• 00:00:30 How Alexander and his co-author Jan have managed to produce such an enormous (and prophetic) body of written work over the last 20 years
• 00:04:43 What Alexander thinks about postmodernism?
• 00:09:01 What are ‘Netocrats‘? How is the world changing due to the Internet? Who is ready for the digital future and who is not?
• 00:14:01 What is the future of (representative) democracy and politics in general? What is a ‘sensocracy‘?
• 00:19:30 How should a ‘world government‘ work? How much subsidiarity will it allow? What role will ‘charter cities‘ play?
• 00:24:15 Will we be able to switch between city state benevolent dictatorships (i.e. will countries/ cities be run like companies) as part of our life?
• 00:27:01 Why was Jesus Christ actually killed & the surprising utility of ’empires’.
• 00:30:42 How our future laws are already emerging throughout Internet.
• 00:34:31 Is competition increasing for companies? Should we react with more collaboration to improve our competitiveness?
• 00:42:31 What role do Internet platforms play? Do they actually have a monopoly?
• 00:45:21 Is marketing as a whole evil? How has it changed over the years and how it is connected to ‘attentionalism‘? We will abolish advertising soon to protect our ‘sacred space’?
• 00:51:01 Why is productivity growth so low? Are we not daring enough? Is the focus on marketing (‘useless products’) to blame?
• 00:58:43 Why wars (as terrible as they are) are good measures of productivity and ideology.
• 00:59:55 After the ‘Death of God’ and the ‘Death of the Individual’ how are we now orient ourselves?
• 01:07:32 Why ‘native tribes’ don’t see a crisis of meaning or depression currently? Why some religions are more static than others.
• 01:11:23 What is our best bet for a future religion? Is it likely to emerge or will we have to live with many parallel truths? Will we see ‘weird activism’ instead?
• 01:18:11 Why the world will look more like India and Singapore soon?
• 01:24:12 What surprised Alexander the most (compared to his predictions) the within the last 20 years?
• 01:26:58 What will happen in 2038? Will AGI actually emerge by itself?
• 01:31:01 Are we (co-)created by an alien intelligence? Is the multiverse theory useful? Should we investigate spacetime more thoroughly?

You may watch this episode on Youtube – #96 Alexander Bard (The philosophy of everything).

Alexander Bard is a musician, author, lecturer, artist, songwriter, music producer, political activist and philosopher.

Alexander is co-author of a number of books incl. Syntheism – Creating God in the Internet Age, The Futurica Trilogy and Digital Libido.

 

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Torsten Jacobi: Alexander, welcome to The Judgment Call broadcast. Thanks for coming. Really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time. I know you’re busy.

Alexander Bard: Well, thank you for having me.

Torsten Jacobi: Absolutely. Hey, so you are a 21st century philosopher, and I feel after reading two of your books, you wrote a couple of those over the last decades. I actually read Fruturica Trilogy and The Digital Lividone. I started with Sintiism. I feel they’re very, very accessible. It’s a philosophy that’s relatively easy to read, which is, you know, not easy to find. And I feel like you’ve seen the future, and now you just write about it. So how did that happen? How did you make yourself so aware of the future?

Alexander Bard: Well, I should first of all honor my co writer, Jan Söderkvist. He’s very experienced and extremely learned. And we’re the same age. We met about a year before we started writing together, but I would say the accessibility in our work, and I’m glad if they’re accessible. We do our utmost to make velocities as accessible as it possibly can be without losing any of the quality. We don’t compromise on the quality. And I think Jan is the guy who really does a lot of the work in making the text in Swedish and German language as accessible as possible. But we don’t compromise on the quality. And these are, of course, this is philosophy. I mean, the philosopher is the guy who tries to observe the world at the furthest possible distance. But if somebody’s even further behind the philosopher trying to see the bigger picture, that’s the philosopher. So the philosopher is always the guy who tries to look at the world with the biggest possible picture. And of course, then also the biggest time scale. And that’s what we try to do as philosopher. And of course, we are humans ourselves and we write to humans. So we are discussing the human condition constantly, but from a very large degree.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, what I love about your books is that, you know, you go come from really first principles from very abstract principles, but you make really concrete predictions. And that’s something that I admire with the records while he goes from very abstract predictions and come or thinking frame of thinking and he goes down to very specific predictions. So it becomes way more accessible. I think this is pretty rare. It’s pretty awesome.

Alexander Bard: Yeah, our first three books were redistributed or actually relaunched as the Ferturica trilogy. And the term Ferturica actually is a new literary term. It literally means the mixture of philosophy and futurology. And when you think about if you’re going to do futurology really deeply, you’re also going to discuss things that do not yet exist. Because obviously, there are new things happening constantly in history. And since you have to speculate on that which does not exist yet, you are going philosophical because you’re actually philosophical the same day you use a new term to describe something. So philosophers are when they’re good, they’re really good at just nailing something you have a sense of, but suddenly there’s a word for it. And because you have that word, you can start discussing it. I give an example, in our first book, The Net of Crest, we discovered that there wasn’t really a term for using resources in a sustainable way over time. So say you’re trying to you have a certain resource here, and you don’t want to exploit it because if you exploit the resource, you’re basically exhausting it. What happens if you actually have in your mindset, you’re set that you’re going to use a resource, but you’re going to refurbish it, you’re going to replace it again, it’s going to turn back against you can use it all over again. For example, you do that in agriculture, compared to mining and mining, you take the ore out, you take the metal out, and you throw in the garbage cans, where in farming you actually have to renew it because you have to use the same earth the next year. And there wasn’t a word for that. So we started using the word exploitation as the opposite explanation. And then it became a standard term in sociology and anthropology. And now it’s a widely used term. These kinds of things you want to do as a philosopher, you want to find these new words, where you actually nail something that people have already considered, but there isn’t probably a possible term for it yet. And that’s what we do as philosophers called the invention of concepts.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah. Well, we often associate, at least in the current time, making up new boards with postmodernists, right? And they are also, that is kind of the prior generation of philosophers, right, the last 30, 40, 50 years. And they have been really interested in the human collaboration and about themes that are inside our human existence that are governing us, but they, we don’t really know they’re there, right? So they’ve been criticizing them for the longest time and trying to find out what is actually, why are we here? What are those themes of human interaction that are governing us? But none of us really consciously knows about them. From reading your books, I never really found out what is your thought on postmodernist. Do you think they were spot on or did they were right at that time frame or they are just wrong?

Alexander Bard: No, I mean, I mean, you make, you make your priorities and philosophers do too. And yeah, I read Baudrillard and Lyotard, they were great, certainly Derrida, they profound work that I find very useful. But a lot of the so called postmodernists were very obsessed with the symbolic. And this will live in a very medialized world to the media is very, very important to us. They would then go through, for example, history of literature and then describe the work of literature and have a critique on that. And they stayed very much in what’s called the Symbolic Order. Now, what I found fascinating though, when I started working in the 1980s, this was like 20 years before I started writing, because you have to think through your philosophy properly first before you write it. And I’m 60 years old, and I debuted when I was 39, but I had a career in music industry before that. But most philosophers should actually have another career first of some kind. And I was an economist and a music producer. Then I became a philosopher because you have nothing to say when you’re young. And the young philosophers are right, brilliantly when they’re young, they have to regret it the entire life, even Heidegen and Wittgenstein regretted their works of their youth, their entire life. So it’s a good thing to do like a monocon, just work hard and then wait and then publish everything in a few years. That’s important. My career moves were very smart. But anyway, so what I did in the 1980s and 1990s, when I started exploring the idea, maybe I should be a philosopher after all, was to discover that the two major revolutions in human society in the 10th century, which were cosmology, we suddenly discovered that cosmos was huge, right? And also on the micro level, we discovered of course, philosophers didn’t deal with this. A few of them did, of course, and some of them even inspired the quantum physicists and the cosmologists like Alfred Jordan. But the vast majority of philosophers were stuck in big academic institutions, most in France, Germany, the UK, and they were only about going through the texts and going through the hermeneutics of what we’re finding in monocon. Whereas our entire worldview is rapidly changing, both in the cosmic level on the microsoft. And at the same time, the new technology came along, what we call the internet today, which is data talk for zeros and ones, and not only were there zeros and ones that could be processed at almost, you know, enormous speeds and make the world more intelligent itself, but also this was happening globally. And now we got the satellites everywhere, we got this one thing, like the world has now become one huge computer. And that’s what the internet is. And nobody was writing about it. It’s just like, it’s just flabbergast, which is like, why aren’t philosophers spending time in cosmology, quantum physics and digital, when these are the big new themes of our times, we’re actually philosophers should come to be. So I was, I’m kind of, I don’t, I’m not part of the postmodernist agenda at all. I found the overcoming of modernism also kind of dated and not too exciting. And I wasn’t really interested. I agree with Bruno Latour. He, he wrote a little, a clever little book with a perfect chapter called We Were Never Moderns. And, and in a way, human beings have not changed at all. And over the last 10,000 years, we have not changed. If anything, we become more stupid, but our environment around us has changed. Environment is becoming increasingly technological, increasingly informative. And that’s something we have to respond to. That means the human condition is changing. The proper philosophy for the 21st century deals with the time it’s asked me to what it means to be human, and then rapidly changing aspect, what it means to be human within a highly technological environment.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, that’s what I love about your books. You, you talk about the netocracy. So the, this emerging change, and it’s been a class struggle, a power struggle that comes upon, I think they already see this when we, when you talk about that, is that the intention that goes to only very few accounts in this, in the very active nodes of this social network that we all are plugged into. And I’ve been criticizing this for a long time, is that, you know, 99.99% of the interaction of the engagement social media go to a very, very tiny amount of accounts. Everything else doesn’t really exist out there. Those are the ones with the power, right? Those are the ones that are favored in the next 10 to 20 years.

