TrueLife - Benjamin C. George - Frameworks & systems of Governance

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

An invitation to participate in a future of your own design

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry Born from the blaze The poem is Angels with Rifles The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. All right, ladies and gentlemen,

Welcome back to the True Life podcast. We are here with the one and only Benjamin George, which makes it George and George double dose over here for everybody. I hope everybody's having a great day, the birds are singing. The wind is at your back. And we're going to talk about Benjamin's new book, No Absolutes. I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit about life and where we are and what we're doing and how to maybe see it better and

make it better. Benjamin, what you got to open up with us today? Oh, I've had a whirlwind of a week, so where to begin. Not to mention the world's had a whirlwind of a week, too. Yeah. Well, you know, here's an interesting place to start. Nice. Kind of tapering off and or back into our conversation before, you know, about alignments of people and groups and processes and all of these things. I had a family member have a heart attack this week. I'm sorry. Thanks.

I appreciate it. She's doing okay. But it was really interesting because, you know, you. you know, here you have this whole traumatic thing. And then, you know, she's through it, gets the angioplasties and whatnot. And then the prescriptions come along. And she was, and this is an older person in my family. She's given essentially a trial drug that has only been on the market for less than six months.

With the instructions of if it causes you shortness of breath or it doesn't allow you to sleep, let us know. And of course it did, and she's off of it now, but it was really interesting that, you know, somebody who just had a very, very dramatic, you know, almost life-ending experience gets put on a test, essentially. I mean, I'm sure it's approved.

It had to be approved. But at the same time, if you're, well, maybe, at the same time, if the caveat is let us know if you're having symptoms that would be, you know, very much things that you don't want if you've just had a heart problem. And, you know, it got me to thinking about what we were talking about is just, you know, all of these things that are happening in the world, you know, when on the surface it said one thing or another thing, it's really important. to understand the motivations, the perspectives, the, you know, the, who's, who's moving those chest pieces behind the scene? And for what reason? Otherwise, you end up in situations like this where essentially you're running a human experiment

on somebody who just had a brushworth mortality. To me, you know, that seems just questionably unethical, personally. Yeah, I couldn't agree anymore. Recently, I watched a, it was a conference of sorts, and it was at the Milken Institute, and it was five, six, or seven, or a handful of these top, top, there was like a pharmacist, a surgeon, a multitude of, a multitude of different doctors representing different areas. And one of the things they were discussing was the future of medicine.

and they discussed something very similar to what you're talking about. They were saying that one of the problems with medicine is that it moves way too slow. We have all these things that could potentially help people. And we can't even move a drug forward unless we have 10 years of research and regulations. And one guy's like, yeah, that's for a reason because it's unethical to move forward. I mean, we all remember the Nuremberg trials where doctors were just experimenting people, nilly willy. But that was one guy said that, but the other guys seemed to be on the other side of the fence. And this is all speculation. However, it seems to me that somewhere along the line,

modern medicine has made a choice that we need to move faster. And we have an aging demographic full of people. A lot of people are going to die anyway. They have these diseases. We should be trying new things if we get their informed consent. And the idea of informed consent to some doctors is like, you want to try this thing? Here you go. They don't tell you all these things. Because what's the difference between an effect and a side effect? The same thing, man. This drug does not have a side of effect. It has all these effects. It might cure your running nose, but it also give you diarrhea. Those are the same. They're effects. They're not side effects. That's just a tricky way of dressing it down, man. So yeah, I think she was experimented on. Well, you know,

it's interesting that you bring that up because, you know, the whole idea, behind that is on the surface, it looks like, yeah, where medicine's moving too slow, so we're trying to be better for this generation of people. On the other side, why would a doctor prescribed this trial medication or this new medication? Why? Because there's a profit behind it. Yeah. Because there's an incentive structure behind that. Yeah.

And, you know, these incentive structures, I mean, it's a dangerous game to put, in, you know, monetary incentives especially in conjunction with someone's hell. And, you know, it's not like we, you know, you mentioned Nuremberg, but we also have, you know, more modern things. You know, how many times of these companies been ordered to pay billions of dollars in damages? Yeah. Because they did not disclose or, you know, they didn't do a proper trial or, you know, what have you. There's, there's so many mechanisms of fault at play here.

And, you know, when you have these, I like to talk, you know, to myself in game theory terms, right? You have, you have, you know, a player, if that player is going to be a reasonable, responsible player, they have a certain series of choices that they're going to make when encountered with, you know, different environments, different needs, different problems. if you have selfish players and greedy players, they're going to make a different set of choices. Well, when you align profit centers with health, you end up with a whole lot of greedy players, unfortunately.

Despite the, you know, Hippocraticos and all of this stuff, at the end of the day, it's still aligned with greedy players, which means the choices that are made by those people, those companies, those institutions, they're going to be a broad spectrum of choices that not necessarily benefit the end user, but they definitely benefit the shareholders, the profit centers, and so on. And it's a dangerous game. It is.

It's almost like the end user, the patient, has been almost factored out of the decision-making at all. It's that, okay, this one will make this much, this will make this much. and, you know, especially when you think about the players being, if we dub Pfizer a major player, how many of Pfizer's executives have been on the board of the FDA? It's like a revolving door right there. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, and it's not just the FDA. It's health in all countries.

Yeah. You know, the CDC's the who's, and you look at, you know, the board of directors or who's the executives. and yeah, it's all of those same people. And that should cause concern for anybody. You know, the regulatory body and the people who are supposed to be regulating shouldn't, I mean, there's a reason that it's called a conflict of interest because it's specifically a very big conflict of interest. Yet, you know, when there's huge amounts of money to be made,

and this kind of tails into the end user not being, factored in the equation is because, well, they kind of are, but it's a volume number. Right. Right. There's just so many people and so much volume that, yeah, we know we're going to sell two million of these if we push it through our, you know, our gynecologists or our, you know, general practitioners or whatever for whatever drug it may be. And that kind of structure combined with the, you know, we're going to just have an open-door

relationship with the FDAs and the NIHs and the who's and the CDCs of the world. And those people are going to come in and make a big profit, which is all kind of public record, or at least a good chunk of its public record. And you can see how much money these people in them making. That's, in a game theory perspective, that's a very, very poor alignment of interest if you're the end user. Now, if you're one of those executives, you're doing pretty well in that game situation. But my question would be is, should we allow something like that?

The answer to your question is no, I think. But how do you change that? So, you know, this is a long-term game. And I think one of the huge issues of just facing the world at large is if it's not an immediate fix, if, you know, it's not just a band-aid that makes the boo-boo go away. People don't have the time. They don't have the resources to comprehend the information, to have the conversations, or the will to see them through.

Because everything's on such a quick cycle when it comes to, you know, politics and how all this stuff is kind of regulated in our society, that if it's not a quick fix, if it's not a headline, if it's not a campaign promise that can be uttered in a sentence or two, then there's just not a lot of public will for these things. Now, if you talk to people individually, most people are really upset with things like this, and they would tend to agree that these sort of incentive structures are, you know,

at best problematic. But, you know, fixing something like this is going to be a long-term thing. You know, the obvious solution to me at the start is you need to devolve profit from health. Yeah. Health shouldn't be a for-profit business, nor should communications for that matter. You know, having people who are making massive profits off of networks that are just putting out propagandas or, you know, sometimes fact, sometimes not, those sort of things is a similar problem with, you know, incentive structures and what that information is supposed to be doing

for the populace, you know, it used to be Walter Cronkite, everybody trusted the guy because he spoke the news, right? Well, now all of a sudden, if you were to pull people and say, do you trust X on X network, you're going to get a whole lot of know. And I think we're seeing that, right? People are tuning in the podcast much more often. You have all these independent networks kind of popping up from YouTube channels and whatnot. And so that one's kind of hammering itself out because there's a free market component there that isn't completely held down and regulated and whatnot. Now, we've seen that free market be impacted, especially over the past few years by censorship.

