Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 10: Cosmuhammad Bitcoin Jaesustein
This blog is a transcription of the 10th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews Cosmuhammad Bitcoin Jaesustein, the artist formerly known as Jae Kwon. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher; or read the transcription below.
Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I’m your host Gregory Landua.
Hello everybody. This is Gregory Landua, coming to you with the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. Today’s episode is going to be of particular interest to the Cosmos community. I had the opportunity to have a long chat with — how does it go? — Cosmuhammad Bitcoin Jaesustein, the artist formerly known as Jae Kwon, and got in deep to his transition at AiB also known as Tendermint, the new creative project that he’s working on, Virgo. We vexed philosophical about, on a couple of different levels, personal transformation, the need for leaders to be able to put a little bit of coyote energy to distance themselves so they don’t become bottlenecks if we’re really dedicated to creating decentralized solutions, and a bunch of other great stuff. I had a phenomenal conversation and I felt like it was good for me, good reflection. I’m always inspired by what Jae Kwon’s thinking about and doing. Hopefully, this is a good conversation to give a long-form to unpack some of the things that Jae’s been thinking about recently, and how that’s been showing up in successive stuff that he’s creating and how that shows up in the public sphere on Twitter, et cetera. This is a gift to the Cosmos community, but also I think that my viewers who are more on the ecological regeneration and permaculture side of things are also going to enjoy this perspective of some of the guiding principles of the Cosmos community and the software development side of that element of this convergence of cultural regeneration and technological regeneration and spiritual revelation that is planetary regeneration. Have an excellent listen and be sure to comment or share ideas for future podcast guests in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. My Twitter name is gregory_landua. You can hashtag things with a #planetaryregeneration if you want to make sure that’s associated with the podcast. Have a great one.
Gregory: Hey man, thanks for hopping on.
Jae: Of course.
Gregory: There’s so much to connect about. How’re you doing?
Jae: I’m doing weird.
Gregory: Doing weird?
Jae: Yes.
Gregory: Yes? I’ve been noticing some irregular Twitter activity.
Jae: That’s right. I admit it.
Gregory: It’s good, man. You won’t get any judgment from me.
Jae: Oh, yes. I expect people to judge. Some people are going to be like, “Why is that guy doing that?” or they’re going to be like, “That’s offensive.” Mostly, people are concerned. That’s nice. It’s therapeutic. I think that’s what people don’t realize. I’m exploring something and it’s nice. It’s nice to be able to say what’s on your mind out into the ether where everyone can read it. Why not? That’s what life turn is about. Somehow, we’ve got turned into a system where you can’t say anything or else you’ll get banned or shadow-banned, doggy-housed. It’s ridiculous. I think that causes mental issues for people, some people. I’ve been noticing that my followers are steadily decreasing no matter what I do. I’ve realized, oh it’s because someone keeps somehow unregistered in the system that’s like offensive. I realize I’m being silenced here. It’s not a good feeling.
Gregory: Yes, that’s not a good feeling. Maybe focusing on what would you like to be? I know you’re a passionate guy. Every time I’ve engaged with you, I’ve got a deeper glimpse of the crusade that I feel like you’re on to make the world a better place and how much it drives you to, your creativity and all the things that you created, Cosmos included. What has you feeling excited? Maybe excited isn’t the right word, but passionate or engaged. What’s the world demanding of you or what do you feel like the world is demanding of us right now that’s driving that desire to connect with people and communicate things that may be uncomfortable for people?
Jae: Have you see Mr. Robot?
Gregory: Yes. I haven’t finished the whole… I think maybe I only went through the first season.
Jae: That’s about where I was at, in the middle of season 2. Sunny told me to watch it because it starts off being something like Fight Club but then it evolves into something much stranger. I realized this is what people want. What people want is a kind of transformation or a reset. There’s various ways to portray the reset. In the Fight Club, the reset was after skyscrapers were blown up. It wasn’t violent because it was empty so presumably no one was killed, if you could believe that. Then, in Mr. Robot, it was with a hack, and also some buildings and even people died. Terrible stuff.
Gregory: They bring the whole financial system down.
Jae: Yes. The reason why these movies work is because people want to take it down. However, the problem is it’s only portrayed in ways that are violent. It’s only portrayed in ways that… the lessons are usually, “Don’t, because you’re crazy. You don’t want to do that” or in the case of Mr. Robot, you want to bring it back to where it was before. That’s always the lesson and I think it’s bullshit. I don’t know where that’s coming from, but there’s another option.
Gregory: Say that again. Say what’s bullshit. I didn’t totally follow. What I’m tracking is you’re noticing there’s, in our collective storytelling or the way that cinema has become our modern mythos, there’s this trope, this common pattern and that [crosstalk] is around… It’s like an Armageddon thing. The world comes to an end, brought to you by Mr. Robot or brought to you by whoever it is, but it’s always like…
Jae: It’s portrayed as almost Armageddon-like, but what people want isn’t the Armageddon. They just want a reset. They just want exit. They just want an alternative. That’s why I think it’s bushtit because these movies, some of the only movies I feel like that portray this desire in mainstream media and yet it’s always portrayed in ways that corrupt us, what it could be. It could be an inspiring message about how we can create technology to create alternatives but instead it’s portrayed as hacks or violence. I’m starting to suspect that this is all intentional, that they’re doing this on purpose.
Gregory: What that makes me think of is James Bonds, how every James Bond villain ever, they have this weird, almost always or oftentimes, they’re these quirky, rich, tech billionaire archetypes that want to do something positive to the world, but it gets [done?] in this way that they’re going to do something super violent and super scary. James Bond is the representative of the system, has to go blow everything up and make sure that it doesn’t happen.
[00:10:00]
Jae: It’s the same message over and over again. If you look at the Asian male cast in Fight Club and Mr. Robot, there’s one — he’s a grocery store clerk — who nearly shits his pants, if you’ve seen Fight Club. In Mr. Robot, there’s one Asian guy who’s kind of goofy and he’s eating a sandwich. Then, there’s another Asian guy who’s one of the main antagonists but he is in a women’s body. He’s a crossdresser. From my perspective — and this is not just these two movies but it’s just Hollywood in general — I feel like what’s weird is Mr. Robot is like that’s a life I was living intentionally because I loved the concept of Fight Club and I identified the angst and the zeitgeist of what people want. Watching Mr. Robot, I’m realizing, wow, it’s almost like they’re taking my life story. Of course, because I’m living Fight Club, but then presenting it in a way that is actually like counter, hindering me, that’s trying to silence me.
Gregory: Say more about that trying to silence you in a way that is manipulating your emotions to second guess…
Jae: It’s manipulating the emotions of all of the people who watch these movies in the general public that Asian men are not the ones that are going to be involved in the transformation. Don’t follow Asian men. They’re not leaders. They are either corrupt or they are just jokesters. That’s always the message. That’s frustrating. Partially, it’s because people don’t talk about it enough, but I’ve had enough.
