 So the word of the season is unprecedented, unprecedented pandemic, unprecedented economic depression, unprecedented job losses, unprecedented incompetence, unprecedented reactions from people. Are they really unprecedented? And what does it mean for something to be unprecedented? You know, one of the most difficult things for people to adjust to is change. We like to feel that if anything, the future is a linear projection of the things we are comfortable with, the things we know today, and people adapt very easily to their present environment, but they don't do too well with sudden change. Of course, the illusion of continuous and linear progression is exactly that. It's an illusion. And you can see that in the parallels that people are using, trying to explain what is happening today, what is happening in the world, what is happening in geopolitics, what is happening with the pandemic. Everyone has a reference, a favorite reference. This is a bit like the 1918 Spanish flu, or the Kansas flu, as it should be called. The economic depression is like 1929, or maybe 2008, or maybe 2008 on steroids plus 1929 plus 1918. But we can barely imagine what it would be like to live in 1918 or what was happening at the time. So the Anon summit would be taking place in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which I have visited several times. It's just to the east of Prussia. And of course, that doesn't exist anymore. But it did at the beginning of the previous century. Today, most people don't even know what that is. When the pandemic happened in 1918, the world was coming out of a world war that represented the end of European empires. Literally, the European landscape was completely transformed. And many of the empires that existed simply stopped existing in a matter of just a few years. And yet we can't predict events like that. We can't imagine such radical discontinuity. If you told someone at the beginning of the 1900s that the Austro-Hungarian Empire wouldn't exist in 20 years, they'd think you were a full paranoid. Perhaps they didn't have the term conspiracy theorist. But if they did, that's the term they would use. And yet that's exactly what happened. I remember a few highly discontinuous events in my own life. And I remember the sense of shock and also the word unprecedented. I remember the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989. And I remember clearly what it felt like in 1988. The Soviet Union was eternal. It was unlikely to go anywhere for all intents and purposes. The Cold War had locked in a certain arrangement in Europe. And that arrangement was pretty much permanent. No one imagined that anyone could try a revolution or even weirder. The whole thing would just collapse because of a press conference that went wrong. If you look at the history, it's actually quite ironic. But they held a press conference in East Germany saying that they would gradually relax restrictions in crossing the border across the Berlin Wall. But they misphrased it. And they said the Berlin Wall won't exist. And within hours, people started attacking it with hammers. History isn't continuous. Decades go by when nothing happens. And then decades happen in weeks. And we're living through that period of change right now. And that kind of change causes enormous cognitive dissonance. Most people react in a way that represents grief. Grief for the world that is lost, for the past that no longer exists. And as the cliche goes, the five stages of grief start occurring in many, many cycles. So people react with denial, with anger, with bargaining, depression, acceptance. And I think we see a lot of denial, anger and bargaining happening right now. We're nowhere near the potential for acceptance. So the past doesn't give us a good roadmap for the future. One of the interesting topics that has been discussed in many books, but started with a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is the concept of a black swan. The idea that if you don't have a sample of something happening in the past, you can't imagine it happening in the future. So it's about the limitations of human imagination. It's about the limitations of a normal distribution of the probabilities of events happening. And we're now living in an era of black swans. I have in the past called Bitcoin, a black swan machine, a machine that generates black swans. And the internet itself, of course, is a machine that generates black swans. When something happens that's completely discontinuous to our past experience, we try to wrap it in narrative, narrative that relates it to something we understand. Hoping that relating it in that way will help us make sense and also that it will help us predict the future. It will allow us to see more clearly what might be coming next. And of course, that's an illusion. But the problem is the narratives are broken. The predominant narratives that came out of the previous century were the narrative of the nation-state replacing empire. They were the narrative of democratic and pseudo-democratic rule. They were the narrative of national borders not secured by kings, but hastily organized through various treaties. They were the narrative of institutions with oversight, representatives, republics, constitutions, and civil rights. And those narratives also contained many dark narratives that we use to understand the world around us. Before the early 1910s, neither communism nor fascism existed as concepts. The practices may have existed in some way or other, but really the narratives that emerge from the 20th century, communism and fascism, we use those today as crutches. We use them to try to understand what is happening or what might happen in the future. We try to understand the play between democracy, communism, fascism, nationalism, etc. And yet none of those things really apply. And one of the big reasons none of these things apply is because we're now living in an era of global communication with the internet. And that changes everything. It changes absolutely everything. The institutions of democratic governance have started to fail and they fail because they don't scale. Not because they're headed by good or evil people, not because they're rotten at the core, not because they've been taken over by mysterious forces, a cabal of superintelligent elites who conspire to destroy our world or our way of life, not because billionaires and soon-to-be trillionaires are pulling the strings of our countries and the world like puppeteers. No, they're failing for much more mundane reasons. They're failing because they are unable to scale to the enormous complexity of a modern world that is super interconnected and that exhibits chaotic behavior and massive information flows that are impossible to process. By this time, we should have had benevolent AI overloads, but the science fiction authors of our past were betrayed by the technology implementation of our future. Instead, we have a boring dystopia. The bottom line is that our institutions that are failing are failing because of this inability to scale to accept the fact that the world has become much more global than it was before and the institutions can't globalize themselves. So other things have emerged in order to fit that gap. The gap itself is really interesting because one thing that happens during unprecedented times is that cognitive dissonance and the failure of institutions