TrueLife - People, Systems, & Ideas - Who had the biggest gun?

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Today we speak about systems theory, governments, & ideas w/Benjamin C. George

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 scar's my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears 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 Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. We are here with the one and only David C. George. You know them, I know them, we love them. There's no absolutes over here. We've talked about frameworks for life and frameworks for language.

And what you may not know is David C. George has a recipe, I think, for incredible success. Not only his books, but he's fun to talk to. And we've got some new ideas we want to discuss today, especially something that he's kind of been working on a little bit. And I'm hopeful he's going to kind of share it with us today. But before we share exactly what it is, I thought we'd take you down the pathway of how he got to this idea. and along the way we can share some stories. So David C. George, Mr. Wizard, I don't know if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, but just for the one or two random people that may show up, can you just introduce yourself

and then we'll take it from there? I'm Benjamin C. George or David C. George today, not sure how are your notes printed that one out. Oh, I'm sorry. But you can find me on Benjamin C. George.com. I'm author of No Absolute Framework for Life. I do a whole bunch of other little things here and there. Getting the podcast started up and enjoying talking to George weekend and week out about the world, how things work, and where we're going. Yeah, absolutely.

And as we got started, you know, we were just talking about building things and projects and working together. And we came upon this idea. Both Benjamin and I have done some things before. And for me, I had started a production. company when I was in my early 20s. And there was a lot of things involved. There were dancing girls and there was music and there were drugs. And, you know, none of those things really, while a great time, it's kind of a recipe for disaster.

And me and my buddy, we had a great time. We made some pretty good money, you know, but we pretty much blew all the money. And at the end of the day, that recipe led to us kind of cracking our friendship and cracking our way into entrepreneurship and understanding that, you know, partnerships are pretty good for marriage, but they're pretty difficult in business. And a lot of times it can lead to the understanding of no loyalty. And that's kind of how we had got started about talking about business and building things. And maybe you can share, like, how have you found the partnership relationship to work in previous adventures with yourself?

You know, I've had it never end up well, but I've had it start out great a number of times. You know, there's a lot to be said about having somebody else who shares your energy and your enthusiasm for a project. And yeah, you can get things going. But the second that dollar signs start to roll in the bank accounts, you know, all of a sudden, hey, where did that laptop come from? Hey, I didn't know we were, you know, flying the Florida this weekend. You know, a lot of random things start to occur.

And a lot of it can be, you know, a lot of it can be done in the front end if, you know, you have good communication and you're, you know, you establish boundaries and guidelines and rules for for the whole project and endeavor. But oftentimes it's, you know, like what you did. Hey, let's start a production company because we have all these. connections and we can make some money. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. All right. So now we're making a whole bunch of money. Now what happens? Well, now bad choices and her feelings and, you know, dishonesty and all these things start to flood in because it's, it becomes driven by, you know, the dollar sign. Who gets to spend the money? Who gets to have the ownership? Who gets to have the power, the control? Who gets to enable the vision? Who gets to be called, labeled the C.E.

Oh, all these little things that all of a sudden they just accumulate over time into, you know, very large rifts in relationships and partnerships and partnerships in general. In my experience, unfortunately. Yeah, I think that's an experience that a lot of people have. And even partnerships that tend to work out for long periods of time, you know, it seems to create distance between the people that created. It's like this shared vision turns or splinters into, you know, and one little misdecision turns into two different pathways after a long enough period of time. And it just, it seems to go down that road. You know, it's almost like, you know how that there's that saying that says,

if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. But on the flip side of that, if you start taking money to do that thing you love, it tends to erode the passion for that thing because now it becomes a chore. And the same thing with the relationships, stuff like that. But you found something interesting. You took a little stint down to South America and were at a hostel for a while. And what was it about the hostel that made you begin to see the world differently? Well, I had started, it ended up being a six-year journey.

I didn't realize it would be a six-year journey. when I started, it was just one of those things where it's like, all right, I'm done with what's happening here right now in my life. And I packed up everything and spun the globe, ended up in Costa Rica. And I was just sitting at hostels and enjoying my cultural experience. You know, we'd have people from Japan coming in. A guy was teaching us how to make sushi. We had, you know, people from Colombia. We had people from, you know, all over Europe doing, you know, six-month tours.