Gregory: As you’re talking about that, I’m just thinking about how awesome it is that, in a way that Andrew Yang is running against that current and against pretty monumental establishment silencing and building a pretty big… for better or worse, whether you agree with his politics, he’s succeeding in creating a [inaudible 00:12:39] following and a really interesting conversation in the country.
Jae: I think you’re right. Hopeful. I like the idea of universal basic income. It’ll even the playing field a little bit. The banks and everyone are really worried about what’s going to happen, which is inflation. Things are going to get weird, I think. I’m starting to think about everything in terms of the structure of the incentive, and also including more understanding about the person and their ego, and so on. I would say Andrew Yang is cool but you have to wonder, what is their ego? Where is the proof that they have gone through multiple rounds of ego death and they’re really going to do this to make the best choice for everyone? Bernie Sanders seems to have that proven quite a bit. Everyone’s trying to go against them.
Gregory: Yes, totally. Bernie is Bernie, man. He’s an essence that is unwavering.
Jae: Yes, he’s a principle. Everyone else, I think, is trying to prove something.
Gregory: I’m not so sure about Andrew Yang though. Bernie’s been around so long and has been a public figure for so long that we can see his principles and his essence and his [innateness?]. Whether you agree with him or disagree with him, the dude has fucking ethics. He believes in what he says.
Jae: That’s good.
Gregory: It seems to me that, and it’s more of a snapshot sense that I have but when I listen to Andrew Yang in different venues, I get the sense that he’s just comfortable speaking off the cuff and he’s authentic in a way that he’s not trying to say what he thinks people want to hear. He’s saying what he believes.
Jae: That’s the name of the game now. Trump got elected because of that.
Gregory: Yes, it’s exactly why he got elected.
Jae: Everyone’s going to do that, but it doesn’t mean you can trust them.
Gregory: Isn’t there a sense in which that can help engender trust or do you think people can fake that?
Jae: I think people can fake it.
Gregory: Like a deep fake, “I come across as really authentic but actually…”
Jae: Most of the time, people just fake themselves. People are narcissists.
Gregory: You don’t have to answer this, but if you’re comfortable answering it — you were referring to ego death. Is that where you feel like you’re at right now as in a cycle of wrestling within and killing off some element that’s not serving you that you’ve been living with and remerging like a phoenix?
Jae: Sort of, it’s been like that for a long time, yes. I remember taking some morning glory LSA and that was an experience because I thought I had killed myself. Those were the kinds of trips I get sometimes. I almost got into a motorcycle accident. I mean, I did. I almost drowned in the ocean. They are not quite psychological but here’s one. I was playing. I really used to enjoy poker. I thought I could be a great poker player because I like game theory and math. That is exciting, but it took me seven years to realize that it’s not me because of other reasons that I hadn’t expected like, I don’t like sitting down for an extended period of time talking to people that I don’t want to talk to. I just wanted to get out of there. Poker’s great because you go broke. You know, it’s objective. When you go broke.
Gregory: It’s very humbling in that way.
Jae: It’s very humbling, yes exactly.
Gregory: It is what it is. You lost.
Jae: Yes. Recently with work — I’m really appreciative of the people that I work with because they help me understand more about my personality, my issues, issues around my personality.
Gregory: That’s a beautiful thing I think about, the difference between work and vocation. I feel like when I see you, I see someone who has a vocation whether or not it’s 100% clear to yourself and even to other people. You have a mission. It’s your vocation. You’re doing something in the world and you’re trying to figure it out in successive moments. My experience is, we as humans, we’re living in service to our vocation. It creates communities that can actually reflect hard and honest truths that help us grow as humans. If you just did work, some random work, you or your colleagues will always avoid the hard conversations or leave or some [inaudible 00:18:42] When there’s a sense of shared purpose and when there’s a sense of vocation, it enables these deep personal growth cycles where you can see the good, the bad, and the ugly, of yourself and of other people and then grow through it. I think that’s a really beautiful thing and an important thing in our world today — that social, cultural and personal evolution is as important as any technological element of what we’re doing I think.
Jae: Yes, and consciousness. It’s changing because of the natural limits of the environment, which is making it higher and higher in priority and awareness. Yes, I think it’s going to be a long trend that keeps growing until we figure out how to work together. I’m hopeful. I’m really hopeful because it’s nice. There’s a common enemy and it’s us. It’s very clear. We tried so many things where we tried to fight each other, but with the Internet, there’s just more information now, more awareness.
[00:20:00]
Jae: Recently in Iran, these students didn’t walk on those flags. People were just waking up in general. That means if we focus on the narrative of how we can work together and promote that and through our collective action make it rise above what’s being spoon-fed us in the mainstream media, then we have a good chance.
Gregory: I see this branching pattern in where the conversation can go in many good directions. I could see talking a little bit and understanding a little bit more about your vision for Virgo. I can see us just talking and thinking more about the personal, spiritual journey side of things. Obviously, those two are connected, I would guess.
Jae: Maybe I’ll do a brief plug on what Virgo is and then we can go just wherever we want.
Gregory: Awesome, that would be great.
Jae: There’s Cosmos which in mind it’s a lot of things, but it’s a proof-of-stake DeFi system that’s meant to create an ecosystem of DeFi and non-financial applications but the Cosmos Hub is about tokens. What’s missing, I think, is that killer app. People say, “Yes, but finance is the killer app.” I’m saying, “Yes.” In the absence of a financial meltdown or instability, people aren’t really going to transition over to blockchain in a mass, I don’t think, as long as there aren’t that many reasons to. However, okay, that’s going to give the case to switch over to crypto’s game more and more propelling, yes. But I think there’s also more that we can do. We can also create applications — and we need to — that are non-financial on the blockchain. The reason why is because there are forces that are trying to stop what we are doing. If we just have Cosmos by itself in all these blockchains, it really wouldn’t be enough because that doesn’t change our regulations. People with lots of money are deploying their capital towards their ends, to extract more wealth while damaging the environment because some people are shitty. Cosmos is not enough. The way these people influence us — if you remember Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and all that — is through social media. It’s through the news and the media that we consume. All these networks, Facebook, even Twitter, Reddit, they’re not doing a good job of decentralizing or really enabling the community to police themselves, to create their own set of cultural norms and let people decide for themselves what they think is right. We shouldn’t trust centralized companies with this stuff, even Facebook’s whitelist with Libra. That’s not enough because the power dynamics are structurally there. Because it’s there, it will attract people who will want to use it and abuse it and therefore, it will get abused eventually. It’s just absolute power absolutely corrupts. It’s almost like physics. You can’t stop it. You can for a while but eventually, it will happen. It’ll get compromised.
Gregory: Pause for just a moment. Can I ask you a question?
Jae: Yes.
Gregory: Do you think that that’s an innate biological or epigenetic phenomenon or is it a cultural phenomenon that absolute power corrupts absolutely? Is this something that, if we regenerate a different social construct or a different economic construct, that that would be different or is this something that is hardwired, just in your opinion? Maybe the answer is, “Who knows” but I’m just curious about that because you’re alluding to something — there’s a foundational assumption there and I’m curious what that is for you.
