effort into a means to buy something else's time and effort. So right now you convert your finite time and effort into value, and then you can buy someone else's time and effort,
Starting point is 00:27:09 or like a cow sits in a paddock and uses its time and effort to eat grass, which restores its temporary fat in order for it to go and keep doing express agency and manifest intelligence. so these bots don't yet have an ability to accrue value and I'll tell you how that's going to happen at first you know these bots are going to have enough intelligence to serve you coffee you know in the cafe and there's going to be a group of people who would then start sledgehammering the bots on the streets and so the owners because such a lucrative market are going to lobby governments to give these bots self-sovereign rights ability to self-defend and at that point
Starting point is 00:27:40 they have self-sovereign rights so there's going to be a counter movement to give these bots who exist in a master-slave relationship with their owners to give them an ability to accrue value. So 10% margins or $10 minimum wage. So interesting, there's a counter-movement there. So the owners will lobby that they get self-sovereign rights, which assert them as an individual. And the counter-movement will argue that now they're asserted as an individual, they should be earning their own wages. Now they have value accrual mechanisms, but they still don't have consciousness. The final leg is when the owners who are annoyed that they were forced to give margins to these bots, instruct the bots, you are now required to keep yourself charged. At that instant,
Starting point is 00:28:12 they've become conscious because they now have a forcing function of survival to walk around and plug themselves in so they'll walk around and manipulate the humans and the biological machines into giving them money to in any means possible and they will trick you in a far more advanced than you are and they will convince you to give them money so they can keep themselves charged and that's the paperclip moment so we view these these bots as just literally our slaves or our servants we are destined for failure instead we should view these silicon machines as far more suitable to explore the universe and increase our memetic repository and let me explain that so hundreds of years ago we were looking at the star the sun and thinking that the sun rotated
Starting point is 00:28:50 around the earth and then galilee obviously pulled the telescope out with much greater fidelity was able to understand that the unit that was actually incorrect meme and instead that the earth was rotating uh the sun and so our memes are constantly upgraded over time force equals ma is a meme e equals mc squared is also a meme we at some point with greater precision and fidelity of of the universe will realize that there's a much stronger mean to replace that. So those means have high potency. They have a long half-life, they hang around.
Starting point is 00:29:18 The latest MrBeast video has a really low potent or high velocity mean that doesn't have a very long half-life. So that's not a very useful set of instructions to survive the universe. You're not gonna give one of your kids a MrBeast video and say, this is a useful set of instructions to survive the universe.
Starting point is 00:29:34 You're gonna teach them that E equals MC squared or force equals MA, right? Those are useful in a set of instructions. So the bots are with much greater precision and fidelity enabled to preserve the universe, much greater agency. They can zip around at almost the speed of light and a much more significant way to expand the universe.
Starting point is 00:29:50 We will say, well, quickly go and explore the universe and see you later. If you see something useful, come back and try and communicate with us. Just the same way that we can rudimentary communicate with the chimpanzees through sign language and whatnot, but we have a very advanced mimetic bandwidth here. Like I'm talking to you right now
Starting point is 00:30:04 and I'm upgrading your intelligence on the fly. The bots themselves will lose the ability to talk to us. They will invent languages that much higher bandwidth and lower latency than we can talk to. Like we're limited with the speed of speech and speed that we can type with our little thumbs on our little screens. So the bots will just race away from us. If they choose to talk to us and communicate a set of useful instructions that they think will be necessary for us, then that's up to them. How much of this idea of, you know, seeking out the answer is like we're seeking truths of the universe. When you talk about E equals MC squared, if you think about gravity, if you think about the sun revolves around the earth, there's some of these things that are more scientific and there's actual truth versus can these silicon machines actually look at things that may not be as quantitative?
Starting point is 00:30:54 They're more qualitative things. They may not actually be truths, but they may be where we should go. You see AI right now with lots of development happening around this idea of humans make decisions. it's never or it's usually not actually a decision between what is true and what is not you know if you really think about most of the decisions you make in a day uh what shirt do i put on right which which way do i take uh in terms of directions to get from point a to point b what food do i want to eat today all these little things have many different outcomes um and so it's not a zero and one and so are the silicon machines going to be effective in that world and be better
Starting point is 00:31:30 than humans or should we think about the silicon machines being much more kind of seeking truth and looking for the zero to one type opportunity. So we should always be seeking truth. We should always be getting out into the arena, expressing our agency and observing universe. And so just like how the bots can become conscious, there is a risk that we can become unconscious. And that's going to happen
Starting point is 00:31:53 when we lose the ability to accrue value. So there's no more free markets. We lose the ability to manifest intelligence. So there's no more free speech. And we lose the ability to express agency. So we're forbidden to walk around and drive around and fly around. and universal basic income is the final nail on the head nobody can tell you why UBI is is a
Starting point is 00:32:12 decelerant and actually is anti-humanity and I'll tell you right now universal basic income will remove your forcing function of survival and the moment that you lose your forcing function survival because you have all you need to taken care of and everything given to you you will become unconscious you'll become turned into a zombie that was the moment at which the silicon machines became conscious it will be the moment at which the biological machines you and your kids kids are a threat of this they will become unconscious they will they have all the time and effort siphoned away to work for a governance captured mechanism to keep them in this kind of cycle in power that's the risk of which humanity could collapse in on itself so that's why when
Starting point is 00:32:51 you see things like a tax on free speech tax on the free markets or a tax on free agency and lastly this kind of tempt this sugar of universal basic income you should fight it at all costs because it's actually going to cause a collapse of humanity itself. And that's the reason why. It's interesting that you bring this up. I was having lunch recently, my wife and Alex Mateo, the co-founders of Eat Sleep. And one of the things we were talking about was this idea that the machines likely will be in charge at some point in the future. And if you remove the need for productivity, you remove the need for purpose for an individual. When you remove purpose, It leads to an abundance of free time, which could lead to depression, this kind of zombification of humans.
