Dev Ojha, also a cryptographer, is the founder of Osmosis. He is now working on helping Zcash scale and go post quantum.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

Watch on YouTube or X. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on X for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

0:00 - Why Dev’s working on Zcash

12:24 - AI is surveillance’s ultimate weapon

13:33 - Encrypted money must scale

15:49 - Compliant “privacy” is an oxymoron

19:25 - PIR for scaling Zcash

36:35 - How Tachyon and PIR work hand in hand

43:47 - Quantum recoverability

47:18 - Is quantum the last cryptography problem?

51:41 - Easier coinholder voting process

1:03:15 - Zcash roadmap

1:17:34 - What Zcash looks like at scale

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

Watch on YouTube or X. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on X for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

0:00 - Project Tachyon

10:20 - Privacy can’t be an afterthought for a protocol

15:24 - Encrypted Bitcoin

22:11 - Soundness bug in original sprout pool

30:15 - Sapling

33:00 - A decade of progress

39:04 - Zcash’s anonymity set

51:29 - Using private money as a passthrough doesn’t work

56:04 - The importance of ledger indistinguishability

58:30 - The ultimate privacy stack

1:05:58 - Tachyon removes all cryptographic bottlenecks of encrypted money

1:08:16 - What’s next after Tachyon?

1:15:25 - Weightless blockchains?

1:18:24 - Ragu

1:19:44 - What the next 12 months look like for Jack and Sean

1:31:22 - “Everything worth doing is worth doing on ambitious timelines.” — Sean

1:32:16 - Sean’s advice for young engineers

1:34:18 - What got Sean and Jack into Zcash?

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Transcript

“Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.”

― David Deutsch

“I do not hesitate to proclaim this the Anthropocene era: The creation of man is the introduction of a new form of being into nature, a force previously absent from the world … This new element, more than any that previously existed anywhere, not only relates the non-living world to the living as had already happened, but, in a new and mysterious way, unifies physical principles with intellectual and moral ones. It is a force which, in its power and universality, is not inferior to any of the other great forces of nature.”

— Antonio Stoppani (In Volume II of his monumental three-volume geology textbook Corso di Geologia).

It seems that, as soon as our ancestors could afford to, they added a spiritual dimension to their existence. Human burial practices are at least 100,000 years old, and religious ceremonies date back at least 50,000 years. Though interpretations vary, it is thought that the famous archeological site called Gobekli Tepe is the oldest ritual site ever discovered. This Turkish site is thought to have been constructed around 10,000 BC—not by city-dwellers, or even by settled agriculturalists—but by nomadic hunter-gatherers. This implies that such people satisfied their spiritual needs before settling down and building the great early civilizations of Mesopotamia. The Biblical Matthew, with his famous line “Upon this Rock, I will build my Church,” may have got things backwards.

Cave paintings that reveal a reverence for animals and the Greek constellations named after divinities suggest that our forebears lacked the explicit distinctions between the sky above our heads, the fauna that roam the Earth and ourselves that we take for granted today—it has taken centuries of scientific investigation to make the fundamental differences between these realms obvious. The terrestrial, celestial and human were intertwined in the magical stories our prescientific ancestors told themselves.

In humanity’s earliest theories of the world, then, people played a fundamental role.

But, with the dawn of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century, such anthropocentrism grew less plausible—first, in 1543, Copernicus overthrew the geocentric model of our Solar System, and then, in 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica. Newton offered a bold new worldview, in which the motions of objects from pebbles to planets could be both explained and predicted—tell me the current position and velocity of an object, along with the forces acting on it, and I’ll give you its position and velocity at any later point in time. Copernicus—and later Galileo—demonstrated that the Earth was not at the center of the Solar System. Newton robbed our ancestors of their innocence by proposing the first universal theory, which explained phenomena across all of time and space in purely physical terms—magical and religious thinking were banished from his predictable, clockwork universe. Humans, it seemed, played no special role in this new understanding of reality.

Then along came Darwin and our ancestors took another step towards adulthood. In Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, all the apparent design in the biosphere has emerged through a long, long chain of slight modifications passed down from generation to generation. Those changes, which we now understand as due to mutations in the genetic code, were more likely to be passed on if they increased an organism’s fecundity—its ability to produce offspring—who, in turn, survived and reproduced. (The modern incarnation of Darwinian theory considers genes, not organisms, as the fundamental replicators.) The organism’s environment was a selector, a ruthless arbiter that determined which organisms were more likely to reproduce, and which were more likely to be tossed into the dustbin of extinction. String together enough of these cycles of random changes and non-random selection, and the result is all the elegant design and order in the biosphere.

There was no getting around it—this process explained the evolution of humans, too. Apparently, the story behind the emergence of algae and cattle also explained our entry onto the world stage. There was no room for the exceptional status of our species, which many had hoped biology would preserve.

So, after only a few centuries of modern science, the role of people was diminished on all fronts. We are not at the physical center of our Solar System, nor of our galaxy. We are not mentioned in any of our profoundest physical theories, which present a world that conforms to exact laws of motion and can be predicted with certainty. And even our best theory of life implies that we came about by the same naturalistic process that brought about every other apeish creature. Anthropocentrism, it seemed, was a thing of the past, a relic of a less mature people.

It’s taken a few centuries, but we’ve come back to the ancients’ view of the relationship between people and the cosmos. While we’ve rightly abandoned the majority of their beliefs, they were right about this much—to understand nature at its deepest, we have to acknowledge the special role people play. As we’ve explained, it is people, and only people, who are the ultimate transformers of this vast and wondrous cosmos.

You probably remember from high school that the effects of gravity diminish with the square of the distance. The same is true for the intensity of light. In general, physical effects rapidly diminish with distance. even from a hundredth of a light-year away, the sun would appear as a cold, bright dot in the sky, barely affecting anything. At a thousand light-years, even a supernova would have little impact. When viewed from a neighboring galaxy, the most violent quasar jets would be little more than an abstract painting in the sky. There is only one phenomenon whose effects do not necessarily diminish with distance: knowledge. A piece of knowledge could aim itself at a target, travel without diminishing for a thousand light-years, and then completely transform the destination.

It is taken for granted that our Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in five or so billion years, expand to become a red giant star and swallow the Earth in a deadly tsunami of heat. Many people take that moment as the moment that the human project will end. But our descendants may not want the Sun to eat the EarthEarth so. Such a feat is out of reach with our current technology, but no law of nature precludes us from succeeding in this task..

In fact, we know what would be required—we’d have to (somehow) suck matter out of the Sun. Not only is this possible in principle, but humanity has literally billions of years to plan and do so extremely gradually.

If humanity chooses and succeeds in modifying the Sun this way, then the typical account of stellar evolution as written in physics textbooks will simply not apply to our star. Those accounts explain the lifecycle of stars in terms of nuclear and electromagnetic forces, gravity, hydrostatic pressure, and radiation pressure—but they fail to consider the effects of yet another fundamental force—knowledge.

So, while the size of the Sun in billions of years does not depend on the gravitational effects of Mars, or the atmospheric events of Neptune, or the collision of asteroids in our solar system’s empty pockets. It does, as the textbooks say, depend on its own gravity, radiation pressure, and nucleosynthesis. But it also depends on intelligent life on Earth—the choices people make, the outcomes of their elections, their economic activity, the development of their moral values, and how they rear their children.

What’s true for our Sun is true for the universe as a whole: the fate of the cosmos depends on the future history of knowledge.

We’ve said that very few physical transformations take place in the absence of life, and that the overwhelming majority of transformations that could happen require the presence of people and their knowledge. But even the universe’s rather unvaried raw materials have the potential to explode into an infinite basket of wonders once we create knowledge about what we can do with them—and not a moment before that. For instance, coal is the result of millions of years of the earth’s slow but steady hand pressurizing dead plants, rock, and soil. And it can last in its black, stoic state for just as much time, as it doesn’t decompose. For most of humanity’s history, they must have regarded coal as an impotent rock, roughly as valuable to their lives as any other round bit of stone. Archeological evidence suggests that around 3500 BC, people in China were mining coal to use it as a source of energy. Armed with new knowledge of how to harness coal’s attributes, what had been an impotent feature of their environment had suddenly become a means to improve their lot in life, to transform their world from a worse one to a better one. In Ancient Greece, the heat from burned coal helped people in metallurgy. The Aztecs used coal as lights for their ornaments. In all cases, the value of coal was not some intrinsic attribute of the ancient material but rather depended on the knowledge that people had about which transformations coal could be used to cause.

The logic of the situation generalizes to the entirety of the cosmos. Cosmic rays and cows, dust and dark matter, tornados and tundras, planets and particles, black holes and white dwarves are all raw material to be transformed by the knowledge that people create into works of art, technologies that boggle the mind, a prosperous civilization that spans the cosmos itself.

Already, if one wants to explain regularities found on Earth, one cannot avoid mentioning the effects that people and their knowledge have had. But we are just beginning. Alien cartographers of the universe may one day observe the Milky Way and notice that entire solar systems have been altered by forces very unlike gravity. They may see that planets have been moved around as if by God’s invisible hand, that energy from stars is being siphoned this way and that, that oddly shaped objects are rotating around black holes that are made of utterly alien materials.

They will map out what they see, but their maps are hopeless against the tide of human creativity. For a future generation of these alien cartographers may find that the space between the Milky Way and its nearest neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, contains far more interesting systems than just cosmic dust, all with the clear mark of an Intelligent Designer. And they may find that even Andromeda looks entirely differently than the previous generation of cartographers had detailed, and that there exist patterns that somehow correlate between the two galaxies, even though none of the forces in physics could have possibly explained how one of the galaxies could have possibly affected the other to such a degree. These cartographers may explain the correlation in much the same way that we explain correlations between two Western societies, say, the United States and Great Britain—that there exist literally galaxy-wide cultures in both the Milky Way and Andromeda, and that they are exchanging and adopting each other’s ideas.

The alien cartographers may give up hope on mapping out the universe, resolving themselves to the fact that those pink-skinned Apes that originated on the planets of some backwater planet will continue to conquer the cosmos, atom by atom and galaxy by galaxy, forever converting its raw materials into products of its own imagination in a fundamentally unpredictable and unending process. Or they may choose to join us in the most important project there could ever be.

It may have taken those cartographers a long time to admit what they were seeing, but the spark had taken place long before humans had played with galaxies as easily as a toddler plays with her toys. As you well know by now, humanity finally kicked into high-gear during the Enlightenment, when we realized that progress was both possible and achievable, when ideas that fostered creativity and criticism began to replace those that suppressed them, when we sought to explain the world around us with rigorous theories, both scientific and otherwise. If we so choose, we can continue to make the world, the solar system, the galaxy, and the rest an infinitely better and more beautiful place. Human knowledge—our values, scientific theories, political ideals, and culture—can come to be the predominant cause of every physical structure in the cosmos. To the alien cartographers, explaining any given phenomenon they come across will entail explaining the choices that people make. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

Across 2,500 years of history, a pattern reappears. Athens in the age of Pericles. Florence under the Medici. Silicon Valley today. Different continents and different centuries, yet the same phenomenon: concentrated wealth directed toward unproven visions, within competitive systems that bred innovation. These were the sparks that lit civilization’s brightest periods, and they may be glowing again in our time.