And so what ended up happening is you can. got this kind of very creative vibe, a very, you know, detached and free vibe in these hostile environments because, yeah, they're cheap, you know, so you can afford to not, you know, be burdened with staying there for a whole month, you know, it'll cost you're out $450.50. And, you know, the people who are staying there, that was affordable enough to them. Some people worked at the hostel. Some people worked locally in the towns, you know, other people were just traveling through, there's always an environment of creativity and fun and there was always potlucks and bringing people together from all different cultures and everybody cooking one dish or

meal from their culture and then having these feasts. I mean, just wonderful experiences. And it was one of those things where it's just like, wow, how can you bottle this up and bring it to the world? Because everybody who's here is just enamored with the experience enjoying themselves. profusely. And on top of that, you know, one of the guys who worked at a hospital, he ended up moving on to start a restaurant attached to that hostel. And so, you know, I got to see a lot of these, you know, ideas not just blossom, but, you know, flourish too. And when you get to see

things like that come to fruition from an environment like that and without the friction that you would normally get in, you know, society, like we're talking about the partnerships, right? Right. One of the many nuances, you know, you have to wonder, well, could this be, could this work on a larger scale and how could it work? And so I've been on that journey ever since. And it was about 15 years ago now, actually. What, like, it's so amazing to me. Like, myself, when I came to Hawaii, I lived in California and I was working at UPS and I just kind of rolled the dice.

and I picked up, I sold everything I had. I had a nice car that I didn't own it, but I was making payments on it. I was running a nice place by the beach and had a little like rowboat and like, I had, I was well. I had a lot of bills, but I was doing well. I had the appearance of living well, but I wasn't satisfied. And so the opportunity came up where I could take a spot in Hawaii. So I sold everything I had.

I was 29 years old. And I just sold everything. and I had about two weeks to get here. I told my family, look, I'm moving to Hawaii. I'm going to go out there. I'm going to find a place to live. I'm going to work there. I'm going to live there.

My parents said, what are you talking about? You don't even know anybody there. You never even been there. Like, how are you going to, when are you going to do this? And I'm like, two weeks. They're like, two weeks. What are you talking about? You know, and it was not only scary, but it was also very liberating.

You know, you don't realize how much crap you have until you, you try to get rid of it all. And then you go, dude, I want to get rid of this? Yeah, I get rid of that, get rid of that. And so I condensed my life down to two black bags. And after I sold everything, I had like two grand, which was a pretty big eye-opener for me because I had the illusion of having so much. And, you know, I probably had like 30 pairs of shoes, you know, like just ridiculousness.

And so I sold everything, condensed my life down to two black bags. I got on the plane. And on the plane, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to Hawaii. I kind of shot at the Kila. I'm all excited. And then when I landed in Hawaii, you know, I sat in the baggage claim and everything just hit me. Like, oh, I don't know where, I don't know where my job is. I don't have a car or no place to live.

You know, I didn't do anything. I didn't do, I didn't do any research, nothing. I got on the plane and went and just figured, yeah, I figured out when I get there. And so I sat, I'm sorry, yeah? No, no, no, go. And so I, um, I sat in the baggage claim. alone with my two black bags and you know i wasn't bawling crying but on the inside i was just really scared i'm like dude i've i made the worst mistake ever i don't even know what to do i don't

know what to do and so i ended up walking outside to the outside the terminal and i caught a shuttle that goes into wikiki and the guy's like where are you going and i'm like i need to find a cheap place to stay and he's like oh i got you man i know a spot he's like so he takes me to like this kind of Roach Motel on the back of Kehoe, which is like in the backside of Waikiki. And it was a room for like 60 bucks. And I stayed there for four days. I went on Craigslist. I found a room to rent from these Korean kids.

Ended up being like a poker house, which is a whole other story. But I got a moped and figured out where work was. And, you know, a few years later, I had bought a house that I met my wife. I bought another house. sold a house and you know it's so amazing what you can build yourself up to be if you strip yourself down and start from the foundation again and get rid of these ideas that were weighing you down this this idea of having to have and it's kind of a way of forcing yourself to let go of things and only after you do that can you begin to to let the light shine through you i know that

sounds kind of cliche or silly, but I think you can really begin to build and see yourself better once you strip away all the paint and all those stuff. Yeah, all the attachments. And when you spoke about going down to Costa Rica, it gave me that feeling again. The way you described it was like, it was like this care-freeness and you're surrounded by this novelty and there's new cultures and, you know, all of a sudden there's a new you emerging. Do you think that it's that, like, I was trying to narrow it down to one or two things, but I guess it's all of that that allows you to rebuild and start to see the world anew.

