All right. Thank you for joining us here on Bitcoin Study Sessions. This is Grant. That is David R. Sampson. David R. Sampson is a Canadian-American evolutionary anthropologist. He is an associate professor of biological anthropology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Did I get that right?
Mississauga. Yeah, it took me a minute, too.
Yeah. And he's also the director of the Sleep and Human Evolution Lab.
Sleep and Human Evolution Lab.
So his research explores the human uniqueness through the lens of sleep, cognition, sociality, and tribal instincts in primates and human societies,
including some fieldwork with wild chimpanzees, orangutans, lemurs, and small-scale human groups.
Um, yeah, he's a fascinating guy.
Uh, we are acquainted with him through my time at the network school, uh, because David
went to Balji Stronov-Awesome's network school and gave, to my knowledge, the most popular
talk that's ever been given there.
Um, and, uh, we connected over that because he wrote this bestselling book called Our
Tribal Future, which we reviewed on the podcast.
And now we are blessed to be able to have a conversation with David as well.
So, David, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it.
And to get us started off, really, I think the place that I want to start from is we came to this because you have a focus on tribalism camps and bands and tribes.
But you also brought in the software thesis, which we found utterly fascinating.
Would you kind of step into how you found that and how it plays in really beyond just the infinite scaling of trust that Bitcoin allows?
Awesome. Yeah. First of all, guys, I've got to thank you both for your proof of work.
it i i've been on a lot of podcasts and you'd be amazed at how how rare it is that the people who
are doing the job of interviewing you have actually read the content of your book the good ones have
probably skimmed it and they've they they have a couple concepts or themes that they want to
explore with you you guys did the proof of work i mean grant your summary i think is the absolute
gold standard of a summary of my book that I could possibly imagine. I'll probably just integrate that
into my class because it was so good. It was, it was so precise and your guys' conversation on it,
you guys really dug deep and I, I really appreciated it. So first and foremost, you guys are
doing a really cool thing by actually reading the content that you guys explore together.
And I think that makes you pretty unique in this space.
So, yeah, Jason Lowry, he came on my radar relatively early once he blew up on Twitter X.
I've got a core group of friends that have been in the Bitcoin space maybe since about 2016, 2017.
they'd been planting seeds in my brain for maybe three or four years before I started deep diving
it. Software was one of those moments where it became a truly interesting anthropological question
at that point. And I think I marked up Jason's thesis about as thoroughly as I've marked up any
book I've ever written. It was absolutely fascinating and engaging. I think the best
way to do this i've got a couple slides on it yeah and i'll pop those up and then we can really
start exploring this idea of what i think the software the most at least from the perspective
of an evolutionary anthropologist this concept of not just the sovereign individual but sovereign
community right and i and i think that jason gives us the actual playbook on how that that
thing can mature and come to fruition.
Let's see, I can actually share right here.
It's great.
And in talking about that too, you mentioned evolutionary anthropology and we're kind of,
we want to know how, maybe you're going to get to this, but how Lowry's thesis fits into
your particular academic background and also your path towards Bitcoin, given the particular
perspective that you have.
just given all that you know on this very specific, you know, this scientific area.
Yeah, totally. So, okay. So can you guys see the screen?
We can, yeah.
Awesome. Okay, so we'll start, right? We'll start with anthropology.
So this is the Hadza. This is the Singele camp.
I was there in 2015 and 2016, and I was there for a National Geographic-sponsored project on sleep and cognition and activity.
Where is this located at?
This is one—I mean, I've done some remote field work in my time, including with wild chimpanzees, which we might talk about, actually, when we get to power law theory.
but uh this is in singheli tanzania and you um fly into dar al salam and it's a about a two days
track off road to get to this camp and it's we me and my research assistant ibram ibrahim mubala
who's like right behind me there in that picture we got stuck on the way out twice like it was
super remote. And the second time, a couple of Hatsa guys came and helped us actually get the
four by four out of the mud so we could get to camp. So this is after about six weeks of field
work. And at that point, I'd been living in this camp day in, day out. And this was one of those,
if it wasn't for this experience, coupled with my experience of social isolation that I had
accidentally gone on by pursuing an academic career in North America.
This was a direct juxtaposition to that experience of choosing a career track,
having to geolocate, be stripped away from your kith and your kin and your best friends
and everything that makes sense to you, your entire intersubjective belief network,
and going towards a job that ensures that if you remove yourself from that core geolocation,
you are socially isolated.
And so as a visiting assistant professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas,
and as a postdoc at Duke, I was certainly socially isolated.
And you don't even know, it just starts creeping into your bones, right?
And then I did this field research project with the Hadza,
and it was the extreme inverse of that.
And I got to live with the people that rely on each other day to day for the shared project of survival and reproduction.
And it was incredible.
It was definitely an eye-opening thing.
And if it wasn't for those two things interacting, I would have never, I think, written our tribal future.
So one of the things I noticed was how, as a default, how day-to-day life is relatively pro-social.
And what do I mean by that?
because so much is at stake, there are mechanisms set in place by which these face-to-face
relationships allow a certain level of human thriving and for it to be done in a relatively
egalitarian way because they're face-to-face. And the science has borne out on this. So this
is a relatively recent PNAS study, one of the most renowned journals on the planet, really.
And what they showed was that there's high life satisfaction reported among small scale societies with low incomes.
And that is directly in comparison to you can see on the on the X axis here.
Let's make sure to like because there are people that just listen to the audio.
So walk us through it.
What is PNAS?
What does that what does it mean?
Proceedings of National Academy of Science.
OK.
Now, it's it's I mean, it's really hard to get published in it.
It just means it's a really high quality scientific study.
So on the X axis, you have GDP.
And then on the Y axis, you have life evaluation.
So that's basically a question on a survey.
A subjective.
A subjective statement of the purpose, meaning, and well-being that you experience on a day-to-day basis.
