Nick White explains how stories create shared realities that enable large-scale coordination, from money to nations. He shifted from AI to blockchain after reading Sapiens, drawn to a system where rules are encoded in immutable code and enforced by mathematics rather than human institutions. He argues this could reshape money and governance.
Chapters
And so stories are fundamental because what they allow us to do is they allow us to create shared imagined realities. And this is the key thing that makes humans different from other animals, is that we can have a shared imagined reality that allows us to then coordinate in larger groups. Same thing with money. If we didn't all believe in money, then how would we have this ability to pay each other and transact? So why did I switch from AI to blockchain? That's what I want to talk to you about next. And that is, I switched because I kind of fell down the proverbial crypto rabbit hole. And so I want to take you down my journey of how I fell down the rabbit hole. So this is Alice kind of peering in and not knowing what she's going to find. And she finds a lot down there. So in 20— early 2017, I actually happened to read this book called Industries of the Future. Which I really recommend you guys to read. I think it's still very relevant. It's by a guy named Alec Ross, who was part of the Obama administration, and his role was basically to figure out the future directions of technology and where America should be looking to make sure that they're on the frontier, they're on the leading edge of all of the next technology that's going to shape the 21st century. And when I was reading this book, obviously I was already very much into AI and robotics and all of that, And then they talked about cybersecurity as a— there are 4 main pillars: AI, cybersecurity, biotech, all of which I kind of expected. And then the last one was blockchain. And I had never heard of blockchain before, so I was kind of taken aback. I was like, you know, how have I not heard about blockchain? Obviously, I'd heard of Bitcoin kind of peripherally, but I didn't realize that blockchain itself was a more fundamental paradigm that could do a lot more things than just simply like Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. So, that kind of got me, piqued my interest, and so I ended up reading a bunch more books. I ended up reading pretty much everything I could on Amazon, and then I went, I started going onto Twitter, and just consuming all of the new content. The thing about blockchain is it's such a new field that you have to, there's actually not, all the stuff that's written in books now, it takes like a year to write a book. And by the time the book is out and published, most of that stuff is very old. So in order to actually be up to date, you kind of have to be on Twitter, you have to be on Medium, you have to be reading all of the latest and staying up with the current times. And so once I consumed these, I started to try to, like, be more involved in the community directly and follow the space more closely, because that's the only way to really be at the leading edge. And reading these books, it brought so many, like, questions to my mind. You know, things like really fundamental things like, what is money? You know, I think we use money all the time. Like, we all probably have cash, or we use payment apps, whatever it is. But we never think about what's happening underneath. And it's pretty funny that as entrepreneurs, where we're supposed to question all assumptions, that in many ways we take like money for granted. And, you know, what is value as well? Like, how do I, how do I know why something is valuable? Like, why is a Ferrari worth however much money it is? And why is a Toyota not worth that much? Or, you know, a Louis Vuitton bag, for example, why is it so valuable? And also, it made me think like, what else will blockchain and cryptocurrencies change? Like, what is the potential As I said, beyond just, let's say, Bitcoin. Like, what, what will it do to the world? How will it reshape the world, right? Because that's why, as entrepreneurs, that's what we care about. We care about the impact on people's lives. And it actually all kind of tied back to this book, which I feel like is a very now typical Bay Area, San Francisco book, but it's a, it's a really excellent one. called Sapiens. And the reason it's— this book is important is because one of the things that he teaches you, or he— or not teaches you, but that he expounds in this book, is the concept that everything is a story. And this is maybe kind of confusing at first, but, like, just bear with me because it's very true. Like, money is a story. If you look at a dollar bill or any currency, There's always like, you know, the leader on it and all these words of inspiration. And it's all sort of tied into a greater story about, at least in fiat currencies context, like why you should trust this piece of paper as money. Like why, why do we believe that something that actually has no intrinsic value is valuable? Like why do people, you know, kill each other over just like paper? And money is only as valuable as the amount that we believe in it. And so this is sort of like kind of a weird thought to have, but the more you consider it, I think the more true you realize it is. And then to take it even a step further, you realize that nations themselves are stories. Like, they're all about the founding fathers, right? They wrote the Constitution, and then 250 years later, we're still here building the United States of America. But in reality, there's no physical United States entity. There's no physical reality that is the United States. There's no entity. It's just kind of a shared imagined reality that we all believe in and all buy into. And so— Stories are fundamental because what they allow us to do is they allow us to create shared imagined realities. And this is the key thing that makes humans different from other animals, is that we can have a shared imagined reality that allows us to then coordinate in larger groups. If we didn't all believe in the story of the United States, then, you know, all the citizens of the United States wouldn't be able to come together and be productive and trade and, you know, build all the things that we have in the world. Same thing with money. If we didn't all believe in money, then how would we have this ability to pay each other and transact? So these shared imagined realities are really powerful, and they're kind of like the fabric of what society is. They depend on 2 key things. The first thing is rules. Every— these all— all these institutions have certain rules you have to follow. If you don't follow them, then you can't participate. And the other thing that they depend on is trust. There's usually some entity who is the one that is trusted to uphold those rules. So in like the case of a nation, you know, we all obviously have the Constitution, right? We all believe in the Constitution. If you don't obey by the Constitution, you can't participate. And we trust in the government to uphold those rules. Or let's say in a different case, like the bank, we assume we trust the bank to have our, you know, best interests in mind so that they're not printing money and doing things that are sort of against our common interests. We put a lot of trust in these institutions. And if they don't follow the rules, then they lose our trust. So this is very, like, high level, but I hope that it's kind of at least landing somewhere. So what if you can create a shared imagined reality where the rules could be written in code And you only had to trust math to uphold them. This is the, to me, the core value proposition of what blockchain is. Normally, in all these institutions, it's run by human beings. And human beings are flawed. We cheat. We know not all of us are all that trustworthy. We've all been cheated by our governments at one time or another. I don't know if we even really trust Actually, in the previous slide I had like a photo of Congress, and like, I don't know if we trust our politicians all the time to have our best interests at heart. So my point is that obviously certain things can only be done by humans, but the more that we can leverage something like this where you only— the rules can be written in code. Code is not something that— it's an algorithm, right? You can't— it just flows. You can't just like skip around. And you could just trust math, essentially, to uphold them. That way, you don't have to worry about someone cheating you. You know, upfront, transparent, transparently, this is what the rules are. And this is how I know it's going to be, I can verify using math that the rules were followed. That is the core value proposition of blockchain. And To me, that's actually pretty like mind-blowing, because it's that fundamental, that it can change something as important as money or even the way we run our countries. Obviously, that's— these are very like long-term visions, but I do believe that blockchain will impact things as fundamental as this. And so that was my sort of rabbit hole, eureka. revelation moment that made me decide that I wanted to switch from AI into blockchain.