Athens and Florence: The First Renaissances

In 5th-century Athens, Pericles presided over a society that gave us philosophy, mathematics, history, drama, and democracy itself. The Greek world was divided into rival city-states. Athens contended with Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. This rivalry compelled experimentation and encouraged risk. Each city sought to attract talent, not to imprison it.

Fifteen centuries later, Florence stood at the center of a second flowering. The Renaissance was financed by merchant-bankers like the Medici, who supported artists, architects, explorers, and political thinkers. Florence competed with Venice, Milan, and Rome much as Athens had with its neighbors. The struggle was intense, but the results were sublime: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Machiavelli, Galileo.

Two forces joined to make these bursts possible:

1. Decentralized competition through city-states

2. Wealthy elites willing to fund the future

Together, they produced some of the most brilliant ages in history.

The World We Inherited

Modern states do not look like Athens or Florence. Nation-states consolidated power, borders hardened, and federalism gave way to sprawling bureaucracies. Citizens ceased to be free movers. They became captives of geography. Governments no longer competed for people but for territory.

Yet the ancient formula is returning, though in a new form.

The Internet as the New City-State System

The internet now functions like the city-states of old. Instead of Athens or Florence, we have networks, protocols, online communities, and even emerging “network states.” They transcend geography and invite anyone who wishes to join.

For the first time in centuries, people can align more closely with their chosen networks than with their assigned nations. This marks the birth of the sovereign individual, a person who lives by choice rather than by passport.

The New Patrons of Genius

And once again, wealthy elites are underwriting bold experiments.

• People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are building rockets to make humanity multi-planetary.

• Peter Thiel is funding projects in radical life extension, challenging the inevitability of death.

• Others are advancing artificial intelligence, enlarging the frontier of mind itself.

Silicon Valley has become the Florence of our age. It channels concentrated wealth into ventures that governments would never attempt. Its patrons are the Medici of our time.

What They All Share

The pattern is unmistakable: when competition creates openness and wealth funds the seemingly impossible, genius flourishes.

• Pericles turned Athens into the cultural capital of the ancient world.

• The Medici transformed Florence into the engine of the Renaissance.

• Silicon Valley today is underwriting civilization’s next experiments in space, in longevity, and in intelligence.

A Renaissance Without End

The bursts of Athens and Florence endured for centuries but eventually dimmed. Our Renaissance could be different. It could last indefinitely, if we choose to sustain it. The internet has revived competition. Patrons stand ready to fund the future. The sovereign individual is rising.

What Pericles, the Medici, and Musk have in common is not their time or their culture, but their role as catalysts. They lit the match. The challenge before us is to decide whether, in this age, the flame will flicker or whether it will blaze into a fire without end.

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The viewport stretched wide, a cathedral of glass against the void. He stood there alone, tall, shoulders squared, a body carved into permanence by the twin miracles of biology and code. No gray in his hair, no weakness in his stride. Centuries had passed, yet he remained: unbroken, undefeated, immortal.

He remembered Earth as it had been: green and alive, clouds rolling thick with rain, the scent of soil rising after storms. The Garden was gone now. Not by apocalypse, not by the hands of builders, but by the weight of those who claimed to guard it. Bureaucrats fought their endless wars, choked the world with paper and steel, and in the struggle to hold power, they let paradise slip away. What was lost was innocence, and the illusion that Earth could endure under their watch.

He closed his eyes and let the past bleed back.

There had been enemies once, smooth talkers cloaked in concern. They promised safety by chaining progress, virtue by worshiping decay, equality by denying ambition. Socialism, degrowth, the prophets of AI doom: all preached surrender. They told mankind that greatness was a sin.

But greatness refused to die.

Tools were forged in secret, technology no state could throttle, no bureaucrat could seize. For the first time in centuries, the eye of Big Brother blinked and went dark. Freedom surged through the cracks like sunlight through stone. Capital flowed without chains, innovation without permission.

And when rockets roared upward, SpaceX painting fire across the sky, humanity followed. Mars, the Belt, the outer moons. Civilization unshackled, carried on pillars of steel and plasma. The builders had not destroyed Earth; they had simply walked away, choosing a horizon that could still hold life.

He remembered the day the last chain fell. The day humanity realized it would no longer apologize for its own existence. The day progress became unstoppable.

And yet…

Victory left scars. Eden Earth was lost, not to creation but to corruption. The forests that once hummed with life stood thin and hollow. The seas were restless, altered. He carried the memory of them like a wound that never closed.

Still, his own body was proof of what had been won. Partial reprogramming had stripped time from his cells. Peptides coursed through veins that would never clog. His heartbeat was steady, eternal. Death had been written out of him. He was the alpha of a new age, not because he conquered others, but because he refused to be conquered by decay.

Now he floated in silence, watching stars flare like ancient fires. Alone, but not despairing. Civilization had survived. Humanity had escaped the prophets of decline. The dream carried on, even if Eden had been left behind.

His reflection glimmered in the glass: strong, sharp, alive. He smiled, not the smile of joy, but of defiance. The world had been saved. The future belonged to builders, not beggars.

And in the void, he whispered it to the stars:

“This is only the beginning.”

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Transcript

“The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.”

— Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994)

How can we have a duty to remain optimists? Isn’t optimism just a kind of mood, a disposition that captures some people and not others? In the face of so many Enemies, isn’t optimism naive? After all, surely socialists, environmentalists, doomers, and the rest will always be with us in some form or another. Similarly, it is a common refrain to say that, “the human condition is fallen, and so evils like racism and murder will always be with us. All we can do is hope to minimize them.”

But throwing up one’s hands in quiet resignation that any of those evils will forever be with us is the mistake of philosophical pessimism, which says that some evils cannot ever be solved or entirely defeated. This is not merely a mood or a disposition, but a deep assertion about how the world works. And it is wrong.

Consider the set of all possible transformations that the laws of nature allow for. This includes not just spontaneous ones such as when a star becomes a black hole, or when helium atoms fuse into carbon and iron inside the furnace of a star, or when particles and anti-particles collide and produce high energy photons. Those transformations are extremely few and far between as compared with the transformations that life can cause. Sure, the furnace of stars and the violence of supernovae have spawned the ninety or so naturally occuring elements of the Periodic Table. But the human genome alone creates as many as one-hundred thousand different proteins, and humans are but one of about five billion that have ever occupied the Earth, each producing a different set of biomolecules and causing different side-effects on the environment. 

And the set of transformations that people can cause is greater than that of the biosphere—in fact, people are the only entities in existence that can bring about any transformation that’s allowed by the laws of physics—we can recreate not just the nuclear fusion found inside stars or biochemical reactions inside a cell, but we can also create objects that neither the lifeless cosmos nor the biosphere could ever possibly bring about—skyscrapers, particle colliders, computers, video games, novels, and intergalactic civilizations. As for material objects, so with ideas—we can transform a static society into a dynamic one, a bigot into a nonbigot, a violent criminal into a peaceful citizen. We have already made such transformations on a societal scale many times before—slavery was once taken for granted in the West, and now the very idea that it is desirable is virtually extinct.

Is there a limit on the transformations we can cause, on the problems we can solve? Well, the laws of nature tell us that some transformations are impossible—we can never travel faster than light, we can never violate the conservation of energy, we can never determine prices without markets, we can never predict which mutations will emerge in Darwinian evolution. But while Nature is uncompromising in her prohibitions, she is a rather liberal Mother. For instance, while we can’t exceed the speed of light, we can create spaceships that fly extremely quickly through the cosmos—fast enough for any problem that requires large-scale travel. And already, we communicate at speeds that our letter-writing ancestors would have hardly thought possible. And while we can’t predict which mutations will emerge in a species’ offspring, we can selectively breed animals until we get the one we want, or we can genetically engineer them from scratch. For any such transformation, people are capable of bringing it about if and only if they create the requisite knowledge for how to do so.

Is there a transformation that is forbidden by the laws of physics but that people cannot cause, no matter how much knowledge they bring to bear? As David Deutsch says, “If you imagine the set of all transformations…some of those transformations are permitted and some are not permitted by the laws of physics. So the question is, which ones of them can we actually achieve in real life? The answer that must be…that the ones that we can achieve in real life are precisely the ones that are not forbidden by the laws of physics…if there isn’t a law of physics that says ‘you can’t live to be five hundred’, then living to be five hundred is a soluble problem. It’s just a matter of knowing how…if there were a thing that we can’t achieve no matter what knowledge we bring to bear…then there is another law of physics that says we can’t do that. And that’s a testable law. A testable regularity in nature is a law of physics.”

So the pessimist is wrong to think that murder and doomerism and the rest will always be with us. After all, no law of nature says that it must be so. On the contrary, they are problems—soluble problems, provided we create the knowledge of how to solve them. 

Moreover, optimism is not some naive disposition, or some optional mood that one may adopt from time to time. It is the rational stance in the face of humanity’s endless stream of problems. Popper was right that we have a duty to fight for a better world—now we can explain why.

Evil ideologies such as doomerism, problems such as death and sleep and hunger and war and poverty, and stultifying institutions like the modern school system will last precisely as long as we lack the knowledge of how to eliminate or improve them via the right transformations. And since this is always possible, giving up is not just the boring thing to do, but the immoral one as well. As Deutsch says, all evils are caused by lack of knowledge—including the evil of giving up in the face of problems.

Now, if all evils are caused by lack of knowledge, then the growth of knowledge is the fundamental driver of progress, the primary weapon in the fight against our problems. With this understanding in mind, we can see in clearer terms precisely why all of the ideologies we discussed are, in fact, Enemies of Civilization: they slow the growth of knowledge and wealth (wealth being the set of all transformations we know how to cause).

Socialism slows the growth of knowledge and wealth by killing society’s magical ability to allocate resources efficiently. We therefore waste more than we otherwise would, leaving us with relatively fewer ways by which we transform the world from a worse state to a better state. 

Environmentalism causes us to stop consuming as much energy, thereby putting a ceiling on the set of transformations we can cause. Put simply, the more energy we have at our fingertips, the more ways we can transform the world to our liking.

Scientism places an arbitrary premium on scientific knowledge over moral, economic, and political knowledge, thereby curbing the growth of the latter. To make progress, it isn’t always enough to know how to bring about a particular transformation. We also need to know whether such a transformation is worth the tradeoffs and satisfies our ideas about right and wrong (questions that can be answered with economic and moral knowledge).

Relativism rejects that there is a difference between, say, indigenous ways of knowing and universal scientific theories. To the extent that such an idea is taken seriously, the creation of genuine scientific knowledge is made that much more difficult—after all, while there is an indigenous worldview for every primitive tribe, there is always only one truth of the matter. More generally, there is an infinite number of false scientific theories for every one true one. Relativism lumps the true ones in with the false ones, mistakenly empowering the latter group by its sheer force of majority rule.

Dogmatism curbs the growth of knowledge by asserting the uncriticizability of some ideas. We’ve seen that knowledge grows by criticizing our ideas and then offering better ones to supplant them. If we can’t criticize an idea, we can’t figure out what’s wrong with it in the first place, and therefore how we can improve upon it with a successor.