Alexander Bard: Yeah, the telecom companies all sold us the light 30 years ago that the internet will be accessible for everybody, which it is to a certain extent. And then we somehow power will be dispersed equally for everybody. And of course, that was not the case. It wouldn’t be the case. We have different types of talents and some people are just very, very sad to witness the media. And it’s a lot about being able to network and collaborate. And that’s why the old ideas, for example, being an atomic cell, being individual or dying, because that’s no longer a functional strategy in the internet world. You have to be incredibly collaborative. And we shouldn’t be too impressed with the things we’ve seen so far, because a lot of the things we’ve seen so far, for example, the influencers who came along in the 2010s, they will evaporate and disappear in no time at all, because they’re actually using old ideas and old ideology, which is to promote myself at all times, very American, always be ready with a sales pitch. But they’re actually doing an environment that eventually will kill all of them, because that’s not what the internet is about. You have to sort of figure out how does the internet work? And over time, what will pay off? And over time, what will not pay off in this kind of environment? And we wrote the netocrats the first book 21 years ago, we basically said we use both marks and each and we started looking at the internet society and sort of the digital age and how this would be different from previous periods of history. And when we did that, we discovered that it’s almost like being in Paris in 1789, knowing that the old paradigm are all out in Versailles having a party. And none of them can read or write or count. They’re just old money. They’re not even old money. They’re just old titles, old entitled, right? And they have a party out there and they think the future is going to be precise. They’re all locked up there, 40,000 people. Whereas in Paris, you have hundreds of thousands of people who can read, write, and count, and read tabloids, newspapers every day, and start to read encyclopedias, which are like works of everything that’s ever could be imagined from A to Z, you know, the precursors to be completed today. Yeah, that’s the story of this information, this knowledge. And of course, these people who live in the small departments of Paris thought that, what the heck, we should take over around the world. And the world should be run from cities and not from the countryside. It shouldn’t be run by nobility. It should be run by a new bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie will then build factories. I mean, the factories, they will manufacture things that the world would love to buy. And this will cause world trade to explode. And of course, all the power should move to us. And this was key in the French Revolution. Of course, it got bloody and messy because people didn’t know what they were doing. But when Napoleon came along, 11 years after the French Revolution, and he was not nobility, he was not a royal, he was not from the church, he was a poor, peasants guy, of course, like the lowest of the low in French society, but he was therefore he had a perspective of the whole new paradigm. He had everything to gain by playing himself to be the king of the new paradigm. And he was, and of course, Hegel and the other philosophers were incredibly inspired by what Napoleon achieved. He basically said that, yeah, Napoleon conquered Germany, and he plundered us and he burned us down. Doesn’t matter. Napoleon is the shit. If you just look at Napoleon and then start constructing institutions, Napoleonic institutions, the way schools are universities, hospitals, political institutions, parties, corporations, companies, factories, all these institutions we created over the last hundred years are Napoleonic structures, because they built on the idea that all those involved in these structures can read, write, and count. And that unleashed enormous amounts of power and creativity in human society, put Europe at the center of the world map. It even made it possible for the Europeans to conquer and slaughter three other continents, which they did. You cannot deny that it was successful. And that success was down to the fact that what happened in Paris was interesting, whereas what happened in Versailles was dying. And ever since Versailles slowly died, and we’re going to see the same thing now, because the internet, just at the printing press before, it’s a revolution on such a massive scale, it completely changed how we communicate one another, how we intelligently try to foster value out of the different systems that we create, that it takes a whole new set of skills to be a netocrack in that case, to be successful in this environment. And we’ve only seen the beginning of that right now in the 20th century. People will then see more and more of it, but we’ll see the old institutions of politics and academia and old industry fall apart. So it’s going to get very messy before.

Torsten Jacobi: I find this really interesting. We see this power struggle right now playing out, right? So we have kind of a revolution in the US, and then the capital was taken for a moment, and then we don’t know what actually goes on with our elections. So the trust in the institutions and in representative democracy is at all times low. Everybody sees that, but we, a lot of people just push it towards, well, this is part of this, this is a transitionary process, and we’re going to go through this digitalization. But in the end, we’ll come back to things that we’ve learned, like democracy and some of these core values will never end, core democracy and representative democracy as we developed it. But you, you draw a different outlook, right? That might look quite different from what you’ve known during the last 100 years or so.

Alexander Bard: Yeah. To begin with, my favorite philosopher is Hegel. And he was a German. So here we go. Yeah. Okay. What would Hegel say? Well, Hegel would say, why are you making the assumption that the political zone will be of equal size over time? Politics can either be more or less important in a society. And what we’ve seen over the last 30 years is that politics become less and less important, why it’s become more and more entertaining and had more and more media attention. Now, the fact that something gets media attention, like this Biden Trump, Biden Trump, that’s more like television. That’s our television. It’s basically a reality show. And I always remind people that what actually happened was that Donald Trump took his TV show to the White House for four years, Nancy Pelosi played the evil witch, and finally it was over four years later. And then a really lukewarm Biden show moved in or something. But if you look at politics in itself and its influence as a whole, the power of politics has been diminishing over the last 30 or 40 years. And it’s doing so quite rapidly now. And that’s exactly why nobody who really wants to be powerful moves into politics any longer. We lead politics to kind of mediocre people who are more interested in the attention of it. They see it as a reality TV show. And that’s essential politics is also becoming. So the question is, then, if power is a constant in society, the power is leaving politics, it’s not really interesting to spend any more time on trying to resuscitate politics because politics is over. It’s more interesting where is power moving inside. And the term we use for that in our work is sensocracy. So if you think of like digital, like we have satellites now everywhere around the planet, and we have, you know, fast Wi Fi cables everywhere, and everything is getting connected with everything else on the planet, and it’s moving towards zero cost as well. So everywhere on the planet connected with everywhere else, it’s almost so cost efficient now, it’s moving towards zero cost. That is the internet. The internet on the book, the global empire basically said, here’s a planet called Earth. Here’s a network. And then you put the network on the planet and we call it the global empire. Please note that the global empire we use the term is not a human empire. It’s a logical empire. Technology has no reason to have any borders at all. Technology will work itself towards being one huge cloud covering the entire planet because that benefits technology. So that’s where we’ll end up. Now, if you see that worldview, then, okay, so for example, you might say that, oh, I’m going to go offline today. I’m going to turn off my laptop. I have too many Zoom meetings. I go off with the kids somewhere. I always tell the guys, well, I congratulate you on thinking you’re going offline because if you go into public park, you will actually have sensors everywhere, follow whatever you do. Look at your eyes and they know who you are, know who your kids are. You can’t go offline anymore. Now, if you can’t go offline any longer, that itself is a system. And that system is called synsocracy. Sensors and sensors. Sensors that measure our senses, the interactive human senses and all that they call this synsocracy. Now, the people who are interested in this idea, of course, the Chinese, but the Chinese have decided they are going to create their version of the synsocracy and it’s going to be a dictatorship. Rome by one guy at the top. Since 2014, the impingus implemented the Chinese version of the synsocracy. So it’s about time the rest of us try to figure out an alternative to that, because we obviously don’t want a dictatorship. And I’m not going to moralize against the dictatorship. I’m just going to say they’re not very sustainable. They tend to be bloody over time. They tend to be very dysfunctional. They tend to be virus resistant leak out of laboratories when you have the dictatorship. So nobody wants to tell the dictator because he might be upset. To take six months for the virus news to reach his ears and therefore these societies are very vulnerable. We know that communist China today is vulnerable. We don’t want it. Now the question is then what possibly could be a synsocracy that, for example, has installed power sharing as a function of the technology cell from day one? And these are questions that very few people have even started to think about. But once you start to think about things like politics and law and AI and economics and future relations of power, boom, you understand synsocracy is the shit. You need to deal with these things. You need to do so.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, I’m fully with you. I think this is really the future lies in its often, well, there’s a couple of things that scare people. And I think that’s when they stop thinking about this and kind of kind of get worried. One is that you also, and I think this goes along with all of this, you talk about the demise of the nation state. And what we’re going to get in turn is a supranational major world government. And what we think of is that it’s going to look somewhat Chinese, like the European units, tons of bureaucrats. And there’s, you know, it’s going to look like a COVID regime. Some bureaucrats, the sites that we all have to follow, there’s really no wiggle room. It doesn’t have to be that way. But a lot of people associate that immediately, I guess. And then I think a lot of people now what happened is because of this loss in institutions, they have gone very much in this anarcho liberal thinking frame. So anything that’s coming from the government, any regulation is terrible. And we should have Bitcoin and it should be like an algorithm that basically rules us. That’s what Bitcoin is, right? It’s kind of, there’s some people involved, there’s some voting rights, but generally you’re ruled by even more algorithms. And I think the European Union tried this, especially the Germans. And I don’t think it’s really successful. So humans want to be ruled by other humans. Ideally, they can select kind of the group, but, or maybe by them, by their own decision making only. But I feel like we go on one side very far off into, I don’t want to be ruled by anyone. I basically want to live in my virtual forest. And on the other side, you have the super monocultural, strong bureaucratic UN idea. And that’s what I feel people are worried about. What do you think is a good solution? 

Alexander Bard: Let’s try to find the nectocrats that exist already and then look at their current behavior. And I will say the best place to find nectocrats today is to go to places like Panama, Dubai, and Singapore. Small countries, right? Tightly controlled. They were like gated communities to happen to small nation states. And when you talk a little bit about Singapore, yeah, it’s kind of a, it’s almost dictatorship, but really not. So you can speak your mind, but actually there’s a small elite that controls and runs everything. But the way it works is that people move to Singapore from all over the world if they can’t afford it. It’s terribly expensive. Taxes are low, though. Social services are fantastic. Do you get the best value for money you could possibly have anywhere in the world? As long as you can pay the rent, Singapore is fantastic on the not only country, it also has an airport. You can fly anywhere in the world in 24 hours without any problems at all. Dubai is the same thing. That’s why these places are located where they are. Now, when you talk to people, though, who live in Singapore are highly successful, they work tech, socially successful, they use the online world to their advantage. So they have all these, all these sort of, they sort of fill all the boxes for being netocrats. We wrote about 21 years ago when they weren’t getting it. We have many netocrats there. So for example, we have to sit with an Iranian young woman in Dubai, and she has three kids and Nani’s, and a great husband who works hard like her, and they have careers. And then I ask her, what is the shake of Dubai, which is actually a local dictatorship? What if the shake of Dubai doesn’t give you what you want? Well, then I’m just going to pack everything, take my Nani, set everything with me, and move to Singapore in 10 hours, or somewhere else. And you’re going to see more and more of these places like Singapore, Dubai, Panama is one of them. What’s interesting with Europe is this also possible in Europe. You’ve got places like Slovenia, Estonia, small countries that, for example, I’ve been working with these countries. The working philosophy is trying to figure out what’s the benefit of having a small country of only maximum two million people, what everybody knows, everybody else. There’s just basically one major city and airport, and then maybe some of, you know, like, Slovenia has a fantastic scene in one end, and Mediterranean beaches in the other. I mean, what more could you ask for, right? Now, these small countries are the new model, I think, brought in this huge empire like China and America that’s hard and hard to contain. They’re more and more problematic, more and more internal conflict that could even tear them apart eventually. Because when it comes to technology, technology would be imperial. Technology would be global imperial. It doesn’t owe more to the way human beings do. We have time borders. We go criminal no time at all. As soon as we live tribal size, so we can move to anything larger than tribal, our loyalties disappear in no time at all. And that’s how we human beings operate. So these systems have to take that into account, and people can be tribal and give them tribe, give them clan, give them family, for God’s sake, because otherwise they will not be mentally fit at all. So I’m all for the reinvention of these sort of forms of social gatherings that work for humans. But I would say when it comes to nation, that took a huge effort. The nation state was actually originally invented by the Hebrews and the Phoenicians through an alphabet they constructed 800 before Christ. Prior to that, the Persians invented the first proper empire that a power sharing installed. The US Constitution’s origin are actually the Persian empire about 500 years before the Hebrews created the first nation state. So we know people have experimented reforms that are larger than tribe, they’re called nations, they’re called empires in the past, but it’s been this way hard to make people collaborate in larger social gatherings unless you have technologies and law to reinforce those processes. That’s what we should keep in mind. I would say today, I would go and ask these guys to move to places like Singapore and Dubai and talk to them and say, what do you want? Because what they want will be the demands of the new sort of nature of practice.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, I had Pablo on my friend Pablo a couple of episodes ago who lives in Dubai and I think he would absolutely agree with you. And at the end, I was jokingly saying, well, you love Dubai so much, right? So you’re running for public office and he’s like, well, what are you talking about? So even on a local level, there is no self government, it’s all it’s a dictatorship completely top down. I was really surprised by this because a lot of dictatorship allows a certain level of local governance. You can be not the mayor, but you can be your neighborhood director, so to speak, but those don’t exist. And I thought, well, this is really odd, right? So it’s as you said earlier, these dictatorships, even if they’ve been never lent dictatorships, that the risk goes higher and higher every year that they’re just going to come crashing down. They’re great if they are going the right way, but they are terrible if they’re going the wrong way.