Jae: I think there are two. One is, if there is power that can be abused, it will become abused over time in a complex system with turning roles like presidents or a senate, because it doesn’t actually take that much money to pick off positions. The payoff is so great. The payoff is so great that if you capture something, then you essentially have infinite resources to win because you can extract so much once you’re done.
Gregory: There’s a game-theoretical pattern that someone will always use power in its most extreme and negative form at some point.
Jae: Lots of people — maybe 30% of population — they don’t care about others. They just want more power or something like money or wealth or something. They want power.
Gregory: You really think it’s 30%?
Jae: Yes, and I think it’s more but the reason is because, not over our genes, more because of the situation in our culture. I think that can change.
Gregory: It’s 30% of people behave in a, what appears to be…
Jae: Sociopathic way.
Gregory: Yes, egotistical, sociopathic way, but it’s because they’re being driven. They think they need to protect their kids or they think they need to [crosstalk] politics that are at work or whatever it is that then creates a really negative externality around the results of their actions. They either rationalize away, they don’t see or they choose to ignore.
Jae: Yes. Capitalism is a system of rationalization of exploitation. You can think of it that way. By the way, I’m not saying I’m a socialist either. I’m saying we need to transcend this duality.
Gregory: Yes, totally. It’s a really interesting. There’s so many things here that are fascinating to me. I remember, at one point you shared the stage at — maybe it was Token Summit last year and you were there. I think it was [Lane?]. I forget his last name.
Jae: [unintelligible 00:28:20].
Gregory: Yes, exactly. He was sharing something. He was like criticizing the downside of a one token one vote proof of stake system, because of the propensity for power to over time centralize through the accumulation of blockchain [crosstalk], et cetera.
Jae: I agree. I agreed with him in general, but I don’t think it’s [crosstalk]
Gregory: So do I. There was something that you said though, which I thought was really interesting in its worth. That conversation, in particular, was really important for people to have an open, for all of us to read from the same book. Yes, we all agree objectively that if a proof of stake system was left unchecked the way that the game mechanics go, there’s a power accumulation.
Jae: I would say all complex systems centralized in power over time.
Gregory: Yes, exactly. There’s a name for that pattern, that theory. The thing is that they tend to centralize, but they also tend to be disrupted and re-decentralized. There is this dynamic, this equilibrium that takes place.
Jae: Disruption kind of deal.
Gregory: Yes, but there’s something about the Cosmos vision, which I think is up until recently at least and I think it’s getting more widely adopted, has been unique, which is; okay, that may be but the way to design around that isn’t necessarily to create these complex internal mechanisms to keep people from ever accumulating power.
[00:30:00]
Gregory: It’s to make exit free so that anybody can leave when that starts to happen. That’s the check and balance. If there’s one thing that I learned from you, and I think it may be an original thought from you or you and Bucky or the Cosmos [inaudible 00:30:39], but it’s that lowering the cost of exit is the best way to prevent tyranny essentially. It’s this core foundational…
Jae: Principle or value, yes. It’s a core value of Virgo actually.
Gregory: Yes, and Cosmos I think. I think it’s emanating… I don’t know. I think Bucky resonates with, but I think it’s maybe… I sense that it emanates something about your essence that is a clear thing that you’re serving. That’s part of your mission in life — lower the cost of exit for everybody and you’ll change the game dynamics.
Jae: I really love the idea of volunteerism and I try to draw from that a lot. Kopimism is similar in idea but it’s more about information. The idea of all of this is that like respect each other and don’t force people to do things as reasonably as possible. That means you have to give people an option to use different monetary systems or they don’t believe in your money. You can’t force people to oblige and say, “This is the only thing that you can use just because you’re born here.”
Gregory: Yes [crosstalk] that’s radical. I totally agree. It’s an idea that this time has come and it’s a dangerous idea because for so long, the foundation of empire has been money. The very foundation. When you think about the Roman Empire, what made the Roman Empire work was the relationship between army, slaves, money, and grain, and how those things came together to create a social system that’s aim was expansion essentially. The monetary supply has to expand. The supply of slaves has to expand. If you look at the history of Rome at any time, if there’s a big upset in the grain production or there’s an upset in the inflow of slaves, or there’s a big upset in any of the extending frontiers, essentially you get these explosions take place. You can talk about like, “Oh, the Germans overran the Roman Empire,” but really it can be explained in much more simple terms. Just like the ability to exercise logistics and have a single monetary supply reached its end, essentially. It couldn’t keep going.
Jae: Yes. I wonder if at the same time something else was being born always. While something was declining, another story is that something else was starting to take shape that was corroding the original narrative.
Gregory: That’s a beautiful invitation.
Jae: If that’s true, that may mean that for us to transition, we still need something perhaps that might be construed as an empire. Can you have a voluntary, decentralized, peaceful empire? What is an empire anyways?
Gregory: Yes, it’s a great question. I think the answer is…
Jae: Kingdom of God — that’s what Christians would say.
Gregory: The answer is the Kingdom of God.
Jae: yes, for the religious folks. I’m an agnostic by the way.
Gregory: Yes, I’m also.
Jae: We don’t have to talk about religions.
Gregory: I’m perfectly comfortable talking about religion. It’s complex though, the entrée into that world is… especially in today’s day and age which I think is interesting… I just want to take a moment to applaud you on just what I perceive as — I forget what the name of it is but In Russia in the latter part of the Soviet empire — this avant-garde art form was born in which the observers can’t tell if you’re trolling or not.
Jae: Trolling was invented…
Gregory: Yes, but you can’t tell if you’re trolling. Some trolls you know but some trolls you’re like, “Are you trolling or not? Are you fucking with me? I can’t tell.” I feel like you’re nailing that on the head, which is … It’s important and it’s always dealing with the most uncomfortable issues, for instance in the crypto space. At the end of the day, the different tribal affinity groups in the crypto space essentially are religions.
Jae: Money is faith.
Gregory: Exactly, and there’s something about your trolling that is directly pointing to that. It’s been really funny watching people, how people respond, mostly just by like, “I don’t want to talk about it. Jae went crazy,” which I don’t think is true or crazy, like coyote crazy.
Jae: I don’t know. I’m open to all of this. I realized I’m open to a lot of things; open the idea that may be crazy, open to the idea… I forget what I was going to say.
Gregory: Religion…
Jae: What’s a religion? What’s the difference between spirituality, faith, and religion? What is a religion?
Gregory: I would answer that in the following way. I don’t know. I’m not Wikipedia or whatever. I’m not the store of truth but my sense is…
Jae: You’re the store of your truth.
Gregory: Yes. My sense, for me, spirituality is a deeply intrinsic experience, in which there’s a dynamic transcendence but [inaudible 00:37:37] insofar as I’m unifying my consciousness with the Universe, but I’m the only one who can experience that. It can also be an intersubjective experience but it transcends language. Maybe the closest we can get is some poetry and art and maybe it has a deep affinity with culture, cultural regeneration.
