hi this is mike maloney and i'm joined once again by adam taggart and we just did this amazing interview with dan larimer and it's a little bit long it's a little bit complex but you really want to stick around to the end because this is absolutely life-changing information dan has answered so many of the questions of how we can rearrange society to best suit the the population and create a world of real prosperity and fairness hi this is mike maloney and i'm joined once again by adam taggart


and we have a very special guest dan larimer dan how are you doing doing good thank you for having me okay um you have a mission and it's to create free market solutions voluntary solutions for securing life liberty property and justice for all did i state that correctly yep you got it perfectly and you've got a new book uh so can you show them the book more equal animals and i suggest that everybody get this this is a big argument for freedom uh adam do you have any questions for dan i got a ton of questions for dan and dan


by the way it's a total pleasure to meet you here i'm just very impressed what you've been able to accomplish with your career so far um i you know most curious why you chose to write this book and why now it's clearly you're moved by the inefficiencies and deficiencies of our current system of government so this book is clearly a reaction to something what is that well i've been trying to figure out how to create tools for people to work together and to have freedom and you know i started in the crypto


world i said well we don't need any governance tools you know we have cryptocurrencies and and you just need to let the code be law but the reality is whenever you have two or more people you need to have a way of reaching consensus about the subjective things and you are more powerful and you're stronger when you're working together with people um because you know two people it's not one plus one is two it's one plus one is three uh and so you can increase your individual independence and your power


and impact in the world when you're working together and you have a means of reaching consensus uh and so you know i've been doing blockchains everything from bitshares which is a decentralized exchange to steemit which is now hive which is the first social media platform and then then eos which is a smart contract platform each of these has like the technical consensus which the computers are doing but there's also a higher level consensus which is the people involved on how do you upgrade the protocol how


do you allocate funds to make sure things go to the right place and these blockchain communities have struggled with the same types of corruption and graft that you see in our traditional political systems which have devolved into a two-party system red versus blue uh to a media empire where the media kind of controls who has influence and who's even considered for an election you've got incumbent advantage and you've got the federal reserve which is controlling the issuance of all the money


so you know the while we might presumably live in a democratic government or a republican government uh republic that's governed by a constitution the reality is that uh big tech companies and these choke points in our society are controlling the masses and our government isn't actually representing the will of the people and as the government gets more powerful the people get less powerful so i spent a lot of time trying to figure out well where do our rights come from and how do we cooperate to establish


property rights how do we enforce those property rights how do you have individuals come together into a community and maintaining their independence instead of you join a democracy of 100 million people and now you're a slave to the system you can't secede and leave your vote doesn't really change the outcome and you don't even get control over which candidates are up on the ballot and the elections aren't even verifiable right so those are the problems that i was i've been trying to solve


and i look back into history to the techniques that can be used to eliminate political parties and came up with a system that's really designed from the law of the jungle right you only have the rights which you can uh enforce yourself uh and then what kind of agreements would we want to make with our neighbors uh so that we don't have to you know do everything ourselves but we don't lose our independence or our ability to say no or more specifically our ability to enforce the peace treaty


right the peace treaty which is takes us out of the law of the jungle where such might makes right uh two a cooperative system that benefits both parties uh so that's the subject area i explore in the book is how do you maintain your personal independence uh and then how do you cooperate with other people without losing your personal independence but instead increasing your power uh and so that's what more equal animals is it's about making us more equal in power um and it's the subtle art of true


democracy uh versus the systems we have today which i call democracy and name only or dino systems securing life liberty and property is independence and you talked about uh your investment strategy uh protecting independence can you tell us a little bit more about that you know independence starts first and foremost with making sure you control your money that your wealth isn't subject to anyone else's ability to control your spending or to inflate it away uh and so that's why i'm a big believer


in both cryptocurrencies and precious metals and other tangible assets as a way of gaining independence so you cover a bunch of other topics in the book can you touch lightly on some of those yes so i talk about uh smart contracts or um what i call a new way of distinguishing of thinking about contracts in general uh and this relates to i guess both cryptocurrencies and things like eos and and ethereum uh but it really comes down to property what things can contracts represent and should promises be enforceable by