But when we're talking about, you know, the health aspect of things, there is no free market component there to kind of balance the equation out. That's all bought and paid for game. And so divesting, you know, those profit centers. And I think there's a way to do it. I don't think there's a perfect way to do it within the confines of the structure of society. You know, we create, we have a.

a nonprofit status and you can have a nonprofit business that would direct more, you know, and be more of an open source type thing, you know, open accountability. You could even tie blockchain into it to make sure that there wasn't a human being accountable for accountability. It was just a program. You know, so there's ways that you could kind of break this apart. But at the end of the day, who's paying for? for all of the rules and regulations

that are making that whole market able to do what it's doing. They're paying, you know, through lobbying groups and whatnot, you have all of this, it's bought and paid for games. So what's the solution? One that's probably

not going to be taken simply because the money to be made is far outweighs the value. you that one would get, which is a sad state of affairs. And I think we see that in just about most industries across the board at this stage. Yeah, that's well said. I couldn't agree more.

I see the same situation, the same red thread runs through so many of our organization. And to me, it's the fact that people have become numbers rather than human beings. If you're a CEO or you're a board of director and you're sitting in some boardroom somewhere, you look at, oh, well, employee 017222 is not performing. They're not productive. But they don't understand that this employee's kid just died. All they see is numbers not working. And they don't even use a, you know, they don't even measure all the variables.

They only have a small set of variables they measure. One's profitable, one's productivity. One is shelf life. You know, they have this, they have this, you know, inadequate equation to measure success. And they have completely failed to measure the human component. And when you do that, you strip humanity out of everything. I heard a good quote once that said, as humans, we need rules and we need, you know, if we don't have rules, we become animals. but if we don't have freedom, then we become numbers or robots.

So we need a little mix of both, but it seems that we've gone way overboard into this idea that we're ones and zeros. And I think you're seeing it play out through humanity. You're seeing people rising up. You're seeing people go and kill people because they're not ones and two. There's no humanity. And sometimes I think maybe it's because we're too big. Is this what happens when it gets so big that the only,

way you can measure stuff is by stripping the humanity out and looking like numbers? What what that's that's an interesting point. Um, you know, I think it, you know, too big is definitely part of it, but I think the other part of that sentence would be too big for the system that we've created. Um, you know, when, when we, when we did this whole westernized democracy slash republic movement. You know, the concept was to decentralize power, right? That was kind of the underlying reason that we have a Congress and we have an executive branch and a judicial branch is to decentralize power.

And that was in the context of the available technology of the time, which was, you know, telegraphs maybe at that point, maybe not. But more than likely, you know, just old-fashioned mail systems, word of mouth type stuff. And in order to encompass everybody, you know, you had to have a certain system that kind of worked for that time and environment. Well, we're in a very different world now. Yeah. You know, you were able to all have a conversation. We're able to share information instantaneously around the globe.

to me it seems that we could create a system that would work for greater amounts of people. Again, the problem is, is the people who have the authority in the world to create said system are incentivized against creating a system like that because it would remove value from their pocketbook. I mean, you know, Nancy Pelosi is making a killing on the stock market, you know. He's crushing. She's crushing. It's wild. Benjamin, okay, I have an idea that I'm going to throw this out at you. And it's a provocative idea. And so this is an idea that I think could fundamentally save the United States. Now, it's not, in this idea, it could be applied to other countries could implement this idea.

Feel free to tear this thing down as much as you want. Okay. I got two words for you. national socialism. So imagine the United States. We just cut like $15 billion to Ukraine or to NATO for God knows what for what sort of NGO we gave that to or whatever. What if we just created the United States? Like, you know, the left hates nationalism, the right hates socialism. But you know what? everybody hates national socialism.

Like, if you're a national socialist, then you're a Nazi. But it just seems to me like, like, what's the real problem with that? The real problem with that is that it cuts into the internationalism of the world. And you could make the argument, and I guess I should try to make the argument that that's, I don't, first of all, I'm not a Nazi everybody. I'm just throwing this out as a provocative idea. But, you know, if you look at kind of what happened in World War II on the financial level, what you saw was the end of the.

The Germans trying to be like, hey, we don't want, we want to keep all our money here. And you saw a lot of bankers coming and be like, no, no, you're not doing that. The same thing could be said here. Like we could have, we could provide. I think we already have a sort of socialism for the people on the very top, whether it's pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, the banking industry. These guys are borrowing money from the Fed at nothing and then parking it at the Fed and then take an interest on it. And they don't even lend it out.

Why not? And then those same people are like, you know, this doesn't work. Well, it works for you guys. Why wouldn't it work for us? I'm not, on some level, I understand the drawbacks to giving people free money. I get that. But is it possible that there could be some form of national socialism that would cure the evils that are happening to the people in our country? What do you think?

Well, I would say cure the evils is a heavy load. I agree. That one's a big, that one's a big uphill. Now, you know, I kind of think what you're getting at is kind of like a, you know, the idea of a universal basic income. You know, that kind of been. Let me push back real fast because I don't necessarily need it to be a income for everybody. Okay. Can I change it to a freedom dividend?

Would that make a difference if it was a freedom dividend versus an income for people? that says that you earn it because I think we've put into it like if you've spent your life giving into something shouldn't you get something back well I mean that was kind of the idea behind social security well I'm sorry that wasn't the original idea behind social security but then it became the idea behind social security um you know after because for a while it was the pensions that kind of did that you know you invested yourself into a company and then the company took care of you you know and that was a really good relationship for the people who got to take advantage of that. You know, the 90s rolled around and there's not too many more pension funds ever since then. You know, I would say there's there's a really interesting conversation happening right now because you do have a lot of displaced people. You have a lot of automation and artificial intelligence are going to devastate blue and white collar jobs as they rapidly progress here in the the next 10 years or so. You have a whole dysmorphia of how people used to live versus how they're

living now and how they think they should live. And there's so many nuances and facets to this, right? But one of the things that I, you know, in reflecting on that for quite a few years, I found myself leading down a path of a universal standard of living. I like it. So instead of, you know, equality of outcome, you have equality of opportunity. And that's what you strive to create. Because equality of outcome is sensitive. You know, somebody is going to work harder than somebody else.

That's just going to happen. Yeah. But if you give the equality of opportunity, so that would mean, you know, providing basic services for people, you know, a home, water. electricity, access to the internet, those types of things, if that could be provided. Now, on top of education, of course, which is a whole other facet of this, which is really interesting because if we look at education, I read a fascinating paper. I think it was up to date to 2018 or 2019. 52% of the people in the United States have a sixth grade education. Wow.

18% of people are illiterate. I didn't know that. Yeah, that blew me away. But when you, you know, now if you, if you throw that into the context of narratives and propagandas and all this stuff, now you see why people are becoming so divided and so tribalized, there's a lack of ability to reason about the world. Wow. on a scale to the tune of 100 million plus people in this country, that's wild. Wow, that's crazy.

That changes everything. Right. And so when you look at it like that, you go, oh, okay. So there's a lot more to this problem than on the surface, especially what you're getting from the information channels that most people have strived to. And, you know, when you start to add these things up, you say, okay, well, what is the problem? is there the socio-economic divide. Well, yeah, if somebody grows up in the ghetto and their parents are making $500 a month tops

or one parent more than likely. You know, what sort of opportunity, what sort of choices does that person have? Limited. Very limited. Tragically limited, right? And then you, and then, you know, we hear these hero stories about people who extricate themselves.

from these environments and everybody goes, oh, see, it can be done. But what you're not hearing with the hero story is how many hundreds of thousands failed for one hero. Yep. You know, so when you start to look at these different nuances of this problem, you know, and that's why I went down on this path of a universal standard of living. Because if you cut out that,

that provides the opportunity. for somebody to actually have the sense, the time to themselves, the resources for themselves to say, hey, what do I want to do? Instead of just like, okay, how am I surviving today? Because the reality is, there's a solid chunk of people. Well, I mean, I would hazard a guess, you know, if 52% of people at a sixth grade education, more than likely, most of them are just surviving. Yeah. And, you know, it's not even a great education. education. I went through that system. It was pretty much garbage. But still, it still gave me a

foundation enough that I was able to begin to teach myself to reason about the world, to understand logic, to understand systems, to, you know, look at things from different perspectives. But if you don't have that education, well, now, I mean, oh my goodness, that's a travesty. I mean, to the to the word. And I don't see anybody talk about that. Yeah. Because again, that's not one of those things that is a campaign promise, a one or two sentence solution. That is, that needs to be a complete revamp, a complete re-understanding of what we're doing. And there's not a lot of public will for that when public will is regulated by how much money somebody's getting. You know, because it's, you know, and I think honestly most people who have watched and reasoned about the system would look and say,

hey, these people really don't have anybody's best interest in mind, but they're self-serving agenda. They might have some friends and some family that they want to take care of or they might have some relationships, but by and large, it's very much dictated by how much money somebody got from who and why they gave them that money. Which is sad. Now, once you get to local levels, it's not as bad, right? And you do see the ability to have localized changes via this system because it's not entirely corrupted. But it's going that way fast, too. I mean, you know, you have, you know, just local congresspeople for states getting, you know,

like I saw, $100,000 to just kind of tow the company line. You know, those types of things are insidious to us actually finding solutions to this problem. They sneak their way in and divide people with rhetoric, with, you know, all of these different propagandas, us versus them, red verse blue, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, to your question, the solution of that is long. And I think it's, but I think there's a. path to those solutions. And I was thinking about it this week, actually. And I, you know, I would call them, I came up with the term breakaway community. I like it. And I think if a community modeled itself, a small community modeled itself after, you know, having an equal opportunity platform or, you know, where basic needs were provided, you could even have this structured as, you know, a corporation essentially.

