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Hey, welcome to another discussion. Lucas and I are back to continue our discussion of Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State.
So we're moving on to chapter four today, decentralization, recentralization.
We are deep into the book. This is the penultimate chapter.
We've built up to this.
This is a statement of really, I think, the reason why we need network societies, what
role they will fulfill kind of in motivating more societal progress.
So first, I'll do as we usually do, give a short summary to bring you up to date in case
you haven't read.
That's fine.
And then Lucas and I will discuss today's chapter.
So a very brief summary.
What even is the network state?
This is the book we're reading.
The first chapter of this book gave the general idea.
The idea of the network state generally, essentially, is that new startup societies based around a social or moral ideal can begin first online and then can acquire a real world land and work towards actual diplomatic recognition in order to become network states, a new type of state akin to the nation state.
The more general idea is that biology foresees kind of a move away from nation states, we might say.
So a nation state, you begin with land.
You can picture the board game of risk with all of those colored in countries.
And these land masses each pertain to some national actor.
Each land mass, each colored square is assigned to a team or whatever.
The network state, though, does not begin with land conceptually.
Instead, the board game map for the network state consists of 8 billion different minds, all the people in the world, which are then colored in with membership to a different society.
That's the idea of a state as a network, the network state.
The network state, as I mentioned, begins as a network in the cloud and works to gain more minds and then finally moves toward physical territory in its final stage in diplomatic recognition.
The next two chapters, chapters two and three, gave two kind of, you might say, constraints for a startup society founders to consider.
So startup societies have founders.
These are startups, but they're societal startups.
There are two constraints when your startup is a societal startup, a startup society.
The first is the two constraints are the constraints of the past and the constraint of the immediate present.
So chapter two was history as trajectory, and it was about the constraint that the past presents for a startup society.
A startup society, as I mentioned, begins with a moral innovation.
And it's an innovation, a new thing, an improvement upon society,
exactly because it posits itself as a critique of the past historical trajectory of a society.
So a moral innovation is necessary for a startup society because a startup society is not just a startup company.
If you don't have a moral purpose for your startup society, you just have a soulless nullity,
a Starbucks lounge instead of a community.
So a historical story must be crafted.
Every story of history is just a story
because you are always having to choose
the bits and pieces of history that you find salient
to tell the particular historical narrative
you want to tell to motivate the moral critique
that you're making of present-day society.
A startup society needs to understand the past
in order to craft this historical narrative
that supports its moral claim
as to why it is in fact a good innovation upon current society.
The past then presents us with a field of options.
We can pick and choose to tell our story,
but it is a constraint because that field does constrain what is possible.
And Lucas, if you could bring up that first image here.
I could say, Jamie, bring up the image, right?
I've always wanted to do that here.
Okay, thank you.
This is something that Bologi mentions as an analogy for his view of history.
he says it synthesizes two views the great man view of history and the view that is
opposite the great man but he calls it the tech the civilization tech tree view of history so
history has a constraint this is from the computer game civilization if you played it back in the day
like i did it's an incredibly fun game you basically create you start at the dawn of
civilization and you take a nascent civilization up into the present day maybe even to the future
I forget. And so the tech tree idea within the game of civilization, you can see that there's like this tree of technical advances that you can get in game. And so you advance your society technologically, but you can't just jump ahead to parts of historical advancement that are not sort of linearly adjacent to it.
For example, in order to get to democracy, you can't just jump from monotheism straight to democracy.
First, society has to develop theology, develop a printing press, and then develop democracy,
these technologies that enable a broader field of possibilities within the game of civilization.
So that's kind of the tech tree view of history, we might say,
where history enables possible futures based upon things that have happened in the technologies we currently have.
So it's a constraint, but it's also an enabling constraint that provides us with future possibilities.
That's the constraint of the past. That's chapter two.
Chapter three, then, is the constraint of the immediate present upon what a startup society can do.
Balaji referred to that as the tripolar moment.
So after World War II, you could say we entered into a bipolar moment, the U.S. versus the USSR.
Then with the fall of the USSR, we were unipolar for a while, one might say.
And now we are tripolar.
So that is the New York Times is one poll upstream of the U.S. establishment.
The CCP, another poll, the Chinese Communist Party, that is, upstream of China.
And the third poll is BTC, Bitcoin, which is upstream of the rest of crypto and of the Internet.
These three polls Balaji develops in Chapter 3 kind of mark a tripolar world. Balaji does qualify that as a worldview circa 2022. And in this tweet here that Lucas has zoomed in on, Balaji recently, I think just a couple days ago, February 28th, we were doing this on March 4th, so just like a week ago, Balaji says,
So it isn't New York Times versus CCP versus BTC anymore. New York Times lost to MAGA, but MAGA is winding down American empire, even if that's not yet obvious. The U.S. feels scarcity, so it can no longer provide the world's money and military. The two successors to American empire are China and the Internet.
So now that in this framework is CCP versus BTC because Bology says BTC is upstream of the Internet.
And that's not to dunk on Bology.
He qualifies.
He says that this chapter, that chapter three of the network state is a moment in time 2022.
And that tweet we could take as an update to it.
This book is hyperlinked.
It's a work in progress.
It's a toolbox and not a manifesto, he also says.
so chapter 4 which we're going to talk about today then moves from that was the constraint
we have the constraints of the past the civilization tech tree model of a field of
possibilities enabled by history the constraint of the immediately present which is of the immediate
present which are the power structures the polarities of power that are currently in play
in the world. Chapter four then moves from that tripolar world, or maybe bipolar, to this idea
that maybe we can build a fourth pole, the re-centralized center. So chapter four is
decentralization, re-centralization. And the key idea is going to be, what is the re-centralized
center? A group of people who don't want extremes of anarchy or tyranny. So within the constraints,
again of the past and the immediate present there was a range of possible futures biology
acknowledges at the beginning of this chapter that it's hard to predict the future for at least three
reasons that kind of present difficulties for people trying to predict the future one is that
volatility is on the rise with people being connected to information networks like the
internet social media information propagates very quickly you can have bank runs cryptocurrencies
He's going to zero.
Social media lynch mobs.
Things happen very quickly.
Volatility is on the rise in social media and in financial markets.
So things happen very quickly and very jarringly.
Another thing that inhibits prediction of the future is reflexivity.
Humans are not atoms in a closed system such that you could kind of use scientific laws to predict what's going to happen just because we bounced into each other.
and so we're bouncing around based upon laws of cause and effect,
thermodynamics, whatever.
Instead, humans are reflexive.
We know this.
We react to others' reactions who then react to our reactions
infinitely in positive or negative feedback loops.
Humans are reflexive.