law and there's a whole chapter just that outlines that the moral hazard that is created when we attempt to enforce con enforced promises under law uh and and i relate that to other things when it comes to gold and silver we see how this breaks down banks are issuing promises to pay uh gold and silver which then turn into fractional reserve gold and then eventually the promises are defaulted on and we end up with unbacked fiat currencies but a banking system built on top of smart contracts in that


premise would have 100 reserve banks where there's only one title holder to every ounce of gold uh in existence and um and the property rights are enforced by transferring that gold it can't be promised to pay or debts aren't equivocated to notes payable on demand and so i address all those things the systematic fraud in the way the banking system is structured and how that undermines the gold standard and one of the things that i've been uh preaching recently about like bitcoin


versus gold and silver is gold is actually more divisible than bitcoin and what i mean by that is what's the smallest transaction you can make with a gold coin physical gold coin and what's the smallest transaction you can economically make with bitcoin that's actually transferring on the bitcoin network and when you look at the transaction fees on bitcoin uh you'll see that it's hundreds if not almost a thousand dollars is the smallest transaction you can do with bitcoin because if the fee is not going


to take up like five or ten percent of your transaction size whereas with gold the smallest transaction you can do you know i i guess you might know better than i but a tenth of an ounce of gold can be transacted um and there's no transaction fee so in that sense gold is currently more divisible than bitcoin and as bitcoin goes up in value uh that difference is just going to be magnified uh and that's an interesting fact that i don't think a lot of people in the cryptocurrency space


uh think about actually i've heard of that from um just a question for you about the the platform here which is um it sounds like um you're the the blockchain is really underlying a lot of what you're talking about here right so um it's talking uh it's underlying the contracts that we make socially it's underlying uh the banking system that basically you know we base our our financial system on and uh i know in previous videos with mike in the gold silver folks you've talked a


bit about your political playoffs and that to me sounds you know as i understand it to sort of a a blockchain based uh election system so um is this really a whole new system that that spins around the the revolutionary uh you know benefits that the blockchain technology is unlocking for folks yeah the blockchain you know first of all if you're going for independence the more technology the less independence you have um so i present in my book ways of doing all this stuff in a low-tech way that


does not depend on blockchain uh gold and silver is a low-tech way that does not depend on blockchain and for that reason those technologies have greater independence blockchain uh provides us a way to automate things at a larger scale to have faster transactions and things like that but does depend on a more technological base what i'm suggesting is a different way of like fundamentally viewing how we transact with each other uh how we write contracts with each other how we record and log what we say how we sign


contracts right switching to digital signatures that anyone can verify how we do public records for tran tracking who owns you know real estate who owns title to any assets that have title for tracking liens on all these assets and then completely eliminating the concept that like people held accountable to their promises unless it's just reputationally if you want something that's contractually done it should be able to be represented as a smart contract even if you don't put it in a


smart contract right you can be a verbal contract but the verbal contract would be structured as in if i don't do this then title to some other asset is transferred and that's something that you could write in a smart contract but yes blockchain is a foundational technology which allows people to reach consensus given messages that people are publishing in the world what i love about what you're talking about is you know it seems like the the theory um is it sort of has a timeless logic to it


but we're at a point in in history where the technology finally lets us um you know apply it in a way that that sort of frees us from our our animal brains you know where where human behavior kind of comes in and begins to muck things up um so it's it's fascinating to me that we're sort of alive at this point where we might be able to apply things in the way that you're you're talking about here um i i guess one big question i have coming out of this is um sort of enforcement


right so i think what you're trying to get away from is the control that those people who are running the system have over the many so as we talk about a system that's based on these contracts and whatnot um who is it how is that enforced in a way that isn't providing too much power into any one potential hand yeah this really comes down to the the structure of society as a whole if you have a hundred million people all operating under one democracy you got somebody who's in charge and


they can squash any one of those individual people but instead you organize society as a democracy of democracies so you might have 10 000 people in a county and then you have 3 000 counties in the united states then each county is an autonomous unit it can make its decision it can secede or not and in each county they're all equal they all get one vote um and then you have rules of relative power which basically says higher levels can't tax the citizens of lower levels so under my approach you would not allow