And you can see here this purple line in the bottom right shows that, yes, money drives the wealth of nations, does drive overall life evaluation.
But you could see this really odd outlier.
And this is pretty extreme.
You look at this to the top left of this graph and you're seeing small scale societies in the same top right trajectory on on the median as it expands.
But you're seeing it's almost a whole senior deviation above these developed global northern populations.
Yeah. So for people that are just listening, what he's talking about is basically there are small scale societies that are reporting a level of, I guess, satisfaction and contentment with life that is equal to the people of larger nations where people who make 50 looks like about between 50 and 100 dollars per capita are just as happy as people that make 100 thousand dollars per capita.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So three orders of magnitude difference.
That's a great summary, Lucas. And just to so we're on the same page here.
A small scale society is one that isn't engaged in the modern economy.
So the way that you make your your living is by actually searching out your calories or growing them in some cases.
So it just means that you're not engaged in the modern large scale post industrial system.
and this usually means you're off the beaten path and it usually means your community sizes are
relatively small at most probably villages of 150 which is as you guys know because you read the
book is about band level so um think of like if we're to scale this back to the Hadza the Hadza
have about 30 to 40 individuals in their camp and it looks like this number's been pretty stable since
early human evolution. If you look at the archaeological sites, the paleoanthropological
record, it's probably about the campsites that they look at the refuse, the amount of bones,
they can estimate probably between 25 and 30 adults at these campsites. So that's a very
stable number for our genus throughout its evolutionary history. And the thing is, what
What this slide is showing is that all things being equal, if you are given autonomy and the capacity to make your decisions at a local level with people that you know and have a ledger of record of repeated interaction with, you don't need immense amounts of wealth to be happy.
In fact, all things being equal, you're more happy.
Now, this begs the question, why is it that we no longer are able to dwell in a construct, in a social network, that obviously seems to have some sort of well-being enhancing component to it?
And so this slide right here I think is super important because we get bogged down.
We get really bogged down because of the tribe drive, because of coalitionary cognition.
We get bogged down in politics very easily.
We're very easily triggered by some very basic core drives.
And the purpose of this slide here is twofold to show a that.
In fact, most of our political inclinations are actually ancient drives and we'll disentangle that.
But also that there is a reason why we know it's very difficult for us to just go off into our own group and hang out and do something local.
and that's because since 10,000 years ago we have the agrarian super tribe as an innovation as soon
as you had 10,000 years ago to where groups of people that had tamed genes of animals and plants
could then build surpluses of them and those surpluses are really juicy energetic targets
for other groups and so what manifested was this basically post-agrarian super tribal construct
because if you could command the kinetic energy of a organized group of of males of fighting age
you could gobble up these little stacks of energy all over the map so now we're now we're leading
into software. This is now we're leading now we're leading directly into software.
OK, but I want to just make sure that I so for the people listening and so what we've got this
slide is there's four squares, two on top, two on bottom, equal size, and they are labeled on top
authoritarian agrarian super tribe. This is what David has been talking about. On the bottom is
libertarian in parentheses, paleolithic autonomy. So that would be, I assume, the opposite
of the agrarian super tribe.
And then on the left, you have left Paleolithic CPP.
What does CPP stand for?
That is Central Place Provisioning.
And so.
OK, so this is communism.
This is communism, man.
Here's where it gets.
So I'm going to.
Yeah, go ahead and finish it up.
Yeah.
And then so and then on the right, you've got Paleolithic Anti-Freeloader.
So this would be, you know, the merit based, I guess, where it's like, you know, this is mine.
You didn't earn it. You can't have it.
And then overlaying those four squares are two concentric circles, which I assume represent camp and camp and band.
But I'm not quite sure.
Yeah, that's just saying, where are you in the place?
Like how how extreme are you in in one or the other?
You could take any society and you could place them on this quadrant.
It would be a much better picture, overall descriptive picture than just the left or right, which we seem to obsess about.
But it's a little bit more complicated than that.
So, yes, I love how the left being Paleolithic central place provisioning.
That's where this if you're in the Hadza camp and you hunt successfully, say, a zebra, which happened when I was out there.
I was out there with there's a there's a couple things that have to happen. You have to bring the meat back and it is cut up and distributed by the women. They'll process it. And then the elders get what's called a peme meat. They get a special meat and then it's distributed relatively egalitarian amongst the group.
Now, this is this is where the instinct for communism occurs. But the trick is this really only works face to face. Right.
Explain egalitarian for people that don't know what big words mean.
Yeah.
Egalitarian means that there is no hierarchy of dominance or coercion that is overt.
So it's basically given out kind of equally.
That's, yeah, relatively equally.
It's very much everyone is each other's, you know, everyone is each other's social safety net, effectively.
Gotcha.
Now, on the other hand, the inverse of that is the right.
And it means that, okay, you're engaging in this contract where if a hunter is successful, they're going to bring back the meat and you're going to get a cut.
But if you don't in turn share, that is grounds for excommunication, right?
Because you're freeloading on the largesse of others.
So here we have it.
We have the modern right and the modern left.
Both are ancient drives that have been finely tuned over million years of human evolution.
And we can we confuse these things because of the scaling issue, the scaling problem.
Right. And so on the on the south here and the bottom of the axis, the libertarian axis, you can see here.
This is basically the the extreme social norm of autonomy in a small scale camp.
you cannot boss people around.
They're like the Hadza.
They're one of the most autonomous people I've ever met in my life.
You can't tell anybody to do anything.
And if you do, you're probably going to get the opposite result that you want.
It really is an opt-in system.
Everything's an opt-in system.
And the reason why they can do that, and I think we'll get to this later,
especially when we talk about the network state and scaling of the network state writ large,
is that they have an exit, a very fluid exit strategy.
If things aren't going well in the camp this season,
they can just go to a different camp in the band next season, right?
