Rob Long Returns! Interplanetary File System, Digital Sovereignty & Sim City

About this episode

Long-time friend and collaborator Rob Long joins Vance for their first in-person interview after a pandemic of remote conversations. They open on Long's "100 books" filtering heuristic (better to reread 100 books deeply than skim 1,000 once) before pivoting into a wide-ranging technical discussion of decentralized infrastructure: the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), which content-addresses files by cryptographic hash so they can't be silently altered or memory-holed, and Filecoin, which economically incentivizes distributed storage. They connect this to Jim Rutt's history running Network Solutions (the DNS monopoly sold for $15B) and frame IPFS/Filecoin as explicitly censorship-resistant infrastructure — if a mob demands a site be taken down, a decentralized DNS-equivalent has no single point of capture. This leads into NFTs, which Long calls "a hundred percent in some kind of a mad bubble frenzy" while still crediting the underlying IPFS-hash mechanism with real value (provable uniqueness/provenance, akin to signed art). Vance draws a personal parallel to the 2008 housing bubble (dinner-party attorneys bragging about house-flipping) to describe his current unease watching mainstream, previously Bitcoin-skeptical people rush in — invoking René Girard's mimetic desire. Long counters that regardless of short-term volatility, dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin makes sense given what he frames as a civilizational-scale economic transition (hunter-gatherer→agriculture→industrial→"distributed information age"). The conversation shifts into personal-growth material — incremental habit change ("just don't smoke the next one"), the Dunning-Kruger/trough-of-disillusionment framing applied to VR, meditation, and journaling — before landing on a rich nostalgic thread about early computing (DOS, QBasic, the game Sim City) as formative for both men, tying Will Wright's "software toys" concept and his famous "fitness landscape" talk on balancing work/pleasure to broader life lessons about navigating complex systems. The episode closes on Long's motivation for daily blogging/writing: as an explicit alternative to complaining about social-media mob dynamics, in the spirit of decentralized ownership (RSS, personal blogs) rather than platform-dependent distribution — echoing themes from Vance's own "distribution" concerns raised with guest Chris Bennett, and previewing an upcoming Erik Hoel interview.

“Right now, if you become accused of committing hate speech or something like this, and the angry mob comes to the DNS provider and says, take this website off the internet... [with IPFS] they have to go to some other DNS provider and say, will you please help us? And then they see what happened and they're like, nah, I don't think we wanna do this.”

“NFTs, for example, right, which are a hundred percent in some kind of a mad bubble frenzy at this point, right? Where people are spending tens of thousands of dollars on... a picture of a unicorn crying.”

“The reason that people are enthusiastic about it is because the rest of what's going on in the world seems sclerotic and entropy ridden and troublesome... I feel like there's... I don't foresee a time when it would not be a good time to put money into Bitcoin.”

Key moments

• ~2-9%: The "100 books" heuristic and the tension between hoarding physical books versus fearing digital censorship of texts.
• ~15-20%: The "angry mob"/deplatforming discussion — why following controversial figures (e.g., Jim Rutt's Facebook ban) is often intellectually productive.
• ~24-33%: IPFS explained as content-addressed, censorship-resistant storage; Filecoin as the incentive layer; connection to Jim Rutt/Network Solutions/DNS monopoly history.
• ~28-31%: NFTs as "artificial scarcity," the bubble framing, and the parallel to signed physical art.
• ~33-38%: Bitcoin bubble anxiety via the house-flipping analogy and mimetic desire; Long's dollar-cost-averaging philosophy and "civilizational transition" framing.
• ~39-44%: Incremental behavior change ("quit smoking the next one") and the Dunning-Kruger/trough-of-disillusionment model applied to VR and habits.
• ~48-59%: Deep nostalgic dive into early PC computing, DOS, QBasic games, and Sim City as a formative "software toy," including Will Wright's fitness-landscape talk.
• ~60-67%: Long's daily-writing practice as a decentralization-inspired alternative to social-media complaining; RSS/blog ownership vs. platform dependency.

Notable quotes

“NFTs... are a hundred percent in some kind of a mad bubble frenzy at this point, where people are spending tens of thousands of dollars on... a picture of a unicorn crying.”

“If you become accused of committing hate speech... the angry mob comes to the DNS provider and says take this website off the internet... [with IPFS] they have to go to some other DNS provider and say, will you please help us? ...they're like, nah.”

“It's kind of Renee Gerard's mimetic desire. I see other enough, other people want it, so therefore I want it.”

“How do you quit smoking? You just don't smoke the next one.”