Crazy Wisdom

Adam Chavez is a Founder of Freeplay, & Mokriya. 

We make sense of where we’re headed as a society in a post-trust, post-2020 world.

What’s up with Steve Jobs’ apparent belief in magic? Why does that matter? 

We also talk AI, holographic theory, the impact of ancient Abraham on America, & the Minecraft Generation.

https://alkebulan.substack.com/

[email protected]

https://twitter.com/anksolado

1. What is the relation between the occult and steve jobs?
2. What is a story of 0 to 1 in occult language?
3. What is the difference between the performative sense and the inner self?
4. What is freeplay, the company?
5. What is the relationship between adrenaline junkies and spiritual emergencies?
6. What is the difference between transactional and transformational relationships?
7. Do you think that AI is going to increase atomization?
8. How does the freedom that minecraft represent when it comes to kids ability to create think today?
9. What will AI do to the bureaucratic incentives of government?
10. What is the relationship between decentralization and AI?
11. What is the relationship between desire for freedom and being a good employee?
12. Why do ideologies make some people feel like they are real and others feel like are empty and meaningless?
13. Are the problems of meaning an issue with abrahamic cultures?
14. Why do scientists shy away from discussing the implications of quantum mechanics?
15. What is the holographic theory?

Trent Gillham

Founder of Holium

~lomder-librun on Urbit

https://twitter.com/AidenSolaran

1. What does it mean to reject and transcend triviality?
2. What do you know about machine learning given your experience in 2018?
3. What was it like to work at a big company like GE? What have you learned about starting a startup?
4. What is it like to develop on urbit?
5. How does non-attachment help us to build products but also distract us from with the masses?
6. What is Holium?
   1. Community operating system
7. How is the current system of the infrastructure of the internet keeping the internet a single-player game?
8. What is the library of babel?
   1. https://libraryofbabel.info/
9. Where did the names of tlon and uqbar come from?
10. Who makes sense of disparate information?
11. What did your crisis of 2018 teach you?
12. Does IBM have a chance when it comes to AI?
13. How good was AI at making decisions via algorithm in 2018? What about now?
14. How do you make moral or ethical decisions when technology rapidly advances?
15. How do you build something that gives human communities collective power that technology is taking over?
16. Do AI’s have moats?
17. What did COVID teach you about how technology can actually help communities rather than hurt them or dominate them?
18. What is special about peer to peer database networks?
19. What is different about the crypto age, if anything, in comparison to the VC model of yesteryear?
20. What is Holium’s ballet?
21. What was it like for you to build hoon?
22. What is realm?
    1. First commit of realm was April 15th
23. How did software systems end up being bloated by contractual economics?
24. What is unique to urbit?
25. What is a kubernetes clusters?
26. What do you think of the leviathan that is the federal government?
27. What is the relationship between resiliency of legacy systems and then the pace of technological change?
28. How do we create resilient but also adaptable systems that can handle accelerationism?
29. How did the internet destroy cultural convergence? How far did that make it into other countries outside of urban areas?
    1. Monoculturing is almost the same thing as monocropping
30. The Meme flood and algorithmic pharoahs
31. What is the spirit of technique?
    1. Technological society book
32. When does technology become technique and then become luciferian?
33. How can you dominate technology rather than the reverse?
34. What was the foundation of the amish? When did that happen?
35. What is the antifragile/resilient version of utilization of technology?
    1. Technology is the means rather than the goal
36. What happens when the legacy internet becomes an infinite generation of content?
37. Where do magic and technology intersect?

