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The Conversation
Recorded: Sept. 28, 2025 Duration: 4:16:54Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the evolving landscape of the semiconductor industry, the shift from mining to token systems in crypto, and the implications of legal battles for free speech in Europe. Key topics included trends in misleading marketing, strategic partnerships for legal defenses, and the ongoing need for skilled professionals in the crypto sector.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Hi, welcome. Welcome everybody to the conversation. Before we get started here, everybody please
quote post the space with join the conversation so that everybody can see that we are in fact
live and that things are happening. So I'm going to go ahead and do that right now. Please
everybody else do that as well. Quote, post the space, withdrawing the conversation
or whatever text you feel like is fitting. And yeah, let's get started. There's a whole
bunch of interesting things that are happening that are quite interesting at the moment.
One of the things that I kind of like looked into a little bit from the last space was the semiconductor thing.
So interestingly enough, Intel is actually a massive liar.
And I think so is China as well.
Let me explain.
The precision that normally gets thrown around, which is like, you know, a tooth, you know,
three, two nanometers or something like that, that is more of like a marketing term than
anything else.
And it's like, it's the precision of however much stuff you can really put on the chip.
You know, that's about as simple as it gets.
Very basic is obviously a lot more complicated than that.
But they aren't actually really of that size nor of that precision.
It's really weird.
weird. And actually, it's funny because the 5 nanometer chip, which we're discussing, I think,
And actually, it's funny because the five nanometer chip, which we're discussing, I think,
or like at least mentioning in the last space that China supposedly developed from its 7 nanometer
process, is actually technically still a 7 nanometer chip. The only difference is its
optimization, which is the same game that Intel was playing, so that Intel could say that they
themselves have higher precision chips than they actually do, so that the marketing of it kind of works out for them in their favor.
So technically, it's more or less a lie.
So one of the chips, for instance, that was rumored to be a 5nm chip from China's 7nm manufacturing process
was in a Huawei, and a bunch of enthusiasts took that shit apart,
and independent analysts, they took that shit apart and independent analysts, they took that shit apart and
Basically found that the five nanometer claims were exactly of the same substance as those precision claims of Intel Which were of course all false. So that's kind of where that came from and yet China still has seven nanometers
Right, so it's like mmm because the problem is right to get hot to get higher quote precision off of a the 70
seven nanometer process that they're using which is a duv instead of euv um that's like
physically not entirely doable unless they do something that's insanely like just out of the
box effectively right so that that's something interesting that i found so that's
bullshit that's one thing and even the that's been known to crypto people for a while because
if you like back in the day sorry to interject but like when they were talking about mining
chips right ever it was widely known that like five nanometers or thereabouts is about the limits
of what current physics permits.
So when, because there were a bunch of people, like I haven't looked at this from like any
other setting other than crypto mining, but like people will be like, well, we can do
a two nanometer chip.
And I remember lots of grumbling at like Bitcoin conferences in 2016 being like, yeah, that's
all horseshit.
So it's really funny that like this, this like crypto scammer line from 2016 is now being used
by like intel and huawei which are like the biggest companies in the world
real yeah it's funny because i kind of like missed that part because i kind of knew it was
bullshit um but it was all but it kind of is reminiscent of the same race that we have today
where everybody wants uh better asics so
that they can mine more coin um but today we don't mine for coins we do the whole token thing
with ai and all that bullshit so that's pretty fascinating no offense there elliot
by the way um do you remember when i was talking about manufacturing and AI and its limitations when it comes to the implementation of it?
I love how Elon really cooked today because he quote posted somebody's photo of Starship.
We had that beautiful vapor cone around it because it was breaking through the upper layers of the atmosphere.
And he said, no AI was used in making this photo,
nor was any AI used to design this ship.
I was like, thank you.
That was a great treat.
Thank you for proving me right again.
Thank you so much, Elon.
Holy shit.
Because I've been telling people this about designing and manufacturing,
and it's like, it always falls flat.
I'm like, well well now the guy with
the manufacturing stuff said the same thing i've been saying so there you go congrats amazing truly
amazing i actually got a shower holy shit um i kind of got the the shower part delayed i was
wanted to do that before i started the space i have a whole bunch of like oil in my hair and all
that because i want to like you know kind of take care of that so it doesn't look a shabby.
Right? That's one thing. We're trying to do a bit of a
longer hair
thing. Ah, rosemary and some, I think it was
mint as well and all that
kind of shit. I love that. Rosemary's really
good for hair growing.
Yeah. Your hair's getting pretty long.
Me? Yeah,
yeah, relatively. Yeah, yeah.
I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna to try this thing out for a little bit.
We're going to go through that phase with actually good-looking hair.
I tried to do that once before in my life, and it didn't pan out because I didn't take care of my hair at all.
And it really just looked kind of weird.
And so I just always kept it short.
So we're going to do a somewhat longer thing, but it's styled, obviously.
We're not going to do the whole hippie thing.
That's not going to happen. We're to like actually be stylish about this but anyways
enough about hair stuff and all that um what's what else is on your mind Preston got anything
for us I mean not not a whole lot this was a you know it's a it was another another week at the
office you know uh running a crypto exchange in compliance and legal department. As I mentioned
last week, you know, I'm doing this pro bono case with the UK Office of Communications,
and I represent two social media companies. So we serve them with the lawsuit and that we filed,
we got the affidavit of service and filed that this week. Not a lot I can really say about that because it's pending litigation.
But what I can say is that
these European regulators are running around
trying to control the internet.
And I think they're running...
It's really funny, right?
Because we fought a war over this, right?
And we've actually fought several wars
with the Europeans about freedom of expression
and civil liberties over the last 250 years. And strangely, the Europeans about freedom of expression and civil liberties over
the last 250 years. And strangely, you know, the Europeans have lost all of them. So, which is fine,
like, you know, it's cool. Like we're buddies now, you know, it's, you know, no hard feelings.
But, you know, the regulators are running around doing this thing where they send emails,
right, to Americans. And they send email, like strongly worded letters by email.
And if you want to do something, if you want to get someone somewhere to send you a strongly
worded, or if you want to, if you want to get them to do something and have it be legally
binding, you can't really do that, right?
You can't just send them an email and then, then compel them to do something that you
want.
And so that's kind of what our whole lawsuit is about in the 4chan case.
It was that they, you know, they've, they've sent these emails to Americans and said, Americans, you must obey us.
And we've asked the federal court in D.C. to confirm that that is not, in fact, the case.
We said, actually, we can't get a federal court in D.C. to tell the U.K., oh, your laws aren't valid in U.K. soil or anything else because of sovereign immunity issues.
But what we can do is we can get a confirmation that those orders are invalid here in the US unless they follow some international procedure. There's the various
international procedures. So we serve them with a lawsuit this week. And again, I have to be fair
to them because they're the other party and I'm representing one of the parties in the case. But
I think there is an irony in the fact the fact that uh you know when justice comes
calling going the other direction you know we follow the rules uh when whereas when it was
coming from their direction inbound to the united states they were just sending emails
um but yeah you know it was a good thing i it's i as far as i can tell it's the first time that
that uh and the uk communications regulator has ever been sued anywhere in the world other than the UK.
And in the UK, it's generally under judicial review. So, you know, in keeping with my life
goal of, you know, what I seek to achieve in my life is I wish to have my name in a footnote of
a law school textbook. And that will be sufficient for me to be happy. But yeah, that that's that's that's about it i've got it
i've got and also i've got a boat that i need to put away it's it's currently tied up and i need
to take the sails down and and do that but that's yeah that's that's all that i'm up to this week
nice nice the free speech thing is actually kind of funny because um i remember this like really
interesting video so so the thing that comes out of europe usually is whenever somebody wants to
kind of like shit on them for something um for a long time was actually just, you know, manufacturing, right?
People go, oh, there's no manufacturing that really is happening in Europe that is of a large scale that influences most of the planet, which is a half truth, actually.
But it's somewhat true.
The major thing that's now being used is just saying that they don't have any free speech down there, which is largely true.
And the irony in this is that is sometimes I see like this video
pop around, which is really interesting, where it's like Ursula von der Leyen at some rally
somewhere. And there's a person who's like saying something that the people there at the rally
didn't like. And then she starts talking about how we have free speech, right? As the person who
said something got arrested and kicked out from whatever venue that was very very interesting it's
not just irony that is hypocrisy and actually what's even funnier is elements of um like the
right and the left in this in the european union actually want to have ursula von der leyen fired
that's happening actually at the very moment because she's been messing up everything. So imagine how bad things have to be
in order to have left and the right
agree on the same things.
In the fucking European Union,
that is very difficult to pull off.
These people are always at odds with each other.
And it's like, you have this thing happen.
That is very impressive.
Because I mean, she fucked up a lot of stuff.
It's the same in the UK, actually.
I mean, so Keir Starmer,
who's the prime minister there, and he's a sort of Blairite labor prime minister,
they said they were going to roll out national digital ID this week. So the idea would be that you would have something called, I mean, it's like this totally amateur hour looking app called the
Brit card. And the idea was that you were going to need your Brit card in order to get permission
to work. Left unsaid, you know, speaking as someone who both holds US and European passports and has worked in the
United Kingdom and has a UK national insurance number, they know who everybody is. Whenever you
walk in anywhere, you go to the hospital, you register with HMRC, they know who you are,
they know how long you're there, they know how long you have permission to be there.
So it's kind of a silly scheme where they're saying, oh, no, no, no.
You have to have a mandatory government installed app on your phone.
Um, and that's going to be what you use in order to access public services.
And they even had a member of parliament go on television and say, well, if you
refuse, you're not going to be able to work.
Right.
So this is going to be a gateway for you to work.
So they have their, their, and it's unbelievably like that, even that has united right and left.
Keir Starmer is also, if you look at his approval ratings, he's currently the most unpopular
British prime minister in the nation's history. I believe he has an approval rating. He's
underwater by 66 points and his aggregate approval rating is 13%. And if you want to know how unpopular that
is, if you ask citizens in an English speaking country what their opinion is of the Black Death,
that would be the plague in the Middle Ages, the Black Death being a good thing comes in at about
9%. So this actually happened. So Keir Starmer is basically at the floor of what is possible, right, in terms of how unpopular it's possible for a politician to be.
You know, I think it's easy to make fun of the Europeans, and I know Americans do.
And I think that that serves a valuable purpose in that when we do that, it wakes people up and shakes them out of it but like as as a dual national right and as a dual qualified uh you know english
and american lawyer um it for me it's one of those things where i i don't want i don't want to beat
europe right as an american i don't want them to lose right i want them to win i want them to win
so hard that they get that they're like tired of winning right i want i want the level of winning
of europe i want to have a neo-Renaissance,
right? Where we're building cathedrals in space. Like that's what I want to see for Europe.
And it's so obvious when you look at the policies that these leaders are promoting, it's so hackneyed,
it's so tired, everything that they roll out. And it's so ineffective. It just makes you wonder
it makes you wonder what on earth they're actually trying to accomplish and what
their priorities are. Because everything that they do on tech policy, everything that they're doing
on energy policy, all of the things that matter, they're doing incorrectly. And they should know
if they were doing any rational analysis whatsoever, that they're doing it incorrectly.
So I suspect that it's just that their their political system is just, you know, old, outdated, you know, they're the domestic political interests that have traditionally been very well
entrenched in domestic political parties, you know, are not responsive to the new market forces
that are moving the world forward at light speed. And so as a consequence, there's kind of a
communication delay. I think a poll came out today, a Times poll, not a rubbish poll, like an
actually pretty
good one, which said that if the UK held an election tomorrow, that reform would win, and
then they would win an absolute majority in parliament plus 97 seats, which is unheard of,
that you have both the conservatives and labor collapsing, Lib Dems and the Greens staying
roughly, and SNP staying roughly where they are, and an upstart party which says, listen,
the whole thing is broken, we need to fix it. Um, you know, racing ahead and securing a
parliamentary majority. It's, it's unprecedented in the history of the country. Um, so yeah,
I mean, free speech is an, is an important part of, I think free speech is symptomatic
of a lot of other problems, right? And those it's, it's one of those things where we're seeing politicians react by using law enforcement to suppress dissenting viewpoints in areas.
Free speech stuff that gets you in trouble in England will be if you talk about immigration, if you talk about gender theory and things like that, particularly if you hold a right wing point of view rather than a left wing point of view.
the left-wing point of view. And if you use coarse language in public, or for example,
Hamit Koskin, he was a fellow who set a Quran on fire outside of the Turkish embassy in London.
He was then attacked by a knife-wielding man. And this is like, I've watched the video of it.
The guy tried to kill him. He was swinging at him with a very, very large knife.
And in America, if that had happened, you would be legally entitled to shoot the guy who did it,
and the burning the Quran would have been protected speech. In the United Kingdom, right, Koskin was fined, I think, 250
pounds under the Public Order Act. And the guy who attacked him with the bladed article was released,
was basically released with, I don't even think it was time served. I think he was just released
and given a community order and said, okay, well, we're not going to jail you. So he technically was
punished less than the guy who he tried to kill with a knife. So I think there are a lot of screwed up priorities over there.
The reassuring thing is that we're seeing a public response from the British and European
electorates, both in the form of a political response. Political parties that traditionally
wouldn't be supported over there are now being supported in far greater numbers. If you then look at the digital ID scheme, the UK has an official government website
to petition the government for redress of grievances. It's not a right over there like
it is in the United States, but they have a website for it. And the petition to debate and
repeal, or not repeal, but roll back the proposal to roll out digital ID has already crossed two
and a half million signatures in something like 24 hours, which I think is the fastest that's
ever happened in British history. So you have a very activated populace. I think they haven't
had the vibe shift that America had a year ago or so, a year and a half ago. And I really would
love to see them not be left behind, right? And actually get competitive, start building nuclear
power stations, start reducing taxes, start enabling young people to work and make a living and do well
and you know not basically be subject i think another study came out in france a couple weeks
ago a week and a half ago which said that the average pensioner makes more money than the
average worker right so i think they've got these entrenched structures where the incentives are totally backwards. And you have a lot of politicians who are very heavily invested
in holding those things together. But you can only go against, right, physics for so long.
And I think that's, I think they're starting to reach that point and their electorates are
reacting accordingly. Right. Yeah, exactly. Even I myself, like, look, here's's the thing i should on europe a lot as well
but like the intent of that is just tonight like acknowledging a few wins is always great like
they're definitely shifting around and especially eastern europe i think it's really interesting
what's happening there they're actually winning again for the first time in a very very long time
um like poland is getting their shit together a lot of those countries are getting their shit
together which is like you know kind of unheard of you know the eastern europe was always
looked at as the as the redneck country effectively you know if you wanted to look like the red look
at the redneck and hillbilly zone that's what eastern europe was right so the fact that they're
getting their shit together is actually pretty good and i think they're kind of leading by example
because people look at you know what are the conditions like down there in those places? And they go, hmm,
we don't have these conditions that we actually want to have. Maybe we ought to like copy a few
things from them. And so the vibe shift actually comes over from there, and then, you know,
propagates elsewhere. And again, you know, something that needs to be said is I am a
European myself, I am a German, right? This is that that that is that is the citizenship I hold,
right? This is an interesting thing that people need to understand.
So I also want Europe to win.
I just don't want whatever is happening right now.
This is nonsense, you know, and I don't have free speech there.
I don't have the ability to express myself in any matter whatsoever.
Fuck, like the last time I tried to do that was when one of the foreign office accounts
from Germany actually commented some absolute nonsense on X. to do that was when one of the foreign office accounts uh from germany actually
commented some absolute nonsense um on x i responded to that basically correcting the the
stuff that they were saying they were saying speaking about some sort of democracy being
found in this practice which by execution is actually authoritarian not just authoritarian
it's it's it's it's this absolutism like, bro, this is like everything very far from democracy, if anything. And you're just like, you're just
putting out these, what is adjacent to pseudo profundities. And I'm like, what are you even
fucking doing here? This is completely incorrect. And the moment I fucking did that, I get attacked
by thousands of Turkish bots, thousands of them. That's the first fucking thing that happens. Within the first three hours,
I get attacked by thousands of those fucking things.
And I'm like, wow, okay,
so basically I, as a European,
who voices my opinion on European matters,
German specifically,
I'm not capable of doing so in a public manner
without being attacked
by a fucking botnet out of Turkey.
What the fuck, right?
So I have a problem with that.
Obviously, I get to have an opinion on that
because that actually involves me directly.
I'm sorry, but I get to have an opinion on that, right?
And I get to voice that opinion.
And if I can't voice that opinion,
then I do not have the ability to do so.
So where is the free speech, right?
So now that that's kind of like shifting,
I think that's really cool,
but I need to see a lot more of that
because right now there's this problem that's been entrenched, which is this level of pacifism. And people think that pacifism is good because they say, okay, there's no more war. But what you have to understand is, if you cannot stand to protect what is yours and what you are, because pacifism is there disabling you from doing that, then what's the point of it?
Then it's just a mind virus again
that needs to be cleaned out of the system.
And there needs to be a rational approach to these things,
a rational approach to defense of what one has
or what one wishes to achieve
to improve the conditions that exist in a specific country, right?
Or even in a community or yourself and everything.
There's a certain,
I think in America,
we're very unaccustomed
to the European way of doing things
just because we have
very different traditions
in history here.
So traditionally,
when civil liberties are implicated
in the United States,
you get lawyers involved. And in our system, here in the United States, you get lawyers involved. And in our
system here in the United States, law is traditionally very adversarial. By contrast,
in the United Kingdom, law is not so adversarial. It's very much process-oriented. People have
hang-ups. They have certain hang-ups. They have certain, how shall we say,
there are certain things you're not supposed to do and certain things you're not supposed
to say.
So I was on an adversarial phone call the other day and I dropped a casual F word because
I use it like a comma.
And it was an English solicitor on the other side.
And the solicitor took umbrage to this.
It was on a recorded call.
And I was like, I don't give a shit what you think.
I'm in America. You're not going to jail me over a meme i'm going to use the f word on a phone call
if i want you got a problem with that tough shit and um and so that's just kind of like our style
the other thing like if you for example it's latin america south america if you use the f word
in a negotiation with a south american lawyer they take grave offense um because it is it is
viewed as massively indecorous.
And so what you can do is you can drop that on a call or you can be a little difficult on a call
and they just don't know what to do, right? Because they're just very different legal
traditions, which are not quite as adversarial as they are in the United States. That's also
true with civil liberties defense. So I was at a conference in London back in June, which was
a rule of law conference being hosted by the Margaret Thatcher Center in King's Bench. It
was a Chatham House rule, so I can't say who said this, but it was a very senior figure on the
conservative side of the house with a law degree. And he took some very major, he was objective to the fact that the Labour Party and those
on the left in the United Kingdom tended to be activist lawyers, whereas those on the
right tend to follow the more traditional way of doing things.
And I said, I got up and I asked a question, very, very, very, very, very senior fellow.
You'd know who he was if I mentioned it.
And I said, listen, like I'm an activist lawyer.
Like it's the other side is very, very effective at being activist lawyers in favor of their totalitarian mission and objectives. So
why, why wouldn't we choose to do that? And well, you know, I think that's appropriate. You know,
we can go back to the way things were, we can do things the old way. And one thing that's been
interesting in the wake of the 4chan or 4chan lawsuit is that I think a lot of people in the
UK have woken up to
the fact, right, that you can use the law as a sword and a shield, right? Because usually it's
the shield. And you frequently would see, you know, free speech lawyers bringing defenses,
right? So someone would get arrested for something. And the free speech union, which is the big
organization over there, frequently, they're frequently acting in a defensive rather than an offensive capacity. Someone's been arrested, you fund their defense. Someone gets
kicked out of their job, you bring it to the employment tribunal. But then with Graham Linehan,
who's the Irish comedian, US resident, Irish national comedian who got arrested when he landed
at Heathrow, he and the FSU, I think two or three weeks after we filed our 4chan lawsuit, the FSU
was, yeah, we're
suing the Metropolitan Police for false imprisonment.
Like we've had enough of this stuff.
And so you're starting to see a very aggressive pushback where people are realizing that you
can use the law as something which exposes hypocrisy, which shows the weakness of these
systems.
You know, the 4chan lawsuit, as I said, to my knowledge, it is the only lawsuit that has ever been brought
against a European speech regulator ever in the United
States.
There was one lawsuit which was brought slightly earlier.
It was Truth Social and Rumble because they got a censorship
order from the Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes,
and they got a similar order than one we're seeking
in the middle district of Florida. They sued there, and they got a similar order than one we're seeking in the middle district of Florida.
They sued there and they immediately moved for
I think it was I think it might have been Wilkie was representing them.
I'm not sure off the top of my head, but they immediately moved for injunctive relief
and they got the order that we're seeking, right, which is confirmation
that these censorship orders are not valid in the United States.
And so when you do this, right, and so I'm not, you know, obviously,
I'm trying to contribute to the discussion without revealing litigation strategy. But there's a, there's part of the part of the reason you push back, right, is because you flush out the other side, right, you make them show up, and you make them play by your rules, which is not something that happens if you just sit there and decide to ignore their letters and ignore their correspondence.
rules, which is not something that happens if you just sit there and decide to ignore their
letters and ignore their correspondence. And so what we're preparing to do in the free speech bar,
those of us who are minded to do so, is basically any censorship attempt that is inbound to the
United States, regardless of where it comes from anywhere in the world, we're trying to develop a
template that can be reused where you say, listen, if you're going to try to push around an American
citizen, we're going to see how this works in the District of Columbia. We're going to see how this works in
Texas. We're going to see how this works in the Fifth Circuit. We're going to see how this works
over here. And then we're going to try these different things, but also putting the Europeans
on notice, right? No longer will you have the freedom to operate on a worldwide basis like
you did under Biden, right? Or Trump won. Because what's going to happen is we're sick of it, right?
Americans are sick of it.
American companies are sick of it.
American lawyers are sick of it.
And we've decided collectively, like as a little as a little team, right?
Team Freedom, that when you come over to our house, we're going to
we're going to explain in lengthy detail, right?
Our complaints 23 pages long.
We're going to do a diagnosis of
what your law says. We're going to tell everyone who reads this complaint, what your law says.
We're going to explain to all in sundry, right? Who read it exactly how, right? This law contravenes
American principles of free speech, the speech act, right? Which is our defamation rule section
230, you know, our, our history and tradition around abolishing speech crimes
and things like seditious libel or criminal defamation.
And part of that is about changing norms in the United States.
And part of that is about illustrating to the Europeans, both the people who are bringing
these actions, and also policymakers and also senior members of political parties on that
side of the pond.
Listen, if you want free speech and you want to reap the benefits of American style freedom,
this is what it looks like compared to what you are doing.
And so that's kind of, it's fun to be part of the early fight back on this.
And I think the fact that we're able to demonstrate, and I think we are able, right? They brought a bunch of enforcement actions from the UK earlier in the year,
and none of those have moved to completion. So, and they've been hanging out there for eight or
nine months, but basically we drew a line in the sand at the American shoreline and said,
no further, right? You're not, you want to try doing this, please be our guest, but like this,
this is going to stop at the waterline. And I think that's going
to get repeated. And the more that you do that, and the more that you embarrass the political
masters of these systems, right, the members of parliament, the executive branches, you know,
the Ursula von der Leyen type figures, and you basically illustrate to them, listen, if, if,
you know, one guy, you know, with a poodle, you know, working nights and weekends in his house
can bring your entire censorship regime to a grinding halt. Maybe it's time to consider the value of that regime and
whether you need to have it at all. So yeah, it's, it's, yeah, I've rambled a bit here. But
basically, the part of, you know, where the battle is shifting now, it's, there's, there's a, you
know, I've been doing this, as you know, Adrian, I've been doing this for while um in the free speech stuff and but there's a big difference between being someone who has a
lot of opinions about something and then being someone who can operationalize those opinions
into a doctrine and then a strategy and then executing right that strategy and i think what
we're going to start seeing now is the opera opera operationalization got to cut it out on the third attempt
um of of like a free a global free speech doctrine being pushed out of the united states right so
we're going to project outward right if you attempt to come in right you're creating these
links to the united states you're creating causes of action in the united states and you really got
to be careful because if you start doing that then then we're going to exercise, you know, we're going to ask some federal court
to exercise jurisdiction under an applicable long arm statute to drag you in front of a U.S.
federal judge. And you're going to get some papers, right, delivered to your front door
with the great seal of the United States on the first page, you know, directing you to do so.
So that's kind of what we're trying to do is create some
deterrence, but in so doing, right, demonstrate the fundamental toothlessness of what these,
all of this stuff relied, all the stuff that the Europeans are doing now,
relied on a consensus which no longer exists. It was people like, you know, Justin Trudeau
and Jacinda Ardern and whoever that lady is in Australia, the American who's, you know, running around trying to censor Americans because she lives in Inman Grant,
Julie Inman Grant, guys like Keir Starmer, senior people in the home office, senior people in the
European Union, senior people in Europol, senior people in Brazil. And all of these people were
kind of operating in that fun little, you know, WEF club for the last 10 years, where they assumed
that they were going to be able to set the normative values of the internet, and then enforce those values on a global basis,
because Americans would go, oops, you know, sorry. And, and humiliating them, right, on a global
basis is an important part of defanging those regimes. And the way that we do that is by
fighting back and winning. So yeah, that's my two cents on how we're going to push back
and what it's going to look like. It's going to start here, but then eventually the model's
going to get copied within Europe, within the UK, within places like Australia. And potentially
politicians will realize that they're kind of chasing something that they're never going to get.
chasing something that they're never going to get.
I'm not sure if you guys heard.
Actually, so the irony of this whole thing, the irony of this whole thing is kind of with,
you know, just back to what you were saying earlier about the, what is it, the behavior
that one needs to take when, you know, something that is legal is being discussed, something
that has something to do with, like ethics, not really ethics legal is being discussed, something that has something to do with ethics.
Not really ethics.
What is that?
What I'm looking for that word, you know, practice, standards of practice, I guess, where it's like indicative of a fight for silence.
You know what I mean?
Europeans actually have the fight for silence. That's what they want most of the time.
I know that from kind of like my experience.
I am, ironically enough, someone who knows very much about Europe
and how the culture operates and whatnot,
but also I'm someone who doesn't truly work like that culture
because I see its weaknesses and its benefits, right?
There's a certain level of precision that is amazing, of course,
and that's something I try to emulate as much as possible as well.
But there's a certain level of practice where some things that are otherwise very beneficial for you to use are just not being used for some reason that is neither ethical nor practical.
So that would be the fight for silence.
It doesn't even occur to them.
