E80: Thorchain Founder: Using Memes to Upgrade & Accelerate Humanity

24:30I was trying to sell my family. I'm buying Bitcoin. I called it a once a generation lifetime opportunity. Bitcoin's going a million bucks. I was telling my family Bitcoin's going a million bucks when it was 800 bucks back in 2013. How? Why? Well, I was explaining this is a new financial system. It takes away trust. It solves the problem of a decentralized mint. It allows anyone to contribute to it. It allows anyone to participate. And this was when Bitcoin didn't even have, you couldn't even download an app off the App Store. Apple had blanket ban them all. So my next move, I was trying to create a Bitcoin wallet for the Apple App Store, but they banned it all.

25:02So I remember downloading like the Windows EXE, the Bitcoin core.exe file on my Windows laptop. And that was my wallet at the time. And I was trying to build it. And then wallet, self-custody. And then I kept my finger on the pulse and I watched Ethereum launch. I went to a hackathon. I won it. but it was like a decentralized app, a smart contract dev at the time. And then after I won the hackathon, I got like a thousand bucks worth of ETH. I think it was like, I don't know, a dollar,$10 at the time. And then everyone's like, let's build the, it was like the DApp craze in 2016, 17 was like decentralized applications.

25:41And I just on this kind of factory, this kind of hackathon where everyone was thinking that in the Ethereum land, there was all DApps, DApps and DLs, like DAOs. and I remember at the time writing a whole bunch of white papers as people were like, well, you won the hackathon, you're a smart contract developer now. I wasn't. I just literally done a couple lines of solidity code and I remember writing a white paper on various white papers. One was Decentralized AI. I shared it around. One was a Decentralized Marketplace at the time and there was a third one that was involving like drones or something and I pitched it around.

26:17Everyone thought the Decentralized AI one was too crazy and the decentralized drone one was also too crazy, which they were because neither hardware or AI in 2016, 17 was anywhere like today. And I decided to launch a decentralized marketplace. So basically like freelancer.com, whatever. And I think we raised about 10, I can't remember, it was probably like 5 ,000 ETH at the time in this ICO for this decentralized marketplace. But towards the end of that year, I realized that nobody wanted, and we built this marketplace and we had like 1 ,000 providers and users, but I realized that nobody cared about paying each other in crypto.

26:54And they had to pay each other tokens. They just want to pay each other in stable coins. By the way, stable coins didn't really exist back then. There was only Omni, the Omni layer on Bitcoin on Tether, and we couldn't work out how to get, there was DAI. DAI was just make a DAI, DAI. And so we tried to like rebuild the marketplace in DAI, and it was a disaster. Like no one cared. So then I realized it was all a game of liquidity. people were on crypto to trade and so that's when my next phase started what did you do with the first marketplace so we tried to build it and eventually i handed over to another team so i could focus fully on decentralized liquidity and that team basically migrated that marketplace over several chains ethereum to partner smart chain and beyond uh and eventually we uh that team and i we burnt out like 80 percent of the tokens and uh the the project still runs today and uh It's called Kenya Marketplace.

27:49Still barely running today. There's still a small treasury that the team run. But in the meantime, I sent him to the project over to 2018 and started building Decentral's liquidity. Take me back to the beginning of ThorChain. Why did you launch ThorChain? Is it because you just realized, oh, people just want to trade? Or is it because you had a greater vision? Or as you said before, I don't really plan. I plan as I kind of move along, right? As I was building this marketplace, right, and we were trying to get the token listed, it was listed on KuCoin. Like the token went to like$300,$400 million, this candy coin, right?

28:27And it pumped and dumped. But, you know, we were tied up with centralized exchanges. You know, all the big centralized exchanges were like demanding like$300 ,000 listing fees, $600 ,000 listing fees. And you had to pay like market makers$100 ,000 a month to market make your token. So our treasury was just being blown up by kind of this centralized exchange Ponzi game where you literally just paid for liquidity and paid for your token to pump a dump and everyone thought that was the thing. And six months prior, I was involved in the Bancor launch and I invested in the Kyber ICO in September 2017 and also even the AirSwap ICO.

29:06Remember AirSwap in like October? Yeah, I had Samir Tabar like a year and a half ago and I started the podcast. Yeah, and I was looking at these projects going, actually know these ones are going to deliver like Bancor network token delivering on-chain liquidity Kyber was in was promising like Kyber on-chain like Kyber network crystal on-chain liquidity loved I love the vision on-chain liquidity because I recognize that central exchanges were oh by the way in 2014 I had my bitcoin on MTGOX Mt. Gox and I could see some craziness happening so I moved all my bitcoin off MTGOX before the hack and I moved it to btce.com And so MTGOX blew down in flames.

29:44It got hacked and I've narrowly avoided that. But my Bitcoin was being held on BTC. I had a bit on my Windows wallet and a bit on BTC because I was buying like Litecoin, Primecoin, Feathercoin, Peercoin, all those crazy coins that you've probably never heard of. This is like 2014 era coins, doesn't it? And BTC got taken down by the FBI. So I woke up one day, logged into my exchange. It was just the FBI logo. because the hacker was laundering all 800 ,000 Bitcoin out of BTCE, which is a Russian exchange, and the FBI, and I felt massively rugged. And that's when I declared war on decentralized exchanges because, yeah, just come on, why are we using these decentralized MySQL databases to trade decentralized currencies?

30:28So that started me thinking about decentralized liquidity. And so coming into 2017, 18, I realized nobody – was building out correctly. It was like who was building Bitcoin to ETH swaps. I just wanted to swap ETH to Bitcoin and Litecoin to Bitcoin because that didn't exist. And at the time, you could only use like atomic swaps. And everyone's talking about atomic swaps, atomic swaps. And atomic swaps involve eight like steps between me signing something on a UTXO, you signing something else, co-mingling with mine. and we kind of like do this eight steps back and forward where we share like progressively signed and unsigned UTX.

31:13And finally, we swap on the two different chains and I get my Litecoin, you get your Bitcoin. And I thought nobody's going to use that. The user experience is just mad. I thought, well, what is needed is a ability on-chain liquidity, a liquidity pool where you put in one asset and it pops the other. And the way I described it to everyone is it's a fruit basket. And the fruit basket has one rule. It's got a basket of 10 apples and 10 oranges. And if you put in an apple, the fruit basket will spit out oranges. And you put in an orange, it'll spit out apples, right? And it's got 10 apples, 10 oranges, and you rock up and give it one apple, how many oranges will it spit out?

31:49And that was the way I thought about it. It was 1 divided by 10 plus 1, 1 divided by 11, which is basically 0.91. So it will spit out 0.91 oranges because then the fruit basket can operate at any price curve. You could rock up with a billion apples and it will still give you some amount of oranges without going insolvent. So taking that fruit basket idea, we built it on chain, which is the basis of ThoughtChain. How did you become one of the projects with the most mindshare in 2020-21 crypto cycle? Because you can build the right thing. There's a lot of people doing, probably building things that are decent, but that are never really known.

32:31because there is a big difference between fundamentals and kind of narratives, right? And you manage that really well last cycle with ThorChain. How do you do that? Yeah, memes, memes, brother, memes. So I built ThorChain under anonymous identity. So my original first few projects I built publicly and I realized that a true project, and I was forever married to this project, it's very difficult to plan ops lessons to hand over a project if you build with a public identity. When do you ever get to hand it over, right? You're forever married to it. So instead I thought, no, I need to build a project and do plan opposite, hand over to the community and then pop out myself.

33:09So I can create this persona and shed the persona and become myself rather than building the project under myself and trying to reimagine myself after handing out the project. So the first couple of projects I did under my full identity realized the problem there and built ThorChain under an anonymous identity called Lena. And Lena was the dev in the Discord. She was this kind of like 20, 21, 22 year old Spanish looking junior dev. And she had a Telegram account, a Twitter account, which is Thor Chang and a Discord account called Lena156. And she ran the whole project. In fact, a lot of my team at first didn't even know who Lena was.

33:48I was built it. But I, and very, very, very start, I was consistent with the memes. This project had to build upon memes. And that's why I married it to Norse mythology. and and there's a lot of memetic power in last cycle thought chain there was 3x tvl there was liquidity black hole there was uh like yeah we we created all these kind of self-reinforcing memetic taglines that drove a narrative to the point where in the last cycle i think thought chain hit a full ftv of like 8 billion and it was like a top three defile project how did you know understand that the meme gain was so important look even back in 2017 meme coins were a thing so uh believe it or not uh so the powerful the coins that attach themselves to memes uh perform really well and so litecoin the meme around litecoin was always big the silver to gold yeah right and the meme around i mean back in 2014 13 14 there was like Litecoin, Peercoin, Feathercoin.

34:58But the strongest one was the Litecoin meme because the silver to gold meme, but also Bitcoin's backup. And I realized the Litecoin's got nothing on Bitcoin. It literally has nothing. It's got faster block times and different emission, 84 million, so 21 million, whatever. But the meme of silver to gold was so powerful that it drove it up to huge valuations. And Charlie obviously realizes the way I value it, and that's why he dumped in December 2017. But I recognize the memes drive the narrative and the narrative drives the price. And that's why we built Thought Chain on memes, also on technology, hardcore technology.