How would you describe being able to see the world anew like you did when you were down then? Well, you know, my experience, interestingly, was pretty similar to yours. It was all of a sudden it was like, I decided I'm doing this and a couple weeks later. I was gone. Nice. And then all of a sudden, I rolled into the San Diego. Jose International Airport, I walk out, people are yelling Spanish at me, all the taxi drivers, right, that are trying to pick you up at the airport. I don't speak Spanish. Meanwhile,

the only piece of information I have is the name of a hostel that I found online. And that was it. And so, you know, it was similar. It was just like, oh, crap, I've bit off something here. I hope I can chew. You know, it's like, I hope I can swallow this one. And yeah, but it is one of those things where all of a sudden you strip away all of these attachments, you know, we're indoctrinated into this world where of consumerism, where it's, you know, oh, you have to have the PlayStation,

oh, you have to have the car, oh, you have to have X, Y, and Z, you know. And all of a sudden, when you get rid of all those things, I was down to a backpack and a laptop. I was a digital nomad before the coin was turned. And so it's one of those things where all of a sudden you're like, oh, I don't need the car.

I don't need all of these things. And then, you know, you learn a lot more about people. Because at that point, you're being honest. You're not hiding behind all of these, all this stuff. It's just you. You're just there. This is who I am. This is what I'm doing.

I don't, you know, there's not much else to the story right now. But guess what? This is, every story has a beginning and this is the beginning, right? And so, you know, I think when you, when we're talking about, you know, we've talked a lot about perspective and we've talked a lot about, you know, trying to reprogram the brain essentially and, you know, different ways to do that. But I'd say one of the most effective ways is to simply just do something like that. You know, something that seems entirely irrational at some level. When you're like, oh my gosh, you know, people talk about longevity. They talk about, you know,

loyalty to companies. They talk about pensions. They talk about, you know, all these things that are kind of embroiled into this, you know, culture of the United States that this is how we operate once you become an adult. And if you can shed those, shedding the stuff becomes really easy. And then you get to, you are a new you. You get to figure out who you really want to be in life, you know, what you want to do, what you actually want to accomplish. Otherwise, you know, it's just the same repetitious cycle of the party, the friends, the, the, the hand. the, you know, the concerts, the festivals, the movies, the revolving door of media, or, you know, the doom scrolling on TikTok every day, you know, what have you.

Yeah, it's, I think it's like the hero's journey. You know, after I moved, I really started looking into philosophy, much more after I had moved and come out here and started going through some tragedies. And it's so amazing to be able to identify with the stories of the past when you begin to write your own story like that. And the good news for anybody is you should do one thing every day that scares you. And if you can, like I'm not saying be reckless and leave your family. And I'm not saying to do that. However, I think if you're willing to take a chance and believe in yourself, then what you're,

you can accomplish is something you can't even imagine right now. And so, you know, when I think about the hero's journey, I think about, you know, getting the call to action. Like you feel like, oh, man, I don't feel like I'm fulfilled. I feel like part of me is dying over here. And I'm just doing a bunch of blow and hanging out with strippers. And like, well, well, that has its own sort of dirty happiness to it. Like, there's so much more to life. And if you, each, start feeling like you're dying inside, then that's a call to action. Like part of you is dying inside. And you know what?

You can do that stuff forever. But if you feel that call to action, you should act upon it. And if you, once you begin to act upon it, you'll see your story beginning to unfold. And like, whenever I read mythology, whether it's Odysseus or, you know, the green night or anything from Joseph Campbell, or I watch Star Wars, where you read the story about the camel to the child, you know, you can't. can begin to see yourself in these works of art and it will allow you to understand that you're a work of art and like all works of art parts of you are chipped and flaking but i think it's that initial step of fixing the loneliness inside yourself that will allow you to begin to fix the loneliness in your environment and when i have you have this beautiful project called the terra librae project

