Alexander Bard (The philosophy of everything)

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• 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