Alexander Bard: Yeah, but they’re not corporations. You think corporations are dictatorships. In a corporation, you’ve got owners and the owners install a board and then before the board, somebody’s responsible for running the corporation. It’s run like an dictatorship. If it doesn’t suit you, you can leave. And that is the model that I see a lot of these things have been run because you can run things quite efficiently that way. And of course, Singapore will have its peak and it will have its fall and Dubai will have its peak and will have its fall because all systems, all human systems always have rises and falls. And the question is then for how long can these sort of city states that would dominate the world now, how long will they last? And I think here’s what benefit of being European rather than American at the moment. Europe has a long history of city states. It was called the Middle Ages, right? And actually, there was quite a good time in European history. So for example, Germany is both in a lot of different smaller city states, and it’s tried to be an empire that mimics the French and the British and tried to create the German Empire in the 19th century for a brief while. But actually, I think all these models that are smaller, more decentralized actually work better now because the technologies will take care of all the other things. So all the benefits of scale you had when you built the nation states, certainly to build an empire, all these supposed benefits of scale, the European Union sort of built the idea that we could have benefits of scale equal with the United States of America. And therefore, the European Union was a good idea. But now it turns out there are no benefits of scale left. Actually, the most prosperous places on the planet are now small city states. And when it comes to example, the COVID 19 vaccination programs, who was the head? Israel? Who else? United Arab Emirates? Who else? Bahrain? Europe? Iceland? Yeah. Then you go again. You see, when it comes to something like that, quickly get the vaccine. So get people vaccinated and get the economy back to normal. These small city states were far better, even in China and America.

