Decentralizing the Social Singularity
This week our guest is philosopher and author, Max Borders, who founded the non-profit Social Evolution in order to solve social problems through innovation, and who has also authored three books deeply exploring humanity’s movement to a society of decentralized governance.
In this episode, we explore some of the finer details of decentralization, including how it manifests itself in the digital and physical worlds, how bad actors are kept in check in a society without a central authority, the types of technologies that will help mediate the transition to such a world, and the many flaws and opportunities that exist in such a paradigm.
Find out more about at social-evolution.com or follow Max at twitter.com/socialevol
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Host: Steven Parton - LinkedIn / Twitter
Music by: Amine el Filali
Transcription
Max Borders [00:00:00] As human society and civilization becomes more advanced and more complex, there's more information that is impinging on our human systems. Right. Decentralization allows us to reckon with that complexity in different ways.
Steven Parton [00:00:29] Hello, everyone. My name is Steven Parton and you are listening to the feedback loop from Singularity. This week my guest is philosopher and author Max Borders, who founded the nonprofit Social Evolution in order to solve social problems through innovation. And he has also authored three books deeply exploring humanity's movement towards a society of decentralized governance. In this episode, we explore some of the finer details of decentralization, including how it manifests itself in the digital and physical worlds, how bad actors are kept in check. In a society that doesn't have a central authority, the types of technologies that will help mediate the transition to such a world. And the many flaws and opportunities that exist in such a paradigm shift. So without further ado, please welcome to the feedback loop. Max Borders. All right, man. Well, I think the best place to start, then, is probably just with your books that you have. You have nice a nice collection there. The Social Singularity After Collapse and the decentralized. And obviously the theme that runs through them is, is that of decentralization. But could you kind of speak more broadly to the narrative or the story that you're trying to tell with with this collection of work?
Max Borders [00:01:49] Yeah, I think that's a really interesting way of looking at them, because I think if there's a there's a through line or a theme that animates all of the work. It is probably that human relationships can and perhaps should be more lateral ized. And what I mean by that is, well, let's just take the singularity trope, right? You know, Ray Kurzweil and others into the past sort of postulated this idea that as we move into the future, we're going to approach a time in which the machines, whether that's artificial general intelligence and perhaps even sentience and consciousness, the machines wake up in some sense. And so as we move further into the future, that. That computing power and complexity is going to yield certain kind of fruit. We don't we don't exactly know what that is, but we hope it's helpful and we hope it doesn't enslave us. So really, decentralization as a concept has a lot of dimensions. It's it's almost an endlessly fascinating. Body of thinking around how the world could be ought to be. And in some sense, already is. And. The art portion, depending on the book, can be external, as in the way our human systems are organized, we look out into the world. We can see these human systems arranged in a certain way, the protocols for which causes to reflect. Is this working? In what ways is it's not working? And of course, there's there's all kinds of there's baggage in that. It's inevitable ideological baggage even. But I try to become I try to be non-ideological at I hate I hesitate to use this term because it's kind of beaten to death lately, but a meta level, right. 111 click above sort of the protocols we currently live in to ask the question, questions about those protocols and what kinds of results, consequences they generate for humanity. But I also have a way of thinking about decentralization. That's very internal, too. It's like if if this is indeed from a systems level view, going to benefit humanity in some way, what does that require of us and what kind of consequences to our behavior in our internal states are necessary for going on this journey? And that is that's more present. And it started to sort of emerge in the book after collapse and is particularly apt and explored in the book, the Centralist, which is the third in. I guess you could say a related series. But yeah, the through line of decentralization is, is certainly multifaceted. And that's that's really kind of trying to help readers make that cognitive leap to understand the the risks, benefits and consequences of decentralization and the kind of necessary protocols and necessary sort of moral orientation that would inform that. Mm hmm.
Steven Parton [00:05:19] And how is that kind of all, I guess, lead into what you're doing with social evolution? What kind of mission are you on with that nonprofit as it relates to. To what? The books detail.
