← Zero Hour with James Poulos
Zero Hour with James Poulos
Ep 86 | The Bitcoin War: How Governments Are Rigging the System | Logan Allen
00:49:30
Logan Allen, founder and CEO of Zorp Corp, joins James Poulos to uncover the truth about cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, energy control, bureaucratic control, and the war over technology.
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- [00:00]
James Polis
I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more.
- [00:10]
Logan Allen
Squats anywhere I can.
- [00:12]
James Polis
1, 2, 3. Will that be cash or credit? Credit. 4 Galaxy S25 Ultra.
- [00:20]
Logan Allen
The AI companion that does the heavy lifting.
- [00:23]
James Polis
So you can do you get yours@samsung.com.
- [00:26]
Logan Allen
Compatible with select apps.
- [00:27]
James Polis
Requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy. The computer, the Internet, life online. They're just not what they used to be. Is there any way back to the good old days? Or are we forced into a bold new future? Incredible technologist Logan Allen is here with us right now. I'm James Polis. This is Zero Hour. He's incredible to me. Logan Allen, he's an entrepreneur and a software engineer. He's the founder and CEO of Zorp Corp. Gotta love it. An applied research company at the intersection of crypto and critical infrastructure. Welcome, Logan.
- [01:30]
Logan Allen
Thanks, James. Happy to be here.
- [01:31]
James Polis
So usually people don't think of cryptocurrency and critical infrastructure in the same sentence, if they think about them at all. It seems like crypto is getting a bad reputation again. Tell us what's really going on.
- [01:43]
Logan Allen
Well, the truth of the matter is, is that popular perceptions are right. Most of the cryptocurrency industry is centered around building a series of virtual scam games where the game is to play a lottery, where you're guaranteed to lose money if you're not an insider. And they have all of these fancy words for justifying the research that they do. And they like to call these games proof of stake, or in other words, we are going to play a game of Monopoly where we start out with Boardwalk. But amusingly, there's an entirely other history of cryptocurrency which people conveniently forget, which starts with bitcoin. And bitcoin is an entirely different way of orienting the economic game of money. And of course, you see a lot of different bitcoin podcasts that talk about this in varying ways and talk about bitcoin solely as an economic phenomenon and not as a technology. But in fact, I think that the proof of work idea, the proof of work way of being, and the proof of work way of organizing technology and energy is critical infrastructure. What does that mean? Particularly unlike most of the rest of the crypto industry, proof of work is lives at the intersection between economics and the real world, not just the way that all of these kind of entirely virtual currencies live where they're entirely means of just moving around points that have no correlation with the physical world. Bitcoin instead is actually a way of accounting for energy. And energy is one of the most valuable things in the world right now. Of course, it always has been. But we have particularly new ways of leveraging energy in the form of computation and of course, in all of the other modes of an industrial economy. And so when I talk about Bitcoin or proof of work as critical infrastructure, what I'm pointing to is one, the idea that monetary networks and communication networks are critical infrastructure that are necessary for us to use any type of modern economic convenience. But also notably that Bitcoin itself is a way of reorganizing economic incentives around decentralized energy and infrastructure. And what that means particularly is it's a way of reorganizing the economy and energy production outside of government incentives and subsidies.
- [04:20]
James Polis
All right, so proof of stake, whoever has the most monopoly money has the most influence over what gets added to the chain of the currency. Proof of work, something different. You're talking about whether it's computers competing to solve a math problem or something akin to that where there is energy involved and you've got to expend or invest the energy in order to have any kind of role in adding to the chain, right?
- [04:46]
Logan Allen
That's right. So there's actually a well known within the crypto industry paper that they try to shove under the rug by an amazing researcher, Giuliani Fonti from 2018, that shows that proof of stake networks inevitably over time converge to a single more or less central bank owning all the money. Which is very funny because this is, this means that if you go to a venture capitalist and say, hey, I want to make a proof of state currency and I've got a good go to market that's got a good community that's definitely going to buy this, they're going to fund you no matter what because they know that they're just going to get more and more money that they can then dump on unsuspecting, most of the time, other venture capitalists.
- [05:28]
James Polis
Okay, so let's talk about the energy piece because it is becoming more important. Whether you look at AI, which is just an enormous energy hog, whether you look at like Call of Duty is also, I mean there are so many things that if you want to have a kind of adventurous time on the Internet or online, there's a lot of energy flying around. Of course, there's a lot of concern that like there isn't enough Energy and how do we get more energy? And a lot of debate about that. What do you think the answer is to the energy demands? Do you think they're too high? Do you think there's enough supply? What's the way out?
