The Crypto Renaissance Has Begun | Josh Rosenthal

Transcript

this episode is brought to you by pair swap the leading aggregator to find best prices across various decks you'll hear more about them later in the show this is the the crazy part about it it wouldn't have occurred to medieval you that you were permissioned the idea of being permissioned means you know it being permission-less is like that you know what agency or the ability to do other things is like that was your world that was the area you breathed that you're like a goldfish in a bowl it never would have occurred to you that that was wrong or even that that was the case and so sometimes i make this comparison and say hey you know medieval you what a chump right like it didn't even occur to you but like what will future historians say about us [Music] all right everyone we have

another special episode i really feel like i say that for every episode but this one is actually really really special uh the the history nerd in me is the most excited i've probably ever been for a podcast episode and the history of doing these things uh a lot of people don't know i was a history major and my my friends know that when i'm not talking about crypto i am talking about history which makes me a really really boring person to hang out with for people who don't like either of those things but today we have josh rosenthal uh who is a phd he has a phd in uh i think it's medieval and early modern history if i got that right he is a historian turned vc uh and i'm just so excited to talk to josh about uh both crypto but also the

renaissance so josh welcome to empire hey thanks for having me here big fan appreciate all you do on number fronts and uh i did not know your history it's funny there's a definite flavor group of people that are into humanities not just arts but more kind of storytelling and generally you know qualitative humanities type things that are into crypto more than you might know most of us don't talk about it though it's still kind of we're in the closet on it so i'm glad you're one of the members well i actually think there are a lot of folks in uh encrypted who studied whether whatever whatever you want to call it humanities or liberal arts uh mike and i we i mean we just have to we we're like starting at this base level of just knowing psychology mike was i think psychology and classics um i'm pretty

sure it was that was history and so we never learned finance right and so we're learning everything from the ground up uh and i think it it it just gives you this more open view of the world no that's crazy that my minor field my pg was actually classic so that's uh it teaches you a different way to think about problems the web two guys call it kind of first principles but it's a it's a different definitely a different way of thinking about what's happening and what might happen so good wow that's crazy yeah super exactly now that we've you know ostracized 98 of the audience i know a lot of finance majors listening to this to be like damn damn all right turning off the podcast now i think a good place to start would just be can you set the scene can you take us

back to medieval life actually take us back to medieval life pre-renaissance during the renaissance take us back to what this like permissioned life during that period of time when uh looked like and i think we can use that as a kicking off point yeah sure like i'm not into crypto just to be totally clear that's like not my thing i'm i'm more into kind of like cultural and societal transformations and mostly from a historical perspective so call it renaissance especially like these shifts between you know the late middle ages and the early reformation and renaissance was an epic change and so i'm into those kind of things and it just so happens that crypto is you know an iteration a recycling a retelling the next chapter in the story and so for folks who aren't into spot trading or finance or into kind of weird pixelated

cats like if you're into like history and particularly like what happened in the past and what might happen in the future i'm like how we can mitigate unintended consequences and like at the end of the day like i see this is a giant story one in which we're actually players so if you're even remotely into you don't even have to use a c word or call it crypto if you're remotely into the way the different changes and how people work together how money might work how your work might work how you might do governance any of these things like crypto is just the natural x you know extension of that and you know the transformation from the late middle ages to the renaissance you know we call it a renaissance that basically means it was a rebirth or recreation it was the death of the old

world and a recreation of a new world and old world sometimes i trick people and i say hey just imagine medieval you like what would your life have been like and essentially like the word that comes to mind is permissioned it was fundamentally hierarchical but for you experiencing it it meant that everything you did or wanted to do was permission you need to ask someone else in authority for permission to do something so like statistically speaking you're a farmer you've never been more than five miles away from your farm you can't read you can't write your life is very difficult you work from dusk until dawn every single day and it's it's back breaking work you've done that your parents did that their parents their parents their parents their parents their parents their parents about four more sets of those that's what your kids will do your

name might even be farmer like that's who you are and if you ever had an idea to change that if you said hmm this this authority i don't quite think it's legitimate i think these institutions are failing that idea probably never would have occurred to you ideas aren't transferred around there isn't mass communication you can't read you can't write and like those ideas are sealed in documents of power so it's very difficult for you to have a different idea you know occasionally things bubbled up from time to time ideas that you know rights and values should be different those were brutally smashed down partially because it couldn't gain enough critical mass from the community because you couldn't share ideas and you couldn't you didn't have capital to like pursue those ideas wealth was permissioned it was concentrated most

wealth was in land and animals that seems crazy until you realize like most people's wealth is in their house today um it's land and animals but you didn't have access to that just statistically speaking and yeah there's some coin and currency but that really wasn't for you and you couldn't spend it as you wanted to anyway there were things called sanctuary laws and so you didn't have access to wealth you didn't have access to spend your money as you wanted to you could communicate at scale new ideas wouldn't it impact you um and like these two things like fuse to form your identity the idea of the new wouldn't have occurred to you it was so effective in terms of hegemony like for them religion wasn't just private belief it was the structure of their like cosmic reality and at the top of it there were authority figures pope

cardinals archbishops bishops archdeacons subdeacons priests preludes all the way down in you and the same thing with you know the political apparatus which was interwoven you know holy roman emperor imperial electors you know all the way down and then there's you and you're at the bottom of both of these things and so as a historian and i'm kind of an odd one in that i look at complex systems even kind of modern events we pull on these threads one was value all your value was permissioned one was communication your communication was permission and one was identity like these two things like stick you they put you where you are and you're not going to change that your stars are set you know you're you are a farmer you will die a farmer your kids will be farmers don't even think about anything else um you cannot leave your land without

permission you can accumulate wealth without permission and most of the time those people in permission in authority would deny you access to that and so that was your life the kicker about it is and this is the the crazy part about it it wouldn't have occurred to medieval you that you were permissioned the idea of being permissioned means you know what being permission-less is like that you know what agency or the ability to do other things is like that was your world that was the air you breathe that you're like a goldfish in a bowl it never would have occurred to you that that was wrong or even that that was the case and so sometimes i make this comparison and say hey you know medieval you what a chump right like it didn't even occur to you but like what will future historians say about us and so i

kind of walk through those same threads and say value you think you control your own money right maybe unless it's worth less and less every year and you don't even know how much less it's worth do you believe the cpi or that you can spend it any way you want to you're not subject to those like medieval sanctuary laws right ah i mean i used tried to use a credit card to you know attend a crypto event and that credit card denied payment and they said we know the content is not fraudulent we just don't like those ideas being discussed we're not going to run out on your rails or communication like obviously they can uh they can de-platform you right like that's just for the crazies historically it tends not to work out real well for the rest of us when you start de-platforming the crazies or they

could cut the cord you know there won't be another arab spring like we saw in egypt like they know how to cut the cord now and so things like decentralized broadcast and dvpn is incredibly important but we're still they may let you keep talking which means like a medieval they may transmute your time and attention into their product in web 2 and fang like a medieval lord they'll harvest the fruits of your interaction and you we don't even know it and they might use a magical incantation to shape your reality what you see and what you respond to called an algorithm and so in many ways we're very similar to our medieval twins our life is permissioned in a number of ways and we're not aware of it um so that's kind of the setup so when i look at what's happening today i say hey value being concentrated

communication largely you know permissioned and like identity the point is it never occurs to us is very similar to what we saw in the middle ages if that that makes sense it's a crazy thing to say it does make sense it does make sense so i mean there's so much to unpack there and i think one point to maybe double click on is just identity um and within identity just the the idea that you could have new ideas um that really started to shape what a new identity looked like i was a farmer my father was a farmer his father was a farmer and now for the first time ever you have new ideas and i think it's too uh important to just explore like in crypto uh paying homage to the matrix we call it like did they take did they take the red pill right uh you know are they

red pilled are they down the rabbit hole and what allowed people in the renaissance to go from farmer to farmer to farmer to farmer to i'm taking the red pill and i'm expanding my mind like what what what happened here yeah yeah and in some ways i mean it's one of the craziest transformations ever um like i said there are a number of renaissances before when we say renaissance we think of like cutesy angels or michelangelo or this or that um they're in that's because that's one we remember there were a number of renaissances before that you know kind of known to historians today but we've forgotten about all of those because they didn't last they didn't have staying power they really didn't transform at an epic scale and the one we think of did partially because it succeeded where all other renaissances failed because communities like use two