Max Borders [00:05:32] Yeah. The mission is really broadly speaking to to understand social evolution along a number of vectors, you know, one of which I think is, is just complexity. You know, I think understanding in some, you know, not the most sophisticated Santa Fe, you know, modeling terms, I'm not a I'm not a computer modeler. But certainly the idea of complexity is it really does inform this as human society and and civilization becomes more advanced and more complex. There's more information that is impinging on our human systems. Right. Decentralization allows us to reckon with that complexity in different ways than perhaps needed to be done before. It also recognizes broadly, broadly speaking, pluralism. The mission of social evolution is to is to liberate people and solve social problems through innovation. With a big fat parenthetical, not politics. There's, of course, a degree to which politics is. As unavoidable. But reframing and re conceiving of politics as being, at the very least, highly localized and community specific. Nisha, if you like. That's really that's really the way we like to think about things that social evolution. So several social evolution. The organization is primarily a publishing platform for these ideas, a way to disseminate these ideas. But certainly we have aspirations for much, much more, which I can talk about if you like.
Steven Parton [00:07:12] Yeah, I mean, if you'd like to just dive into kind of some of those aspirations now feel free. Well.
Max Borders [00:07:19] I'll give you an example of something that it's very early stage and I hesitate to even talk about it here, but I have to sort of well, perhaps even three, but certainly two interconnected projects that I've only begun to work on lately. One is a project currently we refer to as the Constitution of consent. And this is be a symbolic legal document that really is takes the idea of the consent of the governed, which, you know, is a phrase that we get out of the Declaration of Independence. So it's a pretty distinctly American phenomenon, or at the very least, you know, cribbed from from the British empiricists in the Enlightenment. But in any case. So it's full. Full flower in 1776 when, you know, the declaration was laid down in Jefferson gets a lot of credit for that. So this idea of the government is a very important idea, but it was never fully instantiated in law. Some argue that it should have been or should be instantiated in law and that we should consider the Declaration of Independence a kind of legal document. But it's not. So we got to think about upgrading that. And if we think of law as being a kind of social technology, we should think about how we can upgrade that social technology. I make a joke in the social singularity about DAAS, the democratic operating system, which has only two apps, the Red App and the Blue app. And this is, you know, in the era of having smartphones with multiple, sometimes hundreds of apps, it becomes more intuitive to think about the way we can think of. Of our social operating systems as accommodating more and more communities and conceptions of the good in each of these communities and conceptions of the good might have its own rules sets. But that wider meta framework for rules has to contain it so that the multiple apps can can emerge or be co-created among the people. So it's it's a very distinct reframing of the way we think about about politics as something Hobbesian that gets imposed on people rather than something that gets chosen and that you invite into your your matrix of protocols, culture and so on.
Steven Parton [00:09:52] Where did those protocols and community live? Are those purely digital concepts or constructs, or do you see those being something that actually ends up permeating and reshaping, kind of like the physical world, drawing boundaries, maybe like a state line or, you know, some kind of property line? You know, do these ideas transcend the digital and enter into the physical world in any way?
Max Borders [00:10:16] Oh, yes. That's absolutely has to be the case. I mean, as human beings, we we thrive on human touch, proximity, community, not not just tete a tete, like getting to talk to each other in person, but but interfacing in distinctly evolved and human ways. I don't think there's any way, even with advances in telepresence that come out of maybe projects that come out of singularity, you, you know, there might be massively interesting ways to improve how we relate to one another online, and it seems more and more realistic with the metaverse and so on. That being said, it's important to to respect our human roots. And that human rootedness, I think, is is at least for the near and medium term for humanity, pretty inescapable. And I'm not too eager to escape it either. I'll be honest in saying so. I don't know. That being said, you know, Biology Srinivasan, who's doing a lot of really interesting ideas in this space the space of conflict, decentralization, competitive governance, so on. But he's brilliant guy. You know, he's he's on a lot of podcasts, melting the faces off the hosts for hours on end. And he's he's not only a polymath, but just a brilliant guy. And his network state concept, which you may be familiar with, is sort of assumes that with all the territories on Earth being attached to rules, that's already in the form of jurisdiction and these sort of Hobbesian forces. Sort of resting on territories and protecting them. And there's a there's a kind of equilibrium there. But that equilibrium is based on sort of history and conquest. So it's it's it's interesting to ask whether and to what extent rule sets and territory can be decoupled. Okay. So that's sort of the first question. I find that there are people around the world already from so many different countries. With whom I relate much more personally in terms of my values, in terms of the kind of community I'd like to live in. But they are not nearby. They don't live in my same territory. We may also have vast agreements or disagreements about cultural phenomena, things like that. But at the end of the day, I think the way biology sees things is once we do find these cultural, moral, cultural overlaps with people around the world, the