Sure. So, yeah, I'm Ethan. I'm a cofounder of, the Cosmos Project, which we, wrote the white paper for that back in in 2016. My background is in, a mix of things. I I graduated with a degree in, physical science with a focus on biophysics, specifically the origin of life was sort of the the problem that, captured me, namely how was it in the universe that's always running down? Do we get organisms and and living systems that run themselves up? This seemed like an important thing to answer. And sometime in in 2013, I discovered Bitcoin and, you know, in a previous year, I had sort of seen it and dismissed it because I didn't understand it. And I I didn't know what all the cryptographic primitives were that it was using. And in 2013, I dove in a little bit more, and and came to understand that Bitcoin seemed like the kind of phenomenon I was studying, the origin of life happening in the digital media where you have this sort of self emergent, organizing network essentially, that that is persistent, has an identity that sort of lives on through time that can defend itself and and and so on. And so that just completely fascinated me. And it seemed like, you know, if the Internet was kind of a biological revolution in communication, then the Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies were a subsequent revolution in in coordination, and that seemed very important. And I've pretty much been kinda all in since then working professionally, in the in the crypto space basically since 2014 and then, you know, eventually founding Cosmos in 2016 and working on that ever since.

this A little bit. Yeah. I mean, I had always been, I got into programming in high school, I guess, in grade 10 or something. So I had some basic understanding of of computer science. What What I was really trying to do, you know, through most of my undergrad, let's say, I would and and when I started my master's degree, I was largely, not really concerned with larger political economic issues. I was mostly kinda narrowly focused on, like, you know, grand problems in in physics or neuroscience or cell biology, the origin of life, like, trying to find a grand unified theory of everything, let's say. That was kinda my my drive. And at some point, that started to be, you know, challenged a bit by metaphysics and and existentialism and, you know, spirituality and these kinds of discoveries, which led me, maybe somewhat perversely, but I think also interestingly to pursue a somewhat, like, moral physics, and to try to try to understand how a sort of, you know, metaphysics or existentialist position might be derived from a physical understanding or biophysical understanding, which led me to sort of what what I call today, which is maybe my philosophical basis of, sustainability existentialism. You can get into that maybe maybe later on. But, somewhere through throughout university, I ended up, you know, being turned on to the problems with economics and and society and issues around how things are funded and financialization and became quite disenchanted with the academic establishment. You know, before then, I figured I'd be a professor and would never have to do anything else. And then, you know, things changed quite dramatically when I when I realized how, like, you know, morally corrupt so much of, our institutions are. And so that led me to really think about these problems of of coordination and of, of organisms and and sustainability. I had discovered, like permaculture and, you know, local agriculture and, you know, how to grow food to to support the population. And in thinking about the the origin of life and the problem of an organism kind of sustaining itself, started to apply that lens to society and and, you know, how socioeconomic systems are are kinda like organisms and you need to apply a similar lens to them in terms of how they respond to their environments and how they sustain themselves and how they consume inputs and and use them to, you know, grow and and reproduce and and live over time, and and what that means. And so, you know, sort of realized that we were lacking, I think, a a theory for how to do that and institutions that do that well. And and and, you know, I like to say that, so much of of how our society is structured is more like a tornado than an organism. We don't really effectively represent our boundaries. We're sort of spiraling, and we're just gonna crash into our our resource limit, which is kinda what's happening with with, modern economies. And what I saw in cryptocurrencies and and the sort of coordination function that they provide was a new way to to represent, the interests of of society and to coordinate better to sort of, you know, mitigate those, those crises, let's say.

Yeah. So, we frame the kinda key goals or the philosophical foundation and the values of Cosmos as as sovereignty and interoperability. Right? And there's really a a kinda deeper political economic aspiration there, for the, you know, kinds of technologies we wanna exist and what we want communities to be able to be enabled to do with them. Right? And, you know, everyone who's building in the blockchain space is talking about the same kind of issues in political economy, the, you know, monopolization of of corporations and the sort of exploitation of the network effect and, you know, the way social media is eroding democracy, all all these kinds of things, lack users, sovereignty, and so on. And then the solution is always, okay. Well, we'll build the one true blockchain system, and everyone will use our one blockchain network. And if everyone uses it, that will solve all the world's problems and, you know, kumbaya. And, that struck us as somehow somehow wrong. And, you know, the the vision is sort of evolving. So you were sort of against 2016 is a little bit like Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, in in our minds, there were gonna be, many, many blockchains, and each of them would had a right to exist and could solve different purposes and and really would serve different communities and different stakeholders. And what we needed was to build tools, not to build the one true blockchain, but to enable this proliferation of blockchains to represent the values of, you know, the heterogeneous communities all over the world, and yet for them to still be interoperable with each other. Right? So we wanted them to have sort of sovereignty over their infrastructure, their application, the expression of their own values, and yet to be interoperable with the many other, sovereign communities out there. Right? And so that that was really the the sort of core ethos of of Cosmos was to facilitate that. Now that's that's sort of how the the vision has has expanded in its, looks like larger political economic scope. Sorta more narrowly at the beginning, it was really about, okay. Let's solve key problems in the blockchain space. If we're gonna have a proliferation of blockchains, they can't all use proof of work. That's gonna be too expensive. You know, we need good tools to actually develop them. We need them to have good protocols and so on. And so many of the pieces we've built over the years, the Tendermint consensus engine, the application blockchain interface to separate consensus from building applications, like, all these things enable, many advances. These are sort of public goods we've we've put out over the years, obviously, all open source that have enabled a proliferation of, people building blockchains using the tools that are right for them, the programming languages that are right for them, and, you know, representing the the sort of using mechanisms and and representing values that are right for their for their communities. And the sort of larger cosmos vision is to enable them all to be kinda stitched together using IDC, in the way that makes sense without a sort of top down prescriptive topology, but in a way that, you know, is a bit more bottom up and and and emergent. Right? And in the midst of that, of course, there is, you know, one blockchain maybe we care a bit more about than all the others. We call that one the Cosmos hub. It hosts the Atom token. That was sort of the shelling point that there was a lot of coordination around to actually fund, you know, a lot of this development and so on. But unlike many other projects, the Cosmos Hub community isn't a sort of maximalist community. It's not like this is the one true blockchain. It has no special privileges in the network topology. We call it a hub, but its hub functionality is emergent and, and it needs to be earned. It's not something that's sort of prescribed before, so it's not like rent seeking in that kind of way. You know, it it's a hub insofar as it it will provide value to those to connect to it. And like all the other chains that are being built, you know, in application specific ways, the hub is being built to be a, you know, specific application that serves the needs of of many other chains trying to connect to each other. So it's a little bit more forward looking to say, okay, there's gonna be all these chains. They're gonna have needs for connectivity. The Cosmos hub can sort of, provide that. So, you know, along the way, Cosmos has tried to deliver. Like, first, we prove proof of stake could work, at scale, and now everyone's using proof of stake. You know, the application specific chains was sort of a big push from the Cosmos community that not everyone's gonna wanna build on Ethereum. They want their own chains. They want their own sovereignty. And, of course, we're seeing that prove out. And then and then the next big piece was this, like, interoperability standard, what we call IBC, the inter blockchain communication protocol, just really, like, one of the key key pieces of of Cosmos that enables these different sovereign chains regardless of their sort of underlying structure or consensus or, you know, application to still communicate reliably with each other. So