different type they use decentralized technology so it kind of gets to what drives history do you think it's means of production do you think it's great men with ideas i actually think it's like communities using technology and they used a particular type of technology not just silicon valley kind of hedge fund say better faster cheaper like specifically decentralized technology and this decentralized technology had a generative function baked into it and so it it kind of didn't need adoption it created its own adoption and so specifically if we pull on those same threads so they started using uh for value there was a new protocol it was called double entry bookkeeping you may know of it as like ledger based accounting right and so one of these families out in the middle of nowhere you hadn't heard of

them at the time they're in the sticks in the south of france they did the renaissance thing and went ad fontes back to the sources dusted off this book and they came up with a new way to do accounting instead of doing transaction reconciliation transaction reconciliation they did debit and credit and so that allowed them to to create all sorts of new financial fundamentals to increase speed and like to unlock capital which there was enough coin to handle credit anyway and so it just exploded and transformed like the nature of finance and so that meant new players won this family called the medici went from nobody to you know taking the seat of the papal seat and the throne of france but they also along with everybody else started disseminating that capital in these new financials which weren't available

previously without this ledger based protocol and so now you have loans tens of thousands of loans hundreds of thousands of loans you couldn't have left your farm but now you can you can get a little loan and you can't read or write but you kind of keep a little ledger and you can make these chicken scratches in it and kind of know what's going on so you actually financially can leave but then like would the idea have ever occurred to you at the same time as that permissionless financial protocol was you know taking over the world by storm so too there's a permission permissionless communication protocol and that was the printing press which you know in the internet everybody says oh the printing press is like the internet blah blah blah i'd say the internet might have been that but it kind of followed this false fork to

where now it's re-aggregated what i was talking about the medieval lord is being able to control it so at the time the printing press was crazy like those documents of power not just ideas but access to capital access to rights you didn't have access to those those are sealed on manuscripts they're incredibly difficult to get a hold of they're geographically proxied you'd have to travel somewhere someone would have to let you in and you know writing a little thing would take like a year basically to copy right super expensive and the printing press was like crazy like by all objective of standards it was a horrible idea right like gutenberg would have got kicked out of every venture capitalist office because he's taking out this protocol where only five percent of the people are eligible for like only five percent of people read

right you can't take that protocol to market and yet that printed protocol had this generative nature where it not only created its own market creating literacy it created new types of interpretation communication that we couldn't have otherwise imagined and so you're printing and it's very decentralized like you could set up a print shop in the back of a store and like no one would know it some cities tried to kyc printers but it didn't take a lot to skirt that and you know sometimes they complied but the point was it was everywhere instantly and it proved you know unstoppable in a number of ways and rather than when we say printing press we think of like gutenberg's bible and these long textual based things that take forever to print that wasn't what you saw medieval you moving into renaissance you didn't see that you saw

you saw a fluke drift in a giant broad sheet right and it had a it had an image on it a wood cut image or a copper etched image and so you hadn't seen art before medieval u had seen like you know art was 2d flat and symbolic but you hadn't seen it it hadn't made its way to you and now the sudden you're seeing art at scale so the printing press allowed art at scale and it wasn't just art that was pretty it was art that communicated meaning it had semiotic impact that these symbols meant something and they meant that the reality you were experiencing was only one of many possible realities you could you could change your stars if you will and those things had snappy tag lines on it so you might not be able to read but you get your buddies together and you're

doing it down at a public you're doing it at a bar and you can kind of figure out what's going on and it basically was a sharp knife that just pricked authority some of these are crazy images like demons pooping out you know authority figures to us it'd be like money printer gober you see that thing and you go oh wow they're the memes of the renaissance they literally were memes i mean they're all there's always symbology before but it was symbology plus mass media where you could do it at scale and so now these things are flying all over the place and farmer you says hey the authority that keeps you permissioned is illegitimate you can do something else here's a bit of capital to get you started this thing is the birth of proto-mercantilism birth of capitalism so that was crazy and then

also there was a mind shift too that that was communicated in those ideas where previously like the sacred was purely religious and that was all that was worth being commemorated and the common and profane and mundane wasn't so you see the art shift and the technology is baked into the art which is like worth noting it looked weird and odd to the power holders at the time but um to the people who were seeing it for the first time they understood the the meaning and the symbolic unpack and part of that symbolic unpack was uh was that uh being apart from the world wasn't the only thing that was worthwhile so in medieval you you were a farmer you're worth nothing because you're toiling away in the world the people that had value they were outside the world they're off in a monastery or chloe's

steering netery and now these images come along and they say hey what you're doing in this world with your family and your friends and your community members and even your work you can work in finance and that's a glorious amazing thing to do that was radically transforming to say not only are you not subject to authority which says you can't be participating in this world you have capital you have ideas and one of those ideas is that that cosmic hierarchy is flattened and what you do in this world matters and that was enough to get a lot of people to uh to leave the monasteries and you to leave your farm and you uh you started all these crazy these crazy new economic models thanks to these new financial fundamentals that's a that's a long answer but that's a it's a big question yes yeah i mean i think the two most

important things there are just that you there there's the creation of two different things you had double entry bookkeeping and then the spawn of the medici family right and then you also had gutenberg i loved the gutenberg story right because i think um if i remember that story correctly it was really technology that was invented in china but gutenberg builds it in germany i might be wrong about this he builds it in germany because he thinks there's a market for this but when you actually look back at how gutenberg talks about the printing press he just the market size the the tam was so so so off right he thought he could produce books by it was like the hundreds or the thousands he never thought it was like he never thought i mean how many books are out there billions of books probably now

right he was just orders of magnitude off and it just reminds me so much of i want to draw analogies to crypto but also just analogies to the internet right like the total addressable market um uh of of what people thought the internet could be and now what what folks think crypto will be is just orders of magnitudes off from what most folks think it will be now that's one of the things like when you tell the story you kind of shorthand but you could none of these things were new there were iterations you know print chinese double entry bookkeeping coming from roman from plenty north african communities they the ad fonte's piece was kind of the renaissance thing going back the sources was rediscovering a lot of this and your point to the tam is really important so you know if you view web 2 so i kind of

view history as a pendulum swinging back and forth broad strokes between aggregation consolidation which is tam total addressable market big as you can get own all of it and decentralization and maybe it just swings back and forth maybe it ratchets up and thesis antithesis synthesis but either way you know the world we're now is very hierarchical in terms of permission and value aggregation and part of that is our business models reward that right you want as big a total address mark as you can get and you want as much of it as you can get and that's kind of like things playbook right and so like saying crypto is saying hey i can take pieces of that cam and pull them out and redistribute them to the little people along the long tail and part of that ownership economy so it's a different fundamental like model towards that and

that's actually what gutenberg like ran into he thought tam was one thing and the ability to scale that to take those pieces of value out and distribute them scatter them like seed them all along long tail it can grow it can compound infinitely in ways you can't imagine an example of that he thought he could only sell you know a few thousand you know books and he was probably right it only was at the time like books were were not what sold it was this new form of media which he couldn't have otherwise imagined this giant broadsheet that was what when you know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands like luther in any given year is accounting for like 50 of the things printed with these broad sheets right and so like the decentralized technology created or recreated the tam in a fundamental way and so we look back and we say hey

renaissance was highbrow and it was hoity and there definitely was a bit of that because it was remaking institutions but mostly it was a common it was a commoners it was a lowbrow phenomenon right it was in the bars with these images and that's what gutenberg couldn't quite figure that out and part of that is kind of what we see in crypto too like if you really believe that this decentralized technology is generative if i mean it can create like it can solve perverse incentives it can create like virtuous cycles out not just through smart contracts but through social coordination like in fundamental ways we haven't seen before it allows you to do amazing things and at the renaissance it was you know a couple memes were doing what you know hundreds of thousands of you know imperial mercenaries couldn't they're taking down

these these hierarchies and uh you know same thing today one of the other good questions historians if you want to get super advanced go into the ap class like you always look at like continuity versus discontinuity right like how is it similar how was it different so in some ways like yeah the internet for sure you have this in mass you have this in scale the difference was you don't own right now you don't own what you create for the most part right that's a medieval lords fang aggregators harvesting that and with the printing press that wasn't the case the people actually owned those copies and were able to sell that so like the value the ownership was baked into the communication and it wasn't just you know anytime you have that happening in a cultural recreation it follows this pathway right it starts with finance

because it's the most valuable then it goes into identity which we see with like nfts and things like that and then you go into work with those and then you go into school and education for propagation and then you go into people who aren't interested in the movement but just in the benefits in that case it may be like crypto is a business model not just metaverse but turning cost centers into revenue generators and so what happened with the printing press was people were participating art became more fluid it wasn't just you know an artist taking off you know a box people were participating in different ways and by having the ownership layered on to the object of sociality they could participate in ownership in different ways and that's what opened up all sorts of things whether you're a printer or you're an artist and you're now getting