- [06:00]
Logan Allen
What we see is that the amount of available energy is directly correlated with human quality of life. And so, in general, there's not enough energy because we need to be using more energy for better quality of life for everyone. And so, of course, we all have the solutions to this already. We can just do nuclear. But of course, there's, how would we say, political blockades between civilization actually having more or less unlimited energy and not. And so do you.
- [06:29]
James Polis
Do you think that's like a real objection, though? Do you really think the block. The blockages are caused by people who are just afraid of nuclear energy?
- [06:36]
Logan Allen
No, it's not about it being. It's not being afraid of nuclear energy. It's. It's actually that it's very, very profitable to have control over a scarce resource. And it's not very profitable if people can have unlimited access or nigh unlimited access to a free resource. And so really, the fundamental difference here is between a civilization and economy in which a small group of people control everything and thus have all the status because they are the limiting factor towards getting resources and an economy where people can freely create in an entrepreneurial way to make a better life for each other and for their families and communities.
- [07:18]
James Polis
Got it. Okay. So when you take that kind of model of socioeconomic life and plug it into the model of energy, and then you look at bitcoin and you say, like, okay, well, this is promising. But suddenly a lot of people have woken up and say, wait a minute, where's all the btc? It's kind of been locked up by those big Wall street investors, those big firms. Is it too late for bitcoin at this point?
- [07:43]
Logan Allen
So I don't think it's too late for bitcoin. I think bitcoin is a very, very interesting model because if you want to keep winning in bitcoin, you have to keep sacrificing more and more. And you have to do that in a provable way. You have to be sacrificing physical resources. And so I think that bitcoin is here to stay. Bitcoin is going to change the economic world forever in various ways. But the issue with bitcoin is that as a technology, it's been fundamentally limited by, in a very similar way, political forces that found a way to, how would we say, Political forces found a way with Bitcoin to create a scarce resource that they could control and thus manufacture solutions to. So, in other words, there's a small group into the Bitcoin community that have made Bitcoin unable to steal through various types of facetious arguments and political squanderings and, or political squabblings. And what we see with Bitcoin is that they are now selling solutions to the problem that they've made. They call them lightning, they call them liquid, they call them all kinds of things. Right.
- [09:01]
James Polis
Just different layers that you can stack up and try to get people to use.
- [09:04]
Logan Allen
That's right. But all of these layers reintroduce a problem that Bitcoin was fundamentally created to solve. That problem is actually a legal problem called the third party doctrine. And amusingly, all of the problems that are proposed for fixing Bitcoin and scaling it reintroduce this third party. So the third party doctrine is actually a legal loophole around the fourth Amendment. We all love the fourth Amendment around.
- [09:34]
James Polis
Here, but it doesn't really sounds like a problem.
- [09:36]
Logan Allen
Yeah, so we all love the fourth Amendment, but it doesn't really do much for us anymore. Yeah, right. It's totally legal for the government to know where we are at all times so long as we choose to have a phone. Right. Because there's a third party between us and the government that's collecting our information. And so, by the third party doctrine, the very fact that we need to use a telecommunications network in order to have our phone and that the telecommunications network knows where we are, means that we actually opted in to exposing our information and neglecting our privacy. So what that means is, from the government's perspective, with the third party doctrine, we've chosen not to have privacy around where we are in space by having the phone that connects to the telecommunications network.
- [10:27]
James Polis
And people complain about this, and God bless them, but they also just resign themselves to this reality. I mean, you know, there are a handful of people who are like, yes, I'm going back to the flip phone, but it seems so impractical.
- [10:40]
Logan Allen
And even if you do go back to the flip phone, you're still exposing your location to the telecommunications network and they still know where you are. And the third party doctrine still applies. And so this is true in money as well as in communications. Anytime you expose your information to a third party, the government has the ability to obligate that third party to collect your information. So. And of course, we call this the Bank Secrecy act in finance. And of course, this has all been deemed constitutional because if you expose your information to a third party, it's de facto public and you've waived your right to privacy. So Bitcoin was created to solve a very particular problem in the privacy space, which is, it was solved. It was. It was built to remove the third party. You could publish your transaction directly to the network, and the only people that needed to see it were the network. And of course, with certain kinds of cryptography, you can make it so that while you may publish it to the whole network, the only other person that can read the transaction is the recipient. And then there is no third party you're sending more or less directly to the person. And in that case, the fourth. The Fourth Amendment applies completely.