the federal government to tax anyone they could tax the states and all states would pay the same tax but the states would have to figure out how to tax the people in order to pay the tax to the feds that keeps that keeps a modularization and loosely coupling which facilitates the ability to secede which maximizes the independence of each county which allows the county to max to then protect the independence of the people within it and this this approach creates a fractal relationship of power which make sure that you can


always divide uh if if some of the other parties are not agreeing to the peace treaty either starting to abuse the constitution or the constitution you leave uh and that's a non-violent way of um of enforcing the peace treaty and if you need to use force then well you're equally matched uh and you never have like one state like california paired with a small state like um like idaho or or whatnot and so you can you don't have these power imbalances where the cities control the countryside or vice versa because if we


operated under the principles of traditional democracy china should rule the world china and india they should they should control everything because they have the most numbers and we all know that at that scale that doesn't make sense but why then should california rule the united states or you know richmond rural virginia uh it's it's the same kind of thing where numbers don't necessarily make right dan when you first wrote about the political playoffs uh in your blog i tweeted sign me up


because i was just like totally convinced because this solves a whole bunch of the big problems that you get where you get these uh maniacal uh uh power hungry people that actually don't know what they're doing they just can convince you that they that they're the best leader uh they shove their way to the front of the room and they basically say uh elect me and i'll tell you how to run your life uh so uh what are the uh the the problems that the current system hence that the new system eliminates because


this does the randomness uh does solve a whole bunch of the problems that we currently have yeah well the biggest problem we have in the current system is that it can't prevent political parties and political parties are groups of people colluding to uh take over control of the official government so instead of having three branches of government you know the legislative judicial and executive we've got a party that controls all three and the party has its own internal governance that has no requirement to be democratic or


representative or any of those things so because the system of governance that we have allows and can't prevent the formation of political parties the political parties come in and control now you've got two parties uh going back and forth uh fighting for control and that's also an artifact of our voting like whoever gets the majority of the votes wins that's going to always devolve into a two-party system which won't represent the people there's another issue is the media right the media controls


who people can see who people are told is electable uh and so and they also like slander people and lie and it's just uh you know you're in the spotlight so much that a lot of good people want to have nothing to do with running for office which leaves only the power hungry people running for office and there's another aspect of it is the current system rewards the people who are willing to lie and tell people what they want to hear instead of deal with the truth and and some of the truths out there are quite


hard and people don't want to hear it um and it rewards people that are willing to do backroom deals and things like that the more honesty and integrity you bring the less likely you are to be able to navigate successfully under the current political system uh so the system i approach you know i group people into groups of of 10 and they're randomly selected and each group can only vote for members within that group which means most people don't have to know anything other than be able to


evaluate the character and the platform of the people in their group and then it goes up and then you do it again at the next level until you elect your leader and this randomness makes it impossible to form political parties because now you have to get two-thirds plus majority in each group uh and there's no way to like know how these groups are going to be apportioned ahead of time uh and this is a it's well known that using randomness in this matter uh yeah i guess historically it's well


known i guess the broader population doesn't know but then the amish use it we use it in in the draft uh the ancient greeks used a sortition to actually pick people and the easiest way to understand how this kind of like gets a better representation it's like a sampling process is i'm going to use an analogy here to like say basketball teams you've got small schools that have a small number of people and they don't generally have very good basketball teams because they're just


pulling from such a small group but if you take like the olympic basketball team for the united states is pulling from hundreds of millions of people and we got the best of the best and they're so much better than i guess the average person this distribution of skill in basketball is distributed according to the pareto principle which says that one percent of the people have more skill than the other 51 combined uh the same thing applies to wealth or media influence or any skill so one percent of the


people have more skill at corruption and evilness then then all the rest combined so on average society can be full of very very good people but the game that we're asking people to play in order to get through power in society is rewarding like the most evil people because they're the ones that can play the game the best uh and the political playoff process by using the randomness eliminates the ability of those people to get ahead uh because we also limit the size of any particular group


uh and all those things together make it more representative and prevents the massive amount of corruption the easiest way to think about this is regardless of the size of your country if you've only got like 100 people or 300 people in congress the greater the population gets the more on the corruption side it's going to be because you just less and less of the pareto curve is actually represented in the government structure itself uh and that's why small countries they can be corrupt