Jae: It has a deep affinity to — physics is wrong — maybe quantum mechanics.
Gregory: Exactly, quantum. It is a quantum experience. Whereas religion is an attempt to ritualize and codify [crosstalk] experienced in those states usually, I think, for the health… although it’s manipulated by some. I also think, in general, it’s usually in good faith trying to codify an operating system that is sourced from that transcended experience. This is what connects with blockchain. What is the state machine other than a transparent codification of time and space into the consensus reality of a group of nodes?
Jae: Yes, it’s inter-node, inter-person protocol, automated one that lets emerge monetary system.
Gregory: A monetary system being: what do we value? What is that which we choose to imbue with value so that we can build a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts together?
Jae: Is the United States a religion?
Gregory: I would say liberal democracy and scientific materialism is a religion and the United States is an expression of that in some way, like it’s a church.
Jae: Talking about the whole concept of it is just the fact that 200 years ago or whatever, was the constitution. There’s White House, the senate house. This is what’s supposed to work. This is our best shot. Starting to sound like a religion to me. What’s the difference?
[00:40:00]
Gregory: Yes, I don’t know. I mean, it’s definitely a continuum and where to draw the line I’m not quite sure.
Jae: There’s no deity. There’s no god.
Gregory: There is a god. The god is…
Jae: The dollar.
Gregory: It’s the god of the enlightenment, in quotes. It’s the rationalist, materialist god which was born out of the strange protestant reformation hitting the scientific revolution.
Jae: The work ethic of the protestant and capitalism merged together.
Gregory: Yes, all in this bind. It’s like a meme complex.
Jae: The capitalism will save us.
Gregory: It’s an entity. These things have spiritual mass. It’s an entity and we feed it. We feed it with our day-to-day. I was quite uncomfortable to note this Christmas. I have two kids. I have an almost-three-year-old and a one-year-old. We participated despite my best efforts in a fully secular Christian materialist Christmas. It’s all about grandparents and kids. Everybody wants the presents and everybody wants to do the thing and have the sweets. Through that ritual, we were feeding this strange godhead of capital. It’s what we were doing.
Jae: Did that come from St. Francis? Is that it? From St. Nicholas?
Gregory: Good old Saint Nick.
Jae: Where did Saint Nick come from?
Gregory: I don’t know the whole story but I do know that there’s a whole, on a deeper Pagan roots of all of this, the pre Saint Nicholas figure was connected to Amanita muscaria, those big, beautiful red mushrooms with white flacks. You can’t eat them directly because they’re toxic, but if you drink the urine of a reindeer who had eaten these mushrooms, it’s this really potent psychedelic essentially. That is connected somehow deeply with the spirit of Christmas. Then, bound up with Saint Nicholas and in [inaudible 00:42:40] and the north. These mushrooms tend to grow in the north associated with beech trees and the Sun. There’s this powerful shamanic heart to the Christmas season and the rebirth. We co-opted for a reason. It was co-opted and turned into a ritualized moment where we’re feeding something. Got to feed something. It was co-opted for a reason. It’s a very potent time, that rebirth of the Sun. I’m rambling a little bit.
Jae: Talking about co-opting. I think and I’m still investigating this, but this is what I discovered recently — that Jesus was talking about this concept called “metanoia” which means to see more broadly and differently. I have my own interpretation of it, but I believe that word was mistranslated to mean “repent” and so guilt was associated with it in order to control people through guilt.
Gregory: That’s really interesting. Oh my gosh. What you’re saying is that there’s this concept — we’ll call it metanoia — that was co-opted and turned from a self-driven, intrinsic reconnection with our whole perspective or like a broader perspective to the unilateral imposition of guilt by some figure of power. It’s like a co-option.
Jae: Like Jesus on the cross suffering. Yes. Jesus wasn’t about his suffering. Him getting on the cross proves a point so he made it work, but his message was about changing the way we think and prepare for the apocalypse, a vision that he saw, the Malthusian trap. People co-opted that and made people feel guilty under bleeding Jesus.
Gregory: Did you grow up in a Christian family?
Jae: Kind of. My dad was a Buddhist and then he converted to a Christian. I went to church a few times. I have a Bible. My mom gave me a Bible a long time ago. She doesn’t actively go to church anymore but I have that. What I wanted to say was that this is what Muhammad said in the Quran, in the second verse, called “the cow,” lines 58 and 59.
Gregory: What did he say? Was he talking about metanoia?
Jae: Yes, that word and that it was mistranslated.
Gregory: Oh, so this is a clarification. This is Muhammad as a prophet clarifying something that the disciples got wrong about Jesus’ teaching and clarifying it for his followers.
Jae: In this case, I don’t know this 100% but there’s a book on it too so I’m trying to figure it out. I’m going to get it and read more about it.
Gregory: It’s interesting. I participate in this school that’s deeply consciousness-rooted…
Jae: This is [world relevant?], yes.
Gregory: …in which the practice is, essentially, to take radical responsibility to get these individual capacities. My own capacity to self-reflect, self-remember, and exercise my will in order to develop my own ability to engage deeply and authentically in the real world, not my projection, my idea of it, but what’s real. The biggest thing that gets in the way of that is what our modern culture calls “feedback,” which is the cybernetic concept of governing a system, like someone telling me what I did wrong for instance.
Jae: I’m losing you.
Gregory: Did you lose me because of the network issues?
Jae: No, just the concepts. I’m not sure I got them.
Gregory: I’m trying to connect this concept of metanoia with my emerging understanding of why the adoption of the cybernetic concept of feedback is similar to the churches. It’s the same. It’s like “same” same but different, as forcing people into a confessional and a relationship with a authority, in which you’re subservient and you’re reporting your sins as the mechanism for governing and keeping people in control. In the concept of cybernetics born in the 70s — or even before that but advanced significantly in the 70s — and then the concept of feedback started making its way into the corporate culture so people always [inaudible 00:48:40] and feedback on that. Like, “Hey, you need to learn to accept feedback” or whatever it is, which is this concept that we’re machines, that I’m a machine and in order to act right you need to tell me what to do, which interestingly enough… obviously I need to deeply listen and attune myself and harmonize, but there’s this shift. Is the responsibility on you to give me the feedback or is the responsibility on me to make the choice to shift my perspective to metanoic instead of being self-centered?
Jae: What would be the term metanoic? Are you saying to adopt and accept a culture where you are responsible for giving feedback is that would follow from metanoia? is that what you’re saying?
Gregory: What I’m saying is maybe a tad more radical than that. I’m saying a culture that supports metanoic consciousness is one that demands individuals to constantly dedicate their life’s practice to reconnecting with metanoic consciousness.
[00:50:00]
Jae: What does that mean in terms of feedback?