Yeah. So, there there's a lot of things that that feed into this, and maybe this will lead us also to larger conversations about political philosophy. But, you know, it it's my understanding that we have gone way too far down the the corporate rabbit hole and sort of lost sight of, you know, how we organize society, and and the corporation has become the sort of primary vehicle for doing that. And and the problem with with the corporation, is that it insufficiently represents the value contributed by many other stakeholders. Right? Or or it's, let's say, it's, obligations to many other stakeholders besides the shareholder. Right? And so in, like, you know, the American ideal of the corporation as purely existing to deliver profit to shareholders, it just chronically fails to actually represent in its structure the other stakeholders that are involved, which means from a sort of, you know, larger sustainability existentialism perspective, it's it's kind of doomed to failure. Right? If you don't sufficiently represent your environment, you you can't sustain yourself. And and to have a whole society built out of that kind of flawed model, you know, it's just it's just a recipe for for disaster. So it's kind of been, clear to me for for for some time now that, we do need more cooperative, structures that explicitly represent in the kind of state machine of the organization more stakeholders. Right? And and there's been progress on this. There's a number of different forms. We have b corps in The US now and and and elsewhere that that try to prioritize other stakeholders. But the nice thing about cooperatives is they really, you know, empower the actual workers of the organization who do, you know, contribute so much value that is so chronically, you know, underrepresented in in the structure in a way that, you know, can be very unfair. And and I think this is one of the major failures of of Silicon Valley and this kind of model to actually, you know, properly democratize ownership over, over these companies. So it was really important to us that when we were spinning up informal that we would structure it like a a workers cooperative. It's still a for profit entity. We're still, you know, we still have revenue. We're still driven to make money and distribute it to the owners, but the owners are, the employees, and they they control the company on a one person, one vote basis. So, we were exploring sort of a lot of, alternative, you know, structures there. So we're not a statutory cooperative. We went, you know, from the outside. We look like a normal private corporation, but from the inside with our sort of articles and shareholder agreements and bylaws, we have this one person, one vote, governance structure, but we also have a separate class of economic shares that are not uniformly distributed, but don't have voting power. Right? And so, you know, as the as the CEO of that of that company, I'm sort of constantly reminding the employees, like, I'm accountable to you, you know, not just to myself or not to some, like, abstract investor, but, you know, I'm here because I earned the position according to the employees, you know, to to continue to to serve the company and and to serve the employees and and to build the vision and and so on. So I think that's really, really powerful and important. And part of part of the model we're trying to, we're trying to create with informal is something that can be reproduced by others. So we wanna, like, export the model and build tools and so on so other people can easily do it. But we have this notion that, you know, corporations aren't bad. Like, shareholder based corporations aren't inherently bad. It's not like there's something fundamentally wrong. The thing that's fundamentally wrong is that the entire society is is built around them. Right? And so what we're kinda pushing for is a model where we have more of these sort of, cooperative parent companies that can spin out and incubate more shareholder based, you know, for profit standard, let's say, high growth corporations. And that way, the the gains from them are sort of more automatically distributed across, you know, the the workers in in the kind of parent, and that should hopefully help, somewhat equalize and distribute ownership and gains and and so on. So that's, that's kinda how we're thinking about it. Yeah.

existentialist. Like, no one knows what that is because I made it up. So, like, I'm cool with that. But, like, socialist,

Yeah. I mean, the the reality is day to day, it functions it it can function a lot like a normal company. Right? You have, a CEO. You have an executive team. You can have, you know, a traditional management hierarchy, decision making, however you want. It can look like from the inside, you know, a normal normal, quote, unquote, hierarchical, you know, authoritarian, if you like, kind of company. It doesn't have to. It certainly can. But at the end of the day, the the employees, the workers are have control over the executive team. Right? They can they can have a shareholder meeting and fire them. Right? And so at the end of the day, you know, if they want that sort of authoritarian structure, they can vote that into place and say, okay. This is how we want the thing to run. You know, no one will know if we don't tell them that it's a cooperative until, you know, our annual shareholder meeting or until we have to, you know, overthrow the CEO for doing whatever. Right? So so it it's sort of up to the company how it wants to run. There's a sort of a common misconception like, oh, you're cooperative. Like, how does anything get done? Is everything, you know, by consensus? Like, how do you get everyone to agree? Like, no. It doesn't have to be like that. Some people, you know, will structure their companies like that, but you can't really scale that. It's very difficult to you need to pursue visions and and and so on that way. But at the end of the day, in our structure, you know, we do have a CEO. We do have an executive team. We do have quite a bit of, autonomy with within the company. And we're trying to, you know, culture that and culture as much sort of distributed decision making and and clarity over that as possible. But, you know, also at the end of the day, I'm accountable to the workers. I know that, you know, I do something they don't like. They can, they can always over overthrow me. So we're talking about this kind of funny idea of doing a fire drill where basically I fire everyone. And then they would use their you know, they all have termination periods. Right? So I could fire everyone because I'm the CEO. I have that power. But then they could, they could call shareholder meeting and, like, replace me as CEO and undo the firing and hire themselves back. And then if they want, like, you know, reappoint me as CEO. So that you know, we're probably not gonna do that because it might be a waste of time. Know, reappoint me as CEO. So that, you know, we're probably not gonna do that because it might be a waste of time, but, it's a cute concept, I think.