they're not generally as corrupt and evil because they don't have the it's like a small school putting a basketball team that's not quite as skilled as corruption and best by random chance some people might be some honest people might be involved but the bigger it gets and the more centralized it becomes the um the more likely you are to have massive amounts of corruption so dan i think anybody watching who's paid attention over the past several elections here in the u.s uh agrees with you that we have a system


that really is captured by special interests you know run by um you know this sort of the the psychopathic uh cohort right that that our system selects for adversely so what's so great about your system is it it gets rid of the adverse selection uh it makes the elected process much more based on merit it has a lot of checks and balances along the way and that sort of fractal nature you talked about which is great so it's very hard for that system to get captured the way that our current system is


and i got two questions for you if i can ask you to try to address both in your answer here they're both about sort of the human condition um so you know i sort of think about your political playoffs very much like march madness right um and let's say we end up electing the best people for the job but there's that old expression that uh you know power corrupts um how does your system address somebody who gets into power and you know becomes altered by it yeah uh well for starters you have to think about governing


society it's like flying an airplane uh you you push on the levers and then the flaps move and the economy shifts and things happen but there's a time delay between when you uh issue a command on the control and when you start getting feedback of what impact it actually had on society so if you imagine trying to fly an airplane when you move the joystick but you don't get the feedback for 10 years on what the consequences are going to be you're going to crash that plane very quickly because you don't know what


what's going on and so you you see oh we're crashing and you start shifting it the other way and it's just like goes wild out of control so what that means is we need stability in what the laws are they should not be changing constantly um and so the way i present it in my book is your elect your leaders your leaders might propose a law but they don't have the ability to propose and ratify a law in their term so this congress might propose a law the next congress has to ratify it uh


which means that the people get to elect new people you're not going to get someone that gets into power and says hi i promise you i'd do x i'm going to do not x uh and the people get rid of them and then uh stay on course and by doing and any law that would also automatically sunset if it's not ratified several times this creates a stable base for society so the laws are predictable we don't want to have situations where there's some crisis and all of a sudden we need some law


that takes all of our freedoms away that's just not possible because the system is designed to provide that stable base i i love that i specifically love or particularly love the the sun setting laws i mean our number of laws that are out there have has just you know increased exponentially over time and you know i've heard the proposal that uh hey going forward for every new law we proposed we got to take one off the books or whatnot but i love that sun setting clause because that's why the only the ones


that have true value are the ones that keep getting ratified over time all right so my follow-up question was um so i for folks that haven't read the book yet you really should um it's it's just fascinating and dan as you can obviously tell here has invested a ton of thought into creating a system here from the ground up that just makes total rational sense at least in the way he presents it so my question dan is is let's agree that it's going to run exactly the way that you envision


will it be allowed to thrive will it will the current power players let a competitive competing system like this come into existence um what kind of resistance are you expecting from those that are benefiting from the status quo it's interesting because the status quo maintains their power by preventing people from reaching a new consensus and we can all agree that we don't like the current system but we have no tools to reach a consensus on a new system to replace it uh and and so censorship and


um you know i guess all the other tools that they use in corruption and voting and so forth is designed to prevent people from you know even talking about new ideas uh you know meeting up right some of these covered restrictions are designed to prevent people from talking to each other so that they can uh change the status quo and that's how they maintain their power and the system presents a new opportunity to say hey if we can just get people together and we use this process then we know that


we've got a new consensus and we don't need massive media infrastructure we don't need massive technology but we can reach a new consensus and most importantly it protects the ability of people to reach a new consensus once people get in power and protecting the ability for people to reach new consensus is the key to freedom so of course the powers that be are going to do everything they can to undermine and prevent people from reaching a new consensus they're going to divide us


by race and sex and every which way they can they're going to use propaganda uh and to some extent they're going to try to outlaw but this process is so simple and so basic and so fundamental and so pure that it's hard to just call it evil and block it or ban it outright uh and we're about to find out on the eos network i've created a eden governance layer which is going to utilize this process to allocate tens of millions of dollars of community money to fund development in the u.s ecosystem