It never occurred to anybody in the last 10 years.
to anybody in the last 10 years of the reason the 4chan lawsuit was a big deal when we filed
it was because it never occurred to anybody that what the Europeans are doing was actionable
in the United States. It never crossed anybody's mind. It never crossed anyone's mind in Europe,
and it never crossed anyone's mind in the United States because most of the law firms
that were doing this kind of work wouldn't represent the kind of companies who are victims
of this kind of conduct. So I wanted to do this three years ago, but we wouldn't represent the kind of companies who are victims of this kind of conduct.
So, yeah, I wanted to do this three years ago, right?
But we didn't have the right situation because the Germans were going after one American
company.
They were sending letters via the MLAP procedure and the US Office of Justice Assistance under
the Biden administration was serving those notices on Americans, criminal threats. So I think that
with Europe, there is, and I kind of straddle both universes. And if you're dealing with
particularly regulators, there's a huge amount of deference, which is expected. And if you're
dealing with counsel for the other side on any contentious matter generally speaking there's
a lot of professional courtesy which is extended but sometimes that professional courtesy right
when you're dealing with something as fundamental as your fundamental rights and when one side says
listen you haven't got any fundamental rights uh deference is not the right answer right that's war
so you have to and you're you got to be ready to go to the mat and you gotta be ready to take some professional risks in order to do that. So that's one thing that the Europeans are learning at this point is like, listen, we've, we've lost so much ground that we have two choices. Either we can continue to be gentlemen, right? Line up in neat lines and wear colored uniforms and, you know, send volleys at each other, or we can, you know, pick up some muskets,ets go hide in the hide in the woods and play sniper like the americans did um so they fight fair right even
if it's kind of against their interests to do so um and i think that's just like if you get a lawyer
who's you know 50 55 60 years old and they've been practicing law for 40 years in one very
particular limited way it's going to be really hard to shake them out of that if you then talk
to some of the it's like the airmen of World War I, right?
And World War II.
Actually, it's more like World War II because they had a certain sense of honor with which
they would be shooting down all of these planes, but it wasn't actually practical.
And that's why none of it actually ever mattered or amounted to anything that was truly productive.
Where it's like, it's a style.
It's like, oh, we're fighting this battle where it's like, we are going into a ring and we're battling it out.
And there's like rules, but there are no rules in war, although now there definitely are.
Back then, those rules weren't as documented, like, you know, infractions of those rules weren't as documented, nor was its enforcement ever really rendered, right?
So you had this really interesting disadvantage of one side because they had this weird structure to them that they wanted to kind of action out in practice that then prevented them from causing any more damage than they actually already did.
I mean, there are rules, but one of the rules is that you've got to be polite and you can't defy expectations.
So there's a lane which you are expected to keep into and you're not really allowed if you stray out of that lane.
I mean, you can do it.
Ethics, right?
The ethical rules, those are hard and fast, right?
You don't break the ethical rules.
That's something that gets you in trouble.
But the ethical rules, there's a lot of room within the ethical rules to maneuver.
But within the professional sort of norms of practicing as a lawyer in Europe, there are expectations,
right? That aren't ethical, right? But they are expected. And if you ever decide that you want
to step out of those expectations, you can have some very entertaining phone calls. But, you know,
in the United States, I think we're very, we're much more inclined to fight dirty ethically,
right? But still dirty and using everything that
you can to win for your client and a bit less decorum as well which you can't it is what you
call the winning strategy where any type of courtesy is conditional and not you know actually
real you know like say for instance there's like this interesting video out there where somebody
says like you know if i have a gun and you have a gun we like you know we talk about the rules you know something
like that but if you have a gun and I have a knife you know things change a little bit or if I don't
even have a knife and you just have a gun or you have a knife and I have nothing and it's like there
you see America in a nutshell which is conditional all of that stuff is very conditional even the
ethics at some point right like you know what would be frowned upon by one side is then at some
point, if they're in that position, practiced by that very same side that frowned upon whatever
the actions were that were taken by that one initial side, right? It's very, very conditional.
I find it quite fascinating. It's one of the reasons why America is losing and also winning
at the same time, or why historically even America won a lot, right? It's like, it's always
conditional, but the lack of determinism in that is, I think,
a weakness. And the Americans could, in big tech in particular, the Americans do this. I remember
reading a presentation that I think Google produced, where they were talking about, back in
like 2018, 2019, I can't remember it off the top of my head. But they were talking about European
and US free speech norms
as part of their content moderation strategy for you know on a worldwide basis and they
essentially said as a company that their policy was going to be that they were going to adhere to
the european speech norms and that was the way things were going to go now if the u.s tech
industry right five or six companies microsoft google, X, and a handful of the bigger social media shops like Reddit or others decided collectively, if everybody decided to go out to Tahoe one weekend, they're all sitting around and they just said, you know, why don't we just go tell the Europeans to go fuck themselves?
They could do it.
And there's absolutely nothing that Europe could do about it. And not only that, it'd be like, okay, cool. Do you really want to raise the great firewall and the great firewall, Hadrian's firewall, and try to keep everybody out
and not have a tech industry of your own? Go right ahead. Be our guest. The fact that that
never happened and didn't happen is both evidence of typical corporate risk aversion. You don't get
to be very senior in an in-house legal function in most places unless you are a really good risk manager. And so as a consequence, you know,
that kind of risk taking is not necessarily rewarded in that particular function,
but also a willingness to play ball and kind of like a discomfort with a fairly novel situation,
right? Which is that there was the situation
the internet initially started out with
was the US had the internet industry, nobody else did.
They didn't know how to regulate it.
It wasn't such a big deal.
It was growing exponentially, but it wasn't.
And I remember 2008, right?
It wasn't part of everyday life, not every,
it was everywhere, right?
But it wasn't as important or as pervasive as it is today.
You then fast forward 15 years, 20 years from that, right, to where we are now.
And it's everywhere. It's everything.
There's no such thing as a company that isn't a technology company.
Everything's online. Everything's digital. Everything's remote.
Everything's encrypted.
Yeah, because before everything was how gamers are today, in a sense.
If you have a super good gaming rig, that's a thing.
You're in this kind of club of ability, right?
You're able to run this game at this amount of frames that allows you to cause you know this
much damage this much impact to like you know the enemy who has like a lesser rig in a sense
where at that point it's like hey actually the people who are dominating the internet are the
people with the best computers and back then it was kind of like that in a sense also because
computers were clunky and difficult to manage which i think is something we'll actually end
up returning back to once the current world of the internet becomes more regulated and more managed,
then there will be more instances of self-hosting hardware
that is independent from all of these massively entrenched
and somewhat damaging things such as even Microsoft.
The irony in that being I have to run a Microsoft system
because I want to play video games,
and running anything other than a Microsoft system to play video games is moronic because, you know, the dominance is there, but I would want the dominance to be shifted, but there's not enough money to do that, right?
So it's like, yeah, 2008 Internet is like today's version of gaming where you cannot play this game enjoyably or at all even if you don't have a certain level of compute right so I mean legally something else happened to parallel to all that right which is
that in 2008 everybody kind of assumed the default assumption was the websites
regulated where it's based but as the services became more and more used on a
global basis the Europeans and the UK right or if we count the UK as part of
Europe the continent you know we'll just, the Europeans and the UK, right? Or if we count the UK as part of Europe, the continent,
you know, we'll just say the Europeans look at themselves and they said,
hold on a second, we don't have any control over this space.
We haven't built our own because we didn't undertake any of the policy
measures necessary in order to, you know, I think Rocket Internet
like was the biggest company in Europe for a while.
And that was basically a German company that cloned all of the big
all of the big American majors and created little small European
versions of it. And they said, well, we don't have our own industry, so we might as well try to
regulate the Americans in order to ensure that our policy objectives are carried out.
And then the big tech companies, right? This is a fairly novel legal question, right? Because we
didn't have digital communications or services which felt like they were local, but were being
managed 3,000, 4,000, 10,000 miles away,
you know, 500 years ago when the principles of law were being developed. And so what they did
is they kind of muddled in, right? They wandered into this situation and they muddled through and
they built these compliance apparatuses, which tried to be all things to all men in all places
and comply with all rules at the same time. Where we finally gotten to is this, I call it
compliance impossible, right? Which is the status where every jurisdiction is now trying to assert control over the same servers
which are located outside of their jurisdiction. And they're trying to basically carve up those
servers, every server in the world, so that it has a different set of operating rules depending
on where the server is being accessed from, right? And so a company like Meta or Google can afford such a vast legal apparatus that what they're
able to do is they're able to comply with the European rules by engaging in the ritualistic
regulatory kabuki that the Europeans specialize in.
They're able to go to the meetings, they're able to have the discussions, they're able
to engage in the regulatory inquiries.
Of course, they don't perfectly comply with all the rules at all times, but they're able to show enough compliance with that ritualistic way that
the Europeans do regulation that the Europeans leave them alone. And then what the Europeans do
is they go and pick on the companies that don't have those kinds of resources in order to make
the test cases that will define how the rest of the world is expected to behave. So they went after 4chan, Kiwi Farms, Gab, and sanctioned suicide. Those are the all American,
all social media, all controversial as hell, right? All my clients. And they weren't all my
clients before. They were all my clients after they got targeted because I decided I was the
guy to do this. And so a couple of them were my clients before. So essentially they decided we're going to use these as the test cases.
And what they were expecting to have happen was that the fines and the notices would go out.
They would be issued.
They would probably get defaulted.
And then what they would do is they would jump through the various procedural hoops
after the fines were issued and they would eventually get the websites blocked in the UK
if they were unable to collect.
That's my guess about about how they expected to do that. And so what they would do
is they would demonstrate the ritual to everybody who was watching at places like X or Google or
Meta, et cetera, et cetera. Now, what they didn't count on was that a bunch of Americans would
turn around and go, this is stupid. We don't like what the UK is doing. We have political
objections, even though we're 5,000 miles away from the United Kingdom. What we think you're doing to your own people is outrageous. So we're
going to fight you. So we'll see you in court. And then flipping it on them and saying, okay,
well, now we're going to fight you. You did something which offends us in our country.
And we're going to drag you into our courts in order to have that discussion under our rules,
in accordance with our law. And so what we've seen is that there's been kind of a,
I haven't seen them really move very aggressively since they learned that there was
going to be opposition, you know, against other companies. I don't know what's going on behind
the scenes over there, but it threw a spanner in the works and that was expected, right? Because
the playbook was, we have to prove that the ritual works and the response to the attempt to prove
that the ritual worked, right? Which the attempt to prove that the ritual worked
right which is in a sense you know i've thought a lot about noesis and uh and cog sex since getting
to know you um and psyops in particular those are those are a couple of things that i have i have
meditated on very extensively um and essentially it was a big psyop right the psyop was we're going
to prove that this thing works in a particular way and then what? The psyop was, we're going to prove that this thing works in a particular way.
And then what we're going to do
is we're going to go around
to all these big American companies
and tell them, actually, you know what?
So see, here's the psyop.
This is what happens.
And it was a foregone conclusion, right?
That the way the world is going to go
is that we're going to have a splinter net
where you are going to be expected
to comply with every little local rule.
And it's probably easier for you
to comply on a global basis with the most offensive and most controlling local rule.
And that way, all of our little buddies at WEF, like with our big ideas about what should be
hosted on the internet, we're going to be able to coordinate and tell the Americans that they
have to play by our playbook. And what happened was that blew up in their face because what
happened was instead 4chan said, we're not afraid of you, right? Kiwi Farms, which is even smaller than 4chan said, we're not afraid of you.
And what I'm hoping has happened, and I certainly haven't gotten any phone calls from big tech
legal departments, but what I'm hoping happened as a result of that is that at Meta and Google
and other companies, you know, the senior lawyers all got around the table and they said,
if 4chan and this Yahoo, right, this weird Yahoo with a Twitter account who spends too much time on the internet isn't afraid of these people. Why the hell are we?
Right. And that breaks the illusion, right? It stops the PSYOP dead in its tracks. It's legally
right, right, in addition to that. But what it does is it shatters the illusion of inevitability.
And that is the most important thing about winning a fight against a superior opponent
is shattering the illusion that their victory is inevitable.
So that is what, you know, without, again, I'm not going to go into the detailed litigation
tactics about why we're doing things in particular ways or what we're expecting to respond with
or the legal arguments.
But this is also a cross-border political fight, right?
And it's a political fight being run by two small companies, you know, with skeleton
teams and two lawyers and a couple of other lawyers who are chipping in on, you know, quietly behind
the scenes. And we said, you know what, we can break the illusion. We can break the spell by
doing something very, very simple. And as a consequence, that's the force multiplier, right?
It's that we don't even need to win right in order to get a major political victory
against these kinds of rules and to change the assumptions right that that just because a company
a content or a server is readable in a place it should be regulated by the rules of that place
and we should try to then say okay well what does that then lead to and that invites legal teams and
you know larger department larger companies and others to say, maybe the
world should look like this, where the situs of the server is the law of the server. And if you're
going to connect to that server, you're going to be subject to the rules of that server, just like
having a big telescope and looking at someone holding up a giant newspaper over the horizon,
rather than saying that the laws
of a foreign country can creep in and boss around Americans.
And I think that's ultimately, from a legal standpoint, if you ask yourself, well, let's
run a conflict of laws analysis and see where that comes out, I think legally that's right,
because you couldn't get these orders.
And one thing we wanted people to consider and ask when they read our lawsuit was, is
it possible for these orders to be enforced from the Europeans under the DSA
or anywhere else in the United States? And the answer to that question based on the precedence
we have in the first, relating to the First Amendment is no. And then say, okay, well,
if that's the case, right, then maybe there's a political settlement, which makes more sense,
both in terms of a domestic political settlement in these places that are thinking that these
sensorial rules are going to make them.
The UK have this crazy line.
They said they wanted to be a regulatory superpower, whatever that means, back when they were
enacting the Online Safety Act.
And they thought, they actually thought that they were going to be able to regulate the
communications of the entire world.
They said that something like 250,000
online services from the largest social media company to the tiniest little online forum would
be in scope for this new set of rules, this censorship rules. And there are not that many
internet companies in all of Europe, let alone the United Kingdom, which means that they were
targeting the United States. And what we've seen from their first set of enforcement actions is
that indeed, most of the priority targets for these rules were
American targets. So yeah, it's, it was about, you know, part of, you know, part of what this
all was about was, was the lawyering, right? And the lawyering is the lawyering. And, you know,
for obvious reasons, I can't discuss, you know, I have lots of thoughts that I'm happy to discuss
in private, but I'm very much unable to discuss in public. But in terms of the politics and the visibility, this is a bigger fight. We're not going to win it unless we convince people that this state of affairs that the censors in Europe want is not inevitable. And that's kind of, it's an important battle. I think we've made some meaningful progress there, and I'm hoping we're going to win.
It's an important battle.
I think we've made some meaningful progress there,
and I'm hoping we're going to win.
Ironically enough,
this is just like, again, precedent warfare, right?
Where basically to control politics,
all you have to control is whatever defines the meme,
and that's what precedent is,
because precedent is effectively a form of a meme,
and that's what law operates by a lot, right?
So in the goal of trying to set precedents, Europe has actually ended up setting a like, ended up like, you know, giving these
companies the kick in the ass needed for them to set the precedent instead, right? And I think
that's really interesting. That's where that's where things kind of blew up for them, because
they always assumed that things were going to go a certain way, because nobody's going to sit there
and say, fuck you, right? This is the thing that's
always been interesting. You know, it's an interesting thing with tech companies, because
I never really see a tech company look at a government, look at the stuff that is being
asked of them and just go, so here's what we're going to do. Fuck all that. And if you make us
do this, we will suspend all of our services immediately. And then we're going to see how
the population reacts to the draconic stuff that you're trying to make us do this, we will suspend all of our services immediately. And then we're going to see how the population reacts to the draconic stuff that you're trying to make us do.
And everyone will know about this.
Everyone will know exactly who's behind this and who to call when this blows up in your face.
So we're not going to deal with this right now.
And I think a lot more companies are actually going to end up doing that.
And that's a really cool precedent that I would like to have kind of be expressed a lot more so we don't ever end up in the state of the internet, which is like, you know, back in the 1990s, where only a very few truly have access to what is a free internet.
Because beyond, you know, like if any of these like draconic, nonsensical and practical regulations ever come to pass, then basically the internet is just going to return back to what it once initially was and it is a highly managed read more than you can write
environment which prioritizes nonsense and noise over any kind of signal because it's all ideological
right at the end of the day that's what its legislation is all for especially in all these
like weird countries it's all about hey i need to figure out a way to kind of preserve a certain
perception ideology or whatever have you right the? The psyops aspect, right? And the narrative
engineering that it comes with, because with precedent, you manipulate everything else,
because that is the mean. I think the, I mean, the strategy is, the strategy is, is pretty
straightforward. If you're, if it's a large tech company that decides it's going to refuse,
it's not where, you don't even's going to refuse, it's not worried.
You don't even have to turn off your services, right?
You simply have to put yourself beyond their jurisdictional reach.
And the manner in which that's, and the reason no one's done it is because it's extremely expensive to do that, right?
So if Google were to shut down its London office, pull out of Europe or pull out of
London, pull out its people out of London, it would be politically unbelievable.
They'd have to fire tens of thousands of people. They'd have to sell off
prime real estate in central London in order to put themselves beyond the reach
of the UK. And then they would have to say, okay, well, because with these things, right,
when you're at that level, it's about inflicting pain, right? It's about inflicting reputational
pain and economic pain, right? So it's not, we're not talking about courts or anything like that.
The question is, how do you put yourself out of the reach of these countries?
And the answer to that is you have to make sure that you don't have any assets or personnel
that they can put hands on.
So you have to basically pull out of the country, get rid of everything, get your people out,
shut down any servers you've got, and then not set foot in that country ever again.
And that is the rule.
So, and that's the only thing that will work,
essentially, is that you have to do that and then make sure that there's not some parallel
agreement with some other country that they can reach your assets in some third country.
Now, we've seen other countries like Brazil, which is a borderline lawless place,
when X refused some orders that the Brazilians had handed out or resisted those orders,
they then went after assets that had nothing to do with X, right?
They went after and tried to seize Starlink's local assets.
Yeah.
Which is really interesting because that was the next thing I actually wanted to talk about,
which was when governments fail to regulate companies or to force them to do something,
the next thing they're going to attack is internet service providers and internet service distributors, right?
That is the next thing that's going to happen. Like, you know, of course, we've addressed the idea of, hey,
wherever the data center is, and wherever the information is kept, you're subject to whatever
that server, like you were subject to the laws of wherever the server is, right? But like, also,
the intent would be, you know, you attack, say, internet service providers based on, hey,
you are distributing information in this place over here, so you
are subject to the laws
on what information is
or is not to be distributed, right?
It's kind of like how you can attack all these companies.
And I think Brazil is one of the first to, like,
effectively actually do that in a very public manner.
And they did kind of make
X and Starlink fold in some
way, right? That's the probably made Elon fold
in that way, because there was an unwinnable scenario
for them. It was really fucked up.
It was completely illegal though. They're true.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they had to make them fold because it was
a practical problem where actually
at that point, the government had the
ability to do the other thing, right?
We looked at, hey, companies have so much power
that they can literally say, hey, government, fuck you
for your demands, fuck your demands.
In this case, actually that government because it's pretty dictatorial had more power and so they were able
to say hey fuck you company do what i say or else right and they could actually get away with that
because nobody's doing anything about it right well the governance isn't necessarily legal but
you know the other interest sorry andre andre why don't you chime in i'll shut up i've talked enough
no no no i'm really enjoying listening to you i was gonna actually add two thoughts to this like
one on the brazil um uh because they went after a citizen not a company right so they went after
a u.s citizen for a company that he owned was doing something um that's where us should have
stepped in right in my in my mind, my mind, because now it's
targeting of us citizen for not the company, which is separate legal entity, legal person.
Right.
But two men UK has such a huge opportunity.
Cause I was listening to Preston, right.
If UK just rejects all of European regulatory rules, all the tech companies will migrate
all their equipment and stuff into UK.
Like just boom but immediately
because if they promise that to the companies that's it Germany France everyone else in in EU
you won't see tech that'll be all in UK yeah 100 I mean 100 and like I know um I know some of the
guys who are very very tight with uh Nigel Far, and he's being very well advised on this. So if reform wins, I would expect that the UK is actually going to do some pretty progressive
things on tech regulation, free speech regulation.
And, you know, currently, you know, a poll came out, they're going to win.
You know, if the election were held tomorrow, I don't know how they're going to get an election,
given the way that the parliamentary system works.
But if they if one were held tomorrow, they'd win by 100 seats. So that's
something which is pretty interesting. Yeah, Brazil shows what... The Brazil example is
illustrative of two things. The first one is just how far some of these governments... I don't think
Americans fully appreciate just how far these governments will go to silence their own people
because we're just not used to it, right? Because if the US did that, you'd have injunctive relief so fast, it'd make someone's head
spin.
And part of what the Trump administration has been doing lately on their side has been
a little dispiriting because they have been doing things like the Jimmy Kimmel deplatforming
and Brendan Carr shooting off his mouth about things that the SEC has no lawful power to
That's the kind of stuff where it's
like, guys, you're doing such a good job with free speech offshore. Why in hell would you not
be consistent in the United States? I know. It's very confusing.
By the way, I want to ask something. I want to turn this idea of precedent to something that's
more mainstreamable. So what if I said, how accurate is it to say that legal precedent is a legislative meme?
How accurate is that, do you think?
Legal precedent is...
Is that accurate?
I think legal precedent is...
Legal precedent is a...
Because it feels like a meme, right?
Because that's kind of what it is.
It's a meme that kind of influences things.
And it's like a template of sorts.
And that's kind of what memes operate by. It's kind of like a certain form factor as well of like vibes but
in this case it's law law is a law is a meme of sorts i mean i don't want to it's one there's a
danger in in being you know it's it's like everyone's saying well you know the universe is a
machine well law is more like a law is like the internet i think i would say that law is like the
internet because it's like this this semi-rigid structure
that stuff gets added to all the time, right?
And then it becomes part of a more established structure.
So the law looks like the internet,
but precedent, which is stuff that's kind of like
outside of the law and not inherent to the law,
is a meme that influences the way that the internet
in some ways works, yeah?
It becomes a rule.
Go ahead, Maya.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, no, after you. No, I was just saying that a legal precedent becomes a rule. Go ahead, Maya. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, after you.
No, I was just saying that a legal precedent becomes the rule.
Internet culture, basically.
That's the thing.
Memes are internet culture.
Culture dictates what happens next.
And in a sense, precedent influences enforcement and application of the law.
Precedent's a source of law, right?
So law has a lot of different sources.
That's, I think, the way to think about it. And depending on where you are in the world,
different sources, you know, different sources of law flow into the daily life in different ways.
So in the American adversarial, you know, common law-based system, a precedent becomes itself
a binding legal rule, right? So if you can create one, you can point to it,
and it either has binding value, depending on where and how it's decided or it has persuasive value. The other thing is that it can influence behavior, right? So both,
and that's precedence both in terms of a precedent for something that, something that, and there
are two types, right? There are precedents that are legal precedents, which means that you've got
a court ruling which is binding on lower courts, the applicable jurisdiction, a state, a federal circuit, that sort of thing.
And then you have precedents for conduct, which is that if you do A, then B will happen.
And so what we've tried to do with the 4chan case is the latter of those, which is that
if you do this, we have just laid
out a complaint which is capable of being copied by anyone, anywhere, at any time.
And depending on their particular facts, now they've got something that they can work with.
Whether that's going to create a legal precedent at the end of the day depends on whether we win,
and particularly we'd have to win on appeal. Or, you know, and the other side would have to not default
and we'd have to win in a contested proceeding.
So it's one of those things where you have a source, right?
You have both the, once something is a behavioral precedent,
you've got a complaint on file, you've got an argument,
you've introduced a meme into the system.
That meme will then be crystallized, right?
If someone uses it and wins.
And that's kind of, so yeah, it is kind of, because then you say okay well we have this rule and we can then replicate right the rule in other places and in other ways um so yeah
in that respect it is like a meme but it's a meme with force right it's a meme that you can that you
can raise and you can say listen this worked over here once it can work over here again and then
people will change the behavior in response to the knowledge that this is something which is capable of occurring.
So in a sense, if you were to take a look at what I said, it is a legislative meme, is it not?
It's a law.
It's not a, I mean, legislative is, yes, I suppose.
It's a legal meme.
I think when people say legislative, they usually mean lawmaking.
Right.
But depending on...
So, like, I mean, there's a legislative...
It's a legal meme.
A legislative meme.
No, it's just a legal meme.
That would be the thing.
Because I'm trying to imply legal, but I'm also trying to, like, make it multidimensional.
But I think legal makes more sense to make it more streamlined, yeah.
Yeah, completely.
I completely agree with you.
Yeah.
Right.
Because I wanted to, like, you know, get that accurate, because it's actually something I want to post. I thought it was funny because
we were kind of like wanted to describe it as something. It's like a, there's a whole bunch
of things that I usually like to do, which is to take a look at something and to turn it into a
string of information that is very condensed, that can be referred to at another point. Like for
instance, art, if somebody asked me what art is, I have a thing for that on my page somewhere.
Right. So I become like this database of all these different takes that one can refer to, like
a vector database, which is kind of like, you know, what social
media is, because it's like media
for social, which is not actually social,
nor is it media. So
it's like, it's really funny
like that. So I'm going to put, actually, I'm going to go ahead and post that
because that's what I thought of when we were like discussing
you know, legal precedent.
So, yeah.
Compressing information, basically,'s what I'm after.
And what I want people to think, what I want a European regulator, if some Austrian regulator
in two years time decides they have a problem with a social media company, what I would prefer
for them to think is there is a material risk that Preston Byrne and Ron Coleman are going to
file a lawsuit against you or that someone will do exactly what they did to you. And so you need to think long and hard before you try to long arm
your law onto American shores, because this will be the response. So, and I'm very confident based
on my site analytics that that European regulators are aware of who I am at this point, but we want
them to know, right? Like this is, this is something that could happen to you if you try to push around an American.
And so I think, yeah, and that is a meme in a sense.
It's like, listen, if you post something stupid, like, this will be the response.
Yeah, pretty much.
I'm going to put this, like, post at the top of the space right here.
Legal precedent is like a legal meme.
legal meme. What you said earlier about why the big social media company didn't rise up three
years ago, do you think that part of it was also because they were also under pressure
in the U.S.? The administration didn't have their back. the regulators were pressured it can be it can be summarized to
Republicans were really fucking stupid and didn't understand the importance of
the internet and they didn't really take it as seriously as they should narrative
engineering basically one of the major points and I've addressed this in like a
previous space as one if like I said this many multiple times there's like
for the people who were back then considered
to be like conservatives and you're the boomers and all
those people, they had like literally zero
understanding of culture or how they got
where they were because everything was like always handed to them.