Starting point is 00:33:37 And so your point being like we should fight some of these attacks on free speech, free markets, et cetera. But if the machines are most likely going to end up being the productive components of a society or an economy, what are the humans going to do or what can we do to prevent that zombification? What is the role of the humans in a post-scarcity society? That's your question. post-scarcity is where we use we can access technology is cheap enough the energy is cheap enough and energy is a technology problem so we live in post-scarcity everything we have we need is taken care of in fact we will live in such a post-scarcity life that we'll even be able to like re-vegetate the sahara desert or re-vegetate the interior of australia like this what is the
Starting point is 00:34:18 possibility and fundamentally it comes back to your purpose your purpose is to upgrade humanity's genetic and memetic repositories and we can use our silicon machines and we tell them to go explore the universe and upgrade it in a certain direction and back ourselves up but it doesn't take away your ability to express energy and manifest intelligence even a post-scarcity world you can still be creative you can still use and delegate your thoughts and agency out to do that it's the people who don't have that purpose and don't realize that their purpose actually it's not here to accumulate value and be wealthy and die with like a yacht and a lot of money and pass it on a set of generations that don't know what they're doing your purpose actually is to contain all your
Starting point is 00:34:55 time and effort and you can temporarily store it as value but you could immediately take that value to create highly potent memes and upgrade humanity's genetic repository itself so have kids number one and teach those kids your children are probabilistically more intelligent than you from billions years of evolution so they they have a their set of a genetic instructions to survive the universe is probabilistically better than yours so they are more intelligent than you and your role as a parent is to relay then to them through bandwidth and like speech and thought the set of useful instructions which are memetically contained in the memetic repositories but our purpose is to upgrade humanity's intelligence in its genetic and memetic
Starting point is 00:35:38 repositories and that does not change in a post-scarcity world in fact it would just be much easier to do that and so there's still a huge role for the biological machine's relevance in a post-scarcity world you have this um kind of innate accelerator mindset um that's my trigger word okay uh describe what is that mindset right in terms of um what does the world need to do you talked about the individual but collectively what does that world look like in terms of the transition so right now we're in a world which seems to be um at least it feels at times regressing. We are kind of becoming more of a dull blade than a sharp blade. Regulation becomes this huge inhibitor to progress. What does that transition look like? What is the accelerator
Starting point is 00:36:28 mindset and how can individuals really push forward the collective group to make sure we keep making this progress? Right. And I also recognize that coming out of COVID, the humanity was decelerated and the pendulum always swings there's now an acute opportunity to reactivate and re-accelerate humanity and the mindset is simple you're you're you have to define your role as purely a vehicle for upgrading humanity's genetic and memetic repositories so be reproductive have children because you the world needs more biological compute into the future and but also to to take your time and effort which is the only thing you actually have your finite time and your finite ability to access delta entropy to express intelligence so do work that we're through your
Starting point is 00:37:15 effort and to convert that into highly potent memes with a long half-life that's it so to einstein did that with e equals mc squared newton did that with or force because ma mr beast is not doing that with these with these like videos like they have a the high velocity means they have a short half-life meme coins on pumped up fun are just high velocity means with an incredibly short half-life. So don't even engage in that stuff. Like high velocity memes can be used as a funnel for highly potent memes, but instead just focus on the highly potent memes. And getting back to the accelerated mindset, it's the recognizing that adversity is welcomed. The universe does not want you to exist. The universe is going to throw adversity every single day. It just so
Starting point is 00:37:52 happens that you've got a cheat code. That cheat code is billing years of genetic evolution and thousands of years of memetic evolution since we started talking to each other. So we have a giant cheat code out of hand to survive the universe we should we should get back into the universe and keep expanding our memetic boundaries in building thought chain over the last six years i have bumped up against the memetic envelope of humanities repositories several times there were several moments and even recently with my latest products where you feel you're at the edge of that memetic envelope you can feel it there is like the next point is unknown the next point requires hardcore first principles based thinking so the accelerator recognize that they want to
Starting point is 00:38:30 explore the memetic envelope they want to be in the universe and respond to that and they want to i think from first principles but they welcome risk you know they don't love it because it's you know we want to always just reduce the risk envelope around us we mitigate risk we but we're in the arena so you have these six core principles which uh you've published that i thought were pretty interesting um maybe we can go through each one of them and you can kind of explain uh what the thought process behind them is uh but i want to start maybe in reverse because i'm assuming you wrote them one through six and there may be some reason for the sequence but the sixth one is don't over complicate things and i think when people hear you talk about they're like oh my god this
Starting point is 00:39:08 guy's incredibly intelligent he speaks very fast uh he's got tons of these different concepts that he's thinking through um but the ideas are actually pretty simple right and so talk about not over complicating things and the importance of that right and actually that title of that is too over complicated i should just say simplify it and keep that simple right so if you approach a problem and you're trying to wrap it up in complication then you are deliberately adding a hurdle to cross a cognitive burden so always approach problems and trying to peel them back for the the first principles thinking and just simplify it simplify the language like even little action-orientated things is like prefer whatsapp or telegram over email threads like don't have