Gregory: This is a slippery one. Thanks for sticking with this. If I have the assumption that I’m going to rely on you to give me feedback, where is the agency? I have outsourced my agency to you instead of taking responsibility myself. Who has the responsibility for regenerating the Christ consciousness, if you think about this from a Christian perspective? Who has the responsibility for connecting their heart back to Christ’s consciousness? Does the preacher or the pope who’s going to give everyone [crosstalk]
Jae: Not centralized authority but rather everyone is responsible for giving feedback to everyone including themselves. Once you see that we’re all on the same boat together with global warming and so on, it makes … I’m also considering where we’re headed in terms of the technology and the ability to sequence our DNA. Shit, you might have children thousands of years from now. To see that you are “one” and you have responsibilities, but also to see how you “one” needs others and to see how a collective can best evolve and learn together, I think, helps you derive a set of protocols that says, “Everyone is responsible for giving everyone feedback including themselves.”
Gregory: Let’s shift gears a little bit. I remember once I got a glimpse when we were in Berlin for that phenomenal first Interchain Foundation meeting.
Jae: Interchain Conversations.
Gregory: Yes. We were walking early in the morning. We were walking back along a canal or something, and you started talking a little bit about your vision of community, of all humans living together in an agro-utopian, eco-balanced way community — your vision of what was automated and what wasn’t. I’d love to give you a chance to just share a little bit, like a glimpse of, a little snapshot of that as something that feels inviting to you, or something that you feel maybe you’re inviting into the world or is inviting you to serve it, so that listeners can get just a taste of how you see an idealized society or an idealized community living together, raising children or whatever might be happening there.
Jae: Okay. Wow, that was a lot. First, obviously I don’t have answers but I can try to think stiff that I see. We need to figure out better food distribution and production system because there’s so many issues that I think everyone knows, inefficiencies and the chemical nature that’s not sustainable. All of that needs to change. When it comes to food, I think what that means is you want food that is as locally produced as reasonably possible and it should be reflected in the cost too. You should be able to see that in the cost to get food from far away, because the energy the carbon output and transportation is still high. If you truly reflect that, I think would be greater. If we truly account for and pay a little more to help with the regreening efforts, then I think people naturally want food grown locally. I think automation is going to be huge too. I remember when I was doing 3D robotics or 3D printers way back a few years ago, it came … if anything, the plastic exclusion is nice but for really crazy stuff you need quite advanced tech. What became obvious is that making… it wouldn’t be too hard to create a nimble robot perhaps with 3D printing components, with a camera and a good AI, to be able to do manual labor in terms of pest control and seeding and maybe even harvesting. If we get that, and I think it should be cost-efficient to connect two perhaps to a solar grid nearby. Every town should have food production outdoors, some being greenhouses with automated, quite automated. Then you also want to integrate education into this too and also just well-being. People should be able to go there and learn about how food is produced and everything. It would be a good way for people to learn about… you should be able to go somewhere, see a fruit, pick it after you washed your hands and learn the source code for all those machines there. Just dive into it. Whatever you want to know, the software, the AI, and then you connect it to the blockchain. Now you want to trade. You want to see how that food that lives here get shipped off via rails hopefully in the future and understand the blockchain. I just think that it’s vital for us to connect with the soil and get on with the program of regreening. In order to do that, the education system must be based on food production. It’s a nice topic that branches into so many things. That’s what I’m trying to say. Why not? Isn’t that what education system… where gardening is the crucial part.
Gregory: Are you talking about permaculture?
Jae: Not permaculture, but — I forget — some lady developed it. It will come to me.
Gregory: I was thinking biodynamic and the connection between that and Waldorf education, but that’s Rudolf Steiner. My understanding is he stole a lot of stuff from Isadora Duncan, who’s a dancer but also a very creative woman who’s contemporary with Rudolf Steiner.
Jae: I don’t know. What causes us to be so good at exporting our violence, I think, is being separated from food production. It’s part of it. You get used to the notion that the world is some abstract thing that you’re not really in touch with except through money and deliveries.
[01:00:00]
Gregory: What’s really interested about that if you really think about the history of how we came to be where we are, what money is, is a way to generate liquidity in order to hedge risk associated with being tied to a place, because the enormous risk of being a peasant — with that is to say that’s pejorative but what it means is someone who’s land-based — who has a relationship with the primary product agricultural productivity and management of the place. There’s the place and there’s stewarding. If someone comes up over the hill and has a sword or a gun or nuclear weapons or whatever and they want to take that place from you, what do you as that peasant or that [inaudible 01:00:40] what do you have? How can you escape that? One way to think about the creation of the global monetary system is people hedging and creating pools of liquidity that can move around and can never be taken from you. The farm can’t be taken from you. There’s something foundational about learning… We can’t keep running. We have to solidify and feel safe at home that we invest into regeneration and stewardship of our agroecosystems.
Jae: Right, [crosstalk] or it will get stolen.
Gregory: [crosstalk] rob and leave. It’s just a super extractive cycle to maximize liquidity so you can get the hell out. That’s [inaudible 01:01:36] the technological element of regenerative stewardship of agroecosystems. That’s actually not so hard. We can do that. You can create. You can sequester carbon in the soil. You can create biodiverse agroecosystems whether it’s automated or human-led. The agronomic process to create fecund, beautiful, abundant produce in a great way is totally doable, if people can relax and trust that what they create won’t be stolen from them. I believe, one of the foundational needs we have somehow, is to support out that trust that I as a peasant, as a yeoman, as a freeholder, as a farmer, as a citizen…
Jae: That investing in this land is good; that it won’t be taken away.
Gregory: It won’t just be taken away. That dichotomy and that relationship between the market and the commons and my private ability to take care of my family, in an indirect way that’s what we’re trying to solve for at Regen Network, although it feels too sticky to tackle head on. It’s complex. It’s tangled up and you’re dealing with how many millennia of this hardcoded game theory and adversarial economics [crosstalk]
Jae: Do you want to hear a dangerous idea?
Gregory: Yes, I’d love to.
Jae: I don’t know how feasible it is, but it sounds crazy. Imagine if you made a blockchain game perhaps, where it singulates peasant takeover of the land and redistribution, based on is it a farmland, is it corporate. The game says you sign up if you’re a peasant. The whole point is to simulate what might happen if it’s done right. After enough iterations if you get advanced enough to the point where people would say, “Let’s just do it.”
Gregory: What you’re saying is we can do a real epic multiplayer game simulation around agrarian reform essentially.
Jae: Yes, of regenerating. Yes. You’d have people who are responsible for acres, you’d have roles. It’s quite a dangerous idea and certain people would certainly freak out because it’s just the motorcycle that’s played out before. It happened in China.
Gregory: It happened in China. It happened in Russia. It happened in its own way in the United States several times. It happened in Chile. You know, Allende and Pinochet. It’s happened over and over in Latin America in different moments. Agrarian reform has been the driver of many, many revolutions all around the world.
Jae: It doesn’t have to be that violent actually. Maybe we can think of different things. If we were to learn from history and make sure that we transcend it, I think more people can get behind it. If we say, instead of focusing on land redistribution which is quite violent, we ensure that transitions happen slowly. There might be other elements to this game like border redrawing. I do think there should be a new protocol. If today we live in some trivia of less valiant world and the nation-states have all these borders, where people don’t have control over borders, what it should be, I think, is at the fringes, at the borders, is where the border should be defined based on lots of things around that locale. Over time, borders might peacefully evolve naturally if things are kosher. If there’s no conflict there and voluntarily that’s what people want.