They can walk, and that's fine.
And this was the state of play until 10,000 years ago
where you get to the authoritarian agrarian super tribes.
And that's why Jason Lowry's thesis hit me like a bolt of lightning effectively
Because what you've got with softwar is a mechanism by which these small scale societies can now begin defending against the trajectory of the past 10,000 years, which has been agrarian supertribes, which has been in its modern instantiation, it's been the nation states.
Nation states. Yeah. Nation state. Exactly. Again, just I would just want to give the background on this. So there will be people that listen to this that don't know what software is. Software in Jason Lowry, look him up, fascinating individual, but it is power projection theory.
So basically it's saying that if you look at the history of conflict in the world, everything comes down to who can project the most power.
And if you measure it in terms of that for success, then Bitcoin is the most powerful weapon ever created because it projects an infinitely scalable power over zero space because it's digital.
um so yeah yeah um read the book software we that was our first thing that we actually did on this
podcast was software so this is why we're so interested in it was because this is where we
started um i apologize for for cutting you off i just i want to encourage people to read that book
because that's where we started um grant started doing these killer summaries and and really
engaged a lot of people no i'm i'm glad you did the summary it's a it really is a fascinating read
and uh it is actually a very anthropological read too he's got a full chapter too that that just
really um i sent him a message because we had been in some level of contact over over x and uh
i sent him a message letting him know that i i gave him a review of the book and i let him know
that it was likely a better anthropological summary of the past 10 000 years than most of
the graduate level work I see in my department. It was fantastic. And it was done. And the reason
why I loved it and why I thought it was especially unique is because it was done from the viewpoint
of a physicist, right? Where the core mechanics of watts and joules and energy were never forgotten.
They were always the foundation, which is what makes software such a compelling argument. And so
So if you've got, you know, human nature is all about incentive structures.
So if Bitcoin de-incentivizes, say, the attack on the individual to extract their resources because it's protected by these jewels that are connected to this encryption protocol,
then the same thing can apply for the sovereign community and so it's sort of the the the move
i'm making here is one of in the book we talk about how there is no such thing as a nuclear
family right like you plop a nuclear family out into siberia and in one generation it's extirpated
it's it's gone it's done it can't it cannot survive it cannot reproduce the same can be said
certainly by an individual. Any solo individual is nothing in evolutionary terms, is nothing
without a basal community that likely probably needs between just to survive population genetics
and bad luck, probably needs 500 individuals in a social network. That's like the bare minimum,
right? So if this can protect the individual, it can also protect the community.
And what I see here is a de-incentivization of the extraction of community-level resources that are disembodied, that are protected by encrypted power.
If communities can start leveraging this technology, they gain for the first time some level of purchase and defense against what has been the running narrative for the past 10,000 years, which is the nation, state, tribe, steamrolling local communities at will.
That's sort of why I love the software thesis.
Yeah, this is, I think, when you look at especially like the 60s and 70s, there were tons. And even even before that, there's always been experiments in small small scale communities.
You know, we're going to create this utopia. And a lot of them obviously fail because it's typically some crazy white guy yoga teacher that wants to have sex with everybody. And that doesn't work.
But the ones that persevere, they end up becoming steamrolled because they can't get around this problem of we have to have money and we have to use the nation state's money.
And that means that we're tied to them. And this is central to Balji's network state thesis, which is that because you have decentralized money, you can now start your own country and you can do it in a way that.
And previously, when everybody went to go start their own country, they were all kind of sink or swim individually. But now you've got literally hundreds of these network societies that are popping up. And by using Bitcoin as the base money of them, they are all raising each other up and they are all celebrating each other's successes to, I guess, to further proliferate.
So, yeah, that's that's totally right. And I just one more thought on software in particular, software in particular, is that.
I think. When we think of, you know, the common phrase in the Bitcoin community of once in a species innovation, I don't think that's an overstatement at all.
I agree. As you guys noted, you know, one of the central tenets of our tribal future was this exploration of the trust paradox.
And you guys, Grant, you did a fantastic job of describing it. Just to rehash here on the base layer, trying to solve the eternal question of who do I trust? Who do I invest in? Who do I engage in a pro-social reciprocal network with?
And for a billion years, that answer was genetics. It was kin. It was those with the closest DNA you distribute your energy towards. And then for those social species, relatively rare, there's maybe about a dozen on the planet that have the social networks and the brain size to be able to measure a ledger of record complex enough that they can actually take into account friendship.
It's basically a pro-social reciprocal relationship through space time between individuals, dyads.
And then the most recent innovation was tribes 300,000 years ago.
You have intersubjective belief networks leveraging symbols as a kind of like secret passcode to be able to say, ah, if this individual, despite the fact that I've never met them, if this individual is emitting this signal, then I can bootstrap cooperation with them.
And so where software really opens it up is the fact that in 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto innovated Bitcoin, we had for the first time in human history, a way to store currency and human energy by which no intersubjective belief network could manipulate for its own ends.
And that had never been the case for the entirety of the human condition beforehand.
And so I really do think it's, you know, if it's not Bitcoin, the concept itself is like, you know, Pandora's box is open.
And I have every faith for a lot of reasons that it's likely going to be Bitcoin.
But if it's not, we're just going to innovate our way back to it because it's too crucial an innovation for our species.
And it's really kind of existential.
And in the terms that you use here to tie together all of the evolutionary history, when we move from genetics to friends in this pyramid, you talk about a ledger of social relations.
Then when you get above that to the tribal level, you begin talking about tribal tokens.
And it's interesting, this language, this vocab of ledgers and tokens leading us up to Bitcoin, which is itself a ledger that nobody can corrupt, which nobody can manipulate.
And so just to tile that together is, I mean, what does tile that together is the notion of being able to trust that when you give value, you receive value back, what solves the problem of trust.