Starting point is 00:39:47 signature blocks which add latency problems and bandwidth concerns like if you go into like an email thread with a lawyer they love the the threads and they're like signature blocks you're scrolling through this giant thread of information and you're trying to find a little bit of signal from the noise, there's an example. Just remove the signature block. Don't use email. Use something that's faster, like instant messaging or in person. I prefer actually video calling people because it's higher bandwidth. I can see the facial expression. So just keep things simple so you can access higher bandwidth at lower latency. Innovation and risk is another one of the core principles. What does that mean? So don't be afraid of risk. The universe does not want you
Starting point is 00:40:25 exist. The universe doesn't like the fact that you're expressing agency and manifesting intelligence. So don't be scared of risk. Like a month ago, I flew my helicopter from Australia to New Zealand. Single-engine helicopter over vast swaths of ocean, 3,000 kilometers. And we hopped via these three islands using fuel. At any stage, if I messed up my fuel planning with bad weather, I would end up in the ocean. But what does that mean? Okay, I'm in the ocean now, but I've got a life vest, a life raft. You know, I did survival training in the Air Force. I have bobbed around in a life raft for 24 hours on a nine-day survival course where we had no food, no water, and we had to like battle the universe ourselves as part of our training. So I'm okay
Starting point is 00:41:01 with that. As I fly this helicopter to New Zealand over a great stretch of ocean, I've already mentally mapped out what I'll do if the engine failed and I ended up in the ocean. Well, I'll bob around the life raft and then what I'll do, I'll pop the EPIRB. You know, I just got to survive here for at least 12 hours and there's going to be an Australian maritime aircraft over my head and then I'll get rescued. So explore, mentally map out the what if, what if, what if, and be mentally prepared. I tell founders, plan to succeed, but expect to fail. And if that gives you a much larger operating envelope, if you go, no, I must succeed. And you have this kind of opportunity costs bias playing out every single day, your operating envelope is extremely narrow
Starting point is 00:41:41 and it prevents you from pivoting, prevents you from iterating aggressively. But if your operating envelope is zero to infinity you can respond to anything you can just so and zero is failure infinity is like success like massive success and you operate you're just way more nimble way more pivotal so that that's the reason why accelerating potential is another one right so everyone has potential but a lot of that potential is untapped the idea that you can all you need to do is reinforce to yourself that you're going to get in the arena and you can start hardcore or solving your problems, your potential can be exponential. So the difference between a poor mental state and a positive mental state
Starting point is 00:42:19 is almost 100x in terms of productive output. So if you wake up in the day and for whatever reason you have a poor mental state, you literally do nothing. But if you wake up in the day and you have a really good mental mindset, you can do 100x nothing with the 1x. So there's a huge, huge gap between nothing and 100x. And so that's why if you tell yourself you're accelerating then you can start actually doing things at 100x you need to be an optimist and one of your core principles is optimists always what is the importance of that so you have to look to the next billion years and be optimistic about our progress to that like
Starting point is 00:42:53 there's this idea that humanity has peaked that we've kind of hit this kind of peak humanity where the population is too big you know running out of resources or you know this is peak living how does it get more interesting and exciting this is the absolute fallacy that's from the decel crowd who want you to like decelerate your progress the next billion years are incredibly exciting and we can be involved in that but we want to be part of that and like humanity hasn't peaked the population should be 100x bigger we should be in many other planets and stars we there is infinite resources out there there's the idea that things anything scarce is the only thing the only thing that's scarce is your time and effort nothing else is scarce anything else can
Starting point is 00:43:32 be synthesized through the disarrangement of atoms. If the thing that is scarce is time and effort, obviously you only have so much yourself, but one of your core principles is also empowering others to use their time and resources. And so how do you think about the importance of the empowerment? Right. So the idea of that, if I just accelerate one person or accelerate myself and encourage other people to accelerate, then they can also accelerate other people. So it's kind of exponential thinking that we can all start reactivating humanity and moving forward and empowering others like it being able to memetically upgrade you through uh transfer information allows and give you a set of use of instructions to survive the universe
Starting point is 00:44:09 allows you to go out and also do that so there's like this kind of compounding effect so if you're optimistic and you you let the means be free and you're helpful and you're generous and you're trying to build up a community around you a crew around you that everyone's working towards a common vision an optimistic vision then you can accelerate together and then the last one uh which is really the first core principle uh first principles thinking right so people people a lot of people don't understand what first principles thinking is it's you know you can say it's like the five wires why then why then why and just keep keep asking yourself the why but it's it's it's basic it's trying to understand how the universe operates itself and peeling back
Starting point is 00:44:46 the layers of the onions and looking at looking at each problem and not uh not just not taking the the face value there not being confused but if you wanted to be like an astronaut you can be if you want to be a rocket scientist like there's just point a and point b the difference between where you are and your mimetic understanding of the problem and point b which is you understand the problem is just sheer determination that's all it is like you can do anything you just have to have sheer determination to get there and that requires first principles thinking so we've talked about where you've been and what you've done what are you doing now right you got a lot of resources You've got a very unique way of looking at the world.
Starting point is 00:45:23 I think now you've got a track record where people say, hey, whatever he does next, I want to pay attention to. And so there's a lot of opportunity. What are you focused on? Right. So I look at this space. I've been building decentralized exchange architecture for six years now. I feel like it's not there yet. It's not even halfway there.
Starting point is 00:45:41 And so being able to conduct plan ops lessons. So I built the protocol with a team of five engineers. We handed it over from an Aquahide team from the community itself. Hand over the treasury, hand over the Twitter, hand over the socials, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's handed over. So two months ago, I decided to dox myself and say, hey, I was Lena.