I think there’s a lot of magic there. And a couple of episodes ago, I talked to Joshua about the nation states and he was very clear and he was like, well, these things were only there to rally the people, they motivated people and they were they were better than the empires because nobody could really attach themselves emotionally as much to an empire. So the nation states were better at this. And now this is not with the case anymore, because we are more and more rallying about what we see on Facebook. But if that’s something that happens in Germany and Sweden or the US, it doesn’t really matter anymore. Yeah, I would even add that Empire nation haven’t really stood against each other. Two different alternatives and actually work very well together. So for example, why Christ was killed, we should be honest about it. But the Saddukite sect killed Christ, the ones who killed the Jewish sect, the Jewish sect. It was because Christ clearly, whoever was historical figure, Joshua Nasser, was really rebellious. As a result, the Hebrews who break loose from the Romans. And to them, that was ridiculous. The Hebrews were a special nation within the Roman Empire, highly privileged. Under Herodists, for example, prior to Christ’s arrival, then uncertain, they were the central things because actually, they were trained to be the first nation ever within the Persian Empire. Just switch from Persian Empire to Roman Empire. And the way it works is that in an empire, you have a court language. And the court language, how you communicate on the top level of the entire empire, but then you can allow people on a lower level, have their own folk religions, folk languages, their own dialects and things. And that’s how you run a good empire. That’s the Roman Empire was run for hundreds of years. That’s the Persian Empire, for example, thousands of years prior to that. That’s what the best Chinese empire can run too. And that actually makes sense. So if you have a sort of court language that unifies the military, the priesthood, and the court, then you can have local cultures. And actually, the idea of universal human rights and freedom of speech and freedom of thought all originate in imperial structures. Because it’s precise about having an imperial structure that if you can locally do what you want, but globally, we have to be coherent, then you’re ready to create a different place where you can allow people to do that. And it’s the same thing when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion or whatever, you still have to live within a Germany or a France where actually adhering to the nation’s laws, it’s an ultimate religion or a system, that’s the court language equivalent, you can then allow for expression of smaller entities within that larger container. So if you look at empire that way, then we understand, okay, that’s how we learned, for example, why freedom of thought, freedom of expression of good ideas, long term good ideas, they make society more sustainable, and also more creative, and therefore they’re good ideas. So, but then nation, nation is essentially, we can all read and write the same language, and it requires a highly educated population until the printing press came along. And here’s the beauty of it. What Christianity told the Europeans inherited from the Jewish religion was that you could have different layers of community. And it’s that Christianity said there’s a community called church, and there’s another community called state. So pay to the emperor what you do to the emperor, that state structure, and then pay to the lord to be part of the church. And the beauty of doing that is that the Europeans could think at different levels. And what then happened was that when Christianity started falling apart after the printing press arrived, and people could read and write to begin with their own Bibles in their own local language, but they could also read and write in a local language or communicate in that language, we got the nation states of Europe. And so if you, for example, spoke the dialect of Hanover, or rather, you wrote the way you spoke in Hanover, you became a German eventually. If you wrote the way you spoke in Oxford, you became an Englishman. And that’s where we got the nation states of Europe. They became one. Yeah, a lot of people bring forward that argument. I don’t know if this is something you would refer to as our future. There is a, there is a super national but very limited government that’s more resembling a dictatorship that’s more strict. And then we have the US state system that’s relatively independent. So we have a federation of global states that are relatively independent. It can’t be cities or it can’t be states, doesn’t have to be a certain size of body. Everyone can kind of choose and might look similar to what we have or very different, but we have one super national government that’s relatively strict and not as accessible as more like what we think of a dictatorship. So we, it has maybe run by a philosopher king. A lot of people think that. Yeah, I know, but I’m not, I’m not a play to this. I think it’s a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. So no, rather I’m the kind of guy who hopes that Puerto Rico, despite having a totally ruined economy. Puerto Rico is one of the worst and greatest. It’s just loans like mad. They’ve been borrowing money for decades to become dependent on America. Puerto Rico is one of the most expensive colonies ever. But if Puerto Rico does know how to make a decision, whether they go independent or try to become the 51st state of the United States, I do hope they go for the independent thing because they go for the independent thing. They have examples of Panama and Costa Rica and other countries in Latin America that have tempted a lot of really wealthy older marathons to move there, take the money with them, live the good life and have prospering economies because of it. So I think the city state model should actually depend. I’m just waiting for, I thought Brexit was fantastic. I hope Scotland leaves the UK next. But I think the more we have spin offs that make cultural sense because the Scottish today feel more Scottish than the field British. And that’s because it’s Edinburgh and Glasgow and a few other cities. And there’s, there’s a sense of community between this, between these people. It’s a long history of Scotland being independent from England. And they basically discovered that, why are we going dependent? And then we make alliances with others who do not have to be English to be Ireland, more than anything, we make alliances with others when it suits us. Because making alliances in a sort of crypto digital environment moving into it will be much easier than the past. And you can have a lot of different alliances. But how those alliances affect one another can also be controlled by AI. And I would say that, no, I do not want any philosopher things in here at all, not at all. And certainly we don’t want to solve the economy. That would be the price of paper that I think that the more we have decentralized smaller units and efficient technologies and all of the levels that operate, the better off we are. And when it comes to a shared law for all of humanity, we already have one. It’s called the internet protocol. Well, people didn’t realize what the internet protocol was installed in the 1980s, which is the formation of which everything else online is built. It actually became a global standard. And law is your standard. If you have the same law in one town or the next town, it’s the same standard. So you can move from one town to the next. You know what the law is. You can pay according to the law. That’s what we’re talking about here. The internet protocol is already like a US constitution, but it’s really a world constitution that has already been installed. And for good or bad, we have to live with it from now on because it’s now getting fixed and built into crypto, built into AI, built into everything that would then connect with the online world. I think you just go with the price of Ethereum in the last couple of minutes, Alexander, because that’s where the economic incentive and smart contracts come together with the self governance. One thing that you really focus on the books, and I think this is awesome, you really focus on the non zero or something. I think Adam Smith would love this. It’s really where can we create those games that leave both participants in or whatever many participants are in that game better off at the end. Everyone wins on average, which is very different than a lot of these zero sum games that we see in modern day politics, where we take some subsidies from there and move it to somewhere else in the population. Nobody really wins in this stuff. So I think that’s awesome. One thing that I found really interesting in your books is that you basically say, well, competition will be less and less interesting. What we really have to focus on is this global cooperation. Cooperation is a non zero sum game and everyone will be better off. I’m a little, I found this surprising because I feel when we, in the other chapter, when we look at enterprises these days, we all see an increasing amount of competition out there. Margins are shrinking everywhere. So it seems to me for entrepreneurs, the competition is actually much stronger than before. How should entrepreneurs react to that? No, but I love the Silk Road. And okay, and if you travel along the Silk Road and you learn the culture of like for thousands of years, people are traded and they ship the goods back and forth from Xi An in China all the way to Cairo and Egypt, all the major cities of the Middle Ages were along all the world. Now, fantastic. The biggest and most successful human construction ever in the Silk Road. When you walk into the bazaars along the Silk Road, you discover that there’s this beautiful mix between collaboration and competition going on because the collaboration action is the framework itself. So it’s called Membranix. So Membranix is that you got to prove that you’re worthy of being a trader inside the bazaar. And that permit can be, you know, it can evaporate and be gone in no time at all if you don’t behave according to the rules of that environment. That is collaborative. So the collaborative part is that we allow you in and you represent a certain community when you walk in here and you expect you bring the best possible goods from that community you want to trade. And then you can trade with all other communities and see what they can offer. And that’s how you do the trading. And in the trading, you have the element of competition. So, oh, okay, we got Persian carpets here. We got five different types of Persian carpets. They’re slightly different because they come from different parts of Persia. They’re all Persian carpets. If you want a Persian carpet, look at all five and maybe the price ultimately decides what you think. So if you can get the same quality of low price, you probably go for the low price. There’s a competitive element in trade that is fantastic, but it’s always contained within a collaborative network. And once we understand this, but of course, yeah, that’s what we have nation state governments and we have standards for trade. And of course, we’ve had central banks in the past to print money and the money was used for trade. And while we were trading, we were competitive. Now, this is all up in the air. It’s up in the air because the old institutions that try to control these things using military force and therefore had a monopolies of these things called nation states. They’re gone. They’re no longer relevant with crypto and everything else. We’ve got to mind these things. But we still have to create these containers of collaboration because we have to trust the common side of collaboration. You will not really do a good deal at the end of the day anyway. You’ll be at the bottom heap of all trading if you don’t trust that your body you trade with. So that will criminal network. Criminal networks always end up at the bottom and take care of the shit that nobody else wants to do because you don’t want to go to jail. That’s what the criminal network is. As soon as you legalize criminal opportunities, you actually move those networks up to a higher level where they’re actually facing more competition, which is why criminal networks often hate being legalized because actually they’re not that good at what they do. Now, when you see these different layers, then you discover the beauty of collaboration and competition. But our message when we say that we should leave competition and go to collaboration in general today is because we’re leaving a highly competitive paradigm behind us. The highly competitive paradigm was built on the cart and count and we called individualism and then we put it as an ideology inside capitalism and the nation state is the old structure we’ll live with until now. It’s now falling apart because of capital problems by the internet, even it’s killing capital or making it rather secondary. It’s killing the nation state structure, also making it secondary and of course killing individualism. Why? Because nobody follows somebody who goes online and just doesn’t want shit talk about themselves all the time. It’s called narcissism and we’re sick of it. But we love to hear stories and getting involved with communities online that welcome us as participants within those communities. And that’s what we talk about synthesis and synthesis practices that we will even have a spirituality that originally very much emphasized the collaborative aspect of humanity going forward. Yeah, well, I think I’m all the way with you with that. I just feel there is this amount of software businesses that are eating their way through all different industries right now. And what happens is it’s generally a winner takes all game. So there is one company that is big enough has enough VC dollars and that’s the one that takes over the world and that goes for any business you can automate that they are or anything where you have enough data or you have preexisting algorithms. I feel the competition is so strong that only one so wide creates a natural monopoly and then ten years later falls apart. These things, these cycles are getting quicker and quicker. But from my point of view, I feel like the competition is speeding up. And maybe you’re saying the same thing. You’re just you’re saying that it’s more if you collaborate. No, we’ve already seen that digital offers a very fast dialectical relationship between centralization and decentralization. So what happens is that when things become too decentralized, for example, Silicon Valley is basically over. Silicon Valley has peaked already. It’s falling apart rapidly. People have been leaving the sun for this. Why? Because it became an unsustainable environment, incredibly expensive with a low quality of life. So why would you even say that? But also because that model, which was a higher and higher concentration towards everything. But at the end of the day, when Facebook started launching their own Tinder platform, nobody wanted to do Tinder on Facebook. Now, you’re going to cruise for women or cruise for men or whatever and have sexual encounters with people. You don’t want your grandmother to be in the same place. If Max Zuckerberg couldn’t even figure that out, could he? No, he couldn’t. That’s why Facebook failed now so many times. Because they don’t understand what it means to be human and how easy it actually is now in the app world to have different functions and things. I’ll give you another example. I do a lot of online work just like you do. And I love it. I used to work with television, boring, like mad, and I’m not super difficult. Online is much nicer. But people then asked me, so are you two dependent on YouTube then in that case? YouTube is a massive force, right? And I say, no, not really. But the reason why I’m not dependent on YouTube is I know ready to date 11 year olds only send links to each other. And they don’t even remember which platform they check. So if you become independent from platforms, that means you become independent as an agent, and you can then start networks with other people, and they don’t even know either on which platform they’re operating, meaning that platform loses power. If the platform starts squeezing you by forcing more ads into your communication, or trying to squeeze more money out of you, then you start to think, why am I still with that platform? Because my friends don’t pair which platform I use, and the conditions of being there and getting worse is like being again a trader with a bazaar, so to quote, it’s just like, if this bazaar is getting unfriendly and too expensive for me to be in, then probably the other traders are thinking the same way. Maybe there’s another bazaar being built somewhere so I can go there. And that’s exactly what’s happened on a