Justin Murphy on independent scholarship, tech-capital acceleration, and why crypto is the antidote

How are the punks doing? Are they still Are they still hanging out? Hanging around. Uh, well, before we dive into that, we have Justin Murphy in the Reream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP Ultra Dome. Justin, how are you doing? I'm good. What's up, guys? Suited up.

You're looking You might be the sharpest guest we've ever had. I love this. I love this suit. You're looking great. Well, thank you. you know, you're the reason you're the reason I use uh one password.

You you had some sort of course on like creativity or something and the main thing I took away was use a password manager because you gave such an emphatic uh endorsement of password management and I adopted it and it changed my life and I love it.

And then we interviewed the the CEO of One Password and I was like, I love this. I learned this from Justin Murphy. Wow, that's uh really interesting to hear. I'm an avid user of Lucy. I'll throw in as well. Oh, that's how people how people don't use password managers is beyond me.

I mean, even with password managers, it's it's living hell, but I'm glad you glad you solved that. Yeah. Um maybe maybe for the folks who aren't who aren't super familiar. What's the shape of your business? What's the shape of your day-to-day? I know you have a number of different outlets.

I was uh I I wanted to invite you on the show because I noticed you were live streaming and you actually mentioned us and I was like, "Oh, that's so cool. " because I love when the uh when when we like create some format and then other people can kind of spin off of of it and whatnot.

Uh but but how how do you describe like your whole uh like yeah your whole your whole person [laughter] your cinematic universe I suppose. Yeah.

So I mean I left my very nice cushy academic position about six years ago and I left at that time with a very clear mission which was to basically reinvent the scholarly life for the internet era.

Um, I had I I was watching sort of academia go downhill and all the creator economy stuff was sort of kicking kicking off and it was clear that there would be ways to essentially port everything I was doing as a professor onto the internet and I would just have to experiment and test a lot of things out and hustle and and try to figure it out.

So that was what that was my mission six years ago and and it still is. I mean that's my calling. That's my vocation. and it always has been. And uh I basically built a couple businesses, tried a few different models and had moderate success with a few of them.

Um and then, you know, my I started having kids and kind of took a step back to kind of, you know, think about what this stuff really looks like, you know, over the long term. Uh I I had a lot of successes, had some failures as well.

And that's when I decided what I really needed to do was uh sit down and write this book called The Independent Scholar to really map out the whole thing and really put this kind of new lifestyle and business model on the map.

So basically the past past couple years, past two or three years, I've kind of been in hiding honestly. I've been having kids, figuring out how to do that and writing this book.

um to try to basically teach everything I've learned about this lifestyle and business model that I've that I've built and also to ground it in a kind of longer running history because most of the a lot of the greatest thinkers and philosophers and what I call independent scholars uh throughout history were actually free floating individuals hacking it in weird entrepreneurial ways and most people don't know about this history uh and it was largely what inspired my kind of mission uh so I decided I needed to to do it right sit down take the time required and put it down all in one place.

So, that's that's finishing up. Um, and then I also I occasionally work with startups if something actually really interests me and seems, you know, really exciting and asymmetric and I like the people. Um, so my life's really crazy right now just because I uh a startup I started working with like 2 years ago.

It started I was just sort of like consulting, kind of advising, helping out with the branding and messaging. They just they just keep winning and this thing is like kicking off. So, we're in the thick of it right now. That's called Noctchain. Uh, it's a layer one blockchain. Yeah.

So, that's kind of consuming everything at the moment. Uh, apologies to the poor people who pre-ordered my book. A lot of people are waiting on it. It will come out by the end of this year. Mark my words. But, right now, I'm I'm in I'm in the weeds with Noctchain cuz they they're this thing I think is is it's going off.

So, that's a summary. It's a little messy, but um I basically have accomplished my mission that I set out on six years six years ago, and I still haven't, you know, come up for enough air to tell the story fully, but I will. And I I think, you know, um I'm pretty proud of everything I've accomplished. Yeah.

How do you think about the uh just like the the the basic economic forces around like long time horizon content which is how I would put investigative journalism and academia.