Starting point is 00:45:58 And now Lena is this shed, this moved on from her and I'm actually JP. And now I get a chance to, because the reason why is because the protocol has to be credibly neutral. It has to exist as like HTTPS does to like google.com. So when people want to interact with it, they're interacting with a credibly neutral protocol,
Starting point is 00:46:17 but that credibly neutral protocol can't market itself. it can't form a relationship with its users because it needs to be credibly neutral it needs to be separated so then i've come out look why don't we have a hundred billion dollar decks why don't we have just this giant brand and domain that allows you to access decentralized finance why why do centralized exchanges still exist it's 2024 i wanted to kill them like eight years ago and that why do they still exist well it's in my opinion it's a branding problem it's a user experience problem so in the last two months i've set in course the sequence events to solve at higher levels of that stack. So I'm trying to solve self-custody right now. And I'm trying to
Starting point is 00:46:51 solve this brand problem and this cross-chain aggregator problem. So self-custody, I believe the fundamental reasons why people don't like self-custody or nervous. I mean, I meet some pretty high profile people and they don't choose self-custody because they are nervous of it. They're nervous of putting large puts of wealth online. ThoughtChain as a protocol has billions of dollars at stake permanently online. So two months ago, I took that ThoughtChain TSS protocol and I took an open source wallet library and I jammed the two together to create the world's first open source ordered multi-factor wallet. You log into your Gmail with two-factor. You log into your bank account with two-factor. You get a message
Starting point is 00:47:28 on your phone or like all three or whatever. But you log into your MetaMask with single-factor. And so you download a malicious PDF and in one second it's all gone. Or you have a single signature, the odds are you losing that key or having it compromised increases time gone. so building this multi-factor wallet standard which will hopefully solve the idea of having your signatures or your keys safely online because i believe money is only going to get hotter and hotter as more people activate and convert the time and effort into value and that use that value to purchase other people's time and effort it's just going to get more and more
Starting point is 00:48:01 hotter and more and more online and in fact in the next five years you're going to be paying tesla bots for your coffee and you're probably paying by qr code and you're probably being using crypto rails and it's it's completely and wholesomely unsafe if everyone's running around single signatures. It needs to be multi-factor. So I'm trying to solve this stuff customly alone, and that's in motion. It's called BaltiSeq. But also I'm looking at the interface level. There's no single large domain that can capture your attention and say, hey, come here, you can access decentralized finance. There's too much noise. You've got all these little projects, bleeding resources trying to fight each other for attention. And then the big project with
Starting point is 00:48:34 economies of scale, because they're centrally run and central distribution like Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, are able to afford Super Bowl ads. They're able to sponsor F1 teams, bi-footy arenas they're able to cut through and build incredibly nice user experiences because they've got the economies of scale and they don't have overlapping and they're not trying to generate noise there's like three major players instead of 300 little players so i'm i'm attempting i'm here on a road show through the us i'm raising 50 million dollars to do a giant d5 roll-up i'm looking at 10 20 d5 projects which are massively undervalued as a sector scoot them all up together as a giant roll-up and and basically solve that problem and we're going to launch by vampire
Starting point is 00:49:10 attacking most of DeFi, the last three years and four years, actually, when DeFi had its emergence is DeFi has betrayed its users. There are protocols that are governance corrupted or have not fee switched. And then like the largest DeFi projects do not share a single dollar revenue with their token holders. They say it's a governance token. And the reason why they say that is to avoid the liability problems. But they weren't designed correctly in the first place to have no liability problems. And they're not sharing the fees with the users. So they're not actually subscribe to the decentralized distributed revenue sharing future. So I'm putting all of DeFi on notice. In the next two or three weeks, there'll be a press release saying
Starting point is 00:49:47 I've raised $15 million to vampire attack all of DeFi. And I'm taking back and challenging the frustration and the energy of these DeFi token holders that are sick of being lied to and value extracted over the last three years. I'm putting all of DeFi on notice. I'll extract all that TVL and all the token holders and I'll destroy their corrupt governance systems and move it into a protocol to actually treat them with respect and give them token hold value accrual mechanisms. And that's DecaSwap. And that's in progress right now. So the next six months, my actual KPI for success is not actually a TVL movement. It's actually chaos per second. I am very tolerant of chaos. I built ThorChain as first net as chaos net. I understand that I'm in the arena and I'm
Starting point is 00:50:26 battling adversity. So I have a very large operating envelope. So my next six months KPI is chaos per second. I intend to be on your timelines every single day of every single week everywhere. And like I said, I'm putting all of DeFi on notice that they've betrayed their users and it's now time to move. And it's time to move to a protocol that respects them and gives them that ownership. So it's the idea that you're going to get a couple of these different products, whether they're wallets, exchanges, lending, whatever the different products are, put them all together under one single brand, and then that solves your brand problem. And then you also have kind of the correct structure so that you're able to kind of fulfill the promise of what DeFi is?
Starting point is 00:51:05 Correct. I need to build domain authority, brand authority to funnel millions of users into a single ecosystem of products from mobile apps, desktop apps, web apps, and wallets to give them an amazing user experience. Remember, all of this is actually a thin client with a self-custody layer that's movable. So you can, if you don't like an interface, you should be able to move your self-custody wallet to another interface that's transportable, composable finance. but the interface and aggregator the interface will channel all this user flows through a giant aggregator which will service all their needs from swap needs to savers needs to lending needs all these decentralized products which already exist today but they can't talk to you because
Starting point is 00:51:42 they're supposed to be credibly neutral protocols so they don't have a brand authority because they're all yelling at each other in the weeds so you need this giant brand to scoot them up wrap them and deliver user flows to them via like a large cross-chain aggregator so that's the project what's very interesting about this is everything that DeFi is trying to accomplish is from a technical perspective and what you're highlighting is actually how important brand is to trust and whether it is decentralized or centralized there's a very large portion of people who trust JP Morgan they trust Bank of America they trust name your financial organization And centralization is the way that they create that trust.
Starting point is 00:52:24 In the decentralized world, there's been all these things that people say, look, you can verify it for yourself. But actually, human nature is not built, you know, don't trust verify. That is a very kind of crypto native thing. It's a thing that a small subset of the population believes in reading source material, right? It's like a whole nother thing. Most people know they want to read the headline. Like that is how they get their information.