Another way to put it, investors don't base investments on reality,
but rather on their own perception of reality
because perception is what matters for us conscious beings
who are able to model other conscious beings.
so volatility reflexivity a third thing that inhibits prediction is biology kind of terms it
competing curves it's just the idea that as we move towards the future we can picture a graph
with a lot of different lines on it that are all the different players in the system jockeying for
power we can identify the players the lines in the graph but we can't identify which one's going to
go to zero, which one's going to win? It's tough just knowing the field to know the result at the
end of the day. With these constraints in mind, Balaji then gives us what is one of the, I guess,
the heart of this chapter, you might say, a sci-fi future that he believes is at least a plausible
prediction of where we might go given where we're at. That is American anarchy, Chinese control,
and an international intermediate so in this hypothesis this scenario america descends into
anarchic civil war between two factions which you can characterize as dollar green and bitcoin orange
dollar green is the u.s federal government the establishment the dollar he says the democratic
party and wokeness he might change that thesis a bit updated a bit now but that's what he writes
here in this chapter. The dollar green is the establishment. It is fighting for democracy
against insurrectionists. Bitcoin orange within the United States is state governments. It's
decentralized media. It's Bitcoin. And at least at the time, the Republican Party fighting for
freedom against fiat tyranny. So we can kind of see the seeds of a civil war in those two factions
and also in some trends that I think all of us sense to one degree or another. Things like
increasing polarization in the United States, increasing class and economic envy, declining
state capacity, declining kind of general prosperity.
We see foreign defeats looming.
We saw it in Afghanistan.
We're kind of contemplating what's going to happen in the Ukraine.
U.S. states pulling away from the feds now on immigration, maybe with sanctuary cities
in the past with people defying immigration in the other direction.
Texas not wanting to, not agreeing with the Biden administration's laissez-faire.
idea of letting people in. The final trigger event in the American Civil War, then, biology
thinks, could be something like Bitcoin seizure, because that kind of neatly encapsulates the
difference between the two factions. Dollar Greens have no power if the dollar system
goes down. If they go bankrupt, Bitcoin Orange has no money if they have no BTC. So the future
Civil War could catalyze, come to a head. And this is, I mean, not, you know, it's no stretch
to think that capital controls could be imposed in the future. We saw that with Lynn Alden talking
about what happens at the end of a long-term debt cycle. And one iteration of a capital control as a
sort of seizure. As gold was seized in the past, so too could Bitcoin be seized in the future if
it did appreciate appreciably in value. So this civil war, American anarchy would look
markedly different than the first American civil war, Balaji notes. When the North fought the South,
the political lines were neatly geographic, and so the war could be fought by armies invading and taking territory.
But dollar green and bitcoin orange adherents are spread out throughout the country, even the world.
So it will be a net, the second American civil war would be a network to network war to control mines,
to win mines, not state to state to control territory.
A war for minds looks like what we saw in the past eight to ten years, cancellation, deplatforming, silencing, shunning, debanking, asset seizure, silencing in various forms.
In this war, dollar greens would seek dollar supremacy and American nationalism.
They're the establishment and maybe try to forcibly unite people under one voice.
Bitcoin Orange then, to quote Bologi, would think something like, quote, it's okay with,
but Bitcoin Orange would be okay with the uncertainty of crypto anarchy over the certainty
of inflationary tyranny. And it is not looking to mend the federal government, but to end it,
like the reformers Republicans, maximalism is going to win, according to the Bitcoin Orange.
So in this war, it is unclear Bologi thinks who would win between the parties, but both parties
would lose in the sense of suffering political violence, which Bologi says not a good thing.
It's indiscriminate, arbitrary, unproportionate, and never pretty.
Meanwhile, in response, so this again, this science fiction hypothesis is American anarchy, Chinese control, international intermediate.
So now, Chinese control, what does that mean?
China continues a trend of restricting movement, censoring, surveilling, and controlling through use of its techno-authoritarian stack of AI, surveillance technology, central bank digital currencies, things like that, making it harder for its own citizens to leave the country and, of course, harder for critiques of it to be made.
the alternative to American anarchy and Chinese control would be the international intermediate
this consists of people who don't want Chinese control or American anarchy
Balaji kind of gives a hodgepodge of potential groups who pertain to this American centrists
Chinese liberals global technologists and he notes two countries that might provide
a large body of people that pertain to it, India and Israel, in that they are the number one and
number two locations for immigrant tech founders to the United States, and technology could very
much, very easily break towards an international intermediate away from anarchy or control.
That is the re-centralized center. It is a middle path. Instead of anarchic decentralization
or coercive centralization,
it would be volitional, voluntary re-centralization.
That's what a startup society is.
It's not anarchy.
It's not totally decentralized.
It's a re-centralization around a moral purpose,
a moral innovation.
So startup societies now strike out on their own,
telling a story based on the history
that they've kind of analyzed and cultivated
to tell their particular story,
to make their particular moral critique,
and kind of set themselves against the current moment,
the tripolar or bipolar moment, in order to seek progress.
So in conclusion, I'll just quote Bology.
This process of constantly forking and innovating
and having startup societies compete in the marketplace
brings in new blood.
And that's the concept of the re-centralized center.
The way to demonstrate it's a step forward
is via mass exodus of people
from both American anarchy and Chinese control
to the re-centralized center
to high-trust startup societies and network states.
That's the re-centralized center.
So that brings us to our discussion.
And Lucas, to kick it off,
I was curious about what you thought about this last tweet.
Do you think that we are out of a tripolar moment
and into a bipolar moment with New York Times,
the U.S. establishment, the old establishment, having lost to an insurgent populist MAGA contingent, or majority, I don't know.
I think things are moving decidedly into a new direction.
I mentioned this in an earlier talk that we had.
My view on this is not so much the tripolar moment.
My view on this is more of there are competing factions right now that are both dying.
The American establishment and the Chinese control are both dying to the power of technology and the power of networks.
And so I look at it less as a triangular pull and fight between the Internet and China and American establishment.
And I look at it more as the Internet, Bitcoin, that libertarian bent as being the sort of love child, what's left over of those two.
And so if I use that view of it, if I use what I think is a more accurate view of it, then what I see is I see the American establishment losing power.
I see the Chinese establishment holding power.
And I think that that's really revealing because I think right now, if you're holding power, I think you're losing.
I think you're going backwards.
And so I do see the Internet decentralization.
It appears to be that they're gaining power.
But throw all that aside, throw my opinion of it aside, and let's just look at it from Balji's tripolar.
So what are we experiencing right now and what a topical time to be having this conversation.
What we're experiencing right now, I don't think is the first time really that we're seeing an example of things coming to a head of the Internet and American establishment really starting to butt heads.
I think what we're seeing is finally a shift that if this were one of those internet arm wrestling, you know, it's been pushing, pushing, pushing with the establishment, pushing the internet and pushing decentralization down.
And now all of a sudden that wrist is switched and it's starting to come back.
We're seeing this with Doge.
So I think there is clearly factions that are fighting very hard to maintain whatever grip they have.
We're seeing the release of the Epstein files or all of these things that turned out to be an absolute nothing burger.
because it turns out that there's still a massive faction within the intelligence community
that is actively withholding and subverting executive orders
and trying to supposedly...
We're hearing a lot of reports that evidence is being destroyed.
So I think that's an example.