paid for that or whether you're a disseminator or a distributor like that actually the thing you see is like a layer and image of like the underlying social coordination not to get like too crazy and philosophical on it but all these things if you look at like the web 2.0 philosophical darlings like mcluhan and those guys like they say hey mass media and you have the advent of it and the mediums the message is tied to the media it's like mcluhan's first book was the gutenberg galaxy right he starts with gutenberg for a reason and like we've been kind of talking about this as we've been re-aggregating into like you know kind of modern kind of federal like fang tam aggregation our philosophers have been starting to say hey imagine a world or science fiction writers imagine a world where like you basically can have media

where it's owned or where you have consensual like interaction on technological rails like you know mcluhan love chardonn and that's like new sphere which we'd call the internet and so like now you have for the first time in history the technological capabilities to take this renaissance further than we've ever seen before the last renaissance worked with other ones failed because we had technological capabilities double entry bookkeeping and printing in a way that we hadn't before and now we're engaging in this quantum leap we started with attack and said oh we can do the internet maybe we can do a bit of this like you know digital banking stuff and now we have these underlying primitives and like it's not just arithmetic it's not one plus one and now we get two it like it goes hyperbolic that is all this could be wrong but like this is kind of what

tends to happen in history if you look longer if you look over these long epics and that's like the last thing i'll say is that it's like this weird irony or paradox it's an inverse correlation that the people that are witnessing the greatest transformations in history are the least likely to recognize at the time if you read the medieval historians or they're gonna they just don't recognize what's going on and like one of the images in history i always kind of use a metaphor as like waves or the ocean and so these deep waves you don't notice those these currents maybe you kind of see but you see the little ripples on top and so it's just too difficult for us to like notice his waves what you do see is you do see the destruction and you see the chaos like to the people in the

renaissance they didn't think it was a glorious time with gilded angels they thought it was the end of their world their currency was largely worthless they thought their institutions were crumbling it was super volatile they thought they were done and that's one of the things that history can do to kind of like help guide us is to is to allow us to say hey is this the end of the world or is this part of the deconstruction and the recreation and like everything i see and this isn't just me pontificating this is like years in the archives looking through like the source code if you will it looks really really really similar to what we're seeing today yeah it feels uh it feels very it feels like neil howell could have had a field day it feels like the fourth turning could have been uh

written in the renaissance as well uh you know there's a lot of fear and like uh you know you've had this big uh like just a lot of spook like just everyone's basically spooked and uh basically this mass fear in the market and every your way of life is changing and to you the person who your life is changing it's scary but to us hundreds of years later looking back you say what a glorious time and i do feel like folks could look back on today and and think something similar yeah this isn't like when when stuff really dies historically it doesn't die with a bang and market chaos it dies with like a whimper and you don't notice it it's like follow the roman empire the historians like wait was it was it this date or this date we don't unless you're late then you uh unless you're dokwan

and you really end with a bang yeah yeah even that it's like it's just from a historic perspective we've been doing this what like a few years right i mean like i mean we're so early in this like i know it's not pleasant like we're deeply affected by this right like we have our guts punched too but it's like you have a choice you can either like be suckled by these like medieval institutions and that's like super soothing they're playing lullabies for you and that feels good you go to college you get the office you work on finance editor or you can kind of go out on your own if you go out on your own you do get punched in the gut that happens every single time but like if you're not experiencing that volatility someone else is doing it on your behalf and they're arbitraging you

and like the risk is actually staying in a failing like status static system that's when like things go bad this stuff as crazy as it sounds is actually a leading indicator of it working out doesn't mean you're not going to take losses short term but this is this fits the rhyme it fits the pattern it fits like the general rubric of what happens is things are like massively transformed and like from kind of a past kelly and wager like what are you good if you lose okay you you participate in crypto you lost some money um not good you wasted some time you met some people that are kind of nutty you learned some other technology fine you saw a glimpse of what the world could have been um and if you win like it's just asymmetric though there's nothing else out there um so i

think it's worth making that bet but yeah it doesn't feel good but honestly this is just part of it it doesn't make it better but this is this is what it looks like during a renaissance like historians always wear these rose-colored glasses you're like you talk about all the people that kind of kept their hand and kept their cool and blah blah you forget about like you can either beat the market or beat reality by like betting against it which is very difficult to do or getting in big on something early and like this has all the tells of being something early including the volatility is actually a tell which is kind of a crazy take but at least historically speaking tends to be true no i tend to agree with you so if i'm speaking it back to you and i want you to correct me if i'm wrong

basically the middle ages could be described in one word which was just aggregated right like both value and information were centralized culture was top down the church held the power the church centralized and guarded information you were a farmer your dad was a farmer your kids are going to be farmers you didn't travel far from your farm you didn't read you didn't write you farmed right and identity therefore was very permissioned it was this strict hierarchy you were born into this like rigid system where farmers stayed farmers uh otherwise put maybe you have like a lack of identity you might want to call it or maybe just a very permissioned identity and um i think you also mentioned something around just literature right like information and writing was often

very esoteric as maybe in latin it was stored in private places literacy was extremely low and boom you get two technologies you get the double entry bookkeeping uh popularized by the medicis it increased the money velocity it you had these new financial products and loans and well maybe what feels like defy today uh or bitcoin or ether like that's that's kind of what i'm hearing when you say these things and it led to this economic rise to power through this new ledger-based tech um it feels so similar to today and then you have the printing press and for the first time ideas could be spread permissionlessly in a permissionless manner a huge threat to the church sounds like they tried to kyc it couldn't shut it down only five percent of the population was literate

so maybe a bad idea but no we get memes um and memes make it into the bars uh because of the printing press and now these ideas that used to be challenged behind closed doors they could now be printed and and they had there was the velocity of the memes increased um and what this did is it basically just unlocked it turned uh italy i think florence maybe was the hub into this cultural center of europe and that brought new art and new jobs and new ideas to the table uh and that sparked what we know as of as the renaissance and oh my god even as i'm just saying that it sounds so similar to today it really does so i mean i'm curious how did we do there no that's pretty good man you were a history student that's that's better

than i i could have rambled on no that's like that's so good that's the thing like for them renaissance was a recreation like literally the word means rebirth it's like death of something recreation of their society they thought their world was going to end and they were right it like was destroyed and recreated at every level military economic political work social art identity philosophy ontology epistemol like anywhere you want to go we could go into that that's like a thousand percent correct and that the technology was decentralized which had this generative nature which meant that uh it kind of created it it literally created it renaissance things if you want to use that as a verb stuff that shouldn't have worked you know when gutenberg says i don't think it'll work or somebody thinks it

won't work it did work because like the decentralized nature of it allowed different people to share in the ownership and created these virtuous cycles like kind of long along the tail that wasn't that wasn't possible before versus just aggregating tam and like it uh it it tended to work in ways that we couldn't expect like if you look at kind of history of innovations it's always two folds right one is like same thing as before better faster cheaper fine and then there's like the next fold which is like something we couldn't otherwise imagine which wouldn't have been not only possible without this tech but we couldn't have otherwise imagined and so you're essentially unlocking communities to work together like which sounds so simple but it's like if i want to get you to do something or if you want to work together i can pay you and i can

share ideas and coordinate right and like without those two things that that just wasn't there so it was it was really crazy and like yeah that your identity was given to you it was top down and so it was something you were given um and you could say you know the church just wasn't the church it was the whole structure right so that's like what you were born into and like those like religious links were socioeconomic links essentially too right of fidelity and obligation and the reason why you'd honor a contract and so when those luther came along like satoshi just forked all that and like all that giant pyramid just goes tumbling down instantly and so now the question is like what do you want to do um and so which is crazy to say hey he essentially like forked their reality at every

conceivable level and so that kind of smashes your world apart but now you have these other tools in hand and you can work with other people in the same situation so totally scary you're out of the nursery super volatile craziness ensues lots of people point out like there's craziness afterwards wars of religion all sorts of stuff like yeah totally true um but um the interesting thing about it like is if you play the story forwards that's kind of where we are same thing like the the reason why the tech is generative too is because it was a sandbox they're experimenting with fundamentals right financial fundamentals governance fundamentals like these little things that became our constitution or became edict of nantes or something like all these things were up for grabs and they played around in the sandbox and like a thousand flowers