way we discover that is perhaps first online, because that's the lowest cost way to make that discovery. I want to acknowledge that and say that that's true. However, I'm also very much of the mind that we can begin to create moral, cultural. Niches or cells here on the ground already. And so the second project that I hesitated to talk about, but that she invited me to is the formation of a. The formation of a fraternal society. It could be surreal to in other words, it's to the brotherhood of man, the sisterhood of men, the sisterhood of humans. You know what I mean? So that that that's really just the idea of a fraternal order is a is a is a way of discovering moral, cultural, kindred ness, cultivating that, developing that in people. And so the coupling of the idea of a constitution of consent with a fraternal society is something I'm very interested in doing. And of course, that biology may be right, that may need to start off online before it. It kind of comes down back down to earth where people can establish chapters, lodges and interrelate with one another in very close proximity. But that social technology, for example, of the Freemasons is has worked for hundreds of years. It's been around a hell of a lot longer than the Internet. And we need to respect that. And I think that there's that idea of mission morality, mutual aid in a sense of life, meaning that's a lot of EMS. I apologize. But those for EMS, taken together, are possible to cultivate with the fraternal society. And I'd like to see them enjoy a renaissance. And, of course. This kind of Internet technologies can help. And so of course can cryptocurrencies and and blockchains. Though they're in their nascent so you know they have kind of a bad reputation right now. Once you get through the evolutionary bottleneck with these technologies, we're going to see another Cambrian explosion, I think. Mm hmm.
Steven Parton [00:15:15] Well, in in the short term, what you're saying to me doesn't sound like it really works, right? Because you still have these brotherhoods and sister hoods under the umbrella of the government that they belong to physically, Right. But do you see in the long term that these, let's call them small ripples, eventually cause a wave that kind of restructures the the umbrella, the the larger governmental structures? Like Is that kind of the goal here is that you ultimately do subvert the idea of the nation state into these decentralized cells.
Max Borders [00:15:56] Yes, that is absolutely right. That was really well put. Very succinct. And subversion, I think, has a negative connotation that maybe gets a bad rap. But it's really about. It's really more to think about what kinds of systems and protocols are more likely to bring about human flourishing. So to the extent that an. A a set of a hierarchy or a way human beings are organized, begins to outlive its usefulness. In terms of human flourishing, We have to begin to question those structures. We have to begin to interrogate them. And the best way to interrogate something that you might call a status quo system is to offer something new, a new constituency group. Around a system, a set of protocols, and invite people to join it. I'll give you a couple of quick examples. If you if you think about and these are these are kind of the smaller examples compared to what I'm what I'm aspiring to, to participate in creating. And that, you know, I'm under no illusions about that. But think about it. What we used to do in 2012, we, we the idea of hitching a ride with someone, you did that at your own risk. Right. You put your thumb up and you hoped that the guy or person driving the car, you know, didn't didn't whisk you off to the to some sort of trap in the woods and and have their way with you in some unspeakable way. Right. Or just have an uncomfortable situation in the car. This guy, Travis Kalanick, comes along and with a with a group of people and he uses GPS. He uses all these other current technologies, stitched them together in an interesting way to create Uber. And that facilitated not only reputation but security, because all of these relationships could be tracked in real time recorded. It engendered trust. And and there were good incentives behind that because if you're selling your reputation by, you know, trying to harm someone or even be disrespectful to them, that would be reflected in your reputation. And if your reputation was sullied, that, of course, limits your opportunities in terms of making money. So. Now there's a certain there's a ten years later, there's, you know, Uber and similar technologies are ubiquitous. It's not to say they're perfect. It's not to say they couldn't be improved on better. And there's certainly competition in this space. But. It was a way of looking at a legal gray area, a kind of a status quo with certain kinds of arrangements, and those arrangements where if you needed a ride, you would have to appeal to a cartel and that cartels, the sort of municipal cartels called taxi medallions. And so to subvert that, you know, the entrepreneurs and innovators came along and subverted that as a system of interaction to the benefit of. Of users. And certainly if there is, there were no benefit, there would be no Uber. So we know today logically that it is beneficial. People bitch and complain about Uber. You know, I've done it before, but but at the end of the day, this example just gives us an idea of how you can form massive constituency groups around something operating in a legal gray area. That is paradigm changing and we can make the same case about bitcoin, for example, fully accept this delay at every layer of the stack is nearly fully decentralized. As far as anyone can tell. There are people who poke holes at Bitcoin for not being fully decentralized or being risky, but I think it's probably as an effort the most decentralized, technological or open source effort ever, ever conceived. And we may see competitors come along in this evolutionary fitness landscape of cryptocurrencies, but suffice it to say we're using it as an object lesson right now for for this idea. What kinds of things are possible when we imagine consent and cooperation versus compulsion as a primary mechanism of of social order?