Doomerism is just a modern incarnation of philosophical pessimism. The doomers of all kinds—AI will kill us all, social media is poison for children, digital tracking technologies will end our privacy and freedom forever—are mistaken, either in their hyperbole, or their harping on the downsides of something without considering the upsides, or in their prediction that such-and-such technology guarantees the end of humanity. By disabling the human mind from considering that progress is possible, pessimism stops us from considering solutions to those problems we consider impossible to solve. And since the creation of any novel solution entails the creation of more knowledge, pessimism is necessarily antithetical to both.

So the growth of knowledge and wealth is necessary if humanity is to keep making progress. And if that’s true, then we should want to accelerate this process—no evil should last a moment longer than it needs to. There is no reason to stop converting the raw materials of the cosmos into resources for our benefit—on the contrary. The dead, monotonous universe is there for our making, our happiness, our problem-solving. Greed is not a sin, after all.

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Transcript

“We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded…blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract dogmas…luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control – the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual…

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation – the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death…

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.

We invite everyone to join us...

The water is warm.

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.”

— Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Although our society is becoming more dynamic over time, some creativity-suppressing memes that had dominated our static ancestors survive to this day, albeit under different guises. As we saw, those memes ensured that societies like Sparta made practically no progress at all. Thankfully, in our time, such memes don’t stop us from improving our lives and the world more broadly. But they do slow us down and, if left unchecked, they could come to dominate our dynamic society and revert it back to the static societies of old. We therefore have a duty to not only recognize them for the threat that they are, but to do everything in our power to eradicate them entirely.

Socialism advocates for centralized institutions, like States, to take the means of production away from citizens against their will. Socialists falsely assume that States can better allocate wealth in the form of consumer goods and services better than the private sector. But in the absence of free markets, States cannot determine prices and so literally cannot discover how resources can be best allocated. Resources like wood and gold could go towards the production of all sorts of consumer goods, and market prices signal to entrepreneurs which resources show go into the production of which consumer goods. That is, entrepreneurs use prices to ‘calculate’ whether or not a particular venture will make consumers’ lives better off. For instance, he might want to buy wood to build houses that he wishes to sell. But he can only determine whether such a venture is profitable—that is, if it makes people better off—if he knows the prices of both the wood that he’d buy and the houses that he’d sell.  But centralizing all of society’s resources into the hands of a single institution obliterates the possibility of prices.  As economist Ludwig von Mises writes, “The paradox of “planning” is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action.”

The impossibility of socialist-style central planning came to light in 1989, when Boris Yeltsin, then-president of the Soviet Union, visited a grocery store in the United States. Back in Russia, people wait in line for food and other goods, but in the capitalist United States, Yeltsin could buy as much of any of the countless items he wanted, and the lines were nothing like they were back home. In recognition of the stark contrast, Yeltsin said to some Russians who were with him that if Russians saw what American supermarkets were like, “there would be a revolution.”

Many socialists think that wealth is a fixed pie. They see rich people and poor people and think that such inequality is unfair or unjust. Because they think wealth is fixed, they are sure that the moral thing to do is to forcibly transfer wealth from the rich people and to the poor people. They think that the State ought to do such things—hence, they want the State to own the means of production, use them to create goods and services, and allocate them in a fair and just way to the people.

But wealth is not a fixed pie. Mankind was born into utter poverty, and now billions of people are wealthy enough to have the free time to watch documentaries such as this one. So, yes, poverty is a tragedy. But with enough progress, we can all become as wealthy as today’s billionaires—indeed, most modern Westerners are wealthier than the kings of old, who died of diseases we’ve long since cured and lacked basic comforts such as air conditioning.

The answer to poverty is not socialism, which only makes it more difficult to create more wealth. But trends indicate that young people in the West don’t know that—an Axios poll showed that 41% of American adults in 2021 held favorable views toward socialism.

Environmentalism, or the so-called degrowth movement, aims to minimize humanity’s impact on the environment by having fewer children, consuming less energy, and releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. As documented  in a recent New York Times article, anthropologist and prominent degrowth advocate Jason Hickel once wrote that “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”

The author of the New York Times piece, Jennifer Szalai, further writes that, Hickel and other degrowthers make is ultimately a moral one: “We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth.”

But there is nothing moral about slowing down growth for the sake of the planet, or of rebalancing our relationship with Nature. Growth is not some abstract thing that greedy capitalists have made a deity of. Growth means more wealth for people in the form of life-saving and life-enhancing technologies, from shelter to protect us from the violent forces of the Earth to mass food production to bring starvation to an all-time low. 

Environmentalists are willing to sacrifice the well-being of humans for the sake of the Earth and its non-human inhabitants. But they fail to appreciate that it is only humans who stand a chance at saving the planet and every species in existence! After all, the Sun will eventually engulf the Earth, and the overwhelming majority of species have gone extinct, never mind what humans have done. But only humans are capable of developing the technology to protect the Earth from the Sun’s death and revive any species we so choose. This might sound like science fiction, but already we deflect asteroids from the Earth and create cells with synthetic genomes. The gap between those feats and the ones you think are science fiction is not insurmountable—but human civilization will need to grow to achieve them.  

So, even by the environmentalists’ own standards, people are the primary moral agent in the world. Any side-effect we cause can, in principle, be reversed in the long run. Incidentally, the primacy of people serves as a devastating criticism against those who advocate that we have fewer children—after all, more people means more creativity, more boundless potential to make progress.

And if something like climate change is judged by its effects on people, things have never been better thanks to growth. The Earth doesn’t care about us—but we care about each other. As philosopher Alex Epstein notes, “if you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.”.

Yes, fossil fuels have changed the Earth. But they’ve also given us enough energy to create solutions to an uncountable number of problems, including developing safe, manmade environments that shield us from Mother Earth’s dangers. Degrowth would rob us of such creations and leave us cold, dark, and vulnerable. “On a human flourishing standard,” Epstein writes, “ we want to avoid not “climate change” but “climate danger”—and we want to increase “climate livability” by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.” 

You may laugh at those environmentalists who throw paint at art, but they’ve been effective at halting the development of nuclear power, a potential source of abundant energy that we’ve known how to build for decades. We can’t calculate how much suffering could have been ameliorated had we been free to build nuclear power plants across the Earth. 

Scientism is the false idea that scientific knowledge trumps all other kinds of knowledge, that science alone can give us answers to all of our questions. But moral, economic, political, and philosophical problems can’t be answered by science alone. This is why the phrase ‘follow the science’, as we heard so often during the 2020 pandemic, doesn’t make sense. Scientific knowledge can inform our choices, but it alone cannot tell us what to do next, either in our personal lives or in our political life more widely. For instance, science might offer us an explanation for how and why the Corona virus spreads, the conditions under which masks reduce spread, and the effect of age and body fat percentage on risk of infection. But science cannot tell us whether the tradeoffs associated with government-mandated lockdowns are worth it, whether government should invest public funds into drug companies for the development of a vaccine, whether all questions pertaining to a pandemic should be left ot the most local level of government or to the most global level of government, whether a grandparent ought to risk infection to visit his grandchildren, nor whether a businessman should run an underground (and illegal) speakeasy during lockdowns so that he can afford rent. The answers to such questions require more than just scientific knowledge—they require political, economic, and moral knowledge. Knowledge about what one ought to want in life, knowledge about the tradeoffs involved in our decisions, knowledge about the intended and unintended consequences of governmental policy, knowledge about legal precedent, and knowledge about what our political institutions are capable of doing. None of this could possibly be found in a science textbook. Those who claim otherwise are guilty of the sins of scientism.

As economist F.A. Hayek, inventor of the term ‘scientism’, wrote, “It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences—an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude—an attitude which…is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”

But if we cannot acquire moral, economic, or political knowledge via the methods that work so well in physics, we do we get such knowledge at all? The same way we always do: by conjecture and criticism. We guess what the right policy is, how we ought to act in the world, how the economy works. And we criticize all of those guesses—maybe not with the rigorous experiments we conduct in the physics laboratory, but experimentation is just one way of criticizing ideas. 

Ironically, with the staggering advances made in the hard sciences over the last century, scientism has been on the rise. Quite simply, people think that they can take science’s successes and carry them over into every other field of human endeavor. In political and cultural battles, it is often thought that he who knows the most science must be in the right. If only we put the most scientifically minded people in charge of the world, it is thought, then they could solve all of our problems from on-high. But science alone cannot tell us whether children have a right to take hormone blockers, whether circumcision should be legal, or how long patents should last. That is no reason to despair—with or without the microscope, we can continue to make progress with creative guessing and criticizing. 

Relativism comes in many forms, but perhaps the most dangerous is moral relativism—the idea that there is no difference between right and wrong, good and evil. “Who’s to say who is in the wrong?” the relativist ponders high-mindedly. “What Hamas did to Israel on October 7th is barbaric, but we must end this cycle of violence,” she says, implicating both sides. “Russia may have invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine is conscripting her own citizens. Therefore, both sides have committed wrongdoing.” “If Hitler was a villain for his genocide, then so was Churchill.”

Relativism might seem open-minded and fair, but it is neither. For it is not open to the possibility that one party is in the right, the other in the wrong. It is not open to the idea that one society is open and dynamic, the other closed and static. It is not open to the notion that one country cherishes life while the other worships death. Nor is relativism fair—the relativist does static societies no favors by denying that they could become as prosperous as dynamic ones should they choose to do so. In his own little way, the relativist traps evil under the weight of its own suppressive culture when he could have cleansed it with the light of better ideas. And the relativist distorts the self-confidence of dynamic, progressive societies by muddying their understanding of why they’re so successful in the first place, mitigating their ability to make even further progress and spread the right ideas to static societies. The relativist is no highfalutin hero—he keeps evil on life support long past its expiration date. 

Perhaps relativism is thriving in the West right now because people can afford to make such an egregious error. But not forever. For the Enemies of the West are the Enemies of Civilization more broadly. They will not stop their anti-human ambitions, no matter how much relativists deny that that is what they are. Nor will it be relativists who ultimately stand up to them, but rather those who distinguish between right and wrong, stasis and progress, victory and defeat.

Dogmatism refers to an idea that is considered, implicitly or explicitly, uncriticizable. The final truth. Known with certainty. Never to be changed. People tend to associate religious doctrines with dogmatism, but the connection is not a necessary one. After all, some religions have evolved to cohabitate with the rapid progress we’ve undergone since the Enlightenment (to be sure, other religions, tragically, have not yet done so—and whenever someone admits to ‘taking something on faith’, dogmatism is surely at work). But dogma is not confined to the cathedral. For instance, many political ideologies are thought to have perfect foundations by its adherents. Some (though not all) strains of libertarian thought hold that the so-called nonaggression axiom alone is enough to deduce the answer to all, or most, political questions. Even in science, our best theories could, in principle, spread by dogmatic means. Karl Popper himself described Freud’s psychoanalysis as dogmatic. As philosopher Bryan Magee writes in describing psychoanalysts, “We should not…systematically evade refutation by continually reformulating either our theory or our evidence in order to keep the two in accord…Thus they are substituting dogmatism for science while claiming to be scientific.” Even when it comes to the hard sciences, we could imagine a world in which people are not persuaded that Einstein’s theory of relativity is true, but rather are pressured to accept it as an uncriticizable foundation of our scientific worldview. 