A full-stack web developer, speaker and adviser to a small number of blockchain startups 

Owenbarnes.com

On urbit: ~locruc-fonmec

1. What are the foundations of privacy?
2. What is the next big thing?
3. Was Facebook built in PHP?
4. Where do you see Urbit converging with cryptocurrency values?
5. What is composability?
6. What happened with Tornado Cash?
7. What is a personal AI?
8. What is the transformer paradigm?
9. What is the apocalyptic paradigm when it comes to AI?
10. Why is there so much fear regarding AI?
11. Will AI ever be able to decide what is beautiful or not?
12. What is the root of fear?
13. What is decentralized computing?
14. In what ways is Ethereum complimentary to Urbit?
    1. What about competition Uqbar?
15. Why would you need the huge security guarantees that ETH represents?
16. What do you think of the Bitcoin Maxis evaluation of ETH as censorable?
17. What is the problem with kelvin versioning?
18. What is the history of computing?
    1. “Mother of all demos”
       1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY&ab_channel=Marcel
    2. Brett Victor
19. What is the future of computing?
20. What is the value of data?
21. What is the future of regulation when it comes to what we are discussing?
22. The AI that you are talking about, what is the difference between Chat GPT and that AI?
23. Why did languages teach us so much about the transformer paradigm for AI?
24. What will be it once we can generate apps on the fly with AI?
25. What is the difference between content and context?
26. How is a human similar to a shattered giant ice cube?
27. What are the implications of the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI?
28. Why does the training of the algorithm cost so much power rather than just the keeping up?
29. What happens with the live training model of AI?

Sam Frank, Writer, Investor, and Board member of the Urbit Foundation

Substack: https://samfrank.substack.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/anecdoted

Urbit ID: ~todset-partug

1. How did you first get involved with Urbit?
2. What is it like to be a writer in the descent of that profession brought on by the internet?
3. What are the politics like in the new york writer's groups?
4. What does it mean to be a rationalist?
   1. Did you see the Peter Theil takedown of the rationalist community?
5. What was Vitalik like before he became nerd famous?
6. What was the original DAO version versus where it is now?
7. What does it mean to be an alien in a human body?
8. Where do Moldbug and Nick Land converge and diverge?
9. How does being a writer help you understand technology in ways programmers can’t?
10. How does talking off the record play into being a writer/journalist?
11. What is the relationship between being conservative in technology versus being conservative in other centers of contemporary power?
12. What is the relationship between ethereum and urbit?
13. What is urbit going to be?
14. What was it like to get on Urbit in 2018?
15. How does localism play into urbit?
16. What will Urbit do to information?
17. What will the Google be of Urbit?
18. How will the network map be different for Urbit than it is for contemporary social media?
19. What are the metaphysic strings that thread the current urbit network?
20. What do you think search will be like on Urbit?
21. How do you categorize knowledge?
    1. What about information?
22. What is the relationship between entropy and knowledge?
    1. How does the breakdown of knowledge work differently pre-internet and post-internet?
23. How is the speed of development different in Urbit versus the legacy internet?
24. Are the development costs lower in Urbit vs the legacy computing world?
25. What is the relationship between knowledge and context of knowledge?
26. What is the difference between something that works and something that works well?
27. Talk about how Stewart started researching random esoteric spirituality  stuff on Google and got himself into a deep hole
28. Is postmodernism an entropy of modernism?
29. But maybe its both, parts of the world will decline under entropy and a new species gets created that enters the new age? (25 minutes in)
30. You seem like someone who is part of both the new age esotericism and part of technology, what is that like?
31. Why did society edit Nikola Tesla?
32. What is the relationship between urbit and AI?
33. Who is Rudolph Steiner?
34. What were the influences that led to unbalanced specialization?
35. The tradition itself is no longer valid for the increased complexity that comes from the age of acceleration
36. Who is Norman Kahn? Book “In search of the Millenium”
37. What is the root of the “ascension to 5D theory”?
38. How is the brain a filtration system?
39. How does the specialization matrix/left brain make people more fragile to the obvious acceleration we are going through?
40. What did Charles Eisenstein say about COVID?
41. What is it like to go to UFO convention?
42. What is it like to be authentically weird rather than cool weird?
43. How does rationalism end up repressing the irrational?