create two gaps on two different scales. One is a gap of governance and the other one is a gap of narrative. The gap of governance is when the institutions become incompetent because they fail internally and they're no longer able to solve things and when an institution is in solving things, people clamor for it to be replaced. The gap in narrative is more interesting though because that gap grows inside the cognitive dissonance between what we are told reality is like and what we perceive reality to be when things are changing very very rapidly and sometimes in ways that are unpleasant and we certainly live in a time when things are changing rapidly and unpleasantly. So the narrative is exhibiting a gap and the institutions are exhibiting a gap. The narrative of superpowers, the narrative of the competent government, the narrative of the stable coin, the narrative of institutions that work efficiently, all of these things are failing and together with those the political narratives of communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy are also failing. They're failing to explain what the hell is going on because they no longer make sense. Now what happens when you have a narrative gap? The most interesting things that happens is that we now have a narrative machine and the narrative machine is the internet. It is a machine for producing narratives and these narratives are instantaneously global, very often viral. It's a meme machine, a memetic system that produces narrative and it produces narrative much faster than any of the previous mechanisms for producing narrative. Now this is important and it's important for a really simple reason. Society is narrative. Society is a collection of memes. All of our cultures are just a collection of stories that we have taken down through the generations and when you have a meme machine operating within a society then it can rewrite the narrative of society in real time. Ironically all of this is happening at a time when people are most fearful. They're fearful of things that they don't understand and in order to understand them many people ascribe some dark force. They, they are conspiring, they are going to vaccinate us all implant us with chips, spray chemtrails on us or whatever they are doing this week. 5G, creating coronaviruses, whatever it is, they, they are the mysterious cabal, the conspiracy to control the world and in every country there might be different they and in many cases they is assigned to government that somehow exhibits incredible ability to make decisions and then make those decisions become reality through competence and efficient management. The truth is they're not in control. The reason they are not in control is because the institutions they use to govern are broken and so the theme of our era is unprecedented incompetence that emerges from an unprecedented collapse of institutions that is caused by unprecedented disruption through the sheer scale of global information flows. If you pay careful attention you'll notice that right now the dominant discussion is about how this is the end of globalization, the end of free trade flows, the end of free and open travel, the end of open borders in super states like Europe, the end of all of the wonderful things that globalization brought us. Who's globalization? Wasn't my globalization? Well it was a bit because some of us got an opportunity to implement globalization as a personal strategy but for the most part globalization is a game played between massive nation states and massive corporations jockeying for power and that form of globalization is over and the reason it's over is because it's fragile and the reason it's fragile is because it is overwhelmed by information and unable to process it. But just because that form of globalization goes away doesn't mean that another form of globalization doesn't emerge. A humanistic globalization, a person-centered globalization, a globalization when we realize for perhaps the first time at least this century that we all belong to the same human species that happens to have the same biochemical receptors in our lung tissue and therefore we are susceptible to the same disease and we react to it in many of the same ways. Some react with fear, some react with hope, some see the gap and mourn the collapse of institutions that gave them the illusion of stability but most never had the illusion of stability and in that gap we can choose instead of sowing fear to sow hope. Here's the bottom line. We do have a new governance model. We do have a new non-institutionalized institution of trust. We do have a global narrative and memetic machine in the form of the internet and out of that has come an independent network of trust built upon decentralized open blockchains. These independent networks of trust give us a new glimpse of what governance can be when we replace rulers with rules without rulers. The network of trust gives us rules without rulers and that is a fundamental departure from our status quo and it's very necessary because the status quo has never had less status. The status quo has failed to rise to the occasion and has left a massive gap and we are ready to fill that gap. Not right away. Some of these things take decades in order to resolve themselves. Sure the US dollar is worthless but it can continue to be expensively worthless for another 20 years being propped by the sheer will and determination of those who imagine it to be worth something unless we change the narrative. And sure most of the cryptocurrencies and open blockchains we have now are relatively fragile. They're collugy. They're difficult to use but that's going to change and it's going to change even more rapidly if we need it to change if we build solutions to fill that gap because right now we can and must lead with hope. We have to look at building solutions instead of arguing about problems. When most of the people who look at open blockchains things like bitcoin they see them and they see anarchy. When you say there are no rulers people think anarchy and in fact they often call us anarchists. I myself have been called an anarchist priest which is rather ironic since well not my character. But anarchy is not chaos and this is a fundamental misunderstanding and a very important thing to change in our narrative. Anarchy in the basic essence of the word means no rulers and until now without rulers you couldn't have rules without institutions and oversight guidance hierarchy accountability all of those things you couldn't have rules therefore as soon as you take away rulers as soon as you take away institutions of oversight what you get isn't anarchy it's chaos because there are no rules but that's not what anarchy means. Anarchy means no rulers not no rules and interestingly enough we are now bringing to the world a system of rules without rulers in which not only is there no chaos but quite the opposite there is a rock solid determinism a predictability a transparency an accountability that is impossible with traditional systems and these systems of rules without rulers are global are open are neutral and they're here today and so that's what we're left with unprecedented chaos creating a gap in infrastructure and institutions and a narrative and into that gap not chaos but a system of rules without rulers that actually brings solutions instead of fighting about problems thank you