Steven Parton [00:20:41] Yeah, well, one thing with what you're saying here that I often struggle with, or maybe with this idea specifically that I'm having trouble reconciling is something you mentioned in social singularity, which kind of touches on it, which is this question of how do we, as you put it, reorganize to collaborate and compete with a I When I think of something like this decentralized world or Uber, I can't help but think it kind of demands some sort of AI nanny, right? Some sort of AI uber system that kind of helps organize all of the many moving parts because when you have complex systems, right. One of the things we know with complex theory is there's a lot of lot of emergent phenomena that are really hard to govern at the lower level. So it feels like we need something that kind of pulls everything together, but then that starts to get into this place with are we becoming just coerced by the AI and how decentralized are we really if we end up being glued together by that system? So I know I just threw a lot at you there, but if you understand my point, you kind of talk about how you reconcile that.
Max Borders [00:21:53] Well, I think the way I reconcile it. Is far more tentative and speculative. So I don't want to I don't want to sit here and act like I have all the answers. I think the alignment problem is a pretty difficult and deep one. If we can imagine that as air advances, it becomes more a genetic. And at the same time more kinetic, which is to say it begins to become self-aware and finds ways to insert itself into the world of things, into the world of things that move and enter the entire causal physical nexus of our reality, right? Which includes like the devices you and I are talking through right now. And we can imagine superintelligent. Art, a superintelligent entity that starts to have an agenda or some sort of goals or aspirations that are at odds with any given one of ours as a human being. And that that's a problem in both in the sense that human beings have sometimes wildly different goals and aspirations and conceptions of the good from one to the next. And really, the idea of decentralization as a research program is starts with that acknowledgment and then builds around an art around that, like, hey, we ought to be able to form our communities around our different conceptions of the good or our different ideas for what? Constitutes the good life. And an experiment with those ways of living. That's not to say all those experiments are going to succeed. Many will fail. That is the evolutionary process. Darwin doesn't give a shit about your ideals. At the end of the day, so to speak, you know. But. We can at least acknowledge that we're more likely to find some sort of peace or harmony if we're united by the idea that a certain level of pluralism is and ought to be permissible. And that's that's sort of that's one of the things that human beings need to reckon with. And this is this was an insight from the Enlightenment that that I don't think has really changed all that much. So. What is an art of artificial intelligence? Is it multiple intelligences? Is it a single intelligence? Does it have a single system of values? Is it driven by a rights based conception, virtue, ethics, utilitarianism, a sort of an amalgamation of these that can cause it to be to live in contradiction or to govern in contradiction? These are all really important and hard questions and. I kind of approached them in the social singularity, but with a lot of a lot of humility. Yeah, because. Because one has to be humble in the face of these kinds of questions. I mean, there's just no doubt about it. Yeah. A final note on this, though. There are some what I would call timeless. Universal moral prescriptions. Maybe we could call them virtues. And in the decentralized, I call them the six moral spheres. Whether or not these six become primary or central to this whole enterprise. I think it's interesting that. Let's just take one. Okay. Let's just take one of these. We can go with Hamza. Hamza in the eastern and the Vedic traditions is the idea of not harming others, not initiating harm. It doesn't say you can't defend yourself. Just as we don't initiate harm and we practice this non harm in thought were indeed this pretty. This is pretty intuitive for people like, yeah, we don't hurt other people. You know, that's that seems pretty basic to to to our moral outlook. I mean you can you're always going to get these, you know sociopaths and people like that in the world who who are just like, huh, I'm just going to benefit myself. And I might play some some sort of moral language games to get by, but otherwise I'm out for me. But being out for oneself in a in a sort of a benign, self-interested way is different from being a sociopath. And if we can we can unpack that, then we say, okay, well, what is that difference? It's the willingness to practice a moral rule around not harming others, not making them worse off in some way, and having that be a principle that guides your behavior. That's practice daily. So now we're getting into the sort of the internal states of what would constitute a more decentralized order. It requires us to to take on a moral frame. It's not just about protocols of enforcement, right? The law. It's also about moral practice. So these can be. Act. You know, culture, morality and technology, social technology rules can act as kind of a braid. So you start to look around the world at all these traditions and what they're united by. It's some variation on this, this idea of non harm of a Hamsa of don't doing, you know, hateful or awful things to other people. And it emerges in just about every tradition. That's not to say that there isn't tremendous divergence away from this moral rule, but one wonders whether and to what extent this can be codified in artificial intelligence, you know, machine learning, not what is it? Language modeling.