Stephen is working on AI dev on Near protocol and developing on Ethereum

1. What is the NEAR blockchain?
2. What is sharding?
   1. Increasing throughput of the transactions
   2. Breaking up the blockchain into shards so that you can get more parallelism
   3. When does ETH sharding begin?
   4. ETH sharding is based on blobs
3. Why are you attracted to Rust?
4. Can you use Rust on Ethereum?
5. What is a virtual machine?
   1. Something that is interpreting bite code instead of binary
6. Why would a blockchain need a virtual machine?
7. Why are virtual machines more secure?
8. What is web assembly?
9. How do interfaces work for smart contracts?
10. What is a blockchain?
11. Why would someone want to have a blockchain for gaming?
12. Why does a blockchain economize resources better than something like AWS or cloud computing?
13. What are zero knowledge proofs?
14. What is the relationship between zero knowledge proofs and KYC networks?
15. What is determinism?
16. What are your thoughts on AI right now as an AI developer?
17. How far are we from AGI?
18. How much has psychology or biology informed the development of AI?
19. Has anyone formed a plan to actually get to AGI?
20. Would gaming be a good way to create an AGI through this bootstrapping thing you mention 25 minutes in?
21. Why is gaming AI dumbed down?
22. Is it dumbed down because of resource efficiency?
    1. No its because you want that determism and the expected range of behaviors
    2. QA doesn’t want to deal with unexpected issues which cause bugs you can’t fix or expect
23. How is deep learning affecting gaming developments?
    1. How is gaming affecting deep learning?
24. Are you using copilot for developing?
25. What is reinforcement learning?
    1. Find out how much you value decisions that lead to certain rewards
26. What does it mean to “discount something”?
27. Whether OPENAI is open source?
28. What did NFT protocol did you create?
29. What is a Markoff chain?
30. What is a lottery smart contract?
    1. You purchase tickets with your crypto wallet
    2. The more tickets you purchase, the better chances you have for a payout
31. How does peer reviewing work for writing solidity?
32. What are the implications of developing on a blockchain versus a normal database?
33. What is state when it comes to programming?
34. How do you visualize the state of the EVM?

Deborah Simpier Co-founder & CEO  of Althea Network and Gravity Bridge

1. What does Althea network do?
2. What is interoperability?
3. What is the payment experience like right now?
4. Why do telcos get monopolized?
5. When did we start referring to people as users?
6. Why do 29% of New York City not have access to the internet?
7. How do you create frictionless payments?
8. What is the relationship between stable coins and frictionless payments?
9. What do you mean by machine to machine?
10. Have people tried to game the system you are building?
11. What is proof of sale?
12. How many people are on your network?
13. What is the radial layer?
14. What is liquid infrastructure?
15. What is the connectivity layer?
16. What is ownership?
    1. Leverage
    2. Choice
17. What is the product’s future in developing countries?
18. What are the challenges between doing this in developed countries and developing countries?
19. Why would someone need interoperability?
20. What is the role of BTC is now?
21. What are the struggles of proof of stake right now?
22. What does it mean to run the validator on your machine?
23. What is X86?
24. What is PLTE?
25. What is the intersection between ALTHEA and Urbit?
26. When does the althea blockchain launch?

Dr. Jonathan Paprocki

Jonathan is a specialist in topological quantum compiling, a Tlon engineer, you can find him on Urbit @  ~Datnut-Pollen Blog can be found at Discordia (http://datnut-pollen.discordja.net/discordja)