35:42But we created all these memes around it and relied on Norse mythology to propel it forward, to just leapfrog. Because if we were trying to build a project on, I don't know, some made-up name, and I'm just looking around and saying like Epsom or whatever, just a whatever name, a made-up name. How do you generate a green pasture of memes from that? It's very difficult. By the way, Chainlink in 2017, 21 cycle was also a big meme army around that, right? Absolutely. The Link Marines and all that kind of crazy stuff. So I was trying to build that at the same time. And Norse Mythology is one of the oldest memes we have.

36:21It predates the book of Genesis. Norse mythology is a spoken meme which probably formed the basis of the book of Genesis, which is wild. And the book of Genesis formed itself as a written manuscript, right? And it probably selected from the main elements of Norse mythology because a lot of our culture, a lot of Western culture, comes from Scandinavia and Norse and it kind of came down from there. The Norse men were aggressive. They pushed hard. They battled the seas. They went and did crazy things to propel the population around the world. And so that's why a lot of our mimetic narratives, our mimetic repository is based on Scandinavia and Norse and Germanic kind of origins, which is wild.

37:14Crazy, isn't it? But when you do that, you are targeting a certain type of people, right? because the memes are kind of more intellectual or harder to understand than if you talk about, I don't know, like a pepe or whatever, right? That's the idea. Complex meme versus simple meme? Yes. Yeah, I mean, I recognize Norse mythology and like Thor Chan and all of that is a complex meme. It's green pastures and there's a lot there, but also what helped it, it was like the Marvel Thor and that generated a lot of memetic narrative lots of memes and gifs that you could easily post. And, you know, that's why, you know, the CEO being Chris Hemsworth and blah, blah, blah.

38:00So there was like rich pastures there, complex memes, but we try to simplify a lot of that. Like the CEO is Chris Hemsworth and Marvel Thor was to present a lot of gifs and 3X TVO was another meme. And the meme of, you know, the liquidity black hole, like blah, blah, blah, blah. We just try to simplify it and project that out. Simple taglines you can latch onto. but also we were very edgy like we we didn't hold back and we with the main twitter account and uh with the thought chads and whatnot we made everyone very intense and cultish because and our brand the brand was very bipolar you you couldn't you had to either love it or hate it you couldn't be lukewarm and that's the correct idea is if you split your audience between hot and cold and avoid just lukewarm so if i present you a lukewarm brand you neither have an opinion or you don't have an opinion.

38:50But instead of the thought chain brand was bipolar. You either hated it or you loved it. And that's why the Twitter account and the leader of the thought chads was edgy and made you either hate it or love it to create this cult. Certainly. And you have to create a cult. Yeah. And the attention game is exactly that too, right? You have to have an opinion. Otherwise, no one is going to... Either people hate you, either they love you, as you say, but they need to feel, they need to identify themselves to something, right? Correct. Yeah, absolutely. So that, your first question, why do you call yourself master of the memes?

39:21Like everyone should call themselves master of the memes because, I mean, I've lived the memes the last six years in everything I do. I believe like our purpose, and I don't want to drop the memes and genes too early, but fundamentally our purpose is to upgrade humanity, both mimetically and genetically. That's it. So we have at our disposal a different intelligence pathway of upgrading than the cow or the onion. The onion can only learn the universe and pass on a set of useful instructions about how to survive the universe genetically. And so it births a new onion and says to it through its genetic pathways, this is how you survive the universe.

40:02You're an onion. This is what you need to do. And it gets to upgrade itself every time an onion lives and dies. Same with cow. Cow is a bit more complex, but it observes the universe, learns the universe, and passes on instructions through its genes to the next evolution and go, this, you're a cow, this is how you survive the universe. And it works because we have cows with us today, right? But humans have a different, a much more faster way of upgrading, memes. And so because we have an ability to communicate, so cows can communicate. So they communicate with memes that they move and, you know, they do it like they communicate in nonverbal cues and non-genetically.

40:41so they can't upgrade each other's intelligence on the fly. A mother cow can teach its kid cows or calves about what not to do. And like, you know, electric fences, they can, the first cow to touch an electric fence learns about it and is able, not everyone in the herd has ever touched an electric fence, but they are able to communicate to each other, don't touch that electric fence. We don't know what happens, why it's electric, why it zaps us, but not every cow needs to get zapped by an electric fence. to know to not touch or let you fence. So clearly they have memetic pathways of intelligence transfer.

41:15The difference is because we have an extremely advanced speech organ and also an extremely advanced brain that's constantly curious and we've evolved to constantly ask the questions and pass on, we have at our disposal a very advanced memetic pathway of intelligence transfer. So it's like me telling you stuff is upgrading your intelligence right now. You don't need to live and die to upgrade your understanding of the universe. To get a useful set of genetic and memetic instructions about how to survive, right? Most of everything we do around us is we rely upon our memetic repository, right? So we have these two giant repositories.

41:50Our genetic repository, which teaches you how to walk, to breathe, to have eyes and look at me, blah, blah, blah. But also you have a giant memetic repository, which you've been learning since you were a child about how to survive 2024 here in Singapore. And that's how you can upgrade yourself on the fly. That's why we're so much more advanced than the dolphin or so much more advanced than the cow. So you said the first project you've done, people knew you. Then you said, I choose to be anonymous. Yep. Because of a certain reason, right? And now, a few months ago, you did a complete U-turn again to go all in personal branding.

42:30Why? Right. So I handle the project, ThoughtChain, and I'm very loosely involved. I help poke the system in certain directions, but there's, you know, when ThoughtChamp first launched, there were a set of individuals, myself included, who could unilaterally control the thing. I mean, the thing launched with four nodes, four nodes. Now it's got 104 nodes. At one point it had 120 nodes, but it's pretty stable around 100 node mark, right? So at one point it's completely centralized around those four nodes, but it slowly has become decentralized and proven that decentralization. So today I cannot absolutely, and by the way, probably three years ago was the last point two years ago which I could ever have unilaterally controlled the chain, if that makes sense.

43:12So it's completely decentralized. So today I cannot unilaterally, there's nothing I can do to stop that thing churning its blocks and observing transactions and doing swaps. Literally nothing. So now's the correct point at which I should come out and prove the system's decentralized because it's all handed over. It's all the community run it, right? And then I had my bandwidth opened up. What am I going to do next? Because I feel like we're only halfway through the journey of a true DEX, you know, and I want to keep building. I want to keep solving the hardcore problems, but also nobody else is doing it.

43:47Well, a lot of people are doing it, but I want to do it in a bigger way. And I recognize that by just showing people and getting in the arena and building big, and I've got a lot of energy to do that, and I believe in myself to do that and conviction, I can, rather than trying to pass on my information, at the start of this year, I started a fund. I was investing in other founders. And I realized a lot of these other founders that I'm investing in and relying on to like create value and build big products were either naive or new to the founder and didn't have the experience I've had. So then I thought maybe I should just invest in myself and build something big and show everyone else, perhaps this is how you can probably build.

44:27So what I'm about to do over the next, this cycle, the next four or five years is build a very large project, get in the arena, show everyone that you can just get in. You may make mistakes, you may do the wrong things, but it's more important to get in the arena and start building. So it's a long-winded answer, but I'm trying to set an example by relying upon six or seven years of building hardcore to try and activate more people to build. Which is definitely the limitation of anonymity, right? Because no one can relate to... I mean, yes, the CEO is Chris Hemsworth, right? But Ethereum has Vitalik, right?

45:07Solana has Anatoly. You need to have, at some point, to get maybe to an even bigger scale, a leader that you can relate to. Yeah, that's true. What's the limitation of staying anonymous? Yeah, exactly. So Lina couldn't ever project. She never went to conferences, panels. the inevitable podcast. She couldn't, she was relying on everyone else to market the protocol and spread the message. She could post memes and tweet through the ThorChain Twitter account, but she couldn't do anything more than that. She was very limited. And so by handing over the protocol and stepping away from that and shedding that persona and going, well, it's time to build.

45:47It's time to build big and build hard, but I can't control the protocol anymore. It's decentralized. So it's actually much safer now for me to get out and build big and bring attention and Calpult and flows and interfaces and mindshare and power to decentralize liquidity with ThorChain as a base. Totally. For sure, now's the time. And, you know, you can, anyone can try and ring me up and go shut the chain down. And my only answer is unable to, or literally unable to. So ThorChain is safe. I can't influence it anymore. And I'm safe because nothing in the ThorChain jars can affect me anymore. So now's the time.

46:24you're building in public what does that mean build in public set the memes free if you're building secret you are just you have the wrong approach to what you're building like i said and hinted at before our purpose is to upgrade humanity genetically and mimetically so genetically have kids mimetically as in contribute to highly potent means with a long half-life if you're building in secret you are trying to withhold information from the rest of humanity that could be useful all right you're actually trying to uh is accumulate and grab value and for yourself you you are trying to withhold useful information from humanity when that information should be free and so i meet a lot of people who are building closed source products useful closed source products and i'm saying like why it's a useful set the memes free let all of humanity have it, upgrade humanity's memetic repository.

47:19I don't believe in NDAs. I don't believe in copyright. I don't believe in trademarks. I don't believe in patents. All of that should be ripped apart. The good ideas flourish, the bad ideas die. The reason why people protect information like that is purely because they want to extract value at the margin.