Uh, it feels like social media and algorithmic feeds are like fantastically aligned with like news and and kind of fast high throughput creativity like um just because if you're producing a lot of content regularly, there's a lot of ad inventory space.

There's a lot of room for a little side partnership here and it just kind of all flows together very easily.

And I feel like Substack and the social media platforms have done a great job of of providing an outlet for someone who would effectively be like a beat reporter or someone who's just a commentator, an analyst, somebody with a column, a weekly column in a newspaper, you can take that weekly column and you can go and develop an audience and monetize effectively.

But if you're Seymour Hirs and you're going to get like one scoop a decade and it's going to be something that reshapes the global political world order, uh really hard to underwrite that against like $10 a month on Substack.

And so how how are you thinking about like the the long-term monetization summary like like like forces that allow for like long time horizon work. Is that solved? Is there is there a good pattern there yet?

I have a very strong and clear answer to this after a tremendous amount of experimentation and also this kind of prolonged engagement with with the history of [snorts] independent scholars.

I believe the answer to your question, John, is you need to stage one is you have to get out there and you have to you have to write a lot in stage one.

So, you're not you don't necessarily have to be chasing, you know, clicks or playing the the the engagement baiting game or whatever, but you do have to get out there and inevitably there's going to be some kind of volume game where like you have to get in the mix.

But I don't think you have to do that actually for too long because if you can just get out on places like uh X Yeah. and have some kind of blog or newsletter and just or or videos or whatever your medium is.

If you can get out there and just put out interesting stuff that's intelligent and thoughtful and build even a small audience, nothing that you would be able to live on, but if you could just do that stage one of showing that you understand content, that you have real ideas, that you are really interesting and and worth listening to and that you can execute on a basic kind of, you know, modern content operation.

If you can do that for even a little bit, what you then do, stage two, is you get exposure to tech companies. That's really the missing link that people have not fully figured out.

A lot of people have sort of accidentally figured this out, but the the fact is that um you know uh Silicon Valley and technology is obviously the engine of all kind of radical wealth creation moving forward.

And these companies need really educated, thoughtful, creative people who understand how to read real books and how to write really highquality copy and and write thoughtful essays. This whole new world of sort of highbrow thought leadership is incredibly valuable to almost every company today.

And the fact is it's incredibly hard to hire for um tech companies, you know, really struggle to find sort of PhD tier um intelligence for hire um and and who also have any kind of understanding or experience with actually running modern content operations online.

And so what I have found and and this I think is really the the ticket is that if you can just simply prove that you know what you're doing on online with content and you can build any kind of audience and just put out stuff that's worth reading that uh someone smart could look at and be like, "Oh, this person's smart.

" He might not have a million followers. He might not have many followers at all, but clearly he publishes consistently. He's smart. He's got alpha. Um it's I think actually increasingly easy to um find some sort of creative position with uh a startup or a tech company of some kind.

And that's going to be your ticket to actual sustainable wealth and income on which you can then do the really long form thought leadership. Um I've seen basically use use like consulting fees from uh from a tech company to bootstrap like a independent media platform. Absolutely.

And maybe some people don't want to build their own platform necessarily like someone like Seymour Horsch or these kind of older guys like often they don't want to build a business, right? they don't want to build a whole thing and and for them that's kind of a non-starter.

Um but if you can get some if you can get any if you can finagle some kind of situation where you're adding value to um you know a growing tech company or or even just a funded startup for a couple years even if they fail like you can um drive real value that they have a hard time hiring for.

And in an ideal world the company wins and then you really have you know economic security uh to do your intellectual work over the long term.

even if even if you have to hustle this way for for for for a few years in different projects, you can get a very decent paycheck adding real value in a way that is actually quite conducive to to your intellectual, you know, orientation and goals and and lifestyle that you're building.

Um, so you don't necessarily need to build a company or a big media operation, but on that economic basis, you can definitely grow your audience in that time. You can write, you know, a really heavyhitting long form essay once every month or two months or 3 months or whatever the case might be.

um and in this way and you know you start publishing your own books and there there's so there's so many different ways to to monetize but that the the tech partnership I think is the big opportunity that a lot of people are sleeping on people have done it there are enough examples in addition to me uh to make me feel like this is obviously the future um but people haven't really systematized it yet or uh kind of like written down playbook yet maybe it was I don't want to get the person's name wrong but there was someone who did like a philosopher in residence at a venture capital firm and there's been a few people who have uh maybe partnered with like Stripe Press in one way or another and uh kind of like pulled forward some income in various ways.