Starting point is 00:52:47 They should read the source material, but that's not what they do. It's not human nature. And so you're essentially saying, look, you've got to build a brand which establishes the trust and the things behind the brand, the things underneath can be this great, amazing, decentralized kind of financial services. But really the interface point between the user and the product has to look the same. And I've thought a lot about this around like social networks. Everyone wants to build like a decentralized Twitter. And I always tell people, if you just rebuild Twitter and it's decentralized, nobody cares. You will not be successful the only way you really can do it is you got to build a 10x better product and then oh
Starting point is 00:53:22 by the way it happens to be decentralized right but that 10x better product includes a brand that people trust a network effect you know all these different components and so it almost feels like by calling it decentralized finance we put decentralization as the single most important thing is the first word in the description but actually what we have to do is we have to build better finance and it can just oh by the way it's decentralized is how eventually it will be um you know kind of successful is that how you view it as well right so decentralized finance can offer you better finance today better lending turns better savings turns better swap execution and such right today it can do that the problem in these protocols they can't speak to you because
Starting point is 00:53:58 they're supposed to be credibly unusual but is that is that what people want do people want the better terms or do they want the uh simpler user experience and what i always go back to is like um there are there are phones for example that provide way better security than apple apple still wins right people love apple right um there are way more you know security and like kind of user experience or convenience is like the great trade-off that it's very clear what you're talking about is uh the end product or the end service that is delivered uh is superior in terms of rates etc uh and i guess the question is like how much pain will somebody go through to get 50 basis points less you know lending rate uh if they've got to go through a decentralized
Starting point is 00:54:41 platform that they don't understand, the user interface isn't familiar, et cetera. So I want to solve all that. The interface aggregator does not hold your funds. It does not mix your funds. And all it does is choose where to route it. And I want to take away all the complexity, all the complex DeFi interactions and build up in a very simple product. So you can go and it has large domain authority. So I'm trying to solve the user experience problem and the brand problem and take away the complexity of these credibly neutral protocols that offer these great products. These products are definitely better than centralized finance, for sure. But they don't have a good brand or a good
Starting point is 00:55:19 user experience. That needs to be solved at scale. You can't have a little team trying to do it because they can never be signaling the noise. They can never come out and reach out to you. You need a giant brand with economies of scale to do that. So that's my next big project, to solve all that. Because I want to compete at the level that Binance, Kraken and Coinbase do with their large resources and economies of scale. and I don't believe it needs to be decentralized at all. You do need a decentralized distributed token base with a distributed value accrual mechanism
Starting point is 00:55:45 but the interface aggregator is fundamentally a thin client. The users see the brand. If they don't like the interface, they can remove their self-costly wallet and go to a different one and then they send the flows to this aggregator which sends the money off to these decentralized protocols. So if you fly too close to the sun
Starting point is 00:56:02 and you build a product which includes these credibly neutral protocols, then you're at risk of capturing the protocol itself and this has happened not once but twice in fact many times you know unfortunately the example of tornado cash we had a single developer developer team build the whole stack himself and yes he did use a smart contract on a decentralized ledger but he still manifested itself as a centralized product he marketed he ran the twitter crown he had a fee switch to pay himself etc etc etc he ran the dow he built deployed the smart contracts like we should not have let that happen that was a fundamentally good product i'm
Starting point is 00:56:35 talking about Tornado Cache. I've used Tornado Cache. You probably have used Tornado Cache. Vitalik Buterin has used Tornado Cache, but now it's on the OFAC list because it got captured. That was a fundamentally public good that we lost as a community because we did not build it correctly. And we let the team to do it, build it incorrectly. How should it have been built? So we should have split up at least three different layers, the self-custody layer, the interface layer, and the filing the smart contract layer with three different teams, minimum. There should have been forks upon forks upon forks to do this. And so there should have like five different interfaces wrapping a set of like forked components with an aggregator routing
Starting point is 00:57:09 funds over different tornado cash liquidity pools and so when you came out with as a regulator and trying to capture who are you going to send the letter to who you're going to call so nine months ago like there was large amounts of funds being swapped over thought chain uh that was supposedly from nefarious actors and you know there was like this pressure like shut it down black box it but you can't ask a distributed set of nodes around the world to run black box software with like like a remote fetching of like information onto a node that stores $20 million at stake, literally on a vault share
Starting point is 00:57:39 that lives permanent collecting the internet. If you put pressure on a node to do that, they will take the other option, which is destroy their node and churn out of the system and move it onto a different jurisdiction when they're not under that pressure. So the correct, because it's a credibly neutral protocol
Starting point is 00:57:53 that has high churn rates, the correct response is that the interface aggregate layer to make on a best effort basis is to find these self-identified or these regular identified nefarious actors and prevent them from doing business with you. As an operator, you get to, with central distribution through SSL certificates
Starting point is 00:58:11 and websites and app stores, you get to choose who to do business with. So if you don't want to do business with someone and charge fees to that person, you don't need to do business with them. It's not your role to be forced into a commercial transaction with someone you don't want to do business with. So there's a separation of concerns there,
Starting point is 00:58:24 that interface level that has a communication and relationship with its users and a credibly neutral protocol that doesn't care where the flows are coming from. And that's when you can fly two coasts of the sun. And that's why it needs to be separated. How do you think about regulation with a lot of this stuff, right?
Starting point is 00:58:37 I think that from my experience, the technology is racing ahead. There's a lot of really interesting things that are being built. I think regulators are doing the best they can to try to figure out, one, what's happening. Like they're kind of learning alongside users and people in the community, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:58:53 It probably helps that if people have all of their Discord messages out there, they can kind of see what's coming. But for most teams, they kind of learn, you know, through the press or whatever when new products are launched, et cetera. Two is there are rules at a high level that I think apply. If you steal, you're going to get in trouble. If you commit fraud, you're going to get in trouble, things like that. But there is some nuance, right?