And it's based on the foundation, not of, I think it's building a better environment. And, you know, it's not so much giving an income to people. But can you just share maybe the foundation of that idea with people? I think it's a beautiful idea. Thanks. So the 10,000 foot perspective down is, you know, what happens if you can use technology, merged with sustainability and, you know, you know, modern practices for regenerative power creation,

for, you know, communications, for all these things. And what happens if you can create a community where, you know, the foundations for life, the, you know, where to live, food, water, communication, internet, you know, having a portal where you can sell your goods and services that is automatically generated and a drag-and-drop interface so you can be unique. You know, removing the roadblocks to bear in barriers of entry from just, hey, I have an idea to, hey, this idea people like and they want more of. If you could put all of this and take all of the things that really stop people from

achieving those things in society and take all of those pieces out and just leave the core of it, you have. And that's kind of where it started from. And from there, it was an evolution of process. You know, it's been a lot of R&D and, you know, making actual fiscal systems for like an automated guarded for instance. Or, you know, something that, you know, power distribution and communication over a three-mile area based upon, you know, just a differentiation of temperature between night and day. you know, some very interesting projects that have some very interesting applications. But then, you know, then it was, well, how do you make this an actual thing that would work in the real world? And so that's been an evolution of process of, well, you have to have certain pieces to interface with, you know, society.

How are you going to trade goods? How are you going to resolve conflict? How are you going to, you know, get new people in? How are you going to manage all of these little nuances of things that you really don't think about when you're like, oh, that's a cool idea. But when you get to the brass tax of things, the brass tax of things is pain in the ass. I mean, that's why there's so much red tape in society. Because when you get down to brass tax, that's all it is, is brass tax. And there's many different reasons in ways that that works itself out now.

But how do you create a system that doesn't fall into that same pit? And so, you know, I've been working on this for about 15 years, just kind of a passion project on the side of thing. And it got to the point where, you know, now I'm to the stage where I have a working business model because at the end of the day, it did have to become a business in order to fit in with the world. And so, you know, that's kind of, and I think projects like this will be kind of, you know, we talked about how we're kind of seeing the erosion of. nation states and we're going to have like Apple cities and things like that. But I think we'll also see the growth of projects like this. Because, you know, at the end of the day, you're going to have, and we're already seeing it. I already hear about people who are forming communities and Kentucky's and places like this where, you know, they bought up thousands of acres of land and they're just

kind of very selectively selling off private parcels to certain individuals, right? So we're already seeing it happening in the United States. States, and I think we'll continue to see kind of a movement towards that because the larger reality of the situation is, you know, people disagree. And it doesn't seem that there is a mechanism in place for that disagreement to be handled training. And in fact, it seems more and more disagreements continue to crop up now that we realize that we disagree. And so I think we're going to see a continued push for smaller projects like this to kind of, you know, people who agree with each other. People have same moral and ethical points of view online, philosophical points of view online, religious points of view online, economic points of view online. Yeah, I can definitely see that path moving forward.

You have the Free State project, I think, is it New Hampshire or somewhere up in that area? You got sea land. You got other things too, you know. Yeah. What is sea land like seesteading? Well, they bought this old, I think it was a World War II kind of British outposts that was built in the ocean. And so they just purchased it and they declared themselves a micronation. Which according to UN charter, you know, I think the only things you have to have are some sort of seal like, you know, the seal of the United States, a currency. and a passport of some sort yeah yeah that's that seems like it could be pretty easily done

as long as you had the land and i'm sure you could get invaded though or be sanctioned well that's the thing you know now now you're kind of you're living by the grace of wherever you decided to give the middle finger to right in this case the sea lands out in the ocean so they don't have too much to worry about but when you're in like you know rural Nebraska or something like that, you're living by the grace of not just the state of Nebraska, but also the federal government, you know, they, you know, and they could come and shut you down anytime, really. Right. And so, yeah, it's an interesting dichotomy that kind of develops. Not to mention if they wanted to put like a, you know, you're not allowed to travel in our country,

so now you're stuck in your little five acres, you know, that way. Right. Good luck getting food if the fish is bad that day or clean water or yeah i and i think that there has been if you look back to the founding of america i think that there were a lot of places that were tried some so i hate to say the word utopia but like there were several projects that were put up where different societies were tried and and you know we ended up with one that was that worked well for a long time but You are seeing the cracks. Go ahead. Right.