I live with a bunch of Chinese nationals now
and hearing their opinion
and these are Chinese nationals
who have left the mainland to pursue other opportunities
because they don't feel that there are opportunities in China
That's exactly the international intermediate that Balaji describes
the Chinese liberals, right?
Yeah, one of the founders of the network school
So Balaji's Network State has a network school, and there is a co-founder to the network school, and his name is Donovan.
He had been living in Beijing for a decade.
and he was asked the other day,
given the state of the United States educational system,
would you rather have your children educated in China
with the heavy focus on science and technology, STEM,
or would you rather have them educated in the United States?
And he didn't hesitate one second.
He said, absolutely, America.
It doesn't matter how much physics you teach somebody if you are constantly teaching them that there are walls that they cannot walk through, that there's a box that they live inside.
I don't think that we've exited that moment.
I think that that moment is continuing.
If we're going to use Bology's tripolar, then I think that we're still stuck in there.
I think that we are still stuck in there It just that within say the last month and a half two months three months maybe four since the election in the United States with Donald Trump that maybe we really started to see some tide turn and some tide shift
But it's still the same war.
And it does still seem to be the same dynamic, right?
Do you think that we are closer or further away from some type of American civil war as a predicate to American anarchy?
I would have to think that we're moving closer to something.
Like, you know, obviously, so it's not going to be a civil war.
It's not going to be brothers lining up in green lush fields against each other
and marching towards each other and firing at each other
because we are too dispersed.
You can't bomb any city. If you're dollar green, you can't go bomb the Bitcoin orange city because there isn't one.
Everything is everywhere. Everything is dispersed.
Every ideology is now a diaspora that has been spread across geography.
so yes what we are seeing is a war of minds and a war to control minds through media
and through selective interpretation and misinterpretation of events yeah no it's
interesting to think that we could already be in civil war if what you take civil war to be
is a network war that we just have ideas about what wars should look like based on the way that
the last war was fought i mean jason lowry made that point repeatedly in soft war but that's also
then to say what are the ways in which we could already be fighting the next war and we're not
aware of it and that war for hearts and minds that canceling depersoning all of that those types of
things very violent metaphors de-platforming um de-banking all these things you know they are
war-like that's one could say that and i mean i don't think that we're at the pitch when we call
the civil war but yeah economic sanctions right right economic sanctions come with war yeah
definitely you know it doesn't have to be kinetic and often and you know if you look at the history
of wars they're oftentimes um not oftentimes um you can if you want to you can look at war through
the lens of the winner is simply the one that is able to continue financing you know like we if you
can continue raising money for a war, you can continue fighting a war. And this was much more
true when people had control over their own money, when they self-custodied gold, when they self-custodied
silver, etc. Because then their feudal lord or their ruling class had to actually come to them
and ask for the tax to raise the army in order to fight the war. And when that was no longer an
economically profitable enterprise, or when it was so painful economically that the alternative
of surrendering and subjugating seemed like a better idea, then you ran out. And so if you can
continue to finance the war, then you can continue to fight it. And the flip side of that, of course,
then would be if you can't finance the war, if you run something like the Biden's administration
active attack on the crypto industry, which was Operation Chokepoint 2.0,
and you try to debank every crypto founder, every large-scale, vocal, outspoken
detractor from the current administration by taking away their platform,
which was interesting, by the way, because by the time we tried debanking,
I think that it had already been proven that deplatforming does not work.
So I think about the comedian Shane Gillis.
I think about Louis C.K.
I think about Joe Rogan.
Like you think about Donald Trump, who was obviously very famously deplatformed.
Jay Bhattacharya, who was a leading voice on vaccines, who was taken off of Twitter.
What that succeeded in doing was fomenting desire to know what these people were actually saying.
Yeah, and they escaped to more decentralized networks away from establishment venues onto Twitter and things that would platform them.
Which grew their power and sucked power away from the centralized network.
I think one thing that's kind of interesting is that I don't know, maybe you can better than I, but I can't identify a moment when this war began.
I just got done going through a book called The Grey Lady Winked.
And if you want to think about the American media as a network, and the New York Times is obviously a network.
It has a centralized repository where it pushes out media, and then there's a network of offices and delivery stations around the world,
and now it's all digital and people can get it however they like.
But if you are to take the author, I think Ashley Rinsdale, if you're to take the author's take on this, then the New York Times has been actively fighting a propaganda war since the 30s.
30s, like effectively 100 years, planting false stories in the minds of Americans in
order to achieve political goals.
So I personally wouldn't say that.
I think Balaji makes the point maybe that the media really realized that it had a true
weapon back in the 70s when they effectively unseated a sitting president.
Um, maybe the moment was the Me Too moment.
Maybe it was the, um, Black Lives Matter moment, you know, whatever.
But, um, it has been ratcheting up and I do feel that right now it's starting to lose.
Um, it's, it's starting to lose control.
So, yeah, I don't think that that war has just started.
I don't think that we're, we're like, oh, we're, we're in it.
I think that we're just now taking stock of the change that has occurred because the other side now has a way to fight back.
The other side has a little power.
They're in the administration currently.
They're kicking some of this propaganda out.
They're shedding light on some of this.
But even still, you see the USAID dismantling.
And the reporting of the USAID dismantling is still insanely heavily.
Elon Musk is killing babies in Africa because he's shutting down the billions of dollars of aid money that's going to it.
You know, and in fact, the reality is that maybe a couple million dollars actually got to that.
But the billions of dollars went to the non-governmental organizations whose staff is the people who appropriate the money.
So it's this circular feeding mechanism.
Yeah, for many of them.
I think the one that people make good costs for is like the PEPFOR, whatever it is, the AIDS drug distribution.
There's a Slate Star Codex.
It's a good rationalist substack or webpage or whatever.
Scott Alexander, the author there, he makes a pretty good case that
that's been a very effective, as far as evaluating the effectiveness of
aid efforts, like that one was kind of like gold standard-ish
for, and I don't know what
I kind of, what I heard was that they put that on hold maybe, that they were re-evaluating
still going through with that, but I don't think you can carte blanche say all of the
aid was bad or all was good, that it was cut. Well, you can't.
Yeah. Yeah. You can't. And that I mean, that's what makes the grift work is that you can't you can't just unilaterally say this was all bad.
Like there was a little bit of good in there. But that, you know, that's like saying genocide is great because it makes it easier to find a house.
You know, like there there is, you know, or, you know, you don't have you don't have food scarcity in a genocide.
you know if you wipe off the entire population you know traffic man traffic's way better now
that everybody's dead right that is true it's a good point yeah yeah so the you know like that
again like that's that's what makes the grift work is that there is an element a hint a a dust
particle of good and truth yeah um within the steaming massive rotting decimating pile of utter
shit yeah um within that that utter that pile that rotting fecal pile that you described i think one
important step as people people listen to conversations like this people come in with
either they are of the left or of the right because those are the polarities that people
tend to come into a conversation with and part of what biology does with the tripolar moment
is creating another pole and then in this chapter he talks about socio-political axes
these new ways, new polarities, new dynamics with which people should view the current moment.
Don't come in as a Republican or Democrat.