And so we need a ledger to account for that. Or like, how does money fit into this evolutionary history and how does it culminate in Bitcoin? You kind of described that already, but just to use that terminology of ledgers and tokens leading us up to Bitcoin.
yeah um you know i mean so what i see it as is basically a cryptographically protected
concentric circle right um you without this ledger that is incorruptible you're reducing
the likelihood that groups are going to be able to cooperate amongst themselves despite the fact
that they're strangers.
And so this is sort of, to me,
this is a prerequisite innovation
to our species actually making it
through the 21st century.
If we don't nail this now,
I think it reduces the probabilistic likelihood
of our species' survival.
I agree.
Yeah.
It's because the precipice of AI,
I think AI without Bitcoin destroys humanity
because you can just run amok
and there's no limiting factor.
Absolutely. That's where the God Kings, all of a sudden, when you can't even negotiate with the God Kings, because the God Kings are some sort of misaligned artificial intelligence, that's when you're really in trouble.
So you have to have a way to seal the back door such that the god kings that control the protocol cannot do whatever they want with it.
Because an AI would have every advantage in that scenario, especially since they're intrinsically code, right?
So they're intrinsically going to be able to manipulate this at a scale that no human, the worst intentioned human, could potentially use for its own gain.
That's why Bitcoin is like the ultimate defensive system for disembodied information, which is to Lowry's thesis is more and more as we evolve technologically as a species, more and more of the things that we prize are disembodied.
They're out there. They're digital. And so that's the fact that this is coming online right now is absolutely crucial and essential.
And for the sovereign community itself, more and more of the things that the sovereign community needs to survive is disembodied.
It's digital.
More of the resources that you can accumulate such that you can actually empower your sovereign community in the real world is disembodied.
So Bitcoin really allows that protective thicker wall, that proof of work encrypted thicker wall, cell wall, such that the community within can survive.
And that's been the story since cellular life and evolved one and a half billion years ago.
It's like you've got cell A, you've got cell B.
if cell A has a larger, thicker cell wall,
the cost of attack is higher.
And so predators in an environment,
they obey the laws of physics too.
Am I going to spend more joules per second
trying to pop this cell wall open
or am I going to take the easier target?
Every time, one out of one,
they're going to take the easier target.
All a cell wall is, is just the analogy of what we've been doing ever since. It's a fortress. It's a state. And now, hopefully, it's a network.
I want to set Grant up to ask a question, but before I do that, I want to give him a verbal high five because I'm just sitting here basking in what I think is the brilliance of connecting the ledgers and tokens of tribes with the ledger of tokens that is Bitcoin.
That's really artful.
I think that's really cool.
What I just wonder, like you talk about an increasing disembodiment in our current age, our willingness to accept value that is disembodied.
That brings us back to the friendship level of accounting for our relations with others, right?
Because the ledger we had at the friendship level is a disembodied ledger of prior interactions.
Maybe it's embodied in some sense.
I don't know.
I mean, I guess what do you think about that?
Like we have the friendship level where we have an internal ledger where we index social relations with other people and determine if we can trust them based on past relationships.
Then we move up to the tribal level where tokens have to become physical and embodied because we can no longer index them.
We have to rely on external signals.
And then Bitcoin brings us back to disembodiment, the internal ledger or an external ledger, but that is digital and disembodied.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Are these ledgers, like, are we returning to the friendship level, but allowing friendship with people who aren't friends through a disembodied ledger?
Yeah.
I want to hear you go.
I want to hear you start from the importance of the innovation of friendship.
Because reading that in your book, as a result of reading that, I reached out to all of the guys from my band.
Like, when I took off and started traveling the world, I had, you know, I kind of left that behind.
And you had a line in there.
You talk about the honor group of friends.
It's like five people.
And there's a line in there about how these people, there's a case to be made that they are actually irreplaceable.
That you get these five and you don't get more.
You don't get to move on and find more.
And so if you can kind of address Grant's question, but also sort of start from the top down of like the importance of and you mentioned it before, but the importance of the innovation of friendship, because you list it off, friendship, tribes and Bitcoin basically as like once in a once in a species type innovations.
Yeah. Well, just thinking about what Grant just said and then writing into what you were asking there, Lucas, I actually think, Grant, I'm going to push back a little bit.
Maybe there's a poetic metaphor to be made, but the one thing about friendship is that, to Lucas's point here, it is irreplaceable.
And once you get to the tribal level, you're piercing the bubble of human computational capacity.
And it's the limitations on human computational capacity that make a face-to-face relationship potentially irreplaceable.
And so I think Bitcoin, it's the perfection of how to scale trust infinitely, right?
As to where friendship is almost the perfection of how to embody trust in the meat space, within the limits of human computational capacity.
And so I think those things are both very distinct, but in a perfect world, all four levels, imagine a world where you have a majority of humanity's societies where that base layer is satisfied.
So you have strong kin networks that are intergenerational.
You have the wisdom of the elders.
You have the meaning and purpose driven stimuli of children around you.
Right.
So you've got this,
you've got this Paleolithic camp thing.
You have that base layer of genetics.
You also have deep honor group friendships that are built over,
not just a few interactions,
but,
Over a lifetime, right?
Of a ledger of record that at the end of your life, you prize above almost all other things because it's so beautiful and majestic and it required so much time to create.
And then if those things are healthy, the likelihood that your tribe, your coalition of these communities that are connected together, the likelihood that that is a good thing and a healthy thing, maybe net positive for human well-being and flourishing versus net negative, is much, much higher.
And Bitcoin just protects all this.
It's like the protocol that allows all of it to come full circle from the base layer on up.
It's like a positive feedback loop.
Yeah.
And speaking of circles, I mean, is this the basis of the concentric circle moral theory where you can privilege that genetic base layer and the friendship groups that you have over the more distant types of groups as long as you don't do it to the extent that you begin to harm those groups?