47:44is it not easy to say that or easier to build in public when you made hundreds of millions versus i would say there is a maybe potentially natural way to think more being you know value extractor when you kind of haven't made it yet versus and probably it would still create much more value for yourself to share everything, right? But it's kind of like in the human nature to say, I'll keep this for myself. I don't want people to know. The classic thing is when someone says, I have an idea. I'm like, yeah, what is it? I can't tell you. And then you understand that actually it's all execution. It's not the idea, right?

48:21Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. And I'll tell you what, if you build in public, you are accelerating the rate of your idea spreads. but the most important thing you're far more investable you're far more able to direct people's time and effort and their capital in your direction so as a founder of a product you're hoping to attract mind share time share effort share and capital share and refocus that to to help a good idea flourish and if that good idea is flourish you hope to actually make margin on that good idea. But if your only point, your only purpose is to make margin and end it there, then that's why you want to build in secret.

49:03You want to make sure that nobody else has your really good idea so you can maximally extract value from it. But skip past that. You're not actually a true founder. You're not a true builder if all you're trying to do is build for money. And I'll tell you why. You have finite time and effort. You hope to convert your finite time and effort into ultimately just genes and memes. That's all your purpose here on humanity is, to upgrade humanity itself. Take your scarce time and effort and convert it into genes and memes. You can keep it as value. Value is stored time and effort. So that's what money is.

49:36Money is an ability for you to buy someone else's time and effort. You take your scarce time and effort and it allows you to transport the ability to purchase someone else's time across time and space, right? But you should take all that value and immediately direct other people's time and effort in a mimetic direction, to setting a good idea free. That's actually your purpose there. And by the way, a founder in the arena, building in public, attracting time and capital share is far more investable than anyone else. And I tell you that as both a founder and an investor. Certainly. one guy who really understood that very early was a Gary V Gary Vaynerchuk who was saying look I'll just make videos in 2006 on I'll teach you anything you need so you never need me right and he was saying if you're a gardener you should teach your village online right tell them everything that they need to know to never have to hire you and that's the reason they will hire you right and in that sense it's just hiring it's not investing but like the more you share stuff out there the more people you create trust the more you create brand and the more people will be attracted to you right exactly so if if you're a founder and you have a good idea just put it out there build in public take and make mistakes in public immediately fix them right you become extremely investable because you have people's attention because they're just like mesmerized by you, right?

51:12You're like, you're putting yourself out there. You're in the arena. You're showing the mistakes you're about to make and you navigate those mistakes. And as an investor, I look to founders who can, a founder doesn't, has no idea the problems they're going to face over the three, five, 10 year journey of building. Right? So as an investor, I think, are you going to solve the problems or the problems between where you are here and where you need to get? And you need, as a founder, as you're pitching me, you need to prove to me that you can solve those problems. But if I could just jump on and look at your Twitter feed or your Instagram feed or your Facebook feed and realize you've been solving hardcore problems the entire time, you've become extremely investable.

51:47You've given me the proof of your ability to navigate the adversity and build. So that's why just every founder out there, immediately push all your code to GitHub, open source, scratch your stupid business license, your copyright, your trademarks, NDAs, put it straight on GitHub right now, open source. Open up a Twitter feed, a YouTube account, literally have a camera following you around. If you're building a hardware startup, like a super secret hardware store, literally show the whole world what you're building. You will attract time and capital allocation, mindshare. Yeah. It's like a math problem where you could say, I'm going to write down the entire development so the teacher can see, even if I get the wrong answer, they can see the way I think, right?

52:29Or I just write the answer and hope it's correct or not, right? And if both answers are wrong, one is going to enable the person to see exactly what kind of person you are and therefore like believe in you still yeah the other one won't right correct i had so yeah like especially people in hardware it's wild to me like people in hardware they pitch me startups to invest and they go oh watch your email i'm gonna send thend over and i literally laugh at them go i'm not touching anything about the same do not send me annd i'm not even interested anymore and they get offended. I'm like, set the memes free.

53:05Immediately burn that NDA. Immediately take your hardware startup, put it up on YouTube. And I say to them, scratch NDA, post for the next month on YouTube, what you're building, and I'll come back and watch our YouTube videos. And then I'll decide to invest. And they look at me like I'm crazy, but they will never get it. So I can't help them anymore. That's because you're very practical. Actually, we're going to talk about that later, but it's so practical. And it's the same as I've always been thinking in business. in a good business relationship, we wouldn't even need contracts because the whole thing is set on, if I do good work, you're going to pay me because you want more, right?

53:45And like the dynamic is being as practical as possible. I mean, maybe it's a bit naive and sometimes I got screwed for that, but it's a very similar way of thinking, which is just all these rules and things that complicate everything. Yeah. forget that because if you're doing something really good, you're going to attract people. And also the people who work with you will still want to work with you because you're doing something really good, right? And it's probably benefiting them too. So it's just, yeah, it's a very logical and practical way of thinking instead of complicating everything. Simplify it.

54:18That's it. So if you go to my website, jpthor.com, work in progress, like literally everything's work in progress that I do, right? And even if I've got a spelling mistake on my website, people DM me on Twitter, I'll go, you know, I'll fix it. So I was like, I don't care. Like everything's a work in progress. So if you go to my website and I've got six principles and one of them is building public. Another one is simplified, just simplified, just, just don't overcomplicate it. Like even to the point is do not have a signature block in your email because you add bandwidth, you take people's bandwidth and you add latency.

54:52Like dealing with lawyers and accountants. Oh my gosh. They, they love filling their emails up with stupid signature blocks and so do like most government departments it's like you are adding to latency here you are tying up my bandwidth because i'm scrolling this stupid email thread and i'm looking for like the one or two words that i need to like ping into and i'm scrolling past your stupid signature block delete i literally tell everyone delete your stupid signature block i don't want to see it i tell everyone this and not everyone listens because they don't get it the thing is It's more important to have a stupid logo there or a stupid contact.

55:25I know where your contact details are. It's literally in this email. I just don't have anything. You know what I'm saying? It's wild how much capital and effort is tied up in stupid little things. It's ridiculous. Every time I interact with the government department, it's once again, it's just tying up bandwidth. And I'd love to get to a point where I just completely overhaul an entire government department or an entire government itself. Just literally just use a simple Google form or something, just like turn entire departments into just Google forms. That's what they are, really, to be honest.

56:04There's so much to just simplify. This is something we talk about for hours. Just thinking about the inefficiencies of organizations, right? And corporate and politics and how much, it's not just latency, but it's also how much money is wasted just by all this bullshit, right? but anyway I correct people as fast as possible for example I was in a Telegram chat the other day and I was trying to get information across and the person I was asking asked me how should I share he shared the information like as they're like do you want me to give you the information in an email or WhatsApp or do you I'm like just give me the freaking information in this chat right now do not ask me how to send the information just literally give it to me yeah it's wild how many like people are not trained to think like this.

56:50It's just your routine. Yeah. Like they think, they might offend me or if I just give me the information in the wrong way. I'm wanting a specific bit of information for you. I don't care how you get it to me. Just give me the information. Do you think you're a good manager? Because you're so direct. I have the same problem. I'm so direct that a lot, most people, they need you to go. If you have something, especially about to say, you need to go to have a lunch for 55 minutes. How was your wife? blah blah blah and then you do a hug and then the last five minutes say okay this went wrong but that's like kind of how people most people they need that otherwise they feel like they're attacked right if you're so direct i'm a terrible manager because i'm impatient and i'm too direct right what about you if you call me i will literally answer the phone with go i'm serious everyone knows me as the go guy because because they expect me to have this kind of like 10 second 30 seconds small talk about the weather or whatever well i literally just say i answer my phone and say go i don't even know who it is and they'd like there's like a five second pause where i'm like go and they're like okay this is what i want to feel like thank you see you bye okay like you know anyway but no i'm not i'm not a very good manager i lead from the front and people either get it or they don't it's a filter if you can't tolerate direct information transfer then don't work with me you have a wife and a daughter right yeah how do you change or do the same at home go like how do you right because a woman needs something different from her man right but if you if you're always on right always on accelerism and all that stuff afterwards like how do you kind of disconnect and become like a more kind of human person I'm very human.

58:36No, my daughter is exactly like me. She is extremely active, extremely high energy. So she's going to grow up like, and like our kids are always more intelligent than we are. They have genetically a more advanced set of instructions, probabilistically. That's true. It's kind of not true with how we humans have evolved. We're actually genetically uninvolving. I'll get to that in a second point. Because we do this artificial selection of animals you know, I'll get to, there's a bit of a deep dive there. I don't want to get into it too much. But anyway, genetically humans are unevolving. That's, that's kind of fact.