were blooming as crazy as that sounds and so we play it forward what happens you know renaissance good times um and then like stuff starts aggregating again right like the pendulum swings back again and like it aggregated through really specific means it aggregated through like three kind of things aggregated through like identity um the power holders came and said okay so the decentralized technology put the power holders in check because they could either ignore it and lose ground or they could participate in it and thereby by legitimize it right are you gonna let these protestants run around with printing press no you need to like you need to kyc it that doesn't work okay so we keep ignoring it and they keep creating adherence or we participate and thereby we legitimize not just the technology but the idea

that a different reality could be valid as well and so that's kind of what happened that didn't work out so well and then they started re-aggregating and they did that partially through identity they said hey you didn't know this you always thought you're part of a family you're part of a geography you're part of this like nation you didn't know that congratulations um nation means we have certain abilities to like look at you to observe and you have all these obligations to uh surprise they also like monitored very carefully language too and then finally they uh they uh they really nailed down property rights like the great achilles heel in the renaissance was property right so you could take your currency with you you could take a little ledger which represented value you could take a broad sheet in your sac but you couldn't take

your your house or your thing and so that's one of the differences like doing that historical compare and contrast one of the differences that we see with this renaissance the same thing very similar you're a thousand percent right the difference this time is that we have like property rights on chain we call them nfts you think of them as pixelated cats it's fine but like it's property rights on chain for synthetic things and irl things which is crazy and that's like again it's not just arithmetic that's a hyperbolic unlock the likes of which we've never seen so we're facing like much stronger hegemony like we're permissioned and when i say much stronger they're more sophisticated at it just like medieval lord like windowed your identity so you couldn't think of anything else like overton

window or what have you like our our permissioned like uh structures are much more subtle they're much softer we tend not to notice them right just like medieval you if you're if you're a nation state and you have to use four center people you get an f if you have to threaten it you get a c if it never occurs to them to do that you get an a you've done a good job and so those are the tools that we're seeing so we're up against that with these like new like weapons or tools that we can use at the same time back to your neil howe and like things breaking down like we are starting to like see that like really fundamentally so it's really interesting like our world is like static we have these institutions we're born in this blip right you and i are

born in this blip where there's like these pathways and playbooks that tend to work get a go to school get a job things tend to work out for you maybe depending upon who you are like all that is coming unwound institutionally so it's like it's a really weird time like um and what crypto did back then is what it's doing now it introduces a new variable in the mix it splits their reality so previously we'd have these clan warfares we'd have these like you know national conflicts and you know we'd be friends with somebody and enemies with somebody you'd have like an xy access right on the political spectrum conservative and liberal fiscal and social right maybe it doesn't match up but you at least knew what it was and now crypto gave them this z-axis right like are you closer with somebody who

has your values um and are in crypto are you closer to somebody who has non-crypto values that are outside of crypto it split everything and so like post bretton woods in our reality we have like not first world second world third world like rich and poor it really is who's for us who's against us and who's undecided and so crypto is splitting that and just like you said with florence popping up and little city states that were kind of in the middle of nowhere there were other things on the global scene too for by people who adopted that it gave him access and rights and so we're seeing the same kind of thing this enemy of my enemy is my friend and the political lines being re-drawn not just social uh and fiscal conservative and liberal but also crypto are you into like independent call it sovereignty

basically and that kind of got hijacked a little bit by crypto anarchist which is fine but like we're starting to see the development of this like sovereignty as community which is like all that's long story short to say as you play this forward we re-aggregate we're at the eve of the middle age or we're in the middle ages we're in the eve of the renaissance it's very similar now we have nfts for property rights and like the crazy thing about it is like what are we gonna do with it this time um and like history will judge us by by what we do so these blips and volatility that's what we should see the question is like what are we gonna do and you really you just don't get these chances in history that often it just never happens so that's kind of the point we're at

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possible really it's just it's tough to be pair swap right now they give you the best prices uh they save you money you've got this gas refund if you stake psp they've got a smooth and really user friendly interface fast swapping it's really everything that you'd want from a d5 platform if you don't use them already check out paraswap today at paraswap.io now let's get back to the show i can't help but think my my biggest takeaway from everything you just said is that what happened in the renaissance was there was an excitement around identity for the first time in maybe hundreds of years or thousands of years right you have excitement around your identity um because of the freedom that

you have and i actually see a lot of similarities to today right like no matter where you're born into in in let's call it america you have you kind of have this almost predetermined path right if you're like very low income born into poverty like you kind of have that's your identity and like that's your path and hopefully you can break out but on the and the same the same thing exists uh if you're born into like a very wealthy family right you're born in greenwich connecticut or like upper east side new york like you're gonna be a lawyer you're going into finance like you're gonna be fine but like man that's not that exciting of a life right and so when i think about what's happening in crypto like when i hang out the reason i like love hanging out with all my weird

internet crypto friends is there's this just like palpable excitement that that exists you know and there's just so much optimism and enthusiasm and just excitement around what you're doing which really what you're doing becomes your identity and it feels like there are a lot of similarities to to the renaissance and i'm so curious to get your take around identity and especially when i think about what's happening with i mean uh paradigm like paradigm hired a high schooler that has never happened before that's not something that's not that that high schoolers identity like their high schooler and then they have to go to college and then they get internships like they're breaking the mold of identity and it feels like the last time we saw this was maybe the renaissance no that's exactly right like you

actually get to choose right you couldn't choose where you're born you couldn't choose your your lines of patronage and allegiance you couldn't choose any of that um and with with the renaissance you actually could choose you could actually choose like your beliefs like actually determined your identity and the symbols you wore and like are you this group or that group that like unlocks certain things it made you the enemy of these people it made you like friends with these people and that had like different opportunities for employment for finance for spread of ideas like these things forked and then eventually it became like political and and military as well um so you could actually choose for the first time which was really which was really crazy like previously you know your identity was set and then you could kind of go up or

down a ladder depending upon the degree to which you participated in institutions right like the the birth of that privileged knowledge and geographically gating it that's the birth of like the medieval universities right like you're you're behind this thing um and so like being able to say hey you don't have to go to a specific location to be exposed to an idea in the middle ages you can actually see the same idea in print anywhere you are in the middle of nowhere that opened up like different worlds for them right like they could participate not just in the exchange of ideas but like opening up different types of profession i mean so it really it fundamentally toppled like who they were like a lot of the movements adherents were like from lower classes right why because like they actually had the opportunity to not just

accumulate wealth but change like what they did but also how they thought about themselves that's why that ideological impact to say the most valuable thing isn't outside the world it's you participating in this community doing something together i mean the same thing with crypto to say the most like important thing isn't like you know private bank this or that or elite article behind these gates but to say like anyone has access to this and it's not just like something a sticker you put on your vw bus there's like there's real economics tied to that because you have ownership baked into the the media and you can experiment with these fundamentals and so like you being able to control your identity that's the fifth bucket you know you go from finance into identity and then you go into working and then into education that last bucket to say hey and this is

again uniquely with this renaissance through these property rights to say you could actually work wherever you are not just remote work but you can work in a synthetic world right right and you can earn in a synthetic world and enjoy the fruits in the irl and arbitrage the difference which is craziness or you can work in like you know irl enjoy the fruits in a synthetic world where if you're careful they can't like have access to that property like nfts acting as these like bi-directional doorways that allow you to enter these synthetic worlds this gets a bit esoteric but it's not something you teach in undergrads but you often say hey the idea of like imagination and invention and synthetic worlds like a lot of that is like spun out of print for the first time you're exposed to not just like morality tales but like these

ideas of different worlds that aren't yet and so like print is really the advent of the synthetic showing you like what's not real and what could be and like that allows you to like participate in it and change your fate and fortune and alliances here in this real world and that's literally what we're seeing the same thing even down to the art looking you know weird and odd because the that art is like baked into the tech which has monetary value on it and like semiotic mean you're you're unpacking this meaning to it um so like yeah really really unlocking these new worlds and that wasn't just european it was global and you could kind of extend it around that but like we're seeing very very similar things take place and yeah you can still find the outliers and say hey you're under this regime here and

you don't have access here and that's true but we're starting to see a dislocation you know the irl slip and slide from the synthetic and like you as your identity be able to say hey in this plane my identity is determined in this plane it's not and now this one can generate into that one and so it gets it gets real dicey like the historical way you always tell this is oh there are these wars religion people crack down the the history was really more complex it was slipping it was sliding there were little pockets of geographies that popped up maybe near you my enemy and my enemy could be a friend a geography that took advantage of it early days would became a would become a powerhouse for the next you know a few hundred years and so yeah we're seeing that dislocation of like identity and