But we have the technology to have one person, one vote. It can be anonymous, Suedo anonymous. It can be however we deem fit. And we have the ability to, for everybody's voice to be heard. And I think if we started at the small scale and communal levels, that's a pathway to realize, you know, a solution to that problem. I don't think solutions are going to come from the top down. I think that ship has sailed. Wow, that is a, well said, very well said, I like those ideas.

When I look at it through that lens, I would agree with you. We have had 100 years of trying to solve it from the top down. And it seems like it's just progressively gotten worse with that strategy. And you're right. I think, do you know of any experiments or any things that are happening right now where there are these breakaway cities or these breakaway things? Have you heard about anything like that? I mean, there's all sorts of different movements.

You know, there's a, you could go back to the hippie communes or kind of the same idea. But, you know, there's a lot of people who've declared like micro-nations. And there's, you know, a couple. I think there's a libertarian community up in, I want to stay Vermont or something like that. That's kind of. The Freedom Project. The Freedom Project, and they use Bitcoin as kind of the currency and things like that. So there are people who have tried these breakaway communities and are trying them.

I think that it needs to be a bit more than, hey, do you guys like this idea? Let's do it together. I think there needs to be a bit more structure behind it. And I think that there needs to be, you know, I've actually programmed. I wrote a white paper and programmed a little bit of kind of a blockchain technology that would do the voting and whatnot. And I think something like that as the foundation to a community like this and then relying on technology and sustainability and focusing on things that we know enable long-term growth and enable, you know, long-term resources. and if it was a community very much dedicated and properly structured with the right technology, I think that could be a duplicatable model that would be able to replicate itself throughout the world.

Yeah. Now that you say that, I remember hearing about some rhetoric about smart cities. I think they were going to have one in Arizona, one up in Canada somewhere. It's a problem. Oops, sorry. go ahead there's some problems there what do you hear about those well well the problem with the smart

city is again it goes back to this entire thing well who's building the smart city what do they want for building the smart city right obviously you know nobody's motivated unless there's a return on investment these days

from a you know now there is philanthropy and there are people who you know donate to causes and whatnot but In terms of building an entire city, I'm pretty sure that there's somebody who wants a kickback on the end of that. And so, you know, one of the necessary points of these communities would be that the structure of them is distributed.

It's decentralized. So just like we were talking about earlier, you know, the establishment of Western democracy slash republic was the decentralization of power. now we have the technology and the ability to decentralize those power structures into a communal structure where the individual has the power. And to mediate all of this, instead of having a judiciary, we have a program, one that can't be swayed, one that doesn't have emotions, and, you know, is just strictly, X amount of people voted on it

and this is what we're going this is the path we're going to take and then all of a sudden that shifts the conversation back to the community because now if I'm truly passionate about something that's coming up for a vote in our community well I'm going to go out and I'm going to

talk to people and I'm going to protest because there's nothing to protest I'm going to have a conversation because I'm passionate about this and I want and I need to and I want to have convert and convince you of all of this and why we should vote yes why we should vote no and when we do that when you remove that kind of from a game theory perspective when you remove that arbiter

that that point of authority now instead of there being somebody to be angry at so it's it usurbs actually having to put in the effort of a conversation there's nobody to be angry at and so the only way to get things done, if you're actually truly are passionate about it, is to converse with other people in your community. Yeah. I like it. I wonder, it seems to me that there's a number there. And I don't know what that number is, you know, if it's 10,000 or 100,000.

But it seems at some point in time, that would break down. You know, if it got too big, that would break down. There would have to be some sort of familiarity, something like that, or some sort of foundational identification that everybody shared, right? But I like it. I would say it absolutely does break down

at a larger number of scale. But where it differs is you can have multiple nodes of these, right? They can all be independent to one another, but they can all still have things that affect them regionally, which is exactly what government is.

The whole idea of government is that it's supposed to, you know, take this vast landscape of territory and people and be able to democratize the, you know, the relationship between everybody. So, but if everybody, everybody's little community handled their local, you could have a regional, you know, a regional group, a regional vote. There could be things that would affect the region,

Like, you know, if there was three of these over, you know, a 200 square mile area and the watershed that they all used was drying up or was having problems or somebody wanted to put a dam in it or something like that, those would be a regional thing that could then be voted on. Now, again, this does have problems at scale, just like our problems at scale right now. But what it does is it takes and puts the individual value back in there, promotes radical self-responsibility. And at the same time, it takes the individual and now every individual is representative. A lot of the problems I think we have are because we have representatives who are supposed to represent crazy amounts of people that it's just there's no reality that they can. could actually represent all of those people, even if they wanted to. So when you shift that power dynamic, I think the equation changes a little bit because, yeah, you're going to have people that are just going to be like, oh, I don't care,

but you're also going to have people who rally around ideas. And now it's a discussion about ideas instead of people. I think that's the key distinction. Yeah. Yeah. In some ways, you know, if we look at it like nodes or cities and towns, like we almost have the, like our government is a similar framework. So let me just try to say this. Is that idea that you have, could we use our existing framework of our government now if we just switched from people's rights to. ideas? Interesting question. I would say potentially, but I would also say at the same time,

the problem is that it's all focused on people. We the people, instead of we the ideas. Well, we the people is fine. But I think the idea thing is the extrapolation of the individual when you're looking at a community of individuals. Now we need to have a conversation about ideas. Where what we do in the Western world is instead of having that conversation about ideas, we elect a person to go have that conversation for them. So back to the motivation and profit and all of those things,

would that person be inclined to give up that. role for the betterment of society in terms of just like we're all about ideas anymore. Our representatives are representing us. They're only a mechanism of promoting ideas.

I don't know if that would work just because of how entrenched these profit motivations are in the world today. I mean, I'm sorry? Yeah. No, no, no. Go ahead. So if instead of having a representative, if we had the framework where we could all just, I mean, everybody's got a mobile phone. If you could just be like, here's where we are as a community on get, I don't know, pick your whatever your community problem is, you know, here's where our community stands on carbon capture.

You know, I think you could get a very much better representation of what the people in. that node want versus what the representative is paid to do. I think they can do that now, right? Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's these things out there. They're called Dow's in the blockchain world. And it's basically a decentralized corporation.

And they have different types of structures, like, you know, depending on how much of the token that you own, you gain voting rights, et cetera, et cetera. There's inherent problems with those types of. What are those? What are the problems with the Dow's? Well, yeah, one of those is being captured by a small group of people because once you create a limit of who can participate, now that becomes a barrier to entry. The other part of those problems is participation, actually. So let's say I create a threshold that 33% of the voting populace means to vote in order for us to pass any referendum. what happens if I can't get 33% of the party to vote, or 33% of the group to vote on anything,

simply because of there's not enough organization, there's not enough communication. And I've seen this happen with a few different doubts where, you know, because the, the crypto market's mostly speculation, people just bought it in to speculate. I don't really care about the actual governance issues of this thing. Why would I care if you guys are going to get an extra half? percent for mining reliance. You know, I'm here to make some money. So there's a,

there has to be a balance of incentives, just like there has, you know, like we talked about the incentives in the Western world, being completely out of whack. The Dow worlds are mostly out of whack too, because, you know, the whole premise behind most of the people getting involved is speculatory at this point.