There's definitely uh yeah different ways to like slice it. But I think you're I think you're right that there's just like there's a pool of capital over there and if you're able to Yeah. provide some interesting service.

I I hadn't thought about basically if you want to be an independent scholar get ready to hustle [laughter] kind of. Yeah. Well, but look, it's a hustle to get a job as a professor. It's a really bad hustle.

It's it's absolutely grinding competition that is as brutal and as intellectually exhausting and suffocating [snorts] as grinding on a startup for a few years. Honestly, the only difference is you don't get paid very much at all. And also, there's no upside.

So, I mean, um, when when you compare working for a startup or, you know, being creative and hustling with different kinds of creative positions in in in tech startups, you compare that to what it takes to get a full-time tenure position in academia, it's actually like more uh liberating and mentally kind of um freeing and and and more conducive to a kind of creative intellectual life.

I had lunch with an academic couple months ago and he was like, "Yeah, my I'm having a kid in like six months. " And I was like, "Go get a job at a lab right now. " And he actually did. He got Oh, he did. No way.

And uh, you know, again, I I think he'll be able to probably do more interesting work at the frontier with more resources.

Um, and I I guess is part of this like sad that uh like what's the downside here that uh the techno capital institutions are going to end up financing uh uh you know scholarly research and academia like is there is is it is it basically Lindy like this has been happening for like hundreds and hundreds of years and this is like not so different.

Is that kind of what you're getting at with the book? Yeah, exactly. It's not sad. I mean, contemporary academia is very sad. Living a life as a kind of cloistered professor today is incredibly sad. I can tell you from from firsthand experience.

And what we're talking about here with sort of the the the new breed of independent scholars joining forces with Silicon Valley, it's um it is clearly part and parcel with a a longunning continuous history because when you look at some of the most interesting and impactful thinkers and philosophers and creatives throughout all history, what what you find with many of them is that they lived on the margins of institutions both economically but also socially and in in multiple cases.

is what they're what's really going on is they're look is they're be they're looking for any kind of unexploited economic niche where they can just make some money in a way that is maximally conducive to a certain state of mind and and a certain kind of lifestyle and they are you know really kind of opportunistic like they'll they'll you know Spinosa was famously a lens grinder right um this is at a time when being a lens grinder was it's not as manual as it sounds he was a kind of scientific um and technical um expert of optics and to to to grind lenses was actually a an interesting kind of philosophically and scientifically sophisticated uh industry but he also it involved manual labor and he sold uh his lenses to leading scientists of the era and that's actually how heworked with some of the brightest lights in uh Europe European science and and philosophy that's how he got on people's radar and that's how he earned their respect actually is from the quality of his of his lenses that he was grinding um and and this is this is in my book and So Samuel Johnson is another interesting example.

He's a case study in in the book. Samuel Johnson, people don't know this, in the early 18th century, he basically in kind of invented the Substack model. And this is before there was even email. I kid you not. So um he did paid subscription newsletters by print um well before email obviously.

And he would just write essays uh twice a week and he would walk them to the printer's office and where the mail goes out or whatever. and he would send them off twice a week uh by post and um and he made a he made a living doing this for for quite a few years. He was at the end of the patronage era.

So he was one of he was well known in elite circles as one of the most brilliant genius thinkers and writers and conversationalists of the time and he never got a patron. He he never got the bag. He was always forced to hustle. He was always doing creative things.

Um and that was one of them and um he managed he managed to do it and uh you know ended up changing the English language in in many ways.

uh one of the most you know impactful uh kind of scholars of his lifetime and so to answer your question um Silicon Valley and tech startups today are just the current manifestation of this like independent scholars always have to look where is the money where's the opportunity where can I use my brain power in the way that is u maximally adding value but also maximally conducive to me having freedom and time and and being able to think clearly and provocatively and it's obvious now um if when you look at this that um in in in the United States perhaps in the west word broadly.