Instead, I mean, you know, power is distributed differently and people don't have these easy affiliations they had in the past.
For example, he mentions a couple of things that he thinks might disrupt along the socio-political axis people's views of the way that the world is.
And one that he mentions is the rise of India, talking about the Indian network, the Indian network of individuals around the world and not India, the country, the nation state.
And he cites them as the diaspora of Indians around the world, nodes on a global network.
He cites India in this sense as part of the international intermediate, that third pole that's going to emerge in relation to American anarchy and Chinese control, hopefully.
Um, the, the idea of India in this sense is that parts of the ascending, ascending world
in India are now cleaner and more functional, better working than parts of the descending
world, which we can, you know, in the popular consciousness, that's like San Francisco,
where things seem to be deteriorating, um, from an outsider's point of view.
And so the question I have related to that, that I was thinking about, you know, that's
one dynamic polarity that might surprise people, get them out of their easy ways of analyzing
things. What states, people's groups, etc., do you think are also part of this potential
international intermediate, potential group of people outside of American anarchy, outside
of Chinese control, outside of the neat and facile political dynamics we're used to? I
mean, do you have any idea who could pertain to that, potentially?
Groups, people, states, networks.
Yeah, I think we've talked about a couple of these, not in particular,
but I think we've mentioned some of these on previous podcasts
just by the reading material that we've gone over, Africa.
Yeah.
I think that there are, when you think of Africa,
hardcore political ideology is not ever anything you really think of, right?
It's never, oh, you know, Senegal is extreme left.
Nobody even knows that.
It's just that there is this massive continent of, what, a billion people?
Who the majority of live in such dire, utter poverty that ideology is not a concern.
Like it's just having a life, having an opportunity.
And so what are the means by which you can pursue that?
And I think that's probably the reason why Bitcoin and especially layer two Bitcoin lightning adoption is happening at such a rapid pace in Africa.
because they are kind of, you can help me on the proper term for this,
politically non-affiliated.
There was a word that was in my head that I couldn't really think of.
I was really hoping it was going to come out of yours.
I don't know if this is what you're getting at,
but think about the old dynamic we had a few decades ago,
U.S. versus USSR,
and the rest of the states were kind of proxies
or thought of as, you know, we could pull them towards one of those poles or another poles.
And this third world was always like a world that was outside of the dominant combative dynamic of the era.
Now it's like what Europe, U.S., West versus Russia and the rest of the countries just like kind of there.
And maybe we can want to try to sway them one way or the other.
But yeah, the idea of the third world as being kind of outside of the dominant dynamic in play makes them seem without ideology only because we have our dominant ideology that we interpret the entire world through.
Yeah. Just to note, I would say it's not U.S. versus Russia now. It's U.S. versus China with Russia as the proxy.
Yes. Yeah.
And then to add, so two, I think there's two great additional examples.
So we're talking about where are we going to see kind of rise of, you know, flourishing,
rise of people adopting maybe the Internet intermediate that are outside of possibly India and Israel.
And I gave first the example of Africa.
I think the second would be South America.
I think South America is just teetering on the edge of exploding in productivity.
I think having been around, living in Colombia for a little bit and trying to learn about the area and not just hearing about, but feeling the very heavy American influence,
the political control that was used through non-governmental organizations
or three-letter organizations, CIA and such down there.
I think as the American empire shrinks back and those waters recede
and it's no longer tenable or economically feasible or politically desirable
to continue weekly, monthly, every decade upsetting the apple cart in South America
in order to achieve some sort of political end in the United States.
I think as you see that American influence recede in there,
personally I think that you see a big battle.
And I think that the big battle in South America becomes internet intermediate
versus Chinese control, because there is already a ton of Chinese control moving in that you see in terms of the technology that's moving into the area.
I don't think so much the people yet, but a lot of the technology and a lot of the, well, you know, bricks, right?
Part of Brazil, Russia, India, China.
Yeah.
Like Brazil, right?
So there is a established foothold.
By the way, Balaji, a couple days ago, tweeted a, he had a cool graphic, and I might see if I can pull it up here real quick.
He had a cool graphic that showed the fall of the U.S. establishment versus the BRICS.
And while you're looking for that, I'll just note as far as like South America pertaining to an international intermediate that is a third option away from Chinese control or American anarchy.
You know, I think it's very ripe for the Venezuelan diaspora and also people in Argentina, places that have had failing currencies or hyper inflation.
I think those are demographics that you would see tend to both towards Bitcoin, but also towards that international intermediate when they see how many of the negative, how many of the ills of society are immediate consequences of a failing money system, monetary system, and then not wanting to get into a CBDC because they see what governments do to money.
Yeah. I got this pulled up here. You can see this is the G7 countries.
So UK, United States, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, and then the relative the GDP of those countries compared to the GDP of BRICS,
which is China, Russia, India, Brazil, Iran.
There's a whole bunch of countries in this, actually.
Iran, UAV, Indonesia, etc.
But we have seen that crossover moment,
and it appears that happened while everybody had their eyes closed back in 2018,
back when things were whatever.
And not only has that shift occurred,
it appears to be moving very rapidly in a direction.
But what is the salience of BRICS, though, as a block in the tripolar order?
Because India's, you know, biology thinks they're more tending towards part of the international intermediate.
And I think Brazil, they have a left-wing leader now.
So what is the relevance of BRICS, though, as far as...
I would say, yeah.
I mean, I would say that with the exception of India,
that each of those countries is experiencing some sort of importation of the Chinese control,
the exporting of autocracy,
and adopting, moving more in the direction of what China is trying to push with the Belt and Road Initiative.
Yeah.
Maybe not, and you're right to bring that up, maybe not India.
But I think what we've seen from India is that they seem to make pretty good decisions in terms of how can we continue moving forward but also stay out of other people's messes.
So I can see India being one of the countries that is not just wise enough, but also strong enough to resist importing all of the Chinese autocracy weapons and ideas, but still taking many of them.
Yeah.
You know, still taking many of those ideas.
English speaking, maybe still a lot of the norms that we associate with Anglophone liberalism are very prevalent in India, things like that.
So another sociopolitical axis, just to make this conversation more personal in a sense.
So we can also, to get outside of the normal ways that we tend to look at the world as left and right with our current kind of vulgar and inexact ways of analyzing the world.
So Bology talks about the identity stack, that people are kind of layered, you know, layers of different identities.
To quote Bology, everyone is patriotic about something.
And those people, some people are patriotic about their city, others are patriotic about their countries, companies, or even their cryptocurrency.
So there are things about people, various like layers of their identity, some parts of their identity having priority over other parts.
and like determining what somebody's fealty or identity is is determining what part of a person's
life is not merely a swappable piece for another life and i liked this way of looking at it because
some of my past critiques of what i thought biology was getting at with the network society
was this view that people are kind of like completely denatured,
decultured, free agents that can just move at will between society to society.
So they'll go wherever the conditions are the best economically or whatever for them.
But Balaji does have a deep concern for identity
and his highlighting of the identity stack,
this idea that we do all have multiple loyalties,
some of which have kind of primacy over others.