59:12But anyway, my daughter will have a more advanced memetic repository to understand and learn from. So she will be more intelligent than me. She'll have more agency, more output and more intelligence at her disposal than I do. Right. That's fact. And so I look at her and I'm just trying to like pump into information as fast as possible. And when I'm with her, I'm just constantly like challenging her like i pull out my phone and get her to do my mouse on my number pad or whatever because it's like literally i want her to be supercharged into that memetical positive the time like she's 15 18 she's got the memetic understanding of like a 30 year old there's like how quickly can i get the memes into her like is is kind of how i interact with her my wife is a gp so she's a doctor very smart actually um she she's got a really uh like she's a gp so very smart smart woman but she's very introverted so i have to kind of bring down my energy levels with my wife else it gets too crazy but i actually think i'm good at that i if i'm in output mode then you just have to deal with me i'm in full output because i'm trying to build something but if i'm in negotiation mode or i'm trying to build a relationship rapport i actually match my energy levels back down to the person i'm meeting with yeah it's an important skill something i didn't plan to talk about but maybe it's what you wanted to talk about before but you didn't kind of expand on is you said our kids are basically smarter than us right yeah but there is i saw a video the other day that kind of went viral on twitter from professor scott galloway who was saying the 30 years old today, it's the first time that they're struggling more than their parents at the same age, right?

1:00:54Which means that even if we're getting smarter one way or another, because of the way the world is evolving, for someone who is 30 years old today, it's much harder than their parents to do as well, except a few minorities, which are people who are maybe entrepreneurs and building a lot of things. The other ones are kind of struggling with a lot of things, right? Right. That's because they are completely distracted and they're stuck in this consumption death spiral. It is a failure of society itself. So part of what I'm trying to do is reactivate humanity. I'm trying to spread a hardcore accelerationist idea and accelerate.

1:01:28I'm trying to live the ASL lifestyle and communicate it to everyone I can. Because accelerationism allows you to recognize, one, your purpose is to upgrade humanity itself and to give you an ability and a set of principles to do that. But it's to recognize that we're here to create and not consume. And so the people stuck in this consumption do loop, I call it like do loop. It's like do, do, do, do, do. And you ride back to where you were and you're stuck in a do loop. And like, you just can't escape this kind of consumption do loop. Or you can call it death barrel because you don't actually do anything.

1:02:03You don't slowly die and not actually achieve anything. And so our youth and, you know, the people around us are like massively distracted and they've been taught the wrong thing. They are taught everywhere they look, It's basically accumulate as much value as you can and, you know, be wealthy and then sit on that and then die. No, it's not. Your purpose is to upgrade humanity itself. If our kids were taught that they are literally there to learn about the universe as fast as possible and upgrade humanity itself by creating, they will skip past all that nonsense. They'll be supercharged. But they go to schools and they think it's a box-dicking exercise, right?

1:02:41There's no purpose. Like why are they there? They sold a dream to just accumulate wealth, buy a house, and have a nice car and flex on Instagram, and that's it. There's no meaning for that. There's no purpose. And how does that person defend themselves with the upcoming onslaught of bots? Because bots are about to wipe out 90 % of our labor force or centralize 90 % of our labor force. How is that person going to survive that problem? Because these bots are going to serve them an infinite content machine. So right now you scroll Instagram, right? It's that app is actually tracking your finger movement and where you scroll and where you re-scroll to.

1:03:21And like TikTok does this even crazier, but soon in the next five years, you will have on-demand infinite content at your disposal and you won't even need to scroll. You won't, it will, this device that you'll stick on your head will measure your heart rate. It will look at your eye tracking. It will read the energy levels and the kind of read into your brain and work out which parts of your brain have been activated and it will know exactly. You won't even need to prompt it. You won't even need to. People think, oh, I want to watch a movie of Leonardo DiCaprio in a space Star Wars style movie and then 30 seconds later it will generate an entire movie for them, which they will merely watch and then delete.

1:04:02That's the interim. Ultimately, you won't even need to prompt it. It will know exactly what you want to see, right? You're the next level. And it will serve you that content. And in a socialist government with UBI, you'll be paid and taken all you need to take care of. Your health, we're taking care of. Everything will be around you. It'll be so easy. You'll be zombified by this infinite content machine and your universal basic income. And all your time and effort, which is the only thing scarce that you have, will be stolen off you. And so these people that wander around like scrolling TikTok a day, they are going to end up zombified.

1:04:40And that is going to happen. And that's going to cause a collapse of humanity itself. If 90 % of humanity is stuck in these pods, which zombified them because they're served an infinite stream of content, sugar, and money, universal based income, they're trapped. Who is benefiting? It's the person that's able to steal the time and effort to essentially control their vote to keep governance and power. that's going to cause a collapse of humanity itself. And that's what I'm most worried about. But it's happening already. 100 % it's happening. If we're honest with ourselves, it's completely happening and it's not getting better.

1:05:13Yeah. So people think the internet or like these devices around us are bad. Like that's the kind of mental model right now is, oh, like don't give kids, you know, screen time or whatever. Okay, don't give kids screen time. But remember, these things are just tools. If you see this device as a tool for consumption, you're dead. You're basically a walking zombie in the next 10 years. But if you see that device, and by the way, I spend probably far more time on my devices than even like a Instagram or a TikToker, but I use it to create. I use it to output. I use it to change and upgrade humanity's memetic repository.

1:05:51I use it to create memes. I bought a helicopter to express my agency, my output and create memes. That's why I'm flying that helicopter around the world from the North and South Pole in two years with another machine with a camera touch on it. Why? To create memes. I don't actually care. The helicopter is a brilliant manifestation of our latest understanding of aeronaut engineering and composites and helicopter aerodynamics and blah, blah, blah. And like, I don't care about the helicopter. It's a cool machine. I'm not even flying it right now. It's at home in my hangar. But I use it to create memes to spread a message and get people's attention.

1:06:26It's an output device, right? It's not a consumption device, right? And everything I do around me, everything I have are output devices. They are leverage devices, amplification devices. And anything I own that I use that I don't use, I flip off. I sell off. I don't need it. Everything I have should just be an output device. So be a creator, not a consumer. Right, but create useful stuff because there's two types of means. There's like high-velocity means that are flash in the pans, and then there's highly potent memes that have a long half-life. So if you generate the latest viral video on TikTok, yeah, it's a high-velocity meme.

1:07:07It spreads around the world very quickly and then it dies very quickly. And then one week later, people have forgotten about you. And you haven't actually changed and upgraded humanity. You haven't created a set of useful instructions to survive the universe. Isaac Newton did, Force equals MA. Albert Einstein did, you know, E equals mc squared. What did they do? They sat there. They observed the universe. They thought. They relied on a memetic repository, which they understood quite well as a basis of their intelligence. And they arrived at a new intuition about how the universe works. The apple falling from the tree, you know, F equals mA.

1:07:49And then they worked hard to spread that meme, right? So the same with Albert Einstein. He relied upon, he understood the latest evolution of the memetic repository of science. He observed the universe. He thought about it. He applied his intelligence and he upgraded humanity itself. E equals MC squared, right? That's a very useful meme with a long half-life. However, it's still a meme. We will get to the point in the future where we'll have the robots, the silicon machines that can perceive the universe with much greater fidelity and precision than we can. and they'll have, they'll dispose of a much higher compute power.

1:08:29So they, with more advanced observation in the universe, with a much higher compute power, will be able to arrive at memes which are more correct than E equals MC squared or force equals MA. And that's wild. Because remember, those are just memes, right? And our understanding will be upgraded of the universe. Isn't that just crazy? So what you're saying is that that the meme that is valuable and useful to survive in the universe will have a long half-life. But it will always have a half-life. And it's going to add much more value in time, right? Yeah. So there is kind of like a mechanic that is rewarding the useful and valuable memes much more than the other ones, right?

1:09:19How do we apply that to crypto? I was talking with Meow, the founder of DripIter, and he's saying every coin is a meme coin. Every token is a meme coin. Yeah, and Bitcoin itself is a meme coin. What is the meme of Bitcoin? Digital gold. Well, there's like, yeah, there's like layers upon layers of memes. But the fundamental meme of Bitcoin is that it's 0.00 on the monetary properties chart, okay? So it's finite, it's scarce, it's the oldest, right? You can take Bitcoin and you try and create a permutation of it. So change the supply to 84 million. That's Litecoin. Reduce the blockchain. So it's 0.00 because it's the first called the longest Lindy effect, right?

1:10:06And it's not infinite supply. And it's not, it's finite supply. It's actually a supply will actually reduce over time through lost coins and whatnot. But it's at 0.00, right? And you cannot repeat that. that you cannot have a Bitcoin also at 0.00 that's 15 years old, is up to a supply of like 19.5, 20 million. You cannot repeat that. You can take Bitcoin and you try to create another one, but you're going to move it away from 0.000 and you can put it separately in the universe and you have to build a shelling point around it. You can't do that. So the big meme of Bitcoin is it's the monetary asset that is the oldest digital, but it's also a finite supply asset.

1:10:53It has the strongest memes around it. Which is why it's the biggest coin of all. And forever will be. You cannot replace Bitcoin. And our interesting thing on Bitcoin itself is the only thing finite is your time and effort, right? So Bitcoin is, and you take your time and effort and you convert it into value, right? So the most useful measure of value is the asset that's able to essentially measure delta entropy. So that entropy is the change of usefulness of energy of the universe. And so the universe is basically expanding in entropy continuously. So it started with very, very useful energy, you know, very acute energy, and are slowly reducing the usefulness of that energy and expanding entropy of the universe.