1. What is a Kundalini awakening?
2. What do old dusty books say about Kundalini?
3. What is the relationship between Kundalini and topological quantum computers?
4. Can everything be explained by science?
5. How do you deal with the skepticism that other people give you that you used to give them?
6. How much does the flow state come to you when working with quantum computers? Is it very frustrating?
7. What did you learn about Atman after you randomly spoke Atman?
8. Do you think in images?
9. What do you think is the base layer reality now?
10. When did you start studying quantum physics?
11. Who is John Wheeler? What is the participatory universe?
    1. He talks about Quantum Bayesianism
    2. The idea is that the Universe consists of participants/observers and observations, rules on consistencies of what these interactions guarantee the relationship.
12. What is the study of condensed matter?
13. What is quantum field theory?
14. What is quantum topology?
15. A topologist can't tell the difference between a coffee mug and a donut.
16. Who is Edward Witten, the physicist who received the Field Medal?
17. What are your favorite cognitive hazards?
18. How often do new age thinkers get quantum mechanics right when tying it to spirituality?
19. How important is math to understanding quantum theory?
20. What is quantum theory?
21. Who are the new age mystics who do get quantum theory right?
22. What percentage of quantum theory has to do with the Heisenberg principle?
23. What is the difference between the laws of qualia and the laws of physics?
24. How did you end up at Tlon?
25. What are the differences between Holochain and Urbit?
26. What is a distributed hash table?
27. What is a hash chain?
28. What is naturally inspired computation?
29. What are the aspects of natural physics that are dependent on quantum mechanics?
30. Who is Sam Frank from Urbit?
31. What is the thing that convinces you to pursue incomprehensible projects to the point of comprehensibility?
32. Is doing documentation a good way to learn programming?
33. What is the blog that Jon is writing?
34. What are some differences between writing software for external applications/legacy internet within Urbit versus say writing software in an imperative programming language and navigating Facebook's API?
35. Why did IP addresses not become permanent ways to signify where the message receiver/sender is stable?
36. What does Urbit replace about the current IP address system?
37. What are the differences and similarities between Urbit and Holochain?
38. What is Holochain Scepter?
39. What is Deep Key when it comes to Holochain?
40. How does Urbit enforce global state?
41. What is the data availability problem of the blockchain?
42. Why doesn't adding more blocks make the data processing faster?
43. What is a blockchain?
44. A way to give a clock to distributed system.
45. What is the problem of time in distributed systems?
46. Holochain is a way to run apps on BitTorrent basically (analogy).
47. What percentage of email is spam?
48. What is enforced scarcity?
49. What is the membrane from Holochain?
50. What are all the types of attacks in distributed systems?

Today we have Casey Rodarmor, a bitcoin developer who is working on building non-fungible tokens (NFTs) directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. NFTs are digital assets that are unique and cannot be exchanged for other assets. They have become popular on Ethereum, but have not yet been implemented on the Bitcoin blockchain. Casey is working on a protocol that will allow NFTs to be natively held in a Bitcoin wallet and transferred using Bitcoin transactions. He believes that NFTs have the potential to be a powerful tool for artists and creators to sell and authenticate their work.

Here are some other questions we cover:

1. Where does the name Rodarmor come from?
2. What does it mean to build NFT on the BTC blockchain?
3. Where was the first NFT built on?
   1. NameCoin
   2. Built for domain names
4. What was the first popular NFT built on?
   1. Counterparty
   2. ETH was where they took off
5. Why doesn’t Bitcoin have its own NFT yet?
6. Why aren’t satoshis currently transferable individually?
7. Why did you give a satoshi a unique identifier?
8. Do you need a separate bitcoin public key to use these NFTs?
   1. Not the case that most BTC  wallets have a single public key
9. Why do bitcoin maxis have such strong membranes for keeping stuff they don’t like out of bitcoin?
10. So it matters that people have to adopt the protocol you are using?
11. Do they still point to IPFS?
12. What does it take to change the bitcoin protocol?
    1. These are very controversial
13. Why doesn’t Bitcoin have a formal process for accepting changes?
14. Why are democracies so easy to game?
    1. What is a system that isn’t easy to game?
15. What is competitive governance?
16. Why is Singapore a good example of competitive governance?
17. Why is it so relevant to have the federal government take income taxes rather than state governments?
18. What do you think of competitive governance within Western Hemisphere?
19. Who is Patri Freidman?
20. What is the history of the Friedman family (of the Milton clan)?
21. Would a nuclear-powered thorium reactor help the seasteading movement?
22. What is the limiting feature of seasteading?
23. What are bitcoin transactions?
24. What are unspent transaction outputs?
25. Why is bitcoin not a triple-entry bookkeeping system?
26. What is the difference between ledgers and bitcoin?
27. What is the difference between a global and local accounting systems?
28. Will individuals use BTC as money?
29. Where does USDC issue stable coin?