this is like giving power to politicians this is real money this is going to be a real experiment with thousands of people participating in it and i'm hoping it really revolutionizes the decentralization of blockchain governance and if people see how powerful this is then eos will grow as a currency and as the currency grows in value the economic power represented by the currency will grow as well and who knows maybe this will eventually transform all of society you can uh actually start uh another


political party though that isn't really a party it is this system and people can join that system and and cast their vote basically by uh uh electing a representative from their little group to go up to the next level because the system is basically you start with everybody in the united states running for office and you eliminate 90 and you eliminate the 90 of that you eliminate 90 of that and in a very short time you get down to just 10 people and at that point you could actually pick one at random


and they uh they're going to be super qualified uh the remainder of the ten uh they could be things like vice president and so on uh and um they um uh there's no way that the media can throw any weight behind any of them they can't skew the elections you know in 2004 there was a lot of evidence that the republicans stole the election from the democrats and then in 2008 uh i watched uh you know ron paul uh in the primary the republican primaries ron paul was really the leader when it came to all of the


google searches and everything else people were most interested in ron paul and then there was a date when the media just stopped covering completely and he faded away he was the most popular candidate not just in in the uh republican primary but the most popular candidate period during that period of time and then uh in 2020 you know we've seen half of the country does believe that that election was completely rigged and stolen and half of the country doesn't and so uh this absolutely prevents all of that


and the randomness makes sure that uh nobody can so tell us about that how it prevents the manipulation by the media or uh or by for any particular party or any moneyed interests uh in in picking who's going to run our lives for us yeah it because you're a group to a random group of 10 people in your community uh and those are the only people you can vote for it does no good to advertise or campaign because you only really have to get votes from the nine other people in the room with you


which means we're really leveraging the wisdom of the crowds here because instead of expecting everyone to know everything about everything uh in order to cast a vote for someone who they may or may not trust or may or may not be lying they only have to know about the people in the room and so media power has no influence whatsoever in determining who can advance and your ability to address large groups doesn't matter you just have to be particularly persuasive to the group you're in uh you need to be


a consensus builder uh somebody that can practice non-violent communication to really connect with and empathize with the various people in the group in order to advance and so hopefully the process will optimize for a different set of qualities and traits that are not quite as psychopathic or sociopathic uh compared to traditional politicians and if we can select for that you're right at the end we can just do randomness well one out of the ten we just that's the president because they're all qualified but this


will be more representative and it prevents you know people from buying it all the way up because even if you buy your all the way up to the top you've got a one in ten chance of winning you spend all that money trying to bribe it's not really going to go very far for you and as you advance you're competing against more and more skilled people i use the analogy that if if we wanted to if playing politics was like playing chess or sorry running the countries like like uh playing chess is by analogy you


want to have the best chess player and you want to see people actually demonstrate the skills of playing chess but instead if you you know if china is going to like pick their best chess player to go up against our best chess player you're going to put them in a match to determine who's going to win the trade war uh would you want to elect it based on who's who says i read some books and i theoretically i know how to do it and i'm telling you my strategy you have a whole bunch of voters who know nothing about


chess playing they're more misinformed than informed voting on the chess player or do you want to just say all right let's have a tournament let's pair people up randomly see who wins pair them up randomly see who wins and now you actually know you've got a winner because uh you know it's the just like we identify the best basketball players or any sport leagues we're we're filtering and i think that that process is far better than a direct vote because we're actually testing the skills that


are needed uh in a way that's not adversely selecting for for the negative skills all right dan i'd love to ask you a question i think most viewers are asking in their minds which is um hey if this sounds really interesting to me i'd love to support something like this you mentioned that there's sort of a pilot or some initial deployment of this happening soon um my main question is is you know what is your main ask of those folks who are listening you know is there a way in which they can


you know begin to participate in this even in in the pilot you talked about or whatnot but but what would you ask of the the person who's inspired by what you've just described here um what what could they do yeah well first off it's uh you know no consensus system works unless people understand it right we need more people to understand that the current democracy is not really a democracy right it's a democracy a name only and we need more people to understand the principles that i outline in my book


because if they don't if you can't get other people to at least agree on these principles if this is how an election should be run and this gives legitimacy to it then uh then we're just gonna be stuck right and we have an opportunity here uh once you know in a century or you know once in multiple generations when the system collapses right because i i do believe that the system is in the late stages of collapse and we're going to have to form new institutions and countries are going to