- [11:49]
James Polis
So sometimes this is characterized as like a sort of trustless economy where you don't need to trust the people that you're dealing with because you can just, like, let the network sort that out and you don't even have to know who they are, and you can still rely on that transaction to go through, and you can build, you know, markets and stuff out of that. But, you know, one thing that it should also do is it should make society less paranoid. Right? But here we are in a society that is like, discovering, you know, new frontiers in. In paranoia. I mean, especially now. And maybe things will lighten up a little bit after the election, but maybe not. You know, everyone is terrified that the person sitting next to them is some kind of, you know, Fed or spy or informant or someone who are scammer or whatever. And I, you know, maybe that's a consequence of. Of the United States, you know, going so hard into globalism that the entire globe sort of comes into the United States and you have to live in that weird world. Why are we so, so paranoid still? Is, Is it just an unwillingness, willful ignorance on the part of people to engage with. With models that are going to solve that problem for them?
- [12:55]
Logan Allen
Well, I actually think that paranoia is a perfectly reasonable response to what's happening in the world today. And what I would point to is actually that, that solving the, the problems that technology has introduced to us is, Is very, very, very difficult. Not from a social perspective. From a technical perspective.
- [13:16]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [13:17]
Logan Allen
And it's actually we're kind of in this funny catch 22 because technology has given us so much leverage. We can use the technology and we can get all these benefits. We can be more productive, we can make more money, we can meet more interesting people, we can learn more interesting things. And yet we all know we're being surveilled all the time. That's just true. Everyone's being surveilled all the time. If you're doing anything interesting in the world, you should assume that all your communications are tapped and you should live squeaky clean.
- [13:51]
James Polis
Yeah, I mean, how do you live squeaky clean? Is it possible? Do you have to go live in the woods? Like, where are we?
- [13:57]
Logan Allen
Yeah, so I do live in the woods. I live on a ranch in East Texas with my wife and two children. And I go to the grocery store, I go to church. And aside from that, I'll go to the park every now and then with my kids to play. And as my toddler gets a little older, we started taking him to gymnastics and stuff. But I don't do anything else and I'll go to a conference occasionally. But I think that if you want to do interesting work in the world today, you need to drop everything else.
- [14:28]
James Polis
Okay, so live in the woods. That's number one. But then what kind of, what kind of rig do you have personally? And how confident are you that that's going to reduce paranoia to a level that you can live with?
- [14:40]
Logan Allen
Well, so, you know, different people have different cultures and different people have different intrinsic tendenc. And as a fairly autistic and somewhat obsessive compulsive Anglo, this manner of living is very natural to me. I don't really like talking to other people that I don't know. I don't feel a strong need to do anything but spend time with my family and do work and interact with the people I work with. And so for me, this is actually fine. I just live a fairly, you'd say paranoid existence and that's just fine. I'm just happy with it. It's very natural. But for other people, you know, it would present some horrible neurosis that, you know, they would say, oh, I'm being listened to all the time. And that's so terrible. I'm like, oh, I'm being listened to all the time. That's, that's okay. I'll just not say anything.
- [15:27]
James Polis
Well, so I, and, and you know, that's, that's fine. But there are social consequences to this. You know, America used to be a very pro social society to the point where, you know, boomers, today you can see them just like striking up conversations with strangers in the grocery store. And like, that was American culture and that has been transformed very dramatically. Some of it was know, kind of COVID but a lot of it is kids being raised with iPads and it would be A shame if the cost of reducing the paranoia was to increase the isolation. Under those kinds of conditions, people start to turn to cyberspace as, you know, basically real life. And look at real life, it becomes kind of a desert.
- [16:13]
Logan Allen
Yeah, real life is a desert today. And one of the reasons why people are increasingly paranoid is that the world that they live in is, is a world of media. And the world of media is a world of psychological operations. Yeah, mostly by intelligence. And when it's not literally intelligence, it's organizations that work just like intelligence.
- [16:33]
James Polis
Yeah, third, third party providers.
- [16:35]
Logan Allen
That's right. That's right. We like to talk about cults a lot just in, in the company and the idea that more or less all of civilization is created by cults and that cults are really just intelligence agencies. So we talk about how the Oracle of Delphi and, and the, the Delphi cult, this was really just an intelligence agency in ancient Greece. And in many ways they would act as a nexus between a bunch of different civilizations that would come and ask them for advice, and in doing so they would glean all the alpha, as they say today.