You know, and why most of those failed is division of labor. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, especially in those times when you didn't have mechanized machines, when you didn't have automation, when you didn't have computers, when you didn't have these things that allowed you to kind of move around the physical labor of a human being, somebody had to shovel the shit. And the person who shovels the shit is obviously. going to be looked at differently than the person who's standing in the town square decreeing everything that's happening in the town or the mayor or you know so now you

the division of labor creates these you know almost imaginary but definitely visceral you know divides in societies classes in society yeah so I think you know that's why we have we have the opportunity now to kind of overcome a lot of those turtles. You know, you can now, instead of having, you know, somebody to shovel the shit, well, you can make a system, you know, like aquaponic systems for instance. You can have a system produce hundreds of pounds of fish a year, produce tons of vegetables a year. It doesn't produce any waste. And, you know, you can have automatic systems clean up animal waste. You can have all sorts of different things. We can institute the better parts of technology, the things that we've refined

into, you know, really bad ideas because of capitalism like, you know, big factory farming and things like that, we can take those types of engineering principles and those types of things, make them on a smaller scale, adds sustainable technology and practices to them, and all of a sudden create sustainable community. And so you remove that division of labor from the aspect of the community itself. And then, you know, the community isn't just a community, but it's often. business where it's not just hey we're all working for a commune essentially we're all working for individual wealth and if you structure it's the right way with you know like a blockchain backbone so you have your own tokenized currency um you can have it so that everybody who's producing their

goods and services in the community and selling them at in the world at large uh is generating individual wealth but because of the increased transactional load on the network the community is growing and prospering as well and so now you have something that instead of you know all of these different hurdles and all of these different roadblocks to individual wealth your focus is to create as many individual wealth points in the business as you can because that is is going to grow the the greater whole of the business itself and so you're investing in people essentially at the of the debt. Yeah.

It sounds, well, first off, let me touch on the division of labor. Like, I've never really thought too much in depth about that. But I would have to agree that that is one of the dividing lines where society begins to deviate from brotherhood or sisterhood or as a community, because that's where you start drawing the lines of, okay, you shovel the shit, I count the money, you know, and, you know, every kid makes fun of the janitor, right? Every one of them. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. And it seems to me, if I'm just taking a cursory glance back at history, that was what the slaves were used for. You had a class

of, you know, maybe merchants and then other classes, but then you brought in the slaves to do that stuff. And, you know, slavery's been around since the dawn of time, it seems like. to me. And only recently did we decide that everybody's a slave. You know, it seems like we just went, okay, we're going to tell everyone's slavery's ended, but now

you're all slaves, except for this handful of people up here. Pretty much. Isn't it kind of seen, like, it seems like the drudgery of work. You know, we have, and to touch upon what you said about mechanization and in allowing the

product, allowing the computer systems to do the worked for us, it seems to me that work has become the, instead of people having time to create things or be artistic, everybody's time is taken up with work, especially now with inflation. It's like, you have to work 17 hours a day just to maintain the status quo. And I don't see that going away. I see that getting worse. So what can you just touch you a little bit more on division of labor in the history

and how we can get it to change now? Well, I mean, to your point, division of labor has always been there and it was massively driven by slavery. You know, we don't call it slavery these days. And then, you know, closer to our historical past, we called it indentured servitude. You know, there's been clever names

throughout antiquity for it. But the reality is, you know, by and large, most people walking around, not have the freedom just to say, hey, tomorrow I'm going to go do whatever I want. Right. And when you don't have that freedom, you know, it creates that problem where, you know, now instead of maybe having the creative idea or going on the adventure that would spark the creative idea, now I'm stuck working, you know, 15 hours a day coming home,

spending two hours cleaning up because I haven't cleaned up in three days. Yeah. And then I have to go to bed because, oh, I'm already only going to get six hours of sleep after I sat down and ate a bite to eat, right? Yep. You know, when you, when somebody's time is taken up like that, there's no opportunity for an ulterior thought of, hey, maybe wouldn't it wouldn't be cool to paint something neat or wouldn't be nice to go off and, you know, see this thing or, you know, even have the idea of, hey, you know, I could actually do X, Y, and Z better if we did it. this way because, you know, I have experience in this field. So it removes innovation just from the, from the idea talent pool, if you will. And, you know, where we're at today is, I mean, you can see it. When's the last time you saw a movie that was like, hey, that's pretty original?