Silicon Valley is now the site of that. Why do you think Silicon Valley is obsessed with Nick Land? There's still a tremendous amount of alpha there that uh people have not fully been able to gro um because it's, you know, um it it is dense and and a little bit difficult to read.

Um but that's the reason is because there's real alpha there and people know it and no one really has the time or the patience to kind of work through it, but they know the alpha is there and that's why they're all obsessed with it. What is the nature of the alpha?

just investing thesis or like lifestyle, how you live your life or predicting the future and what the shape of the political economy will be. I would say I mean there there are many specific things you could look at.

If you look at his writing on AI back in the '9s, it's incredibly preient and um much more so than even even you compare Nick Lan's early writings to someone like Nick Bostonramm uh writing about AI much more recently. And a lot of Nick Lan's texts actually uh match reality much more I I would say.

But the the reason so so you could you could double click on many sort of uh specific ideas I guess but the the high level answer to your question John is that um there is this kind of ideological problem in Silicon Valley um across the board.

I mean the the big intellectual problem with Silicon Valley is that everyone is a backpatter. Everyone is mutually invested in each other. So everyone is backpatting everyone else. I mean just structurally, right?

It's not even not not throwing shade at any individual, but just literally everyone is invested in each other. And so, um, pretty much all public content that you see is, you know, it's, um, someone speaking their book and and that's fine and that's America and that's cool. Like that's that's the world that we live in.

But be there is just a big sort of one big drawback to that which is that um, people are too like pro-social I is the way that I would put it in Silicon Valley. you know, no one wants to be, you know, um, uh, anti-human or antisocial, right? Because it it it's not it doesn't sound very nice. It sounds a little scary.

Maybe you don't want to invest in that. Maybe we had this we had this this morning as a team. John, Tyler, and I were sitting around.

We had a we had a post that will not be posted that was like genuinely had us all in tears, but there's one group that would be uh you know taking the the brunt of the joke and we like them. We're friendly with them and we just wasn't it wasn't something we were going to share.

Um, and so yeah, that there's this uh pressure to be pressure to be social, which in some ways is healthy. Like in some ways that stems from like this is a culture that somebody can move to San Francisco and be a nobody and in 2 years be an icon.

And that is like that's positive, but it also means that the the culture is like I'm not gonna do anything antisocial here because two years from now this person might I might be trying to lead their round. Right. [laughter] So, Exactly.

And so the issue with technological acceleration is that it is a brutal kind of machinic global process that's been happening for hundreds of years and we know a lot about it and a lot of it does not look very pretty for a lot of humans. Not all humans but but for a lot of humans.

And so when you really try to model this really rigorously without any kind of pro-social biases and without any of the kind of you know human ideological uh filters that frankly most Silicon Valley players are forced to kind of lay over their thinking and their publishing.

Um you like you you you see like there no no no one in Silicon Valley really is able to talk frankly about uh kind of the the underlying brutality and the really kind of scary structural elements to involved with capital acceleration but Nick Land does that in a very aggressive way.

Um and that's that's the source of the alpha basically.

Well, and Dar I mean Daario's hasn't been I mean I'm sure the the anthropic comm's team uh freaks out every time he goes and gives a talk and says you know 80% of or whatever the statistic he's saying it's some some large percentage of white collar work is going to disappear and then they kind of like walk it back a little bit but clearly like the message is being received.

Well, but notice notice that whenever you do hear some Silicon Valley thought leader or big player come out and say something that's kind of antisocial or bad or scary, um there's always kind of immediately behind it uh the solution that they're providing that will make it all okay. You know what I mean?

So, so the the thing with Nick land is you got a model you got a really hardcore I think very rigorous model of of modernity and capital acceleration which has no such convenient solution hiding in the background to sell you and when you look at that you know stone cold in the eyes it's it's it most Silicon Valley people don't want to hear it but on the other hand they know there's alpha there so they kind of can't look away from it either in desire there's this concept of like artificial intelligence being this timetraveling force uh an invasion from the future.

Uh as a human that makes me feel like I want to fight it. Is that the right desire? Is that the human desire to counter the machinic desire? So Land does introduce this idea.