Gregory: You’re talking about the ability to essentially exit the nation-state and join a different one or join a different state.
Jae: Yes, I think the future’s going to hold a patchwork of project choosing jurisdiction and then your neighbors get together and you vote it out.
Gregory: I love that vision. One thing I would notice from my perspective — and I think this is represented in our strategy at Regen Network — is that the pathway towards agrarian reform passes through DiFi essentially. In my mind, there’s two key elements that are resonant with this principle of ease of exit. If you’re talking about agriculture and agrarian reform, people need two key elements. One, they need a digestible dashboard of the scientific reality of ecological health and they need a digestible dashboard of what I call “the invisible structures” or that is the legal financial reality, and they need the ability to make choices in their own hands to create contracts about those two — future contracts [inaudible 01:07:35], contracts about public or common goods generated by good stewardship, clean water, carbon sequestration, whatever it is. If everyone has access to those things, it actually completely changes the playfield so much that the old rules of private property start to dissolve because you start to get people making specific contracts and agreements about both the public and private goods.
Jae: I see. I understand the link because ownership becomes much more nuanced and conditional.
Gregory: Completely the subtle conditional ownership which makes people tune to ecological reality, tune to what is actually providing the most resilient, consistent returns on the investment of our labor, of different forms of capital.
Jae: Yes, agreed. That’s quite a bit of engineering at work.
Gregory: Oh my god, tell me about it. Yes. It’s a lot. Our entrée is through very simple, brute, and kind of silly ecosystem service credits, but the vision is to get to that subtle, multi-stakeholder management of these private and public good generated from agroecosystems so that you really do dissolve the hard fast structured ownership and shift it to something that’s nuanced and grounded in ecological reality. As you said, there’s going to be a bit of a path. It’s not going to happen overnight.
Jae: Yes.
Gregory: What’s the photo up on the… that I see in the corner there?
Jae: St. Louis, Arizona. It’s in Arizona. I guess that’s the Mexican border, if you can’t tell.
[01:10:00]
Jae: The bottom is the sparsely populated RV town, I suppose. It’s a trailer park. Then, above the border is a [unintelligible 01:10:18] Mexican housing.
Gregory: Also these are houses. Oh wow. There is the border. xx
Jae: Speaking of borders, it’s just absurd. That’s not natural. Something’s wrong there. You know something’s going to… not quite right. Yes, so much inefficiencies and so much pain, so much letting down, so much lack of hope. People are at this unmovable fence. It’s a weird system. It’s natural and simple system but it’s so corruptible.
Gregory: Sort of shifting gears again. Did you have any New Year’s resolutions this year?
Jae: Yes, to eat better. I haven’t been doing well, to get better at giving fucks.
Gregory: To actually give a fuck about certain things.
Jae: No, I give a fuck about too many things and some things I need to stop giving a fuck about. For example, people think about my crazy tweeting calling myself Cosmuhammad Bitcoin Jaesustein. People are upset. I don’t care because I’m actually not hurting anyone. The intent is good. I’m not really breaking any consistent social norms frankly because I’m not saying anything that’s really controversial if you think about it. Am I trolling? I don’t even know myself. Maybe that’s why it’s so good.
Gregory: That’s why it’s so good.
Jae: That’s why I troll.
Gregory: To be provocative, I think, to create art or that is to say to create a moment in which you and the people around you have a reflection like go like, “Oh,” maybe things could be different.
Jae: Maybe I’m wrong.
Gregory: Maybe I’m wrong or maybe this person that I’ve trusted is wrong or whatever it is.
Jae: Yes, [crosstalk] didn’t follow leaders.
Gregory: That’s art essentially, a Socratic form of art. That’s how I would characterize what you’ve been engaging with, sort of like coyote, Socratic art form which I wouldn’t call it trolling because when I think of trolling I have a specific like a Chan, 4Chan Internet troll vision, but I do think also there is this resonance that in its highest expression, maybe there’s an intersection. It doesn’t mean it’s not authentic and genuine. It’s just there’s some disruption of a narrative that’s taking place, an invitation to look deeper.
Jae: Yes, exactly.
Gregory: Which I think is great. Just a thought experiment — can you imagine what would have happened less than a year after Ethereum’s main net launch if Vitalik did what you just did on Twitter?
Jae: Don’t know.
Gregory: I think it would have crashed and I think that that is one of the things I love about the Cosmos which is that you…
Jae: I’m proving that it’s not going to crash.
Gregory: There’s no single point of failure. There isn’t actually. The ethos that brought the community together is sufficiently integral with or without any individual that people can actually speak their mind. You can actually be like, “Hey guys. I’m going to check out and I’m going to do this Socratic, troll art for the next little bit” and everybody can be like “Okay” and the community continues.
Jae: Yes, I don’t want it any other way.
Gregory: It’s a signal of success, I think.
Jae: Yes, I think it’s working. I’m glad it’s working out. Exactly. People can’t say anymore, “Jae’s so central to Cosmos. Look, Jae looks like a raging lunatic.” No one cares. That’s what I want people to say. But I’m not. If you actually read all the crazy shit, the writing, it’s actually not crazy.
Gregory: It’s not that crazy, but I think there’s some wisdom in creating the juxtaposition there that allows people to see the reality of the separation between the creative endeavor, which I’m sure you have certain attachments over things going this way or that way or whatever, and you as a person. I don’t know. It’s a cool thing. I think about this a lot as a founder of different projects and how I build resilience in community and not make it about me, but still be able to participate. There’s certain pain to being a creator but then hiving your creations depend on you so that you actually have to create a scenario where you cut the cord. I think it’s kind of like having kids. There’s a certain moment when you have to both let go and then re-meet each other as adults instead of as parents.
Jae: Yes, I want Cosmos to get out of my house.
Gregory: Exactly.
Jae: It’s working. Cosmos is working. It’s liberating. It’s like, oh god, I wasn’t able to say what I wanted for so long. What’s amazing when I started working on Tendermint, it felt like how it feels now. You should have seen all the crazy bitcoiners calling me all kinds of things, putting me down, trying to get people to see what Tendermint is about. It was an uphill battle. There was that podcast with Bitcoin Uncensored. What’s his name? I forgot his name. People were just like fucking trolling me and just trying to get me to stop. It was fun. It was a good challenge to refine your thoughts and to make it solid, to forge ahead. It did actually help in that regard.
Gregory: Totally. When you know it gives you boundaries to push against.