There was like no actual struggle in their lives.
And so what ends up happening is they don't actually understand
how anything works. And so
they can't perpetuate something.
However, the other forces that were
always at odds with this
consistent,
powerful, in some ways,
lack of
culture,
these people are like the nerds.
Because if you look at old media,
you see that the nerds are always
kind of trodden down upon,
in a sense, and then eventually that turns around
and then they capture the sources of media and it eventually make it their own to kind of like perpetuate
something that is a bit different that's why you have say the cultural capture with like the the
somewhat left or even far left in many ways cultural capture of entertainment is so absolute
because these people didn't really have much other than the
ability to engineer the narrative because they knew how data structures worked right they were
like you know autistic in some ways or whatever you wanted to call that neurodivergent whatever
like uh is the current meme and now you know all that shit is super popular like to be a nerd is
super popular now to be autistic is super popular that even like the the most idiotic people you
know want to be smart so they pretend to be be autistic in order to get some sort of social status, right? So this is how you engineer culture, right? So if you don't care about culture at all,
if you don't care about narrative engineering at all, you will lose. You will lose. This is
on an individual level. This is on a family level. This is on a community level. This is on a
provincial level. This is on a national level, and even at an imperial level
as well. If you don't have control over your own narrative, if you don't continue to engineer,
continue to preserve, and perhaps even expand what is your culture and what is your narrative,
then you will simply cease to exist one day, because somebody else will be doing the exact
same thing and beat you at that thing, right? And this is what kind of happened with Republicans, right?
Because the left focused almost entirely all of their energy on narrative engineering.
And look at how successful they are today.
Look at how absolute and how incredible that capture is right now.
It is, you know, arguably damaging and all.
And then you have these people that look at it, you know, as a response and go,
well, we shouldn't care about that whatsoever.
This is all nonsense, blah, blah, whatever else.
It's like, hang on a second, hang on a second.
You are at war with a means to disseminate information.
That is bullshit.
You're not really at war with the whole thing at all.
It's kind of like more at war with you and you don't understand that you should actually be doing the same thing.
You should be looking at something like the World Forum and say, this is interesting these are a lot of shitty ideas but man do they have the ability to
implement why don't we look at the ability to implement and try that out for size try that out
for ourselves that's what the republicans didn't do for a very long period of time conservatives
all the same as well right because they Because they didn't want any change.
No matter how shitty your ideas are, if you manage to convince 90% of the world to implement them, you're still one.
It doesn't really matter how good your ideas were.
You just needed to get enough people to implement them.
Because ideas are cheap and execution is everything at the end of the day right so if you're like
don't have the execution or don't even like bother and trying to gather up the power to execute upon
your ideas then your ideas are effective effectively worthless and so is your memetic value right
because it's all about memes if you think about it it's all about god and memes that's that's
that's all that matters in the universe another thing thing to consider is that there's, it's easy to forget, right?
But if you had any interaction with Silicon Valley in this universe at all, in sort of
the 2018 to 2022 period, it was readily apparent that there were groups like Graphica, which
was one of these like, you know, misinformation think tanks was funded by Facebook.
There were other, you know, Stanford internet observatory. You know, these people knew journalists who were on the left, who knew
activists that were in left-leaning organizations that know people who work in the trust and safety
apparatuses of these major companies. And there were political activists, like dyed-in-the-wool
political activists in places like, you know, Mozilla, right, had a huge political activist contingent. And these companies allowed their employees to be politically active in the
office. And most of that political activity leaned to the left. So like Brendan Eich, who I know,
nice guy, he got pushed out of Mozilla, because he supported a referendum in California that,
you know, 40% of the Californian population supported, but it went the wrong way to that
consensus. So they drove him out of his own company. Similarly, those individuals and those companies,
if you have one thing that happened a lot was companies getting deplatformed from infrastructure.
I'm not going to mention which ones are at which times, but these deplatformings happened in waves.
And the reason they happened in waves is because there were networks of people.
Or what happened with Palmer Luckey as well.
Yeah, exactly. So what happens is there are people who are politically active in these companies
and before brian armstrong kind of broke the spell and said all right enough of this shit like stop
being political in the office these you basically had antifa cells in major tech companies that were
aiming to censor and silence most viewpoints on the right right and this isn't on the right we're
not saying like far right we're talking like anything right of the dead middle and sometimes things on the central
left so like for instance with palmer lucky it was really interesting that guy was not even like
verbally uh supportive of the right what he was doing is he bought out he wanted to like you know
give monetary support to the right you know and the way that he did that
because you have this ability to request
who has donated what to whom
you have the ability to do that
which is crazy to me that that's a thing you can do in the US
it's amazing the amount of transparency that exists there
it's in some ways a massive OPSEC problem if anything
but it's a thing, it's interesting
but what ends up happening is
recognizing that you'll be kicked out of a company, and that you'll be fucked with if he
tries this, decides to instead go and purchase ads effectively to promote what is, you know,
Donald Trump in that way. So he didn't even, like, himself put his own identity behind that,
which is, by the way, what you end up trying to do with a lot of influencers, right? Look at
Taylor Swift, for instance, or look at any one of these other, you know, quote unquote, celebrities, whatever that's
supposed to mean these days. But like, you know, that's a thing. You get these people to put their
own identity behind some sort of political thing in the hopes that this person that they idolize
is a thing that then can influence the minds of the people, you know, so that they represent
whatever politics that is. So that's actually more powerful. And in this case, he didn't even
bother doing that,
which would have been even better than just like,
you know,
paying for ads.
Right.
But,
somebody figured that shit out.
And actually,
I know the person who figured that shit out that really made me look at him
and go,
that's fucked up.
You know,
he told me what he did,
right.
He told me how they fucking figure that shit out and what they did and then
got him kicked out of fucking Oculus because of this shit.
They figured that out and then fucked him.
And now you know he has a weapons company, so it's kind of funny.
You have the Giga Autist, who does VR tech,
and now he's like, hmm, okay,
time to blow shit up.
It's literally the character
development's like, okay, that's it, fuck this.
I'm going to start blowing shit up productively.
And I'm going to
name my company after a sword
and the elvish name translates to flame of the West.
And it's like β
Absolutely, like absolute, complete, complete defeat.
Love that guy.
Absolutely amazing. You know, we're talking about the problem being, you know, all these tech companies that are infiltrated by the left, but it goes even further back into these people's childhood where our education system has been absolutely infiltrated and these kids have been indoctrinated since almost birth, right?
think that's that's causa remota right the cause of proxima is is that you had people in these
organizations the organizations you know i i'm not a i'm not a big tech ceo i have no idea what it's
like running a big tech company um but i imagine that the thought process for a lot of these guys
is just like risk diverse it's just like i imagine it's just like zuckerberg just like whatever
like i just want to focus on like their product guys.
They just want to get the job done.
And when this, this problem first started cropping up, they're just like, whatever,
just, just get it, get it done.
This is a legal function.
I just want to go build shit and like let the lawyers and the trust and safety people deal
with that so I can go build cool stuff.
And then what happened was I realized it was an existential problem.
Yeah.
Like what happened with, what happened was it was an existential problem right yeah like like what
happened with what happened with twitter right jack dorsey had no idea any of this shows were
going on we were just kind of lost interest and for years and years and years everyone was
on jack dorsey because they thought that jack was doing this and it turns out he had no idea
any of this was going on a lot of it stems from banking itself um back with
esg when esg first started coming around um where it came from was a lot of these unions these
teacher unions they came in and they said they told whoever was managing their money like hey
if you want to continue to manage our billions of dollars, we only want our money invested in companies that meet these specific standards,
you know, the DEI stuff.
And as a result of that, they brought a lot of these people into these companies
to meet these standards.
A lot of it was also the Norwegian government.
A lot of people don't realize this.
But the Norwegian government holds one of the biggest
shares.
Holds one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds
in the world.
I think it is actually the biggest one.
I think it's around 2 trillion dollars.
And they literally
fucking use this to promote
a bunch of fucking
gay agendas.
And like promote feminism and workplaces and whatever
they literally voted for something like that in facebook in one of the shareholder meetings
and uh people hate on the swedes what a shame like an ex's case for when it was twitter um
you you can actually there's a really good insight that you could see, which is that their chief legal officer was a lady named Vijaya Gadi.
And she went on Rogan and like talked about censorship, right?
For two and a half hours and explained like all of these principles and all the rest of it.
And the ideas that she had about freedom of speech on the internet were all like, if you know what to look for, it's like,
okay, cool. This is all critical theory, just dressed up as content moderation policy. And so
if you have someone like that sitting, you know, who believes those ideas sitting at the top of
a legal and policy organization, everybody beneath them in the organization and the entire company,
like X and Twitter, like, or at least X, the legal side, legal side or the excuse me the social media side of X
has only one right only one big legal problem right or it's it's and that is liability for
speech of its users because it doesn't say anything itself it hosts a bunch of speech
from its users and so the question is are we liable for what our users say and that's like
a big free speech issue right right? Section 230, right?
Well, so Section 230 is there. You've got like IP, the IP issues, the big one, like
the DMCA and copyright infringement.
Yeah.
But like when you're then setting policy and you're looking at European rules, right?
Section 230 no longer applies. And the question is, like, as we said at the beginning, there's
a regulatory kabuki, right? That you've got to play. You've got to play act like a particular thing in a particular way.
You have to make the right noises.
You have to show exhibit sufficient deference.
And then you also have multiple governments sending you requests being like, hey, take
this off.
Take this off.
This person do that.
I mean, I've seen these requests for smaller clients and like the volume, even for the
smaller companies is like, was enough for me to build a law practice.
I can only imagine what a larger company
like Meta or X or Google is going to do in terms of...
Yeah, but they constantly get takedown requests
from a whole bunch of countries.
Europe is not even necessarily the worst one.
One of the worst ones is Turkey, actually,
because during the time period
where there was a thing against Erdogan,
anyone who was supporting anything
that was from the opposition
was then censored by the Turkish government.
That was a whole thing.
Like, there's an account on here from X that is official.
It's called the Government Affairs account.
And the only reason why we know about any of this shit
is because they posted about it,
because, you know, their request, hey, take this shit down,
and then they actually, you you know legally challenged that request so it was limited it was limited
visibility in that country so that basically what they did was they didn't take down the post they
just limited the visibility of that post in the in the country of turkey right so they didn't
actually end up taking it down what they also did was legally contest this demand to take that
content down or to even like like, limit its visibility.
And that's one of the only reasons why we even know about any of these things,
because X themselves are transparent with what it is that they do.
And they posted about this, I think, a few years ago, actually,
as a matter of fact.
I'm not sure if this is still going on.
Actually, I think that the biggest government
that sends the most requests, as far as I know, is the UK government.
I mean, I got...
Yeah.
The UK used to send a lot of requests under this...
It was a counterterrorism rule, so that you get these things.
There was the counterterrorism internet referral unit.
And what they would do is they'd send requests.
This is before the Online Safety Act.
And so what they'd do is they'd send requests this is before the Online Safety Act and so what they'd do is they'd send requests
and they'd say you may be legally liable for this speech
and we're putting you on notice of it
and would you kindly remove it
otherwise you might get in trouble for it
because if you don't remove it
and so they didn't have a legal power to actually compel speech
to come down specific rules about that
they just kind of gave you you and so it was like oh
holy the uk government is going uh take your down or things may happen i remember getting one it was
a conservative client and they they had tried to get a bunch of speech removed and the the client
was like no no no no no like if it's if it's like if this is a risk like go ahead send us an emergency
data request and we'll we'll disclose the information if you think that there's a risk, like, go ahead, send us an emergency data request and we'll, we'll disclose the information.
If you think that there's a risk of, you know, danger to life, uh, physical injury or damage to property, but if this is just a speech crime thing, you know, go to hell.
And so once they sent in, they sent in one and like, well, this user said disparaging
things about Theresa May and Donald Trump.
And I was, I kind of got a kick out of that.
It's like, well, Americans don't really regard Theresa May as being very conservative at
all. And if you think that a free speech website is going to
censor a user because they said something disparaging about Donald Trump, well, you know,
there's a variety of viewpoints available on that subject and they're all protected by law.
So they've been trying to get that, they've been trying to figure out a way in for a really,
really, really long time. But, you. But ultimately what it takes to do that
is it requires a CEO who gives the directive,
listen, we're gonna do,
and if you don't follow
the Global Government Affairs account on Twitter
or on X, excuse me,
for those of, I think there are 500 people in here,
definitely do it
because it's a really interesting case study
and because it's the first company of
consequence the first major company of consequence that i have seen come out and like expressly
explicitly directly criticize the eu dsa and the online safety act i've never i've never seen it
happen before and you see sometimes like google did it in a filing that was typed up by their
lawyers king and spaulding that they sent over to Congress two weeks ago or last week.
But I've never seen a company do it on its own accord on its social media accounts directly,
just like without being overlawyered and just wandering into the stream and saying, you
know, we're going to do this.
It's unfathomably based and it's very, very, very good to see.
Yeah, that was very personal.
Yeah.
But this is the kind of stuff like behind the scenes that you it all the time, and they try all kinds of different ways.
I remember Gab got one because a user of the site referred to an obese German politician as being obese.
And this was apparently criminal defamation in Germany, despite the fact that the statement was substantially true.
It wasn't substantially true. It was true.
And the website was...
Oh, my God. I stated a medical fact holy shit
basically for stating a medical fact they wanted the company to unmask a user and the company was
like absolutely not um you know we're we're not going to do this this is this is ridiculous if
you want to you know if you think you can get an order on us in the united states go ahead and do
it um but yeah you need the the choices to do that by a company.
I get why big tech doesn't do it.
It's an expensive decision.
If you really want to cross the Rubicon and take on a foreign government like that, it is the most expensive decision your company is ever going to make, right?
And that's why they don't.
And it's the riskiest.
The penalty per infringement is like up to 10% of your revenue.
Yeah, it's so basic. That's the European thing, right? So that's an issue to 10% of your revenue. Yeah. It's so basic.
That's the European thing, right?
So that's an EU.
10% of your global revenue.
And that comes from, so the European Commission obviously governs like things like competition
law in the European Union.
And that's their standard penalty if you violate a European competition rule.
So what they've done is they've said, hey, if you now don't regulate speech, we're going
to fine you up to 10 of your global revenue we're just going to copy
our competition rules right in the hopes that we get companies doing things like they do in
a competition setting right we want them to you know we want whistleblowers to come forward and
you know own up to their mistakes and come beg us again it's like regulatory kabuki so they have a
if you have an answer if you have a cartel, in Europe, and let's say it's five companies that make widgets, right, and so we'll call them, you know, Alpha Bravo, Charlie, Delta
Echo, right, and so Echo's part of this cartel, and they make widgets, and they've been fixed,
bid rigging the price of widgets. If Echo goes and blows the whistle on all of its buddies,
Echo is completely exempt from all fines, right? But they have to supply information to the European Commission in order to be exempt. The second one in the door to break the pact and fess up
gets a 50% discount. I think the third one might get 10% and then everyone else is in for full
lack 10% of your worldwide revenues. And so you can see in the Online Safety Act, which is it's
18 million pounds or 10% of your worldwide revenues,
whichever is greater. And they were going after 4chan, right? Which is, which until recently,
you know, I don't know, this is public information. It was like a bunch of Mac minis running in a
closet. And they said, we're going to, we're going to jail you. We're going to fine you up to 10%
of your worldwide revenue or, or, or 18 million pounds, whichever is greater. You know, we're going to arrest you.
We're going to do this, da-da-da-da-da.
And it's like, what the hell are you trying to do?
Like, this is a small internet forum
that's run basically on a shoestring.
And really, you think that, you know,
you might as well say, you know,
you're going to be a squillion billion,
shabalabadudillion, and like,
you're going to get the same response.
So it's one of those things where they expect, but that's not the point.
That's not the real target.
The real target is a company like X or a company like Facebook or a company like Google.
And what they want them to do is do enough censorship and enough public kowtowing and
enough genuflecting to say, okay, well, you know what?
They're on side with our
political objectives. And so we're going to exercise our substantial prosecutorial discretion
to refrain from bringing an enforcement action. And that's because that's just how Europe does it,
right? That's just how they do it. And they've been doing that for forever. And it's always
threat, threat, threat, threat, threat. With the Online Safety Act, the threats become very explicit,
threat threat. With the Online Safety Act, the threats became very explicit, very direct,
and direct powers of things like banning websites or deplatforming them from banks or other service
providers. One of the websites that had been targeted recently, also Gab was booted from its
payment processor. This is public information that was UK based. So they turn around and they're
trying to bully these sites into compliance with all of these very major, you know, major threats of bad things happening to
them. And what they weren't really expecting is someone to say, okay, well, go fuck yourself.
We're not going to do it and come and get us if you want it, come, you know, come and take it.
So yeah, it's, it's a tricky, it's a tricky problem. I don't fault big tech for doing it because I think that it would be a very,
it would be a very bold move by a CEO to advise their board of directors and their shareholders
that it was, you know, they were acting in the best interest of the company to, to, by basically
saying we're pulling out of Europe. I mean, that, that's a, that's a big, big, big fall. And I can't,
I can't see how most companies could lawfully, frankly,
without inviting a shareholder lawsuit, how they could make it. But I'd like to see it, right? And
I think if all American companies did it at once, or if we saw something like, I was talking about
this earlier, and I kind of got digressed, but there's very significant attention in Washington
now on this issue. We have taken, you know, our little legal team has
taken great pains to explain to policymakers and their staff. I haven't been in direct contact with
anyone who's elected, but I have been in contact with their staffers over the last eight months
on this. I've written memos, done analysis, various other things. I'm doing all the work
pro bono, so I don't have to register as a lobbyist. And so part of this is educating DC as to what's going
on. And I think it'd be ideally where we get to is a place where Washington says, and it's been a
ton of fun doing this. And I really enjoy communicating with people in Washington and
sort of helping educate them on the issue. Ideally, where we get to is a place where diplomacy solves this.
I think there's a risk in the US government getting too aggressive with the diplomatic stuff
that they could, for example, trigger an adverse reaction. So they could, if they pushed on England
too hard, for example, they could wind up with a situation like they did with Mark Carney and
Pierre Poilievre in Canada,
where there's a nationalistic reaction to American overreach. And so I think they're very sensitive to that. And that's part of the reason why they're not pushing back so hard.
But in the meantime, Congress can do stuff. And I know Congress, particularly the House
Judiciary Committee, is looking at this. It would be very useful for them to do something like they
passed with the Speech Act in 1997, which was a law that said that a foreign defamation judgment, defamation is when you say something about someone that's false,
that tends to diminish their reputation in the eyes of right-thinking people. So if, for example,
I don't know, I said that, you know, out, you know, out, let's, I don't want to say something
about out. Let's say out, I said about me, he said, I heard that, you know, Preston,
I don't know, I heard that Preston listens to Coldplay and he likes Coldplay. And I said,
that's outrageous and that's false. I don't like Coldplay. How dare you ruin my reputation. I could
bring a lawsuit. It'd have to be more serious than that, obviously. Or let's say I heard Preston
killed a guy, right? And that's not true. I could bring a lawsuit against him in the United States,
and I'd get damages for that. But in places like England, you have defamation rules, which are
completely different because they have a different standard for the kinds of opinions that can be
expressed. And also the burden of proof is reversed. So what happens is in England,
if you are a speaker and you say something untrue, right? And in England, you have to prove
that this thing you said was true.
And in the United States,
what happens is the burden-shifting exercise.
So what happens is on balance of probabilities,
if one side can say it's actually not as probable
that the statement was true or not,
then the burden shifts to the other party to refute it.
This can create some problems.
For example, the case of another pro bono client I took.
I take a lot of pro bono cases, which is possibly why I don't drive a Model S and I do drive
a Model 3.
But a guy named Hodlannot, he was a Norwegian fellow who said that a man named Craig Wright
was a scammer and a fraud and not Satoshi Nakamoto.
And so Wright had a lot of money and he was backed by influential, you know, scammer,
not scammers. I can't say that, but influential people in crypto who, who believe that he was
Satoshi Nakamoto. I think whether they knew Satoshi Nakamoto or not was another matter.
And he sued guys like Peter McCormick, who's a very well-known British podcaster. He sued my
client and a friend of mine. He sued a guy named Hodlanot, who was this Norwegian internet user
and doxed him and
all the rest of it, sent people around to his house.
And what we did actually, another example of legal jujitsu.
So he threatened to bring a case in England, because in England, you have these lower standards
and you can win these cases more easily than you can in the United States, which would
have required right to prove, right, the assertion that he was Satoshi Nakamoto and to address
certain things. Whereas in England, he didn't right to prove right the assertion that he was Satoshi Nakamoto and to address certain things.
Whereas in England, he didn't have to prove that it's the other side that had to prove the negative, which was impossible to prove,
particularly when there were allegations of fiddling around with discovery and things like that and falsified documents and whatever else.
So what we did actually in that case is we we were sitting around.
He threatened to sue us. I played dumb.
I was like, oh, no, no, no, just, you know, the case is over.
And this is all basically public information from back then.
So not violating confidences.
So we played dumb.
We're like, oh, no, my client needs some more time.
You know, he wants to do this.
He wants to do that.
And in the meantime, we spun up a law firm in Norway
because Norway has better free speech rules than England does.
And so what we did is we sued right in Norway for a declaratory judgment, which is
very similar to the strategy, actually, that we used with Ofcom.
And we moved the forum out.
And then Wright tried to bring the lawsuit in England.
And we haggled it over it for two years.
Because basically, we argued that under applicable European conventions, that because England
was part of the EU at the time that a Norwegian court had
been seized of the matter and as a consequence an English court had no
jurisdiction to hear it and so we dragged it out forever until eventually
Reich got caught up in his own lies and got got ordered by an English court that he
couldn't claim that he was Satoshi Nakamoto and thank God for the it was
Atkins Thompson were the lawyers in England and they did a great job.
So, but like, that's an example of this kind of jurisdictional arbitrage on speech where you have the U.S. identifying that there was an issue with the way that foreign countries did something where you could get the judgment in England and then try to enforce it in the United States or try to enforce it against assets in the U of someone who's in the US. And they said, you know what, we're going to solve that by passing a legislative rule, right? Forget a legal
rule, like a precedent. We're going to pass a legislative rule called the Speech Act, which
says that if you defame someone from, you know, in England, if you get a defamation judgment,
you can't just walk to an American court and seek to have reciprocity of that judgment unless the
judgment accords with the substantive legal and procedural protections afforded by the First Amendment. And that has
prevented what's called libel tourism, which is people trying to get at Americans for American
speech through an English court. And yeah, it's worked really effectively. So hopefully,
even if the executive is unable to apply diplomatic pressure, what I'm hoping we see is something along the lines of the House of Representatives or the Senate enacting a new rule or coming up with a new rule, which states that U.S. companies don't have to comply with these foreign orders that violate the Constitution much in the same way that the Speech Act does.
And that's something where we've got, you know, there are people who are smarter than I am who are working on those legislative proposals.
And I think that's possibly where this is going to go.
And again, part of the lawsuit that we filed, like the political rationale was to explain
to Washington in one stroke, this is what's happening, right?
And if you have any ideas about how to fix it, you know, now would be the time.
So yeah, I think that's possibly where we're going to see a solution to this.
Bro, I got a question, Preston.
Have you ever thought about running for Congress and filibustering?
He is not.
I briefly considered running for Congress after he won.
Do it.
Deep cut. Deep it. Deep cut.
Deep cut.
No, the pay sucks, and I'm more effective as an operator, I think, as a legislator.
Listen, I want to know how to talk for 15 minutes without taking a breath, and you can teach me.
I'm a lawyer.
That's what we do.
It is quite simple.
You just have a shit ton of information.
You have a whole bunch of things that you want to address and you go down them sequentially within a narrative and you just keep talking forever.
I could do the same thing.
I just want to like kind of have a bit of a back and forth because that's kind of like, you know, what happens.
And I sometimes entertain it so I can just like analyze structures because I'm a data structure guy.
I just want to like see more things.
It's also funny that Preston brought up again a thing that I've spoken about for
quite a long period
of time earlier this year, which is
Mac Mini supremacy.
I love the fact that the Mac Minis are back in the conversation.
So, yeah, thanks for that.
I was like, hey, why don't you just
like, how do you solve your problems? Just get a whole bunch of Mac
Minis, chain them up in like a circle and just like, you know, have
them run things. And then it's like, you
got a lot of your problems to solve right there don't
worry about the AI stuff man just like it's there is no there is no concern
there is no heat should I buy a Mac mini right now for you unless you have a
screen that you can attach to it and a nice keyboard from Apple preferably
both from Apple then we didn't like Apple, if you have that,
then you have to definitely go ahead and do that.
It's a very nice computational experience.
Yeah, Mac Mini's are great.
It's not good for video games, though.
If you want to play any video games, not the move.
I know.
But you're very Valley-adjacent, so you're an Apple user.
Yes, I'm an Apple user and I love the Mac Mini.
I mean, I use Apple as well. I've used a lot of their systems
and they're really nice, especially for work and things that are clean. But they're very culty
which is kind of a thing that is as much of a benefit as it is
also a
practical issue, you know, because like Steve Jobs had to have
someone like Tim Apple, you know, you need to have a Tim Apple so that your Steve Jobs cult guy
can like do his thing, but also not be so overbearing that the idea of what the company is
conflicts with what the company needs to be.
Culture, basically.
I thought I'd put that in there.
It's pretty funny.
But yeah, Preston kind of like, you know,
coming in here with the same thing that I said today,
which is like, no interest in politics, eh?
You have no interest in politics, do you?
No, I mean, I want to...
I mean, no.
Like, in a sense, when I said, like, you know,
interest in politics, it's like, hey,
I have interest in politics,
so you basically, you know, look at that, and you go, I'm going to put myself into this, and then I'm going to be a politician type of thing, or shift it in a certain way.
Whereas what you're just trying to do is you have a legal interest, and the politics of things are interfering with what law is, so that's why you interface with politics, even though you don't have an interest in them.
You have an interest in the law, right?
That's definitely not filibuster and what's that that's definitely not filibuster and it was
pretty yeah but i i kind of i'm pressed into like and i asked the question like how
was my analysis accurate you you said something your analysis is accurate i you said something
last week um and i tweeted it. I basically ripped off
what you said and put it into a tweet. I don't want to be involved in politics, but you said,
you said, you know, the important thing is, is whether you're consequential, right? Being
consequential in life is, is what's important. And, you know, my, my mother, actually, I'll tell
you, I got infected with the consequential bug by my mother um who decided when we were when i
was a junior in high school that she was going to start a non-profit organization it was called
lawyers without borders um and so she founded there are two of them there's one called avocats
on frontier which is the the sort of belgian version that is more involved in war crime stuff
and then she founded one in the us called lawyers that borders there was there was an ip dispute
you'll be pleased to know, which was focused on doing things
like delivering pro-democracy.