platform. So I don’t believe that all the internet will end up being incredibly centralized. The Chinese are certainly trying that. I don’t think it will work. I think it will be very decentralized because we can now, even with our own hard drives, break entire internet functions today. And a lot of smart kids and hackers do, where we’re totally independent of big tech. I think it’s kind of scared the general big tech when they discovered this sort of forcing their customers into being locked in in some kind of environment is no longer work. Personally, I stopped using Apple products. I hate Apple. I’d be absolutely honest with you because they try to force me to use their products, everything I did, and then charge me prices that were Louis Vuitton when they’re really H&M. And I’m just like, no Apple, you’re not that good. You’re not worth that kind of money. I prefer to use cheap stuff instead and be more democratic and talk to people in a more informal, flatter way. And the way to do this is you use a lot of different technologies, a lot of different platforms, and then play them out against each other. Yeah, I mean, that’s a very hopeful message. I hope you’re right. I just feel we all build up our Facebook groups, right? And then Facebook said, oh, we don’t show you posts anymore to that group because you don’t have enough engagement. And there’s Facebook pages out there with 80 million subscribers that you basically delivered to Facebook more, less directly. They obviously delivered some too. And then you get three likes and you get zero exposure. And you’re like, whoops. So there’s a lot of investment at me or mind investment and hopes that we had for these platforms that as you, I think you’re absolutely right, that they have disappointed us and we can move on. But obviously it’s another investment. So what I’m talking about. But isn’t it interesting that during the Corona year, we spent more time online than ever before and probably spent more time online than we’ll do for many years to come. We probably will go more physically connected. But we did. Facebook lost market share everywhere because they don’t give us what we expect them to, but they, they’re so high minded. They’re so high minded about their own brilliance that we think, you know, irreplaceable. And this is a typical mistake as Peter Pan said. A typical mistake that tech entrepreneurs make. And I think that’s because they happen to be successful and we’re lucky to run into the right people at the right time. They’re somehow irreplaceable ones. Now you also understand one very post Platonist philosophy because we tend to be more conservative. No, no, no, we, we don’t want them. We don’t want them. But one thing you and I have discussed is actually this question of attentionalism, which is probably one of the hardest concepts we launch in our books, although probably also moving forward. Yeah, you have to help me, you know, with the isms. I’m there’s this good amount in the books and I’ll get confused. So help us understand. Well, what do you guys mean by that? Okay, so again, back to the bazaars along the Silk Road. Most of the time you trade it. So you’re bar to trade it. See, I gave you something, you gave me something back. The problem with that is that I always had to find the guy that exactly what I wanted. I had to have something that he wanted from me. So if you started trading three or four people together, there was a much greater chance you would get a non zero gain that all four traders would gain from it. It was a more sophisticated way to borrow. Then you got coins introduced to synthesis and started, wow, thousands can be involved. Now, of course, that way we come in with the printing press starting in Germany in 1450. Within 100 years, we started printing money. We printed money and put little, you know, metal things and stuff in them. So they couldn’t easily be copied. But therefore they could be used as points. This made paper money made trade even more efficient and basically kickstarted something called capitalism. Now, the problem though is that capitalism eventually ended up with incredibly being just the hardest competition in the global scale. So we say you’re looking at the 1960s, the Second World War has been over for about 20 years. More or less everybody except China yet is still then dragging to the global economy. And we China opening up 10 years later, the entire world is dragging to the global economy. Now that means paper money is floating everywhere. It’s then becoming abstract money, which is digital money. And of course, now we just transfer sums here and there, and we have certification methods and bank IDs and whatever, and it works. But the problem is this. This is the 1960s, marketing and advertising has taken over become more important. Why? Because it’s harder to reach people. And then we think because we send more money, more resources of marketing and advertising, we think it’s more successful. We should rather look at it the other way around. If you work for a company and that company has to spend more money on something, it’s because become weaker at that one thing, and it becomes harder to be successful at it. But the business trust of marketing advertisers became fiendish and difficult. And when you came to the 1980s, the whole idea that you would sell a product and tell people what the product was and what price it had, like you’re done in bazaars with that model was gone, you started making up stories instead about products, about lifestyle and how to connect. So the Coca Cola button was no longer a drink with sugar and stuff in it. You purchased for a certain time. But rather, Coca Cola became a lifestyle, Miami South Beach, you were a fashion model, or you were a rock star or whatever. Snap your drink, Coca Cola. So this would, you would associate all these tech person, these sounds in Coca Cola, right? Now the digital came along. And it got even worse, even more difficult. Why? Because now it’s a war over your eyeballs. It’s a war over your eardrums. It’s a war over your attention. And here comes the big problem. When you start starting attention historically, we human beings regard attention as something sacred. It’s not profane. When we go to the market and buy and sell things, we can do that from Monday to Saturday. That’s usually when we sort of trade stuff and we trade our own bodies and our work. It’s our work and we get paid for it. But we do a lot of trade Monday to Saturday. But on Sunday, we expected to go to church and spend time with our family. Why? These are sacred activities. We don’t make money from go to church. We don’t make money from being part of the community. We don’t make money from raising kids. We do it out of love. It is sacred to us, incredibly deeply human. And this is where the fight is now. And advertisers and marketing people are getting furious about trying to get into the sacred space that human beings have. And that’s when we see mental breakdowns. No, exploding everywhere. We have all these ideas that maybe there’s something eerily and weird about the world going on. It’s just internet. All I’m saying is that digital makes it possible for marketing advertising people to pack your senses straight on. But digital also makes it possible for you to kill them when they do it. That’s called spam filters with ad lockers. And I think historically, I think spam filters and ad lockers are two of the most important, most human democratic instruments ever invented. Because we hate spam these days. We hate sales pictures. We hate people that contact us without us even having permitted them to do so. We’re furious with that. But the marketing and advertising people, they’re getting more and more cynical. They’re like Facebook, who employed thousands of psychologists to make us addicted. That’s evil, right? And that’s what tech people are doing now. They’re evil. They’re literally openly non human evil. They’re worse than AI would ever be. Even AI would back off because AI would see this does not lead to any constructive results. And I began to say, I’ve got a one liner abuse to feed firms to spray. But I’m saying that we will probably in the future regard the abolition of advertising as even more important to us in human history and the abolition of slavery. Because that’s how much we hate advertising. That means capitalism is dead as we knew it. Capitalism is dead. Capitalism can no longer go. Capitalism is completely dependent on investing money into an operation and forcing yourself onto people like a rapist through marketing and everything. That’s capitalism. So this is action. This means there’s a huge return to sacredness, a huge return to religion. People are becoming more spiritual. They have to come back in here because we need to recreate the sacred space, the private space around ourselves. There isn’t profane and isn’t public. And that’s what we sort of like Christ did when he walked in the temple, one of the great things he was there. He walked in the through all the money guys out of the temple said, it’s none of your business being here. It’s not that he was going to be wrong. We traded money. It’s just that it’s not our religion because religion is sacred. And I think these are the really interesting topics today. Yeah, I think that’s what I really want to talk about too. I’m just want to say I’m not as harsh with marketing, but what I wanted to ask you is, we’ve lost that and that’s a recurring theme on the podcast. So I keep asking people, why did we lose all this productivity growth that we used to take for granted? And we had in the 60s and 70s and then it somehow stopped. And then we know Peter Thiele’s quipping. We wanted a flying plane, flying cars. And what we got is actually 140 tweets characters in a tweet. So something clearly went wrong. And what I associate and that’s what I’m trying to get to what I associated that with is that we are not daring enough. That’s why we have negative interest rates. Why are we not daring enough? Well, because this motivation that we used to have from God that we used to have maybe from this individualism from this card, it’s gone. We are this, we are this just and head on the head on his enjoying being since 1968. That’s completely just following the limb big system pressures and everything else is, you know, we don’t want to go to the moon. We barely want to go to Mars. We don’t, these mega projects, this historic project of where humanity wants to be, they’re all gone. I don’t see them anymore. If I see them, they get canned, you know, two years later. Peter Thiele is right about that his boyish dreams will not happen, but he’s wrong about this actually would be interesting today. Because going to the moon, once we got to the moon in 1967, yeah, that was news for one day. If it would go to Mars, that’d be news for one day. Then we, yeah, there are some humans on Mars or crazy nuts over there. It’s no better than Siberia anyway. We might as well stay in Siberia. Now, I’m an economist myself. I would say that you can’t measure productivity growth the way you measure GDP growth. Actually, the way you measure GDP growth, GDP growth, we get a big pandemic COVID 19. It undeniably is a huge cost of mankind. But because people work harder and work more to save lives, because the disease is stoning the system, you get GDP growth. At the end of the day, solving problems was interesting. But if the problem doesn’t even occur, then you have a lower productivity growth, because you actually solve the problem once and for all, the problem will not return to haunt you. A lot of productivity growth comes from returning to a problem that’s never solved. It’s called subscription services. That’s why medical companies hate accidents, because they actually solve the problem. They prefer to put down pills for years and years and years and never solve the problem, because that’s how they make money. Here’s to say to men as well, watch out when you argue with a woman, because you probably don’t want to solve the problem. You probably want to milk the problem for years to come. She can do that. She gets away with a lot of fun. But watch out for how systems actually are solving their problems. And when you solve a problem, that leads to negative economic growth, because it wants to come on. It’s no longer a measure. I would say, what we’re missing out, what is deflation and repression in the economy at the moment, are two reasons. One of them is the technology itself solves so many problems that weren’t solved before and therefore creates new markets for those things to be exposed to. They don’t necessarily resolve in growth, because you solve the problem that you’ve added a new activity. And actually, the new activity is more efficient than the old activity was, which means you get lower growth. So you’ve got to watch out when you measure these things. And the other thing that people don’t understand with deflation or repression is that deflation present, yes, it’s a sign that we’re not spending enough of the money that we’re printing. And that will probably lead to deflation eventually. But the current deflation or repression also because money cannot solve the problems we have. You cannot throw more money onto marketing and advertising. You think you’re going to get through. You’re only going to be an even bigger, even worse rate, if you do. And that’s what corporations usually do when they get more money. They’re more like, yeah, let’s spend it on more marketing, more advertising. And then their competitors do the same. And it’s a race against death. They spend more and more and more on marketing and advertising, rather than spending more and more making an even better product. And then trust the algorithms, which is what they should do. I think marketing and advertising will do the job for them. Once you make the switch, though, that the payback on marketing and advertising falls towards zero. I think, for example, woke is an example of that at the moment. You already have corporate neutrality as a new term in America. It took about two years to get there. Meaning the people who have discovered that woke is only costing you money. It’s a terrible mistake by marketing people to go political with the corporation. So instead, by going for corporate neutrality, like Coinbase, based on the most attractive technology companies in the world today because of that, if you go towards corporate neutrality and kill woke, you’re actually saying, we’re going to kill all the marketing advertising. We’re going to throw it out the door. We’re going to make the best possible product in the world, after which the algorithms would point to us anyway without spending a single penny. That is the future of technology. And that is when you will see a slight inflation or pressure come back in and higher productivity growth in general, because of course, then innovation can really start. That’s what people see. So we’re looking at, say, towards the 2030s and 20s. Yeah. So you’re saying that really it is about the core innovation. And most startups these days are about 80% marketing spend and then 10% R&D and then 10% whatever, raising funds. So they have basically a big marketing organization. Very few of them actually do any basic research or find that necessary or more than in the marketplace. Like VCs don’t really want them to be invested in R&D because they can’t really see the ROI right away. And Google and Facebook have fooled all these companies to believe that we can now target the ad so it fits perfectly and doesn’t irritate people and gets to the person who would really like to see the ad. Okay. That’s like a cynical sociopathic rapist telling you that, oh, you failed to rape this woman yesterday because you were too close. You know what? We’re going to help you really rape the right woman. So we’re going to look at the map and find exactly the woman who you can undisturbedly rape for as long as you like. That’s what they’re promising you. It’s not any better. It’s capitalism at its worst because it’s the end of the world. The only thing that can overcome this predicament with both were tenacilism. And gladly, I see the crypto companies are doing precisely that. They learned from the mistakes the big pick made and they’ve learned that we don’t ever want to rape anybody. We don’t even want to seduce anybody. We don’t ever want to have any sales pitches because that in itself looks like we’re just going to put our product out there and if it works, it will work. I’ll give you a perfect example. Where in Germany are you located at the moment? Oh, I’m in Greece. You’re in Greece? Great. You’re in Athens, right? Athens has Google Maps. If you look at Google Maps, you’ve got restaurants. And probably by now, people use Google Maps so much when they go out in Athens. Any restaurant with a grade of lower than 3.5 probably dead by now. It might even be that any restaurant with lower than 4.0 is dead by now because people like