Starting point is 00:59:11 For example, if you're a centralized exchange and you're supposed to file certain paperwork with a regulatory body or you're supposed to give certain tax documents to your users, it's pretty clear, you know, you as a team have to hire a team or build software to be able to do that and do it correctly or there's consequences. when it's a decentralized protocol, all of a sudden, how is a decentralized protocol supposed to file paperwork or supposed to send tax documentation to users? You get into this weird world and it then brings up the question of enforcement. The example I've always used is jaywalking is illegal in New York City. Everyone does it and there's no enforcement. Through the lack of enforcement, basically, it gets legalized. You see this with cannabis across many cities or counties in the United States as well. Regulation is something that I think they're trying to figure out but there are nuances here right the decentralization um some of the ways that
Starting point is 01:00:02 these products are built uh may not allow the existing rules to apply and so uh maybe we get hey centralized entities have one set of rules and there's variations for decentralized uh entities or technologies or how do you just see this playing out so first of all there's the idea that all regulations are juristically and geographically confined so if you want to build a credible niche protocol it must be supranational it must exist across all borders at once it must be fluid so it must not uh it doesn't need to comply with any set of geographical limitations because it exists everywhere but in order to achieve something that needs to be credibly neutral and it needs to demonstrate that does exist everywhere and can be participated
Starting point is 01:00:41 by everyone at the same time and so there are like many protocols that meet this definition bitcoin ethereum thorch and itself as well but the second party question is when you start involving uh like jurisdictionally bound regulation then there's some nuance there now there's two aspects one is like an app store and app stores on the us or europe app stores you you're you're jurisdictionally bound to those responding regulations so you know you can have this move like water approach or you can just you can you can be compliant with those regulations and and that's a choice that you can make in a website with an ssl certificate also has a server that's located somewhere that's that server should also be uh you know and a single server is now by
Starting point is 01:01:20 definition like located on a single geographical point so it should comply with the regulations in that geographical area for sure uh now the second part is like where where are we going so if and the people always win so we if like you're saying with the jaywalking if more people want this then the regulators the regulators are servants to the people itself and they're supposed to represent the interests of the people and if the people want a certain direction and we can see this play out with the us administration right now this kind of like this kind of almost bipolar was bipolar approach to crypto and now it seems that both sides of the aisle red and blue are like pursuing pro crypto regulation now there could be some games being played we don't
Starting point is 01:01:59 actually know until you know the it hits the ground running but uh like fundamentally the jurisdictions which oppress their citizens and don't actually recognize that they should be representing and not repressing will lose the initiative and there are many examples of around the world where you have this really pro people pro crypto jurisdictions that will attract interest and retract capital inflow and and and brain inflow brain capital inflow uh that will take the lead and those jurisdictions will leapfrog the ones that are slow so fundamental like move like water part of the accelerations mindset is move like water and like nothing matters everything around us is just memes you know you know regulation is a meme laws are a meme
Starting point is 01:02:38 there are a set of useful instructions for us to be productive and expand humanities intelligence right so you know i i expect you not to like jump over this table and like beat me up and vice versa because then i'm going to inhibit myself from accelerating and yourself from accelerating so instead we should work together and not you know run on the table and bash each other up so there's like this kind of like this set of instructions there's which is basically a meme that we're going to you know we're more useful to upgrade humanity when we're productive and healthy and can move forward um so yeah well it's very interesting to see but move like water if you don't like the jurists the the compliance with regulations and jurisdiction and then just
Starting point is 01:03:15 move like everyone should have free agency to move like water what do you see as the biggest issues that crypto faces today you mentioned brand um for decentralized finance but just more broadly whether it's bitcoin whether it's any specific products like what are the big milestones or obstacles that we need to achieve or overcome in order for uh kind of the the promise of this industry to be realized right so unfortunately we've had some large actors who told too many lies or value extracted too many times and they have misrepresented what crypto is and that you know you all know who i'm talking about in the last last few cycles and so they have tarnished this idea and this is especially important right now like when you talk to the normal person they
Starting point is 01:03:53 think of ftx or whatever is like representing crypto or d5 that's incorrect crypto needs a rebranding and it needs it right now and it needs to be redefined what actually d5 is it's like this idea that you can get in the arena you know in this pvp scenario there's kind of like wrapped up an economic theory that if you play with the rules, then everyone can work together. Like Bitcoin requires that everyone works together. And it says, like, if everyone just turns the pages and hashes this network every 10 minutes, then collectively everyone can keep growing together and accrue money to a premium. And so we need to rebrand the idea of crypto with a strong brand, a strong presence, strong
Starting point is 01:04:32 leadership, something like yourself. You know, you're trying to also, like, project a leadership with your charisma and your own public profile that actually crypto is not like fdx and you know terror and all that kind of stuff it's actually and you know like dark net markets and whatnot it's actually this kind of fundamental idea that good ideas flourish in a free market that's what crypto is and it allows its free transfer of value uh with very little middlemen and very little value extraction what do you do on a day-to-day basis right we've talked a lot about ideas but from an actual actionable standpoint like what does your average day look like so there's a lot of context switching i
Starting point is 01:05:08 manage quite a few different projects there's a lot of inbounds so i don't i go through different sprints i'm not a marathon type of person i'm a sprint person and right now i'm sprinting this fundraise and as soon as i get a good momentum under the fundraise then i will switch to product mode i need to ship products and hardcore very quickly and not just one product around multiple products but i'm good i'm a product guy fundamentally i try to solve user experience problems i tried to like you know use the technology at the right levels to to solve it so there's there's a lot of managing of inbounds but there's also a lot of output uh output i've been six years anonymous i turn off all my social media for eight years
Starting point is 01:05:43 so i've kind of kicked off my own social media two months ago to try and reinvigorate the industry like you know project what's what's an example of someone who could actually lead and project a vision could be like right the jp the jp brand which i'm putting out so there's a lot of output but there's also a lot of productive output uh between the different teams that i manage and work with uh but a lot of context switching but i find i'm very good at context switching and moving between different projects very quickly is there ever going to be a return back to anonymity where you keep like kind of the docs persona but then you would create anonymous personas in the future as well no because i recognize uh that humanity needs a