- [17:07]
James Polis
Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, usually when, you know, I think about cults and intelligence, I think that something bad is about to happen to, to me or to the people involved. You know, like, definitely a lot of, of what passes as, as founder culture, at least up until fairly recently, I think a lot of Silicon Valley is beginning to sort of understand that, that so much of startup culture is just cults, you know, and placing bets on cults. And, you know, there are perverse incentives here and some, some people out there are starting to become, you know, self aware enough to say, like, yes, I am running a cult. We are worshiping this, you know, large language model or whatever. And, and that seems, you know, that handing over the destiny of your country to people who are shamelessly worshipping computers seems like a risky bet. And, and yet you're telling me that maybe cults are not necessarily bad. So how can an ordinary person trying to find their way in this world distinguish without total paranoia between a good cult and a bad one?
- [18:14]
Logan Allen
That's a great question. So in my view, the question is always, what are you worshiping? Regardless of what we're talking about, that's always the question, what are you worshiping? Why are you worshiping that? And what is it doing to you that you're worshiping that? And so when we're talking about cults specifically the question is, is what are they worshiping? And as you say, most of the cults that people are doing in Silicon Valley are worshiping technology, they're worshiping the machine. But interestingly, the things that people are worshiping in D.C. or in the Paper Belt, while it's not exactly the machine, it's still mechanistic thinking and managerial organizations, which are exactly what led to the machine. In other words, the Paper Belt worships bureaucracy and Silicon Valley worships the machine. These two are very, very similar to each other.
- [19:06]
James Polis
Very similar. You look at the origin of the corporation and sort of like, well, what's going on here? What is this that's being built? And it's just kind of a prelude to the network, right?
- [19:15]
Logan Allen
That's exactly right. And so if we look back to the kind of the very beginning of the west, we can say that the things that are unique about the west are that the west separated mechanistic thinking from teleological thinking. In other words, the west separated the study of mechanism, the study of what's true, from the study of what's supposed to be, or in other words, the study of the good and the beautiful. So the west separated the true from the good and the beautiful, when truly, prior to the west, the true, the good and the beautiful were all one thing. They were all considered one thing. You would worship God, and God was the root of good, God was the root of truth, God was the root of beauty. And then some people in the west said, no, we don't really need God anymore. What we need is we need to find out what's true via studying only the way things directly interact with each other and measuring them.
- [20:15]
James Polis
Where do you trace that back to? Is it Bacon? Is it. I mean, Nietzsche is pretty late in the game. How far back did that split start to happen?
- [20:26]
Logan Allen
I mean, I would really pin the blame in the beginning on Aristotle, but the effects of Aristotle really took a long time, time to, to play out. In other words, Aristotle is really the one who, who broke from Plato and broke from what we would recognize as being also Christian, because Christianity, though not Platonic, is, is very, very, has a, has a very strong interplay with Platonic thinking. And so Aristotle, and I suppose you could say Aquinas, took these ideas and they were present there in a dormant state. The idea that you could study and split things apart and dissect and analyze, and eventually I would say, really this came to a head in the 1600s. And in the 1600s we see mechanistic thinking come to the fore and be truly and completely separated from the study of the good and the beautiful. And around the same Time we see a very fundamental shift in the academy. We no longer have the traditional schools in the academy of law, medicine, theology. And we suddenly have these people that want to be called scientists. They say, we're not philosophers, we're not doing philosophy, we're not studying knowledge. We're studying specific things and we're going to organize them into disciplines.
- [21:56]
James Polis
We're creating knowledge.
- [21:57]
Logan Allen
We're creating knowledge. That's right. And so the west is characterized by two unique characteristics. One of them is mechanistic thinking and the worship of mechanistic thinking. And the other one is, of course, democracy and the elevation of democracy. So the idea that sovereignty rests with the people, which of course started with the French Revolution. And so between these two things, the idea that we all need mechanistic thinking and that we should really find what's good and beautiful just by the aggregate consensus of the masses, these are the fundamental tendencies of the West. And so when we talk about both the Paper Belt and Silicon Valley and the worship of the machine and the worship of the bureaucracy, these are both just worshiping mechanism. And I'm not betting on either of those things.
- [22:54]
James Polis
Well, it all seems to come together in the idea of social credit. Right. And just institutionalizing social credit, then you can have all the mechanism that you want and you can have all the bureaucracy that you want.
- [23:05]
Logan Allen
So you asked, how do you know what a good cult is? And how do you know what a bad cult is? I would tell you a good cult is one that worships God, that worships the good, the true and the beautiful in union with each other. And a bad cult is one that worships mechanism, regardless of where you find it.