identity like that's kind of the super set and like nft allows you to do that like where i where i spend my time mentally is a function of who i talk to messaging and communication and like how i spend my money with like assets or property or currency for things or helping others like it all kind of goes together and just like at the last renaissance we saw this explosion of governance if now i'm not being told what to do in hierarchy if i can have representative functions in different ways and these are new fundamentals we see new fundamentals in finance but so too in governance you know pluralism federal republicanism like all these like governmental experiences that are like unfolding so we say we speed run art fine like down to the details like i'm generated i'm on chain i'm a

participant we speed run finance we're doing that it's bumpy for sure but like that's what happens and now the next phase is speed running this governance to say like how does it work and like what i would predict in this unique historical moment is as our you know as our globalization kind of deteriorates for a variety of reasons see peter zion and as like our institutions like fail like like atrophy for a variety of reasons like crypto by being decentralized allows us to instantiate our identity and retract it in different ways in different places so just like the renaissance wasn't a spectrum it wasn't highbrow art here and lowbrow art here so to identity like your kyc you know state issue identity versus your aenon tied to an address or have proof of experience or expertise or

accomplishment your high school kid and paradigm we hire a non kids all the time like um it it it changes the nature of like saying it's i'm not a byproduct of like credentialism from external party it's from like the community and my accomplishments which is really much more meritocratous um and kind of balkanized allowing multiple things to coexist at the same time in a aggregated world where tam is everything there's one thing only one can win maybe two you know vc's will trad vc's will talk about duopolies maybe two in a crypto world where i'm taking pieces of tam and scattering it now multiple things can win with different design choices right it might be tr it might be c5 and d5 this chain that chain and like rather than a mono-ism where there has

to be one thing that wins like what we've seen historically with crypto is that a pluralism where different design choices which fail in different ways at different times actually create a broader generative lift than what we've seen both economically and socially it's a it's a crazy time so that's why i say it's a renaissance it's like literally we're seeing communities using the same types of technology in the same ways reinventing the fundamentals we're not aware of it sure it's super volatile it's not dying a slow death it's it's like chaotic and like chaotic fine like it fits the pattern really really closely um josh let me ask you something here which is in the renaissance people people it's not that people in the renaissance weren't religious they were they didn't they didn't oppose god they

didn't oppose religion they opposed the harsh rules of the church and it kind of reminds me of and and i might be getting that wrong but just to go with the question like it kind of reminds me of today we don't necessarily oppose government we don't oppose finance we oppose the harsh rules that the government can put in place we we oppose some of the the harsh rules that some of the financial institutions put in place do you see parallels in that sense and and maybe the secondary question would just be like is there anything we can do if you're the government or your finance like these financial institutions can you can you stop it or is there anything that you could do that's such a good take man that's a history major in action right there

that's exactly that is like no not kind of sunny at all that is like that is spot on like there's i'm always hesitant to go into this because like people get ruffled but like you have to distinguish the institution from the ideology right the content of belief from like the the physical apparatus like in time and space that controls you right and those are like those are like different layers and like one layer is like what do you believe should there be like a church should there be a government and then you can also like distinguish like the idea of like government or a church or like authority for sure you need authority you can't have people driving on both sides of the road blah blah blah blah blah blah for sure but then you're saying like then the next layer is are you actually opposing this instance of

it right and what in particular are you objecting to this instance of it in terms of institution and like for a lot of people that institution is just because it's calcified because there's there's no other alternative it's virtually impossible to like to change the nature of like two-party system in the like it's super difficult because of like a variety of forces and like it's not like there's a bad guy i mean it's not like you're telling a story and there's a villain right this is just a function of the historical time we're in cruft accumulates and calcifies over time and then it gets so heavy and it crumbles under the nature of its own way right some of that's demographic you can talk about workers to retirees some and that has like implications for education for finance for all these

things right like if i'm a victim if i'm in that specific situation i'm a pension fund manager i'm not getting my seven percent unless i bet on something like this right so i get out of these things i jam into vc vc gets hyperinflated i go and detect like it's it's not that anyone's being bad i mean a complex fallen system where like wheels like grind basically like the only person that took down the holy roman emperor was like just institutional craft right you're napoleon after that it's like the bureaucrat the guy's at the desk he could beat anyone except for like that like it's a function of that and then eventually it crumbles and so like you as a government have a choice like how do you want it to crumble or how do you want to remake it you're going to have to remake yourself at some point by

by pleasantly or unpleasantly like do you want to like control and participate in that system which is where it gets like really interesting and yeah from the church perspective like it wasn't we say church and everybody's like we put on our modern filter we say oh like my church what i believe that's not what was going on that was like that was the largest landowner that claimed temporal authority they said they were the ones that controlled the sword and the armies not the military and they largely won that fight the holy roman emperor is like kneeling begging like uh contrition like basically they won that fight and so what happened this is crazy and there's a crypto analogy in here what happened with the renaissance was as they went back to the sources they found that a lot of those sources particularly the documents that had led

to this accretion this like piling up were faults they weren't legitimate these are even like roman catholic guys like erasmus is reading this donation of constantine right it's this it's this document where like the whole where the roman emperor constantine says hey i give you the armies pope here you go and they find out that thing's a forgery right and so now they're like oh wait like my document is false they're using like scientific technique they're going back to the code and they're auditing the code of authority like that's wrong what else is wrong and like we see a lot of stuff going on with that like i think part of the i want to call it the part the problem of crypto but it's a reason for the volatility which is why it's a leading indicator of its power is that we're actually seeing what's behind the

scenes for the first time right we're seeing oh someone can front run a market oh wait so yeah somebody encrypted does that a little bit and it's awful it's like you're just seeing that for the first time that's been going on the whole time or somebody or you say like oh this gives unfair advantage to whales yes of course it does it's always been that way like now you're seeing that and so like now for the first time when you take those blinders off it's not pretty but you start getting the ability to play with it right you can say hey maybe we do different types of voting maybe do quadratic voting or you do you can play with these like fundamentals so like the church wasn't just the church it was their military and economy and university it was everything it was their culture this if you want to use

the word the state the state was subservient to the church and like luther unraveling that unraveled every single layer so everything was up for grabs it can get dicey wars of religion craziness or it can be kind of managed and what tends to happen is you tend to have some hierarchy and you have tend to have some decentralization in a complex system it's not as if it's c phi or d phi or kyc or anon you tend to have like in a healthy complex system it tends to be pluralistic we kind of forgotten about that where you have different people making different design choices that aren't just accepted and okayed but you hate those people over there where they actually reinforce and help generate in the system so when d5 goes this cfi does that when c5 does this you

get some balance out of it right now things are still super correlated but that's how a healthy system tends to unfold like what'll be super interesting back to your fourth journey is like what happens on the political scene now that you have x and y and now that you have like x and y and you have a z axis on it right how do people realign for a while i'd say just putting on the poli sci like history hat we've kind of had a mismatch where fiscal social and fiscal conservative or uh ten not like conservative social conservative fiscal that boxes for parties tend not to work so cleanly anymore and now with somebody entering crypto entering like a z-axis saying hey what about self-sovereignty what if you can like create your own world in your own way and start from the ground up it's not just a threat to like

nation state in terms of fiat or currency if you ask a political scientist yes phd in poli sci they'll say hey a nation state is like a imagined community their words not mine instantiated by um by mona by uh currency and contract and you look at crypto and you say that's currency and contract and imagine community is consensual identity it might be a re-emergence or an iteration of what a nation state actually is it might look very different in the in the future to come hmm a long answer but you're asking you're asking these short questions but they're like really big questions so here i'll i'll hit you with another one so we're drawing all these big parallels between the renaissance and and web 3 and i'm almost honestly one of the things i'm

thinking about josh is like we're so zoomed into web3 uh but when i'm hearing you talk i'm like the internet web three in the arc of history it's all one thing it's not like this decade was in the internet this decade was crypto like if i'm if i'm 200 years in the future i'm just saying like though those like 30 years was like this new thing you know that's so good no that's like back to that like ocean analogy you see when the when the currents change right you know those ripples you forget about them oh there's an internet you don't even remember aol or netscape or geocities right now right like those were dominant ham and you've kind of forgotten about them like in this big picture when you look back the further back you get the more you only remember the more significant

changes right and everything else gets compressed if i were to go esoteric on you in the renaissance i'd say well there's like early and late it was distinguished but you'd be like what are you talking about i only want to know that like this thing changed right and that's what we're going to see crypt like the internet we're going to see hey we have the ability to like do zeros and ones to do like digital communication at mass cool and we did that for like 40 years and then it got re-aggregated we're like oh that's not good why'd that happen no because ownership was ripped out of communication fine and then we're going to look back and say hey crypto is like you controlling and owning those zeros and ones and being able to instantiate what they mean about you what they mean about value what they