secede and there's going to be a lot of chaos and ability to form something new and if we don't have people educated in the principles we're just going to form a new system that's going to end up just where we are now you know in another hundred years and the cycle will repeat so getting people to read the book the book's free buying the book and then giving it to them getting familiar with the principles those are all things that you can do with or without what i'm doing um the


other thing you can do is apply these principles locally let's say you have a church you need to pick leaders in the church where you can do this with a deck of playing cards and a congregation of 200 people and people can get experience with the process um and then if you want to join the eos community you can go to use community.org get involved in the eos ecosystem get invited into the eat-in experiment and actually participate in playoffs and then if you win you're given a budget to go uh promote


adoption of eos as a currency and whatever else the eos community wants to do in the world so that's a whole spectrum of things that you can do um to be involved so it's eos community.org is where a lot of these concepts are being organized great eos community.org your uh your very impassioned and i think very accurate uh summation there reminds me of a famous winston churchill quote where he said in a crisis the ideas that get implemented are those that are already on the table and if listeners like you expect that


the current system we have is going to break down at some point kind of our job right now is to try to get better ideas onto the table now so that when people are casting about in crisis for something better it's a tool that's on the table that can be grabbed yeah exactly and the time's not very long so we really need to to spread these ideas quickly which is why i'm so thankful that you guys have me on here to uh share this with your audience oh well thank you uh you know one of the things for our


viewers uh they may not know much about eos and eos has a seven more than a seven billion dollar market cap so it's actually a very serious uh you call it an ecosystem uh tell us why you call it an ecosystem well it's an ecosystem because it's a it's a currency all currencies are ecosystems that have lots of people building independently and integrating with it you know if you want independence the first thing you have to do is take control of your money so the eos ecosystem is people are choosing to use


eos as their currency and this has been proven very suspect successfully in venezuela where eos is the only cryptocurrency that can work because transactions confirm in half a second the transactions are basically free uh and you know they can't afford to use bitcoin or ethereum or these other cryptocurrencies that uh down there in venezuela but they've got hundreds of businesses where people are buying their groceries and renting scooters and taxis and using eos because their currency has


been collapsing and it's just the only cryptocurrency that's suitable so you know i i believe that eos is like getting an idea on the table it's a new currency uh that's you know it's a couple years old now it's got the most scalable blockchain technology soon it's going to be powered by you know this eden governance model based on more equal animals uh and that's going to be allocating uh tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year to hundreds of people in the community


uh to to grow so i i'm very excited to see how eos as a currency as a blockchain as a smart contract platform uh can really impact the world to to realize my mission of free market solutions and secure life liberty property and justice for all dan you've done a a great job of really laying out i think just a transformative uh model for a much fairer um and i think freer way of really sort of managing society i mean really everything from social agreements uh to how we transact and run our economy


and how we we govern ourselves and i've got to think that a lot of those same tenets and principles also apply to the flow of information in media the question i have for you is not only has has our government largely been captured by special interests but so has the media and so much of the information that we receive today is coming through somebody's filter and we've all seen the stats the the major media outlets all roll up to like three or four major corporations we all saw a lot of the censorship we've


we've seen the increase in censorship in media but it was certainly on full display in the recent u.s presidential election where you know very large you know long-standing media sources were declared fake news or you can't report on that um and uh i think we have a crisis of trust in the media right now in fact i did a great interview with matt tybee uh independent journalist on this a while ago and he definitely corroborated this so i know that you are heavily interested in this and in addition to all your your work


that you've done uh with eos and the eden project that you mentioned um you have a new venture called clarion which i believe was sort of created to address a lot of this those issues i just mentioned about media and and too much control and censorship can you elaborate what you're doing there yeah so you know clarion is all about allowing anyone in the world to talk to anyone else in the world that wants to listen uh without any middleman about so you have independence and freedom in your


communication um and you know ideally we'd all have a radio and we don't have our own radio station and we can all listen to anyone else's radio there's just nothing anyone can do right that would be maximum freedom of everyone to communicate with everyone communication is the most fundamental aspect of consensus building you can't reach a consensus if you can't communicate you can't have a democracy if you can't communicate instead you know when communication is