- [23:24]
James Polis
So, you know, my, my take on this is that you actually can't worship mechanism alone, that this is cope, and that there's, it's. It can only serve some other higher entity or purpose or concept. Tools, you know, tools do things and it's really hard to like, you know, can you really worship a tool? Or ultimately, do you have to worship what it is that you do with the tool or what it is that you think the tool is designed to do?
- [23:57]
Logan Allen
Sure. So tools fundamentally provide leverage. They provide asymmetric outcomes. And when people are worshiping tools, what they're actually worshiping is power in the material sense, because they're worshiping the thing that the tool gives them, which is power over others. And we see this from bureaucracy, the west, in being able to most effectively organize a very large bureaucracy and be able. And the west as an entity that was able to more effectively utilize its tax base, was able to use this to, of course, out compete the Soviets in the Cold War. This was a use of mechanism, this was a use of leverage. And so the thing that the west was worshiping was not their actual ideology, but was rather their ability to organize as a bureaucracy. And so the thing that they wanted was power was social status over others.
- [24:58]
James Polis
And, you know, by power, we're basically just talking about the ability to do things to other people.
- [25:03]
Logan Allen
Yes, because if they were worshiping, say, the health of the people, they were saying, like, what we need is we just need to have the best, you know, the best natural virtues in the people and vitalism. Vital, yeah. If we just wanted these pagan ideas of the natural virtues, which are good, we love the natural virtues. But if they were worshiping that, they would be acting differently than they are. And what we actually see is that they're worshiping power in the form of the tool, and then they're using the power that the tool gives them as a means of leveling any forces that could generate other kinds of power that they would not have exclusive access to. So what I'm saying specifically is the bureaucracies hate new technology that they don't already have mastery over because it presents a threat. Because any other group of people that have leverage, whether this is Marc Andreessen, whether this is Elon Musk, any new technology that can be mastered, provides an avenue of escape from the bureaucracy. And so we have a conflict today between two groups of cults that worship different kinds of mechanisms. And this is shaping out to be a. I would say at this point, it's a warm war, not a hot war, but a warm war between Silicon Valley and the Paper Belt. Because the paper belt has power over particular kinds of bureaucracies and processes that allow them to give many, many resources to different groups of people and to benefit and to profit from giving those resources. I mean, we see the stock trading that they do with Raytheon and Nvidia all the time. They profit from this. They profit from their exclusive access. This is a wonderful thing for them and not really for anyone else. But there's a class of people, of technologists that we would say are productive in the economy that are not benefiting from this situation. And I think that we've reached a breaking point, which is very particularly that this group of people, this group of productive entrepreneurs are organizing amongst one another to seize power from the paper belt. And that's an interesting thing. And I would hesitate to say that it's good or Bad even, because at the end of the day you're going to be governed by someone. But what we see is really a class conflict between two groups that are both vying to manage the state.
- [27:54]
James Polis
Yeah, well, and this seems to be a lot of what's going on with the election. Presidential election is about this, right?
- [28:00]
Logan Allen
Absolutely. And so as a technologist, I watch this closely because in a very real way, the thing that these two groups are fighting over at this point is whether it's legal to build new technologies that are not already co opted by the state. And so crypto, as you're aware, has become a major issue in this election. I think that that was a surprise to a lot of people. But crypto, if you want to use it just as, as an example, as a characteristic example of the technologies that exist today, crypto is a way to organize groups of people around incentives without a need for bureaucracy. That's very dangerous to people that are masters of bureaucracy.
- [28:56]
James Polis
Yeah. And it threatens their control of, we can call them human resources. You know, at a, at a certain point you can use human beings in a certain way and exercise that power, but you can also just squeeze them dry. You can squeeze them dry of, of energy vitality, you can squeeze them dry of utility. And that seems to be kind of on the table as well. You know, there does seem to be a faction that's sort of like, well, you know, if we do just kind of exhaust the supply of human resources, then we'll have built something better and we won't really need human beings anymore.
- [29:27]
Logan Allen
Yes. And we see this group of people, interestingly, this is the group of technologists that are actually trying to break off from the other technologists and join the paper belt. We see this with Sam Altman very clearly with the work that he's done in government, lobbying around, trying to build AI safety councils and things. He wants to be betting on bureaucracies and he wants the safety of the bureaucracy. And he's saying to them, I will give you God. Yeah, I will give you God. That's what he's telling them. And I don't believe that what he's going to give them or whatever is God. I think that that's a silly idea.
- [30:08]
James Polis
But they want it to be true.
- [30:10]
Logan Allen
But they want it to be true. And we know that we live in Disney World where imagination shapes reality with limits.