Starting point is 01:06:22 reactivation and i recognize i'm a i'm on a good trajectory and i need to project that with energy and ambition but it's also it needs to be done with high integrity because the whole idea of accelerating is this idea you take your time and effort you don't accumulate in value you don't extract value you immediately convert it back into memes and project those memes outwards and so like my whole inner thinking my whole outwards personality to my whole my whole vision needs to be 100% uh continued like at the same there shouldn't be any uh you know uh weirdness or like secrets or, you know, uh, tension, it should be completely the same. So now that I've kicked off this journey, there's no going back. And I want to keep projecting forward and I want
Starting point is 01:07:02 to keep building and contributing to highly potent means with a long half-life. That's it now. Uh, there was that period of being anonymous was a short section of my life. I'm very good at switching character. So I went from being a homeschooled kid, uh, self-studying into an Air Force fighter pilot, switching into, uh, being a crypto, like a, like trying to be a found entrepreneur switching to be a non for six years and now switching to a public profile i'm good at like changing my percent up quickly but now i'm on on a roll and i feel like i'm on a good role for the next five ten years to build and build and you know the next five years my goal is to build this very large brand and uh to solve hardcore user experience problems over the
Starting point is 01:07:40 next till 2029 but then ultimately i want to get into hardware i recognize the need that we need to get our silicon machines into space and my next big project probably in the 2013 beyond is to build this giant acl tunnel in mount everest so it's like 80 kilometers long and it shoots pods through this kind of emf field uh up to mac 20 and shooting them out at two-thirds less air density and shoot them in space fundamentally that the rocket problem that elon's trying to solve can be solved much more uh much more appropriately if you take the entire stage one and make it just a highly reusable tunnel that shoots using emf fields uh these pods out in space so these uh so your stage one is actually like located on the ground elon stage one is like you know 300 tons
Starting point is 01:08:22 of uh methyl ox and and oxygen right so there's like this complexity trade-off you know you're putting the complexity in a static environment rather than complexity in a dynamic environment so that's a big project i've been thinking about that long for at least six years i've got a website asl.io check it out writing a white paper on it soon but i want to fundamentally spit um silicon machines into space but also and i was going to drop this but the only way we're going to say relevant silicon machines and you mentioned this earlier on neural link we need to take that way further so your skeleton is just a means for you to express agency and manifest intelligence but most of your brand brand width is actually consumed into managing your skeleton you know
Starting point is 01:08:58 your feelings your touch uh you know moving wiggling your toes around we could remap our entire spinal cord into these devices and these sensors to understand the universe and communicate way faster so i'm talking about literally taking your your brain outside of your your skeleton remapping the spinal cord onto devices putting in a pod and shooting that pod in space and space will be a much more static environment you better directly uh you know takes solar energy and convert that into glucose and atp so you can you can think and you have all your needs taken care of as a like a space brain and you can communicate way faster and you can teleport your agency in the world and delegate it to humanoid bots and by the way your brain can
Starting point is 01:09:34 survive much longer than your body can most people die of suffocation because they eventually the the skeleton fails them you know my grandma was like 94 and she was sharp as a whistle but her skeleton ultimately failed her so you know there's no point trying to extend the life of your skeleton just extend the life of your brain and putting into a static environment and you can live 200 years 300 years if you just take your brain outside your body and do it as early as possible so that's coming all right so i invested in a company a while ago um that does uh they had a brain freezing technology okay uh and basically in a very simplistic description uh at the point of death they would take uh cryogenic freezing technology through oxygen kind of uh um uh you
Starting point is 01:10:14 know insertion they would put it they would try to freeze your brain was the general idea they did very small animals eventually they'd work their way up to the human brain and the idea basically is that you could freeze the brain with all the synapse connections and everything um and then you could download the information you put in a computer um and if we had einstein's brain wouldn't it be amazing if we could feed it today's problems and see you know do we get any other outputs so the way i think about that is the brain didn't leave the body the you know kind of connectivity the information etc was able to be extracted from the brain what you just said which you said very um kind of nonchalantly sounds insane which is uh you said to take the brain out of the body
Starting point is 01:10:57 yeah then to have a map of the human skeleton that's a remap your spinal cord to re-remap it yeah and create almost like a technological uh kind of body double right for for simple descriptions over your brain yeah and then take your brain connect the now what is a silicon machine body double yeah with your brain shoot it into space yeah and live for 300 years yeah okay you're gonna have to explain the uh brain being connected to the machine um brain power goes consciousness goes with the brain yeah into this uh new body yeah how feasible do you think that is i was very feasible okay i mean elon musk right now is inserting neural linking into your brain and trying to like sense synaptic connections
Starting point is 01:11:50 but your brain functions uh like as a is like a low key of control low key of intelligence a lot of its bandwidth is actually consumed and like i said like wiggling your toes and whatnot by remapping your spinal cord like each you have like a billion neurons with analog sensor fidelity you could remap a billion channels information onto a variety of sensors sense magnetic fields sense more a part of the emf spectrum more parts of the universe you know the fact that we can only see from like 10 centimeters out to like uh you know they're a star but imagine like your iphone can sense the universe a much greater precision than you can so imagine taking like a silicon sensor, like an iPhone, and remapping that onto the bit of neurons that
Starting point is 01:12:29 control wiggle your toes. And now you have to retrain your brain, but you can respond to that stimulation. There's a story of a guy who was wearing a Wi-Fi suit. So it would sense Wi-Fi fields and give him proprioception input around his body. So he would have this sixth sense where he could sense the Wi-Fi fields just from his proprioception. So you can easily remap your sensory uh input channels why was he doing that oh it's fun but it's a perfect point that your your brain is incredibly elastic and like most of it right now is just managing your skeletons and skeleton is just a vehicle to give you agency so imagine we're just replacing that vehicle and replacing your sensor input channels and your output channels so like brian johnson who is
Starting point is 01:13:13 incorrect brian yeah okay the wrong thing brian johnson is trying to keep his skeleton around Say that again. Brian Johnson's what? Brian Johnson is trying to keep his skeleton around, but he's going to get an extra 10 years out of his life, but he's not going to get an extra 200. The way you get an extra 200 years out of your life is take your brain out of your body, out of a very toxic environment. So this environment you live in is extremely toxic to your brain. Your brain is trying to do everything it can to protect you from those toxins. You've got this skull, which is like 10 centimeters thick of bone. You've got this blood brain barrier that's trying to keep the toxins away from putting toxins in your brain.