Yeah. I think it's a very real problem. And and maybe the biggest risk is that, you know, crypto just kinda gets co opted by Wall Street. You know, there there are a few ways to look at it. One is, like, at the end of the day, the the crypto revolution, if we can call it that, is going to overall increase certain baseline qualities that I think many people would agree are valuable. Right? People are getting an education in in security and the idea of, you know, what custody over assets means, how to use private keys to sort of, you know, manage authentication and identity and stuff like that. And and, you know, crypto is kind of raising the bar overall on that. There are other trends happening, you know, two of a and and so on. I remember people using YubiKeys, and that's not really because of cryptocurrency, but cryptocurrency is sort of accelerating that. The other piece is the sort of, you know, consensus systems and, the ability to do kind of multi stakeholder agreement, which is really what, you know, blockchains are, multi stakeholder databases. That could really lead to improvements in, in in infrastructure and the sort of political decentralization of infrastructure even if, you know, cryptocurrencies don't help realize the division we all we all think they do. They're sort of that increased, you know, quality. And and then, of course, there's the openness, transparency, verifiability, which is really kinda one of the the key principles cryptocurrencies are pushing for. Like, that's that's kinda here now. It's out of the bag. It can't go away. Right? So, unfortunately, though, it looks like, you know, what what is kinda happening with with DeFi, is that we're just getting, like, a new version of Wall Street where everything is a little bit more transparent and verifiable. Right? And so whereas before, there were very high barriers to entry and, like, you couldn't really verify easily what was under the hood, now you can. But other than that, we have, like, the exact same political economy taking place on top. Right? And and this this bothers me, quite substantially because I I think it really shows. And, you know, when I was younger, I sort of certainly subscribe to this more naive view that, you know, the like, technology can't solve all our problems. And and a lot of what's happening in in blockchain is just like, oh, we have this new technology. It's gonna solve all these social problems. And it's like, no. It's it's not. It might help a little bit. It might, like, open the playing field or or, you know, get more access or or enable new innovations and so on. But unless we're careful, it will likely quickly be consumed or co opted by existing, you know, financial interests and and and structures. And I think that's what we're that's what we're witnessing and that's what, you know, we're hoping to, you know, push back on and and create something a little bit different.

Yeah. So I think we're we're trying to discover what regenerative finance could really mean. I I mean, we were fortunate that the memetic structure of, of DeFi and DeJams kind of set our set us up. That. Yeah. So we are capitalizing hard on this this region narrative. And but that's really the idea. And I I think the crux of it is, you know, going back to the kind of sustainability existentialism and and how does an organism exist in a universe that's always running down. It's a matter of, like, actually representing internally, your environment and your real world processes. Right? And so much of of, let's say, degenerative finance, stems from the fact that it's so decoupled from the real world, from real world trade, from the things that actually keep people alive, from real inputs, from the sort of, you know, ecological basis of our and and even, you know, human action and labor basis of our of our reality that it's inherently degenerative because it doesn't actually represent anything real. Right? Which is not unlike Wall Street, I I would add. Yeah. I would, you know, I was really kinda talking about Wall Street and and,

And so that's exactly right. And that and that and that's a lot of the concern. Now I would I would caveat that just a little bit by saying that there are innovations happening both in the blockchain layer and in the DeFi layer that are really, I think, really profound And that will can have a big impact on political economy and and helpful hopefully, help resolve certain, you know, outstanding issues in in kinda international macroeconomics, let's say. And maybe that's, you know, naive or hopeful or optimistic to think that these crypto nerds are gonna come up with things that are gonna solve, you know, 200 year old problems, like, let's say, like, the tripping dilemma or the the trilemma of international economics where you have, you know, challenges either issuing a reserve currency or managing the sort of, you know, trade balances between countries, stuff we we can get into all that and how DeFi might help there. So there is something really interesting happening there that that could be applied. We're not seeing it applied yet, but the problem is that, essentially that, yeah, these things aren't really connecting to real world real world processes. And that's where the the regen idea comes in. Right? That we need to actually ground this stuff in the real world, in ecological health, in, you know, regenerative behaviors for for the planet and and for ourselves. And that's really where where Cosmos is is trying to focus. Even though we do have, you know, a great set of degens and and DeFi and a lot of innovation happening there within the Cosmos because the tools enable that, there's also a very strong contingent that's focusing on this region aspect, like the region network, the IXO network. You know, we're working with, Grassroots Economics. It's another project in Kenya to start to adopt, use the cosmos tech and other sort of local currencies. And in particular, the thing I'm most, most kinda interested in is, and I consider this basically the the sort of policy outcome from sustainability existentialism. So if you start from that philosophical basis, you end in what I've been calling monetary localism. Again, made up terms so you don't get to have, you know, connotations for it. But it it it basically implies much more, locally grounded supply chains and and self sustainability in in communities. And and the way to, the way to do that is kind of by reformulating, money at a more local level and building it out of basically trade credit. And so allowing communities to extend credit, to each other internally and and kind of building a web of, you know, obligations out of that and building money on top of that and then trying to sort of stitch them together into a into a global system. That's at least kind of the idea. But yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. I mean, there's also, you know, systems like the region network, which are focusing also on, like, you know, global carbon credits and and ecological monitoring and how to incentivize people to actually regenerate, you you know, perform regenerative agriculture and take care of their land and rivers and and and stuff like that. So there is there is kind of a global element to it, and you can you know, there probably is still room for, global coordination and regenerative global finance, let's say.