I can't tell you. Right? Yeah, me either. I mean, you know, everything's a remake, a sequel. a rehash, a reboot, you know, there has been a couple originals along the way, but then you realize that, oh, it was actually a novel that was written in 1946. And you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. You know, and so we're already seeing it kind of play out at scale, which is once you remove, once you just turn people into worker bees, you remove the ability for them to innovate, for them to create, for them to, you know, come up with the, a great idea. More so, when we pack on all of the roadblocks in society, all of the, you know, well, if you don't have a million dollars, nobody's going to look at your movie script to begin with. Or if you haven't made 10 movies, or, you know, if you're not, you don't have 50,000 followers on TikTok,

you know, all of these little nuances of things in our society kind of play themselves out to the point where it's like, me actually having an idea as a human being and being able to bring it to the world, there's so many barriers of entry, let alone if you actually even have the knowledge of how to get there. Most people are never even taught how to steps to take to get there. Register an LLC? What's that? Right?

You ask, I would gamble if you were to ask the average high school kid graduating this year, how do you register an LLC? I think you would get less than 30% of them. And that's probably on the high side. Yeah, I agree. So how do we change these things now is you have to basically, you have to change the rules of the game. You have to change how the game is being played.

If average individual A, Alice, you know, only has one hour to herself every other day. Well, she's never going to be able to, go down and chase her dream. She's never going to take that idea and run with it. She'll never be able to quit everything and sell everything and hop off to a different location. There's just too much friction. But if all of a sudden, you know, she didn't have to worry about the house payment. She didn't have to worry about the, you know, the water, the utility bills, the internet. Those are taken care of. So now all of a sudden, the things,

13 hours, I don't have to work, you know, just to cover my ends meet. I can work eight hours and I still have my money to go do my things and live my social life. But I actually have six hours left where I can go be, go explore me, go grow, go adventure, go on a vacation, go see new things, have a novel experience. And I think if you were to interview a lot of people who came up with great ideas, a lot of those people have had the time to do that. Right. So do you think, what do you think about like a, you know, caught like, obviously the student loan debacle is, is that, just a debacle. But what if there was some sort of program? And maybe this could fit into the framework of the Terra Libre is like, what, what if there was some sort of grant for good ideas? Like, okay, here's X amount. Let me see your idea. Okay. And then the community gets together, looks at it. Yeah, it looks pretty good. Okay. Here is, here's a grant or here is. here is a place to stay while you work on your idea or how does something like that pan out? Yeah, so that's one of the benefits of having this whole thing arranged as a business and a network.

Right. Is because now you can allocate X amounts of funds that are set just for that. And we've talked about Dow's before and we've talked about one person, one vote. So now all of a sudden somebody with a good idea, you know, everybody can propose ideas to this channel, let's say. They can propose an idea to this channel, and as long as there's an X amount of response from the community saying, yes, let's fund this, they get funding for that project. And that can be handled without the ability, you know, you don't need any moderators, you don't need people reviewing projects, you don't need any of these things. The people in the community and the business who want to participate in this will participate in it. They're not actually putting up their own funds.

they're just voting to allocate funds of the network and business itself to fund the project. And so, and this is all done with smart contracts. And so, you know, you don't have arbiters in this situation. And so you enable a much more meritocratist environment. This sounds a lot like, as we're talking about this, I bet you this is happening. Like, this seems like the world economic form is already doing. They just take money from everybody. which is not their money and they fund other people's projects and other parts of the world.

And if it works and they take all the profits from that and fund their own pet project for their kid over here. The thing is, the thing is you would structure it in such a way so that the people who are running the project, they are generating the individual well. Right. Right. There isn't contracts here that are like, oh, by the way, because we funded it, we get 90% of the proceeds in perpetuity or some crazy stuff like they have going on in the world today. So it really comes down to the nuance of the structure and the beauty about where we are technologically, we can create a smart contract that dictates exactly that.

And so there's no interpretation, right? Right. And when you remove that interpretation aspect, then you get a lot much more of a fair system that ends up playing out. Yeah. And just for like, I have a, I've read a little bit about. smart contracts and different cryptocurrencies that are tied to them and how sometimes, you know, crypto can be both a means of transaction and a smart contract. But can you give me an idea of like, let's say that I wanted to start a media company

for the Terra Libre project. How would a smart contract look in that world? So when you have a smart contract, So let's start with the blockchain. Okay. So the blockchain is going to be a series of transactions grouped into a block is what they call. A block is just, it's usually a set number of transactions. And then it just every time that the next discovery in the algorithm happens, which is mining,

then a block is generated. The transactions are inserted into the block, the maximum amount of transactions, that block then goes onto the blockchain, and it's basically a running ledger. A smart contract allows you to basically execute code when that happens. And so let's say, like, I have the rights to my book. And I want to sell you the rights, but, you know, I'm going to, I want 15% royalty. So we would have a smart contract that I would get 15% royalties every time the book sold. And those sales can be tracked by, you know, in different, many different mechanisms, right?