Because all of our ideas contain errors, dogmatism always prevents us from improving on the ideas locked in dogma’s cage. Couple that with the fact that any error, no matter how small, could result in the eventual extinction of the human race, and we have good reason to rid our society of all dogmatic elements. 

Doomerism is the idea that humanity has no shot at continuing to make progress, or that our extinction is just around the corner, or that we are uniquely vulnerable to being wiped out today, or that we are just one innovation away from guaranteeing our decline. 

This attitude neutralizes the human spirit—after all, if humanity is sunk, why bother trying in the first place?  

One of the primary examples of doomerism today is the debate of artificial intelligence. Some think that, if we just keep innovating, we will eventually create an entity that is more intelligent and/or powerful than people could ever be, and that we will fall to the status of slaves or animals beneath its feet. First of all, if the machine is not creative, then it will be precisely as obedient as our microwaves are now. And any unintentional side-effects of artificial intelligence can be accounted for with safety measures, as are currently being developed for self-driving cars even now! Secondly, if we do end up creating a machine that is as alive as we are—a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI—it is no more rational to assume that it will pursue our destruction as it is to assume that new humans will do so! In the latter case, new humans—namely children—are raised to adopt the values of the culture around them. Of course, sometimes they rebel—especially when adults force them to do things they don’t want to do. Therefore the problem of how to integrate an AGI into our society is the same as the problem of how to raise children into happy, productive adults—and we’ve been improving at that for centuries. 

Another dangerous effect of doomerism is tyranny, whether through cultural taboos, governmental regulations, or outright bans. They all amount to slowing down the growth of knowledge and wealth, and of progress more generally. For if the next innovative step marks our doom, then surely a little—or a lot—of tyranny is justified! But innovation is the very panacea that doomers are worried about—it is stasis, not change, that will mark our end.

Moreover, we might choose to slow ourselves down, but the bad guys won’t. So there’s no world in which AI doesn’t continue to progress. But there is a world in which the bad guys get a hold of novel technologies before we do—and, with it, the end of our sustained Enlightenment. 

So socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism have all earned their bona fides as Enemies of Civilization. In one way or another, they curb our ability to make progress, a stain on the project that is humanity. But is each stain a unique color, or do they come from the same poisonous ink jar? 

Indeed, all memetic Enemies of Civilization have one thing in common: they slow the growth of knowledge.

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Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Intro

1:18 - Live players

5:41 - Great Founder Theory

11:20 - Our material technology rests on our social interactions

14:23 - Optimism, pessimism, and human agency

23:21 - Operationalized knowledge

25:22 - Lost and dead traditions of knowledge

27:34 - Tradition of criticism

29:36 - The most important piece of knowledge to preserve

32:27 - Common features of declining societies

39:18 - Are the Spartan warriors overrated and just had very good PR?

42:07 - DOGE and bureaucracy in America

45:28 - The machinery of freedom

47:43 - Tech Samo is most excited about over the next 5 years

50:10 - Curtis Yarvin and the orbital authority

55:01 - Samo’s advice for young people

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My conversation with Zooko Wilcox and Josh Swihart on unstoppable private money.

Zooko Wilcox is a legendary cypherpunk and one of the founders of Zcash—private, digital money.

Josh Swihart is the CEO of Electric Coin Company, the team behind the Zcash protocol and the Zashi wallet app.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Maya Protocol integrates with Zcash

3:52 - Coinbase social engineering attack

7:43 - Private money negates capital controls

14:13 - Privacy comes from money at rest

18:24 - The Zashi effect and future roadmap

25:11 - Project Tachyon

39:10 - Zcash’s anonymity set doesn’t depend on the number of its users

45:37 - Turnstiles in Zcash and the 2018 inflation bug

57:28 - “ZK” has become a marketing stunt among crypto projects

59:48 - On Binance delisting ZEC

1:01:35 - A transition toward using crypto as it was originally intended

1:04:52 - Should exchanges use transparent addresses?

1:17:38 - Coin holder voting in Zcash

1:23:38 - Sci-fi influence

1:28:37 - Gary Gensler

1:29:40 - Why I like Zcash

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Transcript

“As a set of discoveries and devices, science has mastered nature; but it has been able to do so only because its values…, which derive from its method, have formed those who practice it into a living, stable and incorruptible society. Here is a community where everyone has been free to enter, to speak his mind, to be heard and contradicted; and it has outlasted the empires of Louis XIV and the Kaiser. Napoleon was angry when the Institute he had founded awarded his first scientific prize to Humphry Davy, for this was in 1807, when France was at war with England. Science survived then and since because it is less brittle than the rage of tyrants. This is a stability which no dogmatic society can have. There is today almost no scientific theory which was held when, say, the Industrial Revolution began about 1760. Most often today's theories flatly contradict those of 1760; many contradict those of 1900. In cosmology, in quantum mechanics, in genetics, in the social sciences, who now holds the beliefs that seemed firm fifty years ago? Yet the society of scientists has survived these changes without a revolution and honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares. No one has been shot or exiled or convicted of perjury; no one has recanted abjectly at a trial before his colleagues. The whole structure of science has been changed, and no one has been either disgraced or deposed. Through all the changes of science, the society of scientists is flexible and single-minded together and evolves and rights itself. In the language of science, it is a stable society.”

— Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values

Before the Enlightenment era of the 17th and 18th centuries, people thought everything important and knowable was already known, enshrined in the unquestionable authority of ancient writings, institutions, and cultural traditions. While these all had bits of useful knowledge, that knowledge was bound up with many falsehoods. But because they were enforced as dogmas—much like the memes of ancient Sparta—the knowledge contained in them could not be improved upon, and their many falsehoods carried over from father to son.

So, they believed that knowledge came from authorities that actually knew very little. And therefore, progress depended on learning how to reject the authority of scholars,  priests, sacred texts, traditions, and rulers. This rejection of authority was a necessary ingredient for the scientific revolution. “Take no one's word for it,” was the motto of the Royal Society. 

A necessary ingredient, yes, but not a sufficient one. After all, authorities had been rejected before, many times. And that rarely, if ever, caused anything like the scientific revolution. 

During the scientific revolution—which was but one aspect of the Enlightenment period—people believed that what distinguished science was the idea that we derive knowledge from our senses. But this doctrine, empiricism, can’t be true. For one, it rules itself out, as we cannot possibly derive knowledge about empiricism itself from the senses! Besides that, the eye only detects light, and the brain only detects nerve impulses. And yet most of the world isn’t made of light, and hardly any of the world is made of nerve impulses! So none of our perceptions reveal to us the world as it truly is—our senses are woefully incomplete, error-prone, and indirect.  

Finally, scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen. And the unseen, you have to admit, doesn’t come to us through the senses. We don’t see those nuclear reactions in stars. We don’t see the origin of species. We don’t see the curvature of space-time, and abstract entities like heat and energy. So empiricism can’t be how science works, nor how we know about these things. And yet we do know about them. How?

Empiricism replaced the old authorities of knowledge with the authority of the senses. Because of the senses’ supreme role in this new scheme, empiricists sought to justify how knowledge of what has not been experienced could possibly be ‘derived’ from what has been experienced.

The conventional wisdom was that the key is repetition: if one repeatedly has similar experiences under similar circumstances, then one would be justified in ‘extrapolating’ or ‘generalizing’ that pattern and predicting that it would continue.

This method of ‘extrapolating’ the future from repeated experiences, called induction, is best seen in the classic example of the rising sun. The inductivist sees that the sun rises each morning and so ‘extrapolates’ that it will rise tomorrow morning as well. As the days go by, the sun continues to rise each dawn without fail, and the inductivist’s ‘confidence’ in his theory only increases. 

Except that modern science tells us that the sun will not, in fact, rise each morning until the end of time—stars are not immortal. What was the inductivist missing?

Bertrand Russell illustrated the shortcomings of induction, in his story of the chicken:

The chicken noticed that the farmer came every day to feed it. It predicted that the farmer would continue to bring food every day. Inductivists think that the chicken had ‘extrapolated’ its observations into a theory, and that each feeding event justified this theory even further. Then one day the farmer came and wrung the chicken’s neck—so much for extrapolating the future from the past!  

The truth is that inductive extrapolation of observations to form new theories isn’t even possible. Though they wouldn’t admit it, inductivists always guess a theory or explanation first and then fit their so-called extrapolation into that framework. For example, in order to ‘induce’ its false prediction, Russell’s chicken must first have had in mind a false explanation of the farmer’s behavior. Perhaps it guessed that the farmer harbored benevolent feelings towards chickens. Had it guessed a different explanation—that the farmer was trying to fatten the chickens up for slaughter, for instance—it would have ‘extrapolated’ the farmer’s behavior differently. Also, suppose that, after the chicken’s first one-hundred days of receiving food every day, the farmer suddenly double the size of all the meals. Would the chicken then ‘extrapolate’ that all future meals would be twice the size for the rest of eternity? Or would the chicken ‘extrapolate’ that its meals would only be twice the original size for the next one-hundred days, only to revert to their original size after that? The chicken will choose to extrapolate according to whatever theory he has about why the meals changed in size in the first place. In other words, the chicken’s prediction about what will happen follows from its explanation about what’s going on.  

This is true in general: science isn’t primarily about making predictions, but rather explanations. Predictions are merely downstream from good explanations, and we use predictions to test those explanations. In other words, explanations are primary, and checking their predictions against reality is one way that we can test our explanations. It is here that senses do play a role. They’re not the source of our theories as the empiricists thought but are instead a crucial part of how we compare our theories’ predictions with reality, whether that is a laboratory experiment (think of the particle collider at CERN) or an exercise in data gathering (such as when astronomers peer through their telescopes).

And even when we do employ our senses, our connection to reality is always, as Karl Popper said, theory-laden. When you look up at the night sky, you see cold, dim, tiny pinpricks of light we call stars. That image couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, stars are extremely hot, bright, and large. But how do we know this about stars when no one has ever gone anywhere near one of them? 

As I said earlier, scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen. Consider dinosaurs. No one has ever seen a dinosaur. We explain the seen (the evidence of fossils) in terms of the unseen (a story about what this thing was that walked the earth tens or hundreds of millions of years ago).

Scientific theories are explanations: assertions about what is out there and how it behaves. The origin of all human knowledge is not sensory data as the empiricists claim, nor is it an extrapolation of the future from the past bold guesses as the inductivists say. Our knowledge consists of bold, creative guesses—never authoritative, always subject to improvement. 

Because theories are the result of guesswork, we should only ever adopt them tentatively. All people make mistakes—we are fallible—so we should expect even our best knowledge to contain mistakes in addition to truth. There are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor is there a way to establish a theory’s truth or likelihood. We should always expect to find more problems with our theories, and even better explanations to supersede our most cherished ideas. As long as we continue to look for problems, this process can continue forever. Science and philosophy are both unending quests, and there is no bound on the progress we can make.