That's that's certainly a risk. Yeah. That you that is just like the same DJM incentives and behavior, but That is greenwashing. But greenwashing. Exactly. So there there's certainly a risk of that, and that's something I'm I'm also worried about. But I have a somewhat incrementalist, I think, approach or iterative approach. And so I think there are ways to leverage. I don't wanna say leverage greenwashing in the right direction, but, you know, sort of. It's always a battle. Right? Like, you have good intentions and you're trying to operate in existing political economic conditions, existing market conditions, you need funding, you know, you need to incentivize investors. So it's a it's always a battle to sort of manage these these competing interests. And most of the leverage is on the side of of of the capital, ultimately these days, and that, you know, pushes you in the direction of, you know, it just being or whatever. But, hopefully, the sort of underlying, structures of, like, sovereignty and interoperability can help, communities express these more, you know, locally grounded values and sustainability values, and that will, that will start to emerge. But, yeah, it's a battle. So

Yeah. That's, it's my way out of getting put in boxes. You know, I I should caveat this by by, you know, with a a admission of humility, I guess, that, like, I am very much an amateur political philosopher, political economist, and I've only really started a a deeper investigation in in the last year reading classic texts and so on. So I'm still trying to put together the history of economic ideas and and, you know, how it all how it all fits. The thing that has been pretty steady for me with is this kind of sustainability existentialism, this idea that, you know, which is derived from my my biophysics. And I think something like ten years ago, I tried to write a blog post called, like, how to derive politics from physics, which basically leads to a kind of localism and what I'm now calling monetary localism because I've come to believe that that money is actually a a very important, social relation and and, you know, institution in society that needs to be completely reformulated. So the the grounding of sustainability existentialism, let's say, is this problem of, sufficiently representing your environment and and your boundaries in order to take advantage of of external energy inputs and incorporate them and and sustain yourself. Right? And this is something that organisms and ecosystems do very well, and it's something that is actually, you know, contrary to the, what might be seen as, like, a contradiction of the second law of thermodynamics that entropy is always increasing. This this tendency, actually supports it. And and so the underlying, you know, concept there is that basically lower entropy forms, so better organized forms, can be better able to dissipate incoming energy than not. Right? And so you can think about the fact that, like, humans exist and organisms exist and all this is because those systems, even though they're low entropy, highly organized emergent systems, they exist and they're thermodynamically favorable because they do a better job of dissipating the incoming sunlight than, a barren rock would. Right? If you just have a rock, the sunlight you know, a lot of the sunlight will just sort of bounce out, whereas what these organisms and and living systems do is they they harness that incoming energy, and they sort of cycle it through many processes, stepping down iteratively, dissipating slowly as heat over time. And on net, they produce more heat in the universe, than than they would have if if they didn't exist. Right? So you get this kind of, you know, life is this, the way I put it is this, like, inevitable yet absurd phenomenon where the the beauty in the form of, you know, this emergent form is derived from its superiority in destruction, its ability to actually increase the entropy of the universe faster. And so maybe this means we're hastening the heat death of the universe and so on. And, you know, if you wanna resolve that, you can read Isaac Asimov's The Last Question. That's sort of where I go, where I stop there, and then we can come back to the politics and what it means for what it means for society. But, essentially, I think what it means is that, we need to think about our energy inputs as a society, where they where they come from, what their limits are, and we need to match up our internal structure to actually represent that. That's to say that internal structure of society or of an organism contains literally a model of the environment and of the energy that drives it. Right? The the driving signals you would say in sort of non equilibrium physics. And that model contains information, and the the amount of information it contains about the environment, the effectiveness of the of the model you contain within you for predicting the environment, is actually directly related to your sustainability and your ability to sort of harness incoming energy and changes in that energy and, you know, reproduce and and sustain yourself. And we do a very bad job in society today of accurately representing our environment, our energy inputs, what sustains us in our institutional structure. You know, a lot of this is due to the way we harness energy, fossil fuels, or sort of, you know, the we're kinda subsidized by the history of the Earth with all this all the sunlight stored up in the, you know, in the geologically, and and that's a big problem. We sort of count these you know, people count this as income on their books when it's actually burning the assets of the earth, so there's kind of an accounting problem there. So, you know, that that's this is this is sort of the grounding of the what I would call the sustainability existentialism. And and as you start to reason through it, you find very strong justifications for more local political economic structuring because, you know, these are sort of classic information theoretic arguments that, at a large scale, certainly at the globe or even at the nation state, large nation states, highly centralized institutions, there are there are limits on the bandwidth that they have and on their ability to synthesize and accurately represent their environment. And this sort of forces you to push push the model and the representation down to a more local level where you where you can effectively, synthesize and and, you know, build a model that that responds accurately to the environment. And so, you know, you find yourself in a more of a, you know, a a political economy of the kind of the ostroms and, you know, the, commons governance and and stuff like this that's much more localist oriented than any kind of, you know, global, political regime or or or something. So that's that's kind of, a basis, and we could go into a lot more, I'm sure.