If you look at blockchain on a graph of market penetration, you know, it's probably just past 12, 15, 20 percent market penetration, which means it's on its rise like this, and it'll rise very quickly to 90 percent market penetration, simply because the cost of trust is mitigated from institutions and operations down to the cost. of electricity. So it's just more economical to underline blockchain for all sorts of things. You know, deeds, titles, all, you know, any sort of, any sort of mechanism where you might need a notary or any sort of escrow service. So instead of all those things having, you know, buildings and people and computers and networks and systems, now all of a sudden you have one single program that moderates the entire thing. The cost of running these is just so dramatically different that if I'm a business that adopts this, my operating cost, even if I'm a small guy, are going to be minuscule compared to the big guy.

So now I can, you know, and because small guys start competing, big guys adopt. That's kind of kind of how it goes. You know, so those those alignment of factors are very key and why a community like this would be successful versus why I won it. and I think, you know, looking at it, and I've thought about it for quite some time, there needs to be a meritocracy component to it. So the people who are working for the community, the people who are invested, the people not necessarily invested monetarily, but invested with their time and effort, those people need to have some form of compensation.

And so I think there's a balance to be struck between essentially socialism, meritocracy, and democracy. And I think striking that balance is, you know, I think we could actually solve many of these problems. And it's an interesting balance to strike, right? Because you're going to piss off just about everybody. Yeah, it's the only way there has to be some form of it. You know, it's interesting. Like two of the most interesting people I know live in Colorado. That be you and Charles Hodgkinson, who's the main or one of the guys that he's the main guy for Cardano.

But he's one of the main guys in blockchain technology. And he is, you know, they have had problems with getting people to vote on stuff and, you know, pools being captured and stuff that way. But I think that there's something to be said about a slight change in our idea of be it socialism or be it, you know, democracy or be it capitalism. And I think you could just maybe, you know, the same way that you shave off one molecule to get DMs, from psilocybin you're going to shave off one little piece of those and get a whole new system i think there's there's gotta be a better way there i i think i think there is i mean it's kind of been a passion project for me for 15 years to be honest um i was originally traveling down in central and south america and you know i met you know indigenous tribes and they were

completely self-sustained they And, you know, they had hundreds of people completely self-sustained, all working in a communal level. And nobody was working nearly as hard as anybody in the Western world. And then I saw, you know, smaller communities that were integrated into the Western society. And, you know, they're a sustainable there, too. And then all of a sudden you get to, like, you know, the central cities. And these things are completely in utter disarray. I mean, the jungle's taking back the city as you're walking through the city.

I mean, you see, you know, just erupting trees and whatnot. You go, okay, so this is a little different than these beautiful, sustainable beach communities and jungle communities. So what breaks? And, you know, the idea that something is sustainable is, I think, one of the key components follows it. that community, whether it be through individual effort or an automated system or a partially automated robotic process, needs to generate all of its own food, needs to capture all of its own water, needs to generate all of its own electricity. If you don't have that sustainable component as a part of these cities, it's when you get these kind of runaway growth situation. and that's when you end up with these massive megacities that we have today that if the trucks stop being able to show up for whatever reason, you have 18 million people killing each other in three days for food.

I mean, you know, these are, that's a dangerous thing to be teetering on if you think about it from just an objective perspective. So I think integrating that sustainable portion with all of these other kind of foundational axioms, you know, a universal standard of living. decentralized one vote, one person system, you know, meritocracy on top of, you know, that that socialist universal standard of living and then the democracy in there. I think when you start to play with these and put these together, you can create systems that solve many,

if not all of our problems that we face today. Okay, let me ask you this. I love that. And I think that that, I think that that, is accurate. I believe in a system like that. But what it seems to me one of the major drawbacks or the fundamental drawback would be the you would have to you would have to have a worldview, a narrative and a story for those people that live in those communities. Well, kind of. There was something else I left out in that, which was,

removing the roadblocks to personal wealth, wealth generation. So capitalism needs to have a play in that as well. You know, for me to start a business today, you have to register with the state. You have to usually get a lawyer if you don't know what you're doing. You have to, and then you don't even know what you're setting up if you're doing it that way because, you know, how many people actually got schooled in business law and, you know, business structures and all these things.

and there's so many barriers of entry. And then let alone if I actually want to do something with like a hardware or chemicals or anything like that. And all of a sudden, the barriers of entry continue to stack up. So to the point that if I'm not somebody who's exceptionally credentialed or has a massive network of people or a pool of wealth to draw from, I can't participate. Even if I have a fantastic idea. And I can't even float that idea to have somebody tell me that it's not even a fantastic idea because I can't even pay enough to get that feedback. So removing those barriers of entry to personal wealth generation. So now imagine you have a universal standard of living, so I'm not worried about paying the bills.

But now I want to go out and I have a passion. I have something that interests me. I really got into, you know, rocketry or whatever. Now I can go out and my entire focus is that. Now, part of this crypto network would be to enable that each individual would have access to the ability to sell their own goods and services at no cost. It's just part of your app on your phone, right? So now I don't have the barriers of entry to get into business. I don't have the barriers of entry to subsist so I can try business.

Now I can go out and test my ideas against the marketplace without having to worry about fulfilling all of these other resource draining things. That creates a wealth of innovation, of creativity, because you're removing the constraints of what's drawing people's focus away from those passions, from those ideas, from those pursuits. That's awesome. I never thought about it like that. Yeah.

In some ways, I guess we're kind of seeing a glimpse of that. I mean, you and I can come on here and we can have conversations about the future and the past and what we think and how we feel. How would that just be like everybody's phone? comes with like a Shopify account or like what would it be like kind of yeah yeah but you would make it a little bit more of an automated thing and then so the white paper that I wrote um you know if you created this environment where at the end user you could you know they're basically their own

business now what happens is you're going to have an increase of transactions on the network and that means more value being shifted in the network, which means more value generated in the network, which means more value for the communal organization. And that's what provides that feedback loop is what provides the ability to provide the universal standard of living, to have the upkeep, to have all of these things. And so the idea is you create a truly sustainable system,

not from just like a power production standpoint or a food standpoint, but a humanity sustainable production where it's not just about living and surviving. It's also about gaining wealth and growth and thriving. And we have the technology to build that today, 100%. Now, you need the will and the resources to accomplish. it. Nobody wants to give up resources because there's no profit to be made by investing in. That's the caveat. You want to build this thing and let all these people use it for free? I can't believe it. What's wrong with you? We're going to say to give that away? And then, you know,

but if you do it that way and the meritocracy, and this is where the meritocracy component comes in, as people generate their wealth, it's going to naturally raise the tide in all ships on a raising tide type thing. The entire community, the wealth of the community is going to go up by each individual's success, not by taxing them or taking something from them or having them go through a patent process, which is going to get ripped off, or any of these shenanigans, but simply by the fact that it's creating more transactions on the network. It's drawing more attention.

And it's not, and as that happens, more and more people are going to get attention, and the whole network will grow. So that, and that meritocracy component comes in the play as you invest more into the system, as the system grows from your, from your creativity, from all of these,

then wealth comes back, you know, twofold, threefold to the entire community. Yeah, it's, it's I wonder if Google or Yahoo or or you know YouTube they could almost do that now

like if they sure there's you know I estimated to get a group of basically 10,000 people doing this would be you know probably $1.2 billion

and that would be to build the foundation the next one would cost the fifth of that. And then the next one would cost the fifth of that. And it kind of goes like this. But the cost goes down over time. It's the initial cost

to set this up, which is the big burden. It's the big hurdle to cross. But yeah, somebody like a Google, you know, a YouTube, or Facebook, you know, instead of focusing on VR, they could build, they could build re-R, real

reality. All right, but you, we got a question here, man. Let's see what our friends have to say. He says, hi, this is from Anthony Hayes. What's up, Anthony? Thanks for listening. Hi, Anthony. Hi, guys.

Listen into what you're trying to put out there. I'd like to add, in the days of Noah, corruption of the duel and mind got so bad that God decided enough was enough. Man's ignorance in those days are far lesser than today. We just seen in England the shops running bare. as people's self-greed and self-importance became clear, how dogs behave in moments of trouble and shutdowns, your societies that you are talking about, forget the one basis of human, greed, and corruption.

That, well, I think that that, is that more there? That you. I think it's, okay, so I guess what he's, I guess what he's trying to say here is that the very foundation of greed will make it so that we can't do it. What say you, Mr. Wizard? Well, you know, we were just talking about this in the game. When you have a greedy player, you know, the choices that they're going to choose are going to negatively impact the others.