During the Enlightenment, the West figured out how to create an unending stream of knowledge. Indeed, the Enlightenment may be defined as the period in which people finally figured out the necessary ingredients to create a never-ending, ever-expanding, ever-improving knowledge stream. For the first time in history, people embraced the radical notion that knowledge could be increased and improved. This optimistic stance, rejected by their ancestors, became the motivation for of a new intellectual tradition. A tradition of criticism. Much like the ancient Athenians, Enlightenment thinkers understood that it is through criticism that we refine our ideas and determine which idea is best amongst several competing theories. The result was explosive. The West became one of the most dynamic societies in history, rapidly discarding memes that suppressed creativity in favor of those that encouraged it.

So the Enlightenment brought more than just new ideas—it changed how we think about ideas themselves.

Enlightenment thinkers realized that explanations of the world ought to be, as David Deutsch says, hard to vary—that is, no parts of an explanation should be arbitrary. Newton’s theory of gravitation wasn’t widely accepted only because experiments corroborated its predictions, but also because it was a hard to vary theory. Gravity, force, mass, acceleration—each concept played a vital, interconnected role in the grand play that Newton had created. Change any single component, and the entire explanatory edifice collapsed like a house of cards. 

Finally, the West gradually developed institutions (such as hubs for scientific research, as well as networks connecting scientists, patrons, and writers) that protected the capacity of people to criticize ideas without fear of oppression or violence. The Republic of Letters, for instance, spontaneously emerged sometime in the 1500s and served as a vital precursor to Enlightenment-era scientific institutions such as the Royal Society (which was, in turn, founded in 1660). 

As Law Professor Michael J. Madison writes: “Across Europe and eventually in North America and Southeast Asia, thousands of experimentalists, observationalists, natural philosophers, and collectors – men of letters, philosophes, savants, a self-identified intellectual aristocracy operating outside the formal boundaries of nation, state, and church – documented their studies in letters and distributed them in far flung correspondence networks…conducted not only through letters but also through books, pamphlets, and oth er printed publications…The product of this intellectual exchange was a large, distributed self- governing collective of early scientists and philosophers, bound to one another informally but normatively by a well-understood, if imperfectly enforced, system of rules and guidelines. Written correspondence was linked to in-person visits and conversation and eventually to the formation of early learned societies, scientific academies, salons, and scholarly journals.”

During the height of the Enlightenment, the West roared not only with dynamism, but with optimism—people thought that progress was both possible and desirable. Perhaps no group embodied this spirit better than the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Meeting monthly by the light of the full moon, this diverse group of innovators came together with a common goal: to harness science and technology for the betterment of humanity. The Lunar Society boasted, as Professor Bridget Kapler writes, “James Watt (1736-1819), the designer of the great steam engine; Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), a poet, inventor, physician, and botanist who published his own theory of evolution and developed a mechanical steering system that would later be used on Henry Ford’s Model T; Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), a rebellious Unitarian cleric and scientist who first isolated oxygen and discovered carbon dioxide; Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1793), fondly called the “Father of English Pottery,” who was dedicated to improving his manufacturing techniques and seeking better means to complete his work; William Hershel (1738-1822), the astronomer who discovered Uranus; John Smeaton (1724-1792), a civil engineer and mathematician who built canals and the Eddystone Lighthouse to withstand the pounding of the waves through the use of hydraulic lime; James Keir (1735-1820), the chemist who made an affordable soap for the masses; Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817), a keen inventor and educator; William Murdoch (1731-1802), the inventor of the gas light; William Small (1734-1775), a mathematician and philosopher; William Withering (1741-1799), a physician and botanist who discovered that heart disease could be treated with digitalis from the foxglove plant; and Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), a country physician that recorded many cures and expanded the frontiers of medicine. Approximately a dozen men at its height, the Lunar Society of Birmingham unified themselves as a pioneering collaborative with the goal to weigh and consider the conglomeration of science and social change.”

Many of the institutions and traditions that blossomed during the Enlightenment survive to this day, albeit in more modern forms. We are fortunate today to still have things like the scientific community and the scientific tradition, and we tend to take these for granted. For example, if a professor in a seminar were to respond to a question by saying, “You’re not allowed to ask that—just trust me, I’m the professor,” he would be laughed at. Although there are many areas of life where such a response might not be met with laughter, science is one domain where it is taken for granted that criticism is part of the culture.

The Enlightenment is the moment at which explanatory knowledge took center stage as the most important determinant of physical events for everyone in its vicinity. Its sphere of influence has only expanded since then, and could, in principle, swallow the entire cosmos whole in due time. But we had better remember that what we are attempting—the sustained creation of explanatory knowledge—has never worked before. We were once the victims (and enforcers) of a horribly static society. We now have a duty—and it is a wonderful duty—to accept our new role as active agents of progress in our post-Enlightenment society—and of the universe at large.

Co-written by: Arjun Khemani and Logan Chipkin

My conversation with Ethan Thornton, founder of Mach Industries.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

Watch on YouTube or X. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on X for updates on future episodes.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Intro

1:07 - Why Mach needs to exist

3:16 - Early experiments

5:07 - Dropping out of MIT

8:36 - Raising $85 million at 19 years old

11:20 - Decentralized vertical supply chains

13:54 - The most important domain of the next century

15:55 - Betting on hydrogen

18:11 - Overview of Viper and Glide

21:06 - Building feedback loops across teams

25:29 - Facing regulatory hurdles

28:19 - Knowing when to be risk tolerant

29:54 - Time until China invades Taiwan

31:45 - The future of warfare

42:29 - Takeaways from the (unmanned) war in Ukraine

48:23 - Biggest influences on Ethan’s life

49:37 - Mach’s long-term plan

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Transcript

But not all city-states in Ancient Greece were as static as Sparta. In fact, at least one was the complete opposite. While Sparta suppressed the creativity of its citizens and resisted any change, any innovation, Athens fostered a culture of creativity, trying out new ways of living, technological innovation, and conjuring up new philosophical ideas. In other words, where Sparta was a static society, Athens was a dynamic one. 

The Persian Wars had left Athens in ruins, but one statesman, Pericles, was determined to rebuild the city both literally and culturally. During his rule, between roughly 460 and 429BC, he did that in spades. Historians describe fifth century Athens as a ‘Golden Age’ or even the ‘Age of Pericles’, and for good reason. 

Under Pericles’ leadership, Athens made progress in nearly every dimension. Architecture blossomed, culminating in the famous Parthenon. Socrates established new modes of philosophical exploration, and Plato founded his Academy in the city. Historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides made their home in Athens, and their work is cited to this day. Artists and artisans alike created timeless works within the city’s walls, and free trade brought wealth to entrepreneurs and workers all the same. Politically, Pericles pushed for more democracy than Ancient Greece had grown accustomed to, establishing one of the most egalitarian societies the world had yet seen.

Artists, philosophers, freedom of movement, trade, and open political participation. If told about these facets of Athenian’s Golden Age, the Spartans just a few hundred miles away would have spat on the ground, dismissive or disgusted by such practices. But because of Sparta’s perfectly honed, creativity-suppressing culture, these Spartans would hardly have thought of these things in the first place. Sparta’s rigid hierarchies would never bend to incorporate, say, an eccentric philosopher, or a new way of doing pottery, or a fresh way of integrating new political participants. 

We saw the kind of memes that drove Sparta to stasis–namely, those that disable and suppress the creativity of its citizens. But what kind of memes drove Athens’ dynamism?

In Athens, Plato developed ideas we now call ‘Platonism’ or ‘Idealism’--that our physical world is but an imperfect copy of an abstract, unchanging world of forms. So, the chairs people created and engaged with in our everyday lives were merely approximations to the idealized chair that existed in Plato’s world of forms. Because abstract objects were the ‘true’ objects, Plato thought that we could understand how the world works by studying the world of forms, rather than by getting our hands dirty and exploring the corporeal world of the here-and-now.

But Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle, disagreed. Aristotle thought that we learned about our world, not by sitting in our armchairs and thinking about abstractions, but by going out into the world and studying and engaging with it directly. For instance, some call Aristotle the first biologist for all of his field work and taxonomic categorization of living things.

As historian Arthur Herman writes, “If Plato tells us to leave the cave in order to find a higher truth beyond the senses, Aristotle retorts: Don’t be in such a hurry. What happens in that cave is not only important, but the only reality we can truly know.”

Neither Plato nor any other Athenian seriously came down on Aristotle for dissenting from his teacher. On the contrary, Aristotle thrived, and he earned himself a swathe of students and founded his own school just outside of Athens called the Lyceum. Aristotle disobeyed his teacher, but not only was he not punished for it–he made progress because of it, and persuaded others to drop Plato’s ideas in favor of his own. 

The memes of Athenian society spread by surviving criticism–those ideas that survived the most criticism were retained and copied, while rival variants that failed to satisfy people’s criticisms fell by the wayside. These are the kinds of memes that define and dominate a dynamic society more generally–those that spread by enabling creativity and surviving open exposure to criticism, rather than by suppressing criticism and creativity as in the static Sparta. Athenian students copied Aristotle’s theory not because they felt psychological pressure to obey, but because they thought about his idea in light of competing ones, like Plato’s, and found them wanting.

Consider again the Spartan boy who seeks to copy the memes of the wrestler. He does not filter the wrestler’s sweep kick through his own criticisms. He wishes to copy the move only to the extent that it furthers his obedience to Sparta’s broader culture. He wouldn’t dare disobey by modifying the kick. On the other hand, an Athenian boy watching the wrestler may criticize some faults in the sweep kick, think of improvements to it, and develop his own version of the move. He then may try it out, and other boys, noticing the superiority of this new version, may do the same. This is Athenian dynamism in action–a bubbling cauldron of creativity, disobedience, novelty, and the eventual adoption of new ways of being. 

Sparta’s static society was defined by a tradition of obedience; Athens’ dynamic society, a tradition of criticism. 

Now, our society is the first to embody sustained progress over many generations, starting with the Enlightenment around the late seventeenth century. But fifth century Athens had the right institutions, memetics, and traditions to have had its own Enlightenment and never-ending stream of progress. Yet the Athenian Golden Age ended after less than a century. Why?

Even dynamism cannot guarantee sustained progress–indeed, nothing can. A few decades after Pericles’ death, Sparta defeated Athens in what is known as the Peloponnesian War. Blood is not the only thing spilt in war, and Sparta snuffed out Athens’ dynamism and optimism in her victory. Athen’s Golden Age had ended, and with it, the chance for unbounded progress in all directions. 

The death of Athens is a tragedy in its own right, but we should take it as a warning. For while our dynamism has lasted for over three hundred years already, we cannot–can never–rest on our laurels. As we’ll see, there are Spartas around every corner, eager to snuff us out. From both without and within, memes that spread by suppressing creativity and criticism threaten memes that foster them. But while victory is not guaranteed, we will only lose if we make the wrong choices. Neither God nor man nor fluke accident determines our fate. We alone can decide whether our dynamic society progresses until the end of time or goes the way of Athens. 