I thought it was interesting and good for that Balaji acknowledges.
And he's acknowledged this type of thinking other ways in other places throughout this book.
But it does give me comfort that he has a really deep idea of the network society.
And something with a moral purpose.
And that's very central to his idea of the startup society.
It's not just like a soulless nolity, not a Starbucks lounge.
It's an actual community with people who have an identity, a fealty to it.
Yeah.
One thing I would point out about that is that that patriotism that identity that desire and longing for a connection to some greater thing I think that we might give a little too much credence to
how strong that draw is based on the generation that we grew up in, based on the age that we are.
If you go a generation above us, to our parents, you know, people in their 60s, 70s,
it's incredibly strong.
They can't see that they would ever give up.
The idea of ever leaving Kansas or the United States
or being Mexican or something like that,
that's just a non-starter.
But if you go down to, say, the 20-year-olds,
if you are faced with no opportunity, no economic opportunity to have a life,
if you're faced with daily persecution for what the things you believe,
that if you stay in that area that you're going to face that for the foreseeable future for the rest of your life,
then it's a lot easier.
I see a lot of, you know, like now living with a lot of like mid-20s to mid-30s people that have all left their home country.
And have, you know, like the common question when you meet someone here is, you know, what's your name and where are you from?
And I've realized that the where are you from thing doesn't really matter.
Do you want to describe where you're at? Where are you?
Yeah, sorry. I'm at the network school. I'm at Balaji's country.
Startup society. He's not there yet. You guys don't have dramatic recognition at this point.
yeah yeah uh we are we're in uh we're in malaysia um in a on a on a little man-made island um
in between singapore and and malaysia um but what would the question i interrupted you an
interesting plot i'm interrupting you again but what were the questions that um people ask each
other that was really interesting what's what's your name and where are you from and what's your
name is what's your name is a useful question yeah but where are you from just really isn't
useful because as i've i've learned it's like you know you'll you know you'll be you'll be talking
to someone who is clearly chinese speaking with an australian accent and they're like you know
where are you from and they're like oh sydney you know uh are you sure about that like yeah
i mean that's how these people you know that's how you do that's how you identify um or uh
there's a girl with clearly a Russian accent.
Where are you from?
Hawaii.
And this is where these people identify.
They identify with the place that gave them opportunity,
not with the place that they were born,
not with the place that their ancestors came from.
When you ask them where they're from,
they don't tell you where they were born.
They tell you where they got the opportunity to become the person that they are.
And so I think that we need to caveat the strength of patriotism with a bit of additional figuring towards age and opportunity.
Because people that are young, people that want to have opportunity, they do not have a strong connection, I don't believe, towards the geography upon which they were birthed.
Yeah.
I think they have a much stronger connection towards whatever is going to give them opportunity to grow.
Yeah, I think you're right.
The idea of the network state is physical barriers are breaking down.
I mean, with COVID, we had the initiation of remote work and life is becoming more in the cloud and value was created.
Internet first becomes physical second.
People can be anywhere.
Physical location becomes much more contingent.
And with that, I can see there being changing values about how people relate to the places they're at, for sure.
Yeah.
I mean, you've moved around a good bit, too.
I know that you strongly, I feel like you strongly identify with the area that you came from, as do I.
But I think when I look forward, then, yeah, I think more about where's the opportunity.
yeah
that's where I'm stuck
no definitely
I'm stuck at the
we talked about this in the past
but I'm stuck at the idea that
human beings are
not chosen
they are given by their past
you don't choose who you are
you are a person by virtue of
the set of obligations
that are imposed upon you
by your social context
for example
nobody chooses to be the son of a particular person nobody chooses to be the brother of another
person once you choose your spouse but once you're married that's supposed to be a lifelong
commitment where you don't choose it day to day whether you're married or not each of these
commitments has you know you have moral commitments that arise from unchosen circumstances that you
find yourself in and that's just maybe a moral view i have of what a human being is is something
that is not created by the person,
but is created by the social context that they're in,
which imparts upon that person obligations,
duties that they didn't choose.
But we've talked about that in the past.
One of the things I think that's relevant to this is,
so Balaji talked about, as I mentioned,
those sociopolitical axes that we can use
to disrupt our common, normal, comfortable ways of viewing the world.
He has technonomic, I don't know if it was technonomic or techno-economic,
but a fusion of technology and economic axes that we can also use
to help us see the world that we're entering or the world that we're in more accurately.
And one of the interesting ones that he talked about was that
there is this common pattern of a three-phase transition
where things start as physical, then the next stage they're in
it's kind of this physical digital hybrid and then they're fully digital that's where the world
is digitizing and dematerializing and in that progress there's kind of three discrete stages
an example being paper the paper started off as physical this thing you wrote down
then we developed scanning technology we were in this kind of physical digital hybrid stage
where you would have a piece of paper and you could scan it onto a computer to save it there
now and then the final stage of that transition is fully digital where the paper
there is no paper the the thing is paperless it's online it lives there it begins and dies there
digital the final digital stage is where things are natively digital and only kind of printed out
instantiated physically as needed and i think that's a really helpful way to view things is
where are we in any specific process in any specific thing in our life where are we at in
that continuum of physical physical digital hybrid and purely natively digital i mean that's the
thesis of Bitcoin, right? That we need a natively digital currency. And that's maybe the idea behind
the network state is that a digital society looks something like something that begins in the cloud
and is printed out as needed around the world, instantiates physically as people come together.
Yeah. So you have digital, you have native, digital native money now. We're seeing the rise
of a digital native workforce, not in terms of people that work remote,
but in terms of AI agents that do work in cyberspace that is instantiated in physical reality.
And so we're moving into that direction very rapidly.
the digital native government in terms of DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations,
digital native societies, where this is what gave rise to the idea of the network state, right,
is the digital native societies that are societies that build first online.
um facebook uh your your um your your your your magic the gathering online card trading group or
whatever um yeah so all of those things coalescing as we rapidly move into that
native everything digital native um and i think the final step of that is where we sever the
connection between the digital native economy money and workforce
instantiating physical world products and instead um creating digital products that are consumed
digitally so this would be the you know diving even further and deeper into being a truly online
society living in the matrix you know plugging in and leaving the physical world behind
a scary terrifying thought for many people i think an absolute reality that that will
come to fruition in some manner um yeah um what do you think about where we're at in that process
uh in terms of like are we are we just now kind of breaking bread in that area or are we halfway
through the main course yeah um are we are we coming up on dessert like where are we at here
In any particular aspect of your life or object in your life, it's at a different place in the continuum.
We're not at one neat point.
Some things are still very physical about our lives.
Some things are purely digital, natively digital.
So there's different aspects of our life that are stuck in different phases of this transition.
And I think that that's why this is a really useful framework is if you can look at your own life
and look at the different aspects of your life
and see how many, you know,
how much of your life is purely physical,
how much is natively digital,
and then ask of those purely physical parts of your life,
is this inevitably going to be digital?