1:11:51So basically Bitcoin measures delta entropy most accurately because it's essentially able to take useful energy and it gets converted into waste heat, so it increases the entropy of the world. And so it's able to essentially prove that an entropy change occurred. right and because your time and effort is you directly contributing to an entropy change in the universe so you eat food and you can further food into glucose and that glucose changes the heat like literally as you move around and and you actually increase the entropy of this room right now because you are doing you're converting energy into useful less useful energy through waste heat all right so your economic output is a measure of your time and effort which is the only thing guess you have.

1:12:39Bitcoin measures the entropy change of the energy that goes into computing those hashes. Right? Ethereum doesn't. It's to that same extent. So Bitcoin is the only way to reliably measure the entropy change of the world and attribute a value to it because that's all your time and effort is. So every token is a meme coin? Yep. But now we have something in this cycle which is the main narrative. Meme coins, right? The main narrative of the cycle. High velocity memes. Yeah. What's your thought on that? You're a big meme fan, right? Since years. What do you think about meme coins? So you're talking about high velocity memes.

1:13:24So like a typical meme coin that gets dumped by a celebrity, you know, they have locked liquidity. They used to, back in a few years ago, you would drop a coin in a liquidity pool and the founders would rug it, right? So we quickly stopped rugging. People were worked out. You don't want to touch a coin and get rugged. So now on these meme coins, they lock the liquidity and they launch a really low FTV and then they pump it, right? And so that's kind of evolved over time. But what do these meme coins do? They're called meme coins, but they're just high-velocity memes that extract value from a community.

1:14:00What about the Pepe or Whiff? Do things the same? Because I'm thinking about meme coins in like kind of three categories. is you have Dogecoin, like the kind of like Bitcoin of meme coins. There for 10 years, I think, or 11 years. And then you have this kind of newer sort of memes that meme coins like Pepe or Weave. Pepe, for example, I mean, it's from last year. There was problems in the beginning with the developers kind of dumping. Yeah, they like sent us to Vitalik and Vitalik Sol's, Harvard or whatever. But then it kind of survived that. And it seems that it's fairly distributed and kind of getting bigger and like big enough with enough liquidity that it could become something, right?

1:14:40And then you have all these kind of shitcoin memes that are launching one day worth a lot. So, I mean, like every coin is a meme coin. So as this meme grows, and every meme has a half-life, right? So you're fighting a half-life against new inflow. So like a high-velocity meme has a very quick half-life. can the inflow of people outpace the half-life of that coin? Well, these little coins, no, absolutely not. Like the celebrity drops it and immediately dumps it and the half-life is accelerated and inflows stop, right? So for example, a more mature coin like Whiff or MemeCoin, you know, Pepe or whatever, is the half-life of that coin long enough or short enough to beat the inflows of the new people being attracted to the meme?

1:15:30That's all it is. Yeah, absolutely. So Bitcoin has a half-life, right? But the problem is, so if 9 billion people were using Bitcoin, right, it will slowly have a half-life. There'll be a point at which something could replace Bitcoin ultimately. Will it beat that? By the way, we're nowhere near because we're only like 100 million, 200 million people in Bitcoin and we're going to get to like 9 billion. So the inflow of people into Bitcoin outpaced its half-life. But in 200 years' time, right, do you think Bitcoin will have a half-life? But what is the half-life of Bitcoin? That's the next one.

1:16:08Like when 9 billion people use Bitcoin, right, and it does measure the economic output of the world, what is half-life? Well, I'll tell you what. In 100 years' time, we're going to be in space. And by the way, Bitcoin has a hash horizon. It's only 20 minutes. So Bitcoin, a hash horizon, is limited to 20 minutes. anything outside the speed of light times 20 minutes, Bitcoin can't touch. What if all of humanity leaves Earth and goes into space? Bitcoin will implode. And then so that will demonstrate its half-life. The 9 million people that inflowed into Bitcoin, ultimately the low key of that 9 million people moved away from Earth because they all went to space or went to Mars or humanity itself imploded.

1:16:53And so then the value of Bitcoin imploded as well. Everything has a half-life.

1:17:00Every business too, right? If you think about it, every business is going to die one day. Tesla's a meme, right? But what's the half-life of Tesla, right? Because the inflow, you don't remember, the half-life has to be slower than the inflow. Well, the inflow has to beat the half-life, right? More people need to be joining. Like the nuclear reaction keeps growing before it can start going through decaying, all right? So Tesla is doing that because Elon is just constantly taking all the dollars created in profit and reinvesting back in. I'll tell you what is on a precipice right now, Apple. Apple are about to face a half-life.

1:17:40They spend all their profit on share buybacks, right? That's the difference between Tesla. Elon spends all their profit on building more for the future. He's building five years, 10 years ahead. SpaceX is another example, right? So that's an example where he's using the capital flow of the company to keep pushing the half-life further and further out and keep increasing the inflow. Apple, under the stewardship of Tim Cook, is about to show you it has a half-life right now because there is no innovation happening in that company. They're using all their money to just do share. They've spent like$600 billion on share buybacks.

1:18:20600 billion could have got you Could have solved nuclear fusion It could have solved Like the rocket problem Like 600 billion Could have built A giant Accelerator tunnel To ship Pods into the space Internet pods Or space branch Or anything But they wasted it Yeah I think it's Jeff Bezos saying I think it's a three year Time frame But it could be like Depending on the side of the business I guess it's like longer, but whatever you're doing today, you're going to see the results in three years in the business, right? Maybe if it's a huge business, whatever you do today, it's going to be in five years or in 10 years.

1:19:00So maybe you can also afford to be a bit more chill or just buy back your shares instead of investing in innovation. And you don't see the actual consequences of your decisions or action until later, right? But at some point it's going to hit. Yep. At some point it's going to hit. Correct. One of the refreshing facts when studying you is that you are extremely practical, as I said before. Yeah. A key trait that many founders in general lack. You think very practically about the big problems in the industry and then solve them. Right. What are the top problems in our industry right now? And what's your attempt to solve them?

1:19:34Yeah, I mean, there's multiple layers here. So the problem I'm trying to solve at the moment is that the interface, there's no large brand that can wrap and abstract all of DeFi. There's 200 million users on Binance. There's 20 million users on Metamask. There's probably 2 million users on DeFi. There's a difference of 100x there. And why? It's because DeFi is too complex. DeFi needs to be abstracted. DeFi needs a giant decentralized friendly brand that's going to bring 100 million users in and put them safely on chain. So that's DecaSwap. That's what I'm trying to build right now. But also, users are scared of self-custody because all these wallets are single signature.

1:20:10So building ThoughtChain, We built around a hardcore MPC protocol, which basically splits up key shares around 100 nodes, a fully open source, fully in the public. If you can attack it, you can steal$1 billion, right? But it's got non-zero amounts of value in its vault every single day. So clearly it's a secure protocol, touch wood. And I basically took that to build a multi-factor wallet called VoltaSig. And you log into your Gmail or your Discord with two-factor, but you don't log into your Metamask with two-factor. So I'm trying to solve that and share it with the users It's a complete open source, audited, and built in public.

1:20:45So self-custody, a giant brand to abstract DeFi, like two problems I'm trying to devote to solving at this point in time. But also there's a wider narrative problem. And DeFi is not exciting. All the attentions over at Meme Coins and CDFI, which I despise, like CDFI just got nowhere. So don't touch any of that stuff. But also like LSTs, which also fundamentally, like they're all promising decentralization, but they're all centralized. So we're not, we haven't, we're back, it's 2024. You shouldn't touch anything that's holding people's money in a centralized way. All these CDE5 protocols use multisigs.

1:21:22It's like, come on. We were trying to improve upon multisig back in 2018. How do you rekindle the DeFi flame? Well, we want to basically just kickstart this narrative like DeFi Samutupano. We need someone who's willing to get in the arena, create a narrative change, put themselves on the line, risk their own time, effort, capital brands. And I'm taking it on right now. I want to get in the arena and challenge people's ideas of what DeFi is. If I challenge that, I mean, obviously it's extremely useful for advancement of the space, right? But people in this space are kind of DJs and they want to have fun.

1:22:04And they might just say, oh, this DeFi stuff, yeah, it's important, but it's boring. Right? I prefer the meme coin. Well, that's why I've got Project Chaos. It's going to be not boring. It's going to be chaotic. And it's going to be fun. Okay. And so Project Chaos is, you know, I'm raising$20,$30 million to literally attack all of DeFi via vampire. I'm literally commoditizing vampire attacks to get in the arena and do protocol versus protocol wars. Everything you ever wanted to do to just governance attacks, liquidity attacks, whatever, just get in the arena and just throw some stuff downrange.

1:22:36I'm risking my own capital to do it as well. Because if I can make DeFi fun again and create some money games and some attention, then we can bring some attention back to DeFi. So that's a big play. I mean, it might not work, whatever, but I'm in the arena having a crack. But also there's no like charismatic leaders who can project at a good example of what to do. You know, we did have charismatic leaders and they either get exhausted and leave or they either tell too many lies or make too many mistakes or go too much in the leverage and they blow up. and there's plenty of examples of that right?

1:23:10Plenty. I had a few of them on the podcast actually end up in jail or Yeah, no, it happens I mean like it's, crypto is an emerging industry, it's not clear what's right and wrong most of the time, I mean generally if you have a good moral compass of what's right and wrong, then don't tell lies, don't cover build it like if you, don't go too much in the leverage, don't tell too many lies own it and don't rug and don't steal and blah, blah, blah. If you're like, there's a pretty general set of rules that if you follow, then you'll most of the stuff. I mean, there are some cases like the TernatoCache developer and even like CZ who, you know, I mean, yeah.