Yeah. Exactly. The the sort of localism I'm talking about is not a, you know, isolated kind of one off Right. Spending for itself kind of thing. It is this this more polycentric, multi scale localism where you actually, you know, be because your energy inputs and and the driving signals are also multi scale, which is to say that you need internally, you need multi scale representations. Right? And so there are things that you wanna represent at the most local level possible, and then there, you know, which is, say, the individual or the family or whatever. And then there are things you wanna represent at higher and higher orders, and you need to kind of, you know, learn what kind of external driving signals need to be represented at at what levels and form sort of, you know, better, better models of society and have this kind of multiscale localism that allows us to go basically from local to global and back, is sort of how I've been putting it. Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. So, this is my my my classic talk on the brief history of distributed state, you know, where where my understanding of, like, what we're doing as a society, is really this kind of state machine replication in the sense that each of us has a model in our head. You you you can tell, I like I think a lot in terms of information theory and models and and how we model each other and understand each other in that kind of way. But each of us has models of the world in our head, and and there are, like, implicit rules in our society, in our social norms, and so on. And what we're trying to do is we replicate these things over time to our our children and, you know, to to maintain our, you know, social relations and and and structure of our society. And that, you know, that is this kind of process of, of distributed state and of that state's replication. And what I what I like to point out is that I think there's a kind of an analogous process happening in the distributed state functions in sort of geopolitical history and in, you know, network digital, infrastructure, where we started in a world, let's say, of, you know, villages and city states on the one hand, and, like, individual computers and intranets on the on the other. So that's the sort of first stage where you just have these, like, small, kinda isolated, self sufficient fend for themselves. You don't really have to worry about much beyond their borders. There's not much interoperability or anything like that, and they're sort of, you know, somewhat primitive, initial, initial states of this. Right? And then you move on from that stage into the era of geopolitically, what I called somebody else's, empire. Right? And and digitally somebody else's computer, which is sort of the cloud. Right? So you have the the great empires of of history, Alexander the Great, and, you you know, and so on who come in and and sort of combine all these all these self sufficient city states or villages into a an overarching empire. And there's a sacrifice in terms of the, you know, the stateful relationships. You basically have to give up some of your sovereignty. You have to adopt some of the imposing culture, let's say. And, you know, and there's a trade off there because now the empire will protect you. Its army will protect you, but you have to pay taxes and and so on. And same with, you know, Jeff Bezos and and, you know, his his computing empire. I mean, he's like the Alexander of the great of our time, trying to unify the world into his into his cloud. And, again, there's that trade off where, okay, you have to pay higher taxes, higher fees to to Amazon. And but on the flip side, you get all this infrastructure and it's high availability and or at least they claim and, you know, they keep your servers up. But, you know, if they don't like you, they can shut you off just like if, you know, the Macedonians didn't like you, they could, they could smite you or suffocate your religion even though they were relatively tolerant as far as I understand. Anyway, the the problem with this kind of with the with the this empire approach is that the underlying substructure of society is too varied, for a single kind of state, a single set of rules to apply broadly to all of them to really represent the underlying stakeholders. Right? And so you get this kind of commotion. You get rebellion. Right? And so geopolitically, this was the the rebellions of the nation states, the American revolution, the French revolution, and sort of everyone else that came with their own nation state. And in the digital network realm, we have the the cryptocurrencies, which are sort of sovereign nations in their own right, defecting from from the cloud and and trying to establish their own, you know, kind of infrastructure that that can, that can sustain itself independently of this of this larger empire. And and that has sort of become the the the primary mode of of society and of digital networks. Now let's say not that everyone's using blockchains yet, but that's that's sort of where we're at. But the problem there is that you still have the same the same issue. You've made progress. You have all these all these states with their own constitution that better represent their their citizens that, you know, give them more voice in in political elections and and and so on, and they're, you know, they're kinda interoperable. They trade across countries or whatever. But we're we're still at a point where the the civilization underneath the constituency is too complex to be represented by a single a single state machine. Right? And so trying to unify these massive geopolitical bodies, you know, the entire United States or the entire Europe, let's say, it it's too much for a single state to effectively represent the underlying interest of the stakeholders. And so we're seeing this, like, intense, you know, factioning and and all this, like, political fallout and, you know, accelerated by social media and and so on. And and we see the same thing in the blockchain realm that these single state machines of, you know, Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, they're not robust enough. They're not, you know, they they don't have enough bandwidth to adequately represent their stakeholders, and so they fork. Right? And so Bitcoin forked, and we had Bitcoin classic because there was a divide over what Bitcoin should be and a theory sorry. Bitcoin cash. And a theory classic. There was a divide over how to respond to the DAO and and so on. So you you see this happening there as well that the these, like, single, you know, political states essentially are are insufficient to adequately represent the interest of of of the stakeholders. And so the question is sort of, okay, well then then what comes next? Right? And and the the the sort of idea here is that actually, finally, we get this kind of merger of of these two realms of the digital network and the geopolitical realm into this world of an Internet of blockchains, right, where we where we sort of, descale a little bit again to more more local, more representative political structures, smaller scale states, and so on that that provide more sovereignty, at a more local level that can better represent their constituencies, but in a way that is highly interoperable with all the others. And this is sort of the the the, you know, Cosmos is trying to provide this sort of technical foundation for that, the new form of blockchain design and interoperability to enable this sort of political economic trend of, you know, more, more power to municipalities and and more local communities essentially, to bring about a a more representative, let's say, global system that better bridges the gap from from local to global, and back. So that's sort of the idea behind the brief history of of of distributed state that we're we're sort of coming upon this convergence between these two threads, these two parallel threads, and that convergence is in this sort of sovereign interoperable political economy that Cosmos is trying to enable through the technology, through the, through the interoperability protocols and so on, but it's fundamentally a social concern, you know, problem of social scalability. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. It certainly looks that way. I have this problem where I'll, like, project a little bit what I wanna believe about what people are saying because, like, I wanna just agree with everyone and, you know, so this is this challenge is actually, you know, seeing in an unbiased way what what what they're saying. I think there there's a few sides to this. On on the one hand, I think I think the Austrians, hit this point of what I've been calling, like, arrested development where they sort of they failed to follow themselves to their sort of logical conclusions of their economics because they got caught up in this, like, reactionary political, effort. Right? Dealing with, like, okay, post World War two and what happened and what was fascism and, you know, Nazism and socialism and, like, oh, it's really scary, and so we have to really fight back. And in doing so, I think they they kind of somewhat lost their roots and and failed to actually, like, further their their analysis to really understand what they were what they were talking about, and and where it would go politically. And, obviously, their ideas were then, you know, co opted by some of the, like, worst states, most oppressive states, say, in in in the West, like in Reaganism and Thatcherism and so on. We've resolved, and we've gotten this, like, terrible neoliberalism that has, you know, arguably derives from the work of of the Austrians, which, I think is not something they would necessarily have wanted, but, you know, I'm not I haven't really spoken to them, so so I can't say. I, I wrote a thread recently trying to trying to sort of trace out my understanding of where they went wrong and and kinda what happened here. And, you know, my impression is that, you know, like I said, they got caught up in this sort of reactionary political struggle and and failed to sort of go back to the the sort of economic roots, but that the Austrian thought actually concludes or matures in the work of the Ostroms and in the work of a more sort of institutional economics, which they, in some sense, predated. In another sense, you know, didn't quite follow-up on, but I think is a sort of logical outcome. And then there is some interesting work about, you know, the indirect influence of the of the Austrian thought or at least Hayek's thought, say, on on the Ostroms. And I think Hayek was a little bit more, subtle or or tempered in his understanding and and would say much more of a localist maybe than the others. There's certainly, of course, like a a fundamental localism to Austrian thought in the in their methodology of the sort of methodological individualism and reasoning from the perspective of, purely of of the individual and, you know, purposeful human action and and this kind of thing. But, I think they they certainly missed a lot of key insights on the structure of society and and the problem of of representing your boundaries and, yeah, and all this. So, I sympathize with a lot of their early work because they were some of the first to really try to reason rigorously about the time structure of production and, you know, the the consequences of sort of, abusing, money, which which I think were really important and they were effectively right about, but they didn't really provide a a reasonable alternative. So they kinda got ignored. And, you know, Minsky would come along, like, a a few decades later and take all the credit for kind of financial instability and problems with with with credit and so on. So I I think there's some really interesting history there of, you know, the difference between, say, Minsky's business cycle theory and, which pretty much been, like, kinda widely adopted now, especially post 2008. And then the Austrian business cycle theory where the Austrians were like, well, yeah. Like, obviously, if you if you let banks and governments just, like, issue money, you're gonna get booms and busts. You're gonna get all kinds of malinvestment and overconsumption and, you know and so, obviously, it's bad. And they kinda stopped there, whereas Minsky sort of dove in a little bit more to map out the the actual web of obligations and say something about, well, so a big government could step in and and settle this, which, you know, I don't I don't necessarily agree with either. But, so anyways, I think I I, I have quite a lot of respect for the Austrian tradition in their economics and some aspects of their politics, and especially especially Hayek, I I sympathize a lot with. I do consider him more of a a localist, and I think, you know, more modern Austrians. I think, sometimes throughout Hayek is like, oh, he was too much of a a statist or or whatever. You know? He wasn't, like, hardcore enough, and he wanted companies to issue their own fiat money. And so to hell with him because only gold is money or whatever. And so, you know, obviously, I I sympathize more with with Hayek than, say, Rothbardians on on that front. But, it is interesting how the, you know, the the pure Austrian tradition kinda climax in a in a kinda anarchism, you know, this free market anarchism, which one of the things I'm trying to understand now is how it relates to the sort of, nineteenth century, you know, left wing anarchism, Doan and and others and and, you know, really how those things differ in their understanding of property and and and so on. So that's sort of, new space for for me to explore. But, I I I like the idea that the Rothbardians are this kind of moronic cult. I think George Selgan said that or or something, and, you know, I'm I'm okay with that. But, yeah, I sympathize with a lot. Let's just say I sympathize with a lot of heterodox schools. So I think they all agree to truth and the Austrians included even though they're traditionally considered, you know, far right or whatever. I think that's a unfortunate mischaracterization resulting from missteps in in later years due to the historical circumstance.