Like if you talked to Mike Benz about it, he'd be like, oh my God, deep state.
But they were focused on doing things like training judges in Kenya or another project
that they worked on was indexing all of the laws of Liberia and then creating a case index
so that Liberian lawyers could imprint, so that Liberian lawyers could imprint so that
Liberian lawyers could know what the law in Liberia was because Liberia follows the American
style legal system.
And so precedents were really important.
And so they didn't, but they didn't have any central source.
So what they did is back in 2008, they went and talked to Linklater's about it.
And Linklater's had all this spare capacity because that was, of course, the credit crunch
and like nobody had any work and London was about to do major legal layoffs. And Linklater's in a week managed to throw 100 lawyers
at the project and basically create a, in conjunction with West, managed to create a
complete compendium of all Liberian case law. And then they printed it up and they shipped it off
to Liberia so that Liberian lawyers could actually have a central database saying, okay, what are our rules? And then could quote them and cite them in court and things like
that. And she told me, right, the reason that she did that was to tell us, her children, that you
should live to do something consequential and not just to make money. And you should try to make a
dent before you leave. And when you do that to a 16-year-old, it fucks them up beyond all
comprehension. Because then what happens is, as they go through the various phases of their professional career,
they're saying to themselves, okay, well, I'm sitting here doing this document review at three
in the morning on a cartel case for wire harnesses for cars. And like, what the fuck am I doing?
Like, I don't see how this fits into the bigger picture, but you know, the, the objective
of, you know, if you're asking, you know, what do you want to get in politics, what your personal
means? No, I don't want to be a politician. I don't want to be a, I don't want power. I don't
want to be elected to office. I don't want to be some, you know, celebrity, you know, some celebrity
guy going around on Fox news or have my own podcast or anything like that. I just want to do
things that are politically consequential and make the world better. Um, and then leave, right. Leave things better than I found them and have
people say nice things about me after I die when my children are mourning. That's really it. Like
that's the question of legacy, which I was like ranting about on a subscribers only space, like
about, I think two weeks ago, I was like, you know, what is legacy and how do people like actually
receive this? I got, it's a, it's a question that I like decided to ask decided to ask myself again after approximately a year of just doing things
and then at some point slacking off narratively
because there was this need to take a break,
but you couldn't because you always have to be plugged in
and I like being plugged in with the show and everything
and all the stuff that's been happening with the internet
and how that all came together.
Because for the better part of, you know, from 2020,
all the way until, you know, early 2025, I took zero breaks and worked just to put everything in my life into kind of like, you know, establishing a platform like this, you know, we could actually
have a conversation because I knew that there were these things that needed to be spoken of,
there were these things that needed to be heard by people. And there was just no nobody there
that allowed for the dissemination of that.
So I just decided to fucking do it myself.
I said, fuck it, I'll do it myself.
And then this is what the result is.
You have a thing like the conversation
that happens on a weekly basis
and you have live streams and all this other stuff, right?
And it's really nice.
Okay, now you have to consider
what kind of legacy do you leave behind?
Do people remember that there were legendary conversations that cool stuff
happened or do they just remember the time that i fucked with a bunch of people who didn't understand
you know that on the internet very few things are actually serious like did people remember
that i like said i'm super smooth-brained you know do people remember that is that your legacy
or is hey we have cool conversations all the time. And there
are consequences. And the consequences are that people are more informed and that people focus on
things that matter because they're now inspired for the first time. But those actually, you know,
put their mind to something that is constructive, other than your talks of plasmosis, which is what
I like to do. It's a mind virus, right?
I like to call it Pokemon Toxoplasmosis.
We're like, actually, what we're doing
is we're not at war with one another.
And we're actually, our Toxoplasmosis
is at war with somebody else's Toxoplasmosis.
So what we kind of do is we take this
and we put in like a little Pokemon ball
and we both throw them on the ground.
We just like watch the Toxoplasmosis fight.
And at some point, you know,
if you have any kind of like awareness
and you stop focusing on the To of plasmosis fucking up
Somebody else's talks of plasmosis as it's fucking up yours. You just look at the person in front of you look at their eyes and go
Huh, I don't actually hate you. It's just that thing that hates the other thing. You want to get a coffee, you know?
Like that's that's how I see politics, right?
So I have this tendency to just take politics out of things and And there's a very interesting effect that comes out of this.
And that is that people either really love that or really, really hate that.
It's a very, very binary thing to want to do.
Because it's like, take the politics out or to leave them in there and then appease a certain, like, you know, group, right?
And then if you fall out of line with any one of those groups there's like immense hatred right but there's also immense love
for those who kind of like share that vision and who just want to do something productive at the
end of the day so my legacy being whatever is the most productive and to get people to like just
wake up and free their minds from nonsense not in a sense like how people always visualize with this work of art of a movie that is The Matrix
and go, we got to take the red pill and all this shit.
It's like, actually, no.
What you got to do is you just got to look.
Look around you.
Just be aware.
That's all you got to do.
And everything from there,
just focus on what actually matters
and what is of consequence to you directly
and what you are of consequence to as well.
Right? And that frees your mind. That's the understanding. You don't have to worry about
the reality being a simulation or not. So what? It's a video game. Play it. That's what you need
to be obsessed with. Playing the video game until its completion because you will expire. You will
die. What have you gotten done until that point? Right? That's what you need to be obsessed with.
Fuck the fact that it's a simulation. If it is, video game it's fun have extra frames you know yeah you can be i mean
the thing that i've learned is that you can be the the difference between sort of getting involved
in politics as a legislator and getting involved in politics as an operator and not not an operator
like a dc's beltway, but like I have a thing
and I do my thing very narrowly and I ensure that it's politically consequential is that
you you are you can focus there are things you can control and there are things you can't.
And you if you maximize the you know, without, of course, turning into some crazy psychotic
asshole or, you know, hyper controlling, you know, whatever.
But if you identify, listen, here's the realm of
things I can control and the things that I'm capable of doing by myself, right? Forget anybody
else. And then here's what the second order and third order consequences of that can be.
And it's something I can also make a living at ideally. Once you figure out what that thing is,
you can just go deep, right? And you can just go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
And basically I figured that out in 2011.
It was like, OK, that was like activist lawyer.
That's the game.
And started that.
And it's been like, you know, just like
you don't just take on foreign governments overnight.
Like this has been a grind for 14 years
where it's just been a question of acquiring more knowledge.
You know, all of the stuff I'm talking about has been acquired over years and years and
years of experience.
And, you know, the occasional policy fight back in 2014, we started a little policy fight
with the UK over something called, I was at a crypto startup at the time.
It was not a Bitcoin startup, but we were working on other solutions for other problems
using blockchain cryptography.
And it was, of course, a complete failure.
But you learned a lot, you know, learn from your failures.
That's always good.
And so, you know, we started a policy fight with the UK government over the Snoopers
Charter, which was a law that was going to have mandatory decryption in it and very much
a predecessor to what we're seeing now with the Digital Services Act and the Online Safety
Act and certain provisions of the OSA relating to capability orders and various other things.
So, yeah, that's that is the kind of stuff that you play and you learn and you keep getting
better and you iterate and you iterate and you level up.
And then eventually, you know, you do something which is significant and then you just keep
grinding and grinding and grinding and you see where it goes.
But the measure, right, is like I have a universe of things I can control.
And in the case of a lawyer, that is the state of your knowledge, right, about your craft
and the amount of time that you have in the day.
Because you only get, as a lawyer, you get 24 hours a day.
And so the question is, and you have to sleep for some of it, right?
And generally speaking, then you have to work and you have to like earn your keep.
And then the question, so really the external piece has been nights and weekends.
So, you know, the 4chan complaint, which we're very proud of, that was a nights and
weekends project, you know, very serious nights and weekends project.
Like my, you talk to my wife about it.
I basically had to disappear for the month of August to get it done.
But, you know, that's, that's the kind of stuff it's like, so, and whereas if you go
and become a legislator, that's fundamentally about not things you can control right you have you can control your vote as a legislator and in
the us you know house of representatives you're one in 435. so that is your your contribution is
whether you go up or down but fundamentally right you're part of a wider coalition that's subject
to other interests and other things and so although you are seen as the star of the show
you are not actually a prime mover right you're just someone you are seen as the star of the show, you are not
actually a prime mover, right? You're just someone who sits there at the end of the day and flips a
switch one way or the other. You do that several times a day. And then every year you have to go
on a fundraising run to do it again. And you don't, you know, it's a total, in my opinion,
that's a complete and utter waste of time. I can be way more effective. I can do way more damage for the things that I care about by not participating in that process. And instead, you know, being a lawyer, right?
And so, you know, if I had more resources, if I were in a big law firm, which, you know, I didn't
do very well in big law firms, as you might imagine, you know, someone who cares about
these issues, you put them in a big corporate law firm, which has a lot of conflicts and a lot of clients, a lot of opinions.
That's something which can be difficult to manage those clients in the process.
Not that that's not a complaint, just a sort of fact of life.
And also, they're not optimized for that.
What they want you to do is they want you at your desk, billing hours, not coming up with innovative solutions that are quick and effective, but that solutions that solutions that generate our billable hours and collections with partnerships. So they're not
really optimized for that. So I have, you know, I work for Arkham as their, you know, as their,
as their chief legal officer effectively. So they're not chief legal officer, the head of
legal compliance is the title. So I do the legal department and also the financial compliance
department. And that's a lot of fun, great team, awesome people.
And then when I clock off, right?
So usually about six, seven, eight o'clock at night,
if I've got free time, I go off and I start doing other things.
And I've got a law firm that acts as the house for that.
And so my guess is that for the next sort of,
I don't know, I'm what, 41 years old.
So I've probably got another 40 years, if I'm lucky, of being effective and compass
mentis, maybe 30 until I decide I'm going to go hang out on a sailboat and, you know,
become an adjunct professor at a law school or something like that.
But the objective is like, how do I maximize?
And the answer is keep the law firm, keep pushing, you know, have legal resources at
my command that I can use in weird and creative ways to accomplish political
objectives without actually participating in the political process.
And so, you know, that's, it's, it's really, yeah.
And I think that anyone can do this.
One thing I've gotten recently, a lot of people in the UK, there's one guy, I'm not going
to say who he is, but if he does happen to listen into this, he'll know exactly who he
And he has been like bombarding me with DMs. And it's, it's a lot of fun. I really enjoy our conversations, but most of the messages
are like, Oh man, I'm so worried for the future. I'm like, dude, like do something like you have
the power to do this. Like, come on, you can pick yourself up, figure out your lane and then just
roll with it and run with it. And I think, I think he's, I think he's on his way there. I think he's
going to get there on his own. And that's not the only message of that type that I've received. It's people who,
you know, they care desperately about their country and about, you know, the direction of
where it's going and they just don't know how to apply it. And it's a weird, and like, I get it.
Like I was there 15 years ago on thinking something's wrong. How do I fix it? And I just
happened to figure it out, right? I was very lucky that I stumbled on something
that was a solution, but anyone can do it in principle.
You just need to basically be prepared to say,
okay, here's the small universe of things I can control.
Here's the one outcome.
And it's not like there's a perfect,
it's not like you're ever gonna get to your destination,
it's that there's a flag off in the distance.
And that marks the ideal endpoint for where you want to go.
And you can kind of meander your way there.
There's a hill here.
There's a bunker there.
There's an obstacle there.
There's a lake here.
So you have to go around it.
And there's this long squiggly path.
And ideally, you get as close to that mark, that flag, as you can before you drop dead.
And that's kind of the game. And that's your score, right? And so then you get the score and then that's your legacy,
what you leave behind. But anyone in principle can do this. It's just that you have to really
think in terms of very long timescales and very irregular pathways of progress. It's not like you
can sit down and like, okay, cool, we're going to do a speed run and play this thing through.
The one thing you can't do is speed run this, right?
There's no amount of effort.
There's no amount of luck.
There's no amount of money, which you can throw at the problem and make, you know, social impact happen more quickly.
Because ultimately, a lot of it is about propagation of memes and reproduction of ideas and arranging particular chess pieces in particular ways.
And then just leaving them there, right? And waiting to see what happens for three five seven you know years hence um another thing
i did was write a draft uk free speech law and i did that in 2020 and nobody gave a in 2020
and since then there are a number of other proposals now that are coming out
um and i know some that i'm not allowed to talk about and some that i can
but you know they those people read that and said hey i think i can do it better than he can and they probably can
the law that winds up being enacted in the uk will probably be better than the one that i drafted
but the idea right was not to say okay i want my rule to be enacted the idea was i want someone
else to come up with the rule that gets enacted and i want them to realize that it's possible
because they see this um and so you can do that. It's just like you plant a seed and then
you wait five years. Whereas with legislative stuff, I think you spend so much time running
around politicking and raising money and doing television appearances and acting like an idiot.
It's basically like TikTok for grownups. And I think that that's not an effective way to have a legacy.
I mean, I can't think of any congresspeople who are really like,
oh yeah, that guy really made the world a better place.
I've participated in the legislative process quite a bit when I was a bit younger.
And it's so disheartening to spend a year, year and a half on a project and to have it killed because some dude with an unlimited bank account writes a check that you can't match.
And if you're not doing something that's making someone money legislative, it's not going to happen.
That's the sick part of the world that we live in. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's exactly
right. Like you can, you can work on something and it's the same in other parts of government too.
So if you're working on something for, you know, the state department and there's a change in
administration and there's a change in priorities, then,
you know, oops, like something you've just worked on for four years is gone.
And so there are a lot of people who are, you know, if you're working as a staffer,
I know a lot of people chased jobs in the administration, you know, when there was a changeover, right?
And Trump won again.
You know, there was a man scrambled, right?
Like a lot of my friends to try to be like, oh, cool. How can we,
like, how can we get in with this and how can we get close to this? And I was like, eh, like if
they tap me on the shoulder to do the crypto task force, which didn't wind up happening, I was like,
I'll do that. But anything, I had a friend of mine who was close to the administration booted
my involvement in certain things. And I was just like, eh, like it doesn't, it doesn't,
it makes, it gives me the willies. I'm not game for that.
But yeah, it's that you do something and then the winds sweep it away. Whereas legal precedents,
right? You set that precedent, you're in a textbook, right? You're around forever. People
will read your filings forever. They will understand what you did forever and they'll
understand the contribution you made forever. So for me, that's something which is more durable, even though it's completely indirect,
because it's something where you can invent a doctrine rather than inventing. You can invent
tactics. You can invent doctrine. You can modify previous doctrine by creating new law or not. You
don't create the law. The judge does. But you can prompt it, right? By taking the case and moving it forward.
And so that's very different.
It's politics of a sense, right?
Of a kind, but it's politics where you're staying
in your lane, you don't really,
I don't care what anybody thinks about what I'm doing.
My clients are my clients.
They're the only people I really care about.
And the fact that they have this particular issue
and I'm able to assist them with that is, you know, that's my job, right.
To be their representative.
Um, but yeah, it's politics is, um, is a tricky business.
I saw it chews up a lot of people.
They, it, it's, it's a nasty, nasty, nasty business.
And at least the law for now is, is somewhat, even though it's more adversarial in the U.S.
than it is in the UK,
it's much more gentlemanly disciplined than politics is by some very considerable distance.
So out of what you've been up to, buddy?
I just wanted to say that in a way,
you're kind of making the blueprint,
you're open sourcing the blueprint for a lot of companies and they've been struggling with European regulation
or the UK regulation.
That is exactly what I have sought to do.
So the fact that you described it as such
is an enormous compliment.
Yeah, it's really impressive.
I can't compliment enough.
You're basically doing a lot of public service in a way,
despite your not being in politics.
That's exactly how I hope to be perceived.
I found that just writing the politicians in charge checks helps.
You can write a lot of checks and not get a lot of return. Really? Yeah. I mean, yeah. You can
write all the checks you want. Remember, there are a lot of people writing checks. They have a lot of influence. So I think, you know, one thing that, you know, lobbying is a lot more than and I'm not a lobbyist, but as I understand it, it's about figuring out which politician is most receptive to your ideas, right? How you can, you know, both
provide a little bit of, you know, funding, of course, but like how your business can effectively
advocate, right, to that person and give them cases. Well, yeah, that's the pre-mining of the
check writing. I mean, I'm not a lobbyist, so I, you know, I'm not, I'm not an expert in that
discipline at all. What I will say is that I suppose I've done something very akin to lobbying,
although I haven't been doing it for pay. And there's a very deliberate legal reason for why,
you know, with the whole 4chan thing. And that's been really fun because, you know,
there have been people in the government who said, Hey, I need to know what the hell is this
all about? Right. Please tell me, explain to me, educate me, you know, how, how all of this shit works. And so you sit down,
you grind out, you know, a 10 page memo and, you know, in an afternoon, then you flick it over and
you hope, generally speaking, you hope it's right. Um, but you know, it's with this, this particular
issue, the cross border free speech stuff, there just weren't a lot of people who focused on it.
Right. So, and it just happened to be the one thing I gave a shit about. And it happened to
be the one, like the issue du jour about 60 days ago when the Online Safety Act entered into force.
So like, it's been, this is one of, definitely one of the like highlights of my life has been
doing this, you know, this project and helping to advise, you know, the US government and other,
and other people in Washington, you know, exactly what the situation is in Europe and how they can interact
with it. Um, but you know, it's lobbying. I don't know. I guess I get, I guess it's similar to it,
but it's not something where it's, it's not really for compensation and it's not really for a
financial outcome. It's more like just kind of, and it's not for a particular, you know, client's particular
interest. It's saying, listen, our system is under threat by this stuff that's going on outside of
the country. And here's a way that we can get to speed up to speed with that and get to grips with
it as quickly as possible. Because, you know, I happen to play in both systems, both sandboxes.
Yeah, I don't know. I think there is a way to do politics without cutting checks. It just happens to me that you have to kind of like, it's like you set a trap, and then you wait 15 years for that trap to get sprung. And then when the trap is sprung, you're the only one around who actually knows what's going on. And so, you know, I'm kind of one thing I have asked myself is like, okay, after this is all over, what will my relevance be? You know, after we finally, you know, settled the battle and I just, I said, okay, well, you'll just find something
similar. Free speech is always under attack. There'll always be some, some other client who
needs defending. And I've become very comfortable with the, with that. And, you know, this is just
the start of my litigation career as opposed to my advocacy career. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, um,
I don't think it's, it's not about the checks. You can you can be.
We can tell.
It's about the way you set up everything.
Congratulations.
Congratulations on meeting your life goal, buddy.
I know that was a big deal for you.
So congratulations on that.
No, what were you saying?
Oh, I was just saying in a way, like even if you're saying it's your job, in a way you've managed to align your advocacy.
You're saying you're not doing advocacy, but in a way you're aligning your job and advocating for your, you're able to do both in a way.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm very grateful that, honestly, my W-2 employer tolerates it, to be honest with you, because I don't think I could work anywhere else
and get away with this.
So it's very much, it's hard to do.
It would be hard to do in any set of circumstances
other than the one that I've managed to engineer
in this particular set of circumstances.
I mean, the only other way I could do it
is if, I don't know, Zuck woke up tomorrow and, the only other way I could do it is if,
I don't know, Zuck woke up tomorrow and said, actually, we want to go fight for free speech
on a global basis and decided to just knight me and say, go forth and destroy. And then
I could do that. You never know. It might happen.
I don't know. I don't think that. I don't. I wonder. I actively wonder whether I could survive in a corporation of that size. That is one concern that although, you know, I guess I work in a corporation now. But no, I mean, the important takeaway, right, is that I'm cognizant everyone on this call is going to have something similar, right? Because I don't think you find this particular corner of the internet, unless you care about, I mean, unless you care about, it's epistemology, right? You have to understand
thinking to find this particular corner of the internet. You have to be self-reflect, you have
to reflect on your own existence, right? And why you're here in order to come back to this
particular space again and again and again. And you have to be thinking about the future, right?
Those are, I think, a couple of common threads that every one of us has in common.
So it's the question for you guys, right, for everybody here is like,
you know, I'm just some dude who, like, I'm nothing special.
I'm just a lawyer who works and does my thing.
And, like, the question is, like, how do you do it? Right. Because everyone can, if I can do it, anyone
else can. Um, and there's also, if, if, if, even though everyone could, it doesn't mean that everyone
should, that's another interesting thing that doesn't get spoken off as much as well, because
we live in this like hyper, we need to be super productive type of society, but we don't actually
like really look at what is productive, you know, where we can say, for instance, okay, let's say that this, let's say the virtue
signaling is seen as the most societally productive thing to do, then that is a thing you will
do, even though that isn't materially productive in any way whatsoever, quite the opposite,
actually, it's materially destructive, right, because you're basically furthering what are deceptions, right? Which will be our undoing.
So in a sense, I think people need to also just consider,
you know, do you have it within you, right?
I think that's kind of like what you're saying as well.
Do you have it within you to actually create a lot of beneficial change?
And if you do not have that,
then you probably ought to just step aside and figure out, you know,
the ethics of the situation and what choices you can make
that are within your range of capabilities, right?
And within the range that you want to have.
Because some people genuinely can't take higher order thinking.
It's a thing that destroys them.
They're not made for that.
Their souls are not meant to bear that weight.
You know what I mean?
And I don't think it is necessary for those people to be forced into bearing that weight,
like irrespective of that fact, right?
In a way.
So can I push back a little bit, Adrian?
Because I think I understand where you're coming from,
but I would like to encourage anyone to pursue their goals
first and then figure out how to do so within the constraints
or advantages that they have.
The reason I say that, for example, right?
So one of the most famous people on earth, Richard Branson, right?
If you've read his book, he had dyslexia and he really struggled with numbers and a lot of other things and became highly successful because he overcame it by repetitively reading over and
over and over but this is a person now and he started a student newspaper which is kind of
fascinating because it's a person that you would never expect so in this case it's like it doesn't
matter what you what you are equipped with figure out figure out your goals and figure out how to use
your advantages but the thing is you're not advantages. But the thing is, you're not disagreeing with what I'm saying at all.
You're actually reinforcing it.
I have ADHD, for example, and I kind of still work through it,
still find ways I set up systems so that I don't have any of those issues.
It's a matter of the soul. That's what it is.
In each and every single one of these examples where there are misalignments
or there are proper alignments that stand the test of time for centuries to come
or thousands of years, it's all a question of the soul and of, you know, your relationship
with whatever creator there's out there, whatever perceived relationship you have with that, right?
So it's like, if you take that into consideration and you look at what can your soul take, those are your limits, right?
Because if you don't have the willpower to kind of like, you know, power through certain things, then you will end up really ruining your life and putting yourself in a position that will just crush you in an unfair way.
Because not everybody can take the same thing.
You know, it's like it's like fish, you know, some fish are meant to, you know, survive in high-pressure environments,
and other fish just can't take it.
And if you take the high-pressure fish and you try to bring them up
to the low-pressure environment, he just literally explodes.
And then you get the thing that's called the blobfish,
which people, like, send around a lot.
They don't actually understand what that is,
but that's actually an exploded fish, right?
So that's really disgusting and really fucked up, actually.
But, you know, that's the thing.
So the blobfish is actually an exploded fish.
And then the same thing, of course,
applies to fish that operate
in low-pressure environments. You take those
down there and they get crushed and completely destroyed as well.
So it's kind of like, do you know
what your limits are? And if you don't know what your limits are,
you will go into any one of those environments
and you will be broken,
irreversibly broken, especially on a
psychological front as well.
That's another thing.
Do you have it in you to not go insane?
Well, that's the other thing, right?
So you got two options here, the broken
or you come out hardened.
So it's like, you know, as a kid,
as a kid, I always look good.
The reason I don't go into politics
is because that would be enough to break me.
that,
that level of that,
that arena that's Adrian's a hundred percent.
Right.
Like my limit is not like,
I'm never,
there's never going to be a president burn.
you know, maybe my kids,
not,
not for me.
There's never going to be a Senator burn.
That's never going to be representative burns.
Never going to be governor burn because that's not a,
like,
I see how dirty those games are and don't want to play it but like equally like the thing the thing that's the
grinding over a long period of time and i'm still like figuring it out right i haven't got it all
figured out but like the reason i'm here talking about this is because i've been grinding on one
problem for a decade and a half and like it can be as small and narrow as you want or as wide
you know wide as you want like you know there's some people who choose to grind and what they do
is they get you know old sailboats and what they do is they get, you know, old sailboats. And what they do is they work on
the damn things. They get some old, you know, absolutely gorgeous, like Sparkman and Stevens
from the thirties, and they just go and work on it forever. Right. And then they turn it into this
beautiful work of art. And then they've got, you know, something that would cost them a million
bucks to put on the water today. And they go and sail it around. And at the time of their lives,
it's just like the cumulative i think something which is not
fully appreciated as much as it could be is the result of cumulative effort on a particular thing
right and so it could be a social cause it could be you know deciding you want to have a great
garden it could be deciding you want to build a boat but like if you're willing to just it's a
useful thing for having a sense of direction if If you just kind of acknowledge, it's like building a cathedral
like 200 years ago, right? 300 years ago, the Europeans built these projects that, you know,
were started before they were born and would finish after they would die. And it was just
a question of understanding that like, some things are going to take a really long time to do. So
that for me has been the most comforting part of it from like a personal perspective
is just having the project there.
And, you know, some guys build boats, some guys put together cars, some guys do, you
know, build houses and, you know, get a piece of land in the woods and decide they're going
to go build.
They're really cool.
There's really cool content on YouTube.
I think her name is like Kirsten Dirksen or something.
And she goes around and films people who have
built houses of their own with their own two hands. And they're like 30 year projects. And
there's one that's just totally spectacular. It's in like the Redwood Forest or somewhere near it in
California. And this guy built this house with his own bare hands and it's all glass walls and
he can sit there and like wolves will walk up to the window and just peer into his bedroom.
can sit there and like wolves will walk up to the window and just peer into his bedroom.
And he's, and he looks out over this beautiful vista going out the front door. And how did he
build it? It was just like, well, I moved out here in the seventies and just started, you know,
put one foot in front of the other and built it one log at a time, one window at a time.
And that's, you know, that is something which, you know, you just, if you do, if you choose to
do anything, one brick at a time for 15 years, you're going to be really happy with the results when you're done.