mean about an idea as you so choose and whether those zeros and ones reflect a monetary signifier whether they reflect like pixels for an idea or whether they reflect like a call to like who you are is like a wallet you instantiate or retract like you're going to forget all that so they're going to say like the internet they're not going to remember the internet they're only going to see crypto like and we won't talk about it that way and the same thing with uh they won't talk about web three like what are you talking about i'd be like that doesn't make any sense um so they'll they'll only see crypto and communication of course will be part of crypto we just won't remember anything else um and we probably won't call it crypto like well it's just like back in the day there's like an internet fund

and an internet company and like that it just becomes the fabric of reality so we'll say yeah in this new world where like people actually control their own abilities to do these different things this is this is how it works like doesn't even make sense you won't even know if it succeeds you won't remember the nomenclature which is one of the tricks of like history why like the biggest changes tend to be forgotten but yeah you're a thousand percent right you zoom out and like this is the big thing and just one other thing historically they're all these little false forks before big transformations you forget i mean like you as the historian i say luther you're like yeah but if i were to say with cliff and huss they did some of the same things you wouldn't really remember who those guys are even though they did

similar things right like they got burned you don't they're like losers you don't remember about that right but they're doing similar things like why did luther succeed where those guys didn't well because he had like a permissionless print protocol and ledger-based accounting to help him like propagate it right so you have these little false forks that they were big they rocked the world we've just forgotten about them because they aren't big enough and like that's what's happening with the crypto renaissance we get these tremors beforehand and now we have the tech rails to like work at scale bottom up so like it's it's very tight we could go down to like even almost the source code of it it's like super crazy like how how well the analogies hang up when was the fall of rome depends how you're looking at like this sounds super post-modern but it's like

it's true it depends like you could say hey like when the republic fell and it went imperial lots of people would say that's like the fall of like rome the roman republic it goes caesar right like maybe it's that okay maybe it's when there's no more caesars but wait that barbarian guy he became caesar right so now you have a barbarian caesar is that is that real and then like globally even in the mediterranean you'd say the thing never fell like i mean basically there was always like an eastern half of it and then we kind of talked about it this way and so like it gets really really tricky and it like forces you that's why these threads are super important like i say value communication identity but what threads you pick what question you ask what you mean by the question the details like determine your answer which

is crazy so you can say yeah like you know et cetera et cetera i was going to try to make a bad analogy between the fall of rome and the fall of web 2. but i'm going to pivot my question actually i'm going to pivot my question and say it's not about analogy no i'm gonna completely no but it is like did it die with fang is it dying with web3 like when does it go it's a really good question so we're drawing these big analogies between the renaissance and and web3 i think one thing that feels different to me though is so in in the renaissance right you have this civilization where you have enough money that's left over to create these like great works of art and when you create great works of art you create culture and italy unlike a lot of other

european countries at the time their culture didn't really disintegrate whereas a lot of other places in europe had a it feels like in america culture is kind of disintegrating so it feels like america might be opposite today and then b you you talked about these like the expansion of markets and like uh exploration and things like that and like i just think of um [Music] uh you know columbus going to ask queen isabella to to sail west to go try to find india right because they figured out the world might not actually be flat and like vasco to ghana and uh in india in 1498 and like i just think of like this great period of exploration uh when i think of america i think of like we we kind of stopped doing that 50 years ago

i think of like panama canal in the early 1900s i think of the hoover dam in the 1930s i think of the gi bill in the 1940s the marshall plan after world war ii i think of like creating the highway system in the 50s and 60s and and even darpa in the 50s which led to the internet right we don't do an uh and obviously the biggest one like the apollo space program in the in the 60s like we don't do any of that anymore uh and that feels like a big a big difference between now and the renaissance yeah now that's there's so much man you ask these short questions but there's there's like 10 different ways to like tackle this it's like a really powerful question like um we could do kind of the philosophical or down to the detail okay

so um so one way to think about it is like form versus function right and so like if you on what happened was at the renaissance it did when you teach this to undergrads and like this is like uh i don't even mean undergrads when most people think about this we always think about things in terms of being binary right and it's like there's high culture there's low culture there's wealthy there's not wealthy that like helps us place things in our head they're categories it's like we're victorians like in a room with a parlor and a eating room and a sitting room and like that helps us think about it but really the renaissance like really undid things at both levels the highest culture and the lowest culture and like we tend to remember the high culture now today

partially because like the high culture of the university is like largely one so that's why and they're high culture by nature so they're telling you about like michelangelo and blah blah um so that's why it's helpful as like in the past 50 years historians have started to say hey what are the people on the ground actually think about this sort of stuff so on the high culture it was radical it was a transformation even in italy previously you have a religious scene you don't have a pagan scene you don't have a scene out of your own mind and your own creation that was craziness for them that was flat out craziness to say you don't need permission to paint this content even at the height of this so too can you paint these other pieces and like that was a process so church gets feisty with michelangelo and then he

weaves things in subtly but even at like even in like you know italy it would have been it would have been complete craziness and that's one of the reasons why to validate these changes they used the form of what had been done before as as much as they could even the emperors like the holy roman empire so you say hey when the roman empire fall fall like if he asked charles he's like it doesn't fall i'm sitting right here or whatever like they they retell this story as like a piece of it and so like even the images that we see that were like hi culture those are radical to them like the oil paintings you're seeing or the sistine chapel where they're using that was like you hadn't seen that before that was like ar and vr and even that painting was a technology which was rediscovered

from like room like back to the the sources the dutch so that was going on and that was that was fundamentally the people in power the the smart ones who were riding the wave grabbing on to like the new institutions as they were reforming them changing like what it was and what it meant for them and then at the same time there was a bottom up not just a high but also a low and that was what you would have seen you would have seen these images and these like woodcuts and these copper etchings that aren't so realistic in perspective but are much more like much more symbolically oriented those symbols weren't just like for the dum-dums that couldn't read they were like they were powerful they caused like something in you like emotively to say hey this is my try this is who i'm

with this is what i value et cetera et cetera and so that really like you know the italian city states are like you know they're in the middle of nowhere they're in swamps they did well financially and that's that's like one end of the spectrum they were able to reinvent themselves to renaissance themselves from that old world to not only like persistent power they they were early adopters and they gained asymmetric advantage on that they're fighting off france and what happened they took over france like subtly right like it's a they did a really good job at that and so like yeah for the u.s part of that also was um so their disruption changed like the way we would think about that and that's kind of what we're hitting into now with like we're on the demographic decline basically just in terms of numbers along

with most of europe and world or what have you so our exploration probably it might not even be physical for them a lot of their exploration was like synthetic and i don't mean metaverse but it was like these ideas and these books actually became more real and it was those ideas and books that actually drove the change in the real world whether it was age of discovery or exploration or what have you and so i think we're going to enter a period like that where like as our demographics invert we're going to get more interested in the synthetic and like by most people say metaverse metaverse replacing reality i don't mean that i mean like the synthetic world call it a metaverse actually augmenting reality and driving a new age of uh of discovery not in the sense where i have to throw just

human power at it but where i'm able to pick and choose different places is it like as it has a generative function if you're to zoom out into world history you'd say hey the ottomans did this and that's what kept charles from stampin down luther like one of the things i i think we see in the renaissance is that enemy and my enemy is my friend thing was really different right because now i might have people i'm traditionally aligned with but as they choose to differ on this new forking of reality we'll call it crypto but call it pluralism or whatever i might have new friends and allies that i had never imagined before so i think one of the reasons why like we're in the middle ages there wasn't a lot of that going on right and then the renaissance allows this blossoming and like going forth that's

kind of the point we're at we're only now just stepping into the renaissance when you're right when you look back and say hey we've kind of been you know haven't been doing this or that part of it's like when the whole thing gets retooled you have to go through that process before you explode out i mean maybe the funding we're at maybe the funding comes from different places right like maybe maybe it's dao is creating these great works of uh public funding right maybe the next uh space program doesn't come from from the american government funding it comes from a dow led by elon musk you know so no no there's those those things are literally i don't know if you were talking about the same ones i'm thinking of but those things are going on as they speak right and so like those are

and not just funding that's kind of what i mean when crypto actually starts taking on more of the nature of the state i mean you know exploration space exploration like uh education economic development even public goods right if you look at that like full disclosure not financial advice i'm super biased if you look at like what helium did in san jose where they're like hey state city you're not providing broadband access to your people we're gonna do it for you like it literally in that fifth bucket where crypto starts acting as a business model rather than a technology that allows you to turn cost centers into revenue generators which means things that aren't financially feasible in the real world actually can like work and that also means that you can incentivize like public goods and exploration all the stuff that gets cut out of aggregation