I think the the Austrians failed to, or at least in my understanding, failed to really account for land and the the the theft and exploitation that is sort of inherent in in private ownership of land. And so I think a lot of their a lot of their results are are fine in, you know, when applied to, like, the production process and and sort of the the basic capitalism of of, say, like, a classic savings base. You you save up money by deferring consumption today and you invest it to produce something tomorrow. Like, there's something very sound and fundamental of that from the perspective of, like, actually using the resources you have to represent the world and make predictions about the world and, you know, going back to the sustainability existentialism. But, when they when when land gets tied up in that because land isn't, like, isn't the fruit of any any human's labor. It's something that was sort of endowed to us and, you know, there's, the the theorizing, I I think, breaks down and they're sort of missing an ethical foundation. So, on the on the heterodox front, you know, as you said, I have a heterodox of political philosophy, which I I I love to hear that. I'm somewhat on a mission to synthesize the heterodox strands of economics because, like, the mainstream is so obviously fundamentally broken. And I I wrote this post recently trying to trying to think through what this looks like, and, you know, it's called reconsidering the factors of production. So, you know, in in the mainstream, the factors of production are just like labor and capital, and there are these, like, aggregate numbers. And, you know, there's no heterogeneous substructure, and and they feed into a production function, and that's kind of you know, and they just do a bunch of math from there. Whereas, you know, first of all, I think you need to separate land out from capital because it's very different. Capital is really stored labor. Land is something else. It's not, you know, the result of any any human's labor. It's it's part of the endowment and it belongs to all of us. And to the extent we have private property over it, we'll probably do something seriously wrong. And and then I think we also need to include kind of fundamentally, energy and money as as factors of production, because of the impact they have on on the way we organize society. And so if you take those five kind of factors, I think, one or two heterodox schools kinda maps to each of them. And so what we need for, like, a a proper political economy is a proper social theory of each of the five these five factors of production and, you know, an ethical basis for all of them and to really develop, let's say, sociology around all of them that we can then sort of integrate into what what it implies for how we should organize our political economy. And so you could think that, you know, the Georges and the ecological economists sort of apply to land, and you've got the institutionalists and the and the feminists and the Marxists on labor, and you've got the the Austrians and the post Keynesians on on capital, and you've got the ecological economists again, you know, on energy, and then and then maybe the the Austrians and post Keynesians again on on money or something like that. And so so there's, I think, a synthesis to be had of all these different views. Maybe if you, you know, prescribe or subscribe literally to the very words that each, you know, great thinker said, it might be difficult to synthesize them all, but given everything we've learned, and sort of the this maybe sustainability existentialist kind of framing can help, can help us with the with the synthesis. So that's sort of I'm trying to draw on all the different traditions and and sort of see the best in all of them and and see what, you know, what how we can synthesize to come up with something more complete that has a proper, like I'm saying, sociological theory or representation of each of the factors. I think that's that's, quite important.