And what would it look like if it was natively digital,
digital first, physical second?
I mean, that could help somebody
if you want to start a, found a startup or whatever,
but also just maybe in your life to predict trends
and to better integrate yourself into a future
that in some sense might be inevitable.
Like this techno-economic transition, state change,
things evaporating physically into the cloud, becoming digital,
seems to have an air of inevitability to a lot of the processes,
kind of a replacement of horse and buggy with cars type odor to it to me
because it seems like technology, software eats everything, right?
Software eats the world and it's doing that.
in more and more aspects of our life.
So I couldn't give you a neat answer for where we are at in this continuum
because we are at many places in different aspects of our life.
Yeah.
One of the questions that you had kind of put in the show notes
that I wanted to make sure we got to, which I find really interesting,
is do you see Bitcoin's seizure as a catalyst or a trigger
for a second American civil war.
What are your thoughts on that?
You know, it sounds far-fetched.
You have to both first posit and believe
that we're going to hyper-Bitcoinize,
that Bitcoin's value is going to appreciate dramatically,
and then second, that the government,
we live in a free, we think a free, liberal, open society,
would outright steal things from people.
I think both are plausible, though.
And I think that we've read, as I mentioned in the summary in the intro, Lynn Alden in her book Broken Money, and I believe this has been mentioned in some of the articles we've read, capital controls historically are imposed at the end of a long-term debt cycle in order to trap people into the ledger that the government then is inflating in order to get rid of the debt.
They want to hyperinflate it away, and they don't want people fleeing to different ledgers.
They don't want people investing their money in hard resources in other countries, something like that.
So capital controls are imposed to prevent capital from fleeing to other jurisdictions at the end of a long-term debt cycle.
And that's how it kind of resolves itself politically.
That's a form of financial repression, but it's happened historically.
And we saw, of course, gold seizure in the United States.
These things have historic precedents.
And so I, you know, as much as like, it's always when you're sitting in your comfortable house, wherever you are at your life right now, it's difficult to imagine if you are at a point of relative freedom, that the future could be very different and more repressive.
And the government could be coming after you to take something that you own, to take your wealth kind of directly like that.
But I think it is very, very plausible, and it's the future people should prepare for with self-custody and whatever other measure that they want to take.
It's just so historically, you know, precedented.
Yeah. Yeah, you make a good point.
I think it would be very naive to look at the past and assume that it won't be repeated in some way.
And it's not the distant past.
It's the immediate past. The United States has been seizing people's monetary accounts actively left, right and center, starting first with, you know, nation state actors that they disagree with and then moving towards nation state related actors that they disagree with.
and then progressively moving closer and closer towards a larger portion of the population
with companies who have ideological leanings that they disagree with,
certain sectors, economies, crypto, that they have disagreements with.
And so taking big bites out of that.
Just to recap on what you're talking about with Lynn Alden's, because that's a really salient point to bring up, is that at the end of the long-term debt cycle, the money is rapidly losing value because in order to continue the game of musical chairs going, in order to keep the music playing,
You have to continue to print money in order to pay off the debt that you took on before, which forces you to print more money, which forces you to take on more debt, which forces you to print more money.
It just feeds itself.
And the capital controls, effectively what that does is it disallows you from selling the currency.
When you change your currency into something else, if you choose to buy a house, if you choose to trade it for Bitcoin, if you choose to buy a car, even if you buy a soda, everybody thinks that they're buying something.
But when in fact it's just as accurate to say that you're selling the currency.
So you're selling the currency in order to buy a product or buy a different currency.
Interestingly enough, the place that I'm at, Forest City, is a futuristic megacity built by the largest real estate developer in China.
The goal was for this to be the Dubai of Asia.
This was to be this hub of economic activity, this place where Asia went to do business.
They started building it about 20 years ago, and they built up enough capacity for about 800,000 people.
So this is like a brand new city, brand new buildings, brand new streets, everything.
and there's about 8,000 people in a city, you know, like for our listeners,
like think about having the city of Kansas City or Tulsa or maybe St. Louis.
Think about having a city that size,
but then only having the amount of people that would half fill a basketball stadium,
Like a subpar crowd for a college basketball game is how many people live here.
And the reason is because Xi Jinping put capital controls on Chinese mainlanders
and said that they can't buy a house outside of China that costs more than $50,000.
That's a way to trap that currency inside China because China is arguably ahead of us in the debt cycle,
depending on what you're looking at.
And so, yeah, it's a real world thing where you're trapping a currency.
Bitcoin seizure, I think, is a really interesting thing to talk about and think about
because Bitcoin can't be seized.
Now, exchanges that have Bitcoin on it, banks that have Bitcoin in them,
those things can be seized, but Bitcoin itself cannot be seized.
It can only be taken, or sorry, it can only be given.
It can be given against your will.
Somebody can beat it out of you, but as we've discussed on previous podcasts,
physical violence in order to extract someone's Bitcoin is not a feasible long-term play.
That approach does not scale.
And so I think it's a really interesting divergence of history where I do believe we will see this attempt.
I do believe that we will see in some form, and it may not be the United States government, maybe the United States government, maybe Cynthia Loomis gets enough support and they pass a law that says that the government can never seize your Bitcoin.
And maybe that law sticks.
Yeah.
But I do think we'll see it in other countries.
But I think we're seeing a big divergence because you finally have something that can't be seized.
Not your keys, not your coins.
You make a really good point that it can only be seized once it's centralized.
And maybe if you could pull up that Jason Lowry tweet, because this talks about that specific risk.
So Jason Lowry, the author of Softwar, a major in the U.S. Space Force.
so somebody who has thought deeply about the strategic implications national strategic
defense implications of bitcoin so he says i'm a subscriber to the belief that if bitcoin becomes
a global unit of account its purchasing power will naturally increase as humanity grows more
productive this makes the need to chase yield obsolete unnecessary even bitcoin itself is the
yield now let's so he's responding to people who are kind of wanting to get yield on their bitcoin
in some way. He says, let's put on our adversarial thinking caps for a moment. If I were a nefarious
president or nation, I'd lure people into giving up self-custody of their BTC by dangling the
promise of yield. I'd make them believe that holding their own Bitcoin is too risky and that
they're missing out on greater financial opportunities. I convince them that companies
like NIDIG, Coinbase, and MSTR are essential for securing their Bitcoin and generating yield.
Then, with a simple executive order, I'd nationalize Knighted, Coinbase, and MSTR's Bitcoin.
Or perhaps no grand announcement, no sudden shock, just a quiet, covert policy shift
that the public wouldn't even recognize as confiscation until it was too late.
This is why I don't own MSTR, MSTR's Bitcoin, and the future president's honeypot just waiting to be seized.
And when the next executive order 6102 inevitably comes, which was the past order that seized gold,
it will be widely supported.
Why? Because the government will offer double its current market price value in USD, making those who forfeit their BTC through exchanges instantly twice as wealthy in fiat terms.
Beyond that, most people won't own a meaningful amount of Bitcoin to care.