1:23:54Like it's unfortunate, but that's unfortunately our kind of, like the industry right now. There's no certain clear regulatory certainty and there's kind of, unfortunately, some examples being made right now. You talked about Vultisig, right? A multi-factor wallet. Yes. What is Vultisig if you had to explain it to your mother? Vultisig is just a safe wallet that's multi-factor. What does that mean? Okay, so you log into your Gmail, your bank account with multi-factor, two-factor, right? So you should be able to log into your crypto wallet with a two-factor. But it's on-chain two-factor. So you basically need two devices to sign a transaction.

1:24:35So if a hacker downloads your phone or you download a PDF in your Discord, you're not going to lose all your money. Look, multifactor is not perhaps for the person with a small amount of money in crypto, but it's for the person with a lot of money in crypto that's active. And here's the thing. I believe that money is only going to get hotter. Money is only going to get more online. And the reason is because there's going to be more and more bots, and these bots are going to get one and paid all the time. And the bots are going to pay each other a lot. So we have to, I reject the notion that money should stay offline, that Bitcoin should be in this covalts locked, you know, 100 foot under Norway or in Iceland in the bottom of a well somewhere.

1:25:15No, no, no. Put that Bitcoin online safely. But you can't put Bitcoin online in a single signature wallet because as time goes on, the likelihood of having a key compromise goes up, right? The only way to keep crypto online safely is with multi-factor devices. like two factor, three factor. Naval Ravikant calls Multisig the final evolution of wallet. What does that mean? Well, it's true. It's basically a wallet that works for all the chains that have ever existed and ever will exist. And it's completely off-chain. It's completely, like it supports everything and it cosigns everything. Like it's the ability to put crypto safely online.

1:26:01You can't get more safer than a multi-factor crypto wallet. You can't. And we just have to like solve some parts of the user experience, right? So right now I'm funding an upgrade to our MPC protocol to enable kind of one round signing, which is a way fast and way more reliable method of signing between two devices. But I was talking with some large crypto phone makers and they think that they're going to get the millions of users to when they set the phone up, they're going to write down a 12-word phrase on an Android phone. It's going to come with a little piece of paper. And as you set up this Android phone, they expect their users to pull out a pen and paper and write 12 words down and be secure.

1:26:45And I was like, are you guys saying this outside aloud to yourself? I'm like, this is the solution. It should be a multi-factor device. They shouldn't need to be writing 12 words down. Of course. I've declared war on seed phrases. No more seed phrases. Get rid of those damn things. And any manufacturer of a wallet, hardware, software, whatever, that's still entertaining the idea of single seed phrases, what are you doing? Please talk to me. I can help solve you. Solve that problem. It should be multi-factor. How do you build enough trust in that product to have people move large sum? Is the problem of, I mean, what is the problem of Throwchain 2?

1:27:24Is the problem of all these CD5? Yeah, I mean, we can do a bunch of things. So we can audit it over and over again. We can open source it. We can slowly build up a relationship with our users. When we're doing this right now, it's like, but it relies on, you know, six-year-old MPC technology that survives the test of time. But we just need to manage that with our users. And it's not going to be an overnight thing. But once we feel like the wallet has absolutely nailed user experience, we're going to do a large airdrop to try and attract as many users as possible into it. and basically move them away from single SIG into multi SIG.

1:28:03How important is money to you? Money is an interim parking position for time and effort. And I, so, I mean, I got my hands on a large amount of wealth in the last cycle. And I could have easily sat the cycle out and watch it go to a billion dollars. Right. So I was, you know, if I did nothing, I would be a billionaire this cycle. and if Bitcoin goes to 300K or whatever, then I do my math and I go up. Then 10X, blah, blah, blah. I go from 400 million to 4 billion. Boom, billionaire. But what is that? How is that useful to me? Because it's more meaningful to me to build a product that meaningfully upgrades humanity than to sit on the back of a yacht with a private jet and a helicopter and do nothing.

1:28:48That's meaningless to me. And I've full-act wealth. You know, back in 2017, I'd sold my house, sold my car, taken out a large business loan to fund myself getting into crypto. So my equity value was negative, like 200K. I owed more in a debt than I did in assets. And I was catching a train to work and working at a$300 a month co-working space as I grabbed my way through the first parts of my entrepreneurial battles. I had an incredible amount of agency and output. And I went from that to a lot of money in three, four, five years, very, very quickly. And so then I enjoyed this money and I thought I was enjoying it, but I got to a point where I realized I was completely tied up in things and consumption.

1:29:37And I had lost an incredibly important thing to me, which is productivity. I'd lost that productivity. I was lost the ability to create because I was so distracted in consuming things and holding onto my wealth and living this kind of wealthy lifestyle. Do you have examples, concrete examples where then you realized, fuck, what am I doing? What am I doing? Like I was 34 with a lot of money in a consumption death bar. I have lost all my productivity. I couldn't even, some of a sudden an email for me to action, it would take me like a week to respond to an email. I'll just be like, you know, whatever.

1:30:12And just even just an email to action something. And that was when I realized that was a significant problem. So I decided to reject all that and take all my capital, unlock it again, throw it back into the rent. I also quit vaping and quit drinking because I was drinking a lot. Drinking alcohol is such a decelerant. I've probably forever quit alcohol. Alcohol is a massive decelerant. It gives you brain fog, affects your sleep, affects your productivity. I was also vaping a lot last year, probably because I was drinking a lot. And vaping also gives you brain fog and affects your sleep and just throw all that out, right?

1:30:48And I decided I'd change a massive mentality change. And you know what? My wealth is an interim parking position to upgrade humanity itself. So wealth is interim. It's an ability to steer other people's time and effort, including your own. So coming into 2024, I decided to take all my capital and throw it back in the arena. All of it. And if I need more, I will sell all my worldly possessions and unlock it. And I will gain back in productivity, agency, and output. That's the trade-off there. What's the moment that you said, fuck it, I'm just going to throw all my money back in there and get back into the game?

1:31:27It was the 1st of January 2004. My New Year's resolution was quit alcohol and smoking, vaping. So I did that. And that kind of freed up my mind. And I started expressing my agency and output. And I started building again. And probably March this year, when I'd written this kind of, I'd been thinking about accelerationism for a long time, since I'd discovered the movement, the EAC movement. But it was very edgy. And I realized EAC is a very powerful movement, but it's not able to communicate itself. So I kind of created this movement called Acell, short for acceleration. And that was in February.

1:32:05And in March, I'd written a first draft of what Acell. Everyone's like, what's Acell? You've got ASEL everywhere, time to ASEL. I was like, no, it's time to ASEL, time to accelerate, time to get things moving again. And so as I conceptualized this idea and actually wrote it down, I created this thought stream and I've now funded a book to like turn it into like an action book to share with the world how to accelerate a set of useful instructions, right, which hopefully has a highly potent with a long half-life. I realized actually I'm all in. I was able to conceptualize that wealth value is a temporary parking position to create means and genes.

1:32:43And most importantly means because we're advanced mammatic creatures. And by the way, I haven't even talked about space brains and rockets and tunnels and stuff like that. But I'm a hiker about it. So probably about March, I decided to throw all my wealth back in the arena. So between the moment you said, I'm stopping alcohol and vaping, it took about two, three months. and be like back into full animal mode pretty much. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. What do you mean by having a post-wealth mentality? So a lot of people who are pre-wealth think that wealth is the ultimate state, right? So a post-wealth mentality, you don't need to be pre-wealth at all to view wealth as just an ability to direct people's time and effort to create means.

1:33:31So post-wealth is like you just, you realize that wealth is a parking position to do something. You want to unlock it, put it back in the arena. So I don't care about wealth anymore. Like the greatest value, the most wealthy thing you can do is take all your scarce time and effort and invest in your own intelligence and memetic output. That's all it is, right? So that's post-wealth mentality. It's like you're not building to accumulate wealth anymore. You're actually building and you're converting your scarce time and effort to create memes. That's post-wealth. What makes you happy? Creating useful things, useful memes.

1:34:07And everything's a meme. So I'm most happy when I see a meme that I create flourish and spread. So we're talking about before, you flying to everywhere, right? For work now, business meeting, meeting investors, building, probably not sleeping much, but probably way, way happier than when you were chilling and taking one week to answer your email, right? Way more. Yeah, far more. It's just a far more meaningful life today. And it's far wilder for sure. But I am short-circuiting my time and effort back into memes again. So I spent so much to turn my time and effort into wealth to realize that wealth is an interim position to create memes.

1:34:52And now I'm just taking all my time and effort and all my wealth and just directly creating memes. And that is true happiness. That's true purpose. You spent several million dollars on the music festival arena. Why? More. I've got this crazy hangar back home and I want to turn it into a destination globally. I want people all around the world to fly into my Acell hangar and it's on the side of a hill. It's where it's partly the helicopter. And I've filled it out with the... How did you know about this? You must be checking my Instagram. I see you flying everywhere on the helicopter and then I saw, I think, a post on the music arena.