It's just that, like, you've got to be maniacally focused on that one particular task and not get distracted by other things.
And even for, like, the ADHD, you know, the ADHD sort of tendencies among us, you know, that's something which is just like, cool, I've just got my project.
I'll do an hour here. I'll do an hour there. I'll do this here, this there. You dip in, you dip out. And the project eventually comes together, right?
And so this stuff about free speech, you've got a couple of people in England in particular,
who Toby Young is the other guy who's been doing this. And he was, I think he still is,
the editor-in-chief of the Spectator magazine. He's a writer for The Telegraph, immensely
entertaining and funny public speaker, really nice guy. And he's a writer for the telegraph immensely entertaining and funny public
speaker a really nice guy and he's been grinding on free speech for like six or seven years right
but he came from a position where he was in journalism before that and so he kind of he
accelerated he and i started about the same time and he's built this massive organization now that
shows up when people get arrested for posting memes. And they have lawyers, right?
They have solicitors showing up.
So people are members and it's basically you pay 50 bucks
and it's an insurance, a year, and it's an insurance policy
where if you get in trouble for your speech
and it's, you know, border, it's one of those kind of weird issues
where there's a prosecutorial discretion.
It's well argued.
It's not clearly illegal.
It's not violent or something like that.
They'll send a team of lawyers, volunteer lawyers,
not volunteer lawyers, actually private not violent or something like that. They'll send a team of lawyers, volunteer lawyers, not volunteer lawyers,
actually private lawyers
to come and represent you.
And that's a project
which is a seven-year project.
I had a few points.
Did anybody want to say something?
Sorry.
Yeah.
So kind of like on doing something
for an extended period of time,
it doesn't even necessarily be,
it doesn't even necessarily have to be something that you're constantly focused on as well that can have a large impact.
For instance, let's say that you live in an environment, you have a property, and you can turn that property into something totally different.
Let's say you have a grassland, and you say, I want to turn that thing into a forest
in 10 to 20 years.
Then you basically clear out all of the grass.
You remove approximately half a meter to a meter of soil
because the grass has leached it for decades,
maybe even centuries.
You take that all out,
and then you put holes in the ground,
put trees there,
and make sure that that's irrigated, that nothing is trying to fuck with the trees.
And you do that for a good five or so years.
And then 10 years after, about like 10 years in from after that, you have a forest that now has completely changed the very climate of this patch of soil that used to be there that was like just populated by grass.
soil that used to be there that was like just populated by grass and it was effectively like a
And it was effectively like a savanna.
savanna. And you go there, you go into that forest and you kind of move away some of the leaves on
the ground that have now kind of covered the entire ground so that no grass is growing anymore.
You see mycelium that grows there that actually connects all these things in the forest and keep
it healthy because they take apart dead plant material and reintroduce that material back into
the soil as fertilizer for the trees to then eventually use again.
You've created this thing and you've created or at least facilitated life.
And the reason why I say that is because I've done that myself.
There's these places, I've had thousands of trees in my life.
They consume endless amounts of carbon every single day and every single year.
And I look at that and I think that's absolutely amazing to see something like this.
That had been a six, seven year project and I was there for every single step of it.
I did everything from putting soil in little plastic bags and putting seeds into those
bags, making sure that they grew into these little trees and they took those little trees
and put them into holes and watched them grow into really, really big fucking
trees that are so huge that not even I can climb them anymore.
And so you've left behind a bit of a mark.
Will people necessarily know that I've done that?
Not unless I tell people, which I've just done, but also it's just there.
You know what I mean?
It's just there.
And it's really, really beautiful. It's something
that you kind of feel a bit of a connection to. You realize you've done something. You've left a
mark, even in nature. And it doesn't necessarily matter if you're remembered for that or not.
It is that you've done something, just for the sake of it sometimes, or even in this case,
because of a long-term project that you know will sustain generations to come,
because look at, say, a plantation,
which is what that is, right?
You log out of there now,
in defiance of the FSC,
who have absolutely brain-dead requirements
for certification that actually destroy
and kill the climate that has been created by a forest.
You know, in defiance of that, you log trees selectively,
not all of them in a quadratic patch where you then literally kill everything,
which is what they're doing.
So they're no better than the people who, like, illegally cut the forest.
They do the same amount of damage, if not more,
because they don't replant anything either.
They do that, and they kill the climate.
You pull those things out, and you replant those trees that you pulled out.
And then as the other trees become adult as well, you log those,
and then you kind of keep that going in a recursive cycle.
And so that creates a really interesting recurring contribution,
effectively, to the world in some ways.
And so can you establish a system?
Can you make something that lasts?
Perhaps can you even make something that lasts beyond you?
The Japanese, the same as that. They actually had this really interesting way of securing parts of
their culture and their craftsmanship, in which what they do is they have these buildings that
are built out of natural materials. And every, every few decades, they have to completely rebuild
the building. And what they do is they rebuild the building with the exact same original
material, with the same materials and the same methods as they did hundreds of years ago. They
do that all the time, and it's really, really cool. And they preserve with that skills and culture
and do something that lasts for generations. And that's kind of similar to that, you know?
This is the extent of legacy and how far
it can go. Do you have something where it's like, does it last for about 20 years and then it's
forgotten? Or is it something that keeps going even if your name is not attached to it? Like,
what do you care about? Do you care about legacy that, you know, bears your name? Or do you care
about legacy in terms of the effect that you've left behind that is positive? You know, that's something that I think people should kind of dedicate
themselves to. And it can be small, you know, it doesn't need to be big, but those, those are the
limits, you know, how big can it get? I don't think anybody can be an emperor today. We have a
limitation of that, unfortunately, but you can still make something if people believe in it.
You know, don't make people believe schizo bullshit.
Don't do any of that.
Don't further that.
Build something, man.
Make something that's real.
Ironic from a person who says,
don't go into manufacturing unless you really,
really want to take the difficulty that comes along with it because it is really, really hard and really, really ass
and will take up most of your life i you know my the legacy ultimately right is something where um and it's
something where you you're never going to see it right when you're not there exactly and i was about
to say yeah you never you're never going to see it but but you can kind of, if you look at contemporary examples, you can see the impact of it.
And you can hope, right, that you are regarded, like Charlie Kirk, right, prime example.
I really like Charlie Kirk.
I don't know him personally.
I wish I did.
Or maybe I wish, you know, maybe I don't wish I did, given what happened to him.
But, like, the impact after he died, right, was this outpouring of grief from people who loved him and saw what he was doing. And he will live, you know,
live on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it doesn't have to be like that, right? To me,
you know, every, every year in the Hartford County bar, the so I live in Connecticut. And so my
father was a lawyer in Hartford, he started his career in New York. He was a poor boy, born to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, and wound up moving out to Connecticut to go start his own law firm back in the day.
have a hearing and enter the names of the lawyers who are members of the bar into the court's
records. And this is this wonderful tradition where basically they have a hearing. It's a formal
court proceeding, right? It's presided over by a judge. Minutes are taken, transcripts are taken.
They say nice things about the lawyers who died, their families all come, and then they, you know,
close the proceedings and everybody goes home at the end of the day. And so after dad died,
a couple of months later, they had this proceeding, right?
And we got an invite and they said, hey, the bar is having this court hearing.
Would you please attend?
And so, you know, I attended and met people I had never met before, right?
Who knew my dad and practiced with him and said nice things about him after he was gone.
And that was enough, right?
That was, so when I, you know, when I think about legacy,
like the minimum, like the bar that I would like to hit, it's both the minimum and the
objective at the same time. It's, it's that like, one day I'm not going to be here, right? And I'm
going to have a son who's left behind and, you know, hope, you know, wife, right? You know,
this family and extended family. And, and the question will be like that hearing will
take place. And will they say nice things about me? And will it bring comfort to my loved ones
after I'm gone? And what I'd like them to say is, yeah, he was a good lawyer. He did, you know,
did this stuff. The free speech stuff was incredible. You know, you should have seen
him back in the day, right. When he was in his prime and you know, before he was, you know,
before he was an old geezer and, and, you know, a crabby guy who was, you know, having one too many drinks on the,
on the porch of the beach club or something like that. And so like, it can be that. And I think
ultimately, if you set something like that as the objective, right, where it's like, hey,
this is what I want people, I want people to be, to say, hey, he did it well, he played the game
well. I think that that's also a good guide for life because it means that along the way,
your life will be imbued with meaning, right? Because you're going to be for every minute of
every day, you're going to be like, Hey, you know what, when I'm gone, people are going to talk
about this and it's, they're going to say good things. And as a consequence, I can feel good
about it while I'm doing it. And sometimes when you're
on the conveyor belt and you're just moving forward with the passage of time,
it can feel confusing. But as long as you have in your mind something like that, which is like,
you know what? Okay, one day it will all end, but at least when it does, people will look back on it
because they will. They'll look back on it, They'll talk about it and hopefully they'll say some nice things. And if you, if you live your
life with that objective, chances are you're going to enjoy the journey. I think a lot more than if
you didn't live your life with that objective. Exactly. Yeah. I have a similar, I have a similar
view of things. Also another thing is it's's very, we talked about consequential things,
it's very, the way consequential people are, like, value, like, you can't really quantify how they,
there's not a lot of ways to quantify their influence on society. So it's better not to,
influence on society.
So it's better not to
not focus on that
being quantified right now and just
to focus on
just doing it and being consequential.
So also to add to
Preston's point, basically live a life worth
living. And in
terms of consequential people, everyone's consequential is just scope
and the impact that matters.
Choose your scope, choose your impact.
Man, the space is in our face, is laggy.
It's some heavy philosophical topic.
X is just processing it carefully.
Yeah, I posted in the comment section.
I think a lot of you know this concept.
It's the Japanese concept, Ikigai.
Yes, we were just talking about this.
Yeah, so this just talking about this.
Yeah, so this is kind of related.
Isn't that the thing where you shatter an object, you put it back together again it's like that that's kensugi we were just talking about that also or at least i was but
it's kind of that's like character building in a sense you know kensugi is like character building
because what you try to do is break things actually like here's the thing you really don't
know yourself until you've actually been at, like, absolute zero and have been truly alone.
The majority of all people in the world, by the way, have never actually truly felt or understood, like, experienced and then effectively understood what loneliness is.
It's because you're never actually truly alone in today's world.
Most people aren't alone and will never be truly alone because there's always something or someone.
truly alone because there's always something or someone but if you're like at actually absolute
zero at least once in your life and you come back from that that is really good character
development there's a ability for you to have character development right the same with kintsugi
where you're like you know throughout you know existence you eventually just get bagged up and
then you have to be put together again and then the way that you're put together again becomes an art and the product of this is just like
something that is really beautiful so much so even that kind of with the kind of the irony of
those people have strong characters to say i've been through a lot of shit and to go through a
lot of shit builds character then people try to put themselves through that shit and then they
can't take it and so they artificially create that. It's almost like how there were times
where Kintsugi was done artificially,
where people would just intentionally smash these pots,
these few pots, and then put them together again.
Smash together with gold.
So that it just looks, because it looks nice.
There's a certain beauty in that type of chaos.
It's kind of like the adjacent to the Edo period,
where, like, it's super minimalism,
which I just dislike massively.
I don't like minimalism.
It's very, very bad.
It just kills the brain, right?
And it's imagination.
You need to have some...
You need to have something that's a little gaudy.
You need to have something that's a little bit more complex,
like, you know, how it was done with Art Deco, you know?
You need to have something that's kind of like thrown in there somewhere you know and beautiful
rugs yes we both love beautiful rugs um it's the picture i pinned in the conversation it's a
japanese concept of um reason of being.
Do you see it?
We can turn this into three things and make it more sensical.
I see, I see, I see, like, profession, vocation, passion, mission.
It's like, okay, wait a minute.
It's like a Venn diagram of like four things but there's actually just three because you're hyper dimensionalizing a profession right
i mean you're throwing in the passion part which makes sense but i'm pretty sure you could if i if
i were to put my if i were to put my head into this
and try to compress it, I probably could, but I'm just not bored enough to do that.
But yeah, it's interesting. Definitely is.
Yeah, I've been following this my whole life.
It's hard to combine all of them.
I don't live by these kinds of rigid examinations.
It was more intuitive, but
when I read about the concept that it
already exists. I just look
at whatever is, whatever
gains me and my people the most,
and that's it. That's really it.
Yeah, that's part of it.
Yeah, but that's the only thing for me.
It's about your soul,
you know, what you do with it,
and what that benefits other people
and you.
That's it.
That's, that's, that's all I care about.
I don't care about anything else.
I don't care about virtue.
I don't care about any of that.
I care about who stands on my side.
What is beneficial?
Again, it's like part of the, what is beneficial to me?
What is beneficial to you?
You know, I'm either your greatest friend or your worst enemy you
know that's how it kind of works out the best part is with you know having me as an enemy is that
it actually is just me being absent that is the greatest harm right because i'm that useful i like
to be maximally useful because of this and so it's a very binary or somewhat even trinary existence, if anything,
if that's what you wanted to call it.
Right? Well, when you don't give
people the reaction of reality,
which is not entirely gray, it's just black and white.
When you don't give
people the reaction that
they're looking for, they lose
all power, and that's why it's good
to have somebody like you as
an opponent opponent or someone
like anybody who can just kind of lean out of that like the thing is it's there is no serious
competition and there is no war that's the thing that people like don't understand when interacting
with entities such as that it is a what's wrong with you type of situation you know like what is
wrong with you that that is that is that and that's that's even worse because to force an internalization to to find what the actual
problem is is what the majority of people can't do because they aren't objectively critical of
what their actions entail because of this exact thing that they don't live by these
sets of actions, basically.
Like, what is beneficial, you know, to others?
Whatever others those people are, and yourself.
And what is it that you do with your soul?
And how does that all tie together?
It's like, all of these things have to work in unison.
And if you don't have that, then you have an imbalance.
And then you are just a shitty person, right? That's kind of what happens. Like, shitty people are those that have an imbalance of this, but they don't understand what is good for the soul most of the time. That is the primary
flaw, actually. Again, where I say it is a question of the soul more so than much of anything else.
When you make a decision of how impactful and how consequential am I,
takes will. Something could be wrong with your body.
So now you ask yourself,
do you have the willpower to power through that, in a sense?
Instead of living into the floor, you instead power through that floor.
Which is how we look at people who are somewhat autism adjacent,
but are very, very intelligent, that they're just put under drugs so that they can manage the chaos
by just effectively dumbing themselves down. And that is not a solution, right? The solution is
powering through it, through all that suffering, and then coming out the other end as a very analytical very capable person
right this is what we do yeah on the subject of enemies i mean it's not at least at the tier that
i operate on if someone's an enemy like there's no fucking point of like you shouldn't have enemies
like it's like if you're a lawyer you shouldn't have enemies like it's like if you're a lawyer you shouldn't
have enemies right if you wind up becoming because you know they're personal enemies there's not a
whole lot that you can do about it except consume time which would be better better employed on
other more productive things uh including just like enjoying life and and you know having a
like local politics for example is just like the absolute pits. You see, I live in a small town and there are people who are just like this,
everything, right. That goes on in town. They have select men who they hate. They have members
of the board of finance and board of education who they hate. They have people who they argue
with, who are their threatening, who are their neighbors, right. Who they don't like because
they're always sitting there arguing and just like,'s like man like what what are you accomplishing
by doing that um states some people like to cast a bunch of people around them as the enemy to
keep functioning in life it's so crazy it's just it's it's so crazy because like if someone's your
enemy just fucking ignore them like if they're if you do you precisely one and that you keep and you
have and every interaction you have is negative like i'm playing against a fucking clock here right
like that clock will run out i don't want to give that person a second of what of what time i get
it's being a conscious being in the universe um i'm fairly confident i i am an enemy of certain
european states at the moment we're gonna ask how long is that clock going to take to run out?
You know, that's a little different.
They have a very long half-life.
They have a long half-life, so pretty bad.
Yeah, but like, I don't know.
I'm fairly certain that I am regarded as a public enemy of the United Kingdom at the moment.
But like, whatever, that's their problem.
That's not my problem.
It's their problem. Nice not my problem it's their problem
nice this is true yeah not my concern yeah you can do things about that that's correct
well like what are they what are they going to do like i'm just going to i'm going to stick around
until in america until reform gets in that's the answer yeah and and reform will get in right and
when they get in like i know the people who run the places so it's not going to be you know that that will be fine and then then you know public enemy status will be revoked but like
do nothing win basically so do nothing i i love that meme so much it's it's really good because
a lot of problems can literally be solved by doing nothing and doing something else instead
right like you're just redirecting mental energy you know how maximal like this and that that's the
best part of winning right like when you realize there is legitimately nothing that you can do about a given situation, but then
you go, well, what else can I do? You know, it's just like in chess, it's actually very similar
to chess and how it works, where if you are in a position where your king is threatened, right,
you're in check, and you go, hmm, well, can't do much about that, except this thing over there,
you know, it's like, hey, I can do this thing, though.
Like, I can move over here instead.
And then it's like, okay, now we've actually solved the problem.
Or in some cases, you don't even do anything at all.
Or it's like, okay, you just do something that is largely inconsequential.
So it's almost like a nothing because you still have to end up doing something.
You'll still end up doing something, right?
You'll still end up moving something, right?
That's not a thing that you can kind of, like, you know, not do, right?
Because that's how the universe works.
There's energy everywhere.
The energy needs to be, you know, transformed.
That's what it does.
That's what we call entropy, and it tries to maximize that via order,
which is what we are.
And then it just keeps going, and that's the video game.
The video game is, like, how much can I, like, transform energy, right?
And what do I turn it into? And when you view, when you view your own attention as, as a
privilege and not, and you, you have enough self-control, right. To say my attention to a
matter is, is a privilege to both the people who I'm helping and the people who are my opposition.
Because, because it's, you know, because it's part of a process which will make the world a better place.
And so even if they're going to lose, that's fine.
I think that's the right attitude and the right outlook.
And then, yeah, it's one of those things
where the old line from Westerns,
this town ain't big enough for the both of us.
When it comes to the planet, it is.
It always is.
There is always enough room
to just wander around an obstacle and go
figure something out and so when we see people burning so many cycles just like butting it's
like I think you watch like a clip from I don't I don't I haven't watched television in in 21 years
um yeah it was like I was I was actually I was in a hotel, you know, last weekend with I actually met my wife and I were celebrating our anniversary.
And we decided to turn on a TV and we both looked at each other like, holy shit, like, how does anybody watch this stuff?
It's being broken up by commercial after commercial after commercial.
And it's all the other amazing thing that you see when you're doing that.
Sorry, this is a bit of a digression is you can tell what
is going on in the world based on the commercials that you're watching so like there were a lot of
commercials for tardive dyskinesia which is a condition it's a neurological condition which
is caused by the long-term consumption of SSRIs and that is something which 20 years ago nobody
knew it was a totally obscure condition that was like regarded as this thing that was so rare and unique to science. And now they're like four different
medicines being advertised for it, but from big pharma on like, you know, you're trying to sit
there watching the, watch the perfect storm and you're getting ads for like really obscure
neurological conditions. And you're like, ah, okay. So that, that's, what's been going on for
the last 20 years. Um, so that was last 20 years. So that was enlightening.
But yeah, I mean, it's this stuff where people are taking,
like watching Greg Gutfeld, right?
You sometimes see those clips online.
People watch it on TV.
And then what they do is they then mirror and mimic that behavior in their real lives.
And it's totally distressing because they just burn so many cycles,
so much energy, and you just many cycles so much energy and you just
sit there watching it and you just kind of shake your head and go well all right well that's and
that's an example of time where if you're really jealous the guard your time right and you you say
okay well this time is reserved for the mission and this time is reserved for my work and this
time is reserved for my family and you're like why would i yell why would i argue online and like
diminish myself by doing it's like it's like arguing with
ai it's the dumbest thing you could do like why the fuck would you argue with a clanker i don't
understand that do you have like clanker time in your life if you have clanker time you clearly
aren't living right like you don't have clanker time that's the point i don't i don't get people
who manage to get out of the house and just drive manage to have a bunch of fights while driving, race, whatever, have a fight in the store,
a fight in the...
There's a lot of that.
Oh, yeah, I don't have fights when I drive.
You know why?
Because I drive so early or so late
that nobody's there for me to have a fight with.
That is a great trick.
That's a good solution.
I mean, look, hey, I want to go through traffic faster, right?
I want to be somewhere early. So it's like, well, I mean, look, hey, I want to go through traffic faster, right? I want to be somewhere early, so it's like,
well, I mean, I can go to bed at
I can go to bed at, like, 11pm
and wake up at, like, 4am
or 3am, 3.30am,
go and take a shower for, like,
30 minutes to actually, like, activate your fucking
brain, and then just, like, be on the road at
4, drive for, like, an hour that would
otherwise take you two hours because traffic is so damn
slow and nobody knows what the fuck they're doing in a car because they don't know
how math works, which is really fucked up, right? So you just do that, you save one hour of your
life, you have no stress whatsoever, and you actually have fun, you know, put on some nice
tunes in your car, listen to some synth wave, this is what I do, I have some chill tunes I listen to,
and then I just like arrive at the destination, I'm cognitively completely sound and relaxed as
fucking chill, and that's how it started Monday, for instance, right?
Like, or at least how I used to when it was at, you know, peak production optimization.
That's what I would do.
And it would work, right?
That's how that, that's how all of that works, right?
Yeah.
I have to go into the optimization, bro.
I have to go into the, we did an RTO and I live about if, depending on what time you
leave, if, if a normal commuter you know uh normal
commuter pace it's about four hours from the office but whatever man gotta be done gotta you
know gotta yeah gotta make sure that uh that the that the drones are working right so um but if
you if you do the thunder so that's the new york thunder run and if you do the new york thunder
run at 5 a.m sharp or like 4 45 it45, it's 85 minutes, right? Boom, door to door,
you're Midtown Manhattan. Yeah, piece of cake. So you leave at like five, you're there by seven.
If you leave at six, you're not there till 10. Because what happens is you start hitting,
it's the traffic cascade, right? So if you're 15 minutes later, right, or 30 minutes later on every
phase, which then adds another, not, you know, it adds another 30 minutes later on every phase, which then adds another, not,
you know, it adds another 30 minutes per, you divide, I divide the trip up into sort of like four sections. There's the new, it's the cities along the way. So you've got the New Haven section,
which is when you get to New Haven, that's usually pretty easy. You've got the Bridgeport section,
the Stanford section, then the New Rochelle section, and then Manhattan, right? And sort
of the Bronx and Manhattan. And so it's, so I guess that's five, not four. And so if you can thunder run through before
everyone gets on the road, so you can get to Stanford from where I live in about 45 minutes.
And so if you can get to Stanford in 45 minutes, you're at Stanford at 545, you're in Manhattan by
seven sharp. If you delay that by 30 minutes, then you're at Stanford by like 615.
Good luck. Right. Because then everybody gets on the road because they're all trying to get into New York City.
So it's just, yeah, planning, you know, planning that kind of stuff and just avoiding
avoiding the wrong kind of human interaction is easily done.
Just do it when everyone else is asleep.
Also true with work.
And when I was when I got into crypto, I was an associate at a, at a London law firm. And I just had to like, everyone in crypto is in California. So I
had to just like stay up between like midnight and four in the morning every night in order to like
connect with that. And everyone else in London was asleep. So I built a practice and they didn't,
there's a huge benefit to not sleeping. It is hugely advantageous in a variety of different contexts. But anyway, I digress.
Well, see, optimization, man. It's like, how valuable do you see your time and what do you want to do with it?
This is actually something I didn't think about enough until I met these very interesting people on the internet that people can't really figure out,
but are always after, because it's really fascinating.
That's like 2028, you know?
Like, I met this guy in, like, 2023,
and he told me a bunch of really interesting things.
He got me into understanding how vector calculus works
and what hypervector compute is.
And you'd think, hmm, how does that fix your life?
You know, you'd be like, hey, this is going this is gonna fix me in this case vector calculus fixed me this would fix me right now it's fucking
vector calculus who would have thought that that's the thing that would do it for you
right but i looked at that and i saw everything as these everything as these kinds of systems
again like i wasn't i never had the clarity to do that because i never understood any of this and
then i did now i realized holy shit i know how all of the shit works now. I know how all these people work. I
know how brains work. All that shit is connected to that. And then eventually like expanded to a
whole bunch of other things. And then you ask yourself a question, you know, how valuable is
time? You realize what time truly is and how well it can be managed. And then you end up in a place
talking about orbs and 8D math.
And you go, huh, this is fascinating.
This is really cool.
And in two weeks, you achieve
what others can't achieve in three years.
And then you go, holy shit.
You can do so much.
So how valuable is your time?
Well, it depends on how much you can do with it, really.
Like, the time of a
jealous
girlfriend whose entire
life revolves around
trying to stalk you is
worth very little. However,
time of Elon
Musk, for instance, is worth
a fucking shit ton, right?
Because there's so little of it,
and there's so much done with
how little of, you know,
the time there is for him to spend.
The thing that I think is his superpower,
and I don't know the guy,
but I think his superpower seems to be,
just as like an outside observer,
that the time, in order to do what he does, basically, there can't be a wasted second.
So it's like everything, and like that, that's, I think, what it is.
He's like 100% old signal.
He's like, I mean, he tries to be 100% old signal.
It's the thing, like something like Steve Jobs, he was like 80% signal, 20% noise, which allows you to make art, right?
But if you want to make make things, you want to make hardware, you want to make all these crazy things,
it needs to be 90 to 100% signal that you expose yourself to.
Anything outside of that is a distraction that brings you out of the flow and destroys your ability to optimize, right?
That's a huge thing. You see that with a lot of tech people as well.
Like they just kind of do that without realizing it.
For instance, Elliot, he sits down in front of his computer
and just does AI shit every single day and does all of that,
just that, just does that, and doesn't do really anything else
and is kind of obsessed with it.
And so he does the 90% signal thing.
And so he becomes a lot more successful in doing exactly that
and gets to do
a lot of interesting things because of it too, right? So that's kind of how Elon operates. He's
also like really good at time management, is the thing I've seen as well, and looking at time
management through logic. And I've like started using this as well. The reason why I understand
that so well is because I decided to like play Diablo 4, like the last season, because I wanted
to understand, like, what if I grinded to get to
top 10 in that game myself? What would it take, and what are we going to do to do that? So I
basically figured out how some of the stuff had been done, how some of the trading works, how all
that nonsense is, and I did it myself, and it was in that moment I understood how much he actually takes advantage of some things that are unorthodox, right? That
aren't not allowed, but aren't orthodox in a sense, right? That aren't conventional. You have to do
maximally unconventional things to succeed in becoming the best at something, right? It's the
same thing with Path of Exile, right? And it's the same thing about understanding that, you know, there's some things that you can't get, you know, look at Path of
Exile, for instance, right? That's how I play it. I have a ton of really, really good gear.