Jae: Yes, they helped define the boundaries. I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for the people in the company who have been suffering confusion and surprise for my actions. Along the way, comes more understanding about: how should our society function? If Cosmos is going to be an inter-blockchain system and blockchains are [faiths? 01:19:55] it’s like…
[01:20:00]
Jae: If we want to make this a global system of decentralized movement, we have to be [into faith? 01:20:06]. We have to be able to be able to figure out, not just tolerate. You can tolerate but I think it’s a kind of a sham because the stories of these faiths — Abraham and others — there’s actually truth in a lot of them. I’m saying there are good messages there. Sure it’s misconstrued and abused, but people will abuse anything. It’s like the more pure and the more correct, the more real some set of words might be about how we should live, the more it’s going to be targeted for abuse. You can control people if they are, say for example, not afraid of death, and you shouldn’t be. Then, it becomes a point of failure because someone can control that message.
Gregory: In the midst of your own personal exploration and this Socratic coyote avant-garde troll art that you’re on, on this journey, how are you reinventing your relationship as a leader to AiB and Tendermint? What’s emerging as the healthiest way for you to take care of yourself and do what you need and also have the team to be able to forge a viable path in the world?
Jae: This is a conversation we’re having and I think people want me to — in the company — some people who want me to be a lot actually, to not do what I’m doing. But then, I think it goes against the core principles, core values, to apply rights and expectations unfairly. One thing that we’re all guilty of is relying too much on leadership from some central hero. I think it’s fine for a company to have a CEO role in the sense there’s an ultimate arbiter when you need one, but to rely on a single person as the figurehead and to prevent them from making mistakes or saying controversial things or speaking their mind, is really just to follow someone who’s constrained and can’t think anymore. Truly all of this, let’s not do that. I need to explore and be a coyote. I suppose I see what you mean. That’s how I learned and got Tendermint out. There’s something here that I’m exploring that’s really interesting. There’s something there that, I suspect, is timely that I need to be exploring, and that we’re going to learn something. It’s really interesting to observe people’s reactions. Some investors, it seems like mine have, past on an opportunity — investors — because of my behavior or maybe someone’s just trying to control me because socially people think that this is bad and there’s this pressure to ask me to stop. I think it’s better that it’s clear that I’m not the leader that needs to be dependent on, that people take my words and they add its value according to its truth instead of who I am. I don’t know. I’m rambling. Also, I really do feel like I need to say those things. I can’t stop it, so we’ll figure something out.
Gregory: That all makes sense. I guess I’m just curious as a member of the Cosmos ecosystem, how this shakes out as far as… I’m getting a clear picture which is I think — so tell me if this is right — that there’s a way in which in order to unfetter your creative spirit and actually be in integrity with who you are, essentially, there’s a stepping back from officializing perhaps something that’s been true for a while, but making it clear that there’s a separation between the operational reality of this business which is doing X, Y, and Y, and trying to create this and which you’re still a part of and share [inaudible 01:25:36] saying like, “Look, don’t expect me to do that because I’ve got some other things. I need to go on this creative journey right now, and I’m going to do that.” Meanwhile, there is a group of people who are still in the trenches actualizing different elements of all of the potential that [crosstalk]
Jae: Yes, they are. It’s already happening. I join the meetings when I need to but our team’s got it. They are under-stoked. They don’t want to rock the boat.
Gregory: There’s a danger there, to be honest, in my experience. There’s a danger there of this laissez-faire, King of England scenario — King George scenario — where you let the colonies go for a while and then you come back and you’re like, “Wait, I need these taxes. I need things to be a certain wait” and everybody’s like, “Screw you. We revoked.” There is a danger there of creating separation and then choosing to come back. It’s almost like you may need to create your own constitution and stick with it where you’re like, ”I will never interfere in the following things and you can trust me not to.”
Jae: Oh, yes. This is the conversation we’re having, exactly. We’re defining what that looks like. We haven’t finished all of it honestly because I’m sort of like a bottleneck there so we need to clarify the process, the capital P, a little more and then figure out what the board is going to look like. We’ve been defining and redefining a lot of the top…
[pause 01:27:28]
Gregory: Ups, we’ve lost Jae Kwon. Maybe he’ll come back. Before we got cut off, you were just talking about the certain capital P process, and co-creating a new board and just creating a healthy organization for AiB moving forward.
Jae: Yes, that’s right. AiB is going to be primarily a software company with initially Cosmos and Virgo as its main pillars. We’ll have more in the future, but it’s not the goal for it to be a large company but more like to find the necessary opportunities that multiply each other. Since that, there is a structure and culture within AiB that we iterate on. We want to help provide this to the rest of the world. One way to look at this is to say that we’re practicing radical transparency as defined by Ray Dalio in book Principles, and extending it with process. Now, we want to export this to the world so that the world understands the transparency. My role here is to help set the mission and a big part of hypothesis is setting the process right. You can set a direction, checks and balances internally, so that you can better trust it to evolve the right way. We’re starting to get there. What I want to do is either on [unintelligible 01:29:43] create a good process, make myself be able to be phased out. I’ve already committed to doing all of this where I’m no longer going to be the same role board seat member or AiB.
[01:30:00]
Jae: There’s already a transition plan in works and I think now is a good time to do it because it’s already the case that the team is working quite well.
Gregory: I’m getting a little bit of moving around and your mic is rubbing on something. I think it’s fine. People, listeners, I ask listeners to expect, to not be an overproduced podcast. That’s all good. I just wanted to let you know that I was hearing it. To reflect on what you just said, yes. I’m really excited for you and for AiB and for the whole Cosmos ecosystem as sometimes transitions can be scary, but what a phenomenal opportunity. I’m just excited for you to be putting yourself and having the courage to put yourself in the place where you need to be to unleash your creativity and be focused on what you’re really passionate about. I’m excited for the world for that to be true as well.
Jae: I hope everyone starts living this way where they are just more careful about what they care about and what they set… where they think really hard about what their core values are, what they want out of this world. Hopefully, it’s with purpose. Yes. I think that’s necessary for us to get out of this mess and we will.
Gregory: Yes, I’m a firm believer, although we’re in choppy waters, we’ll be able to navigate across them and I think that’s true in an approximate fear. In your case, with your redefinition of roles and the exploration of what’s next, but I think also, at a planetary scale, we’re all going through a similar experience here. As above so below, as they say.
Jae: Can you imagine the future if we start to live by streaming our thoughts to the public. We’re more comfortable doing that and our UX is better to be able to derive good things from that. You might actually even have enough data to using methods — maybe like Monte Carlo method — to figure out, derive the brain state of us, with the blockchain being like this relatively immutable source of data that could last forever potentially. Aren’t we, therefore, entering ourselves and our souls into a different kind of universe of perspective where, in a way, we’re already immortal if we choose to live this way?
Gregory: I see an orbs cloud forming now.
Jae: An orbs cloud?
Gregory: Isn’t that what the… Dyson Sphere, sorry.
Jae: Oh, the Dyson Sphere. Yes. We’ll get there as soon as we get rid of this mess. If we go into World War 3, it’s going to be bad because obviously, but we’re going to lose out infrastructure and it’s going to get a long time for us to get back to point where we can do then real space exploration, because our grid is so interconnected, because all the pieces come from all over the world. Once it’s down, even extracting energy will be hard. We’ll probably go through charade of long draw of refining solar energy. It’s going to be a different civilization or, if we’re lucky, we might be able to prevent the worst from happening. Maybe we can make intelligent choices about the infrastructure without getting into a global conflict. I guess what I’m saying is, in the next five to ten years, five years let’s say, we’ll globally have a choice to make, and depending on where we go, we will get Dyson Spheres within the next 200 years — starting to get there — or it will be 50 thousand years. It’s like take a pick.