- [30:17]
James Polis
And if he does not give that to them, then his life is going to become very difficult.
- [30:23]
Logan Allen
Yes. But at the very least, he is giving them powerful objects and they like that. And it's interesting the way in which they ignore various laws around corporations and nonprofits specifically because he's promising them things.
- [30:43]
James Polis
Yeah. Okay, so let's take a counterexample to Sam Altman. Like you, for instance, are, are building a technology that as far as I know, has not yet been co opted by the government. What is, what is Zorp and what are you trying to do with it?
- [30:58]
Logan Allen
That's a great question. So Zorp is an applied research company. That's very vague. But what we're doing is we're building a new stack. That's a technical term, but what I mean very specifically is we are building a new type of infrastructure that has different unit economics than traditional software. So this is very abstract because I'm talking about incentives. But what we're trying to do is we're trying to make tools that allow software developers to build things with 100 times less effort and man hours.
- [31:38]
James Polis
Same kind of things or different kinds of things?
- [31:40]
Logan Allen
The same kinds of things. We want to make it so that people can build tools with 100 times less effort that are more secure, more stable, require fewer updates, and require smaller organizations to maintain and keep running. Because it's our contention that the biggest threat to the free world is the fact that technology is so complex that in order to maintain meaningful technologies in today's world, you have to have a large organization that can be easily co opted by the state. So we all know that the Department of Labor has a threshold. Once you hit 100 employees, you have to start complying. You suddenly have to have one third of your staff devoted to compliance. Devoted to compliance. But if you want to build production grade technology that's secure, that does something that people can depend on in today's world, in almost all cases, you need more than 100 people.
- [32:43]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [32:44]
Logan Allen
Period. Why is that?
- [32:47]
James Polis
Well, so what do you say to people who think, well, gosh, why don't I just Pay Sam Altman $2,000 a month and just prompt the AI to build all of my tools for me?
- [33:00]
Logan Allen
That's a great question. So at the end of the day, what we're talking about is really fundamental to the laws of the universe, which is. Complexity is fundamental to the universe. Right. It's. You can measure it. You can measure complexity in the form of information. And information is something that's present in our DNA, it's present everywhere. And of course, information is a measurement tool. Right. Like it's, it's a way of talking about different things in the world and what these LLMs do is they allow you to compress information and then replay it in novel ways. And that approximates a lot of different kinds of symbol manipulation. And that's great. You can use them for very powerful things, but they don't. They don't give you mastery over complexity. In fact, nothing does. Nothing does. Nothing gives you mastery over complexity. Complexity is an eternal snake that will devour you. And so, I mean, I'm using flowery.
- [34:05]
James Polis
Language, but that which cannot be mastered.
- [34:07]
Logan Allen
Yeah, complexity is the thing that cannot be mastered. And the only solution, the only solution to dealing with this hydra is to just start with something simpler and not allow it to get complex in the first place. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to make a world in which, if you're using these tools, the things that you build are less complex. They break in less complex ways. And in being less complex and being simpler, you just need fewer people to maintain them and keep them going. And if you need fewer people to maintain the tools that you depend on for your community or for your family or for your city or for your state to continue existing, then it's easier to pass on the knowledge from generation to generation of how to keep those things going, because it's just simpler.
- [35:05]
James Polis
So is this like a Dunbar's number thing where it's like there's kind of an optimal size of human organization, and, you know, you don't want it to be sort of one guy sitting in a Borg cube that is kind of just disappearing into the. Into the pipes and the tools. But you also don't want to have to have an organization of hundreds and hundreds of people in order to get anything done.
- [35:27]
Logan Allen
You really want there to be 10 to 50 guys, and you want it to be very easy for them to train other people to do what they do. And we see this massive, massive problem across, really, the entire west with the failing birth rates and with the lack of generational transfer of knowledge due to the various broken incentives in our economy. And that problem is that we are not training new people to understand the infrastructure that keeps our water clean, that keeps our power plants running, that keeps our trains from derailing, that keeps our supply chains working. We're not training new people to do these things because the people that are smart are instead being trained to send emails to each other.
- [36:19]
James Polis
Right?
- [36:20]
Logan Allen
And this is a civilizational killer. This will kill civilization rapidly because as we've discussed in the past, each civilizational handoff from one set of parents to their children must occur without a hitch. Or everything's over.
- [36:44]
James Polis
Well, we're seeing it happen now. I mean, so much of what passes for economic activity is all compliance and no competence.