My conversation with philosopher and author Peter Boghossian.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - The enlightenment

5:51 - The dangers of moral relativism

21:28 - Modern education is failing us

31:14 - What’s worth preserving in the West

37:00 - Is wokeism filling the void left by atheism?

38:04 - The spread of Islamism

45:49 - Speech is not violence

49:11 - Derangements of science

52:48 - The myth of the framework

56:34 - Why you should learn epistemology

58:05 - The instinct to belong trumps what’s true

1:02:44 - Chasing likes versus pursuing truth

1:05:08 - What is Peter most optimistic and most pessimistic about

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My conversation with Zooko, Nate Wilcox, and Sean Bowe about the Zcash protocol.

Zooko is a cypherpunk who co-founded Zcash along with his brother, Nate Wilcox, and others. Sean Bowe is a cryptographer and engineer who has played a crucial role in the development of Zcash and has made significant contributions to advancements in zero-knowledge proofs, particularly zk-SNARKs, which underpin Zcash’s privacy features.

Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn

0:04 - Writing the first blog post on Bitcoin ever

6:21 - Bitcoin’s fundamental privacy flaw

9:40 - Unstoppable private money

12:19 - Will Zcash compete with Bitcoin as a store of value?

14:24 - How many people are using Zcash?

16:18 - Good security is good usability

20:10 - Social credit systems and ubiquitous surveillance

23:43 - Why Monero’s privacy tech can’t work

35:21 - Integrating ZKPs into other blockchains

39:51 - Privacy comes from money at rest, not from money in flight

47:42 - Why did the price of ZEC fall so drastically in the beginning?

51:49 - Zcash stablecoins?

55:50 - Quantum threats to Zcash

1:02:50 - Encrypted love notes in the blockchain'

1:07:07 - Privacy enabled cultural trends

1:12:43 - Nate Wilcox

1:14:38 - Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?

1:16:16 - A brief history of Zcash

1:22:42 - Why does Zcash have opt-in privacy?

1:26:55 - Does Zcash still rely on a trusted setup?

1:30:49 - Upgrading the Zcash protocol to Hybrid PoW/PoS

1:40:50 - A bug that almost killed Zcash

1:52:40 - Zcash’s funding model

2:09:09 - Why can’t privacy be added as an L2?

2:14:35 - Scaling Zcash and making it more interoperable

2:23:16 - Shielded Labs

2:24:39 - Nate’s vision for Zcash

2:27:53 - Sean Bowe

2:32:53 - Censorship resistance is a spectrum

2:35:26 - Will privacy coins be banned?

2:37:49 - Privacy and scalability

2:41:47 - Programmable money

2:43:31 - Summary of Sean’s contributions to the field of cryptography

2:55:17 - Zcash might get privacy against quantum adversaries for free

3:00:14 - Halo

3:05:34 - What Sean’s working on right now

3:11:54 - What has influenced Sean’s thinking in cryptography the most?

3:13:36 - Being a high school dropout working in crypto

3:15:08 - Zcash is just getting started

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Transcript

In ancient societies, life was remarkably predictable. People were born and died under much the same moral values, ways of living, technology, and political systems. Contrary to romantic notions of simpler times, this stagnation was a living hell. Without progress, suffering remained constant. All sources of evil—famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids—cause suffering only until we create the knowledge to prevent them. As we’ll see, these primitive, static societies were tragically effective at suppressing the only means by which people acquire such knowledge: creativity.

Take Sparta in the fifth century BC—a prime example of a static society. Sparta was frozen in time, ruthlessly stamping out creativity and individual thought. The Spartan education system molded children into extremely obedient soldiers, with hardly a creative or disobedient bone in their body. Historian Donald Kagan describes it perfectly, “What are the qualities that are supposed to be produced by this system?...Every aspect of your life is governed by the laws and the customs of the community. You better conform; there is nothing else for you…Obedience to your superiors…uniformity. You are all just like one another, you go through exactly the same experiences; there’s no distinction among you.” In Sparta, little ever changed or improved. Its citizens rarely considered that progress was possible—or even desirable. 

But how did Sparta—and other static societies—maintain this iron grip on their people? The answer lies in the power of memes—not internet jokes, but units of cultural transmission: ideas, behaviors, and traditions that spread within a culture.

Much like genes, memes compete for survival. What makes one meme successful over others? According to Richard Dawkins, it’s the ability of a meme to change its holder’s behavior in a way that ensures its own transmission. Memes are, in a sense, “selfish.” They spread not because they benefit individuals or society, but because they compel behaviors that make them more likely to be passed on.

For example, many Spartan soldiers likely despised their harsh, militaristic lifestyle. Yet the dominant memes compelled them to rise early, train rigorously, and engage in constant warfare. Imagine a young Spartan child who dreams of being a philosopher instead of a warrior. This child seeks a life of quiet over the howls of war, contemplation over physical aggression, training the mind over training the body. In Sparta, such a child would face immediate punishment, ensuring that alternative memes never spread. Would-be philosophers... artists... innovators... All sacrificed at the altar of maintaining Sparta’s static society.

Memes aren’t replicated by simple copying. We don’t have direct access to the ideas in people’s brains. Instead, we have to use other people’s behavior as a clue to what ideas they’re trying to express. This process is prone to misunderstandings. As philosopher Karl Popper said, one cannot speak in a way as to not be misunderstood. But words are just one kind of meme, and Popper’s dictum applies to all of them—there is no way to express behaviors, traditions, lifestyles in a way that cannot be misinterpreted.

For instance, wrestling was a cornerstone of the Spartan indoctrination system, one of the many ways by which the society turned boys into warriors. Imagine a young Spartan boy watching two respected men wrestle. He sees one execute a leg sweep, bringing his opponent down. The boy must now interpret what he’s seen if he is to learn how to do the move himself. But this isn’t a matter of simple imitation. He may guess that the man chose that particular move because it would impress superiors. If the boy similarly wants to satisfy the adults of the society, and if he thinks that the leg sweep is capable of causing that, then he may want to emulate the wrestler’s behavior. But which aspects of his behavior are the right ones to replicate? The inspired boy may guess that how the wrestler moved his arms during his leg sweep was irrelevant–or, he may guess that the wrestler moved his arms in a certain way with deliberation, as the move wouldn’t have worked otherwise. There is no guarantee that the boy will be correct—it’s entirely possible that he will incorrectly guess which aspects of the wrestler’s movements were important to the leg sweep and which were incidental. 

In fact, there are an infinite number of ways to go wrong when trying to assimilate another person’s memes. In a way, it’s amazing that people ever get it right at all! When a group of Spartan boys receive instruction on how to wield a sword from a superior, when striving to assimilate the instructor’s memes, they do not typically walk away from the lesson wanting to wield the instructor’s own sword. They rightly recognize that which aspects from the lesson are worth copying (for instance, particular ways of holding a sword during various combat scenarios) and which are not (for instance, using the individual sword that the instruction wielded during the lesson, as any similar sword would be adequate).

For a society to remain static, its memes must be copied with near-perfect accuracy, and any new variations must be extinguished before they spread. That is to say, static societies must suppress dissent and deviation from cultural norms of behavior, often ruthlessly. Thus every static culture has its own version of a secret police, or an Inquisition, or a headmaster, whose task is to prevent change in the culture’s memes. As I’d mentioned, it’s plausible that any Spartan who tried to spread memes pertaining to living the lifestyle of a philosopher, rather than a warrior, would be punished as quickly as possible. Not only would this prevent the memes from spreading too much, but it would also send a signal to any citizens who happened to internalize the meme from the original dissenter—“Do not step out of the Spartan line if you want to keep your head.”

However, suppressing dissent is costly and difficult. No culture could remain static solely by preventing people from transmitting and acting upon dissident ideas once they had been created. So, static societies also evolve deeper, crueler methods of enforcing conformity–they disable the source of new ideas—human creativity.

David Deutsch: Creativity is disobedience. By not recognizing that; by suppressing disobedience, you’re suppressing creativity—always.

The main targets of this are always children. The earlier a person’s creativity is disabled, the less of a lifetime they have to ruin a static society with novel ideas. So, Spartan children were raised in a harsh, uniform education system that coerced them into conformity. They were taught to suppress their own desires and view creative acts outside cultural bounds as evil. These children grew up and imposed the same on their own children, perpetuating the cycle. After all, thinks the Spartan mindset, it was the only way—and the righteous way—of creating people. 

In such societies, the pursuit of happiness is nearly impossible. Creativity is necessary for progress and improvement, but it risks change, which static societies fear. Consider the Spartan warrior at the top of their military hierarchy. He may be perfectly content, if only because he cannot imagine any other way of life. However, even he is not inoculated against suffering such as heartache and hunger, and he may recognize an improvement to his life should he come across it. Imagine that someone suggested such an improvement, perhaps a better way to maintain a loving relationship with his wife, or a cheaper way for him to grow food. If such a change would make life a little better for the warrior, then the originator of the idea would surely go on to tell other Spartans as well, and soon enough, change would sweep over much or all of Sparta. And yet Sparta rarely experienced such society-wide improvements. Why not? It must be because no such idea was thought of in the first place—the suppression of creativity that Spartans learned to adopt as children followed them until death, robbing them of countless opportunities to create new options, innovative solutions, relieving progress for themselves. Thus a static society cannot possibly cause its members to find happiness in life. Rather, it renders them helpless to solve their problems, keeping them in a tragic state of doing the same things over and over, regardless of their sense that something might be wrong. A static society perpetuates by breaking its members’ spirits, turning inherently creative people into slave-like automatons.

For any society, the mere “appearance” of stability is not actual stability unless there is a good explanation as to why things are not changing. For example, it may superficially appear that an ancient, forest-dwelling  tribe that has existed in the same way for thousands of years is “stable”. But a single change from the outside could expose it as the vulnerable, unstable society it really is. Forget something as cosmically momentous as an unforeseen asteroid—a single forest fire could completely devastate the tribe, wiping out its crude shelter, means of acquiring food, and social structures in mere hours.

This enduring stagnation was a cruel joke played on humanity, because for hundreds of thousands of years, we had the capacity to improve, to reduce human suffering, to increase our knowledge of the world, but almost none of that happened—until, at long last, all of them did in an explosion of creativity and progress in what we now call the Enlightenment. 

Co-written by: Arjun Khemani and Logan Chipkin

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Timestamps

0:00 - The Theory of Everything

4:48 - How do you know what’s true?

7:51 - Groups search for consensus, individuals search for truth

13:07 - We have never run out of a single resource

15:25 - Are we destroying the Earth?

17:48 - Marxism denies wealth creation

21:28 - Regulation kills innovation

27:05 - Degrowth and the fall of Western universities

33:31 - Why the West is best

35:47 - Federalism

38:10 - Everyone wants to live forever

41:44 - Humans are universal explainers

43:25 - Collectivism vs. individualism

50:44 - You cannot explain the universe without explaining humans

55:02 - How David Deutsch’s ideas have changed Naval’s life

1:02:31 - The scientific method isn’t possible

1:05:07 - The low-hanging fruit theory is a bad explanation

1:08:19 - The biggest threats to Western civilization

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“Cash is private by default.
The old world was private by default.
The new world is not private by default.
So we are defaulting into tracking.
Zero knowledge is the defense.”