That's pretty much what he's saying. Agreed. You know, the difference in this type of proposed system would be that your greed does not take away from someone else's opportunity. opportunity. Right. Because in the wider world, that's typically what it is. When a greedy actor acts in that way, they're removing the opportunity from other people. Right.

When you have a universal standard of living, now that greed, while it may still remove some of their opportunities, not going to really impact their bottom line of living life. so now my you know and this is kind of getting into psychology of people you know if yeah you might have taken away my ability to earn a dollar and now I can only earn 90 cents because you beat me to market about this or you you you know you stole this from some other person or whatnot but I'm going to go home I'm going to be able to eat I have food I have my family my friends I have my entertainment I still have my opportunities. Now I can just form a better idea. My response to somebody, as opposed to, hey, you just removed the ability for me to provide for my family. My kid is going hungry right now because you took something from me. These are two very, very different, you know, psychological paths on how we look and view the world when we are done wrong against. If it's something that's really impacting, you know, those I truly love and care about and it's taking away my ability to provide for them, that's a whole different game.

That's when people pick up weapons, right? Yeah, yeah, that's when agreed. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, I think the idea of a universal basic lifestyle, I think one factor, that I haven't heard us talk too much about, which you just touched on there is it provides, it gives you back your time,

your greatest asset. It allows you to be the sole proprietor of that, which you do. You're no longer going to have this slave mentality. And if, and touching on what the, what our listener said is, you know,

instead of it being, yeah, I'm greedy, you took a dollar from me. Yeah, I came up and I made this better. but that money is going to be funneled back into the foundation, you know, at least some of it,

where now there's been this blockage that, you know, it goes to the top and it's supposed to come back, but it gets caught up in this guy's family office. You know what I mean? There's like a little... Trickle down. Trickle down. Trickle off to the side into this other account that I have over here.

You know, I got a rain capture, a little gutter. It goes right over here, all the runoff. It trickle down into my dam. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I think that that is something that should be factored in is this idea of your time. Because that's probably the only one thing that we all have that is equal, is that we all have 24 hours in a day. And some people have the great fortune of being able to utilize all those hours without having to go put their shoulder to the wheel for the man. Oh, yeah.

In a sort of way. Well, you know, and the thing is, is how many people are living paycheck to paycheck? A lot. A lot. Yeah. So many. And the reality of that situation is that every single dollar you're making, you're already spending it in your mind.

It's causing you stress. It's causing you worry. It's causing you concern. You're not focused on what makes you passionate. You don't give a shit about what makes you passionate. At that point, you just care about paying a damn bill. Yeah. So this is, you know, when you're,

you remove that aspect of somebody's pathology, when they're not worried about just paying the bills, when they're not worried about how they're not going to make it, how, you know, all the things they're not going to be able to do when their effort is rewarded with now all the things that they can potentially do or are, you know, and have a more, a larger propensity to do. Now you change the entire psychology of the situation. You change the motivations for why people do it. You change how, you know, through those changes of motivation, you're going to be changing, you know, how hard people work, their efficiency of work. They're, you know, their application to getting better at their, at whatever they're doing. Whereas when your paycheck to paycheck, you don't

really care. Yeah. You don't have the luxury of caring. And you don't have the luxury of caring, correct. Yeah. And how much, gosh, it makes me think of so many things. How much of the mental illness today is a direct reflection of people's ability to only scratch by. You know, they, people, people tend to define themselves by what they do, which is such a poor, I wish they wouldn't do that. Like, there's so much more than what you do. You are a brother, a father, a sister, a husband, a lover. There's so many things, but some people are like, I'm a truck driver.

Like, that's the one thing you go with. Like, no, no, okay, you're that, but you're all these other things. And I think that that's this unhealthy feeling. feedback loop that people get into, being a successful stockbroker, a lawyer, a president. When you pigeonhole yourself into this one identity, and especially when that identity is living paycheck to paycheck, that's when you start going crazy. It's like, oh, my God, on this one thing, and you cut off so much of who you are and you've cut off of the possibilities of what you can become or what you can be or what other people think of you. And I really like this idea.

I think there's a lot to explore there. And I wonder what it would be like if time was the actual currency that people could spend. I think that that would be phenomenal. And that's what this, that's ultimately what this kind of structure gets to. And, you know, the fledgling of the idea came from watching these indigenous tribes, actually, as I was traveling. You know, I went and stayed with them. I know a little bit of medical stuff, so I've fixed up a couple scrapes and cuts and, you know, applied some antibiotics and whatnot.

But watching their daily lives is, you know, yeah, they were working hard. They were working hard for the first four hours of the day when they woke up right before the sun, went out, caught some fish, got all the water for the day, harvested all the vegetables for the day. And guess what the rest of the day was? It was hanging out, having a good time, and june. enjoying the morning catch, enjoying the harvest, enjoying each other's company. And yeah, it wasn't always equal, depending on where they were in the world and the access to resources. But there was a fair number of them who were living much more quality lives than I would say anybody living a paycheck to paycheck.

And so the idea, exactly what you said is, what happens when you have your time back? And what happens when that's the arbiter of your daily processes and what you're going and want to do today? I don't even know that there's how many people get to the point where they get to do what they want today. I don't think there's quite a few in the Western world. Probably a small number. Yeah. And we teach kids at the very earliest age that, you know, if you look at the Prussian model that we have, moved in here. You know, you stand in front of an authority figure. You listen to these bells like

a Pavlovian dog and you'll raise your hand to go to the bathroom and get a hall pass. It's like we have, we're building the next generation of obedient workers. And it's been going on for way too long. Well, that was the whole education system anyway, right? It was. It was founded. I forget the guy's name, but he designed an education system to make workers. And that's what we adopted as our education system by some glorious use of the human brain. Yeah, I forget the quote. We have enough philosopher. We have enough like, but you know what?

Maybe that's what was, maybe if we look back at it, maybe we needed that to get where we are today so that we can build this new system going forward. Well, I think you could ever argue against them. right because all of those choices all of that effort everything that that had happened has brought us to today I mean that's yeah yeah you know all we we stand on the shoulders of giants whether those giants were indoctrinated workers or not you know however you know I think it does beg the question of could we be in a different place have we had we taken you know had we had we instead of focusing on as the human

a commodity. If we focus on the human as the end goal, you know, if we're all, for lack of a better word, we're all creators. Yeah. Even the thoughts in our head are producing waves that, you know, energy and frequencies that are going out and interacting with everything else around us.

In my model, it's impacting the unfolding of reality. But beyond that, you know, we are the arbiters of this earth. We are the people who create all the things. We are the people who are building all of the structures and all these things. So we are creators. And if the focus was on building better creators, radical individuals who were completely self-sustainable, who understood reason, understood logic, know how to observe. absorb information, understand the scientific method, able to apply these perspectives and processes to everyday life, would we be in a better place?

I think we would be personally. Because every single person who I've met in my life who's taken the time to get to that stage does wonders for the people around them, their community. They're the pillars of their communities. and I don't find too many pillars of communities that don't have those attributes. Yeah, I agree. I think there's, there's, I think that, I think we could adopt that and move it forward, like you said. I would really love to read that white paper. Maybe you can shoot that over to me and we could, we could cover through that.