If anything, they'll resent those who do, feeling class envy and making BTC confiscation politically popular.
The warning signs are already here.
So that's a pretty dire prediction or prognostication or statement from somebody, again, within the U.S. military establishment about the necessity of being very cautious about where you put your Bitcoin.
Yeah, and I think it's very accurate, very spot on.
I've yet to see really anything come out of Jason Lowry's Twitter feed that at first glance
it may appear to be outside of what you would think But if you put some thought to it
there's not a whole lot of people that own Bitcoin.
There's 8 billion people in the world.
I don't know, maybe a quarter of a million people own Bitcoin.
So there's a whole lot more have-nots than there are haves.
and if it does become realized that Bitcoin is the ultimate asset to own,
that it is so much more valuable than all other assets,
that owning it is more important than owning anything else,
owning Bitcoin is the yield.
That's the thing about everybody always wanted to get yield on their dollar.
They wanted to get yield on their real estate, etc., etc.,
because it wasn't that valuable.
Like, you know, cash isn't that valuable.
Cash loses its ability to buy things very rapidly.
Real estate is slowly pecked away and chiseled down to nothing through taxes and maintenance
and the fact that you can't move it, you can't take it,
you can't chop it off into little pieces and buy a soda or a car or a college education with it.
So it does appear to be that this would be accurate.
There is precedent for government, especially the U.S. government, nationalizing and seizing sectors and seizing assets.
It would be naive, I think, to think that they would go in a different direction this time.
and I don't know what stops that
other than the will of the people
being very loudly expressed
that does give me hope because we do have
tools, digital megaphones
podcasts, substack
X
that are showing that they have the power
to fight back against the establishment and the authority
and to make meaningful shifts in policy direction.
So I think it's a very real concern.
I think absolutely on some extent we will see this.
To what extent, I'm not sure.
No one can be sure.
But yeah, I think it would be very naive to think that this is not going to be a reality.
That seizure of Bitcoin nationalization of a company like MSTR, which already has a very meaningful Bitcoin strategic reserve, that would be, in terms of the amount of it, a significant move towards establishing global dominance in terms of securing capital.
So, yeah, makes sense, I think, moving in that direction.
I don't know, what dystopian reality do you see coming to fruition?
So one dystopian potentiality I wanted to mention,
because this is one that Balaji has a section called
Victory Conditions and Surprise Endings,
and he makes kind of an observation that's very interesting about Chinese control
and about how a really coercive, centralized power in the future
might obviate some of the problems that in the past have prevented such powers from having strong economies,
like in a USSR kind of command economy, you know, certain built-in problems prevented those systems from ever competing with the free market.
So we can start to illustrate this.
Balaji gives the idea of making a pencil.
This is a common kind of libertarian story that no one person makes a pencil.
The pencil has the eraser, the graphite, the wood around it or whatever.
All of these things require various mining, industrial transportation operations to get this very simple object, very quotidian object, the pencil, into our hands.
How is that done then when all these operations are required?
Well, obviously, in the market economy, the price signals coordinate all these diverse parties and bring this thing about almost magically without having to have one person dictating what's happening.
So that has been that's kind of the story of the pencil is why the free market is able to create all of this value and why, in fact, you can't have somebody standing over trying to order everybody around.
and they won't have the market signals.
They will not be able to coordinate all these parties
with the same facility that the free market can.
But then the question becomes,
imagine an authoritarian future, near future potentially,
China solving this problem by integrating AI with the digital yuan,
with the CBDC.
If all transactions are on-chain in economy
and AI then can assess them in real time,
Can there be a centralized algorithmic coordination of supply chains without the necessity of the market price information coordinating all these different parties?
Can you have Soviet-style central planning made feasible with AI and robotics?
Because now you do have this, you know, in the form of AI, potentially something that can arrive at a market signal by capturing all the data from the CBDC interactions, monetary transfers on the network.
So that's one potential dystopia that maybe China can make a pencil in the future through a pure command economy without worrying about market signals.
First off, it's kind of a mind-blowing thing to think about.
That's interesting.
but does that not mean that we are
does that not mean that we would just be using
the most powerful technology ever invented
in order to listen to a market
a free market
in order to emulate the market without its freedom
that's exactly what China would want it for
in order for them to control perfectly
the operation of an industry
without delegating that control in a decentralized way to people that they do not want to empower.
They want the party to empower.
Yeah, because you could use some sort of algorithm to determine allocation of capital in a command and control economy
so that you don't need the big bureaucracy to do it
and, of course, do it wrong and do it inefficiently
and do it insidiously or just poorly.
So there is a lot of potential there.
I mean, like, the one thing that computers do,
or not one thing, but one of the things that computers do better than humans
is they do things better than humans.
They're more efficient.
So, you know, why did the USSR crumble?
Why do we have misallocation of capital
and command and control economies?
It's because the bureaucracy is just not good at it.
So maybe if you did have an algorithmic artificial intelligence
dictating how to allocate capital
based on some sort of
of principles
that you could theoretically have a command control economy
but I don't see how
that would be better than the algorithmic AI that makes those same decisions
based on simply reacting to the market in terms of price signal.
That's kind of a mind-blowing thing to consider.
It would certainly narrow the gap.
It would certainly make command control economies much better, much more efficient.
It would move them closer.
But the benefit, like the only reason we have command and control economies is that there's a group of people that grabbed power and realized how awesome it was and they don't want to let it go.
And so are they going to give that power up?
I guess if you figure into the algorithm, hey, keep this ruling power in class, make your asset allocations dependent upon keeping the woke in their position, keeping the Chinese party, the CCP, in power.
it could just take it onto steroids and make it even worse.
And, boy, that's a fascinating question to think about.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of assumptions.
I don't know where I land.
It's a very difficult question.
Predicting the future, as biology notes, is obviously a very fraught enterprise on many fronts.
And I found that an interesting resolution to the pencil-todd experiment.
But I think we are very far from that.
I think this is something I need to get back to my Hayek, but I think that there's something about the generation of information in the market economy that deals with subjective actors making decisions in the moment that you can't – that the information is generated in a way that is not – I mean it's not present before it's generated and so it has to be generated by the actors.
It can't just be captured by a machine prior to that generation, something like that.
but this is just me talking in circles.
So it'd be fun to read some, like Hayek,
he has this really good essay on the nature of information,
I forget the title even,
but we could read some of the foundational stuff in the future
and see if we can puzzle out if AI is going to be dystopian or not
on an economic front.
Yeah, so one of the things I wanted to hit before we knock off here is,
so Bologi, you know, he has dollar green, bitcoin orange
as the two factions in an American civil war,
Balaji puts himself outside of Bitcoin maximalism
and posits himself and an international intermediate
as not Bitcoin maxis, right?
And here's a quote of him describing Bitcoin maximalism.
So he says,
Bitcoin maximalism is by far the most important ideology
in the world that many people haven't heard of yet.
There's philosophical depth to maximalism.
It represents a root and branch rejection
of the inflation that powers the U.S. government
and thus pays for everything.