restricted somebody has the power to control the narrative to limit the facts to lie uh and and therefore they've got more power than everyone else so building consensus having an honest governance system in society having independence all depend upon having tools that allow us to communicate with one another uh without third parties uh interfering and i'd like to take a moment to talk about censorship because censorship is um a a concept that people throw out there without necessarily understanding what


it means you can have censorship it's not necessarily the freedom to say whatever you want to say uh censorship is when two people who want to talk are interfered with by a third person is preventing them from talking in that case someone who's spamming a network and making it so loud and noisy that two people can't talk is also censoring people um and so there's a need to have tools that allow the people who want to talk the people who want to follow you to follow you and hear what you have to


say um and preventing people from getting in the way and that's necessary to secure democracy so clarion is just a tool that eliminates the dependency we have on service providers right your email account whether it's with apple or google or microsoft is owned by these companies and they could turn it off at any point in time and with clarion you can basically get the same features as email except your email account is simultaneously on all three platforms and on your friends and family's


computer uh so that no one can shut down your ability to send and receive messages with other people both private messages and public messages like tweets uh and it's because your account is controlled by the same technology that your blockchain accounts are controlled by and it's even more decentralized than blockchain because you know i can communicate with you without having to worry about anyone else in the world being involved in that communication and whereas blockchain everyone has to


broadcast to the blockchain and then you need some kind of governance to limit what's transactions or which messages are allowed on the blockchain because there's only a limited number of bandwidth for the blockchain but with clarion it's infinitely scalable uh it's logically decentralized which means there's no central point of logical order that's required and it's a fundamental tool to build consensus and new governance systems which is probably even more fundamental


than blockchain at the end of the day is protecting our freedom of speech is that running on proof of stake it is not a blockchain there are no tokens involved wow it is just a protocol that allows you to send messages to and from uh other people for people to follow you and to basically relay by word of mouth and the connections uh messages from people and you can verify them because they're all cryptographically signed um but you don't have any centralized account registry there's no no blockchain no one else you


need you can have you can just download the tool invite your friends and family to your own private network of it and now you've got a private version of facebook where you're just sharing your photos of your kids and your cats with them without having to worry about these big companies being an intermediary and what you're doing can you run video on it yes the goal would be to support youtube-like functionality leveraging the power of tools like ipfs there's going to be you know every


computer in the world becomes a server on this system and so you can relay videos and images and whatever uh type of content you want to distribute wow so you know in the contrary sorry content creator space like mike and i are in um you really do have to play by the rules of the big platforms and you know thankfully we look our benefit our businesses benefit by being on platforms like youtube which most people are probably watching this on but we've seen a lot of players in our space um you know either leave because they


they got demonetized or they had their channels shut down because they talked about topics that the regulator du jour uh you know didn't like um and and so this sense of this you know sort of uncensorable uh platform uh has a ton of appeal you know i think to to you know the many content creators out there like us and then as you said i think there's just many many people who care about civil liberties who are kind of shocked and appalled at uh the control and and the the invasion of privacy


that uh big tech companies uh who are running the major platforms uh particularly social media um you know have into their lives so um i don't wanna get too wonky into the details but um you mentioned that uh you know this is highly distributed you you it's sort of everywhere i assume though that there is um kind of bulletproof security in other words that if i have private messages or pictures of my family and bits of them are distributed everywhere it's not that people can actually see


that unless i give them permission is that correct correct the the only content that ends up on your computer is the content from your friends and family or someone that you're choosing to follow so you're not you're not gonna have to worry about people sending illegal content to be stored on your computer um unless you of course you're following someone who's publishing it but this is leveraging the relationships and the trust we have in our friends and family uh to kind of


insulate us uh based on your on your social networks this is not a system like a lot of peer-to-peer systems where your computer is being used by anonymous individuals to store anonymous content um and when you do send a message it's encrypted just to the recipients that you want to have it now nothing can prevent them from decrypting it and then broadcasting it on to other other people but in principle it's more secure than anything else because unlike um facebook even when you send it from