Yeah.

And and that's that's critical to a proper understanding because if you if you just treat all these things like commodities, then you get the kind of, you know, economic confusion we're we're in today. You know, commodities are things that are are produced for sale on the market. You know, of course, Marx did kind of detailed analysis of, you know, labor power as as a commodity and and and the problems inherent there. And he he's right in the sense that labor is not a commodity. It's not produced for sale on the market. It is like the inherent life of a human being. Right? That's not It's but it's treated as such. It's treated as such in in our sort of economic theorizing, but that's not that's not what it is substantially. Right? And and so Lanny tried tried to pierce that veil in in his book, The Great Transformation. It's just an incredible book. So, he wrote that, I think, in in '44 or '45, and Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. They're both published around the same time, and they both tried to explain, like, you know, why the wars happened, like or why why fascism happened and why World War two happened. And and they had, like, completely opposite conclusions. Hayek was like, socialism ruined everything. Right? And Palani was like, no. Free market capitalism ruined everything. And I think they're both right in, like, you know, interesting fundamental ways. And, you know, I think both of them had a lot of insights. There's a tremendous amount of insights in in both those books. I think, the the Hayek book is shorter and and maybe a little bit more shallow, let's say. Polanyi goes very deep into the sort of history and and anthropology of social relationships and gives a proper analysis of, you know, the emergence of the market society that that we find ourselves in today. And it's kinda disembedding from, you know, from society at large. Right? It used to be that economics was kind of subservient to a larger society and it came to dominate it. And that was something that was explicitly constructed. And it was through that that land and labor and money became these, you know, commoditized or thought of as commodities, these fictitious commodities even though they're really not. And that's that's what led us so astray. So, I highly recommend that book. You know, there are some things that are maybe naive or or or not perfect. He wasn't an economist by training. I learned recently that he he he tried to contribute to the the socialist calculation debate. So I think what what you're sort of referring to earlier about Hayek and the information theory arguments, in my opinion that the Austrians won that debate, and the, you know, the the the Hayek argument is quite convincing and we could get into that a little bit. And I think it it relates to this sort of, you know, representation problem I've been talking about about sustainability. And, obviously, some of the political conclusions, were wrong, but but markets and prices do play a fundamental role that can't just be replicated by by technology. You do need this, like, emergent, you know, individuals making, making choices and and to express it. That's not to say that prices should be used for everything or or specifically, you know, labor and land, for instance, because there are deep problems with that, which I don't think the Austrians treat it sufficiently. And and so Polanyi tried to contribute, so he had to, like, he had to read the Austrian literature and try to catch up on, you know, to speak in their own language, and then tried to make a contribution. And, from what I understand, he didn't really succeed. It was very convoluted and and and difficult for him to, to sort of, you know, contribute properly to to the debate. And he ended up sort of giving up on the language of economics and move more to sort of history and anthropology and wrote the grant to great transformation instead and sort of told that story, which is phenomenal and I highly recommend. And I think actually captures a lot of lot of what his, what what his argument would have been in the socialist calculation debate. So maybe maybe folks will read that and take another stab at the, you know, making the argument about, socialist calculation, which I think was, you know, people have very different divergent definitions or understandings of what socialism is or means. And, you know, I think there is a kind of a brand of socialism that is certainly not about overarching state planning. There's there's a role for the state, and even Hayek would admit there's a role for the state in a way that's I think quite similar to Fulani. And and and so it's more sort of about, you know, in this calculation debate, what are the things that can or should be calculated, and how do we actually represent, you know, value that is difficult to materialize as a price. Right? Like the value of labor, the value of sort of externalities, and and so on. I think that's kind of what what was was trying to get at also in in the great transformation, which is, you know, still insufficiently represented in our price systems and our market systems, today. And it is really the great challenge and why I've become sort of so obsessed with, with money and monetary theory and monetary institutions because money is sort of the primary means by which we express value today. And it's so broken and the kinda unidimensional nature of it. It's like this, you know, this very low dimensional projection of a high dimensional concept, which is value. Right? Like, value isn't something that can just be expressed in US Dollars until the end of time. And and to think it can is is absurd. And, obviously, you know, the Austrian tradition got carried away with with thinking that we could just have this globalized, you know, economic system. And, so yeah. Sorry. Sorry to tell you.

But but, one thing I wanted to say, so Polanyi had, I wrote this down, because I think it was really interesting. So there were two, so in the great transformation, the impression I get from Polanyi is that, he basically thinks most almost every economist that came before him is wrong. Not that he's necessarily an economist, but he has like, he lumps them all in together. He's got this passage about, like, oh, Marx and George and Smith and Ricardo and all of them. They're like they all have the same kind of view, and so, you know, they're all missing the point. And the only person who got it right was Robert Owen. And before I read the great transformation, I didn't know who Robert Owen was. And then, you know, I was like, like, raging about Robert Owen. I better look this guy up. And turns out he's the founder of the cooperative movement. And I was like, oh, you know, this is a man after my own art. So

like, the first utopian socialist. Utopian socialist. Yeah. As as a way to sort of denigrate them even though their socialism was arguably a lot more realist than Marx's kinda revolutionary socialism. But, so so Polanyi had this quote. So I I wrote this down because I wanted to I wanted to share it. So one was that, you know, Robert Owen, he was saying something like he was the only one to really understand the nature of of the state and its relationship to society, and he looked to the state merely for that which it could perform. Helpful intervention designed to avert harm from the community, emphatically not the organizing of society, which I think is probably something that Hayek would would agree with. And, you know, he makes quotes not dissimilar from that in, in The Road to Serfdom and even even some other of his works. And then and then later, Polanyi actually offers a a sort of tentative definition of of socialism to him, which he says is socialism is essentially the inherent tendency in an industrial civilization to transcend the self regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society. Right? So it's this idea that economics isn't shouldn't be this all pervading, all, force that sort of controls everything, but it's actually, you know, subservient to society. It's part of society. It's regulated by society. And even constructing the self regulating global market is a social phenomenon, required the state to, you know, set up all these all these different things in a way that, you know, was, quite destructive and ultimately the breakdown led to the led to the world wars or whatever. But, so I think that's those are those are kinds of definitions that I could resonate quite a bit with and I think share a lot with the kind of, you know, sustainability existentialism, properly representing your boundaries, you know, understanding all the different relations and not just being naive enough to think that everything can be expressed in in prices.