Well, he doesn't introduce it, but he very much plays up this mental model that you get from the Ter Terminator movies that yes, capital is this kind of uh time traveling entity that comes back and not only kind of composes itself from us, but um just as the Terminator movie suggests, comes back and and kind of composes itself out of enemy resources.

So, so there is in that kind of model um an implicit kind of antagonistic structure, but I'm not so convinced of that, frankly. Um I think the fact is that capital acceleration will be uh quite brutal for um some people for for many people.

I mean it clearly shreds apart sort of modernity and techn technology shred apart traditional values and morals. I mean even even Markx knew that I mean Markx perhaps knew that better than anyone. Uh that has been clear that has been clear for a very long time.

and whatever the errors of Marx were and and and the terrible kind of, you know, tragedies [snorts] that came downstream of of his ideas, you know, the the critics of capitalism in the early modern period like were structurally onto something. Okay. Uh and and there's no doubt about that.

I mean, it it it absolutely shreds any vestage of any kind of traditional morality basically. And and that is sociologically true beyond question in my opinion. Um and so play that forward. Play that forward, you know. Um it's it's going to be ugly uh for a lot of people I think.

Um but I think all we can do really is uh try to basically um you know try to stay one step ahead, be honest and rigorous and aggressive and take the risks necessary to bet on the truth and try to just stay ahead of the machines and try to take with you all of your friends and family and everyone in your tribe.

There's, you know, there's there's really no other no other solution. And I think personally that um it actually goes in a more positive direction than some of Nick Land's suggest, you know, texts seem to suggest. I think it's actually it actually matches much more clearly to something like the city of God uh by St.

Augustine where uh you know, basically the the the good people and the bad people increasingly kind of diverge over time. So technological acceleration kind of pulls these people apart. Uh what he calls the city of God on the one hand and the city of man on the other.

What what technology really does is it accentuates the differences between people who are oriented to heaven and the truth and the good and people who are oriented towards anything else. So if you're oriented towards anything else, you're you're you're going to go down fast.

You're going to get wrecked, I think, and increasingly fast technological acceleration. You're chopped. [snorts] Where where how do you summarize the current discourse?

because uh I would loosely group it into uh general fear among the broader white collar class and potentially even blue collar because you have you know everybody you know people outside of tech are worried about automation and losing their jobs and sounds like you think that's a very uh uh maybe the correct concern to have inside of tech is kind of like bifurcated into people that are thinking like, okay, OpenAI just is starting to look more and more like Facebook every single day.

They have Sora, they're going to introduce ads. They're introducing commerce. This just looks like a big tech company. Um, and then you have people at labs that just believe like, you know, uh, just wait, like, you know, just one more training run, bro. Uh, AGI is right around the corner.

But it's hard to like actually read too much into what they're saying because they obviously have, you know, tens of millions to hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of like, you know, equity tied up in in these narratives that are kind of dependent on on uh those scenarios playing out to some degree.

But how would you kind of summarize it and where do you think it is like even a year from today? Yeah. So again, I think a lot of these categories that people use to parse this this phenomenon are just totally wrong and they're totally ideological.

So for instance, the jobs story, like that's all people can come up with to think about the devastating impacts of technological acceleration. We're going to lose our jobs. We're going to lose our jobs.

So like everything potentially bad about AI gets shoehorned into this like one topic of like are people going to lose their jobs? Like it's much more complicated and um and and in some ways worse, but in some ways better.

So like the better way to think about it is really just that with all technological acceleration you have to everyone has to hustle harder basically like you have to work to stay ahead to succeed you have to work really really hard and increasingly hard and yes there is more surplus people are wealthier on average that is true um so you know you know a kind of poor person in America has exposure to like a lot of really nice things that obviously you know only kings could have in the past so that that story is true but nonetheless to actually build day life that is healthy and happy and sustainable.

You have to be incredibly smart and sharp and and and judge and making good decisions about a number of different things in all aspects of your lifestyle. And you have to be working super hard and you have to be dodging this existential threat.