person to person facebook facebook has a copy and they're indexing it and they're doing stuff when you send email through google google's indexing everything you're doing but when you send messages here uh you know it's far less likely that it's going to end up um in someone else's hands great great um well look we'll we'll start wrapping things up here thanks for giving us so much of your time today dan um mike as we're kind of wrapping up here any other questions you have for dan before


we begin to sign off here um in in more equal animals dan your book by the way i want to tell everybody dan's book is free and you can go and download it or you can buy a copy on amazon right now if you want to give a physical copy to somebody please go and get this book because uh he solves a whole lot of society's problem by solving the root cause of the problem the root cause of the problem being the way we create government and if if we can govern ourselves better uh then a lot of the problems that happen


won't happen they'll just go away but you have a list here that uh you know in order to have a true democracy it's got to be composed of independent people uh independence that are defined as the ability for the minority to succeed resistance to covert control by minorities where the one-tenth of one percent can't capture control uh uh survive a systemic misinformed systemically misinformed population and so on um uh is there anything dan that you want to say about this uh list of what it takes to actually


have a true democracy tell us the difference between true democrat democracy and what we've got what you describe as a dino well yeah democracy as a concept is that the people should be in control and the rules should represent the people so uh what we have today is an illusion when people the people in power say yes we represent you and we're lying to you about the fact that you're actually in control right it's the given the kid in the backseat of the car steering wheel that they


they can drive and they can pretend that they're driving but they're not really driving right uh that's that's what the powers that they do they have you go to the voting booth and cast your vote but you're not really driving that vote's not really deciding anything it's not who votes that counts it's who counts the votes it's who picks the candidates that you're allowed to vote for right you can have any color car you want as long as it's black now it's it's that kind of uh


illusion of democracy illusion of control the thing that makes this possible the only way that this works is for people to take responsibility for their lives and to choose to be independent in the independence has a cost right it's not free it's it's more work um and so the challenge we face is you know the powers that be are giving money to people they're making them comfortable come use my centralized service i'll take care of all your worries and now you're a slave because you've uh


allowed yourself to go the easy route instead of the independent route right and then we have this uh confusion between freedom and independence people say i want freedom well you want freedom from your bills you want freedom to do whatever you want with someone else covering the cost that's not freedom what you want is independence which means responsibility to take care of yourself and if you in order to have your freedom you need to be independent and the people in your community need to be


independent and then you need to work together to ensure that your community is independent so that your community can protect the independence of the people on on and on up so you know you can design the best system in the world and put it in the hands of a bunch of monkeys and they're gonna mess it up right uh you can uh if you have a bunch of dishonest people uh even the best system in the world is gonna fall apart i personally believe that most of us are good-natured at heart and we can


empathize and relate to our fellow humans and that on average people are good the problem is we have adverse selection that is selecting for the people that are bad and then we've got all the moral hazard and consequences of fiat money that cause people to have short time preferences and that kind of corrupts the population um and lulls them into complacency and and so forth so like what i was saying earlier it's very important people understand that the importance of independence the importance of


i guess giving up a little bit of um you know economic wealth in order to have independent wealth and freedom of wealth and and not and healthy food and things like that uh you know if we just allow money and dollars to guide us uh then we're just going to be corrupted we're not measuring the full cost of everything that we're doing we're not measuring the fact that we're decaying as a culture even as our bank balance sheets are going up because they're putting more money we


need to factor in the whole picture we need to educate those around us and then uh and then work together to take responsibility for our lives and in the lives of those around us wow all right you know back in uh 2007 i was interviewing ron paul one of the first things he said to us is we should be more concerned about the we we shouldn't be as concerned about the loss of our wealth as the loss of our freedom uh and that was that had a big impact on me i want to thank you so much for saying


that what were you going to say adam yeah i was just going to say i i think those are great principles to end this discussion on and mike i think you just put the bow on top of it so thank you for that dan thanks again for giving a so much time with us today but but really b putting so much uh obvious thought hard work and creative thinking you know into not just tackling these big problems but actually coming up with scalable solutions that really do seem to get to the root of the problem there and to uh to create


a system that you know i think has a lot of viability and potentially replacing the one that we have here we've got a lot of people that are talking about the problems we have precious too few people actually developing solutions so thank you for being one of those pioneers and with that folks we'll talk to you again soon