So how, yeah, please. Oh, no, no, go ahead. How do you think that that transition? would begin, like, let's say we could begin to implement, you know, sort of some changes that would lead to what we were talking about. How would we begin a transition like that? I think one of the, there's two initial hurdles. One is the resources that we talked about. Right. The second is really the proper education system. We would need an education, we need to revamp the education system. Obviously, if 52% of people are only getting the sixth grade and 18%

are illiterate, we're not doing a good job. Right. So there needs to be, that's one of the larger hurdles that, you know, I see personally is because the other side of that coin is, you know, those people who are on the lesser side of education, yeah, they're going to have a lot of common sense, but they're not going to have any reasoning capabilities for these type of ideas and to them, you know, they're stuck in the paycheck to paycheck, the resource-driven environment. You know, to look into, you know, the future is something that most people can't do, but most people don't even have the luxury to do, as we talked about. If the resources could be overcome, it's simply a matter of, excuse me, simply a matter of

just getting the first few people who want to build the damn thing. I mean, that's kind of how everything starts. It's, you know, if you can get a few people who really want to build something like that, magic will happen. Kind of feel the dreams it. Yeah. Have you built it, they'll come. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. That's interesting. I had a, um, I recently wrote a paper to my child school. And I had this idea of, you know if you if you if you just change the structure of what the school is she i'm really lucky she goes to an awesome school but and i thought to myself like what if we did this thought experiment where you know you you on some level it you would have to try out for the school and i and i had some problems with that but you know the audition for the school could be like

okay what what can you do and you don't don't have to be really wealthy, but if maybe you're a, maybe you can build a Tongan wall or maybe you're good at agriculture, you know, but I think that there should be some sort of at least attributes. Okay, like what can you do? Let me, let me hear what your ideas are. If you're going to have a school for leaders to go to, what can you do? And what once you could figure out how to, well, that's actually, that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a really old model. That's the ancient mystery schools. I'm not sure how familiar you are of those. I love the ancient mystery schools. So, you know, especially the oldest one. It was, you know,

you would come in and you would, the only people who were initiated into those schools were people who actually were really well educated or well resourced or well, uh, defined in the world. But then there, those entire schools were 15 year processes. Yeah. Most of the, them, you know, to actually create leaders and create masters, or, you know, depending on what school you're talking about. And so, yeah, that model has been around for as long as we've been around. Probably longer, right? Quite a bit longer, probably. And I, there is something to that. Because, again, this kind of goes back to the meritocratist aspect of thing. Right. There should be, you know, somebody who spends the time and effort, who takes, who makes the sacrifices, frankly, from, you know, enjoyment and entertainment and all these other things to achieve the ability to, you know, not just have the idea, but to reconcile the idea and speak about it and try to convince other people about it. And, you know, or, you know, become a leader or things like this. That should be recognized.

in society. Because those are the people who truly make society better, you know, objectively, objectively looking back at history. And so you want to reward those people. And I think having, you know, a system like that where, yeah, you're in this thing, but it's not going to be a short process and it's not going to be a luxurious process and it's not going to be something that you get out and you're like, hey, hey, cool, pay me a billion dollars type thing. Because that's kind of, those are the upper echelons of what we call our elite schools these days. Right. If you remove those things and it was just focused on creating better leaders, better pillars of community,

I think that's something that would be exceptionally beneficial to society as a whole. Yeah. Imagine a group of like, say second grade. And maybe you have a class of 10 or 12 and you come up with an idea. And so you have this group of second graders or maybe even have an elementary school. And once a year the kids get together and they form a group. And each group has a project they work on. They work on it for six months.

And then after six months you have like this almost like a job fair slash kind of a Burning man thing where you go up on stage. and you invite the community into the school and you say, here's this product we created, here's this service created, here's this new type of music we've created. Each cohort can have their own project that they did. And it can be, it doesn't have to be limited to anything.

It can be whatever it is they've chosen to do. They get up and present it. I think you just hit the nail on the head. Okay. You invite the community into the education process. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You invite them in. You invite the, yeah, because why wouldn't you?

For one, right? And yeah, you know, there's, there's a new idea to come in. Right. There's, there's garbage like science fairs and stuff like that. But those are only like weekend events. What you're talking about, what you're talking about is the exploration of a young mind and then bringing in the community to not only reinforce that, you know, the wonderful ideas and the creativity. but then also to identify, you know, things that are going to grow the community. And each kid or group would naturally gravitate towards the stage in which they were like, look at this thing. This is awesome. And then the school or the entity, if it was a good service or project or product,

the school could invest in those kids and be like, let's start this business. Now the kids are in a business with this place. And that's where that crypto network comes back into play. Yes. Yes. Because and this is that, you know, one person, one vote in a decentralized aspect of all of that. But now all of a sudden, a portion of your app on your phone is, you know, student community projects. And you can pull that up.

And even if you weren't at the school that day, you see the videos. You see the multimedia of all these things. And you're like, holy cow, that's awesome. A sixth grader thought of that? Yeah. Let's prop these things. sixth graders up. And anybody in the community can then be like, hey, we want to invest $10,000 in these sixth graders to explore their idea to, you know, whatever. And, you know,

and things like that in the crypto network, you have different levels of voting. Not everybody needs to vote on everything all the time. I think that's part of the problem with these doubts. You know, you have a regional thing. If it's just a group of school kids at a local, you know, know, a 70-person school, well, the only people who should really be impacted by that are the 70, you know, the 140 parents roughly in that local environment. You know, and they can, they can vote to invest network funds at a certain scale. And so you break these certain scales off. And yeah, that's going to, it's going to be a hit and miss for a minute and it's going to be some trial and error. But I think the, the idea, the mechanism, the underlying mechanism works itself out because now if you have the people who are truly interested in that cool idea as the only people who are the arbiters of where money should go and where resources should go to these ideas then guess what community is going to get good the ones who are benefiting themselves by investing in these ideas of the community i mean you know it becomes a feedback loop again yeah there's You know, and it makes me excited because I think we're there. Like I think that ideas like this, conversations like we're having, books like no absolutes.

Like I think that this is the beginning of the new form that we've kind of been talking about. And it's exciting to me. Exciting to me too. You know, my thing is, I've also, you know, I've been the passion project of putting a community together like this. has been 15 years in the making for me. I came up with the original idea 15 years ago and thought I had it all figured out. It took 15 years before I could say, I got a good chunk of it figured out at least. But, you know, these types of conversations, you know, the ability for us to communicate with people at a personal level, especially, allows us, I think, to take this next step.

That's part of the reason that I'm now coming out and talking about my book and talking about these ideas is because I think that conversation needs to happen in this flow. And if it doesn't happen, well, I mean, I don't think it'd take a rocket scientist to look around and say, shit's kind of going off the rails. Yeah. And it's so welcoming to be on a level where you can talk to someone. And, you know, previously we were talking about the problems with top-down organization. But when we start speaking of things like, let's invite the community to come in and be part of it. Like, now you're talking about a real opportunity for everyone to participate instead of being forced into this box or pushed over here or allowed to do this. Hey, I'm inviting you to be part of the solution.

And there's something that changes in the way you think about the world and the way you participate in the world when you're given the opportunity or the invitation to be creative or the opportunity to, hey, let's see what you can do here. I really think that that's when creative change and real change and even magic can happen is when people have that. That's giving back our time. That's seeing ourselves different. That's seeing ourselves as a team or part of the other. other rather than an adversarial role in a competitive world. Or a commodity. Or a commodity.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's lifting the veil of commodification from people's vision, I think. I think so too. And I think you touched on it, but I think there is tremendous value.

Tremendous value. Because from my own personal. experience. It was when I first came up with that idea and then I started living more of that lifestyle, even though I couldn't afford to really. I was still hustling. I was a digital nomad before digital nomad was a coin term. And, you know, so I wasn't making the money a digital nomad made, but, you know, I was surviving. But, you know, just, you know, slowly being able to integrate myself into that model at a personal level. Really. just changed my entire perspective on not just myself, my potential, but also other people.

You know, I have a genuine love for everybody. Yeah. Perfectly frank. Now, there's people who, you know, because of their deeds and choices, they're a little less love. And there's some people who, you know, they don't get any of it because of the same things. But at a general scale, you know, I love people. And everywhere I've traveled in the world, people are just people. They want the same things, you know.

And they're all pleasant and wonderful and inviting and caring. And there was one time I was down in Nicaragua. And I was traveling out to this place called the Corn Island. And you have to stop in a place called Bluefield. And then take a boat out there. This was back in the day. And so I'm stuck there for a couple days. So I'm just kind of wandering around me and a buddy and really just, I mean, lean two shacks with sheet metal and wood just kind of thrown together.

Probably, you know, four or five screws for the whole thing type idea. Super hot. 105 degrees that day or whatever. Humidity is through the roof. We're just sweating on the side of the road taking a break. And this sweet lady comes up and she's like, hey, can I offer you some ice water? in Spanish and we figured it out in my broken

Spanish at the time and so she takes us back to this little lean two shack sends her daughter out to run down the street to go get ice cleans out a couple plastic cups which looked like the only plastic cups she owned set us down we're strangers mind you

set us down her son was there trying to cool us off with a fan and daughter comes back with ice she pours us water and puts a fresh lemon in it just smiles the whole time. Now, mind you, we're both, we broke in Spanish, so we're not really communicating. This was just a gesture by somebody who had absolutely nothing, but a little bit of shade and the ability to get some ice water and brought us in and just took care of us.