- [36:52]
Logan Allen
That's exactly right. And so everything is being organized around satiating the bureaucratic behemoth, because that's what you have to do to get your money credits. Yeah, that's what, that's what gives you your dollars is if. Is if, you know, you satisfy the behemoth and then they'll, you know, they'll give you PPP loans or whatever it is. But competence is not rewarded. And free economies that center around sacrifice, that center around proof of work where you have to be spending energy if you want to be owning money. Free economies are the revival of competence and present an opportunity to have new incentives. But if we want to leverage those new incentives most effectively, we have to pair them with a technology that can enter into a positive feedback loop, a flywheel effect, where people can easily learn these new tools and use them to make money in a free economy.
- [37:56]
James Polis
Okay, so this is about getting out of the compliance death spiral, getting out of the demographic death spiral. How big do you need a system like Zorp to be scaled in order for it to be viable? Does it have to eat the world or is there some kind of intermediate level where you think it can sustain?
- [38:18]
Logan Allen
All you need is a cult. All you need is a cult that truly believes in God, in competence and in generational transfer of knowledge. And if you have that, you win. On a long enough timeline.
- [38:36]
James Polis
How long of a timeline do you think you have?
- [38:38]
Logan Allen
Well, there's these different forces. One of them is that there's a declining but increasingly totalitarian set of bureaucracies, and they can just crush you. And so in a way, there's a race of increasing capabilities, increasing size of cult, and geographical distribution of the cold prior to being crushed. But on a long enough timescale, if you just don't die, if your cult can create useful tools and use the tools and continue believing in God, you win.
- [39:13]
James Polis
Yeah, let's talk about that geographic distribution a little bit. Obviously, you know, Silicon Valley has breached containment. It is now spreading across the country. And, you know, not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a good thing either. You look at the paper belt still, still mostly kind of east coast thing. You know, Chicago's out there doing that. Some other places you're just kind of in the, you know, almost the step, you know, the great, great American interior doing this. Do you think that kind of American interior is the place where technology is going to Be sort of brought to heel and put back to human uses again.
- [39:53]
Logan Allen
I grew up in the rural South. I grew up about an hour and a half out of Atlanta in a small town next to Lake Lanier. And I grew up in a small house that my grandfather built when he was 18 when he married my grandmother, who at that time was 19. And that small house was built in a cornfield across the street from his mother's house.
- [40:25]
James Polis
And used to be very normal.
- [40:28]
Logan Allen
Used to be very normal. And he bought up some plots of land next to it and he gave them to his children and his children moved away. I think that the west is over unless competent people can own land and create communities with each other that they pass on to their children where their children marry each other.
- [41:06]
James Polis
Yeah. And you gotta ask, you know that that sounds like the recipe for any civilization, whether it's. Whether it's western or otherwise.
- [41:13]
Logan Allen
Yes. And the fact that you have to say things as basic as this is danger sign. You know, it's a very bad thing when you have to say super basic stuff. And you have to use logic. If you have to use logic to get to an understanding of that, everything is very, very, very messed up.
- [41:36]
James Polis
Yeah. This is supposed to come from the heart, not the head.
- [41:39]
Logan Allen
This is just supposed to be the thing that you do. Because that's what your father did.
- [41:42]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [41:43]
Logan Allen
And.
- [41:44]
James Polis
But we're worshiping this entity. And the entity tells us that we need to spend more time worshiping it than doing these things that are going us alive.
- [41:51]
Logan Allen
Yeah. You have to go to college. And then you have to move to the city. And then you have to go out on benders every weekend. And then you have to try the weed gummies. And then. Then you have to get a dog, I guess.
- [42:01]
James Polis
And then you have to hit the wall and have all of your human resources be expended while you're still alive.
- [42:06]
Logan Allen
That's exactly right. So I think that rebirth must come from the exterior. And whether that's El Salvador or rural Texas, it will be the exterior. It will be the periphery. It will be the heartland, the places, the frontier. It will be the frontier.
- [42:25]
James Polis
The frontiers in the heartland.
- [42:26]
Logan Allen
It will not be from. From the inner. From the inner empire. The inner empire is exhausted. It's unlivable. It's dead.
- [42:33]
James Polis
And its ideas of frontiers are now wrong.
- [42:36]
Logan Allen
Yes.
- [42:36]
James Polis
Right. All the frontiers that they're trying to sell you are actually not representative of what the real frontier is.
- [42:41]
Logan Allen
That's right. Real frontiers are towns with 3,000 people in them where half of them are Very nice families that go to church. And the other half are addicted to meth.