Steven Parton [00:27:55] Yeah, natural language.
Max Borders [00:27:56] Yeah, natural language and so on.
Steven Parton [00:28:00] So there's a lot there. I'm going to push back on some of that.
Max Borders [00:28:04] Yeah, Come on. This will be fun.
Steven Parton [00:28:06] Well, I mean, so the main premise, I guess, is that I could argue that this world that you're painting has a bit of a utopian flavor that requires a world of abundance to kind of make sure that the the lower aspects of the human condition aren't brought out at all. Right. And I think of specifically the case of geopolitics as they currently are. When you have you basically have in some sense, it's not as well aligned with what you're saying. But, you know, we have some unifying geopolitical structures like the EU and the G8 and all kinds of structures that are trying to include together the many nations of the world. And they often have a lot of that Judeo-Christian wisdom that you talk about for for not harming and a lot of Democratic ideas baked into the systems. But when resources are running low, when you have issues like COVID inflation and supply and demand and farmland and all of these things, you see issues where one entity like Russia on that fitness landscape attempts to gather more resources. It tries to take the gain, the evolutionary edge and overwhelm the other, let's say, decentralized pockets. So what I'm building towards here ultimately is how do you stop that human condition without coercion to gather resources on the fitness landscape if things aren't perfect in terms of the access to resources, energy and well-being for the species? Does that make sense?
Max Borders [00:29:48] I think so. I think so. There's a lot there. Yeah. Let me try to let me try to address a couple of the points. And if I failed to address any of the core ones, you'll you'll take me to task and.
Steven Parton [00:30:00] I'll and I'll quickly sum and I quickly submit with basically harsh conditions. Harsh conditions don't bring out the best of us. And I don't think we're probably going to have perfect conditions in the future. So there would be some challenges here.
Max Borders [00:30:15] Yeah. Yeah. And so I want to I want to respond first to the idea of it being utopian. I'm a condition of of poly centricity. Let's call it polycentric law. The idea of many, many different centers of power or more localized authority that doesn't have that has fewer or at least imperial ambitions is. Is. You might say, is meta utopian. And I hate that meta stuff because boys get beaten to death. But it's it's meta in the sense that it's meta utopian in the sense that the utopia. There it is. As Robert Nozick, the philosopher, would have said, a utopia of utopias. So the more localized you get, the closer to utopia you get because you're self-organizing according to what is most likely to look like your conception of the good. The tradeoff is in such a condition as that you can't impose that onto others who don't share your conception. That being said. It's what I'm true. What I'm trying to do is to suggest that there are ways to, let's call it non Hobbesian means of discovering peace, prosperity, peace, abundance and relative freedom. Right. Where the Hobbesian conception says there must be over some jurisdiction, over some jurisdiction which is bound in his mind to territory, because of course it would have been. And whenever Leviathan was written late 1600s, I think that that. That set of protocols that requires people to submit what part, at least of what he calls their absolute right up to a sovereign who would then collect that power and prevent. The citizens from being at war with one another. In other words, it would guarantee peace, but it would do so because it's overwhelming might. It's it's it's it it it holds the reins of power in order to keep the peace. That is the basic Hobbesian insight. And it's pretty much held sway all over the world for hundreds of years, intuitively, even prior to prior to Hobbes's articulation of it. But also after Hobbes, it's we all live in this in a Hobbesian world. And what I want to do intellectually, but certainly also instantiating a new a different kind of world, is to question that Hobbesian way of doing things. The way I do that is I have two terms for it subversive innovation, which you would have encountered in the social singularity, subversive innovation and also under throw and their conjoined concepts. The one focus is on the, you know, innovating the sort of protocols that would allow people to form massive constituency groups that can be a check on a single authoritarian structure that's usually arranged like a hierarchy. So it says, okay, we can pit networks, robust networks, up against hierarchies to check that power, number one. But under throws, the idea sounds like undertow. You know, when you go into the surf and the surf starts to, you know, you get the crashing and all the noise and that's pretty powerful. But what's as likely or more likely to knock you over is undertow as as the tide recedes and that those receding waters are can be very powerful, even though they're not the big splashy waves. And that's really a metaphor for what is what is possible through subversive innovation and networking college technologies, that you can form these massive constituency groups and they can start to really represent a check. Hmm. So. What are some countervailing forces that can be developed through protocols that unify people into in networks where they share conceptions of the good? And they can become a powerful constituency group that checks some of the alternative powers. So whether that is utopian, I don't know. But we're starting to see the first kind of examples of it. So. With subversive innovation. Entrepreneurs and innovators have to be utopian in some sense. They have to have a vision for this better state. Right in the the the the like, super freakishly smart people that go through Singularity University, that vision and executing against that vision requires at least a modicum of being utopian. Of course, that has to be balanced with being realistic, with being, you know, trial and error, you know, MVP type thinking. But but at the end of the day, if we if we're purely pragmatic, I think we'll it will. We will never get anywhere.