And then a Bitcoin then is going to enable a healthy interaction through these different levels so that we don harm others through our use of I guess bad ledgers in one sense Yeah no no totally It interesting because when you were talking about this previously Grant you mentioned something about you know utilitarian philosophy not being your bag
Yeah, right.
I totally agree.
It's the challenge of writing a book, right, where you're trying to make an argument
in multiple philosophical and scientific ways so you can reach the greatest audience possible.
And it just so happens that Peter Singer's Expanding Circle was one of the most influential books on the evolution of ethics since the 1980s.
Like it was just it was the one. Right. So I myself am more deontological, more principle based ethics myself.
That's and consequentialist even. But framing it in a utilitarian argument, I actually I felt was a nice exercise.
size. And yes, this is exactly that. It's instead of the concentric circle itself, it's the
cryptographically protected concentric circle, right? So like it's proof of work
protected concentric circle, which I think is what we've got to get towards as a species.
So proof of work protected concentric circle, are you imagining the proof of work occurring
metaphorically at different levels in different ways? Or are you talking like literally the proof
of Bitcoin.
Yeah, I think both work, right?
I think it works as a metaphor
and it works as literally
what needs to happen
to ensure that groups
can actually exercise
the principles of
a face-to-face relationship
without interference
from some top-down system.
Yeah.
Are you perceived as crazy
if you bring up
Jason Lowery's software thesis
in academic circles,
mainstream academic circles,
evolutionary anthropology,
or just has no one heard of it?
Like what's the reception, I guess?
Oh man, Grant, it's too new.
I mean, even Bitcoin itself,
you know, I think it's just too,
it's too novel a concept right now
for mainstream academia,
for it to be something that is like
addressed by a majority of the thinkers in the space.
I've met a few,
But it is something like Jason Lowry's thesis. I think it will be decades before it's appreciated at the scale that it likely should deserve to be appreciated at.
And Bitcoin, here's another thing, you know, I'll choose my words thoughtfully here, but academia is an institution that will say it's an old institution.
It's an established institution.
And it's benefited a lot and it's been cultivated and it's grown a lot from the state system.
It is dependent in many sort of critical ways on the state system. So it makes sense that it wouldn't be sort of opening Bitcoin or network state theory with open arms in so much that it's those things are not so much a threat, but they are the off ramps to the to the old system.
And so it makes sense that a lot of people would simply dismiss it without a lot of thought in academia.
Is the story you tell where the trust paradox is kind of one of the drivers of human evolution, especially considering that we're social species, is that much kind of a traditionally accepted evolutionary anthropological perspective that the problem of trust is core to how we've developed these different genetics, friendship, tribe as ways to keep surviving in the face of that or to resolve that paradox, that problem?
Is that much traditional story?
um it's a so a lot of people have thought about i would say altruism uh the evolution of altruism
it's a major major area of research in evolutionary anthropology uh i took a lot of that base research
and then tried to make a compelling narrative from it yeah and so that that that level of
sort of talking about it in terms of levels and then the intersubjective belief scale there had
been writers that had said things like it before but it was that that was sort of my contribution
to the the theory itself i gotta just get one more question just to talk about software a bit
more a key part of that for jason lowry is a description of abstract power hierarchies
the point at which um i think we scale to the tribal level and then we're able to have the god
king who can control people in this authoritarian way through maybe what you call the tyranny of the
cousins but a way that they can exercise power that's not kinetic through almost a sort of
symbolic mind control of the population is that present in mind uh lowry's description of the
abstract power based hierarchy to the extent that you could discuss in the context of what you're
talking about could you maybe rephrase that for me though just give me another yeah so lowry has
this idea that there are abstract power-based hierarchies that um we we evolved to a certain
point where people begin to use abstract power instead of kinetic power but the the abstract
power is always to a certain extent at the mercy of the kinetic power um but the abstract power
is scalable more quickly and so it kind of outstrips the kinetic power and we get these
God beings who can then organize vast societies around an ideology that people kind of subjugate themselves to because they believe themselves to fit into some sort of divine hierarchy or something like that.
Maybe that's just a description of ideology in the context of your book that occurs at the tribal level.
Yeah, no, no, no. Okay. So I don't think it's any accident that 300,000 years ago is when we see the first paleoanthropological evidence for the tribe drive scaling across our species. That's when anatomically modern humans come on the scene.
incidentally it's when we first see the paleoanthropological evidence for us
trading with thems we know that because the trade networks start going well beyond the home range of
say 30 50 kilometers you start seeing signature um ochre paint from one type of rock that's 200
kilometers away end up in a site 200 kilometers north so there's definitely an us versus them
network and that's when you start to see what you're talking about i think at scale so when i
think of the abstract power arcades i think around 300 000 years ago this is when you had enough
symbolic capacity as homo sapiens to begin really leveraging this for survival and reproduction
output. So remember we had cell A and we had cell B, right? Just simple adaptation. Cell A has a
little bit of a thicker wall. Let's run with that same analogy. You have camp or band or tribe A,
and you have camp, band, or tribe B.
And because of natural selection,
you have in camp A a predisposition.
This is oversimplifying it,
but you have a predisposition for, say,
like a God gene or a spirit gene,
something like this.
Something that gives them a little bit more
of an inclination to wield the symbolic
in a way that coordinates the atoms in the cell
in a way that maximizes control and predictability in its environment.
And so imagine what happens once that capacity reaches critical mass in tribe A,
and then it collides with tribe B.
The adaptive benefits for tribe A being able to wield the abstract
to coordinate human behavior is so obvious.
Especially if you rob that capacity in one group of otherwise equally powered humans.
One is like, you know, a rugby team that showed up for practice and they've been doing it for a week.
The other is like the all blacks pulling off the haka before and like sending, you know, shivers of terror in their opponents.
Because all the haka is, is this like execution of extreme coordination as power force projection.