It fuses the worldview of Mises, Rothbard, Hayek,
and Ron Paul with Bitcoin.
It naturally aligns with the loss of trust in institutions,
with the suspicious individual who, understandably,
no longer trusts the federal government
or U.S. institutions on anything.
It's not merely an edit to the state,
it's the end of the state.
And it's a push from an ideological direction
the wokes are ill-prepared for
because it's an aracial ultra-libertarianism rather than a white nationalism,
which wokes think is the enemy.
And Balaji then refers the readers to the Bitcoin standard
as kind of a statement on Bitcoin maximalism.
In notes, I thought this was interesting or funny,
Maxis have, quote, developed verbal justifications for being toxic.
And what did you think about that?
I mean, I don't know if you consider yourself a Bitcoin Maxi.
Balaji does not consider himself one, I think,
because he reserves the possibility of a, I don't know what you call it,
other coins having utility.
And there's still the possibility that Bitcoin doesn't make it
for reasons that we can ascribe very small percentage chances to,
but that's still a possibility, right?
Yeah, I wouldn't call myself a Bitcoin maxi.
I would call myself like a probabilistic maxi.
I think that Bitcoin probabilistically is the technology that will take over the monetary system.
I think it will take over the cyber security system.
I think it is the base layer of the Internet.
It may be that that's not the case, but right now it appears to be that that is the case.
And so until something better appears, Bitcoin is what I will choose to use.
Just like until something better appears, I will drive a car in order to get places.
You know, when I'm able to put on a jacket and zip the zipper and tap a button and dematerialize and rematerialize somewhere else,
and it's safer than a car and faster and cheaper, then I'll probably do that.
And so I think being agnostic to the ideology of any certain technology,
but focusing on the benefits of that and how does it solve the problem,
I don't think that that's maximalism.
I will caveat that by saying I currently do not see a use for the other coins.
I think that they're interesting.
I think that they are proving that there are use cases for Bitcoin that have yet to be developed.
and it's like you're sandboxing ideas on other chains, Ethereum, Solana particularly,
that will eventually be replicated onto higher levels of Bitcoin.
But right now that technology does not exist simply because Bitcoin prioritizes security over speed.
And so you have to get around that, not around that first, you have to build upon that fortress and that wall.
I think I kind of want to leave it right there.
Yeah.
Because that's just kind of what I believe, is that I think that if you take that approach, that you're agnostic to the ideology, but you instead align with the benefit to humanity,
then I think that that eliminates the attack surface for a woke attack.
Like the foundational power of woke comes from hate.
It first started with, you know, we'll hate the rich, we'll hate the white, we'll hate the males, we'll hate the straights,
We'll hate the conservatives. We'll hate the gun owners. We'll hate the meat eaters. We'll hate the guys. We'll hate the physically fit.
you know it's just you you eventually run out of things to hate and as long as you are promoting
this idea of bitcoin maximalism that comes with it a subset of other ideologies that comes with it
all of these other things that are attack surfaces for woke to latch on to.
I'm going to eat meat. I'm going to be fit. I'm going to work out. I'm going to get sunlight.
I'm going to not care about the color of people's skins.
I'm going to care more about the content of their character.
I'm going to care less about the diversification of color in the room
and more about the diversification of ideas in the room.
Any of those things are attack vectors.
And so I think that there's probably a big benefit to disassociating yourself with those ideologies to minimize the attack vectors.
Because, yeah, the surface area for someone to attack you with the weapon that is currently being used is hate.
And so you just don't give them something to hate.
By the way, Balji's really, really good at this.
When you hear Balji talk and when you read the network state,
what you don't hear are the ravings and rantings of an ideologically bent, charismatic, cultish lunatic.
What you do here are the very sober acknowledgements of each realm,
and then an assessment of those really from kind of a scientific perspective
to simply say one of these is better than the other.
And not to say that the others are bad,
but one of these is better than the other because more people benefit, fewer people die.
Society rises as a whole.
No, and he looks at, throughout this chapter in this book,
he looks at startup societies as experiments too.
So maybe they'll work, maybe they won't, but if they work,
they maybe will lead to societal progress.
Maybe that moral innovation will catch on even outside the startup society.
So you're totally right that he's not doctrinaire or cultish
in the sense of having the moral innovation that he thinks is correct.
I mean, he wants a profusion of sort of societies to try improvements on multiple fronts, run your experiment, see if it works.
If it doesn't, try again.
I think, Lucas, that you're a love maxi, though, from hearing you opine about that.
Yeah, that's your love maxi, man.
I got it.
Okay, so there was a discussion that I overheard yesterday that I inserted myself into very unceremoniously.
there was this AI guy who was talking about how you need to delay decision making
because you never know how much the environment that you're in affects the decision that you're
having and kept on giving the description or kept on giving the example that well if you're drunk
then you should wait until you're sober to make a decision valid and and I was like I
the reason I inserted myself into this conversation was because I was like,
do you believe that this is a revolution?
It's like a revelation.
Like,
do you think you're the first guy that ever thought that you should sober up
before you do something?
What is,
yeah,
anyways.
But,
and,
and so what I came back to him with was like,
first off,
that's a dumb ass thing to say.
Like there's no rational person in the world.
that thinks that you should make decisions drunk because that's the best way because it's now and not later.
But the point that I made was that decision-making is a skill.
It's a muscle.
It's something that you do that you get better with over time.
And the only way that you can make good decisions is to make enough decisions in order to differentiate
and have a feedback loop that shows you what the difference is between a good decision and a bad decision.
And so the reason I bring that up is to tag on to what you just said about Bology encouraging the proliferation of startup societies.
We don't need one.
We don't need three.
We don't need 12.
We need a lot.
We need to have a lot of people attempting to move in this direction so that we can figure out what works and what does not.
Because if it's just one or two, then they're going to become self-aggrandizing and they're going to fall apart and they're all going to turn into cults.
You know, everything starts off with the best idea.
Like we're going to go find an island and we're going to have beaches and we're going to eat fruit and we're going to play acoustic guitar and give each other back rubs and do yoga.
And they all devolve into one charismatic white guy screwing everybody.
The back rubs, the slippery slope in that scenario.
Eliminate the back rubs.
That's the way it goes, man.
Yeah, maybe the conjunction of back rubs and a guitar.
That's why I play.
So, but yeah, you have to, you just have to have, you have to have a lot of bad, you can't get to a good decision until you know what a bad decision is.
And so we do, you have to have a lot of experiments.
Nobody gets anything right on the first time.
No person is born a winner.
We are all losers.
There are only winners who are losers who kept trying after they failed.
Well said.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's where I end, I suppose.
Yeah, I got nothing.
I'd like you repurposing my failure as potential success in the future,
as some sort of foundation I'm laying through the vast feedback that life has given me
in relation to various decisions.
But I'll take it, man.
Yeah, I mean, that's what makes chafing onto a wet pillow as I cry myself to sleep at night tolerable.
Yeah, well, you taped that pillow, man.
That's all I got, too. I got nothing more.
We're out. We'll be back soon. Have a good one. Bye.
Later.