Permissionless technological progress (woj.eth, founder of Mazury)

It's the first time in history in which you have, in the past century, sort of gained access over information about other people, over listening to their thought. Like, we couldn't have— like, in the past, you didn't have access of this level. Right now, I can listen to this podcast, which hopefully brings some insights, but I can also listen to, you know, incredible people like Lex Fridman on the other side of the world that is interviewing some fucking incredible person.

Exactly.

And so this accruing of access everywhere sort of leads to a compounding effect.

Yeah.

And right now what you're trying to do at Mazari, how I understand it, is sort of organizing and curating this compounding effect of the information about people so that you can facilitate access to people. Now, that vision is beautiful, and I'm just curious to sort of understand How are you going to enable, how are you going to facilitate that with Masquerade?

Okay, so I think now we can actually go into this first principle thinking. So I'm going to start with the first principle. What's the purpose of humanity? And I like to chat about it with our common friend, Luke.

Hi, Luke.

Hi, Luke. Hopefully you're listening to that. And I don't remember the name of the philosophy. He read much more books than I did. But essentially we were chatting about this concept that the purpose of any civilization or any species is to just do what it's uniquely positioned to do, that it's uniquely skilled to do in the best way possible. And for example, humans are unique animals who can who can think and who have free will, who can teach new generations how to build stuff, who have technology, et cetera. So if we assume that humans are uniquely positioned to explore the world and to build new technology, and we did that over the last 2,000 years and much, much more before then, but doesn't matter. We did that over the whole course of the history. My assumption is that our purpose in this world is to continue doing that. I don't know what's at the end of the road, but I as a human want to contribute to the development of new technology, of exploration of our planet, of the cosmos in the future, and just seeing what's up there. So that's the purpose of humanity. And now where talent comes to, and this compounding effect, the science and technology progress over the years, as you mentioned, was very permissioned and only the most wealthy participants in the society could actually be scientists and technologists, et cetera. And in the past, the progress was very slow. And it started picking up just as the access to science and to research was progressively being democratized. And now with internet, essentially you can do whatever you want. You can research whatever you want and participate in any research you want just with internet access from wherever in the world. You can be an excellent software developer from anywhere in the world just with internet access. Which is amazing. And internet on itself democratized a lot of access to doing excellent research and excellent development. And yeah, right now it's not like right now I'm excited about this. I was always excited about this, but I believe that with stuff like open data and open credentials, we can just even accelerate the process of you showing off to the world that you're actually amazing at what you're doing. You're proficient. You didn't have to go to a university. You didn't have to have this network. You don't need to live in San Francisco, London, New York, or Singapore. You can live in the middle of nowhere in Poland, but you can signal to the world that you can contribute to development of science and technology. So that's our mission. That's what I'm always excited about. And yeah, I think that partially answers the question of why are we doing this and what's the purpose.

I love it. Why are you personally excited about this? Because this resonates with me in the sense that throughout my whole life, I always felt that within me, I always had something to show that I really wasn't able to sort of convey. I was never able to show to the world anything. I mean, I just kept it within myself. And finally, you have a world of permissionless access, but not really capturing human potential. We're not able to really convey what we're able to do beyond just our output.

Yes.

Why are you building this solution and why does this matter to you as well? Did you feel In your past also something similar?

Yeah, uh, I think in my case, you know, I, I come from like middle of nowhere, nowhere in Poland. Uh, I was always incredibly curious about the world, but, uh, you know, I, I didn't have the right upbringing, education, you know. I wasn't in, you know, I was for the most of my life, I was like on the outside of, of people doing stuff. Like, you know, I wasn't meant to, to to be an insider anywhere. So I was always frustrated about that because when I was a teenager, I would be fascinated by Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs of the world that just push humanity forward. As a teenager, maybe I was living in these dreams, but when it came to adult life, discovered, oh, so I actually had to be on Harvard to build these things. I actually had to be connected. There was so much coming to this process to actually now achieve these things. And we study great scientists in the past, like Newtons and others, but they were also just, they were like this top, top, top of society that was actually allowed to do science and research. So yeah, I come from this background that I want to build for. I want to build for these ambitious, curious kids that are not positioned to always achieve what they want. And yeah, that's the thing. And you probably can resonate with that, right?

Yeah. No, but I love it because it's a system of cutting through the noise that in today's world we have everywhere and to get into what actually matters about someone. And so the future that you portray is a very beautiful future in which Everybody can sort of be assessed and portray themselves for what they actually bring to the table instead of some fancy university degree. And so you're sort of allowing everybody to follow their route and play at their strengths because finally we have a system for you to get connected to those people that are going to value those strengths.

Yes.

And that's a very powerful, and I think it probably will have a super strong effect on just human output. Yeah.

Just as internet gave us the rails to connect on, I feel like we should be building more and more systems that just utilize this power of internet when you can connect. often don't connect. We still often choose to believe old school credentials, to believe in old school power structures instead of just spotting talent just on the internet, this anonymous Twitter profile who posts some good stuff. But you won't trust them to do something actually important because you don't know them. But because we can represent them with open credentials, I believe it's going to change and you'll be able to talk to and trust this anonymous Elon Musk Twitter profile or whatever, like Mazura profile based on what they're doing instead of like, are they in the circle?

Yeah, it's a powerful notion. It's paradoxically putting the identity back in the hands of the people. You're giving them a chance to just be themselves and show themselves what they are. Yeah.

I think if you look at the history, I would say that identity was never in the hands of the people.

Ah, I like that.

It was always for selected people and history is written by the winners and people that were always positioned in power. But history, the average life of a human over the course of history was not that exciting. It would be people working very manual jobs and they didn't have much to say about the identity. So yeah, I think if anything, right now we're not giving it back to people. We are allowing everybody to have some richer identity than just war And are you suggesting—

are you suggesting we never had identity? Like, in the sense that we— No, no, no, no, no.

But what—

it's a very beautiful notion in the sense that we never had— we were never really able— like, even more in the past, you're born in a village with a name, uh, that is bound to your family, with specific religion that depends on the village in which you're born, because you don't have access to anything else, right? That's what you know. That's what you're given. And your access to material, your access to knowledge, everything is limited and bound by your physicality.

Yes.

For the first time in history, we're able to give unlimited access, or I mean limited, but still exponentially larger access to all sorts of leverages. So for the first time, I feel like people have a chance of discovering who they actually are instead of being bound To what they were given.

Yes, I can agree with this statement. And largely for maybe post-war times, I could say right now, obviously we have new problems in geopolitics side, et cetera. But after World War II, I think capitalism allowed us to build more individualistic society. And for the past 30 years, internet supercharged it with permissionless connection to anybody in the world all the time. So yeah, we are in the very peak of exciting times in history about in terms of your identity, what can you do, what action you can do instead of what's given to you at your birth. At your birth.