1:35:35I was like, oh, yeah, music too. I've got the best sound system, the best lights, the best arena, and I want people around the world to come to the ASL hangar for flagship music because music, I love music, and I love music festivals. It's a high-stimulation environment. there are lights sounds music people energy yeah energy it's energy like i don't go to music festivals to to drink or take drugs or whatever i literally go there to experience the energy of everyone and like like that energy like young people just all there for the same experience and and high energy with high energy music is what's amazing and like honestly watching miss Monique live at Surveyor was one of the, or Grimes at Coachella.

1:36:23I saw, I think it was both on Twitter and Instagram. You were, you were partying in public. Yeah. I mean. Partying in public. Yeah. I was posting it live. It's this high energy. So I want to, I want to create that in Darwin and I want people to, to come to the ASL hangar and be in a high energy environment because Darwin, one, Darwin doesn't have that. And two, it's my hangar, my ASEL hangar and where I can spread a message of accelerationism. You said the only scarce things are your time and efforts. Nothing else is. Do you want to develop on that? Look, you have a finite amount of time on Earth, 80 years at this point.

1:37:09You know, maybe we, with space brains, we can get to 200 years. But in that time, and you have a battery of time, it was 1.0, completely full, the moment you're born, and it's slowly depleting. You will never be able to undo time, right? And as you deplete your time, what do you do with it? You have an option to upgrade humanity, if you want to take that option, right? And that's the only true meaning. But you may not, you know, for whatever reason, Like you may not want to or may not be able to upgrade humanity. And that's a shame. That's unfortunate. But if you then apply your effort throughout, so you could sit on your couch and not do anything all day long, but that's a choice you can make.

1:37:51Or you can take your finite time and your finite effort and amplify it through your memetic understanding. So basically learn how the universe operates. Like, you know, you go to school to actually try and learn how the universe operates. right you i've been in crypto for over a decade now since 2013 so i have an advanced understanding how crypto works right and i'm amplified i'm using that with my finite time and effort to create useful memes so that's what's your scarce and you you know the and value itself is scarce and you you're able to convert your finite time and effort into value which i will you think might take that value and buy yachts and wealthy houses and blah blah no it's actually you take the value and buy memes or produce memes.

1:38:36More memes. More memes. More memes equal more happiness. Yes. That's all that will give you happiness at any level of wealth. Why should the human species think bigger than just the planet Earth? Right. So we have a genetic and mimetic repository. And as we advance the rung of intelligence, so we started billions of years ago in the primordial protein zoo. and through the permutations of our environment, these tiny organisms observe the universe, learn about the universe and upgrade themselves. And that's been happening for billions of years. And they've turned into single cell organisms, multi-cell organisms, bacteria, flora, fauna.

1:39:20They were like swimming in the oceans and they crawled out, they got lungs and they started walking around and they jumped to climb the trees and develop wings and flew around, right? And then we basically have constantly been genetically evolving. And at various stages of the last billion years, that our advancing intelligence has been reset a few times. I mean, just over the weekend, I was in Melbourne looking at giant dinosaur skeletons, like a T-Rex or a Triceratops were like advanced creatures back then, much larger than they were today because of much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

1:39:55It's a lot more humid. So the floor is much bigger. But that all got reset back down to mosquitoes, dragonflies, and crocodiles, right? And so like those advanced creatures were wiped out by some event, some catastrophic event. I mean, the moon spins at the same speed as the earth as a constant reminder to you. Every time you look at the moon, you should recognize that we should get out of this earth. The fact that the moon exists, it billions upon billions of tons was spat out of the Earth's mantle hundreds of thousands of kilometres and over billions of years slowly coagulated under its own gravity into the moon.

1:40:33Every single atom in the moon spins at the same speed as the Earth. We only see one side of the moon because that object was once dust ejected from the Earth's mantle. Do you think any of our advanced creatures today, including us, could have survived another moon ejection episode? Zero. row, we would get reset, we would probably get reset way back through the crocodiles, way back down, probably even to single-celled organisms, probably even like that will get zeroed out, right? So an entire genetic repository is under threat right now, every single day of being reset back down to the crocodiles, or even worse, reset back down to the building blocks of humanity itself, carbon dioxide, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.

1:41:14So the first absolute thing we need to do is get our genetic repository backed up out of earth to survive such an event. The second reason is we also have this crazy mimetic repository. Like it's art, science, religion, humanity itself. Like the iPhone is built with means, the helicopter is built with means. If we had a one week long, a solar flare, like coronal mass ejection event, that thing would turn off our electrical grids. It would zero out all our transistors and take us offline for entire seven days. Like if we had a month of CMEs, our entire fragile infrastructure around us would get turned offline and then watch out for the chaos.

1:41:55That could happen starting tomorrow, running for a month. There's a non-zero chance our entire magnetic field could be blown away. All our airliners would fly across the ends of the earth. So are you ready? Because the more advanced we are, the more fragile we become. If I put two organisms on a desert island and said survive for three years, you and a crocodile, who would win? The crocodile. The crocodile is actually more resilient to the diversity of the universe than you are. You need this kind of like bubble wrap around you. You exist in this giant kind of convoluted, heavily supply chains, logistics and internet and blah, blah, blah.

1:42:36You could not survive on a desert island for three years. the crocodile would do it in his sleep. So actually who's more intelligent, you or the crocodile? Who can survive the universe's adversity in a more resilient way? In that situation, the crocodile could. So our mimetic repository is at risk every single day. Every single day we keep it here on earth. And by the way, it's all going online, so it's even more at risk. We used to keep it in our books and our libraries, and then the only event that would threaten that was when the peasants would light it on fire or a giant volcano would cover it.

1:43:10in dust. Now, all our memes are online. So a single CME can reset that out. It's all like a giant event. So we absolutely need to export our genetic and memetic repository as a backed up out of earth. But more than that, our purpose over the next billion years is to continue to explore the universe. But you're a biological machine. You're a manifestation of agency intelligence in a biological form, right? But recognize that you are mostly memes, right? You're produced through genes, but everything you've been doing for 34 years, I'd imagine 40 years, has been powered by memes, right? So you're becoming slowly more mimetically powered.

1:43:55And guess what? These silicon machines that we're very, probably like one decade away from creating and be completely powered by means. And they will have more agency and more output and more precision in observing the universe than you will. And if you view them as your servant to actually like serve your coffee at a cafe, which will zero out our labor force, then you will be turned into a paperclip if you have that opinion. Instead, we should look to the silicon machines. We should give them an advanced memetic base to work with and a bunch of sensors to say, you have a much more advanced, much greater precision and fidelity to observe the universe, go explore the universe.

1:44:36These silicon machines, their purpose is to explore the universe. We explored zero to 100 ,000 feet. We've explored the moon. But can we explore beyond that? No, because we are artificially limited, well, we're limited through our biological machinery, your skeleton, right, which needs, you know, you need oxygen, you need life support, But a silicon machine can zip around at 1 % the speed of light, maybe 10%. We may not ever solve for 10 % speed of light speed, even like 90 % speed of light, because we don't have an advancement. We don't have the advanced ability to understand the universe that these machines could.

1:45:15They will solve how to travel at 10 % the speed of light, not us. Does it mean that you are, one day or another, going back to your first mission, which was becoming an astronaut or... I realized that humans should not become astronauts. The machine should. The machine should explore the universe. The machine should upgrade a memetic repository. If they find useful things, they should share it with us. Then the next question is, so the purpose of machines is to take our memes and explore the universe, right? They will figure out the problems because they can see the universe with much greater precision.

1:45:50They can think way faster. They can communicate with each other. So we can communicate at the speed of, I'm speaking to you. These machines will be able to communicate with themselves at the speed of light. There's no way we can compete with that. So these machines should be exploring the universe as fast as possible and upgrading the memetic repository as they go along. So then the question is, how are we going to manage this transition between the biologic machines and the silicon machines? How are we going to stay relevant? What are the machines going to think of us? So right now, do you have a pet dog or a pet cat or you know someone that does?

1:46:21Yeah. So you look after your pet dog and your pet cat and you care for it. It is a much better life than other animals around us. I know where you're going. We look after it. We care for it because it gives us a reminder of where we come from. The silica machines are going to look to us as pets. Yeah, I heard that from, is it Balaji? I don't know. Balaji, yeah, yeah. Who said something like that. Honestly, they'll look at us as pets. But we don't really want that relationship. We actually just want to send the machines on. But how are we going to actually communicate and stay relevant in these machines?

1:46:51Well, we need to start thinking at the speed of light and communicate with them. We need to shed our skeletons, right? And this sounds crazy. Bear with me for a second. I dropped this on the palm and he was just like mind-blowing. Anyway, no, we should. So your skeleton is just an ability for you to navigate Earth at 1G in a 16 % oxygen environment and eat food on the ground, turn to glucose, which ATP and power your brain. Your brain. Your skeleton is an ability for you to sense the universe, respond to it, and give you agency and an ability to create. However, what if I told you we could shed your skeleton, which is actually limited to about 80, 100 years because it ages way faster than your brain does.