Right. And when I see and I when I see the power of, say, religion or ideology to co-op symbols at this level, it really is that what you're getting at.
It's this it's this almost this deterrent power projection.
It's saying these are the lots that we can summon.
Yeah. As force projection for our coalition.
You better not fuck with us. Yeah.
And I think it's around 300,000 years ago at the advent of not only the coalitionary cognition of the tribe tribe, but of anatomically modern humans, where you start seeing the complexity of cultures virgin to the point where by the time 10,000 years ago rolls onto the scene and you get these stacks of calories everywhere being, you know, coalesced by these different groups.
all the things that you need all the culture and all the biological adaptations that you need
to just start dominating and creating empire all that all that raw materials there
just waiting to be extracted by use of symbolic and kinetic energy yeah to organize and minimize
entropy and therefore be able to impart greater greater direct power upon anything outside yeah
Yeah. And so this is a question I actually have for you guys. So I wonder a lot about spirituality and about religion. And with that thought experiment that we just ran through, right?
Do you think that's a plausible explanation for why we are the spiritual animals that we are? Or do you think there has to be, you know, something else?
so the the question is i understand it is there an evolutionary reason why we're religious instead
of a metaphysical reason why we're religious is it just the story of we evolved the capacity to
be religious because it enables us to bind us together and makes us a stronger tribe to defeat
other tribes and so those types of tribes tend to survive proliferate their genes or is there a
corresponding metaphysical reality that justifies that impulse that we're religious because there is
a god not we invent a god because that makes us more powerful and unites us and is that kind of
the was that that's the gist that's the gist yeah yeah that's a big question i was like lucas go
first so he can yeah i don't i don't think they're mutually exclusive i think there are evolutionary
benefits to aligning behind religion. Um, just like you said, like it, you know, it brings people
together. It gets them effectively just from a grand scale, it minimizes entropy and it directs
power and directs energy towards a, towards a purpose. Um, but from the metaphysical side,
anybody who's touched psychedelics is going to tell you that there's something bigger. Um,
And you don't even have to do that, you know, meditation and, you know, even certain forms of vigorous exercise and fasting, you know, like there is for people who seek it by challenging.
for people who seek it by being courageous enough to put themselves in a situation
that may allow them, you know, whether that courage is to not eat for eight days or that
courage is to sit in silence for 11 or that courage is to run 60 miles or that courage
is to take six grams of psilocybin.
Any of those things, if you're brave enough to do that,
or if you're desperate enough to do that,
if you're hurt enough spiritually that you seek relief,
that you're willing to go down those paths,
then I think that you are encountered
with something that is greater than what appears in front of your eyes on a daily basis.
I, yeah, I don't think that they're mutually exclusive.
I think that one probably exists because of the other.
But yeah, I, yeah, like I said, like I think anybody who's touched psychedelics is gonna
is going to tell you that there's something bigger than me.
So I don't know.
Yeah, that would be my answer.
I don't think you even have to touch psychedelics.
I think anybody who is human recognizes at some point
that they have a subjective viewpoint upon the world
that is not reducible to any other fact about the world.
This is Thomas Nagel's idea in his essay,
what it is to be a bat, something like that,
that there is a specific type of bat-like experience that is inaccessible to humans.
But the other, the obverse to that is like every human's point of view is sui generis,
is unique to them.
It's not replicable in terms of mathematics or any sort of way
because it's qualitative rather than quantitative.
Humans bring a qualitative perception of the world to the world.
And I just think that that, like the fire of consciousness,
wherever that lights in evolutionary history, that's the religious moment, even though like the formalization of tribes as religions is like a sociological fact, that qualitative fact of the birth of consciousness, wherever that occurs, that's the divine moment.
And I think we stimulate that with like psychedelics now because that like makes the subjective into this monistic experience where everything is united, like unites our subjectivity with an objectivity.
And so we bring the divine and collapse it into ourself.
Yeah, a oneness.
Right.
But that's yeah.
No, that is gorgeous, guys.
This is super well put.
You got to answer the question.
We want to hear it with us too.
Hey, there's a ton of overlap in our perspective, actually.
And it's interesting because this was something I could not wait to talk about when I was watching you guys sort of attempt to disentangle perhaps where my starting assumptions were.
Like in a book like Our Tribal Future, you kind of have to bring the scientific reductionist to the table when you're writing about this stuff.
But you guys, you caught the breadcrumbs when I think, Grant, you were like, yeah, he talks about psilocybin a little bit.
And it's a very important, I would say, milestone in my life.
One of all things, my fundamentalist father of 25 years was the one who encouraged me to take psilocybin because on one of his, he loves ancient Roman history.
And his favorite Roman emperor is Hadrian.
And Hadrian was a Grecofile.
And he participated in what's called the ancient Eleusinian mysteries.
And my dad admired Hadrian so much.
he actually did mushrooms without my knowledge at all.
And then he called me up and said,
David, I have something that you have to try.
And I was like, super.
I hadn't looked into it at all.
This is back in 2017.
Hadn't looked into it at all.
And this is when I got my job at the University of Toronto.
I was like, oh, this is a perfect milestone.
There's a turning of the page, you know?
I think I'm going to give this a shot,
especially after looking at all the John Hopkins studies
that showed so many psychological benefits.
And so I took that five grams and it,
without going into extreme detail,
it obliterated my scientific reductionism, that's for sure.
It was an alternate form of consciousness.
And I realized if consciousness,
this if my base starting first principles assumption about reality are this wrong what
else am i wrong about and it just it just like a lightning bolt cleared my system of the epistemic
hubris that had been sort of baked into it by years of education and getting your phd thinking
you know something and then all of a sudden you're you're like oh wait i was so so fundamentally
in the dark about this component of reality and so that was that was a major eye-opening experience
for me and it married i think the the kinds of concepts that you both are talking about together
to where at one point beforehand, I would have thought, well, Tribe A, clearly religion, religiosity and spirituality is the outcropping, an emergent property of Tribe A defeating Tribe B over space time in East Africa, running a thousand simulations over and over again.