And then we ended up staying and, you know, had a conversation when buying them dinner because why not? Yeah. You know, I mean, it was, and it was a wonderful day where I just got to have a human experience. And I can't. I could go on for probably another hour with stories like that. People are people. They want the same thing. They want family.

They want security. They want exploration. They want adventure. They want to feel good. They want to feel taken care of. They want to feel respected. They want to have operations. When you start to get a little bit further away and people are in tribes and groups of people and stereotypes and all this other stuff, well, a lot of problems start to arise.

At the end of the day, people are just people. Yeah, what a beautiful lesson that that lady taught you. And I'm sure you have caught that lesson before. But what a beautiful, you know what I mean? Like what a beautiful situation where here you are a stranger in a strange land. and someone, sometimes I think that's just the earth or a force bigger than you can imagine, just kind of giving you a hug, like, hey, man, I got you. And it makes me want to do that for other people.

Like I, there's this, let me, can I share a quick story with you here? Absolutely. Thank you. So I, as a, I'm a UPS driver. And on my route, there's one thing I have found is that no matter what you do, you can find something to do while you're doing it and make, it more enjoyable. And one of the things I like to do is I get to know all the families and kids on my route. And sometimes there's just these beautiful little moments that happen. There's this little

boy. He's probably maybe four years old, little Japanese boy. And like he barely speaks English. And whenever I pull up by his house, do you come running out of his house? He says he'll just stand there, like his eyes are all big. I'm like, you want to see inside the truck? You know, and for like the first year all he could say in English was yep so it would be you want to see the side of the truck yep hey you want to look over here yep did you go to school today yep you know it's so damn cute right and i would i got a i got a little uPS truck and whenever i see them i'll hand him some stuff but it's just this little thing that you wouldn't expect like this the the bright smile on a four-year-old kid that doesn't even speak the same language kind of makes and there's been days i've

and having such a crappy day and I show up and like I'm not even thinking about it and I see this kid run out and I'm like you know what to this kid I am something awesome right now like I he looks forward every day to seeing this truck pull up and it fundamentally changes the way I see myself

the world relationships just this little little lesson like teaching me yeah a little moment of time a little a little shot of perspective gosh that's beautiful you know there is you know again many stories but there is

another one where I was I was in the middle of San Jose Costa Rica a couple million people in the town. I'm lost. I'm in downtown. I've asked four people for directions and I don't know how familiar you are with most Latin cultures, but they don't like to tell you no. So I got four different directions and four different directions. And so I'm completely lost at this point and I'm sitting there looking at a map and like looking at buildings and this little old lady who must have been, 75 to 85. Comes up, doesn't speak a lick English, of course.

And she asked me where I'm going, and I knew enough to tell her where I was going. And she grabs my arm, and she walked me to where I needed to be. I can honestly say that moment changed my life. Because that was, like, I was frustrated. I was stressed. I was, you know, I'd been in the country for about two months at that point.

and I had had some good times, I'd had some bad times, and today I just needed, I forget exactly where I was trying to go, I needed to get something done though. And I'd been led astray four separate times by good intention to people, you know. And then this little old lady out in an hour just grabs my arm and walks me to exactly where I need to be, which was, by the way, six blocks away and took 30 minutes. And I was just like, wow. And ever since then, I'll always go out of my way to make sure that somebody needs to find their destination, simply because that woman did it to me.

See, okay, listen to the language there. Like, do you think that that's the way the world works? Like sometimes when you get frustrated, a force shows up and then shows you the way. Like you said, your destination. That sounds pretty close to destiny. You know, in a weird sort of way, it's almost like, you know, who's to say the world we see is the way the world it is? Maybe these people we see are just different forces and we've manifested them in our own mind. And this force is, oh, okay, I see what's happening.

You're a little too stressed out to interpret the reality. Let me have this person show you the way. It's almost like this invisible hand guiding us, you know? Well, in my model of things, you know, that goes into the every other moment, connected every moment. The infinites see of potentiality. I love it. And, you know, when you're in that mode, you're creating a very, a very strong presence. You know, people can feel that type of energy coming off of people.

And, you know, for whatever reason, and, you know, you could get in talking about the reasons, but, you know, that person's in the right moment at that right time picks up on that right signal. And, you know, I also say there's no coincidence. I agree. And so when something like that happens, I feel it's important to pay attention. And, you know, I've spent the past 15 years my life paying attention to moments similar to that, which has led me to here now. And I'm thankful for every single step of every single lesson along that path. so yes to answer your question i you know i do think there is there is a confluence of aspects of

nature of reality of the universe that do generate our unfolding of reality um and we are a direct impact upon that you know again attaching back to the creator conversation you know we are creating our own reality just so happens you're creating with eight other billion people and trillion, you know, a couple hundred billion plants and a lot of billions of animals and all these other things and all these other things. But yes, you are a part of that system and that system responds directly to you, whether you're entirely aware of it or whether it just is a parcel recognition or something like that, or maybe you don't even see it.

It still happens. And I think the more that we observe these types of events, you know, and are aware of these things in our life, the greater the appreciation becomes for just how much a part of everything else we are. And that's where, you know, personally, my love for, you know, people is born from. Because we are a part of this whole thing. And it's all unfolding. I'm naturally inquisitive and I've solved a lot of life's riddles, but I want to see where it's going. What are we unfolding? Why? What for? You know, those are fun questions for me personally. So yeah.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that, you know, it's, it's like an origami goose, you know, but then you, then you, you fold over one corner, like, now it's a praying manus. Now it's a frog. Wait a minute. What's going on here? And it's just this infinite folds that keep on unfolding. And it's, it's, sometimes it's easy to forget that. And it's easy to realize that when times get tough,

it's difficult to remember that you are having a actual physical response. It's difficult to realize that you're part of the reason it's like that. Does that kind of make sense? Like sometimes I get caught up. And if I get in cruise control, I forget that I'm the one in control or maybe not in control, but I'm the one who is at least interacting with this thing. Well, you have an effect.

Yeah, thank you. That's right. You know, control assumes that you're holding onto the wheel. Nobody's holding on to the wheel. Right, right, right. I'm pretty sure we can all agree on that. Right. But, yeah, you have the ability to influence, you know, the direction of things.

And, and yeah, we do, we do get lost in that. you know, if it's a crazy day, you're not thinking about any of that. That's the farthest thing from your mind. You're trying to survive the dang day. You're trying to get done what you have to get done. You're trying to not be busy. You're trying to take care of everybody's knees, yada, yada, yada.

And, yeah, this goes back to, you know, the idea of how we build our communities and society. But if, again, you were able to have more control over, you know, I'm not just looking for resources and trying to, you know, find some sustained level of subsisting, now I'm actually out here in the world. Imagine how that changes somebody's perspective in those daily events. You're not caught up in them anymore. Now your choice is much more your own. The ability to impact those events becomes a much more cognizant and aware profit. asset, right? And I think there's absolutely power in that, not from just the personal level,

but from, you know, the ability for people to get beyond themselves and have conversations like this. Let me ask you this question here. I agree. I want to be part of the team that provides people with more time. It seems like, though, in our reality, what's happening is that there is a massive amount of influence, a massive amount of money, a massive amount of power that's desperately trying to take your time from you. What would be, like, how would that, how would you get those entities to try to stop taking or going after people's time? Because it seems like if we all want to have more time and open up ourselves to the world, we have to control our own

time and we have to be cognizant of that. And it just seems like there's so much powerful interest trying to make sure that you don't do that. How would you shift that? Now, here's the magic of the idea. Okay, awesome. Is you out-compete them in the marketplace. All right, I'm listening. You're not trying to shift their gears.

You're not going to shift their gears. These are institutions that are, you know, enthralled in their models. And they will, you know, they're zombies to change. but the one thing and the one place that you can compete against these people and these institutions is in the marketplace and when you create an environment where all of the people in the organization are not only able to have their time and energy be spent mostly on their ideas and bringing those into the world but you also take away the bare, of entry, the leeches, the parasites along the way who are sucking the wealth of those ideas out as they come to the marketplace.