But they could be tracked by a smart contract themselves. But then the idea would be that instead of having, you know, the lawyers and contracts and arbitrations and, you know, escrow and all of these things, Now I can take all of those and just wrap them up into some code that will, you know, fairly look at both sides of things and say, yes, X happens, so Y can happen. Or Y happens, so I get 15% on my royalties from my book. You can do a lot of things with smart contracts. You know, you've got things like NFTs and stuff like that, which is a non-fundable token, which basically just means that, like, it was. would be for instance the best way I think about it personally is like a deed to a house. Yeah, you know, I own the deed as soon as you pay off the loan for you get transferred

the deed and that would be automatically driven type idea. That brings me, I want to jump right back into this, but I want to, I want to, I've never thought about, like we talk about automation a lot, but when we start introducing smart contracts and NFTs, it makes me, I heard a while back that one of the biggest sections of people that are in danger are like a white collar class of people that do finance. And when you talked about this, it seems to me like a smart contract could be way better than a lawyer because there's really no ambiguity in the smart contract. You said this, I get that. There's no, well, I didn't, what's the definition of is?

You know, there's none of that in there. And so. Right. So I've, you know, I wrote many. years ago that one of the you know everybody when blockchain was coming around they're like oh you know it's just there's nothing backing it right and you'll still hear that today there's nothing behind it you know it's not backed by anything but the reality of the situation is is that it takes the cost of trust between any two entities and democratizes it down to the cost of electricity wow

let's say that again let me say that again i want to i need to process that all right so it takes the cost of trust between any two entities, you and me doing business, and democratizes it down to the cost of electricity. And what is, can you define, what's the cost of trust? Like, can you unpack that? So the cost of trust in the world is going to be all of your institutions. It's going to be the overhead of having the building. It's going to be the lawyers.

It's going to be the notary. It's going to be the banks. It's going to be all of that infrastructure, all of the physical infrastructure, all of the digital infrastructure that they have to support. all of that IT infrastructure that they have to support. All of that cost gets replaced with the cost of electricity to mine at any given location in the world. Wow.

That's giant. That is giant. So what that means on a practical level is that eventually as all of this technology gets more mature, which now it is, is the businesses who are able to adopt and incorporate this technology will be operating at such a much more efficient pace than their competitors, that it will just kick off a cascade of adoption because, you know, obviously, if my margins dip by 30%, because I'm not, I don't have all of these fees that I normally would on a yearly level,

well, how are you going to compete with me as a competitor? You're going to have to figure out how to, how I did it, and adopt similar technology. And so that's one of the things that I see is the real value behind Glot Chain is just because it does take all of that, that nuanced financial infrastructure and puts it into very concise, you know, black and white code, smart contracts, you know, and all run by the cost of electricity by, you know,

networks that are the only thing that we've built that really can't, that hasn't been hacked yet, right? Yeah. So Bitcoin as a network has never been hacked. This is something that's been running in the wild, you know, is worth untold amounts of money and has yet to be hacked. Now, people like third party exchanges and stuff definitely get hacked. But the network itself has never been hacked.

There's not a piece of software out there that's never been hacked. And it's just because of the distributed nature of the network itself. in order to hack Bitcoin, you would have to hack 51 plus percent of every single person running Bitcoin all across the globe all at the same time. It just becomes an impractical thing. Yeah. Gosh, it's so, it's so liberating to see it from that point of view. And it is crazy as things seem right now, for me, it kind of pulls back the curtain a little bit. because like the weight of the system is what's holding us back and we have the if if if block chain if the promise of blockchain can do these things and it can strip away just the husk from the corn like gosh man that would help out so many people we would actually have instead of having this world of nepotistic ridiculousness or all these people that are in bullshit jobs making tons of money siphoning off the system we would have people.

in positions that are that merit those positions like you would actually see people that fucking knew what they were doing maritocracy yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and the thing is is you know getting getting people to that meritocratist stage you know people would think well it's going to be hard to do but the reality of the situation is is you know as soon as the rules are set in the place and everybody knows it's hard-coded and it's fair. Nobody tries to cheat those systems in. Right.