And then after that, it very much all of a sudden opened up.
Well, it's not mutually exclusive.
these things can totally be um they can they can be happening at the same time
and i should just be a little bit more humble about it and sort of uh go in eyes open and this
brings me to another another interesting um point that you brought up grant in the last podcast and
that's um what kind of what what kind of uh if you're trying to camp craft yeah what kind of
systems do you use to instill an identity amongst your camp crafters or your group,
whatever group you care about, whatever group you want to help improve and be a part of.
So my, you know, talking about a psilocybin experience is a deeply personal thing,
as you guys probably know.
Well, I'll just say this.
there was a field season in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I got to work with the Huichal. They're
called the Viveratica. They're the peyote people, more colloquially. And I mean, you go up and I
just had this, my first experience, and you go up into this super high altitude drive, eight,
But eight, it was like an eight-hour drive from Mexico City through cartel country to get up there because that's where these people survived.
You survived whenever you got, you know, you had Spanish come in and any indigenous people that weren't conquered immediately go up.
Yeah.
Lucas, were you going to say something?
I was just these are the people that it was like, this is how I think this is how psychedelics came into the American mainstream consciousness.
Right. Aren't these the people that it was like in 1956 something?
I don't know. Some maybe like banker or something from New York City went there and had the experience.
And then there was an article written about him and like Time magazine or something like that.
I think that's these people. Right.
Yeah, it might be. I think that's right.
And it wouldn't surprise me at all because, you know, they have they have.
So the reason I'm bringing this up is because they have this beautiful syncretism.
The term syncretism just means it has co-opted.
It's a co-option of different ideologies into a new emergent ideology.
And humans just automatically do this.
Yeah.
Anytime there is intersubjective belief networks that have any prolonged contact, syncretism occurs as an outcropping.
Right.
and they're a perfect example
so the Huichal
they are peyote people
the Mata Akame
the shaman
he is a very
he, I want to say
he or she but it's actually almost always
a he, he is a
very important component
of their day to day
camp life but even more so
as a sort of a kind of
community aligner
when somebody does when somebody's going through a major change in their life or if they've done
something wrong the way they make amends is they go on the peyote deer hunt and so you go with the
it's usually a group of eight to twelve and it's a 40 mile hike through the desert at the very end
you shoot an arrow symbolically because there's no more deer there but they back in the day it was
a deer hunt but they shoot the arrow into the peyote they gather it and then they all take peyote
around the fire everyone's vision is sort of like whatever it doesn't have much spiritual weight but
the vision of the marakame is sort of interpretive of what the group needs to do to like get better
right and so i this was the culture i'd been around for a while and one of the the um artifacts i took
back with me was the god's eye and it's a cross it's straight up a christian cross but it's got
little points of different colored cloth on the tips of the cross. And then in the center,
it's diamonds, concentric diamonds that have different meanings. So like the Tatevari,
the grandfather fire, meaning wherever you have the grandfather fire, you're home. And so it means
that a Huachal can summon their home anytime they make a grandfather fire. And then there's light
and dark and other elements that encircle the center of this cross.
I got one of these just because I thought it was really, really cool.
And then I find myself a few years later in the Chihuahuan Desert with two of my honor group.
And I'm, you know, six grams of psilocybin in.
I'm literally surfing the desert at this point.
and I'd been, I'd held the God's eye in my left hand from the very beginning.
I just don't know why.
It was just sort of like something I was compelled to do.
I felt like there was a deep meaning and resonance to this item.
And at the, at, at a peak moment, it just beams up right in front of me.
And I felt like this beam of energy smoked me into the ground and I hit the ground.
and I just heard uh I the main one question that I'd been trying to figure out is like
how how do I how do I communicate how do I communicate
the message of the tribe drive to help fulfill people's lives how do I communicate cat crafting
like how do you do that how do you use it what's the magic incantation to help people realize what
that is and i just heard in my mind like i was on the ground totally prostrate and it was
service is not slavery it's it's it's beauty and to this day that item the reason i bring this up
grant this this item like holds an it is one of my most precious items i whenever i'm riding it's
right there beaming on me right and that i've integrated into a lot of the rituals that our
camp has together and that is what i mean by uh syncretism yeah being a very powerful way
especially in the context of co-creation yeah so it's it's not just me like coming up with a ritual
it's a co-creation right and that act of co-creation invests people's identity into the
ritual itself and and it has this really massive leveraging component to it psychologically yeah
that that idea of syncretism really does address one of the not a concern but just one of the things
as we were zuka and i were talking to that i brought up that it can seem like a pillaging of
other traditions to just draw strange and esoteric symbols from them as if the very fact that they
were esoteric and exotic was some way going to make us richer but not as just the practice of
syncretism as incorporating them into your own developing faith and having
powerful first person experiences with those things.
I mean, that makes perfect sense.
And it's such a beautiful sentiment.
And I wonder if you could build from that.
What about service is not slavery?
Could you, I guess, repeat that phrase?
And then how does that describe camp crafting for you?
Let's go from that.
Well, so if you've ever done, and this is funny,
And I really want to get Lucas's perspective also on how he served at the network school, because when when both those talks, Lucas, independently afterwards.
And I had I had a slide up there with like Gandalf and Aragorn.
And I was like, I know who Aragorn is like that's Balaji.
Right.
It's like you guys have a shaman.
Do you guys like have anybody concerned about sort of the spiritual health of your group?
You know, maybe like when you put on the network school t-shirt or something, there's somebody there to be like, this is important and special.
And independently, they came to me and they're like, okay, so this is Guy Lucas.
And it happened multiple times.
So that was one of the reasons I was super excited about meeting you and continuing the conversation further.
And so to get to your point, yeah, the...