Like nowadays, I mean, think about how much research you have to do on like food just to stay healthy, right? Like you you have to be incredibly smart and sharp and you have to hustle increasingly hard just to survive the chaos of of of technological acceleration.

Um, and so AI is just a kind of um a further acceleration of that. It's going to get more and more insane. The payoff will be bigger for people who are who are right and who keep their head on on their shoulders. For those people, the payoffs are going to be bigger and bigger.

Um, but for everyone else who can't keep up with this kind of shredder of traditional norms, um, you do get you do fall behind and and you it's not a matter of losing your job.

It's a matter of like your whole family is, you know, u opiate addicts because they got oneshotted by complex processes that they had no chance of even understanding. When does this start? Like if we take the time travel analogy, do should we start this whole story at 1860 when GDP really starts to accelerate?

Is that the beginning? Do we go back earlier? Is this latest like AI boom anything special? Karpathy on doresh was kind of saying like no like this is exactly this is just an extension of computing.

So this is an interesting research question about how do you really mark that breaking point um associated with modernity and technological acceleration. People have very different answers. I think it's it's an interesting kind of empirical debate. I've always kind of been partial to Haidiger's answer.

If you read Haidiger's um the question concerning technology, he seems to think that the the the key break point was when we started storing energy basically.

So like he says the windmill for instance was fine because the windmill just sits there it nature kind of operates on it and it can create energy and that's he seems to think that's my reading is that it's fine.

Um but when we start storing it, when we're putting it in batteries and we're putting it into these different containers, he seems to think he seems to suggest that that's kind of the breaking point because that's where you can start to um sort of run much farther ahead of the future because you can store these things up, right?

I I have a stockpile of coal and I have a steam engine and I can I can build up a a a like a larger pile of energy and then I can deploy it all in one jolt to jump forward, right? And then the Marxists have this kind of theory that they like to say that it's the enclosure of the commons.

So like in the it really starts in in in England uh there were for for for you know aons uh these traditional norms of uh anyone could kind of graze on the commons and much of the land was commons.

Uh and then at a certain point there's a specific kind of um decision made where where they start enclosing it in order to capitalize on it and privatizing it and some people point to that as the kind of the breaking point. You can give you can give many examples um and and people kind of debate that.

I think it's sort of it it's sort of um very hard to answer conclusively, but those are some those are some possible answers that I think are interesting. Um, do you think uh Yeah. Do you think the escape the permanent underclass meme is actually healthy then?

Because it's basically is encouraging people to like, you know, sharpen up, avoid uh the avoid the the pressure to just quit your job and and gamble on meme coins.

like avoid, you know, becoming emer I have a completely different take on this and I want your reaction too is uh I feel like the future things playing out in the like kind of the darker scenarios like there's a massive underclass but there's no permanence whatsoever and on any day-to-day basis somebody could go a 1000x up and become extremely wealthy and then everything collapse and go back down to the underclass and I feel like the volatility is actually increasing way higher and we're actually getting more underclass but also less permanence But what's your take on the permanent underclass meme?

So that meme I actually think is a rare good one that is directionally correct in an important way and that actually gets more to the heart of the the threat and and the brutality of of of tech e tech e tech e tech e tech e tech e tech e tech e tech e tech e tech economic acceleration much more so than the jobs meme.

Um that is the kind of anxiety that is the general diffuse anxiety and fear that everyone feels and is right to feel. you're you are forced to feel that um with with capital acceleration and its current inflection with with the AI revolution.

Um so I think that's basically that that is spoton in terms of the the generalized threat and problem. It feels like durable because everyone feels it and it it feels like yeah like you're saying like it's it's somewhat real, right? It's like the techno capital acceleration people feel it.

They realize that making the $20 million in three years is a lot better than making the $20 million in 25 years or whatever has look like.

It's worth noting that it's kind of self-inforcing as well because if that's a meme and you know other people feel that way, then you really have to trust it and you better get after it because even if you think it's false in stage one, right?

If you think other people are buying into it, you think, "Okay, everyone else is going to be hustling harder. they're going to be getting the bag. And shoot, even though I thought this was false, now they're all getting it. I I better get after it or I'm going to get crushed and left behind.