Kenny Rowe is the founder of the Dalten Collective (~sicdev-pilnup), in a previous life he was on the founding team of MakerDAO

1. What is the dalten collective?
   1. Collectively own an urbit start together
2. What is a node?
3. What is peer discovery?
4. What is governance when it comes to Urbit?
5. What can you do with a star on Urbit?
6. What is the relationship between Urbit and DAOs?
7. How do groups do sense-making? What is better for sense-making: an individual or the collective?
8. What are the three values for the dalten collective?
9. How many people are in the dalten collective?
10. What is Qurtus when it comes to the dalten collective?
11. What are the differences between software development in Urbit vs the rest of the ecosystem?
    1. Dev ops is easier
    2. There is a learning curve
    3. Runes and ASQII characters are important
12. What is the importance of communication for project management?
13. When do we get to the magical point of really easy software development?
14. What does it mean to be a functional programming language?
15. What is the highest scale has Urbit got to?
    1. Ubit network explorer
    2. Low 10,0000s
16. What is the thing about exponentials?
17. Does anyone at the FED have any idea of what MakerDAO is?
18. What is the relationship between finance and actualization?
19. Is MakerDAO a eurodollar system?
20. Is Urbit out of the womb yet?
21. What was your first memory of discovering the internet?
22. What is the difference between a functional and performative server?
23. What was the history of computing in the 40s?
24. What is computation?
25. How do you bootstrap a personal server?
    1. What do you learn by building a personal server that gives you an idea of what you can do?
26. Are we already in the feudal system when it comes to Facebook owning all our individual data?
27. How do identity politics make the world really clear?
28. What are the tools you need for sense-making?
29. Why do bitcoin maxis immediately think that Urbit is a blockchain when you try to bring it up?
30. How do smart contracts fit into urbit? What is the synthesis between smart contracts and urbit?
31. Where does sense-making within small groups fit into the patchwork age (PaulPublisher on Twitter)?
32. Where do loners fit into sense-making?
33. What is the relationship between the internet archives and urbit?
34. How does urbit prevent shadow updates from centralized media?
35. Will urbit absorb the legacy internet?
36. What does it mean to have a digital CPU?
37. What do you think happens to Amazon cloud in the urbit land?
38. Cable television is a good idea of decentralization
39. How does Moore’s law extrapolate into other areas outside of transistors?
40. What is a functional definition of computation?
41. Why did computers take over the world in 1940s?
42. What is the relationship between computers and war?
43. What is a babbage machine?
44. Why is 0 and 1 is the easiest way to do computation?

Aaron Lowry (https://twitter.com/Aaron_Lowry)

1. Why are you interested in Cardano?
2. Why didn’t you switch to ETH and stay with Classic?
3. What are the main challenges to build decentralized systems?
   1. With functional governance?
4. How does verifiability contribute to more challenging programming issues?
5. What was the Ethereum schism between classic and ETH?
   1. With the unilateral move to create a new ETH chain we see the first centralization
6. Cardano is centralized in explicit ways through the initial token sale, the corporate structure, and the nodes
   1. It starts out centralized but they have a roadmap to get to centralization
7. What are the differences between a proof of work Bitcoin and a proof of stake system? What does a smart contract system need that bitcoin doesn’t?
8. What happened when ETH moved to proof of stake?
9. Why is energy so fundamental to utility?
10. What is the market cap of Cardano?
11. What are the compromises of ETH?
12. What is slashing?
13. How fast is Cardano?
14. What are stake pools?
15. What is trust minimization? Why is it so integral to a blockchain?
16. Does Cardano validate things locally?
17. Will AI make it easier to host hardware servers?
18. What limits peer-to-peer networks?
19. The market seems to always go towards convenience, which compromises so many things. What are those compromises?
20. Can you argue with physics?
21. How long does delusion traditionally outlast sanity?
22. How do you build something that lasts when structurally the incentive is to build something that doesn’t?
23. What is the difference between accountability and scapegoating?
24. How can you reality-check with others while there are contradictions embedded within communication?