or only for their own ends now you can do it all along the long tail so no i think that you're exactly right we're just opening it up right now as we speak i've got my helium set up my nebra right here so i don't want to move it because i've like positioned the uh the little signal at the right exact right thing uh but that's exactly right but you're starting you're starting to see that on like the public keys that's like a really good tangible it's like we're still super early you're only seeing like crypto is a business model like unlocks right now but i think you're going to see a lot of it over the next couple of years well it starts to get really fun when you know at a certain point in time during the renaissance the institutions had to say

these technologies are just better right the the the institutions had to say uh maybe the medicis are onto something here and the um you know they had like they said okay our way of creating books and and written word is like very archaic like let's just do what this gutenberg guy says to be done and i think it starts to get really interesting when institutions you know they never like new technologies but eventually they're forced to participate and that's that's what i'm excited for with with crypto no that's a that's like that's a thousand me too like that's that's actually the heart of the historical so right now super volatile everybody's losing it that's fine that's what happens i see that as a leading indicator a slow death would be like you don't know when the roman empire like fell apart this is like this is like much more pains of

rebirth in renaissance like and so what happens at some point the institutions adopt it they just do technology is better you can't keep doing manuscripts right um or you want or financials or what have you and so like then it gets really interesting because like your early adopters are usually like zealots like if you want to write crypto twitter super tribal because you need those folks right you need like the 15 year old boy who's like yelling at people on twitter like if you're going to be a zealot and you're going to do it when there's nothing there yet and you see the future like more power to you the tribalism serves like a really important historical function but then as you start getting institutional adoption it starts to cross right so then it gets like really interesting when the institutions start doing it then like you if you do it well you end

up with pluralism which means a lot of things for a lot of use cases right c phi d phi and they generate they're generative right um so like a lot of the early adopters will say no we don't want this other thing it doesn't have these values and like i personally don't take that side of like maximalism on anything even maximalism on like crypto values decentralization or whatever it's like it's great if your thing is the best thing ever in the world more power to you but in a complex system and this is like my my ph.d is that like you know the institute for grant studies in paris like at the sorbonne like i promise you complex systems work better when there's different points of failure so somebody may make a worse decision by your values and maybe maybe even an objectively worse decision in a complex system

that's stronger and so to your point when you start layering institutions in there now it gets interesting if you if you say hey i have the best chain or the best dow that's the most crypto value blah blah blah do you want a hundred percent of that or do you want it in a mosaic or a patchwork of other stuff i choose a pluralistic representation every single time it's a different this isn't like something i say a lot out in the crypto world because everybody goes bat no i mean something that i just pieced together is like crypto is everyone thinks of crypto as a technology you could see crypto as not as a technology but as a new way of um organizing communities and if you extrapolate that out to you know ask this question about like i said this thing about institutions when do they

get on board and stuff like that it's like okay step one like crypto is not a technology it's a new way of organizing communities communities are historically always the ones that create history institutions don't create history institutions participate in history so crypto new way of organizing communities communities create history institutions participate in history i don't know never thought about it like that no it's it's a different way and then you say well wait what's the nature of that technology like is it just better faster cheaper that's why internet false fork better fast cheaper fine that just aggregates tam and like plays demonstrations and you say it's decentralized you have like different communities organizing and decentralization allows

plurality it doesn't just allow one or two to win it allows esoteric interests all along the long tail to be financially and socially viable right in a tam world i have to wipe out that long tail and crush it up to my tam to get a stock like value that's worthwhile right that's my business model is aggregating that long tail in a crypto is an economic model or social coordination model like that allows me to have all these little flowers growing along the long tail and like this little one that wouldn't have been economically viable now all of a sudden it is economically viable that's why i keep talking about this as a business model turning cost centers look this building or coffee shop down the street if i want to listen to music on spotify for you it's nine bucks for them uh i have to pay bmi for 30k right or

15k for somebody else and then if i'm processing and paying five percent and then i'm paying for a lease if i take every one of those things and i flip over the crypto model where i'm uh creating ownership all of a sudden i'm packing up like i'm listening to audience i'm using solano pay i'm using helium pick whatever you want i don't care all of a sudden like that coffee shop becomes viable right and i don't need like a coffee chain aggregating it and so now all of a sudden i have all these different things all along long tail that i can participate in and like these things might not have the same values one might not be as decentralized as the other and like from a complex system that makes a better failure point failure point and just from like world view of what you want the world to look

like i want i want like people to be able to express like like obviously false ideas in terms of like design decisions like it makes it actually generates and makes it more valuable with me and so like he's saying the institution's coming in for sure that creates that mosaic and then what tends to happen if you really believe in the technology you don't have to pound people into it is that those values tend to stick on and slowly the institutions adopt and then all of a sudden their people become part of the communities and now what's happening it sort of changes like that's the way that communities make history it's a it's very much a bottom-up co-opting like uh institutions man this is super this is the most ever gone into historiography this is crazy i i have another one for you which is just think about money

money there um what the renaissance did is it made it so that the florin what like the florin was the currency of one city uh was the currency of florence right but yet it it succeeded where what was the currency back then like the euro like i don't i don't know everybody i guess everyone had a different one yeah it's craziness maybe the analogy like here what's my question i think the renaissance made it so the florin became this widely accepted currency right and now in the maybe late 1400s you had this like global currency that was um kind of this like global reserve currency um maybe for the first time ever i don't know um i wonder if we see crypto if like if we do the same thing with

crypto for whether it's a usdc or it's a some decentralized stable coin that is so far from getting built because of all like we're just far away from building that but like i want i wonder if something like that happens and if we really do recreate money it's like to go really deep into like you know on the eve of the renaissance there wasn't enough coin for like what is it like one fifth one tenth what's needed like there wasn't there is a bottleneck in terms of the actual money production they couldn't print like we could print we knew how to print stuff they couldn't do that so well and then there are all sorts of issues are you taking it off the edges what are you doing blah blah blah but like the point is even in like an even if you had an

aggregated economic world they couldn't have generation because there's a bottleneck on the production until you have that on a ledger to say hey i give you credit for this and you have debit for that if i have a credit and you have a debit or if i have it both that's two less like instances of coins i need so like that literally allowed like the that's the birth of proto-capitalism or mercantilism partially because that the old financial rails in the medieval world weren't technologically proficient enough to allow commerce at scale and so like with defy and crypto like we're doing the same thing we're having like commerce at scale in different ways like part of that is access part of that is like synthetic versions you want to do something on synthetic

stocks like whether you're geofenced and then like to your point there's different winners and losers out of there but those winners look different it might not be the same paper piece of money it might actually be like something that's a digital implementation that's the backing on that right so whether that's a digital usd it it tends to look different than you would otherwise expect but yeah you're it's a it's an unfolding in a way that we haven't seen before the first is the same thing better faster cheaper synthetic the second is a new fundamental that we couldn't otherwise imagine maybe it's alchemics or something no affiliation but just like i give a loan to myself so i don't get liquidity liquidated right like different weird stuff i couldn't have ever met or a synthetic version of apple i can buy in china on a defy exchange or

something so like and then that to your point like how do you want to play like the early adopters like it's always innovator's dilemma right you want to disintermediate yourself no nobody wants to do that like okay like at some point that tends not to work out so well um like you have to participate in it otherwise you lose too much ground but if you participate in it you legitimize the others action so be really interesting the way i think it'll work out is like not crypto versus non-crypto but who's crypto do you want and i probably see that like layered in terms like a pluralistic overlay where you have you have centralized you know currencies and then you have other backstable coins then you have other things on top of that and then at the other end you have complete aenon

and i don't think people will participate in one level of the stack i think they'll participate in different ways just like we kind of do today you said something interesting about when we're talking about the florin about um and and yeah i completely agree you'll participate across the identity stack you might have like three different identities but you said something interesting about the foreign which is that capitalism is basically created during the renaissance and capitalism is really created in florence you get the florin and things like that um yeah like italian city states in during the renaissance were really thriving right and uh it creates this like merchant class aka the middle class it kind of like either creates maybe recreates let's let's say it creates the middle class and what that did is it so then the

merchant class which was like our middle class and created this like demand for clerks who could read and write and that created this need for education for like mass reading and mass writing today we're really struggling in america with the middle class um like the middle class is really dying out and i do wonder if crypto like if the renaissance a created the middle class and then b like leveled up the middle class like taught them how to read or force the need to read and write i do wonder if crypto could is maybe like the savior of the middle class here and could really be something that levels up the middle middle class but maybe now i'm drawing too many analogies between the renaissance no that's my take i mean that's my take i'd step softer on the italian side because the