Steven Parton [00:35:56] Sure. Well, we're we're coming close on time. But I want to get one last question in before we wrap it up, which is you mentioned before the evolutionary bottleneck on technology. What kind of technologies are you most optimistic about in terms of taking us in this direction? What takes us to that utopian asymptote As you would have put it, You know, is it is it going to be something like blockchain? Is it something that we haven't yet seen? Is it already here? What are your thoughts on that?
Max Borders [00:36:25] Yeah, I think technological protocols that protect that enable human beings to laterals their relationships and cooperate at scale, whether that's improving our collective intelligence, as in just knowing what is what, knowing what is true, and being able to apply those truths locally in various projects. We won't get into Phil's philosophical depths about like correspondence, theories of reality and all that stuff. Suffice it to say, you know, collective intelligence, collective intelligence is just this idea that it can be broken up. But, you know, two essential ways of looking at it is, is the more we all are able to apprehend the nature of reality in synchrony, the better off we're going to be. But also pulling different aspects of knowledge from a larger set of knowledge in order to instantiate something that we would be surprised that we can fathom its existence like. I mean the hardware on on my Mac and and all the all the stuff that we're working with right now, you know, it's no single person could have built this stuff. So collective intelligence, we pull from millions of different minds to instantiate all this stuff. So those are two senses of collective intelligence, but they're but they're connected to amalgamate them, I think is is is important in just saying so that's that's the first thing. But also this idea of cooperation that if we want to harness knowledge in other people's minds, enjoy and enjoy specialization at scale, we have to be able to cooperate. We have to be able to find each other to realize our various conceptions of the good and begin to Nisha fight peacefully to establish borders and boundaries around our ways of life that that allow us to coexist peacefully but practice the way we want to practice. Of course, there are limits. There are as many deal breakers as is there are must haves right in everybody's conceptual scheme. But the the. The the idea of pluralism is that we got we got to reckon with that fact of humanity. Poly centricity can be built on pluralism. And so as we move forward in time, we want to be subversive innovators. We constantly want to tear down those human systems that are outliving their usefulness and erect the protocols that allow us to begin to experiment with certain conceptions of the good. Final answer to your question, and I want to go back to that. What technologies I mean, look, we can't I mean, I can't I can't help but think these like first generation eyes just it's blowing my hair back. You know, and look at, you know, the social singularity. I started writing this back in 2016, 2017. It came out in 2018. So just what's happened since having written this book is is pretty mind blowing. If we think about GPT four, what that's going to be like. Oh, boy. So that's extremely promising, but it's also fraught now. But the other thing is lateral ization technologies. So here's, here's, here's a lateral ization technology that I don't want to call them blockchain. There's just technologies like Hello chain that don't use blockchains at all. They're amazing, right? They use different kinds of tech, different kinds of technology to see to achieve sort of similar results in terms of the way people can network and collaborate. They're very nascent, but we're going to see them. These begin to flower. So we're going to see a I start to flower and compete. So competition and co-optation, competition and collaboration. The same with the new protocols and around cryptographically protected human relationships at scale. These are going to go on apparently separately for a while. But my. My sense is there's going to be a convergence sometime in the future. And what that looks like, I cannot say. But it's going to be really, really frickin interesting.
Steven Parton [00:41:03] Yeah. I'm looking forward to it, man. Max. So much more that we could talk about. But unfortunately, time is limited, so maybe we'll do it again. But. Any closing thoughts before we call end into this?
Max Borders [00:41:16] Oh, I just. I really enjoy it. I can't thank you enough for. For. For extending a microphone and. And a pleasant conversation. It was just great.