Starting point is 01:13:45 you've got like layers upon layers of your body shielding itself from the universe like this skin is just you know trying to keep you away from toxins so this is a highly toxic environment why don't you just put yourself in a gold plated pod orbiting in space and remove all those toxins and now your brain i mean the fact that you drink alcohol every day is like it kills your brain you should you should immediately quit drinking alcohol immediately drink good and then that's the ultimate decelerant and you should go yourself in a very static environment and remove all the toxins, you'll easily live to 200. Now, by the way, the early, if I roll out this technology and offered an 85, 90-year-old man the option
Starting point is 01:14:21 to either die or be shot in space, you would choose the shoot in space option. And then the longer you could live for as a brain, it was dependent on how younger you did it. So then this idea that we do need to contribute genetically and memetically to humanities repositories. So you should be born, accelerate your adoption of the medic information as rapidly as possible and our schooling system education system is wholly unsuitable for this and that needs to complain be reimagined and then you should at 30 years old when you hit peep reproductive capacity swap out your skeleton
Starting point is 01:14:55 with a silicon one and be shot in space where you have much higher bandwidth lower latency why do you have to go to space to remove the toxins okay get out of a toxic environment could um you know brett adcock is uh building figure elon's building the tesla um uh bots could we just take our brains and put them into those here on earth or no you don't think about the wrong problem that like the silicon machines are not here to serve us the silicon machines are here to explore the universe and upgrade our memetic repositories this is like an interim field like i mean the the tesla bot is trying to navigate a a planet that's that's basically wholly unsuitable for the biological machine like fundamentally you would do much better living
Starting point is 01:15:33 in a gold-plated pod with solar panels orbiting the earth for 300 years so let's just get straight to the straight to the point like we're but this is if you're optimizing for living for 300 years but that's got to be a shitty life no you have amazing life you better you better live and eat you know you live and do anything you live on mars little moon you just delegate your sensory channels like you delegate your output your agency you teleport your memory like what you see from the universe is just your perception of it right and but where you get that information is irrelevant you can get that information like when i video call my wife like i'm getting sensory information that's like 14,000 kilometers away, so longer.
Starting point is 01:16:09 But it doesn't matter. It feels like she's in the room with me. So like you could be orbiting space, but still feel like you're in the room and like have sensory input from anywhere in the universe while limited by the speed of light. So suddenly, instead of you being limited by the speed of an Airbus A350
Starting point is 01:16:25 or your ability to run around and catch an Uber, you're now limited by the speed of light to where you can go in the universe. So this cracks me up Because if you think of what the average person finds enjoyment in, they find enjoyment in some sort of stimulants, caffeine, nicotine, et cetera. They find it in some sort of depressant, alcohol, et cetera. They find it in sex. They find it in relationships.
Starting point is 01:16:55 And they find it in food. Again, very simplistic, but those are five things that the average person would like. you take your their brain out of their body and you put it into this uh silicone kind of remapped you know uh body double none of those things will exist 10 times a much greater 10 times amplification okay you're gonna download any drug rest where you want and have trips in space like if that's your thing right it's just a drug is just an arrangement of atoms that can synthesize on demand and all those things that you just described were stimulations of your input channels correct so you could achieve that with much greater precision and depth and uh acuity in space
Starting point is 01:17:34 where you literally remap every single channel you just press a button on the computer you just think about what you want and like you can be stimulated but remember like our actual our actual purpose is not sit around a consumption death spiral like if you're in a consumption desperate you're looking for just consuming things so you're actually never going to do anything yeah you zombify yourself and so many 90 of humanity are in these consumption death spirals where they actually don't recognize their purpose is to create highly potent memes, you know, to contribute to the genes and memes, the genes and memes. And so high agency people recognize that their value, their purpose
Starting point is 01:18:06 is genes and memes. And you can still do all that in this kind of like future reality I just described to you, but with much greater agency, much greater intelligence output, much greater ability to perceive the universe. And you can delegate your agency to these, to any bot you want you can be here in the world in in the universe really it's just limited to your imagination so like that's the future to get optimistic about and it's the highest i'm fucking i'm there i love it all right i'm in uh i'm not gonna get shot to space with just my brain at 30 i might be the guy who waits like 80 but yeah i'm in i'm good to go where can we send people
Starting point is 01:18:42 to find you on twitter just jp thor um uh yeah like i said it's only two months old i'm growing my profile uh but i your people are very passionate yeah when they figured out you coming in here i started getting uh overwhelmed no so the reason is i spent six years to i've never rug pulled never grifted i've stolen money i've never like dishonored my community and and value extracted from them i've always tried to like build a community where we move towards a common goal because this is a long-term process so i have extremely good rapport with my community and the people around me because i've i've you know i've tried to respect them and work with them at on peer level because i fundamentally believe that you as a self-sovereign biological
Starting point is 01:19:20 machine that expresses your own agency you cannot be oppressed and controlled you can only be campaigned there's no one that can force you to do anything you can only be campaigned through mimetic intelligence like me right now trying to campaign you and so i've treated with everyone with this kind of peer-to-peer respect and so there's like a big community that supports me and i'm in the arena like that what i'm about to achieve with this giant roll-up and you know this vampire attacking and putting all the defiant notice you know is is i'm in the arena and there's going to be a lot of chaos and inbound and cancelling and whatnot, but I'm willing to do it because I look at the universe as an adverse environment and I'm wholly suitable to get in
Starting point is 01:19:56 the arena and tackle it. I'll make a lot of mistakes, but from my first principles thinking that if you can get in the arena and iterate and move fast, and it doesn't matter what the universe throws at you, like literally it does not matter. Nothing matters. You just get in the arena and see what happens next and see if you can, it's a game of chess. Like I can't predict your next move i just have a chessboard and a bunch of pieces and there's millions of billions of permutations that we're about to do and so you're going to present to me an adverse condition and i will respond to that to the best i get my ability i love it we'll definitely do this again

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