But one of the things that I did was I would hire somebody to help me get the gear.
So instead of like me sitting there for 15 hours, grinding for something that I won't get within
three weeks of continual grinding that then fucks up my wrists,
I instead hire somebody to get that for me in a day,
and then I have the ability to just have fun and not focus as much on other stuff.
I still do the grind, of course.
Say, for instance, all the way from Act 1 through to Act 4,
I did all of that myself with Blythe and Vera because I wanted to know whether I could do it.
I wanted to know whether or not I have the skill.
And then the rest of that I completed
by having other people, like, basically help me and power level me
instead of, you know, doing it yourself
because my time was worth a whole bunch
and I didn't want to, like, you know, go through that far.
And I've already been pretty far to that point.
So it's like, you know, level 95 and then the rest you do yourself because I'd already been to go through that far. And I've already been pretty far to that point. So it's like, you know, level 95,
and then the rest you do yourself
because I'd already been to level 93 prior season,
so I know I can do that.
Stuff like that.
It's all about figuring out solutions to problems
that are somewhat unconventional but still work
and are maximally practical, right?
And everybody does it.
That's how you win.
Yeah, I think just in elon's
case i marvel at like the fact that you can there are times like so i i do one thing right i do one
the law shit and the idea of like it would it would be like okay cool i do the law thing
and then when i'm done like i'm going to switch domains and go into medicine.
And then in addition to doing medicine, when I'm done with that, like, I don't know,
for a word cell like me, like I'm going to go be a priest. Right. And then in addition to that,
I'm not just going to be a priest. I'm going to be the Pope. And I'm going to run and I'm going to run like that. And I'm also going to be the head of head of head of surgery at Sloan Kettering. And I'm also going to sit on the Supreme court. So it's like one of those
things, the level of excellence is so consistent across so many different domains that you're just
like, you just, it's a marvel, right. And it's, it's just something where you, you, there is no,
there is no understanding it, right. Like there is, there is a comprehension, right. Of the,
There is a comprehension, right, of quite what's going on,
but not an understanding in, like, a deep, innate sense
of how it could be replicated.
And, like, I reckon, like, it rhymes, right,
with the stuff where you go deep and you spend a lot of time
and you do whatever.
But, like, the cross-domain stuff is what really, like,
is the thing that just makes you sit back and wonder, like,
what was
in the water like it's just totally like what what on earth like what on earth is going on but yeah
that's but it you know it's it's all on the same theme it's about it is it is very much the the
idea of treating time as a precious resource and not in a precious resource in terms of like you
know billable hours or like yeah i got a clock out at five but just like having a different relationship with time than most people
do right and that's that is something which anyone can do in regardless of the sphere of control that
they have or their capabilities or anything else you can learn to make time your friend
um and you can do that both by planning ahead right as you like planting the trees and then
walking away knowing that you've planted the seed and you can do it both by planning ahead, right? As you like planting the trees and then walking away, knowing that you've planted the seed
and you can do it by, you know, doing reps and repetition.
That's something which people who go to the gym a lot know, you know, know a lot about
the more you lift and the more consistent you are and the more reps you put in, the
better you're going to be.
And it's just figuring out how to hack time, right?
To, to make sure.
And it's also preparing, right?
And sort of preempting and positioning yourself and saying, okay, I'm just going to sit here until time catches up.
And then I'm going to wait. And then when time catches up to me, then I'm going to do this
thing, but it's not today. So like learning how to manipulate time and rather than thinking about it
in the sense of like, okay, it's just something which...
Well, like I think it's energy manipulation, if anything, because you can't necessarily
manipulate time as people think it is something that you interface with time, but you can manipulate energy and energy is a thing that
then manipulates time. Because even if you wanted to look at it from a very direct perspective of
manipulating time, if I took a whole bunch of mass, which is, you know, what energy is, it's a form of
energy, and I put it somewhere and I made it, you know, just implode on itself again and again and
again, it turns into a thing that's called a singularity, which really, really messes with time. So it's one way to manipulate time, but really it's all
about managing your physicals. Managing time is more like understanding how you can move
within physical space as efficiently as possible. So manipulating energy, effectively,
where do you put it? Like your mental energy, what what what energy is best used in this uh used in this moment do i want to think about some sort of problem that's
not going to solve itself at all with my input or do i focus on a problem that can be solved with
my input right that's a better allocation of energy and therefore use of time because energy
time correlation space bullshit all that you know yeah so there's there's another there's another energy, time, correlation, space, bullshit, all of that. Yeah.
So there's another thing, though, that if you think about it,
for example, in a work setting, you schedule a meeting.
Okay, let's do a short meeting.
A short meeting usually means like 30 minutes.
Rarely, it means 15 minutes.
For Elon Musk, I don't remember which biography it was, but a short meeting is five minutes.
So his minimum unit of time that he operates that could be usefully allocated to short meeting is five five minutes um so his minimum unit of time that
he operates that could be usefully allocated to a task is five minutes right so sometimes he could
be sitting there at home or doing something be like oh you're waiting on someone for they're
going to be here in 10 minutes and you're like ah that's not enough time to do no it is if you
shorten the amount of useful time allocation unit you'll you'll become much more productive well i mean i
yeah i have i have meetings all the time and one one policy when i adopted my current position
um was there were there were meetings that were taking longer than there were meetings that were
taking so you calculate right so let's say you want to assemble your senior compliance team
and you want to have you're discussing some issue and you have a meeting that's two hours long to discuss it. That would be okay. Let's say you have eight guys on
the call. Okay. Well, that's 16 hours essentially that you've just spent because you've decided to
buck around and for two hours in the meetings. The first thing I did actually when I took my job
is I said, okay, well, that's not happening anymore. Maximum 30. And, you know, we're not
going to do as many check-ins and we're going
to do this and we're going to do that. You sort of like liberate people's time, but like you have
to add up the amount of meeting time and the number of people in a meeting and you just see
the Titanic. Cause like 16 hours is like two days of work for most people, right? On a nine to five
schedule. And you're just like, Hey, that's 16 hours of working time that was being consumed for
this one particular thing because, you know, someone decided they wanted to micromanage
and decided that 10 people needed to be on a call when instead it could have been two
and it could have been asynchronous.
And so there's no need to do this.
So like being hyper aggressive about both like decisions, it's the weird thing about
running a department instead of being like a working lawyer is that instead of like decisions, it's the weird thing about running a department, instead of being like a working
lawyer, is that instead of like grinding, it's this strange thing where you have to do a little
bit of grinding, not much, but like, it's about making weird, it's making decisions. And so you
basically make like five decisions a day. And so that's, that's five to 10. And then you arrange
for them to be executed one way or another. And meetings are just like poison to like getting shit done.
Because what happens is everybody's sitting around, they're yammering about shit.
And so what you want to do instead is just be like, no, just tell me what the problem is.
And if they do it async, and then you just go, cool, just do that.
Like explain it in two paragraphs, done.
Okay, cool.
Just do this.
Right.
And then you just send them on their way to do it.
So yeah, that's meetings are just, and traditional corporations love fucking meetings. Like I did a secondment in a bank. Lawyers do not like meetings
as a general rule because it takes away from your targets. But in like a bank, they have meetings
all the time and they're 30 to 45 to 60 minutes long. And people are just like drone on and do
whatever. And I think it's because they're not really like your mid-level banker is not assessed on any particular like deal origination metrics or something like that.
So the onion peeler maximizers, because they talk about like, you know, taking an onion and like, you know, peeling it until they get down to the root cause of the issue.
Yeah. Instead of just turning around and just being like, cool, well, there's someone who has authority to make the decision and I just fucking execute.
Like, cool. Well, there's someone who has authority to make the decision and I just fucking execute.
So it's one of those things where sitting, it was just so frustrating because they'd give you, they'd say, hey, we need a deck prepared for this.
Can you do it? I was on, you know, second day, I was a junior associate.
I was like, yeah, sure, no problem. When's your deadline?
And they're like, two weeks, 10 days.
I'm like, okay, fine.
And you sit down, you do it in three hours.
And they just say, okay, here you go, it's done.
And you just saw the difference in culture between like the law firm culture,
which is very much about like being efficient
and getting stuff done,
not necessarily being efficient, right?
Because law firms do make a lot of money
based on inefficiencies,
but like you have to prove
like what you've been doing
for every minute of every day.
So it's very different from then a larger corporation
where you go in and that's not necessarily the case.
And it's very easy for those organizations
to slip into a kind of,
what's the word I'm looking for?
Complacency about how they organize themselves
and how aggressive they are about defending their time
because ultimately a lot of people who work in big companies
who are not assessed on like really solid KPIs waste a
shit ton of time, right? Because they're just there, they're performing a function and their
KPIs that like they keep their boss happy and, you know, the budget doesn't get cut. So it's a,
it's a, people respond to incentives very directly. And so as a consequence, when you're,
when you shift out of a law firm setting into a corporate setting, it's very much about ensuring
that you keep that same ruthless efficiency that you had in the firm, right? When you're in the new
setting and that you're not inadvertently wasting time that you don't need to. It's so much time.
As a lawyer, it's like you cringe because you kind of see every lawyer. I think Lawyer Cat can
testify to this. But like every lawyer has in their head
a little clock and i could probably sit in a darkened room completely sensory deprived and
i could probably tell you when six minutes has elapsed because because i'm very used to the
0.1 and knowing exactly how long 0.1 of an hour dude so fucking real whenever in like a caller
or anything like that he like tracks the time he's okay, it's been an hour now. I'm like, oh shit, you know that?
Every time, dude.
Every time like I'm in the middle of something and he's like, okay, we're at the deadline.
I'm like, oh, that's right.
Yeah.
Time's up.
Yeah.
You have this very keen, like I love clocks, right?
And watches because I have a very keen awareness of time and the movement of time i
think most lawyers do but like i have a kind of adversarial relation to it shipped to it because
i was always trying to carve out time for my own personal stuff right while also trying to hit my
targets which i wasn't necessarily the best at um and so that's uh you know one of the problems
with having outside interests is that that uh is that hitting your hourly targets is not necessarily the thing that you wake up in the morning to set out to achieve.
So it can be difficult.
But yeah, so that's meetings.
Yeah, meetings, man.
You feel the burn.
Yeah, it's funny with clocks, which you mentioned.
Yeah, it's funny.
That's funny with clocks, which you mentioned.
The reason why I like clocks, mechanical clocks specifically,
was not because of the time they keep,
but kind of how they use energy as efficiently as possible.
That was the thing that has always fascinated me about clocks,
especially the ones that are automatic and wind up.
You have this wash that's on your wrist,
and it has this
little uh flywheel thing in the back of it right you can call it that if you wanted to and that
just like kind of winds up the clock and then keeps it ticking and there's like if i've been
around a lot of these types of clocks i've been like in in switzerland uh they they were like
this there was this watch repair shop and it wasn't just watches it was clock repair shop
is the difference between a watch repair shop and a clock repair shop like watches are a lot more compressed hyper optimized
systems um where actually the most optimized version of this is actually a a quartz watch
because that's actually the most precise and that is actually what clocks are supposed to be at some
point right like if you wanted a time piece you have that because it's very precise and it lasts a very long period of time on a single charge. And actually there are watches such as
those made by Psycho, which have a solar cell, kind of like, you know, photovoltaic cell embedded
behind the main face of the watch where you can actually hold it into the sun for like five minutes
and that's your charge for almost a year
and it's very interesting it's very very cool right that's like the most efficient the clocks
are a little different right they're they're like works of art of anything i'm actually holding one
of those watches right now it's called this yeah it's the seiko arnie um and seiko also has so there
are two things that are cool if you like clocks and watches that are that are really interesting
little bits of trivia uh related to this conversation the first one is uh jager
lucute which is traditionally like they call it the watchmaker's watch they used to make all of
the movements for patek philippe um and the experience this watchmaker they have a clock
that they make called the atmos and the oh i know this one dude i know this one this is the one with
the air pressure right right? Yeah.
So it's this beautiful clock, ATMOS.
I recommend everyone go Google it immediately.
It's really cool.
It has this like thing at the bottom of it.
And that kind of like, you know, spins back and forth.
But what's really happening is that you have like this barometer that's at the, that's
at the center of it.
And basically the temperature changes change how kind of like, you know, air compresses
and expands.
And it's this that kind of like drives the whole mechanism. So literally pressure changes, like not just temperature wise,
but also just because of the environment, like, you know, weather that powers the clock. It's a
beautiful thing. I've, I've, I've seen one of those myself. It's really cool. They're amazing.
And so, yeah, so basically the barometric pressure and the temperature changes in the room
will keep the clock powered. So like a one degree differential in temperature in your house, which will happen all the time, will keep the clock
powered for a week. It's an absolute marvel. It effectively runs forever. It's a forever clock.
It's really beautiful. It's a forever clock as long as you maintain it. If you move it and push it,
the little wire gets dis- Yeah. Yeah, that's really bad.
You have a very expensive repair on your hands. But Seiko also does a thing they've got.
So they've got their grand Seiko line of watches, which is so people don't sometimes like get bent out of shape about them because like, oh, it's just a quartz watch or it's just an electric watch.
And they have two of them.
One is called once there's a quartz.
Right.
So they have grand Seiko quartz watches.
But the quartz they use for these watches is grown in a special isolated environment.
So an average quartz watch is
accurate to 10 to 15 seconds a month, right? In either direction. So you'll have to reset it. If
you want it to be really accurate, you basically reset it once a month. There's are accurate to
one second or 10 seconds a year, because what they do is they get hyperfine, hyperpurified
quartz that they isolate in a lab or grow in a lab. And that's what they put in as
the crystal, the oscillator for the watch. So it's super duper accurate. They also have this thing
called a spring drive. So it's a mechanic. So watches are either battery powered, right? Or
they're mechanically powered. And if they're mechanically powered, it means that you have a
mainspring and you have to wind the spring in order to store the energy for the watch. So,
or they're solar powered, but in-powered cases, they have a battery.
So the mainspring watches, they've got this thing called a spring drive,
and what happens is it's a mechanical mainspring,
which is wound by moving around or manually wound by twisting the crown of the watch.
And then what happens is it's connected to an integrated circuit,
and the integrated circuit regulates the release of energy from the mainspring into the movement of the watch.
And so that picks up temperature and things like that.
And so what happens is you get a really, really accurate movement.
Now, the last generation of the spring drive, as it's called.
So this is up to this year.
We're accurate from 10 to 15 seconds a month.
So it's like a quartz watch, but it's powered by a mainspring.
So there's no battery that you need to replace or anything like that.
And the integrated circuit will last 50 to 70 years, right?
Absent, you know, a bit flip or something like that.
But then they've just come out with a new one, which is accurate to 10 to 15 seconds
per year.
So it's basically the most accurate mechanical watch ever built.
And they cost about 10 grand and they're ridiculous and they're beautiful and they're really amazing.
And basically it's this wonderful, like, so eventually I will get a very expensive watch.
And the first one I'm going to get is one of these because I like what it says, right?
When you're dealing with that shit, like you have to ask yourself, like, it's a current, I'm very, I have a bunch of watches.
My favorite one as the one my
wife got me it's this one called the christopher ward which i really like i've got a um i've got
a seiko arnie which is a solar powered one it's a reissue of the one that arnold schwarzenegger
wore in commando and predator and it's solar powered and i use that when you're nice
it's awesome it's so it's it's like this big beefy so when i was doing all the podcasts
about the 4chan lawsuit like interviews and shit like that i would wear the arnie
because i was like okay like i want people to i'd like i want them to like that's the message i want
to communicate um i've got my grandfather's old omega uh which is which is 70 years old and that
was given to him when he retired from the phone company uh back in the 60s and um and so or 60 years old however old it is but um but yeah so like the one there's this whole
universe of like luxury watch shit right and so there are people who buy things they cost
ridiculous amounts of money um like you know a patek nautilus will run like 80 grand the patek
ellipse will run 70 grand there's no way that the production cost and materials cost of the watch justifies the price.
But what happens is people wear it because of the signaling value. And so if I've decided that if I
should decide to ever get, you know, one luxury item like that, what would I get? And the answer
is that Grand Seiko, because what it communicates is like,
okay, I want the best goddamn piece of machinery I can put on my wrist so that if someone looks at
it and they ask you like, okay, you made this completely preposterous purchase. Like it's
totally absurd. There's no way you need that. This is a flex. It is a communication about a decision
you made to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a toy. And like, the question is, what do you want to communicate? Like, I think the cool thing to
communicate is this is the, this is the best one, right? This is the one that is most accurate.
So like, even though it is way, way, way more accurate than you will ever need for any practical
setting, you know, that's that. So if you're, if anyone here is ever looking, ever has $10,000,
you know, burning a hole in their pocket
and they're looking to spend it
and they want to communicate,
you know, I really like engineering.
Rolexes are actually pretty good too.
But like, I think those also carry other connotations
that aren't necessarily,
not necessarily things I want to say.
But those are accurate.
I know what you're, I know what you're,
I know what you're thinking.
I know what you're thinking.
It's like, you gotta, you gotta decide what you want to say It's a manufacturing problem
That's another one, yeah
So it's
That's a strange
That's a strange world I don't fully understand
But if I ever were to do it
I would definitely go for one of the Seikos
Could you like link me that one?
Yeah, I'll send it I'll send it to you in DM.
Excellent. Yeah, that would be beautiful.
But yeah, notice again, it's all about energy management
and that mechanism, in a sense.
How effectively have you constructed this mechanism
to make use of as little energy as there is?
That's a beautiful thing.
That's what I've always loved about watches and clocks.
You know, because there's like art pieces.
There's like clocks which are legitimately just art pieces.
Like there's this one I forgot the name of
where the mechanics are laid out as a stick
and it's basically held together by two pieces of glass right and in the center of it
is where the entire mechanism is so you can kind of like turn it around and look behind the watch
face which is fully transparent by the way right because it's just two pieces of glass that are
holding together this mechanism and you can see all of the inner workings of this device. And it's so beautiful.
And the reason why it's always been very fascinating to me is because
I've always had a problem with things being finite.
This is my issue.
I always have a problem with things being finite.
Especially things that are awesome.
Like energy, for instance.
I dislike the fact that it's a finite resource.
So when I was a kid, I always think about perpetual motion machines,
and I was deeply upset by the fact that no matter what you do,
you cannot get rid of this fucking thing called friction.
And so then instead it was, okay, so you're not trying to make something last forever.
You're just trying to delay its inevitability as much as possible
so that it can leave behind the greatest impact.
And so then I looked at these machines that actually preserve energy, right?
And that's when you kind of come across
a watch slash clock mechanism
where it does something that has eye impact,
but also preserves what it is and what makes it run.
There are also cool things to hand down.
Yes, yes, they're beautiful.
Which is really, so like, i've actually i've got i've got a watch i have a watch here that's as old as me
it literally was made the year when i was born that's amazing um i'm looking at this old omega
this is uh the one my my uh my grandfather wore got when he retired my father kept it in a box
he never wore his whole life and so i pulled it out yeah i don't like i don't get it i think i think it was an issue with like
you know not one i think i think it was a sore point for him um not not for any nefarious reason
i just think that he just you know he's like okay i've got this piece of my own father and i'm just
gonna keep it in this box where it belongs but i've been like wearing it i got the like the band
replaced and like I wound it up
and it keeps time.
Like it's still going
because basically it hasn't been worn
at all in 60 years
and was kept in a climate
controlled environment,
effectively in stasis
for the entire time.
And I was like, OK, well,
things still works.
But it's this very,
it's this very thin thing.
And if you can look up
like what the movement is like,
it's very elegant,
little simple movement.
But like it's just this incredible thing
that gets communicated through time.
And, you know, it's, it's like, you know, you, if you want to, you know, part of the
legacy thing, like, it depends on how personal you want it to get.
And like, it's good to leave behind little objects that people who follow in you, you
know, follow in your footsteps can have.
We've also got like, you know, the whole bunch of stuff. Like I've got a food dog that was in my great grandmother's house
and my sister has the other one and my mother used to have both. So it's like, I don't know,
but watchers are really like the fact that they are transmitted through time while also keeping
that time is just, it's strangely poetic. And, um, you know, Patek Philippe's got that nailed
in the marketing. They say, you never really own a Patek. You just hand it yeah you know you know patek philippe's got that nailed in the marketing they say you never really own a patek you just hand it you know you take care of it for the next
generation but like you don't need a patek to get that like just any mechanical watch that someone
wore it's beautiful because it's a defiance of the un-shittification of technology which is to
make something that is to be replaced and not something that is to last right this is this is
the problem that befalls all of us today it It's like, you know, my computer, for instance, I got, what is this, like this little
laptop, which on which I had done oh, so many things, ridiculous things, been streaming, all
that kind of stuff. And it, you know, becomes outdated. It's made to be replaced. It's not made
to last, which is something that is somewhat acceptable until it becomes super, super expensive.
And you just literally go for the same thing of how much time can i buy from this machine i'm going to like spend seven thousand dollars on a
fucking computer setup so that this thing lasts me for about 10 years right so you bought yourself
10 years of time until you inevitably have to replace parts of it some of its you know foundational
components such as the gpu but like something such as the motherboard for instance as well right
and it's these are things that are meant to be replaced, but things that are
meant to be kept, now those are beautiful, that is legacy.
Stuff was just, like, stuff was just built better, like, even 50 years ago, like, even,
like, basic consumer goods. So one thing I'm into is sailing, And so my wife's cousin had the old sailboat.
This is a it's a Alberg sea Sprite.
23 feet long.
Things built like a tank full keel was about 3500 pounds.
Yeah, it's dope.
But like the thing is a tank.
It's like it's still in amazing shape despite the fact that it's 50 years old.
Whereas if you've got a modern sailboat that are they're lighter, they're faster, they
plane, they do this. But like after after 10 years they're completely valueless and like you
basically have you have to basically get you have to you spend 150 000 on a thing and then yeah you
have to redo everything the sun completely destroys things such as the gel coat right this
is stuff that's the white stuff it's like it made it's made out of and i've seen this a lot because
i've actually been around a lot of boats in my life. When I was when I was like, I think I was like 12, 13 years old.
I got really bored of this weird like homeschooling thing because I just literally speed rounds for all the mathematics and everything.
I just like learned all of it.
And then they forced me to repeat it because they weren't my parents weren't teachers or anything like that.
I didn't have any teachers.
It was literally learn everything yourself.
And if you did something wrong, just repeat it because they wouldn't tell you what you did wrong.
So it's like, okay, you have to figure that shit out on your own. I just got bored of this futile bullshit task. So I decided, you know, fuck this. I'm just gonna like, you know, run outside, not do anything that you say. And instead, look at where there's like problems for me to solve. And I go, hey, here are a whole bunch of dudes that are in their 20s that definitely don't want to be working out into the hot sun like this. But I'm a kid and i'm weird and i don't mind that kind of shit so here's what i'm going to do
i'm just going to go up to this person say like hey this thing that you're polishing slash
maintaining i i could do that for you real quick to demonstrate that i know what i'm doing i could
do that for the whole fucking thing the length of the ship give me a little bit of money and some
food like i didn't know i would do that for like about a year straight it was pretty good and then
actually got myself a whole bunch of stuff you know with the saved up money was one
of the first things I was able to purchase so that was
like I spent a lot of
time around boats and the people on those
boats everything from like you know the lowest
of the lowest worker to like
even the owners themselves at some point
as well right and that's where I actually learned
a lot of
societal history from because
there would be a lot of people who are kind of at the end of their life path, or at least want to experience something different in their life if they're not necessarily at that end yet.
And they would bring with them stories, right?
And I would always ask them questions, because a lot of people love sharing their stories.
You'd be surprised, right?
And if you can kind of listen and prompt it out of them, you will get so much intelligence. You'll get so many lessons from life scenarios that you'll never have to live. Terrible things even, why i am a 24 year old who doesn't necessarily speak like a 24 year old speaks like somebody about 10
And if you can kind of listen and prompt it out of them, you will get so much intelligence.
or so years older than that which is what people keep telling me which you know is very much so true
i just got the demeanor of a 20 year old or a 24 year old because i'm fast i guess
and i and i speak in memes so but that's pretty cool man
the ship is nice I I would this is interesting because I like I understand it and I appreciate
that but I myself have I I used to love these things but I just don't like ocean as much. I like being inside of the ocean,
like diving underwater. I love the dimensionality of it because I can fly, I guess. It's beautiful.
I love to float. It's pretty cool. But I do love land. I love the certainty of land. I'm a very
systems-based person. I love determinism. And the ocean is a very non-deterministic environment.
It's full of currents, waves,
and different factors that are way beyond your control.
It's like sailing is the epitome of that, right?
You literally let the wind blow you
where it wants to take you in some ways.
And you try to direct that as much as possible,
which is an impressive feat on its own, right?
Well, you don't really direct it.
I mean, you're kind of like, what I like about it is that there's a lot to that it's
the one time when i'm not thinking about anything else because there's so much to do so i tend to
single hand which is annoying because there's a lot to do and you like if it's blowing a lot
it's probably not a good idea if it's like blowing 15 you don't want to be single-handed, it's probably not a good idea. If it's like blowing 15, you don't want to be single-handed. If you're like reefing single-handed, you're not going to have a good time,
which kind of sucks because it means that there are a lot of days when you could go out. And I
think probably in a year or two, I'll go out a little bit more on those more blustery days.
But generally speaking, 10 to 12 is when you want to stop because you have to do shit like, okay, get the boat, get it off the mooring,
get the sails up. It's not like set up so that you can do everything from the cockpit. You got
to climb up on the cabin and do some shit. So you do all that. And then you're, you're out and about,
then you got to get the sail down, get the engine started where the mooring is. It's,
there's a lot of like title chop. So like
you can be bouncing up and down, you've got to hit the mooring and then you've got to run
23 feet to run up and grab the pin while you're getting tossed around all over the place. And the
last time I did it, I like lost one of my shoes while I was doing it. So I had a decision to make,
do I go back for the shoe or do I try to get the mooring? And I said, well, I guess the shoes are
right off. And so I went and grabbed the pin and just dealt with it that way so like it can be a bit of a
pain in the ass but the fun thing about it is that like when you know you get i have a very you know
active internet presence and all the rest of it but like you have to get away from it at some point
and the best way to get away from it is just to like have a lot of stuff to do. So you've got on a sailboat, you've got like four or five different systems that you got to run at the
same time. You got the tiller, you got the sail, maybe you're reefing, you got the jib, and then
you've got the various factors of, you know, figuring out which way the wind is going and
then figuring out what the water is doing and then planning it all ahead of time so that you don't
wind up, you know, having the wind die and being in the wrong place at the wrong time so that you can't get home. So like all of that goes on
and it's so busy that like, it's just, it's just busy enough. I tried flying that didn't work
because the cockpit is too busy. So then it's just like too much going on, but then sailing is just
kind of like similar in that what you do is you're, you're out there doing this stuff. You're not
thinking about anything else. You're not thinking about thinking about you know the free speech in the united
kingdom you're not thinking about work you're not thinking about anything except what's right there
in front of you and when i'm done with that after doing that for like four hours it's like you just
it's like the sense of inner peace it's like i don't know what you just you come back and you're
like ah my head is finally i imagine it's a lot like meditation because you just completely wipe the
slate clean and you've said, I'm going to do something fundamentally unproductive for four
hours in order that I can just clear my mind. And then when you're done with it, it's like,
that was fun. That was an interesting challenge. And, um, and you know, and you, you didn't wind
up, I didn't wind up, you know, cracking into another boat or a rock. So that's, that's a
victory. So it's, it's one of those things where, you know, I still try to make time for it.