So I think I have this impression that, like, communism kinda ruined socialism for everyone else. Right? It was like that Martin Engels came along, and they were like, oh, all the socialists before us were utopian. They weren't scientific enough. We'll show you scientific socialism. Revolution and communism across the whole world. And then, you know, what followed was, like, you know, decades of genocide wherever it was tried. So, now everyone has a bad taste in their mouth about the idea of socialism.

Yeah. That's that's fair. My my understanding is that we're trying to denigrate with the, like, utopian label. It was like, oh, this could never work. You're too utopian. You know, here's how to here's how to do it sort of right.

They prove his results. Don't they don't contradict it.

The whole point is that without without price signals to sort of drive your behavior and and do the computation for you, you don't know how to properly allocate resources. Right? And and Walmart is not, you know, a a socialist or, like, a public good company. They have a bottom line. They're trying to make money. Right? And everything they do is exposed to prices. And, of course, you know, it's not to say they don't have, like, elements of monopoly control or that they're not doing planning. The problem isn't about the ability to plan per se. Obviously, you know, planning is sort of a core part of the, you know, this colloquial word, planning is a core part of, say, the Austrian tradition, and and the capitalist has to be able to plan for the production process and how it will evolve in time. But they use prices to do that. Right? And so Walmart is something that's very heavily dependent on prices. It's very cost sensitive. Right? So the fact that it can it can achieve so much is actually a, you know, unfortunately, because, you know, I'm not a big fan of, say, Walmart or Amazon and and the way they're kinda conquering the world, but, it's unfortunately proof of the the power of prices to organize production rather than contradiction.

which I think is where maybe where the Austrians didn't go and where you actually get the sort of institutional economics that I think matures their tradition in, you know, let's say, with the Ostroms where where they start to look at, okay, how do we manage, like, common resources and and and and so on. But, I would still say, though, that the at the end of the day, Walmart knows what they're what they're looking for. Like, they have a driving signal, which is which is prices and profit. Right? So even though internally, they're not using, prices and and and and markets to, like, structure their, their hierarchy or their relationships, they know if they're doing a good job based on a profit outcome, which is which is measurable and which does use the price system. Whereas if you try to apply that to a state, you don't have a a definitive measure of the correct outcome, the sort of utility that you're providing to everyone, the social welfare or whatever, that that is sort of objective, that is not a kinda ad hoc discretionary thing. Right? And and and and what Hayek was pointing to is that if you try to use that kind of, like, planning at the state level without grounding it in sort of price signals, you end up with this, like, discretionary totalitarian outcome where someone at the end of the day needs to make a decision on what you're going for, and that thing is not gonna not gonna reflect the actual larger values of society because there there's inherently disagreements. Right? And so he certainly saw a role for the state and certain kinds of planning and, I think, was certainly very supportive of planning internally within a firm to organize the production process. But in my understanding, that doesn't that doesn't refute the the larger information theoretic argument. But, you know, I should, I should go review this and and read this book, and maybe we can actually have a focused debate on this subject. That would be interesting. Yeah. And then we can send the pages and pages of, you know, Reddit comments arguing back and forth about one thing or another.

but was there, like, anything else that you that you really wanted to mention or would like, to talk about before we finish it off? Yeah. I think I think we we we covered a lot of ground. I mean, the the main sort of arc for me is this, or, if we're we're talking about my sort of, you know, political philosophy is this, you know, these factors of production that include energy and money and the need for a social theory for each of them, which can draw on all these heterodox, you know, patterns of of economics or heterodox threads, and we can synthesize those. And that, you know, I sort of have this grounding in sustainability existentialism, which I think projects into a sort of policy prescription or, you know, mode for organizing society around what I call monetary localism, which is have much more locally organized forms of, you know, supply and production, which, I I think will result in in a, more sustainable society by stitching together these more, like, local currencies into a global, into a global mesh. And, that's really what I'm working for and what the the a big part of the Cosmos vision is this kinda sovereign interoperability and sort of multi scale, multi scale localism, refractor localism that takes us from the local to global and back. And so if that's, you know, something you're interested in, you know, check out Cosmos for sure or or, you know, check out my writings, tell me why I'm wrong, argue with me on Twitter. That's all that's all good stuff. Nice. Cool. Yeah. I've, Oh, and I sorry. I should also just say that, you're interested in informal and and how we're structured. We have a a a blog post called informal owners that talks a little bit about the background research we did and why we structure ourselves as a cooperative and what other forms were available and and and what we're targeting. And we're hoping to to publish a bit more about the internal structure and how we organize our work and, you know, going back to that theory of the firm stuff that we're just starting to touch on, how we, you know, plan production and and and so on. And, so you can you can follow informal, subscribe to the newsletter. And, we're also hiring engineers and and researchers. So if you're interested in, of course, this is all personal political philosophy. Some I'm the CEO of the company, but I don't represent the views of the company. The company is not, a person despite what the state will tell you. Yeah. So, you know, this is this is all, like, personal stuff, but but the company obviously has these cooperatives very strong cooperative values and cares about sovereignty and interoperability and and sort of building a more sustainable society as well. So, check out Informal Systems. Check out the Cosmos Network. Yeah. Thanks, everyone.