- [42:53]
James Polis
Yeah, Yeah. A friend of mine who you've probably crossed paths with a couple times, also a Georgia boy, also an evangelist of the Village. He's fond of saying that the nation is not going to replace the empire. The Village is going to be the new nation.
- [43:14]
Logan Allen
I haven't hear like it. I think that's lovely.
- [43:16]
James Polis
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, if people want to know more, if they want to actually put their hands on what it is that you're building, how can you guide them?
- [43:27]
Logan Allen
We're kicking off our new world stack, our new way of building by going to market with a new proof of work blockchain called nockchain. It has no pre mine. We're not printing ourselves monopoly money and telling everybody else to suck it. We're starting it off with a fair competition where the people that get tokens, that get this money are the people that sacrifice physical energy into bootstrapping the network and making it breathe and making it live.
- [44:06]
James Polis
By doing what?
- [44:08]
Logan Allen
By mining. But uniquely, they're building not hashes like Bitcoin. Probably heard of bitcoin having hash power and a hash rate and ASICs that do hashes. We're not doing that. We're doing something that's completely novel. No one's done this before, which is that the proof of work that people are having, the puzzles that people are using their computers to build, are this special emerging kind of cryptography called zero knowledge proofs. And we're betting the farm on zero knowledge proofs. And you're doing.
- [44:44]
James Polis
Why are they so good?
- [44:45]
Logan Allen
Why are they so good? Yeah. Well, people generally focus when someone says zero knowledge proofs and they're not already familiar with the concept. People generally focus on the first two words because it sounds like they're really meaningful. Zero knowledge. Wow. Wow.
- [44:58]
James Polis
Where do I get that?
- [44:59]
Logan Allen
Yeah, yeah, that's right. The really interesting word in that phrase, zero knowledge proof, is the word proof. That's where the meaning is. That's where the meaning is. What it means is that you can take any computation, anything that you have a computer do, any function it does, and you can record the steps that it went through, and then you can compress them into a very, very tiny piece of information that lets anyone else with no trust verify that that exact computation was done correctly, truthfully, with very little effort. You can verify. You can compress the fact that some big supercomputer did some massive computation into a tiny little file that a smartphone can verify with no Trust. And this is an incredible technology because unlike hashes, which allow you to get a little fingerprint that verifies a piece of data, a zero knowledge proof allows you to get this very tiny fingerprint that verifies a whole computation that was done. And zero knowledge proofs provide a ton of new capabilities to networks particularly. They allow you to take something like Bitcoin and scale it with no need for things like layer 2s or whatever. You can have this trustless network where you can store with no trust the fact that millions of computations were done, millions of transactions were processed correctly as an example, without making it difficult for other people to verify that that occurred. They don't have to trust you. Or interestingly, you can link things that happened off of the chain and use the chain to record that they did in fact happen at a certain point in time. This is one of the areas where the critical infrastructure angle comes in. Wouldn't it be nice if we could know for a fact that our data centers were not compromised or know for a fact that our factories were doing what they were supposed to do and weren't and hadn't been hacked?
- [47:28]
James Polis
Seems important.
- [47:29]
Logan Allen
Yeah, it seems important. Or what if we could show that our hospitals weren't leaking your records? Or what if we could show that our voting machines. Right. What if we could show that the voting machines were recording each and every vote properly and not falsifying them?
- [47:47]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [47:48]
Logan Allen
And what if we could record that in a way that was publicly auditable? This is what zero knowledge proofs let you do. And I think that zero knowledge proofs, alongside the new ways of building that are cheaper and easier and take less energy that we've already talked about, provide ingredients that when combined give us massive leverage that we can use to re secure and revitalize America's infrastructure.
- [48:25]
James Polis
Okay, I'm sold. So if people want to get in on this, where do they go?
- [48:29]
Logan Allen
They go to notchain.org okay.
- [48:31]
James Polis
It's that simple.
- [48:32]
Logan Allen
It's that simple.
- [48:33]
James Polis
And what should they expect to do when they get there?
- [48:35]
Logan Allen
They can start mining or they can sign up to our newsletter and read lovely philosophy that we write on a weekly basis.
- [48:41]
James Polis
Yes, and I must say you've got a beautiful aesthetic going on on your, your public facing material. So thanks. Yeah, important part of it, but incredible technology, incredible technologists as, as advertised. Logan Allen, thanks so much for dropping in.
- [48:55]
Logan Allen
Thanks James.
- [48:56]
James Polis
All right, that's all the time we got until next time around. I'm James Polis, this is Zero Hour and may God have mercy.