And, but it's hard to do. Cause like, it's like, cool. Okay. It's, I've got an hour for lunch.
I can run down there. That's five minutes, five minutes to get out on a launch, you know,
five minutes to get the sails up five minutes to get out of the Harbor. Okay. It's 25 minutes.
So 15 minutes, 20 minutes sailing around
back to the harbor get on the pin so like some it's hard to do when you've got a busy schedule
but if you get like a good afternoon and you can just disappear for four hours it's just magnificent
real that's actually um there's, again, this is
one of those things where, I think
surfing is pretty similar
to that as well, where you have
a ton of stuff that you need to do
just to stay
and get, you know, it's a very physically demanding
task as well, to surf,
and it is a lot of
fun. I've done
something like that, but I've done it with a stand-up paddleboard.
It's like a thing you can do
where you can take some of the smaller waves,
not the really big ones,
that will literally drag you underwater
unless you know what you're doing,
and then rub your ass on the reef,
which will really fuck up your day,
and probably months or two after that,
depending on how injured you are,
because those are very, very sharp.
Like, reefs are fucking sharp.
Holy shit.
But hey, you know, if you don't like that,
you can do the surf the wave with a paddleboard type of thing.
And then just do that.
And it's a lot of fun.
That I do love.
And the reason why that is,
is because there's a little bit more certainty in that.
It's a lot safer.
But it's also a very physical task at the same time
that consumes most of your mind.
And the only thing you care about is the dopamine of just riding the wave onto the beach
and then the urgency of needing to grab the board before all the water sucks it back out
and then rubs it along the floor.
So you have to just kind of grab it really quick and just stand there and go, yes,
and then go back in again and then do the whole thing again,
just for fun.
And then afterwards, you're completely exhausted.
But it's so much fun.
It's worth doing.
Yeah, that kind of stuff is just...
Anything that involves manipulating nature to go,
instead of just turning on an engine and blasting away
just like manipulating i do like that too you know i do like doing that too that that one's fun i like
the engineering aspect of that and going super fast like a well-running car is a beautiful thing
as well right it's just i take enjoyment out of a lot of things i'm not very specific like if i
couldn't if i couldn't surf again like that's's unfortunate, but it's something I can accept, you know, or I can't do it as much.
Right. It's not something that I really, really miss.
I take pleasure out of a lot of things in life and I'm quite adaptive of like kind of adaptive to like what I can take pleasure out of in life.
It could be anything, could be a simulation, could be something that's more real than that.
You know, it's whatever you want it to be.
Right. That's high agency living it's great you're not so dependent on one particular thing it's kind of ironic
coming from a person who loves to determine you know determinism you know
that I get it completely for me for me though sailing sailing is the drug I
raced catamarans all through high school and that was that was wild
that would explain it yeah I've seen that you ever been to one of the um you would ever been
to the America's Cup you have to you'd have to have been at some point right not yet you know
not yet I want to what damn I figured that would have been a huge thing for you well I mean but
like I was a kid and then I was in England and And so, you know, there hasn't been a challenge in a while, has there?
I'm not sure, man.
I mean, I went there when I was a kid, man.
It was great.
I did it for like two years.
It was awesome.
Yeah.
No, it's...
The challenge was always about try not to get seasick.
Just watch these ships do these insane fucking maneuvers and you go,
so I'm feeling like I'm about to die. How are they doing that?
I'm just standing
here. What is that? How does that work?
That's interesting.
The catamarans are
fun because it's like in the Thomas
Crown Affair.
For those of you who've seen that movie
with Pierce Brosnan, they capsize a catamaran.
Which is
interesting. It's very difficult to do they capsize a catamaran which is which is interesting but like
it's very difficult to do with like capsizing a catamaran like if you know no no that's that's
the fun part it's not difficult to do because yeah because the so the downforce of because they have
because their shapes are differently right the jib of course puts a lot of downforce on on the
front of the boat and the way that most catamaran hulls are shaped it's most uh hydrodynamically efficient to move your way as far forward as possible so what happens
is everyone's always you know you're on the harness you're as far forward as you can get
because you want to keep the bow in as hard as you can but of course you're always playing this
game if you're racing a sailboat you're you're playing a game against like how whether you can
win versus whether nature
and physics are going to completely fuck you over by throwing you over the side and with catamarans
they don't generally speaking flip sideways if you're racing it they flip forwards they pitch
pull and so when that when that happens it means that you're going you have maximum power you're
going as fast as you can go and then what happens is there's like a chain reaction where
the bow goes under it starts breaking and then the boat flips forward very very aggressively
and with you attached to it via a harness and so it's consequence you wind up you wind up in the
drink and it's uh it's less than fun and you know you snap out of your harness you get the thing
back up and that's that but um yeah so... Yeah, I lived on big catamarans.
I never raced them or anything like that,
so that would have never been a scenario for me to experience.
So it would be actually safer on that level.
It's like, I've never raced any of those things.
Never.
The big cats are awesome.
But these are like racing cats.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, that makes sense.
I think we got it confused.
But big cats, yeah, those are very stable.
Very neat machines.
We went through the Bay of Biscay
on one of the somewhat stormier times.
Oh, that was not fun.
That was not fun.
I was just standing there watching the waves
go through the net and over onto the window
where I was standing right next to the...
It was a lagoon catamaran,
so they have this section there where the mask
goes through and you have this beautiful metal thing you can kind of
look at, it's really awesome. And I was just
standing there as a little kid and I watched
the wave go through the front of it
all the way onto the window so I could see shit
and I was like, okay I think I'm
actually going to die this time.
I was like, fuck it, I was like five
years old and I was like, oh fuck.
I think that's where Jordan Belfort Sank his yacht it was in the med
Oh damn
That makes so much sense
Yeah because like what happens in the med is like
You just get these crazy ass like you don't get hurricanes
And shit but they have crazy squalls
And that's like that Bayesian yacht
Got hit by one of those
And like it just comes in and just absolutely ruins
Your shit If you're in the middle of it and they're just these terrible very intense
like microbursts that uh that just come out of nowhere so yeah it just comes out of nowhere
it's really really chaotic and like there's a whole bunch of other shit too massive fucking
currents like i mean hey imagine trying to cross the straits like you know one of those things is
uh like you know you've got gibraltar and then you got morocco which is, like, very close to each other. They're at the Pillars of
Hercules, right? And so you'd have this, that's where also, like, non-plus ultra comes from,
because, like, on the Pillars of Hercules was inscribed non-plus ultra, which means there is
no beyond here, no, like, there's no beyond, right? Like, you know, you go beyond was then the,
you know, the plus ultra where you said, hey, you go beyond, right? That's, like, the empire expanding,
but they kind of, like, made it up until that limit and so it
was like the defiance to go further but those
two pillars are there and in between that is a shit
ton of currents which is why I never
there had never been any physical structure that has
connected those two points even though it would
make a ton of sense to do that but it
would literally just like this is this is the
small little mouth through which
a lot of the water has to move
back and forth which is probably the source of Noah's flood.
Because, you know, that had to break at some point, right?
They could, like, open up.
They figured out that the Med was actually a big basin at one point in time.
And the Pillars of Hercules was a wall.
And so what happened was, for for whatever reason sea levels rose whatever else
and it broke and basically the entire mediterranean basin was filled in a matter of years and so that's
it's this weird yeah the whole thing was land right and then at some point like 50 000 years ago
the pillar the sea levels were rising at the end of the ice age and the whole thing flooded and you
can just imagine like so the mediter in the Atlantic this massive massive you know
depression and then this enormous ocean on the other side and just imagine how
like torrential that flood would have been I mean you've seen a dam discharge
before imagine that but like probably a thousand times or more bigger yeah rips
through everything that must have been really scary like
that must have been one of the most insane things to ever have to experience because again like you
said this was a huge open like area and there's there are a ton of buildings underwater to this
day because you know that was a thing it broke one day so like say going through that is funny
because um like not going through that situation obviously i mean like going through that is funny because um like not going through that situation
obviously i mean like going through the straits uh is kind of interesting because you have to do
with a ferry if you want to go to morocco you have to do with the ferry or you go by plane
obviously uh which you also can't do all the time because the physical way that gibraltar the rock is
is is like placed kind of creates these like little micro weather systems that cause a lot
of chaos and then you have to like kind of so flying isn't micro weather systems that cause a lot of chaos and then you
have to like kind of so flying isn't always an option and neither is going with the ferry but
you could go with the ferry it's just going to be really really fucking choppy and the the currents
are so extreme they just like carry you everywhere and then you realize for the first time a very
interesting thing and that is whenever somebody says you can take energy out of waves i'm like
try and do that over there it's just not not going to happen. Like your rigid structures are going to get completely pulverized by like
the tremendous kinetic forces that are trying to like express themselves in this like medium that
is water. Right. And so it's like the Mediterranean is a very fascinating place. It's a lesser hostile
hostile version of Europe, but it's hostile in other ways. And storms are very, very fascinating.
version of Europe, but it's hostile in other ways. And storms are very, very fascinating.
I will say that even in like further northern parts of Europe as well, the storms are very
strange, very interesting. A lot more difficult, a lot more different than a tropical storm.
I've been through a few of those too. Like I'm more afraid of the European storm than a tropical
storm because if something breaks in like Europe, you're going to freeze to death.
That's not pretty. That's really fucked up.
Well, like a tropical storm you see coming. And so what you do is you run.
That's very predictable too. Yeah. Yeah. It's a cyclone. You run,
you tie everything down and then get the fuck on land and then ride it out.
It's only 30, 40 knots, but like a European microburst is like, okay, cool.
Wind 70 knots, which is hurricane force
local yeah hey hey you got you guys you guys like roofs yeah we don't have those anymore now thank
you yeah no it's it's the sailing the sailing in europe is is super hairy it's fun like i i do
fantasize about sailing there's one guy i can't remember his name he's a norwegian guy and he
runs a website called no bullshit just sailing and he has this
Contessa 35 like racer cruiser from 1982 which is kitted out it's absolutely gorgeous it's it's
absolutely gorgeous racer cruiser from the late 70s and he single hands it around like the North
Sea which is fucking insane and he's like he's like yeah so I'm just going to go up to Greenland this week it's going to be a lot of fun we're going to have so much fun then when we're
done in greenland i'm going to go down to scotland and like then it you know it cuts and then like
the next clip it's like 20 foot waves and he's just like oh there's a lot of fun i've got my
storm jib up it's really interesting uh just missed a glacier it's all right an iceberg and
it's just like the the that some of these people do these sailors is just
it's totally wild and they just they just hop around they're just like going around the north
sea dodging like oil platforms and like going and visiting scottish villages and the hebrides
just like doing whatever and making money from youtube ad fees and it's just it's so cool um
it's so so cool doing something they love i mean that's's just, it's so cool. It's so, so cool.
Doing something they love. I mean, that's amazing.
It's kind of like,
you know the Outdoor Boys? You know that YouTube channel?
The reason it kind of shut down, which is
unfortunate, right? What did they do?
I don't think they did. The wife
basically didn't like all of the attention and kind of
made them shut it down. Oh, I heard
about that, but I've never seen it.
Yeah. I mean, but it's still really good content. The content's still there. But it is really amazing to, like, made him shut it down oh i heard about that but i've never i've never seen it yeah i mean but
it's still really good content the content's still there but it is really amazing to like you know
see a human be a human like you know in extreme environments that's another one of those things
that is very appealing and very good for media is to see humans being human like these and these
these engagements here um for instance like you, you know, between you and me, these would be largely intellectual engagements.
We're very few and far between meant for only the few. Right.
And heard by fewer still in some ways as well. Right.
But this is this is like a different version of humanity.
This is like the the Plato and, you know, like these are all the philosophers. Right.
But we're not even precise enough to be that yet.
If we wanted to be philosophers, we're kind of close to it. We just need even more determinism and more precision
and more compression of the data that we have and be somewhat poetic about it to mainstream it,
right? Which is what I do with the posts. But like to see humans beat something
like, you know, adverse weather conditions or like even sailing in that
sense is very much so similar that is really
cool kind of reminds me that you are in fact
the super capable machine that
has existed for
probably more than hundreds of thousands of
years and has like made it through
and now you're here
it's pretty cool
that's why I like sailing
because for me it's that.
When I picked up this boat two months ago, it was in Stonington, which is about 60, 50 miles from where I am.
And so we had to get through.
So we had to get out of this thing.
There's this thing called the race, which is where the Long Island Sound meets the Atlantic Ocean.
And it's super tidally fucked up.
And then there's a bunch of rivers.
So it's choppy as hell
and screwed up. And so I was just like, okay, there's this really fun thing. I was like, okay,
I'm in Stonington. I have to get to Madison, which is where I live as public information.
It's all available. I don't really care. But I was like, all right, so what I've got to do is
I've got to get 50 miles and we've got to plan it so that we can do this thunder run and the tides
and all this other crap and whatever. And I've never done planet so that we can do this thunder run and the tides and all this other crap and whatever.
And I've never done something like that before because I usually just like sailed around my hometown.
It was like, whatever, did race around buoys and shit.
And we actually managed to pull it off, which is pretty awesome.
And so when you do that sort of thing, it like, you know, we almost pulled it off.
I made it to one town away and then the wind died and I was two miles offshore with my with my wife's father as my crew member. And then the engine died and wouldn't work. And so we had to get towed, which, so I had
a choice whether I got towed into my home port or whether I got towed into a working port in Westbrook
and, uh, and, and repowered there. And I said, well, going back to my home port under tow is
going to be the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me. So we'll go somewhere else and I'll finish this in a couple of days.
But like I'd never done anything like that before.
I was like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever done or the best.
And like when you do it, it's like, oh, cool.
Like now I have like a new like I have a new I've just unlocked a new ability.
I can like go do long distance sailing and like it's not a problem.
And I don't know. it's fun to do.
I think a lot of, a lot of people are, there's so much to do online now that we're seeing
a lot less of sailing and things like that.
The heyday of sailing was in the seventies in the United States.
That was when everyone was doing it.
It was cool, like golf or something like that.
And now I think a lot of that attention and effort is focused on either content creation or video games or other stuff. And so you don't, you don't tend
to, a lot of the sailors that you see are 60 and up or 55 and up. And you don't, and there are some
in the sort of 30 to 45 range, although it's an expensive hobby. So you don't see that many people.
And what you're seeing now is back like 20 years ago, there were lots of kids doing sailing and now there just aren't so many because I suspect they're distracted by other things but
like it's so valuable and so cool when you can figure out how to basically windsurf right it's
windsurf a fucking giant fiberglass canoe like halfway across an American state in a day like
it's just it's just it's such a cool thing and I think more people should do it not I don't know
maybe with AI,
you know, rendering laptop jobs stupid again,
people will figure out that they can do cool stuff like that
because the AI will handle the business.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It sure gets me thinking all this.
It's really interesting.
It's an interesting, interesting conversation. interesting. It's an interesting conversation.
Yeah.
For sure.
As always.
Yeah.
It's funny because there's a difference between a meeting, which is this thing that sometimes
isn't even best as a group.
For instance, when I do things with the people where we do manufacturing.
Like I talk to these people individually and sometimes in small groups of like three people
where I ask them something
and it's a communication that lasts
three minutes to five minutes, right?
And we have a little quick back and forth
about whatever problem there is,
you know, examine what it is, right?
And then I get to like working on solving something
that takes me like the doing of the thing to solve it takes me approximately 30 minutes to 45
minutes. And I come back and I tell these guys within like the space of one or two minutes,
what the problem was, you know, I treat everybody as they could understand as though they could
understand what it is so that they kind of memorize it and think about it as well a little
bit themselves, you got to, you know, assume competence sometimes
because you've seen these people as competent enough
to work on those systems.
You should tell them what they are and how they work, right?
And I just, like, you know, say, here's a solution,
here's why it is a solution, and here's what was wrong.
There you go, it's working now.
And then you go ahead and do something else.
Chats such as these here,
this is more like an alignment chat, if anything, right? Like Right? So for instance, if you do it in a professional setting, you test alignment,
you know, to see if everything's still on check or to realign yourself. And then you just kind
of move beyond that and you do other things as well. Right? So, but these discussions are more
like a show, but also an alignment chat at the same time, where you're trying to not necessarily
align one another, but gauge each other's alignments to a specific thing, right?
I mean, I think alignment, I like having alignment chats. I like having alignment chats,
because it's, it's interesting, particularly when you talk to people who have, you know,
as a lawyer, there's a very limited set of skill sets that you do. I'm really fortunate that the CEO of Arkham, a guy named Miguel Morel,
the guy's 26 or 27 years old, sharp as a tack.
You talk to him and there's more experience.
He's got more experience in his very shorter years than a lot of other people.
Practically, the guy's got the mandate of heaven. He's just so, so sharp. And it's always interesting because you come away from
the conversations as an attorney, right? Understanding a lot more about where his
mind is and other things. And it's fun to come into alignment with that. It's fun to say, okay,
cool. I don't know what's going on here. How do I bring... Because as lawyers,
you don't really... Lawyers don't really align. They don't know what's going on here how do i you know bring because that's as lawyers
you don't really lawyers don't really align they don't have strategic alignment chats you have strategic alignment chats with people who are do something else right and you're trying to map
your skill set to what they're trying to do um and make sure that everybody's thinking in the same
way so i i do enjoy figuring out with you, all kinds of people who aren't attorneys,
because if you talk to lawyers all day, you just sit there, talk about procedure all the
time.
It's, it's, it's, it gets really boring.
This group is cool.
Cause I love like, like, or like Suraj or Bly's or out of talking about totally random
different things that I have no idea about.
And that's why I keep coming back.
Right.
Because it's, you get to hear all these interesting things and discover like whether you, you know, whether you know, you what you think
about something you hadn't thought about before. So that's Yeah, it's always nice to pop in here.
I don't I I never do. I think the the conversations that we've had, I think we did one in June. And
that was about three hours long. I popped in briefly last week.
This is three hours long, but like,
I don't do anything else at this point because I think I'm going to do a
podcast next week for the guy named Marty who he does Bitcoin stuff.
And like, I haven't like,
this is just the most free flowing of any of those formats, which is really,
really, yeah, it's really cool to do because, because it's not,
it's not every day you get the opportunity to do that.
That's true. Yeah. It's also nice to kind of like you know have some time again and i've been like you know working on trying to reintroduce uh quality back to the system which is also one
of the reasons why i decreased activity initially because i remember i used to have these spaces the
conversation um every single day for a very long period of time you'd have like eight six hour
conversations like it was a huge thing and i i saw it as necessary at the time because day for a very long period of time. It'd have like eight, six hour conversations.
Like it was a huge thing.
And I saw it as necessary at the time because I wanted to just gain more of a platform,
which was exactly what ended up happening because of the fact that I was always online,
terminally online even, and I did these conversations.
I was recognized in certain spaces and I was able to come in and like start off this
like whole chain reaction of things that eventually led to, you know, my doxing and all this stuff was
really funny. And so, you know, now we kind of go to the oh, shit, we also have a ton of work thing.
And we need to kind of condense time a little bit more. You know, I came back from where I was at,
because I like took a two week break, and, you know, did things. And I came back, I was at because I took a two-week break and did things.
And I came back and was like, hey man, we have to condense quality into a weekly segment that lasts for less than eight hours.
Maybe five, if at all.
And I think it's better in a sense because not everybody has time to show up every single day.
And it's also way too demanding of the mind to do that um like i do streaming which is just video games so it's not as much output for me but this is like input and output and reaction to input as well which is
which requires a lot of mental energy it's best reserved for like a a once a week thing basically
i mean i i think for me it's the that's actually i mean if i had to do something like this once a week thing, basically. I mean, I think for me, it's the, that's actually, I mean,
if I had to do something like this once a week would be a good cadence because there's so much
like quiet, like consumption of written material that's involved in it. Like you just got to,
like particularly on the free speech stuff and the policy stuff, it's all written, right? You've
got to see what, which organizations are taking which positions, you know, and then you got to read, you know, get some time to do independent reading, do legal research, all this stuff.
So, yeah, no, it's it's definitely you have to it's hard to carve out the time to read.
I feel sorry for actually lawyers who are in private practice because the demands on their time are so considerable. And so it's so it's so requires like absolute focus
on like random stuff that I found that when I was doing it,
you just don't get it.
Like you get really boring if you stay in a law firm too long
because you like you get home at the end of the day,
you get home at 11 o'clock, 1130 at night.
And then like the last thing you want to do
is go open an interesting book
because you've literally been reading
since eight in the morning.
It's like it's just absolutely the pits.
But like, yeah, there's a,
there's a danger. And one thing with the 4chan, you know, the 4chan stuff that we've talked about,
I haven't really done a whole lot of pod. This is the only place I've really been talking about it
in a public setting. So like there have been opportunities to, when it's first started,
I did a couple of TV appearances, a couple of podcasts, and then shut the fuck up
because two things.
One, like we had a strategy and I didn't want to actually let out what we were doing, which I still kind of haven't done.
And two, like you don't want to be running around and like like that's your only like that's kind of running around and being like, hey, this is what I'm doing.
Look at this thing I did. Look at this thing I did. Like, isn't it great?
It's like, OK, I want to save that for a particular audience.
And like, if I'm going to go be seen on British television again,
like it has to be about something else.
Like I've done one and like, I don't want to do another one.
So it's kind of like this has been fun to talk through and get sense checks
on the like the state of the war as it's being as other people view it. Because otherwise, there's a lot of risk and
danger in doing live appearances. So LBC reached out and they asked me to do one. BBC, I can't
remember the name of the journalist, but she was the one that that that ripped Seb Gorka's head off a couple of months ago about something Trump related.
And they wanted to talk. It was Radio 4 and they wanted to talk to us.
And I was like, no, no, this is not the right forum.
So it's been nice to actually be able to have a conversation about it, because otherwise, you know, there's not a lot.
There aren't a lot of places where you can go out, talk about free speech issues,
have people who are receptive to them, right?
And then, you know, and aren't interested in just, you know, having an argument with you about it, but are actually have their own positions.
And so you can kind of import those positions into your own way of thinking and then go,
what I'm going to do, I'll probably go to sleep.
This whole conversation will get processed.
It'll go into memory and I'll probably be thinking about it for another week.
Right.
At least.
And the things that are the two-way communication is going to get processed.
And it's particularly the mimetic stuff.
Right.
Like I, you know, I haven't mentioned that to anybody other than this.
So that's, but I think, you know, it was pretty obvious what I was trying to do.
I think some people gave me a lot of shit because they're like, well, this complaint was written for Twitter. It wasn't written for a courtroom.
No, it was written for a courtroom. But yes, it was also written for Twitter and it was written
for people in DC and it was written for attorneys across the United States who might have technology
clients who are asking them questions like, what is this stuff going to do? So it's been really
useful to get the feedback that that was observed and picked up, right? That people have actually
clocked the purpose, right? And also the timing, right? Like we filed that complaint very promptly
and we did it before Donald Trump went to the state visit for the United Kingdom.
And we could have waited longer, we could have done something else, but we didn't. Like there
was a particular moment in time where the things that were said needed to be said so um it's really actually reassuring to see that people you know picked up what i was
putting down um and yeah it's it'll it'll certainly inform my uh inform my thinking going forward as
you know the filings are pretty dry from here on out um but you know what what goes on behind the
scenes of the filings how you think about them, is obviously something which is more complex.
And what you say with a court filing, there are multiple meanings.
There's what it says, and then there's what it really says.
And I'm reassured to see, there have been various places where I've seen that people have read between the lines on some things we've wanted to say where, you know, we've said it very dryly in a filing. But, you know, there's been,
people have drawn the correct conclusions from those dry filings. So it's, yeah, it's been cool
having this conversation and getting some validation for the strategy. And also just
being able to, you know, this community, I follow a lot of you guys on X.
I've had the pleasure of having conversations with a bunch of you via DM.
You know who you are at various phases.
And so it'll be cool as this progresses and this issue of free speech in the United Kingdom
and in Europe in particular, right?
As that issue evolves, we're going to get to check back in and say, okay,
like remember where we were a year ago.
Where were we a year ago and how can we measure progress?
And then what lessons can we learn from the progress that we've made as a movement and as a community that's been focused on this particular question?
And what then lessons can we draw for our own personal lives as we see this one very active living process?
And I think the free speech thing is one where, because the UK is just as hot as it is politically, everyone's really animated.
I haven't seen them this politically animated.
I mean, if you talk to, you know, in the 70s, right, the difference between labor and the conservatives was like 200 bps on government
expenditure as a component of GDP, right? That was the range of acceptable debate. And now it's
very much like either we're going to become a socialist people's republic, or it's the end of
the nation, or we're going to have national renewal, and we're going to raise William the
Conqueror from his grave and various other things.
So it's a very interesting time for them.
And I think it's going to happen from a week to week perspective.
I don't think you'll be able to notice.
But year to year, I think the changes are going to be extremely noticeable.
And so I'm happy to share as part as a participant in that process.
So I'm happy to share as part as a participant in that process.
It's going to be very fun to share that intelligence with all of you and help all of us make sense of that.
And also, as we see that, I think there's just lessons you can have from everyday life.
Like, okay, well, this is this cool, weird macro process, but there's all kinds of micro stuff going on behind it it's not often that you get to
see right how the sausage is made because because you know this this format just didn't exist
until recently yeah that is true it's it's also a funnel a fun little progress tracker like what
you said right because right now at this point i see something that's very disruptive that you
know i'm doing something that's actually kind of unpopular.
Everybody today is somewhat expected to be political.
I think it is one of the most political times in recent memory.