north renaissance so no that's absolutely my take is that like as institutions when i say institutions fail i don't mean they go out of business i mean they stopped serving the role that they were designed to right so if i say hey here's a college uh it's going to cost you five six figures you have a 50 chance of graduating and like and i'm not really going to hire you on it anyway do you want to do it like it stops serving that role right like um and part of that is just demographic reduction and what have you and so like so what happened was the the italian city states are like the great exception because they were very decentralized they were like a federal they were like little independent nations you only talk about in italy they're like these little things and so yeah you had some universities but it

was usually it was very decentralized in terms of how they were doing it and they were at this hub and so like a lot of the stuff came out of there just because the nature of how they're interacting and like when it gained scale largely through prints and now i'm reading like how to do double entry bookkeeping i'm like oh that's great and now i read that up in northern europe and when it hits northern europe like yeah a lot of historians will say will say um and it's hotly debated but i tend to put myself among them to say like yeah the renaissance created like capitalism sometimes they qualify it and they say proto-capitalism because it's not fully fleshed out or sometimes they call it mercantilism which is like another way of saying capitalism and for all intent purposes but yeah no absolutely um and part of that was

because they had the tools when it hit northern europe it went at scale bam and then part of it was also and i can't emphasize this enough but this idea that you could take independence you could you could do back this ideological thing right like this is like max weber and like uh spirit of protestant work ethic or whatever like it's not i'm not doing something holy by being outside the world and by you know milking a cow and like some monastery where there's like 20 guys there or whatever right like i'm actually doing something by like working in a shop in a center of commerce doing that with my family and my friends and that's not bad to do i can do that to like the glory of like i have this calling to do it what do i like and what am i good at i've been divinely put in

that spot so i'm going to work hard to do it i can literally like interact with this world and not only is it not evil it's actually great to be doing so you have people with tools which are coming up out of the italian city states for sure and they're hitting like these centers in mass and these people are saying whoa i don't have to kind of apologetically do this behind the scenes i can go all in and make this my identity like i'm a merchant and i'm not like taking from like you know the the prince down the street i'm saying i'm a merchant i'm funding you right like that's crazy just to give you a sense of like the economic change like when one of the holy roman emperors like right before charles like he couldn't he didn't have enough money to buy like his

his wedding dress right he goes into a city he goes to nuremberg and they're like we're not going to give you credit you're like i'm the holy roman emperor you're not giving me credit i'm not giving you credit like i don't believe so like that idea of like that unlock of credit i can't emphasize enough how crazy that is when that hits and so no absolutely and like one of the reasons if i'm aggregating stuff so one other question you could say is hey why didn't these big financial houses do all this stuff right because it's not worth their time like it's not worth their time they're aggregating tam they're only doing big deals right i'm not gonna do all this little stuff all over europe here there in the middle of nowhere um and so like with the technology it like literally allows me

not to do two things one to make it economically viable to do this small stuff you can think about as the unbanked today and also it means i can do that even being out in the middle of nowhere i don't need this guy's permission at the head of the curve i can do this on my own and so you have an explosion of all this stuff and like capitalism comes from like that bottom up basically it's very difficult to dictate from top down and so now your your take on that i see that is absolutely correct it wasn't just like the italian city-states is the model what happened it was always very small percentage middle class with them anyway they were a player don't get me wrong but when it hit at scale through this new technology that was the birth of the middle class as we call it like um and

then like the deconstructionless historians get feisty and you go back and forth with debates with them but the point of the story is like that's the birth of the middle class um and like not an accident and so when you say hey i'm middle class my my beer cost me more my gas cost me more like not just inflation but like education costs more i have this predefined track and like now what am i going to do like the problem i mean the bitcoin guys will say like back in the 170s like eric weinstein they say i have this problem right like i can't continue this hyper growth if i have five partners at a firm and a law firm and then more people come on i can't keep replicating partners right so there has to be a contraction like there's like strong reasons why

that tends not to scale in terms of an aggregating tam it can only get so big until i over leverage because there's nothing else on because i'm running a pension fund hence like nasdaq right now versus crypto like it is crazy but it's a different kind of crazy it says there's an economic model where i can take from here and do here which is like if i'm middle class or anything but like ultra wealthy like that's what i'm betting on this might be my last question here i'm i'm i don't want to extend the analogies too far but the last thing to think about is like tying it back to the very beginning of this conversation farmers and farmers and farmers and farmers and then um so you basically okay so so martin luther was like early 1500s publishes the 95 theses right like the power of

indulgences and that started the reformation right and the reformation starts to dissolve the monasteries uh or maybe it like hurts them or something it hurts their business or something like that and so maybe when businesses get hurt and the monasteries get hurt i'm assuming like 10 or 20 or 30 percent of the people working at the monasteries they go into the workforce they leave the monasteries and that's good i just wonder if like if that's like people working for dows today it's like today like what do you do if you go to a good college like you go work at like in consulting or like you're a lawyer or you're a banker or like you just do you follow the path and that was the path you like when you were either a farmer you went and worked at a monastery and then the reformation comes

around and martin luther and he's got his memes and uh and now and then you could go do what you wanted and today we have crypto and you can go work in a down you can work in multiple taos and i just i don't know maybe i'm drawing too many analogies no that's like i think that is like historically spot on if it overstates the case it only you need to overstate the case because it's difficult for you know modern you and me to understand the nature of that transformation that is that is it a thousand percent i mean it's funny i don't know if you remember that from your history but like yeah it's a dissolution of the monastery right so if i'm a medieval lord and i give away 10 of my estate every generation i do that for 10 generations guess what like

all that's super concentrated right and like what i do with this church i give it to the monastery and so i have guys running around they're doing stuff and so the dissolution of the monasteries all that land goes back up for grabs number one and then that work force they're all these people so luther like luther's a monk and he gets married he divide he defies his vow because he says that vow is like illegitimate and he said mary mary's a nun basically right and he says like there's nothing like there's nothing less holy like milking or sweeping up is like what you're doing off there in fact he says i'm actually being more holy here because i'm helping people instead of being off in the middle of nowhere and so like this workforce explodes and like this idea of like merit like it explodes the

population and like this other idea that i'm i want to do it for myself capitalism blah blah blah but there's always baked in this doing this for your neighbor this idea of like capitalism too i'm doing this so like i can help my community i can help my neighborhood i can help my neighbor who needs that and so like that's like a really interesting like point that like with this asymmetric opportunity also comes like asymmetric obligation there's a lot of people down the distribution curve that like would like to help their neighbor but don't have the means to do so and like now you can right like now you can work in these different dows and do these different things if i'm outside my traditional path which might not be working for me in the future i can do these other things and in fact like

here's the real mind mender maybe i can make helping people as financially viable or more so than just like working for myself and so the idea of public goods and 501c3 as just something i do over there because i've already done my real stuff over here changes just like with luther doing my real stuff here and then helping out over here like maybe these two things get interwoven and i think we're we're starting to see like pieces of that so now i don't think you're far off i don't i i think you're not even going far enough as i describe it yeah this we've lost like 99 percent of the people here but this is so good surprises listening to this at this point this is great nobody's listening at this point but um josh this has been like truly such i just i i went full history

nerd on you and just like it's really rare i find the uh someone who has as much is that is as interested in crypto as me and as as is is way more interested in history probably i mean freaking phd that's like uh yeah i mean it's just it this has been such an interesting conversation and a fascinating conversation i'm sure people dropped off like 30 minutes ago but that's okay no it's fine like the thing is if anyone's listening like i'd say like i mean honestly i'm not into crypto for crypto sake i'm into it because i i think it literally is like all the tools it may amount to nothing but it's like the very best chance we get for like a fundamental change and a fundamental redistribution of like the way we work the way we create value the way we

communicate the way we represent who we are and our own beliefs too like philosophical religious ontological epistemological like it gives us this opportunity to do anything and like the thing i'd like people to take away is that like when you're in the middle of a transition you never recognize as a transition and it always looks chaotic and that's exactly where we are like right now and so like i'll just say like you never get these opportunities to like witness transformation much less to do some of it knowingly or even to participate in it so like take advantage of the moment for yourself and for others so thank you very much i think that's such a special way to end josh this has been an amazing conversation we will link to your twitter uh in the show notes it's at joshua rosenthal uh and as

always be well my friend thanks so much really appreciate it [Music]