to go to good restaurants. And they could get good rates even if they’re only decent if they’re cheap. People can say, yeah, it’s infotainment value, meaning that I can go to cheap restaurants and get decent food and I can go to decently priced restaurants and get good food and I will give them best grades. And then all the other restaurants are gone. Now, if that’s the case, if nobody goes to restaurants in longer grays unless they check Google Maps first, that means you could start a restaurant and you invite only five guests. And you give them absolutely top experience. Best dining experience they have at. And you give them a nice bill afterwards and they pay for the bill. And you have five guys who walk out the door and give you five out of five Google Maps. That means your restaurant’s going to apply point to all the next day. You’re going to have a long queue outside your restaurant within a week. You’re going to serve people the next summer, every day packed because you created that initial first fantastic experience for five people without making a single ad anywhere. That’s how you use algorithms if you’re clever. And if you figure that out, then you’ve figured out quite a lot these days and you stop spending on marketing advertising, get out of that game and probably leave or sign, go to the streets of Paris, immerse yourself in the new and in doing business and being productive in the new environments. Rather than think that the older environments are ever going to come back. Advertising, as far as I’m concerned, is dead and over. Yeah, so you would consider, you think advertising is a misdirection of what you’ve been taking and that’s where we see this low productivity growth. We don’t really invent anything. It’s kind of like tobacco, right? It makes us addictive to something that is wrong. And if you get rid of it, we go back to the innovation then productivity growth comes back. Let’s assume we measure it correctly. I know this is a big debate, but in the end, one thing that’s always wonderful to measure, maybe not so wonderful in the core sense, but it’s worse. In worse, you see who’s more productive. As terrible as a war is, but the war is won by a more productive nation most of the time, 90% of the time. And it’s never about which weapons you have. It’s the ones you developed during the war and can afford. Let’s put it this way. Yeah, you can add ideologies that’s clever on top of that. For example, when the person invented that, we’re going to conquer Babylon. We’re not going to boil the children oil, but actually going to invite them to co rule the empire with us. I was like 533 before Christ. One of the most dramatic ideas ever, because then the person has invested less than an army that actually become more victorious. So ideologies can add value to that. Who do you try to deal with innovation? Yeah, yeah, that’s a great segue to religion. I want to talk to you about that because it’s such a big part of what you would you would you investigate in the trilogy. And what you really exemplify, and I’ve never read that anywhere else, it’s really how we look into Abrahamic religions as a way that we felt we are bound to the thought process of Abrahamic religions and then discard change that. We thought about the individual, right? And now we in this third process, or maybe it’s much longer numbers than this. And in this process, now we really we’ve lost our way. And the only way out is to become like Nietzsche, right? To find that ubermensch to to define ourselves and define our values in this crazy, more crazy world that looks more like quantum mechanics that we now discover. That seems to be a bit of the thesis, probably misquoted to you 100%. But that’s what I get. I would say that Nietzsche’s cause of the death of God today would call the death of a paradigm. It was a certain god that died. It was the Protestant god that died in Europe. And he saw something rise after that because of a new paradigm that people could read and write, the Bible was no longer than the literature people had. And therefore, they would have a different world. So I’d say the death of a paradigm is what I’m interested in on the rise of a new paradigm that hopefully rises quickly enough to take over. Because if you don’t have a new paradigm rising over an old one dying, you get the problems. That’s what you historically get. So let’s see we’re heading in. I would say you can’t even talk about the last world. One of the things I knew when I started working in the 1980s was that I can’t really buy this mythology that all started with the Greeks and the Greeks were somehow European, because the Greeks saw themselves as like protection against barbarians to the north of a civilized world where they were very minor enough more. They saw the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians and the Indians to civilize. That was the world. Middle East was the world. It was the West, the original West. So I don’t buy into that. I converted the Zoroastrianism myself. I started dollies and Buddhism for years. I learned Sanskrit and Vesta, some Mandarin, so I could study Chinese, Indian scriptures, the original versions. And I discovered that it’s just where actually thousands of years older in the Europe. And I also think the Greek Hebrew connection was constructed in the 19th century by German and French colors. Really, it is the Hebrew Persian connection that is the origin of the West. And therefore, we can also include Islam into that, but not only the Abrahamic faith, but also the pre Abrahamic faiths and pagan cultures and all the other things. Now, on top of that, we created other religions. You always have military religions and you have priestly religions that aren’t the same ones as the Falken religions. And the priestly religions, in our sight, it is academia. The military religions of our society, they’re the state, the nation state, and tidy between those are the markets. These are religious institutions. They both have certain beliefs that certain things are good for humanity, at least they’re good for the institutions themselves and nothing else. And therefore, these things will operate in certain ways. And these are built starting in Venice in the 14th century forward, printing press held it along with a paper money and they’d all exploded. And then we got Western capitalism. But none of this is granted in history that it will stay around forever. And if you if you fundamentally change the very conditions for that, for example, if you completely prevent capitalism from being able to communicate to people the way it has been doing for the last 100 years, it’s probably not even capitalism. Because if you completely destroy the communicated process of capitalism, which we are doing at the moment, then it’s no longer meaningful to discuss capitalism. And it’s much more meaningful to discuss what if we look at the world from the intentional perspective, like, what is it that I give my attention to? Where do I project infotainment value to something? Does this inform me or does it entertain me? Hopefully both. That’s where I will keep my eyeballs and my eardrums, my focus and also get fed. And you know, have all my needs taken care of. And that’s what algorithms that’s a good algorithm to build exactly in that direction. Give us that advantage. And that’s why sort of an algorithmic society, as we call it, is what society makes for itself. And here comes the important part. That makes it enormously important to train people to think that certain things are sacred, not that things are perfect. Sacred is that you will never sell. And private and public, meaning that that which you offer on Instagram and the pictures of your kids and all those things you put out there, without plundering your soul completely and emptying it, all content, that’s public, right? What people are now discovering is they need to create much larger private zones or otherwise they could sell. And I’m really interested in these philosophical questions, you know, what does it mean to be private? What does it mean to be sacred in the in the sort of world we’re moving into now? And we will for sure know that everybody wants access for a sacred space. Everybody wants to go because the only way to get our attention is to have access to our own sacred space. But we don’t want the traders to be in there at all. Yeah, one thing that’s that’s really fascinating. One thing that I immediately always think of, and that might not be something you’ve looked into, but you looked into everything, that’s that’s what I’m discovering. You have the answer to all these these problems. Very often, I think they’re very, very profound the way you thought about them. One thing that I always feel comes to religion is this mandate to improve yourself that, you know, it’s kind of this error correction to our limbic system. We have this limbic system, it drove us forward, it’s kind of like our ant and we are an animal. But then the religion comes on top of it creates more trust and kind of error correct certain behaviors that are just too short term because we want to have a long term positive outcome. Sometimes they go along or often they go along. Sometimes they don’t. And that’s what we use religion for. And that’s kind of when we are talking about algorithms now, when I think this is also the new way we talk about this, this religious instinct, it’s all over the place like everything is possible, right? So everything is possible and not possible at the same time. So what I’m, I think what religion gave us is to give us this mandate, okay, this is a way how you should develop because it makes you and the society around you more successful. Now that seems to be harder to find to get to this point, because we can’t just open up the Bible, we can. I think the utility is still there, but there is a cultural disincentive to do this and be like, okay, you have to find your own way. And I don’t think a lot of people have the ability to do this. I mean, I feel like I can get there one day, but by that time, I’m probably dead. So I don’t get this, this, I get the wisdom maybe when I read the Bible, but I don’t get the mandate because I don’t behave like the Bible. No, I don’t think the Bible works any longer. And this is why I think Christianity is over done with, but I’m very pro religion. I think we need new religion, or we have to go to older religions that are more sustainable and are more suitable for the kind of world you live in now. So I don’t look for legists that preach supernatural phenomena in our life after death or anything like that. We don’t believe in it long, but luckily there are legists that even older than Christianity never did that. They didn’t take the shortcuts. They didn’t do the quick fix thing that Christianity did. It made Christianity popular. And both Christianity and Islam suffer from their popularity. They suffer from the fact that there are a lot of shortcuts and quick fixes about this storytelling that actually is no longer credible. But on the other hand, if you talk to somebody today, the class, probably the class, there is secular atheists and they’re over religion, overdone with it. You essentially hear a very self obsessed cynical nihilist talking, right? And why would you trust a cynical nihilist? The problem is if you throw religion out the door, you haven’t really understood what religion does to you and the way it’s supposed to shape you and domesticate and train you for your next step in your life. So in tribal religion, how are we to be elders? Right? The old matriarch and the old patriarch, they have an ultimate power. And their job is to train you from being a child into being an adolescent and then from adolescence to being a proper young adult. And then from a young adult into slightly older adult and then become a parent and then take responsibility for others and therefore receive the blessing of the community, having purpose and meaning in your life. And when you think of it this way, I mean, I’ve worked with tribes all over the world for years, right? I don’t see any of these modern predicaments with mass depression and has lost the lost sense of purpose and meaning. I’ve never seen that in the Amazon. I just never seen it. And I’m not romantic about the crimes. Hey, they buy t shirts and jeans as soon as they can and they go online and get wifi and start playing funny games as soon as they do. So I’m not saying we should go back in their life, but I say we should understand what religion is. Now, religion though, it’s two different types of religion that we developed over time. The first one is the original religion which is called nomadology. This is basically the religion of the nomadic tribe. It constantly has to be on the move. It has to be on the move. So all change is just to move from one spot to the next to survive. That’s all change. Everything else is circular. Everything returns to the same. There are seasons, there are days and nights and everything returns to the same. This is called the nomadological mindset. Hinduism is a perfect example of a completely nomadological religion. And that has been very hard for India to be, for example, the explorative industrial superpower on a par with America and Europe. They’re getting around that now by not being Hindus any longer because according to Hinduism, everything should remain the same. You should stay within your account. You should not leave anything, which is very nomadological. What happened about 4,000 years ago, starting in Persia, this is the origin of the West dimension that comes with Persians through Hebrews and onto the Greeks. And that comes to Hellenism that comes to the West dimension, comes the idea that a dramatic change can happen in history that changes things forever. And thereby changes the rules. And of course, this idea occurred for the first time when we permanently settled. So your mind is just like, okay, we’re not going to move tomorrow. I don’t have to focus my entire mind on the change of territory and move from one place to the next to survive. I can actually stay in the same place. I can trade in this place. I can farm. I can tame and investigate animals. I can stay here. What am I going to do with my boiling head in that case? Ideas, right? So we move from genetics to memetics and we move towards exploration. This is where we get the first innovations in history. The first proper innovations that changes everything forever. And the idea that the sun can live in a better world than the father, is to not be the sore astronauts who started preaching first. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the eventological religions, even the sort of scientists that we have to deal with the belief that you can go to Mars with them or Moscow, whatever you like. All of these ideas are eventological faiths. And I think that’s important. I think what the West can contribute in dialogue with China, Japan, and India these is that we got on to the eventological pattern 4,000 years ago. And that was actually a really good idea. Now we need even more eventologies today to make the planet make it more sustainable and resilient so that future generations can live here. But why would we do that? That’s a perfect, perfect example of the next growth sector, the next productivity growth comes within making the container more sustainable. That’s why I’m an ecotopian, not environmentalist. I think technology is the solution to the current problems that environmentalism is crossing. Well, I think the same way, exactly the same way. And I think the same about climate change. When you, and I love this in the book, you talked about common, this is something I personally experienced. And you said, well, this is basically just a Christian cult. So it kind of takes values out of Christianity, takes them to an extreme, then makes itself God, which obviously Christianity is has always has this problem with that Dollar Tree. There are saints everywhere. It’s not as strict as Islam or for Judaism. But we still have these cults being generated. A lot of people think of vocism as one of the similar cult Christian cult that comes out of it and goes similar ways as communism. You can argue about that. Do you feel there is something right now that there is a bit of new religion that will fulfill that, right? This QAnon. A lot of people think about that. What do you feel comes closest enough to this new religion that takes a lot of these learnings and maybe gives us this new direction that’s maybe positive you never know before, actually people. Well, I’m interested in peer, I’m interested in peer religious. I’m interested in religion in the sense that we can have a dialogue with the Chinese and maybe, and great competitive alternatives to what they’re dreaming about doing with solosocracy. But that’s really imperialism. That’s what philosophy really is. So you put that on the philosophical like, okay, what is the future of whatever replaces politics? What are the places I can give you? I want to give you all of these different institutions, the global institutions that are tangible over time, or are they just anarchists or pluralists? We try to figure that out. That’s a map you’re trying to build. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people will fall straight into what we call the golden age of sects and cults. We wrote a paper in 2012 that it is not about this. And the golden age of sects and cults means that the worse these sects and cults are, the more horrific they are, the weirder they are, the stranger they are, probably the more they will attract. But unfortunately, human beings have lost it completely. It will only go after even more ambivalents. We’re trying to look for dangers everywhere. So what we’re looking for, phenomenologically, we’re observing and taking in the world. We’re looking for what is the weirdest thing out possibly. And if it’s weird, we start to think it’s true these things. But the word is getting subserv to most of us. Actually, the weirdest proposal we can find looks like the most credible one around. And this is what we meant. This was nine years ago, and we’re seeing it explode. Now cannot know these cults. There’ll be over no time at all. Occupy most of what is over no time too. I mean, you can’t do anything any longer and get people to walk out of the streets spontaneously, demonstrating as something for three days. You know, it’s like Occupy Wall Street is stating Wall Street for three days. They didn’t even know the Wall Street guys were no longer in Wall Street. I hadn’t even done the research. And after three days, the financiers came to Wall Street to meet them and sold them tshirts and said, I was there. Yeah, be the skip. So they were great. They were including the capitalist system that we’re supposed to be demonstrating at because there were two nights in a row. And I’m not sure if you can understand what’s going on. But that’s what I see a lot of these days. I see a lot of these stories. So we will have a lot of that in Europe this summer. I’m sure about that. I think we created an enormous pressure concern with the COVID lockdown. And hey, people are going where they’re aware of it. But we’re saying this in the book is for the video. We’re saying that we’ve got to see more and more of this weirdness and anxiety. Because we don’t have a central ordering place that I’m there with and then create more credible stories. It’s two layers. It’s the imperial layers of monotheism originally was the other for a public level is politics. But in Catholic faith, you have God is an abstract concept. There’s three aspects of God. But actually, you’ll go and worship the Virgin Mary or some saints anyway, because you can relate to them, you can’t relate to God. It’s the same thing for people today. People can only relate to other people. That’s the vast majority of people can do that. The very few people can relate to the abstract are the ones that will be in control. Because they’re always the guys who get the power. But for the vast majority of people, they must relate to something much more concrete. And that concrete thing will be different forms of iconologies. There will be celebrity worships and you know, saints and martyrs or whatever and and George Floyd’s or whatever you’ve got. They will go for these things. But these all of these sects and cults might look very powerful and impressive, because they big stands for quickly, but they also fall apart quickly because they have no sustainability ability. Yeah, but sooner or later, I think this process has been going on all the time. There is something that we produce that makes us that we stick to for like a certain amount of time, but it also makes us more productive, right? I think this is what I think they were the Christianity. It was a cult that was crazy. They all celebrate the safety of Jesus Christ. It made people productive. They had more babies. And then 200 years later, it took over the big emperor in the world and then it took over the world, right? So it’s a big success story that happened with relative short time frame once enough people associated themselves with it. We don’t have that yet, which is probably a good thing. Because I read that when you when you spoke about Nietzsche, where you co author that we, yes, we want to be the Ubermensch, but on the way to get there, there’s going to be a lot of medium stages where we kind of follow a false island instead of improving really ourselves. And this is these these medium state religions, right? The only communism only relived for like 100 years or 200 years. Well, I defend the word communism. I always say that I’m a communist, but I’m not a socialist. Because I think that actually even Marx made the same mistake that he would accuse Leninow. He was simply hurrying to mark. Common is basically just the tribal life, the trust of the tribe, and split the shared resources within the tribe. So that’s what communism meant. It’s longing back tribal life, tribal life is possible. While I’m saying this tribal life is probably regulated with the help of technology, and you can have you can have small you can have larger groups that just try within a sort of communist utopia. The communism can only be one voluntary and it can only practice by an elite, which is exactly opposite of what the left to promise people. So I would say if you go from capitalism to socialism, you can go from socialism to communism. But then you have to remember that Marx was heroic, just like Nietzsche. He just think he went his heroic course would be a group of people of proletariat who wouldn’t be there. We would then see the necrocrats today take that role. But that’s that’s that’s all I say with Marx. And then I leave it at that. What I’m saying is that woke, for example, is not Marxist at all. Work is completely Rosso. This is Rosso. This is this is I’m born a tabula rosa and I can pretend that I’m anything gender whatever like a skin color. And if you don’t like that, then fuck you that I’m going to kill your whole responsible forever and milk you for all your resources, because I’m going to do victimhood calls from now. Right. And that’s of course why a lot of black Americans hate Black Lives Matter, because they don’t want to go into this woke mode or victim and say, yeah, we have a terrible past. But actually, we have done done that. We’ve dealt with that. We can all be successful. So why don’t we look ahead instead of staying within that sort of realm of constantly returning to our own failure, as if we enjoy it. But I think it’s Rosso that’s problematic here. Yeah, because people have a certain bad conscience. I think it trades on other people in society having a bad conscience because otherwise you just ignore that claim, right? But the claims of vocalism has been taken very seriously by a big majority of people. And the first reaction is, oh, you tell me you’re a victim. Okay, let me investigate. Can I give you the benefit of that? So it’s kind of trading on this Christian attitude, I feel that that we still have. Maybe that’s just the slave and that’s where I feel that’s where it came from. Yeah. And it’s incredibly problematic. And it’s not going to win in the long run anywhere. I mean, in a way, the world is becoming like India. Say India with a Singapore next door for the elite. That’s probably more what the world will look like in 50 years time. And I’m learning from India. And I’m just saying, well, the complexity that we have to deal with. And hopefully they’re not going to war one another too much, create society that’s very similar to India. Now, for good or bad, I like India a lot, right? It’s been a lot of poverty that they’ve also done very well in the last 30 years. So the only problem with India is to maintain peace over time and not to create too much rivalry in very densely populated urban communities. They went for the caste system. So instead of saying that your father did this, you might want to do something very different. And your archetype might be different from your father. In this sense that your father did this, you must therefore do the same thing. You must do it the way he did it and not do it any way differently than he did. That creates zero incentive for non zero some games, right? That’s just just splitting the same cake all the time and probably larger population, smaller cake makes it even worse and you get even poorer. And that’s the problem you get for the caste system. The caste system, what I want to avoid, but other than that, to live in a society with so much complexity on so many different levels to still make that work and having a sort of a religion that’s implemented in different ways in different institutions of different levels too, that the Indians are managed to do, I think actually is a model of must be studied. For no other reason, India is the only country we know in the world that cannot be run the way communist China is run today. But India is for sure immunized against the kind of system communist China. They call themselves communist in many Indian states. Yeah, they do, but they are democratic communist parties you vote for and you can vote them out of power. The only place in the world that acts as democratic communism means successful practice. And East Bengal and several of the states in India have done quite well on the communist rule, but this is a communist democratic rule, right? So it’s not Maoist communism or Chinese communism, it’s not communism or decree. They’re actually through the through the voice of the people from the need. And of course, it’s all depending on which ones of the castes you get to vote for you in the elections. That’s India. India’s becoming generalized in a very fast way at the moment. And there’s a lot of interesting things that I work a lot in India, especially before the corona was there all the time. And I find it very fascinating because I’ve argued for over 20 years that the world would increasingly look like India. So learn from what India did well and did less well. Because that’s so interesting. I lived in India for a while and I was really shaken by that. It’s a sense of I care about myself and not about anything else. Like you see this basically in sidewalks or you see about cities, it’s really parcel up in certain individual behaviors. And it’s very different in some concept than when you think of Europe, right, where everything is top down. Maybe that’s the idea in India, but it never really worked that way. Or it’s really parceled out in my individual success. And there’s a caste system, I never could wrap my mind around the caste system, why this still still exists and hasn’t been competed away. I couldn’t wrap my mind around this. So something happened or didn’t happen in India that you got, you got the top down within the castes. That’s trick. So for example, Amazon, Amazon raster, and there’s a small raster minority in India are very successful India called the Parsis. They’re probably the most successful ethnicity in the world when you look at educational levels and even beat the Israelis. So there you go. But the Parsis, I live with the Parsis, they actually live as if they were a caste in the Hindu system, exactly why they’re so tolerated. But because the guts are at the strong sense of top down structure within their own community, they in practice live like in the lead cast within Hindu society. For example, social acceptable for Parsis to marry a Brahmin, as you marry a Brahmin, you marry someone at the top of the Hindu system. So the Brahmins love the Parsis, friends around and love to marry the Parsis family. Even Indira Gandhi, for example, married a Parsis. So technically speaking, her sons are all you’re going to put on for what is a raster and not a Hindu. So when you learn these things when you live in India, it’s going, okay, so it’s within these structures that top down works, where society as a whole operates as a kind of massive huge bottom up thing that occasionally can pop something and pop out of it. It can work for a while. It can be say a local little empire or some kind of nationality to pop up for a while, but then it probably falls down back into the community. But really, all you do all the time with your narrative storytelling is connect the community in such a way they don’t go to war with another war, the absolute hell. And that is fundamental to religion. And that’s where you have the yogis everywhere. Where do the yogis live? In between tribes, in between castes. They’re not a category you can fit into anywhere else, but they just go between. And if yogis are horizontal go between in a side like India, then you can figure out that’s how shameless work in tribal communities too, because they’re similar. And that means they can also then take care of the vertical communication, which is talking to the gods in Europe. And that’s exactly what religion starts with the yogis. It starts with the yogis relationship between tribes, what’s in between worlds, androgynous in between men and women, the shamanic, shamanoid in between tribes, and the horizontal communication with foreign forces and forces outside of your control. These studies, they can also communicate vertically. That’s the underworld to the upper world. Because they can do so, you go to them with your concerns and your life. And they’re neutral. They’re not involved in this sort of rivalry, some power games that the rest of us are constantly. That’s so fascinating. I mean, the way you take apart that part of Indian religion, that’s incredible. I’ve never heard something like that, so intense. I wanted to ask you two more questions. The first one is, when you look at the last 20, 30 years, you’ve been saying you really focus on philosophy the last 20 years. What surprised you the most? What turned out different than what you initially predicted? It’s usually to do with the speed of change. So technology can change slower than you expected, because there are more hurdles than you thought there would be. And there’s suddenly motivated or unmotivated, but very definite resistance to innovation. Then something like COVID 19 comes along, and some departments slow things down. But the vast majority of technological development was actually hurried up this year. That’s exactly why the stock exchange is doing so well. Because the tech companies have gone through the route. Why? Because we discovered that a lot of things we did before, the physical bodies have spent tons of time on, can actually be done through tech. And we can save time, save energy, do other things without money. So that is, it’s not necessarily productivity growth, but it’s a growth in the terms of quality of time that we have to spend on other things. So that just speeds up things. Then I could say digital libido was released in 2018, working on process and event for at least in 2020. Oh, suddenly digital libido was prophetic in less than two years. Because a lot of the things we thought we wrote the book would happen in, say, 20, 30 years time, happened already two years later because of COVID 19. So I would say our future logical map has been correct. The important things we talked about have happened or are about to happen. What people don’t realize yet is that all the old institutions will go before this is over. And they will fight, try to stay relevant, to stay alive. And they will accuse them of all kinds of things when we don’t want to say them, right? But like you and I don’t do television, we’re on mind everything we do. I think it pays off to go into the new world, the new technologies and new ways of communicating as quickly as possible. Because again, the sooner you learn the new technologies, the sooner you learn programming, the sooner you’ll learn to use media and all these things, the better off you are once these things are implemented in the large scale. I’m fully with you. And we just talked about the future. Records, while obviously came up with the theme of the singularity now, has supposedly happened in 2038. Is that something you are on board with? Do you feel it’s going to happen and it’s going to be a massive amount of brain power? Do you really have no way to predict what’s beyond it? Or do you feel it’s not going to look like as fantastic as records while it makes it out to be? Probably not. Fantastic for whom? That’s the question. I would say we wrote about this in the synthesis book a lot. It’s actually a response to what I think is Kurzweil’s very sort of amateurish, a bit infantile, fantasistic. But we work with that constantly. So what this is called is called emergencies. An emergency is that something suddenly happens. There’s a certain state of complexity where certain things apparently can occur, often just for once and ever again. But after an emergence of real importance, you get an emeritus vector. I give you a perfect example, for example, physics. Now, some at a certain stage, physics