And so, um, yeah, I mean, what a lot of people say is that capitalism produces so much surplus that, um, you could just choose to not participate in the rat race and, you know, just enjoy enjoy the surplus.

But that's not totally true because the things that we really want in life and and that really matter to us are are are often relative. Things like recognition and identity and, you know, standing standing in a community, these things are relative.

And so, um, it doesn't really help that much that you can, you know, have, you know, a a big screen TV for really cheap. Um, you can have many other material. It's clear like everyone will be entertained in the future. You [snorts] will not need you will not need to be elite to be entertained.

Like you're going to be entertained. You're going to have the screen. You're going to be able to put on the headset. You're going to be able to take any range of tele medicine drugs to make you feel anything. Uh, you will be entertained. you'll maybe have a a one in a 10,000 chance every week to like escape or whatever.

But um I I do think it's notable that we transition from a pull yourself up by your bootstraps culture, which was like if you just do anything in America in the in the early 19th century, you can get a house.

You can, you know, you can live kind of you can you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps to live the American dream. And now the American dream is on the other side of escaping the permanent under underclass.

At least the American dream that you were sold as a kid of having a home in a desirable area and sending your kids to college and and the American dream was the middle class. It was the default, right?

I mean, frankly, I think the big antidote to all of this, the the other pole of this entire problem that we're talking about is, of course, crypto.

I I believe I mean in in so many ways it's sort of um diametrically kind of opposed to AI or it's like perfectly poised to be kind of the the the the solution to a lot of this because one way to understand technological acceleration is that especially in kind of human societies with all of the faulty human wetwear that we have is that it becomes this like big lying game like everything gets inflated like the you know the money supply is is really just kind of a metaphor for many other things where there's a ton of inflation right like verbal inflation you know uh credential potential inflation is in in a way like modernity is this mad race to um kind of inflate all kinds of things and we we get ahead of our skis in many ways and that's why people have to that's why it's so cutthroat because other people are inflating so you have to inflate or you die and so like human society and modernity is totally torn us under from all of its traditional values and traditional you know an anchorings um everyone is competing in this mad materialistic race to stay afloat which is mimetic and even if you don't want to do it you kind of have to do it meanwhile Crypto is this kind I mean cryptographic protocols are truth machines basically.

They kind of restore integrity and kind of like primordial uh almost physical truths uh to this kind of chaotic constantly inflating uh kind of material modern world.

And so I my mental model is very much that um the reason you're seeing the reason the early stages of crypto have been so chaotic and crazy with you know so many stories of um big crashes and crimes and so many kind of scammers and and con the reason it's so crazy like that is because people intuitively understand that this crypto stuff like is the next big vector through which like humanity will uh be able to secure its future.

Um, and so people are the people who rush into that first are a wild grabag of of of sketchy people, I think. Um, but it's going to be the thing that like it's going to be the only thing that puts uh kind of grounding on all of modern chaos. And you see this like that's what Bitcoin does, right?

That Bitcoin is like literally just reggrounds money and like physical physical resource um uh kind of anchoring. One one suggestion crazy idea for you before you jump and then we'll have to really fun. Thank you so much, Robin. Instead of a book, how about you buy a Lambo and you sell a course.

I will teach you to escape. I've paid for his course. He has a course. Escape the permanent underclass by becoming an independent scholar. [laughter] I mean, you could be the Andrew Tate of of independent scholars. Uh, that's one option, but I don't think so, man. That that's nochain. That's the role of nochain.

We say escape the leveling process. I don't think you should worry about escape. I I don't like I don't like the phrase um you know escape the permanent underclass because it it's much it's much more general. You have to escape the leveling process.

There is a long running gradual historical gradient that is trying to sort of destroy everything of traditional value.

Everything that is permanent and timeless um is getting sort of eroded or hidden and and kind of taken away from you and like you want to escape the leveling process and that's why we're building blockchain. That's what it's all about. Escape the leveling process. That's very cool. Well, thank you so much.

I this is a great conversation. Uh would love to have you back on and go deeper. Everyone really enjoyed this. Uh but uh thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk. I appreciate it. This is fun. We'll talk to you soon. Uh we have our next guest in the ream rating room. But first, let me tell you about Finn.

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