— Balaji Srinivasan

Money is one of the oldest technologies. It evolved to solve what economists call the problem of the double coincidence of wants. Before money, people bartered goods and services directly. However, this approach had obvious limitations—finding someone who not only had what you wanted but also wanted what you had (in the right quantities on both sides of the trade) was often impractical. For example, if a baker needed shoes but the cobbler didn’t need bread, the baker had to find a third party to facilitate the trade, making the process cumbersome and inefficient.

Over time, societies gradually adopted a common medium of exchange—money—as a natural solution to the inefficiencies of barter. Because of its universal acceptability, money, allowed people to focus on producing what they were most skilled at, rather than on only those goods that they could directly barter with. Said another way, the emergence of money transformed economies from fragmented and limited exchanges into interconnected markets, paving the way for unprecedented specialization, free trade, growth, and cooperation.

Throughout history, money has taken many forms—shells, stones, gold, and paper—but its function remains unchanged: a medium of exchange trusted by those who use it. However, this trust is fragile. Throughout history, those in power have often manipulated money’s value by inflating its supply, resulting in a breakdown of said money’s utility and the economic order it supported. Even a child understands that an oversupply of something diminishes each unit’s worth; yet governments and authorities persist in this folly, at the expense of the broader society.

Alchemy—the attempt to turn base materials into gold—is one of humanity’s oldest desires. Modern-day “alchemists” can be found in government offices and their central banks around the world, where monetary authorities try in vain to create value from nothing by issuing endless fiat currency. Like the alchemists of old, they operate on illusion, believing their money will retain its value long enough to achieve their goals. However, history shows that these illusions are unsustainable, leading to economic distortions, the erosion of wealth, and cultural degradation.

The dominant form of money today is fiat currency—money that derives its value not from inherent qualities but from government decree. The primary flaw of fiat money lies in its centralization and near-zero marginal cost of production. Those who control its supply wield extraordinary power, with the ability to shape economies and societies at will. A clear example is Sri Lanka’s recent economic meltdown, during which the government’s excessive printing of money to finance debt and cover import costs triggered hyperinflation. This led to skyrocketing prices, severe shortages of essentials like fuel and medicine, and widespread protests as citizens struggled to cope with the crisis.

Furthermore, to use modern monetary technologies and institutions, we must sacrifice our privacy for convenience. Banks, credit card companies, and governments have access to every electronic transaction we make. In just the last four years, the percentage of global transactions conducted in cash—the most private medium of exchange—has decreased from 27% to only 16%. Whether maliciously or not, governments’ successful encouragement of a cashless future grants them increased surveillance and enables them to monitor your every move. 

For example, China has already implemented a social credit system that meticulously tracks citizens’ financial transactions, online activities, and certain social behaviors to assign them scores. Low scores may lead to difficulties in finding employment, getting loans, booking flights, and even restricted access to services such as high-speed trains and certain public amenities. By consolidating vast amounts of personal data, the system not only monitors but also controls and influences behavior, demonstrating the extent to which authorities can dominate individuals with the power of controllable, trackable fiat currency in hand.

Even in democracies like the United States, debanking is common among what are called “politically exposed persons”. Recently, a clip of Marc Andreessen on Joe Rogan’s podcast went viral on X, in which he talked about how many people have been kicked out of the banking system for “having the wrong politics and saying unacceptable things.” Scores of famous tech and crypto founders reshared the clip on X, talking about their experiences of getting debanked and the nonsensical reasons for it. I encourage you to watch the clip if you haven’t done so already.

Bitcoin, as its supporters like to say, solves this (partially). Nobody can cut off your access to your funds except by forcibly accessing your private keys, a rather expensive endeavor as you scale up to millions or billions of people. 

But the problem with Bitcoin as it is implemented today is that the entire history is public. Transactions are attributed to random identifiers that, in themselves, carry no information about the person controlling the accounts. However, if users are not extremely careful, network analysis can reveal both the financial behavior and the real identities of the people behind the accounts. (Several companies, such as Chainalysis, now provide such a service.)

A stark example of this weakness is the recent Canadian trucker protests against national policies. Supporters contributed Bitcoin to the movement, but Bitcoin’s transparent nature enabled the government to trace and seize the funds. Without privacy, those who hold the monopoly on force can control and dictate the actions of others—at least, when the targets are limited enough in scope that the government can afford to do so.

Physical cash is anonymous but is not a great tool for the new world, where people want to transfer large sums of money across oceans quickly and repeatedly. Bitcoin is decentralized, but Edward Snowden aptly described it as “Twitter for your bank account.” Every transaction is visible to the entire network. If I buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, the barista can figure out my salary and other transactions I’ve made.

We need a digital alternative that is both private and decentralized to protect people’s sovereignty.

To address Bitcoin’s privacy issues, developers turned to the concept of zero-knowledge proofs—a method of proving the validity of information without revealing the information itself. First introduced in 1985, this technology could theoretically encrypt blockchain transactions while ensuring they remain verifiable. However, implementing zero-knowledge proofs efficiently was a significant challenge until 2013, when a team of scientists developed “Zerocash,” a method to make zero-knowledge proofs fast enough for practical use. This innovation laid the foundation for Zcash, launched in 2016 as the first cryptocurrency to implement zero-knowledge proofs.

Zcash also has a blockchain that records and publicly broadcasts every transaction ever made with it, but it hides all identifying information about who made the transactions and how much was spent. So, it provides decentralization akin to Bitcoin and privacy akin to cash.

Zcash combines the best features of both the old and new worlds. It is the true internet of money. With Zcash, you can make transactions without relying on profit-driven companies like credit card firms or exposing your personal data on public blockchains like Bitcoin. And this is just the beginning. Unstoppable private money that scales has the potential to become the engine of global prosperity, sparking a transformation even greater than the shift from barter to currency and fueling exponential growth.

Resources to learn more

• What are zero-knowledge proofs? - Z.Cash

• How is Zcash different than Bitcoin? - Z.Cash

Patron Saints of Zcash

• @zooko

• @nate_zec

• @aquietinvestor

• @ebfull

• @nuttycom

• @jswihart

• @Zerodartz

• @In4Crypto

• @zksquirrel

• @michae2xl

• @roommatemusing

• @zechub

• @zcashmedia

• @cameron

• @tyler

• You?

Thanks to Logan Chipkin for reading and giving feedback on drafts of this.

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Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below.

Watch on YouTube or X. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Follow me on X for updates on future episodes.

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Timestamps

1:01 - A tragic view of human history

7:04 - Why did it take so long for civilization to arise?

13:31 - Fallibilism

21:32 - Cultural relativism denies improvement

24:03 - Richard Dawkins and indigenous ways of knowing

26:49 - Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars

31:38 - The era of man

37:55 - People are unlike any other force of nature

42:51 - The dangers of regulating AI

48:09 - Are we running out of resources?

54:21 - Everything in existing educational theory is wrong

1:11:30 - When David met Richard Feynman

1:17:33 - Everyone is a Popperian

1:20:16 - Only progress is sustainable

1:26:00 - The biggest threat to Western civilization

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Transcript

Imagine condensing the universe’s 13.8 billion year history into a single day. What would we see? What would we learn about our place in this grand cosmic story?

At the stroke of midnight, an unfathomable explosion—the Big Bang—sets our cosmic clock ticking.

In mere fractions of a second, space, time, and energy burst into existence. As our imaginary clock ticks, we witness the birth of the first atoms… the ignition of the first stars… the formation of the first black holes… the assembly of the first galaxies.

All of this cosmic drama unfolds in the early hours of our universal day, long before the first light of dawn.

But then... silence. Cosmic monotony sets in.

For what seems like an eternity—billions of years in real-time—the universe enters a creative slumber. No fundamentally new astronomical objects emerge. The cosmos, vast and wondrous as it is, becomes predictable. Repetitive.

During this era, there is nothing new under the sun–nor in any other direction. Novelty becomes alien to the cosmos.

But wait. In the final moments of our cosmic day, with mere seconds left on the clock, something remarkable happens.

Something that would seem utterly insignificant compared to the astronomical events that had defined the universe until that point.

People. Us. Homo sapiens. Rising from the evolutionary crucible, we emerge as a species with an unprecedented capacity for creativity and progress.

But our story echoes that of the cosmos. For thousands of centuries, we too seemed trapped in stasis. Generation after generation lived and died, facing the same challenges, rarely seeing meaningful change.

David Deutsch: Those people were intellectually our equals, and yet made no progress.

Naval Ravikant: The cavemen, or the Paleolithic ancestors, had access to all the same resources we did. They were living on the same Earth. And by the modern environmentalist arguments, they had a better Earth, they had more to do things with. Yet, they couldn’t do anything. They weren’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination.

Unlike the stars and galaxies, we harbored the potential for radical change.

Only a few hundred years ago, we escaped this hellish cycle of stasis, and we’ve been making real progress ever since. Now, no Western person experiences the same world as a child that he does as an adult.

How did we make our escape? How did we go from stasis to dynamism? What was the spark that ignited humanity’s ascent to ever-greater heights? And why did it happen when it did?

As we explore these questions, we’re not just uncovering the story of our species. We’re discovering the next–and easily most interesting–chapter in the cosmic story itself. Could we, humans, be the universe’s way of breaking free from its own stasis?

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P.S. In case you missed it, HumanProgress.org published an excerpt from my documentary script. Click here to read it.

This article was first published on humanprogress.org and is excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Summary: Anti-merit, authoritarian, collectivist ideas like socialism, environmental extremism, and doomerism are enemies of human progress because they impede innovation, limit personal freedom, and prevent societal growth. Fostering decentralized creativity, by contrast, improves the continued ability of human civilization to advance.

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people—but rather bad ideas.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded . . . blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract dogmas . . . luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control—the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual . . .

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death . . .

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.

We invite everyone to join us . . .

The water is warm.

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.

—Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Although our society is becoming more dynamic over time, some creativity-suppressing memes that had dominated our static ancestors survive to this day, albeit under different guises. As we saw, those memes ensured that societies like Sparta made practically no progress at all. Thankfully, in our time, such memes don’t stop us from improving our lives and the world more broadly. But they do slow us down, and if left unchecked, they could come to dominate our dynamic society and revert it back to the static societies of old. We, therefore, have a duty not only to recognize them for the threat that they are but to do everything in our power to eradicate them entirely.

Socialism advocates for centralized institutions, like States, to take the means of production away from citizens against their will. Socialists falsely assume that States can better allocate wealth in the form of consumer goods and services better than the private sector. But in the absence of free markets, States cannot determine prices and so cannot discover how resources can be best allocated. Resources like wood and gold could go toward producing all sorts of consumer goods, and market prices signal to entrepreneurs which resources should go into producing which consumer goods. That is, entrepreneurs use prices to “calculate” whether or not a particular venture will improve consumers’ lives. For instance, entrepreneurs might want to buy wood to build houses that they wish to sell. But they can only determine whether such a venture is profitable—that is, if it makes people better off—if they know the prices of the wood they’d buy and the houses they’d sell. But centralizing all of society’s resources into the hands of a single institution obliterates the possibility of prices. As economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “The paradox of ‘planning’ is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action.”