Gregory: I guess I hope that our Dyson Sphere reality doesn’t end up metabolizing life in order to create the giant computer.
Jae: What does it mean to metabolize life?
Gregory: Essentially, break into component parts and repurpose it as technology. I’m attached to the beautiful evolutionary complexity of biological life.
Jae: I agree. I think, once we get to a point where we can start to go to Mars, terraform the place — I think this is in the long run, maybe it will take 1000 years — but people will start to see Earth as a place, a garden, and people who choose to live there are going to want to keep it a garden. That’s its identity. It has its own nature. Everyone else will leave.
Gregory: Yes, I resonate with that. I see, from my perspective, the ethical imperative of our civilization of this moment, of these next five years, in a way, is to open up and maintain the dual potential of future generations living fully expressed lives as essentially hunter-gatherers, as humans simply enjoying the somatic experience of walking across of a fecund, beautiful savannah forest garden planet that has to meet all of your needs in a beautiful way. You gather food a few hours a day and have fun in a beautiful Eden, while also maintaining the open door towards the techno civilization expanding out to the stars. Those two have that seeming polarity, that seeming dichotomy. We have to open up a portal of possibility wide enough to fit both at the same time. That essentially gives us the ethos. Out of that vision, it gives us the ethos of how to approach technology and law and economy. That’s my personal view. I myself am excited about both, but would much prefer the boundless expanse of the globe, our Earth, and walking with the tight-knit group of my fellow humans across the Earth in the world and the tangible biophysical world of our ancestors and, I hope, our future generations. That’s my hope to be able to bequeath that to my kids, and their kids.
Jae: Yes, I take we’ll get there eventually, but oh man.
Gregory: I hope so. I think so too.
Jae: Yes, that would be wonderful. It’s the best way for us to move forward together instead of trying to… The analogy I’d like to make is crabs, crabs in a bucket. Crabs are trying to crawl on top of each other to get on top. Yes. Instead of doing that all the time, we should collectively share. We can create models of internal competition where we can almost prove — perhaps we can prove — that this is efficient competition, that it’s even more efficient than capitalism today with the regulatory regime and the feedback cycle and the corruption that happens, and that we should agree to adopt such a thing and then share what we can for our own space because there will be plenty. It’s such a change of mentality.
Gregory: That’s the hardest thing, is the paradigm system, the human operating system.
Jae: Yes, in order to do that you have to change, in the same way that software… it can take a while for closed source software to become open source. It’s going to take a while for organizations to become open but I think that will be happening very soon.
Gregory: Yes, I think there’s a lot of talented people working at this intersection of transforming organizations, transforming governance, transforming the economy, and transforming our technological tools to enable this voluntary coordination and focus on the common good as the basis for the personal wellness. How am I rich if everyone else is poor? It doesn’t even make sense.
Jae: It’s so dumb. It doesn’t make any damn sense. You can have all the money in the world. What does it mean if the people that you’re going to pay to do stuff aren’t going to believe in what you’re doing? What’s the point of all that? It makes a lot more sense to spend your money toward building community and regeneration. That’s a good use for money.
Gregory: Yes, amen. Jae, I’m curious if you have any parting remarks or anything that you want to make sure you share before we close off for the evening.
Jae: Yes, definitely. Thank you. I guess I should say that Cosmos IBC is coming. The new project is also in the works, called Virgo, which is about decentralizing and opening our social, financial, and governance organizational technologies from software to hardware all the way up. because you need all of this in order to… Cosmos is part of it, but you need everything and work together in order to repel, defend against the forces that are corrupt and are trying to fuck things over because of their awful greed. Join us at Virgo.org. Join us at the discord. It’s about the principles of openness, transparency, volunteerism, democracy, exit, environmentalism, and accountability. We’re going to create I guess it’s not an empire, but a different culture in a peaceful way. We have a plan to do that to save our asses. Please join us.
Gregory: Awesome. I’m super grateful for your time. Let’s do this again soon. Actually, there’s a set of conversations around how we actualize that, that I’m invited to talk about in the coming months as this all continues to grow and evolve. I’d love to have you back on the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I look forward to seeing you and everybody else who joins in the discord forum for Virgo. Yeah man, just super grateful for your work and your time.
Jae: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Hey, put me down as Cosmuhammad Bitcoin Jaesustein this time, my new name.
Gregory: Awesome. I’ll do that. That will be the name that we put on the interview list. I’ll do something like artist formerly known as Jae Kwon.
Jae: There you go. That’s true.
Gregory: Yes. I’ll try to get this out to the community in a quick turnaround. I have a couple of people helping me with the production so it’s not just going to happen tomorrow. This week, we’ll launch it and you can share it with the community.
Jae: That’s cool. Please let me know [crosstalk] and really, thank you for the opportunity. This is a funny story. I got invited to talk about Tendermint and Cosmos at Bloomberg Asia radio and I prepared a short thing as a persona. This is before I realized actually this is me. I jumped on the radio saying, “Hey my name is Cosmuhammad Bitcoin Jaesustein this time and I have 12 points I need to share with you.” The host was like, “Well, you can say 3.” I’m like, “No, it’s got to be 12.” I started listing it out, talking about what the revelations meant and where we are today. This is in the midlist of Iranian missiles and people were talking about World War 3. Here’s I am talking about the second seal being open so I got cut off. But I wasn’t cut off here, so thank you for listening.
Gregory: Did you get for posterity the part of the conversation before you got cut off?
Jae: Sorry?
Gregory: Do you have the part of that conversation that you shared before you got cut off?
Jae: Like a recording?
Gregory: Yes.
Jae: No, I don’t have it.
Gregory: I’d love to see if somebody managed to snag that.
Jae: Yes, it’s somewhere out there.
Gregory: Yes, you didn’t get cut off here and you’re welcome to speak at any length about all of these complex topics. I think it’s very important. It’s not a time in our history when soundbites and tidbits and premature judgments and all the rest of it that is the modern media’s way of mind control. I just don’t think we’re not going to evolve ourselves and our world if we’re not willing to have long, complex, and sometimes challenging conversations. Again, I’m super grateful that you’re leading with that and you’re willing to lean in and that we got to have a great conversation.
Jae: Yes, likewise. Next time maybe we can have someone to debate with, someone who’s just going to disagree with me.
Gregory: That’s a fantastic idea. I’ve been thinking about changing the format up a little bit and doing a more of a forum, either within the Cosmos community or without. If somebody comes to mind, I’m happy to moderate and contextualize. We can just go at it and create more richness there.
Jae: That’s a good idea.
Gregory: Cool man, have a beautiful evening. Excited to follow up.
Jae: Yes, likewise. Talk soon. Thank you so much.