became chemistry. Chemistry operates very differently from physics. And the same way, at least on one planet, one time, quite a long time ago, life suddenly occurred and biology came out of chemistry. And we all know this was on planet Earth. So we have biology here now and we deal with biology as its own emergence vector. That’s what a singularity is. A singularity is nothing more or less than an emergence. But the question here is really this one. It’s very, very likely that we will have a point in time where technological development will certainly kick in a whole new year. And what will then happen cannot be described with any of the vocabularies or any of the narratives we’ve explored before. You could not explain biology to somebody only with chemistry. You can’t, right? But once biology exists, then it makes sense to explain and start a fantasist about what could come after biology. Now, probably nobody who did biology or wasn’t about biology, it’s kind of weird to talk about this, because you need mind to talk about the biology, but mind is a later emergence. And its own emergence vector. When people talk about this difference in mind and matter, and there’s a mind matter problem and all that, yeah, no, it’s only a question of prior to the emergence of pure biology, after the emergence, you’ve got something called mind that requires biology built on it that is a different category, not yet. And in this sense, we could even speak of technology itself as its own emergence when human beings discovered they could extend their own bodies, which is tech, and technology is how you extend your own body, make yourself more powerful, by creating tools that add strength to your body. That’s what technology means. When the technological development that happens with human beings and homo sapiens, and we know some animals also have very rough technologies, rally development, we started to develop these technologies in hunting tribes. And then eventually it was picked in with printing process. And before that was the language. And the fact that you could, you could write down everything you invented during your life. So the next generation could build on your knowledge and didn’t have to reinvent everything, right? That is essential with civilization. And all of this develops. Yeah, it’s quite likely we get to a certain point where, oh, wow, things just suddenly changed in a way that this could not have been imagined. Now, for good or bad, when that happens, it’s like Quentin Melissu, the French philosopher, said, he said once, there’s only one word for that action. That’s the word God. He came up with a wonderful one line. He said, God is way too important a concept lead to the religious. And because we don’t have any other word for the unthinkable. And that’s when the synthesis of book we say, instead of saying that God created the world that we live in his creations, that’s ridiculous. creations can have existed forever, or creations can come out of creations. We don’t need a God for that. Actually, we should not have one to begin with, to think it properly. But if God is a great word, why don’t we take it back as a God is something that could still happen. And I don’t think we have another word for I think, I think Kurzweil’s proposal, which is the singularity, I would say, why not just call it God that we’re Cynthia us, the God of creativity or creativity is God. So something that could be a God called Cynthia us that could occur in history. And that will change everything forever when that happens. Do you feel like God to is kind of like this, what we say, if we don’t know what it is, because that’s kind of, you know, what we’ve been doing for a long time, we can’t explain that it’s God. Or do you feel we had it somewhere. And, and maybe there was an alien creator that that kind of helped us, you know, gain this consciousness, a couple of things that he had with humans that nobody else could even copy by now, right? Like other primates have a copy consciousness. Do you feel like they have someone. If an alien creator would have created this, or somebody would have had to create the alien creator, you end up with turtles all the way down, you can’t. We have not created anything to begin with, only mimics everything. The consciousness is also overrated. I’m a big fan of the mind of the consciousness of America. Most of the things you do in your life are consciousness. And it’s only as an insight, you make up a story about why you did what you why you did. Your wife yells at you. And then he said, yeah, I was responsible for that. But somebody has to invent something that is responsible, right? So subjectivity is actually quite, in our philosophy, quite marginal. We’re very much focused on human being a bodied, embodied person, embodied creatures of kind. And that’s as we’re not different from other animals. But on top of that, we have a mind that starts to go off. And we have language to which we could communicate with each other the way that animals cannot do. And that’s essentially what it means to be you. So we’re not headed somewhere, like we are not the bootloader for machines, we’re not just like providing spare parts for some alien intelligence that needed another ship, so to speak, right? That’s kind of no, no, no, no. And I’m not a determinist. I’m neither determinist nor indeterminist. I think both positions are wrong. We know from physics, for example, that determinism is determinism happens locally. We kind of say that the world globally, as a whole, the entire universe of its development over the last 14 billion years, that that is deterministic. No, it isn’t way too complex to understand from determinism or indeterminism. It’s not a program. Because where the hell was that program written in that case? You know, it’s just, yeah, no. But once you go into… You just don’t see it. No, no. But once you go into what a wave function collapses, they realize, oh my god, there’s no free program to any of this at all. It’s just complexity is colliding without the complexity, it’s colliding without the complexity. And it’s called pan dialecticism. The whole way you look at the world. And once you see the world that way, it becomes kind of challenging. Well, if I knew everything that would happen in the world, all that was where I could put it. No, you could not. Because actually, there are moving all of these things, and there are in relations in one another, and they’re also exposed to gravity and decoherence, every one of them. So you cannot forget at all where gravity is. After the future is contingent, and it’s only in hindsight that we try to make the world look like necessity. Yeah. So we should give up on science. No, not at all. That’s kind of like, that’s a bit like this, you know, I don’t know about quantum mechanics, how complicated it gets, and with the multiverse theories, and nobody can really… We don’t have a good, good wave. No, I don’t believe the multiverse theories are interesting, even. I think they’re boring. And I know super student theories are interesting to study. They just allow everybody to perform without wanting to limit their body. Because they have some interesting concepts that are used to stop it, because super students aren’t very interesting either. What is interesting actually is studying space time. I was always interested in that question. And that was like a question that physicists wanted to avoid, because it was so feature difficult, because like, well, if you don’t understand the background on which you base everything else, then you haven’t really gone to the bottom of understanding reality. You’re lazy, right? If you don’t understand what space is, and certainly if you don’t understand what time is, which is philosophically incredibly interesting, then you haven’t really done your homework. Because if you think space time is a given that we cannot understand on which of the atoms are dancing, then you’re still back at Newton. I fully agree. Where do you think should I look in order to understand space time and actually beyond that concept? Because a lot of people I talk to on the podcast, they feel like, well, this is light speed, it’s general relativity, special relativity, and that’s about it. We don’t want to assume more, because then the equations don’t work. We don’t want to talk about that, right? We don’t want to talk about the early stage of the universe, what’s before the big bang, because we don’t have data, we can’t measure it. So they discuss it immediately. Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no. I believe in the big bounds firmly so. Bojavod showed the equation in 2011. You remove the infinities and the series from the mathematics, and the infinities and the series do not exist at physical reality, then you can actually understand it was a big bang. Now, how the big bounds operated, Bojavod’s theories, Penrose’s interesting theories about it can do a lot of work that way. No, I think we should just be deeper, go deeper in science. And I think Lee Smalling has done fantastic work. He parted off with one of my colleagues, a great Brazilian philosopher, and they wrote a couple of really great books, and they’re very, very concerned with the question of time. My proposal is that time are actually two different things. It’s just, like Bergson said, time and duration aren’t necessarily the same things. And that’s because time arrives in discrete units for one moment to the next, where duration is a continuity. And this could also explain why you never can reunite quantum physics as we know it with a relativity theory, because one of them is actually built on continuities in mathematics, and then it was built in discussions. And once you operate with discussion, it’s like trying to title the number of five. So it’s three plus 14, and then it starts forever and never ends, because the circle is perfectly continuous, whereas the discrete mathematics of its cardinal numbers is not. So you cannot unite these two. You have to live with them. And actually, that’s how our worlds fundamentally are. Hegel had done physics, who would have been obsessed with the difference between this question and continuity. It’s a deep, deep philosophical question, and it now eats into the very fabrics of our reality. When you think about the next couple of years, you just explained the world and the universe. What are the questions you really want to solve? Is there something where your fingers are burning? That’s something you really want to write a book about the next couple of years. Oh, there’s so many things. Some things get stuck, and you don’t get any further. And some things just explode in your face. And then somebody comes up with surprising new ideas of where it is. What was that? That’s interesting. Oh, it even relates to my philosophical world. I must study that. Something I might have to work with. If you pens on, there are surprises all the time. But what I work towards though, getting older is a better understanding what it means to be human. And that’s like a fixed entity. And that’s why I say to people, it’s not even psychology, because you should study, they should study archetypologies. Study what different types of humans are there. Just spend time doing that. If you do have the policy and then you go into archetypology, you understand humans. You’ve actually not wasted a single minute of your time, because humans will always be humans. Or humans will be humans at least for a very, very, very long time to come. Even if we’re synthetically biologically starting altering ourselves and getting rid of decisions before we get to them and things like that, that’s not a part of the medical revolutions we had 200 years ago. But they won’t alter our minds. And they won’t alter what it means to be human. And the human body is so clean this year. We have not even begun to touch the surface of understanding what we are. But we can see through our behaviors and our psychological constructs of the world, we can see what it means to be human. And that’s better transparent in technology. Because if you want to focus on technology, you have to relearn everything every three to four years. Yeah, a lot of people think that when going through technology now, it goes through a similar phase. We kind of jokingly say opening eyes like a teenager, right? It has the same intelligence. Not that it has a real intelligence, right? But we are re creating children in form of technology. So we go through what being human actually means, get through the same models, and eventually get to where adults are or where someone really lies like you is. And that’s what technology wants it has. There’s one machine you can spread it out all over the universe, so to speak, right? All machines can learn it in some way. So that’s this big thing that people feel in the next 20 years. Once we’ve decoded humanity, we can make the better human, the forever living human that goes through the universe. Yeah, that’s what quantum, because the most interesting thing with quantum computers is the possibility for them to do AI on a par with synthetic biology, because it requires so much number of crimes. And of course, the other thing I want AI to do is to finally design the fusion nuclear reactor that actually works, right? Because we can only gamble when we have human designers designing those things, right? With AI, we could probably design it if we want. AI will short all the limitations of anything. I would say also because there’s a limited intelligence is the right word. When we speak of will to power as a deeply human force, right? Machines cannot experience will to power at all, because the power itself is only electricity when you put it into a machine. It only pushes things forward, as electricity does. It can therefore have to be interested in intelligence, gathering and processing, because that happens to be just quick operation. It cannot be interested in what we call pathos, your feelings or emotions, how you react to things, how your senses react to other things. Then you don’t want emotions there, right? I think that’s why machines cannot crack jokes and there sounds the right, sound terribly eerie and weird, like it sounds like somebody trying to copy something that’s right. I think machines can create culture for people with really bad tastes. The sophisticated requirement for your taste, like you ought to be surprised or transformed by culture, it cannot happen with machines, we know them. Because they are stuck with the destruction. It’s stuck with the series of one, even if they operate series of one, almost the infinity. It doesn’t matter. It’s still just series of one you do when you do technology. So yes, I expect the machines to conquer outer space for us, because we’re not fit to go there. So let’s leave outer space to machines that then kidnap some bacteria and take with them and model as they so wish, and therefore they can create life forms around the planets and things. So the sort of dull, gray, cold universe we’re looking at to think of something way more exciting. That could be interesting. So we then as humans could go and visit for a week or so in March or something before we want to get back first again, which is our hope, right? As far as the human body’s concerned, and as far as we can take biology, biological development, we as human beings will be stuck on this planet for hundreds or possibly thousands of years. It’s only hubris to think otherwise. But the fact that you and I don’t care whether a third guy goes to Mars or whether the shame that we happen to like goes to Earth, that will happen within the generations. And that will be happy to send the machine that’s much more adaptable to the Mars. So being human necessarily in your mind means we have to have a human body and the limitations of the human body and be without the humans. It cannot be something that a machine can ever, I don’t know, I want to say Emily, but I think they have to have this survival strategy and they will sooner or later copy that survival strategy. So they will behave like that. You need emotion. But then the machine must be a neurological functioning machine, not anything we know today. And then it must have bloodstreams and things. And then it’s no longer a machine, is it? Then you’re basically building Frankenstein’s monsters and you’re building a human. So the description of a human that you just described, we’re far from that. We’re moving very fast, very fast computing is what we do. And what that can do is… Yeah, Alexander, I’m really looking forward to that answer in your next book. I really thank you for your time. I mean, you’ve been very generous with this. That was awesome. That was incredible. Thanks for coming on. It’s been a pleasure and I’ve been here for totally selfish reasons having this discussion. Alexander, that was awesome. Thanks so much again. Thank you so much. Take it easy. Bye for now. Talk to you later. Bye, Alexander. Bye.