The impossibility of socialist-style central planning came to light in 1989, when Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Soviet Union, visited a grocery store in the United States. Back in Russia, people waited in line for food and other goods, but in the capitalist United States, Yeltsin could buy as much of any of the countless items he wanted, and the lines were nothing like they were back home. In recognition of the stark contrast, Yeltsin told some Russians who were with him that if Russians saw what American supermarkets were like, “there would be a revolution.”

Many socialists think that wealth is a fixed pie. They see rich people and poor people and think that such inequality is unfair or unjust. Because they think wealth is fixed, they are sure that the moral thing to do is to forcibly transfer wealth from the rich people to the poor people. They think that the State ought to do such things—hence, they want the State to own the means of production, use them to create goods and services, and allocate them in a fair and just way to the people.

But wealth is not a fixed pie. Mankind was born into utter poverty, and now billions of people are wealthy enough to have the free time to read articles such as this one. So, yes, poverty is a tragedy. But with enough progress, we can all become as wealthy as today’s billionaires—indeed, most modern Westerners are wealthier than the kings of old, who died of diseases we’ve long since cured and who lacked basic comforts such as air conditioning.

The answer to poverty is not socialism, which only makes it more difficult to create more wealth. But trends indicate that young people in the West don’t know that—an Axios poll showed that 41 percent of American adults in 2021 held favorable views toward socialism.

Extreme environmentalism, or the so-called degrowth movement, aims to minimize humanity’s environmental impact by having fewer children, consuming less energy, and releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. As documented in a June 2024 New York Times article, anthropologist and prominent degrowth advocate Jason Hickel once wrote, “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”

The author of the New York Times piece, Jennifer Szalai, further writes, “The distinctive argument that Hickel and other degrowthers make is ultimately a moral one: ‘We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth.’”

But there is nothing moral about slowing down growth for the planet’s sake or of rebalancing our relationship with nature. Growth is not some abstract thing that greedy capitalists have made a deity of. Growth means more wealth for people in the form of lifesaving and life-enhancing technologies, from shelter to protect us from the violent forces of the Earth to mass food production to bring starvation to an all-time low.

Some environmentalists are willing to sacrifice the well-being of humans for the sake of the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. But they fail to appreciate that it is only humans who stand a chance at saving the planet and every species in existence! After all, the sun will eventually engulf the Earth, and most species have gone extinct, never mind what humans have done. But only humans are capable of developing the technology to protect the Earth from the sun’s death and revive any species we so choose. This might sound like science fiction, but already we deflect asteroids from the Earth and create cells with synthetic genomes. The gap between those feats and the ones you think are science fiction is not insurmountable—but human civilization will need to grow to achieve them.

So, even by the environmentalists’ own standards, people are the primary moral agent in the world. Any side effect we cause can, in principle, be reversed in the long run. Incidentally, the primacy of people serves as a devastating criticism against those who advocate that we have fewer children—after all, more people means more creativity and more boundless potential to make progress.

And if something like climate change is judged by its effects on people, things have never been better thanks to growth. The Earth doesn’t care about us—but we care about each other. As philosopher Alex Epstein notes, “If you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.”

Yes, fossil fuels have changed the Earth. But they’ve also given us enough energy to create solutions to an uncountable number of problems, including developing safe, manmade environments that shield us from Mother Earth’s dangers. Degrowth would rob us of such creations and leave us cold, dark, and vulnerable. “On a human flourishing standard,” Epstein writes, “we want to avoid not ‘climate change’ but ‘climate danger’—and we want to increase ‘climate livability’ by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.”

You may laugh at those environmentalists who throw paint at art, but they’ve been effective at halting the development of nuclear power, a potential source of abundant energy that we’ve known how to build for decades. We can’t calculate how much suffering could have been ameliorated had we been free to build nuclear power plants across the Earth.

Scientism is the false idea that scientific knowledge trumps all other kinds of knowledge—that science alone can answer all our questions. But moral, economic, political, and philosophical problems can’t be answered by science alone. This is why the phrase “follow the science,” as we heard so often during the 2020 pandemic, doesn’t make sense. Scientific knowledge can inform our choices, but it alone cannot tell us what to do next, either in our personal lives or in politics more widely. For instance, science might offer us an explanation for how and why COVID-19 spreads, the conditions under which masks reduce spread, and the effect of age and body fat percentage on the risk of infection. But science cannot tell us whether the trade-offs associated with government-mandated lockdowns are worth it, whether the government should invest public funds into drug companies for the development of a vaccine, whether all questions pertaining to a pandemic should be left to the most local level of government or to the most global level of government, whether a grandparent ought to risk infection to visit his grandchildren, or whether a businessman should run an underground (and illegal) speakeasy during lockdowns so that he can afford rent. The answers to such questions require more than just scientific knowledge—they require political, economic, and moral knowledge. Knowledge about what one ought to want in life, knowledge about the trade-offs involved in our decisions, knowledge about the intended and unintended consequences of governmental policy, knowledge about legal precedent, and knowledge about what our political institutions are capable of doing. None of this could possibly be found in a science textbook. Those who claim otherwise are guilty of the sins of scientism.

As the Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek, inventor of the term “scientism,” wrote, “It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences—an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the ‘scientistic’ attitude—an attitude which . . . is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”

But if we cannot acquire moral, economic, or political knowledge via the methods that work so well in physics, how do we get such knowledge? The same way we always do: by conjecture and criticism. We guess what the right policy is, how we ought to act in the world, and how the economy works. And we criticize all those guesses—maybe not with the rigorous experiments we conduct in the physics laboratory, but experimentation is just one way of criticizing ideas.

Ironically, with the staggering advances made in the hard sciences over the past century, scientism has been on the rise. Quite simply, people think that they can take science’s successes and carry them over into every other field of human endeavor. In political and cultural battles, it is often thought that he who knows the most science must be in the right. If only we put the most scientifically minded people in charge of the world, it is thought, then they could solve all our problems from on high. But science alone cannot tell us whether children have a right to take hormone blockers, whether circumcision should be legal, or how long patents should last. That is no reason to despair—with or without the microscope, we can continue to make progress with creative guessing and criticizing.

Relativism comes in many forms, but perhaps the most dangerous is moral relativism—the idea that there is no difference between right and wrong or good and evil. “Who’s to say who is in the wrong?” the relativist ponders high-mindedly. “What Hamas did to Israel on October 7th is barbaric, but we must end this cycle of violence,” a relativist would say, implicating both sides. “Russia may have invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine is conscripting its own citizens. Therefore, both sides have committed wrongdoing.” “If Hitler was a villain for his genocide, then so was Churchill.”

Relativism might seem open-minded and fair, but it is neither. For it is not open to the possibility that one party is in the right and the other in the wrong. It is not open to the idea that one society is open and dynamic and the other closed and static. It is not open to the notion that one country cherishes life while the other worships death. Nor is relativism fair—the relativist does static societies no favors by denying that they could become as prosperous as dynamic ones should they choose to do so. In their own way, relativists trap evil under the weight of their own suppressive culture when they could have cleansed it with the light of better ideas. And the relativist distorts the self-confidence of dynamic, progressive societies by muddying their understanding of why they’re so successful in the first place, mitigating their ability to make even further progress and spread the right ideas to static societies. The relativist is no highfalutin hero—he keeps evil on life support long past its expiration date.

Perhaps relativism is thriving in the West right now because people can afford to make such an egregious error. But not forever. For the enemies of the West are the enemies of civilization more broadly. They will not stop their anti-human ambitions, no matter how much relativists deny that that is what they are. Nor will it be relativists who ultimately stand up to them but rather those who distinguish between right and wrong, stasis and progress, victory and defeat.

Dogmatism refers to an idea that is considered, implicitly or explicitly, uncriticizable. The final truth. Known with certainty. Never to be changed. People tend to associate religious doctrines with dogmatism, but the connection is not a necessary one. After all, some religions have evolved to cohabitate with the rapid progress we’ve undergone since the Enlightenment (to be sure, other religions, tragically, have not yet done so—and whenever someone admits to “taking something on faith,” dogmatism is surely at work). But dogma is not confined to the cathedral. For instance, many political ideologies are thought to have perfect foundations by their adherents. And even in science, our best theories could, in principle, spread by dogmatic means. Karl Popper described Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis as dogmatic. As philosopher Bryan Magee described psychoanalysts, “We should not . . . systematically evade refutation by continually reformulating either our theory or our evidence in order to keep the two in accord. . . . Thus they are substituting dogmatism for science while claiming to be scientific.” Even in the hard sciences, we could imagine a world in which people are not persuaded that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is true but rather are pressured to accept it as an uncriticizable foundation of our scientific worldview.

Because all our ideas contain errors, dogmatism always prevents us from improving on the ideas locked in dogma’s cage. Couple that with the fact that any error, no matter how small, could result in the eventual extinction of the human race, and we have good reason to rid our society of all dogmatic elements.

Doomerism is the idea that humanity has no shot at continuing to make progress, or that our extinction is just around the corner, or that we are uniquely vulnerable to being wiped out today, or that we are just one innovation away from guaranteeing our decline.

This attitude neutralizes the human spirit—after all, if humanity is sunk, why bother trying in the first place?

One of the primary examples of doomerism today is the debate over artificial intelligence. Some think that if we just keep innovating, we will eventually create an entity that is more intelligent and/or powerful than people could ever be and that we will fall to the status of slaves or animals beneath its feet. First, if the machine is not creative, it will be precisely as obedient as our microwaves are. And any unintentional side effects of AI can be accounted for with safety measures, as are currently being developed for self-driving cars. Second, if we do end up creating a machine that is as alive as we are—a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI—it is no more rational to assume that it will pursue our destruction as it is to assume that new humans will do so. New humans—namely children—are raised to adopt the values of the culture around them. Of course, sometimes they rebel, especially when adults force them to do things they don’t want to do. Therefore, the problem of how to integrate an AGI into our society is the same as the problem of how to raise children into happy, productive adults—and we’ve been improving at that for centuries.

Another dangerous effect of doomerism is tyranny, whether through cultural taboos, governmental regulations, or outright bans. They all amount to slowing the growth of knowledge and wealth, and of progress more generally. For if the next innovative step marks our doom, then surely a little—or a lot—of tyranny is justified! But innovation is the very panacea that doomers are worried about. It is stasis, not change, that will mark our end.

Moreover, we might choose to slow ourselves down, but the bad guys won’t. So there’s no world in which AI doesn’t continue to progress. But there is a world in which the bad guys get a hold of novel technologies before we do—and, with it, the end of our sustained Enlightenment.

So socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism have all earned their bona fides as enemies of civilization. In one way or another, they curb our ability to make progress, a stain on the project that is humanity. But is each stain a unique color, or do they come from the same poisonous ink jar?

Indeed, all memetic enemies of civilization have one thing in common: They slow the growth of knowledge.

This article was first published on humanprogress.org and is excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

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