Yeah, there's a few, but most of the people accept that as part of, you know, it becomes an accepted wisdom pretty quick. So it's one of those things where, you know, the transition from, you know, oh, how do we get rid of all these like banking cartels and all of this stuff? Well, it's really easy. As soon as people at a consumer level start to adopt these things, those things will just naturally get pushed out to the extremities. Yeah, and you could argue that's kind of what's happening now.

That's why we see these crises and even these wars is people hanging on to this, oh, we got to have this old system still. You don't understand it was not good. It's horrible. And it's not going to be without friction either. I mean, so for instance, I mean, from like the adoption perspective, like, you know, one of the promises of these things is that it's borderless technology, right? Like if I'm in Venezuela, I can send you, you know, something.

in Israel. What actually ends up happening is because, like, the Ethereum, for instance, they have a central authority. You know, they have people who run it. Now all of a sudden, those people become subject to state coercion, to financial coercion, to just political coercion, social coercion. You know, and so, for instance, if I wanted to send Ethereum today from Venezuela to you in Israel, I cannot do that.

So, you know, the promise of the technology is there, the reality and practicality of it is you have a whole, you have a massive monolithic system that has been in control for a very long time.

And they're not just going to roll over and take it. Right. Right. So there is going to be friction along the path. Yeah. And it seems that is where we're at with all technology. I was I was talking to this gentleman,

Dan Hawk yesterday, and he's a, he's an indigenous Native American, and he is, he is big on space. And we were talking about the way in which satellites can monitor, you know, not only human beings or,

or different, they can be used for military applications, but they can also monitor resources. And one thing he was having problem with was for, he represents a large number of tribes in the United States. And they were wanting to put their own satellite up to monitor resources. And the government was giving them a lot of pushback. Like, oh, no, no, no, you guys got to have all these, you got to have all this stuff. And he was speculating.

One of the main reasons that they did not want them to have their own satellite is because they could see the resources. They could see the fraud that was happening. You know, and the government's like, we don't have a license for that. And then it got me thinking, like, you know, on one hand, you know, I fear the idea of constant surveillance. And I think everybody should be skeptical of that on one hand. On the other hand, it's already happening now. And if we're going to have that kind of surveillance, maybe, you know, you can't stop technology, but you can play a part in it.

Like, why don't we have like a people's satellite, we could monitor people like Monsanto or you could monitor the military, like you could monitor American corporation polluting a river in South America. And then you could hold them responsible. Let's pull their charter or let's penalize 30% of their profits and give that, you know, you could reallocate that stuff. If you could prove that they were acting nefarious, like we, why is it that we are, we are so scared of technology when we can use it to help us?

Well, there's a couple things to unpack there. I think one of the things is, you know, all satellites, or well, a lot of the satellites that are up there are public satellites. Taxpayers paid for them. And a lot of that data is actually public record data. And you could find out a lot of things like that. The problem then becomes, well, if some big company. who yeah, they have a subsidiary who runs in the United States because they're a global company. Yeah, they're found to be, you know, deforesting the Amazon and polluting the Amazon River.

But, you know, what are you going to do to sue the subsidiary in the States? Well, they actually have no assets. You come to find out. You know, and so the basically who who's holding the bill at the end of the day becomes a cat and mouse game. in a lot of these instances. And I think that's why you don't see that implemented today is just because there's so many ways to loophole through. There's private trust.

There's offshore companies. Right. You know, there's you can, you could just go hire a guy to run a bank account for you. You know, and that's one of the hardest things to detect from a fraud perspective. Yeah. You know, so there's so many different nuances on how. you know, we figure out who holds culpability in the world. And so without having some sort of, you know, judiciary body, for instance, that everyone is accountable, which, you know, we've tried this, right?

We've, you know, we've had, we had the, what was the predecessor to the UN? Yeah, that was the, uh, region, oh, come on. League of Nations. League of Nations. Nice call. So, you know, we've been trying this for a while, but nothing has any teeth because the only thing that has teeth is, well, I have more bombs than you do. Yeah. And that's the only teeth that are respected in the world of today, pretty much.

I mean, there's some economic teeth that can cause a puncture wound here and there. But at the end of the day, it's really, you know, who has the bigger gun? Yeah. And has been for a long time. Now, we can lament on how unfortunate that is, but that is the reality. Right.