1:47:33We could stick your brain, which is the low key of your intelligence and your senses, really, and put you in a pod that can synthetically generate all your glucose, salt, and oxygen needs in a highly controlled environment, shield you from the toxins and the kind of threats of your environment, right? You have a one centimeter thick skull to protect your brain from the chaos, the adversity around you. What if we just give you a gold-plated pod, put you in orbit where there's no kind of that threat, unfurl your solar panel so you have 24-7 power or nuclear, giving you synthetically enough glucose, sugar and oxygen to power you for 200 years.

1:48:17How long can your brain survive? Because it actually decays a lot slower than the rest of your body. My grandma was 94 years old and she was sharp as a whistle and her body failed her. So let's just, so many of these amazing brains suffocate and die because their skeletons fail them. So what I'm talking about is just get rid of the skeleton. By the way, don't do it when you're 80. Do it when you're 40. Because the earlier that you do it and the earlier that you put your brain in a safe, stable environment, which is in a pod in orbit, away from the chaos and adversity of this 1G environment, the longer your brain will survive.

1:48:51And then you go, well, actually, will I live as a human? Yes, you will. I was going to say, where is the soul in that equation? You are your brain. You delegate your agency to your skeleton to walk around this earth, to catch planes, to type on your little iPhones, because it's the only way for you to have agency and output and create. But what if I said, actually, we can take your entire sensor, your spinal cord, which is 69 million neurons. And by the way, a neuron is just responding to an analog signal. And the whole universe is analog, right? Everything in around us is analog wavelengths. Everything is just analog wavelengths, frequencies and vibrations, which is wild.

1:49:31And let's remap those 69 million neurons and all your sensors and your olfactory nerve and your auditory nerve and your visual nerves, remap it on a much more advanced sensors to allow you to see more of the EMF spectrum, see more of the auditory spectrum, sense magnetic fields, look PFR out into space, zip around in your pods at the speed of light, right? Because you could actually do that then. You'd become fused to a silicon machine. And then you go, well, what about my agency, my communication, my sensors, and my stimulation? Well, you're in high output mode. You can communicate the speed of light with the machines and with the other people.

1:50:06You can delegate your agency. You can delegate your sensors and agency to a humanoid bot in New York and then zip it over to a bot on Mars. You don't need to be on Mars. You could literally 20 milliseconds later or the speed of light to the Mars and Tansai 2, you could be anywhere within a speed of light of around 200 milliseconds, which is the latency, which is sufficient, right? But you could yourself as a pod zip around at 10 % speed of light. So now, right now you can, you think about like walking around here in Singapore and catching a plane to New York is going to cost you 19 hours, right?

1:50:40Because the machine has allowed you to have that agency, which didn't exist 200 years ago, by the way, you are limited to like little canoes and boats. And now we've got a machine that can take you to New York in 19 hours, right? What am I about to tell you? Like keep shedding your biological limitations and travel at 10 % spin light. That is how we stay relevant in the machines. And then people go, oh, what is the purpose of the human? What is your purpose today? And I've already told you what that is, is to advance humanity's intelligence genetically and memetically. And that's still entirely relevant as a space brain.

1:51:19Absolutely. It's completely in line, basically. Correct. Level of evolution. Or maybe next, next, next. Correct. Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. So lots of people who are watching that are probably going to think, this guy's on another planet, right? I'm right here with you. But if we get a bit more, I mean, I understand the whole concept. And if you think about what you said, right? 200 years ago, we couldn't do that. Now we can do that in 19 hours. The next step in whatever, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years is going to be better, right? Yeah. It has to, because that's what progress is.

1:51:56If, how old are you? 35. 35. let's get back to when you were 18. If you miss your 18 years old self today, what would you tell him? Upgrade your memetic understanding universe as fast as possible. Do not, I mean, I was very naive when I was 18. I was trying to, like I said, I was trying to pursue my vision of being an astronaut by like hopping through. But I was, no, actually my 18 year old self was pretty switched on. It kind of knew what it was trying to do. It was trying to push towards this. It was trying to ignore the, So it was naive, right? It was about the chaos, you know, the distractions of the world and had a singular vision.

1:52:35But I didn't understand why. And so I'd literally tell that 18-year-old person, start producing memes now. Converting all your time and effort into memes and do it immediately. That's all it is. And genes. I wish I had kids when I was 21. That's a good one. Honestly, any young person out there, your purpose is to upgrade humanity through genes and memes. That's it. genes and memes, baby. So as soon as you can, have kids. And have a lot of kids. And then teach them very rapidly. And then spread them out. As soon as they're 18, boost them out. And then at the same time, create as many memes as you can.

1:53:13And by the way, you can do all of that and more. You have one daughter, right? One daughter. I wish I had more. I want as many kids as possible. We started too late, unfortunately. That's actually one of my biggest regrets. Is not having kids younger. not finding a stable partner and just having kids as young as possible just lots of kids what's your advice for someone who wants to find a stable partner what's the fastest way to get there if we need to do everything as fast as possible and this one is a very tricky one given today's world right dating apps everybody's very confused on how how to you know there's always like the grass is always greener on the other side there's always a better partner you talk about the Instagram and all this stuff before, right?

1:53:55Like there's always someone who looks better or is, who seem to have a better life, so it seemed to be happier. How does a 21 year old or 25 or 30 year old single, let's say guy, find a good spouse as quickly as possible? Yeah. Well, that's, that's, I mean, I'm married. Um, and I took too long to get married for sure. and you know there's find someone that you can produce genes and memes with i mean just genes with you just want a partner that that matches your imperative about creating kids as fast as possible and it's you don't need to get too overworked about it you just need a someone that's stable that's roughly the same moral compass and religion just gives you a moral compass by the way religion is a giant meme that gives you a moral compass as like allows you to what is right and wrong.

1:54:52And if you find someone with an overlapping moral compass, generally the similar religion, and that's why religions are useful to humanity and why we've got so far to coordinate, because when we have aligned moral compasses, we can coordinate and share resources and evolve faster. And so religion is actually useful in the sense that we align our moral compasses. So I'm getting back to it, but religion is still a meme. Everything's a meme. That's a wild statement, I know. But find someone who has a line moral compass because then you're not at odds with each other as far as possible. So you've got to match your moral compass and then you've got to match your imperative, right?

1:55:29Your imperative produced genes. You're not with a partner. I mean, you should have a productive marriage and have kids. That's all it is. But even marriage is a meme in that sense. Like what you kind of want is a stable environment around your kids and a marriage generally gives you a stable environment because you have a aligned moral compass and you have this kind of mutual understanding that you're going to stay together, look after your kids, right? But that's actually, if you peel back the last young and that's all you want is to an environment where you can supercharge your kid with memes, with information as fast as possible.

1:56:03So they're not worried about where the next meal is coming from or where the threats of the environment, you can take away all those, those threats from them and just focus on injecting them with memes for the 18 years. So generally a marriage, which is a meme, is the best environment for that because it's stable. So find the first partner you can, right, that has a closely aligned moral compass to you, but first you've got to work out what your moral compass is, what you define as right and wrong, and then try and build a stable environment to produce as many kids as possible and inject them with memes as fast as possible so they can, and then you, because that's your purpose, it's genes and memes.

1:56:42Yeah, that's a long-winded answer. But it's a difficult problem to solve, that's for sure. Especially if you don't have much money, right? Because let's be honest. Money is irrelevant. Imperative. There's a lot of anxiety for couples today and our generation. Or maybe it's just an excuse, but I don't think so. It's an excuse. It gives you imperative. Imperative. Having a child will give you imperative. You will solve the money problem. And money is just a resource problem. By the way, everyone has time and effort. Money is just stored time and effort. So don't come in and say you don't have much money.

1:57:13No. How much time do you have? How much effort can you produce? Everyone has the same amount of time and a similar amount of effort, right? So money is irrelevant. Money is just the ability to convert your time and effort into resources to provide stored resources to provide for yourself and the people around you. That's it. And we've all got the same. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? Too short. I would kind of think more five to 10 years. I mean, no, it's too short. There's too much permutation and chaos in the next 12 months. What's your biggest prediction for the next five years?

1:57:48Look, I mean, Bitcoin will march us way to a million dollars. That's pretty certain. Crypto will 10x. More money will get hotter. Our society will get more chaotic and more confused. I want to try and bring order to the chaos. I mean, I love chaos, right? Chaos tests your adversity and your ability to think fast and tests your dynamic environment. Like, you should welcome chaos. You should welcome adversity because it proves your intelligence and your agency and your ability to create. That's why I love chaos because I get to prove my intelligence in the chaotic arena. Absolutely. Right? If you cannot tolerate chaos or adversity, who are you?

1:58:23You're just a… You're weak. I mean, it's bad to say, but it's true. No, it is true. You should look to chaos. You should… Honestly, because you can… Well, you should look to get in the arena to handle chaos. Right? It's not about creating chaos for chaos, I say. It's about the universe is chaotic, right? And the universe will throw adversity every single day. It tests your intelligence and your agency to be able to navigate that. That's why I welcome chaos. I welcome adversity. Like, throw it at me. I mean, there's a limit, obviously. What is that limit? It's all solvable, all problems that you can solve.

1:59:01Amazing. Thank you so much for this amazing conversation, JP. That was awesome. Oh, thank you. No, I enjoyed it. It was really good. You asked some wild questions, but I mean, there's so much more. what to talk about next time part two yeah memes and jeans baby memes and jeans memes and jeans