And you put those two together and you take that as competition to those people, you're going to win. Because the people that you have that are creating these ideas and putting their effort and time and love into this, those are the people who are going to eventually, even if not in the beginning, they'll beat a team of 100 people working on the same problem. Because they're going to be able to see perspectives in that problem that the team of 100 people working for a paycheck who are still worried about their bottom line and all these other things,

they won't have the proper perspective to view. Now, is this going to happen every time? is it going to happen, you know, instantly no. But over time, in a marketplace of ideas, which is what the free market essentially is, the people who have more ability to spend their personal resources, their freedom, their will, their passion, their love, on their ideas where they will directly benefit

are going to kick a shit out of people who are working for one dude on top of a mountain. I, you know, and anybody who disagrees with that, I don't know what to tell you, but you don't know people. Yeah. It's interesting. Like, as soon as you said that, I began thinking, how has it affected my life? And the moment I began becoming my own person, the moment I began believing in myself, loving myself and being like, I'm going to build this thing. All of a sudden, my consumption of other people's ideas kind of fell away.

You know, not ideas that I'm interested with other people, but the ideas that are trying to penetrate me. Yeah. Yes. And all of a sudden, I'm like, I got 25 things of my own than I have to do that I really want to do. I don't have time to consume this person's attempt to persuade me. So, yeah, that does make sense. And I'm much, I feel that I am much more aware of and passion. of and enthralled with these dreams and ideas that I have versus my job where I have to find

ways to be stoked about it by whether it's seeing a kid or or you know creating my own thing at this other person's work you know like right so yeah that does make a lot of sense and you know even like seeing the kid and having an interaction with a kid is in a few places in the country pretty sketchy proposition you know I mean you know and even so even your ability to create a better situation for yourself is under scrutiny, which is, it's wildly incapacitating the people. You know, it's like, I have some business down in Mexico, some manufacturing stuff, and my business partner, you know, he goes, you know, you just go down to Mexico and you want

something done and you talk to the guy and it gets done. as long as you're talking to the right guy. Yeah. You know, whereas here you have to go to this organization, get this stamp, you know, send in this paperwork, have this proper, you know, get them your account information and, you know, verification and regulations and all these things.

And by the end of the day, you're like, what was I doing? Yeah. Oh, man. So, you know, those barriers to entry, right? Right. They become profit centers for some people. but they become a depletion of resources for the creative and the enthusiastic and the actionable people of society. And they do that and then they create a very narrow path that if you follow this path, you can actually bring it to market.

By the way, this VC firm needs 20% equity because in order to bring this to market, we're going to need about a million bucks. And, you know, that's how it goes. You see, and, you know, every, every single step becomes a compromise. Wow, that is, there's a lot there. Every single step becomes a compromise. Is that only true in the system we have, or do you think that that's true in everything? That's a hard question to just off the top of the head. I would say it's certainly true in the system.

than we have. Yes. Or at least relatively true. You know, I think there's always, whenever you're going to have an interaction with other people, there's always going to be some form of compromise. Because we're trying to have a conversation and agree in ideas. So, you know, my ability to communicate, the evidence that I have versus what you have and your ability to communicate, there's going to be a compromise.

there. Compromise doesn't always and isn't always a negative thing. Sometimes those compromises allow us to enlighten ourselves. However, I would say that the compromise that is inherent in today's society

rarely, if ever, serves to have any sort of beneficial outcome to the individual. Yeah, that is. I was just thinking the same thing. In our society, the word compromise has a negative connotation because it means, oh, you can do that, but I'm going to, I want this from you. I want this from you.

Exactly. Where you and I can have a compromise that's synergistic and we're building something together. It's not like we're compromising. I mean, we are, but it's not like it has a negative compromise. It's more of like a positive building with each other to make our ideas better. Right. So in that context, I would say yes, probably in all forms of iterative. of society, you're going to end up with a compromising situation.

The context and the nature of that compromissity, I think, is a very, very wide spectrum of positive and negative. I had something written down to it just reminded me about, okay, so it's on truth. And in your book, you say, in order to actually know if something was true, you would have to have access to all the information that ever existed. Anything less is a guess. Even if that guess seems to be consistent, the only real verification would be to compare that guess to all information. And so it brings me back to this idea of truth. And truth for the people on the top in our system it's a lot different than our truth on the bottom.

And so how could the system we're talking about be a better truth? I know it's kind of a complicated question, but does that kind of make sense? Like, with truth? Sure. Okay. Sure. Yeah. You know, truth is relative in that sense.

Now, you're going to have a lot of relative truths. And I think this is what you're getting to that, you know, seem pretty consistent. And then when you have this type of society, you know, those relative truths from the top down are, you know, people must be governed are, you know, these ideas that, you know, ignorance is, is not applicable to the law, you know, things like these. These truths are relative that they're top down and when they impact people, people get typically have a negative emotional response to these types of truth. Right. We could probably dissect that a little bit, but in this other model of society, you know, the truths are going to be coming from a point of authority. These relative truths are going to be the relative truths of our, you know,

our elementary school kids who had a great idea. Yeah. Those are the, because the ideas are the heroes that are being talked about and discussed and, you know, moving forward in society as opposed to a guy or a girl or, you know, whoever can, you know, make people emotionally riled up and or, you know, get on the most TV shows or YouTube shows. I think the types of relative truths that come out of that model are going to much more positively impact people than what we see today.

did you say the ideas are going to be the heroes yes i can you can you just expand on that a little bit more i really like the way that sounds so i mean you know the ideas uh historically speaking are always the heroes right yeah we have the stories about you know people or whatnot but it's the ideas that are either villainized or you know are the heroes of history uh likewise i think from a societal perspective, if we were to remove personal experience out of it and just look down, it's the ideas of a society that are up for discussion. And it's the ideas that move forward a society. And if you have bad ideas or bad discussion around even good ideas, then the movement of the society is going to follow that track. Whereas if the ideas are the heroes and those are what are

identified and what people, you know, that's the dinner conversation as opposed to, you know, all the bad things we could say. It creates a different dichotomy. It creates a different relationship between the people as an individual and the community. So I think it would be, you know, significantly different. if our society was, you know, much more, even though we do it on a, you know, we do it kind of in the background, I think if the idea was the hero and it wasn't attached to an individual, it wasn't attached to a company, it wasn't attached to a chunk of money, now all of a sudden we're talking

about things that actually improve the whole community, the whole society. We're not talking about the dude who we think is going to do it. And I, you know, I, and another point on that, you know, everybody should be the hero in their own story. Yes, absolutely. And if, you know, you're the hero in your own story, then the group of stories becomes the idea.

The group of people, of all those heroes putting together their experiences and their, you know, their tribulations, and all of these things will create, will foment the ideas that move society forward. I really like that. I've never heard that before. I've never heard ideas are the heroes. And it opens up so much more.

Like, everybody can participate in an idea. And, you know, ideas don't have to be, well, you can't be part of my idea. But if you're just one person, you know, it's so limiting. But if you're part of an idea, it's like you get to be part of the solution. And you're not excluded from being the one person that can make it happen. And that seems like a bad idea.

One person being in charge of everything. That doesn't seem like a very heroic idea. Or tribes being in charge of something too. Yeah. You know, it takes the motivation or the predication towards tribalism and shifts it towards idealism, really. You know, if we're focused on the ideas, then we're, that's all we're. discussing. We're reasoning about it. We're discussing the logic. We're discussing the implementation, the systems that play, all these things when we're talking about ideas. If we're talking about a person, a group of these things, the ideas are not part of that conversation. We're talking about potentially their ideas and how it emotionally impacts us. But it's not a discussion about how these ideas can be a better thing in society.

you know and if it is in today's landscape it's who-hoo hurrah this is perfect nothing can be wrong with it because it came from this dude or this girl and there's inherent problems and I think you know you don't have to put on reading glasses to see it it's pretty prevalent everywhere you look yeah yeah I agree 100 percent I I really like the idea. I really like the idea of the system that we spoke about earlier. And I'm looking forward to next week when we can maybe discuss a little bit more about what that is. Maybe we can dive into the paper and get some more information there and talk more about their ideas. I got to get ready to go drive a truck and maybe see a four-year-old kid that'll change

my day for the way. This is so much. fun Benjamin. I really enjoyed it and I think we got to get into some really good ideas about it. So tell people where they can meet you and where they can find you and they can learn more about some of your ideas. As always, Benjamin C.George.com and you can also tune in next week on Wednesday for another episode of George and George. Yeah, absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining. Anthony, thanks for chiming in and talking to us. and that's it for this week, ladies and gentlemen. We will be back next week.

Thank you for your time. I hope you have a great day. And I'm going to try not to hang up on you after I do this part right here, Benjamin. So let me have one second. Loho, everybody.