Everybody's got to stand for something or whatnot.
And I've taken this choice to kind of remove myself from politics.
And remove politics out of my environment.
Because I'm tired of it.
And I just can't fucking stand it and I just can't fucking stand it.
I just can't do it anymore. So like conversations like these are rare and I think not many will be
paying attention to it, but I think there's, you know, a decent number here. You know, it's a,
it's a nice, it's a nice Saturday in the US and a lot of people are listening to this right now,
now, not thousands. Maybe one day there will be thousands. I'd hope there'd be thousands, right?
not thousands, maybe one day there will be thousands. I'd hope there'd be thousands,
Because that would show that, you know, the shift is successful, returning to something of a normal
time, something that is more focused on utility as opposed to meme wars, right? Because at some
point it has to become exhausting, right? And that is how empires fail. They don't necessarily fail
because they have shit laws. They fail because they have exhaustion.
They're tired.
I mean, I wonder if the pace of technological change,
I presume most of the guys up on the speaker panel,
guys and gals on the speaker panel,
are familiar with Ray Kurzweil.
And the singularity and exponential technological change. And that's like,
that's happening, right? It's, it's happening. And it's happening in a way that's noticeable,
if you know what to look for. So, you know, in, in Japan, it looks like they figured out how to
regrow teeth, for example, like, there's just like, we are living in an age of miracles.
example like this is just like we are living in an age of miracles and it's
one of and like you know AIs are now independently making mathematical and
scientific discoveries on you know pure math and protein folding and things like
that and so like you're seeing the you're seeing the ripples right on top
of the surface of something very very big that's coming underneath and like the
the politics is just such a distraction,
but I wonder if at some point the tech is just going to be so incredible
that everyone's going to marvel with mouths agape and open eyes.
They're just going to be sitting there marveling at the pace of exponential change
and whether that's going to just totally rewrite the playbook.
But the problem is there's still the memetic capture aspect,
just like what happened with entertainment.
That also is in the technology sector.
Say, for instance, there's an open source browser called Ladybird.
That's a real thing, by the way.
And you have, say, Cloudflare donating to these people money
so that they can run their thing,
because open source is very, very important.
And then activists come in and go,
oh, they're donating to Nazis.
And the problem is these people
are working at the foundational aspects of software.
Like even in Rust, there's a huge problem, right?
Where people are very ideological
and it sucks because, you know,
the whole thing is amazing.
It is a cool thing to be using.
But then same thing with Linux, you know,
where like PewDiePie, who is seen as racist for some reason,
that guy, when he started using Linux himself,
a lot of the people who follow PewDiePie,
like subscribe to PewDiePie on YouTube,
then went into Linux as well, and there was a huge influx.
And the people who run Linux wanted to protest
by somehow figuring out a way to like get these people out of Linux's environment as much as possible.
Because they thought it was a political thing.
It's like, they say that technology is political.
I largely agree with that to a certain extent, right?
But I don't agree that technology needs to be limited because of whatever politics you believe in or access to technology should be limited necessarily depending on what politics you believe in or you think you believe in.
I think that if we wanted to interact with certain types of systems, we should kind of
remove the politics from it because that's the only thing that's actually harmful.
You don't think that the human initially is harmful.
You just think that their opinions are harmful.
So instead of thinking about their opinions, just think about making our software better.
I would love to have a relationship with a lot of these people because I think that they're doing a tremendous amount of good work.
But the only problem is there's such an ideological capture and I don't want no part of it.
I don't want to deal with that.
I don't want to talk about whatever things you think are real.
I want you to make code because that's what I want to be using.
And I want to pay you for that work that you do.
Same thing with the office.
I don't want to have a conversation about whatever real political nonsense you believe in.
You are hired for a very specific task
and you're going to complete that task
for the money that it is that you are then eventually owed
for the completion of that task, right?
And that's how it should be
and that there should be no difference to that.
That's how things should be
and that's how they should remain.
And so that is problematic.
That's why I want to remove politics from a lot of stuff
because I simply think that it has no place
and that we should instead think about more immediate issues.
The immediate issues being, how do we build good things?
Like, I just want to interact with somebody like, hey, you know, let's imagine that you have somebody who's like a person who does.
How do I say this?
Let's say you have a Rustive, right?
And they're obviously trans, right?
I don't think that that's a problem.
I don't care about that.
There's no issue with that, right?
If they don't have a problem with me,
I don't have a problem with them.
Like, I just want to buy your product.
I want to interact with your thing.
I want to like pay you to build a thing
so that you can like, you know,
make the system work better.
I want to pay you for that stuff.
I don't care what you represent.
Literally, you could do whatever the fuck you want.
You can identify as a cat, put a tail up your ass. I really do not care. I don't
think that that matters. You do whatever you want. It doesn't matter. You want to be a cat?
You're a cat. Fine. I'll call you a fucking cat. I don't care. Can we do work? That's my position
on the thing. So I think if we remove this need for ideology, then all of a sudden we have actual
progress and we can actually work together again for the first time in a very long time, I think. I think it's simply not practical to expect everyone
to have the same opinions as we do, because we can simply work with anyone, even if they have
different viewpoints. The fact of the matter is the output. What are we producing? Can we produce
something that's useful for humanity? That's what open source is all about. Like, it's this amazing thing where anyone can work together
and build amazing things, even if you...
I mean, people shouldn't care about, like, you know,
what's your opinion, where you come from.
I don't think any of that should matter.
All that matters is code, and code is the absolute truth
at the end of your day.
Like, I mean, it should have been the ground reality.
But unfortunately, you know, a lot of people simply debate about things that doesn't really matter.
Like, I mean, what matters is the users.
Like, are you working on the Linux kernel?
Are you working on, you know, amazing projects like the Ladybird or Chromium or anything, right?
Well, what matters is, is the user having the best experience possible?
Or is it secure enough?
Independent of their political opinions too, right?
Because that doesn't matter.
It's like, okay, sure, you know, you have somebody else.
Here's the interesting thing.
In these work environments, the people that you'd like to,
like even the people who are ideological, right?
Like deeply ideological in the work environment in which they're in.
They want to keep certain people out of that environment.
I'm sorry
to say this, but you do realize
that some of the most racist people on
the internet are very good
at hiding the fact that they are who they are
and they live out their life
on the internet and pretend
when they're in public. So much
so that literally the person
who you nearly never pay attention to,
who you even think is slightly gay, for the matter of fact,
because if that's something you're aligned to,
whatever you have, they'll align with that a little bit
and they'll be hidden and they are there.
You will never know.
You're not good enough to spot them.
Like even if you read an entire manual of that,
you're good to spot that shit on the internet
where they're free to express themselves.
But when you're in an environment where
you can just like virtue signal all the time the signaling will be so strong and
so absolutes that there will be absolutely nothing that you can do to
identify what the hell is actually standing before you right so even the
people who are ideological who like to keep these individuals out of software
you know they're one of those people who you really really dislike is in the
office with you know that right you know there's nothing one of those people who you really, really dislike is in the office with you, you know that, right?
You know, there's nothing you can do about that. You know that there's nothing that's going to be there the entire time.
Like, that's the thing. Sorry to say, but that's real.
What they're gatekeeping in that context, right?
Because you can always, Linux, I think, is its Apache license, if memory serves.
So, like, you can always fork them, right?
But what they're basically saying
is that they have a community of core devs.
And if you want to be able to commit, right,
to their code base or their copy of the code base,
they're expecting ideological adherence, right?
And it doesn't make a whole lot of sense
from a political perspective
why Linux should be political at all.
But the fact is, right, they've self-assembled. They've decided that's what they're going to do, and it's what they're
going to do. I think my view on that is that when you have, you've seen occasionally attempts
to use open source licensing to restrict how stuff can get adopted and used. What usually
happens is when you try to get that hard- hard coded into the license, it results in the absolute failure of the project complete. Right. So like even a project like Mastodon, which is very left coded, like they don't like they don't fuck around with their license. It's GPL three. And that's, you know, they take a very hard line on that. And in fact, they have used that license politically, right. As a club in the past, an early version of Truth Social,
which is Donald Trump's social network, was actually a fork of Mastodon.
They didn't republish their, they didn't distribute their source.
It's actually, no, sorry, it's not GPL3, it's AGPL.
And they didn't redistribute their source.
And Oigan Rochko said, with the takedown demand, saying, hey, you're not in compliance with the license.
You got to do this or you're going to have a copyright infringement action up your ass.
So it's one of those things where I think when, like, I can understand how a group of
people are going to like congregating around a particular repo and working on a daily basis
is effectively free of charge on a particular code base might want to police, might want
to like tone police and politics
police the people who they have to deal with on an everyday basis. And that's fine. I think the
fact is that's going to become, particularly as the vibe shift that we're going through,
accelerates and spreads. I think that's just going to become disadvantageous from a market
perspective. And you're going to find that communities that, okay, someone says, hey,
we don't want you committing to our code base because you're right wing or because you voted for Trump or
something like that. A lot of that's going to just go somewhere else. Someone's going to fork
code base and the market's going to sort itself out. It's annoying as hell. I don't think,
you know, I don't think the business and politics should mix at all. And that you should be able to
work with any, any, any business problem that you're going to have, unless your business is
like, I don't know, a super PAC, right? Or some type of explicitly political organization where everyone needs to be
hardcore politically aligned to a particular set of views. There's no reason why if you're building,
you know, rockets or you're building social networking or anything like that, that the code
itself should have any political opinions. And so you should be able to work with anybody on it to,
you know, accomplish the particular task that you've been set out by leadership um is he not
is he not two seconds i'll be right back i have to walk the dog
that's hilarious Really?
Hmm.
Okay.
It's a bit of a DM thing.
Anyway, I'm back.
Sorry.
It's a dog emergency.
Dog emergency.
But yeah, I don't know.
It's one of those things where, how to put it,
I think the marketplace of ideas will wind up sorting it out. And it's kind of annoying to deal with now. And it was annoying to put it. I think the marketplace of ideas will wind up sorting it out.
And it's kind of annoying to deal with now.
And it was annoying to see it, but it was everywhere right back in 2020, 2018, 2016.
And I think now it's just everybody's tired of it.
And they're just they just want to get on with the job.
I just want to get on with the job.
And like, yeah, again, I've worked with people from all, you know, all orientations, you know, political stripes, you know, you name it, the full, you know, full range of diversity of, you know, the human experience over the last 15, 20 years.
have been pretty tolerant of diversity of opinion.
And I think part of that is a matter of selection, right?
Because I knew, because I think when you're very out
as a public defender of free speech,
that's going to self-select.
I remember one big tech company,
I'm not gonna say which one,
called me up back in 2023, I think, 2022.
And it was 22 actually. And they said, I think, 2022. And it was 22, actually.
And they said, you know,
there's at least one woman on your team.
So you guys, it was a crypto team, right?
So there are four of us on the team.
I said, well, you've got one woman.
So there's one of our diversity checkboxes is ticked
that we need to do in order to instruct you.
And I just rolled my eyes.
I was like, man, like, I'm sorry,
but like, it's a team of four.
Like, and we've known each other for years and you're asking us whether we, you know,
take some internal, you know, political checklist. And we didn't wind up working with them as a
consequence. Um, because basically they said, oh, well, you need to, you need to take all these
boxes and they're like, we're just, we're just four people. What's how much, how much, you know,
how much, how much politics do you want us to incorporate into our business in order to win yours?
The answer was none.
It was a strange time 10 years ago and even six or seven years ago.
I'm very glad to see that I think that tide is going out.
But, yeah, it's a tough problem.
But open source is one of those things that solves itself.
It's not something which will abide restrictions for very long,
particularly if a project wants to have a license.
I mean, you can just imagine an internal legal department
at a large corporation, if some guy develops an OS,
and then they turn around and say,
oh yeah, by the way, our OS, in order to do this, you have to have certain political opinions.
Like that's not going to survive a compliance department review.
And so as a consequence, you'll just be like, cool, we can't use this software
because it requires us to do things that are insane and risk all kinds of breaches.
So that's that's why no one uses GPL or not a lot of people use GPL.
And a lot of people prefer to use Apache because GPL has its very stringent requirements.
There's the risk of GPL infection.
And so if you mess with the formal licensing scheme too much to prescribe the behavior of the user,
you're going to find that your users are not very happy about that because there are 7 billion potential users on the planet and chances are pretty good that they're not going to align with you completely on their points of view.
Real.
Yeah.
And again, I think that's why we should remove the politics part of things as much as possible.
Right.
Same thing with like, you know, science, right?
This is the same thing.
I had like a whole rant about that on a live section yesterday.
Like, well, technically it was today because, was today because it was in the AMs.
But at some point it just damages everything so much that you don't trust in it at all.
And then the damage that comes out that exists as a result of that
is such that science itself remains damaged.
So that if you come up with something that actually is true none will believe it because they will
assume it to be false because so much what had been you know falsified had
been propped up artificially just because it was ideologically sound at
the time to do so and it was the only thing you could do in order to get money
right so just like I mean that's money right so that's like i mean
that's that's the whole that's the whole idea behind the noetic order as well it's just we
want to remove the politics side of things we want to get to get to the get to the ground of it and
also i think politics themselves are kind of a parasite on personality and ego if anything and
to be truly objective means that you cannot actually be someone who's an adherent of politics because that conflicts with an adherence to ethics, which takes precedent above all else.
Right.
There is.
You can't be objective.
You have to be delusional.
delusional, right? That's the politics is all about delusion. It's a fake religion, basically,
Right.
That's the politics is all about delusion.
It's a fake religion, basically.
that's what I'm saying. Even finding people that you can discuss politics with, and they're able
That's what I'm saying.
to decouple whatever their opinions or whatever they want to discuss from their identity is rare.
So sometimes it's better to actually just remove the political subject from the discussion.
Because, yeah, people really cannot decouple.
They can't decouple a lot of things.
They can't decouple the politics of another person.
They can't discuss the subject at hand without
making a whole opinion about the person or bringing their
emotion to it.
But yeah.
I had this problem when I was teaching a class last year and I was a crypto law class.
And one of the students wrote in the end of year reviews, you know, you gave me a bad
review because I said that like Donald Trump, trump you know if he were elected the president would be good for the industry which
is true because he was a very pro crypto pro-tech president and had come up with pro-tech policies
and was being advised by people i knew who were pro-tech right and so as a consequence you could
reach the conclusion that if you're in tech or interested in representing people in tech
that his election was going to be beneficial.
And like there were some students who just couldn't handle that because they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You said, you know, beneficial things.
And it was like, no, no, I was trying to teach you like exactly what, you know, what was what the consequence would be of a particular outcome of a political process in which you have a one 300 million say, which is already predetermined based on where you live.
process in which you have a 1 300 millionth say which is already predetermined based on where you
live so it's not something where it's not something where it's it's like a it's not something where
you're supposed to make a value judgment on what you're being taught it's something where there
was a factual you know piece of factual information being communicated and you decided to get offended
by what the content of the fact um and so that's something where I stopped teaching and I kind of don't
regret it because there was a lot of that where you would try to communicate factual information
or like crack a joke about, you know, some opinion you held and someone would get offended by it and
say, well, no, no, no, no. And they wouldn't be able to disaggregate the, wouldn't be able to
disaggregate the lesson, right. From their own personal points of view, when in fact they were
there to receive the lesson, right? So they were completely missing the point. Exactly. And it's
such a like basic cognitive ability. This is just to not, but there is some sort of allergy to
certain terms whenever you bring them up. The whole subject is just,'s gone it's almost um that people throw what's that saying
when they say you throw the baby and the bath water throw the baby out with the bath water yeah
yeah that's exactly what i always dislike that statements for its for its like stupidity really
because i think it's all about the assessment of a defense mechanism that's what's what it
like really is about right because you can tell for instance, I can tell you right now
that purple isn't real, and you will go, what? Right? But if I told you that purple was an
illusion, you'll consider it, right? You'll consider what I'm saying, because you understand
that something is a reality. You say, for instance, that purple is a reality for you,
but you also understand that
illusions, misconceptions of reality that are a trick of perception, that is real also to you.
You have to turn that into something that is real for you. Because if you flat out deny someone's
reality, they will not know what to do because they cannot conceive of not only the absence of
a thing, but also the absence of a thing,
but also the negative of a thing,
because that's not how we work.
We're made out of energy.
No, it does not exist for us from an information perspective.
It's not possible.
You literally wouldn't know that it's there.
That's the point of zero, right?
That's the point of zero in the head,
where literally there is nothing there.
So because you can't do that, the defense mechanism says,
this person probably is trying to fuck me up because they're trying to break my brain. So, instead of thinking
about that, you just tell them it's an illusion, because they know what an illusion is. They know
that those things can exist, tricks of perception, and you say that when I mix red and blue, and you
put those together, perception doesn't understand how exactly to reconcile that both blue and both red is present here.
So it just goes, instead of my head hurting,
I'm just going to like mush them together and go purple.
That is very much so not real.
If you actually looked at purple,
you will begin to notice that there is actually red
and that there is some blue.
And if you do it long enough,
your brain actually feels really, really funny.
I wouldn't recommend doing that.
I'm just saying that that's something you could do.
So if I now tell you purple is an illusion,
you're more likely to accept that
than when I say purple isn't real.
Both those statements are equally true in some way,
although there's like disagreements
with whatever precision is there.
But still, there is an aversion
because I don't think we have a style
on how to approach people
against their defense mechanisms, right?
Like to say, for instance,
hey, anything that starts with Donald Trump,
instantly your heart rate goes up a little bit
because you've been indoctrinated by the news
to think that Bro's a fascist, for instance, right?
And whether or not he is a fascist,
you can have a disagreement on that,
it doesn't matter. The fact of the matter is still, you have a biological response to hearing bro's
name. That's a problem, right? So if you say, look, certain policies, for instance, like,
I literally just told you because it's put into your like perception filter. That's how like
everything works. Cause technically nothing is real. There's also no intuition. There's nothing.
It's like literally all just a subconscious response
to something that you've seen before
and that you have like in you somewhere, right?
So if I put stuff into you,
then you're going to just like see these things
that don't exist, right?
It's all just illusion.
So if I, for instance, were to go ahead and say,
hey, we are in the crypto industry.
We do these things.
We do these things.
We do these things.
These policies suck.
These policies suck.
These policies suck.
These policies are really good.
These ones are really good. This has to be good. This has to be applied. This has
to be applied. This has to be applied. And this thing over here will be applied by this person
over there. You guys want to know who that person is? Unfortunately for a lot of you,
that's going to be this guy who we don't like so much, right? But it's beneficial for us. So you
make it a rational thing, right? So people need to kind of, you need to kind of go beyond their
defenses in this way
by understanding what the real issue is. And the issue is always ideological.
And it's all about perception, the narrative, right? So it doesn't work.
I think the problem is like when you're dealing with young lawyers or proto-lawyers, right,
who haven't become them yet, like the expectation is that the ideal, the expectation, the thing that
you want is that you need to be able to drop them into something on five minutes notice and say,
okay, cool. Like you need to be up to speed with this now. Like it doesn't matter what it is.
It doesn't matter how much experience it is. The expectation is that the phone rings,
the problem happens. You've got to be on an adversarial call or in a hearing in two hours
and you've got to be ready. And so when you see like someone who's supposed to be doing that, right, there's supposed to be basically special ops for, you know, special ops for, you know, lawful adversarial nonviolent warfare in the setting of, you know, the adversarial system that we have as a, you know, that we operate as our legal system.
system that we have as a, you know, that we operate as our legal system.
And you then see them also, you know, clutching their pearls at something so minor.
It's just like that, that tells me that they don't understand the assignment and the assignment
is it doesn't matter what the position is.
It doesn't matter, you know, who to a certain extent, it doesn't really matter who the client
is, especially when you're a junior lawyer and you don't pick your clients.
So the thing that really bothered me more, more about that than anything else, or that situation
I just described than anything else, is that the student is meant to be honing themselves into a
completely blank slate where they don't pick the client, they don't pick the problem, they don't
pick the mission, the mission picks them. And then what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to be a zealous advocate within minutes, right? And that's not,
of course, that's not usually what happens. Usually you get lead time, but sometimes you don't,
right? And sometimes you've just got to get dropped in and you've got to be prepared on
very minimal information and knowledge about what the other side's going to say. And frankly,
minimal information and knowledge about what your client wants to be prepared to argue and on very short notice.
And being unable to adapt to something where you have plenty of lead time and where there's
a rational explanation and being able to get over yourself enough to understand, like the
reason you're there is so that you can become a more competent advocate in this particular domain right and that is what the the skill set that you're trying to
to demonstrate and by getting letting your own politics get in the way instead of saying okay
no no this is the mission um and i'm supposed to the mission is is is all that matters right and
the client is the mission um it tells me that they just don't get it. And I'm worried that, yeah, I'm worried that that's,
yeah, that worries me that the next generation of lawyers
hasn't figured that out.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
This is like a basic skill, especially for a lawyer.
This would be a basic skill that they should have.
And I did notice a student actually in law school,
I don't think
this is like a separate case because there was a group of people, like a law school student who
would have similar reaction. I think it's way cooler if you're a lawyer and it's like, so
are you completely in control of yourself so that you have the ability to adopt any position at any time and you're total chameleon, depending on what argument you need to make?
Yeah, that's awesome.
That is the coolest possible thing as an attorney that you can be.
And you see that in England in particular, the barristers, they argue for prosecution in the defense.
They'll go either way.
So it's something where, you know, there's something's missing when the politics is infected, the training system to the point where you're losing the capacity to those of us in our society who are supposed to be most objective and most able to set aside their own interests, right, In order to put their interests or their client first, those of us who are supposed to be
doing that are not able to.
That tells me that they're not going to be good lawyers because they're not going to
be able to really get it.
It's almost like play acting to a certain extent, right?
You have to get in a character.
And on a phone, like, you know, I was on an adversarial phone call the other day with
10 minutes notice and I trolled the shit out of the other side.
It was hilarious.
But like the I'm going to go to details, but it's like the client, I think, was a little worried about it because he was like, what are you doing?
It's like, trust me, I got this.
But like you, you have to be able to just get into the mindset and go.
Right.
It doesn't matter what the problem is or who it is.
You just you just have to read the situation, go in and deal with it. And if you're not able to do that when you have plenty
of lead time and you're in a non-adversarial setting and you've got 12 weeks to think about
what you think about it and you're going to write a snarky complaint about your professor in the
end of term reviews, it just tells me something about capacity. Speaking of capacity, I need to
have some capacity tomorrow morning,
so I'm going to hop.
I know that I'm hopping a little earlier
than we're terminating,
but I trust you guys will be able to survive without me,
as you always do.
Earlier than thou.
That's what I say.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
It's always a pleasure to see you guys,
and yeah, I will catch you on the
flip side thank you so much for coming in thank you this way no problem see you next week
all right excellent well that's pretty pretty nice enjoy that it was good um yeah it was great
i wonder what i'm gonna talk about next week. I love him.
The problem is with
the timing of the conversation,
I do think there should also be a Sunday version of this,
but the problem is the time zones conflict
with me in some way,
so I don't quite know how to logistically make that happen.
That is a problem. Try it once.
Right.
Improv conversation.
Yeah. One or two hours.
Yeah, try it once, and let's
see what happens.
Okay, let's see.
Let me look at the time conversion real quick.
That was eastern yes yes
oh god okay maybe three oh god yeah that that that three at three would make more sense yeah
but that's damn bro bro. Holy shit.
I mean, it's awfully bad.
We'll see.
We'll see if I make it for that.
Because normally it takes me a bit to lock in at that period of time.
But yeah.
I'll probably do it.
Okay.
We'll see.
Take in coffee and you'll make it.
Probably, but it's...
I know.
For now it's going to be occasional.
I forget how dry one's own mouth gets
when you speak like crazy.
It's been a while now.
It's my job, so I'm like this all the time.
That's why, as you say my voice
is always going yeah yeah I mean I used to do those a lot so my voice can kind
of like take a little bit but man has it been has been a while being sick yeah
well I mean I'm alright I'm out of that in this entirety by the way blize what
are you doing right now I'm farming up maps farming its entirety. By the way, Blythe, what are you doing right now?
Farming up maps.
Farming gold to buy maps.
I bought like 10, so we have like some stock.
I think... Like, I think I'll go live in an hour.
Right?
Yep.
That's what I'm going to do.
I'll go live in an hour and we'll play for a bit.
You know, have some fun.
Last night's stream performed very, very well.
Of course, you know, got a whole bunch of views on X,
as it usually does.
Very good, very good.
But I also got quite a few views on YouTube
in comparison to some of the other lives
that we normally have.
So that is pretty good.
We have, on that one, 312 views.
That's the highest viewed live stream that we put out on YouTube, at least. So that's the highest that's the highest view uh highest viewed live stream
that we put out on youtube at least so that's pretty cool like that is epic um yeah those
streams have been performing quite well like the viewer count is nice in comparison to how much
like you know i have people that are subbed it should be a little more actually but you know
it's fine it's a thing we're trying to multi-platform and there's only so much attention
to go around that is a thing uh but yeah x X still, of course, remains as the primary. But we did have a lot of
engagement coming in from YouTube. That was pretty good. Like I saw the chats.
That was nice. So thanks for those who were there. And of course, you know, those people on X
who comment a bunch as well on the stream, so we can put things in there.
So yeah, I think I'll be live streaming in about an hour.
That's what we're going to be doing.
I think I'll actually head off right now and just kind of like pre-show a little bit, you know, and then I'll...
Maybe like a voice chat free stream on Discord?
Maybe a little bit, but I need like a, I need a bit of time.
So yeah, I got it because I got to do something.
But yeah, I'll've got to do something.
But, yeah, I'll come in there, and then we'll go live.
We'll go live.
Yeah, because I've got something I need to do now.
So, yeah, give me a bit.
I'll post in a bit.
Everybody stay hot on the line. And actually, if you'd like to, some of you can chill in the advanced members section of Discord as well.
Link is up at the top right there.
Maybe also in general. It depends on
what you all are trying to do.
But if you can be there and hold down the fort for about
an hour or so, I'll be in to
livestream, if that's something you can do.
Sounds good.
Bye, guys.
Have a good night.
Alright, everybody. Make sure to join the server above it's pretty
cool lots of fun there very controlled environment very neat very clean very high signal
something you definitely want to be a part of yes and so much yoga exactly that too
all right guys make sure to join the link is bent right yeah the link is bent up at the top make
sure to click that and join. I'll show you there in
about an hour. I guess some of the speakers
on here are going to be there.
We'll see who.
Pre-chill with them until I've arrived.
Alright, everybody.
See ya. Bye. Thanks, Adrian.
Thanks, everyone.
Bye-bye.ζζ