It's co-creation and camp crafting is hard work.
It's what I call it's human work, right?
It's human work.
There's never a day off in especially the first year of our camp when we were really co-located and just trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of it all.
I mean, the number of just like camp meetings you have, it's a lot.
And you have to negotiate through a lot.
And then a creation of a good ritual, that's hard work, right?
That is like service.
That's true service.
But it's so meaningful and rewarding.
Right now, my wife and I are, we will often, you know, when you kind of like, there's a little bit of silence for a while and you fall back on some themes that you've been exploring together.
We'll fall back on, well, now we have a two-year-old and we found out last week we're going to have another boy coming in April as well.
Nice.
And, you know, it's one of the things that we cannot wait to do as an act of service is a coming of age ceremony to create one, not not just rely on, you know, other previous traditions of it, but to really let them know that now you are an adult of our camp.
And that means something.
There's a now you're in a new life history stage.
You're now a functioning member of our group.
And that comes with great power, great responsibility.
My wife, who is Southeast Asian, when she came here to Canada and as she she grew up, her parents, they didn't have any equivalent for, you know, like a sweet 16.
And unfortunately, the sweet 16 is sort of died off as a practice in North America.
And she was like, you know, I I didn't even know when I was a woman from a girl.
It was just like all of a sudden one day guys are spending more, they're paying more attention to me.
And there's like a signal to their attention that I'm starting to understand, but still is strange.
And so she was like, I would, I cannot wait to create something with the camp, with the group that signifies that, look, you're going from girl to woman now.
Or you're going from boy to man.
Something like that, right? Where you're actually, the act of service is creating the foundation by which you can pour your identity into the group.
yeah i just kind of reflected on that that
thinking about for myself i don't think i had really like a defining kind of coming of age i
think for a lot of guys it's like um their dad gives them a beer that's like now you know okay
you can drink with me now. Now we're equals. Um, that wasn't mine. Um, I don't know. Yeah.
The quinceanera is on the rise. Um, there's a lot of those, you know, you see, you see a lot of those
around. And it's almost like legalistic. Now you get your driver's license, you get the right to
vote. It's like these legal things that demarcate you as a citizen, but it isn't a coming into
manhood or a reception of yourself as like, you know, something more than a legal object or
something like which is why we're struggling so much because nobody's driving anymore and nobody
votes like young people don't vote and people you know young fewer people are waiting longer and
longer to get a driver's license or just not doing it at all yeah um to go back okay so to talk about
the network school um i i wanted to yeah i i'm glad you brought that up um the air because i wasn't
sure of like, when you spoke at the network school, seven people reached out to me independently.
Jake and Juba and Monasa and Jackson, and I can't remember who else, but all of these
individuals, and they all said the exact same thing about the, you know, the shaman. And I was
really, you know, obviously really honored. That's really just like I got, when you were talking
about it just now i got chills just thinking about those people um but um i hadn't understood
any of the other roles so you apparently so there's a you're talking about gandalf and and
aragon are there other are there other so uh there's like the hunter is that kind of what he
is uh or the i would i would use form you know for for a say the hadsa for example there there would
be leadership is is strong a strong word because it's a it's leadership based on
not it's basically prestige hierarchy like in what context is this person the most reliable
for this thing and it can oftentimes that can move it can be a moving target um but it's almost
never in the context of hunter-gatherers almost never by dominance or trying to overtly exert
power now on the other hand though you do have a a shaman which is i define a shaman as a pro-social
force a pro-social mediator of the spiritual health of the community uh a witch would be the
inverse of that okay a witch or a wizard which uses their powers for malevolence which totally
happens trust me it totally happens because you can weaponize anything you can weaponize
spirituality um very easily especially since it really taps in deeply into the human psyche so
So even if it's not objectively real, it can have objective effects on people through power of placebo and nocebo.
So, yeah.
So there's this intersection of like your approach to camp crafting and the network school, network state.
I mean, they're the same thing.
It's like, you know, we're going to get together with an intentional community, people that have the same values.
um what so do you feel that spirituality or maybe not religion but some some form of like
spirituality is vital to the success of of that type of an organism or you know that that type of
a group of people because I, I think, I think it is. I think that, I think that, um, you know,
if, if I create a, if I create a camp, then I think, you know, psychedelics or spirituality or
pursuit of, um, just pursuit of peace, I think, um, of, you know, psychological peace, I think is,
vital in order to keep that together. But what role do you see that playing in,
in the success and failure of, because you've, you've studied a lot of these different groups.
Yeah. So it depends, I think, on how we define spirituality. Is it, is the act of say,
coming together in a circle that's lit by firelight, where we all come and we focus our
energy on one thing, utter a few shared words together, like, is that inherently spiritual?
And if that's, if that's the, if it's the affirmative, then yes, it's a prerequisite,
right?
Anything beyond that though?
I'm, I don't know.
I'm, I'm open, but would you need say a religious scaffolding as a requirement for a, I guess
for a network school or a network state to survive?
I don't think so.
I think you would just need a strong identity.
But here's where it gets really hard to disentangle
is a lot of the ways that you make a strong identity
rely on things that are inherently have been ways
that you communicate spirituality.
So a ritual is like a standard,
it's a way to standardize the norms
and the sacred symbols of your group across the population.
That you have to have.
You won't have a good thriving group without that.
So when I think about this in the context of the network school,
it doesn't have to be mass on Sunday.
It can be something pretty modest.
I love the fact that the network school is boiled down into very simple sacred values, the learn, burn, earn, right?
So simple, so easy to communicate.
Those are the values that we adhere to.
And at least one of them can be done and levered communally.
This is something that Jackson and I talked about at some length.
The fact that you've got the burn component.
component physically doing hard things with a group of strangers will bring you closer to them
what if you can just introduce a little ritual to it right like now we're doing you you you create a
spiritual scaffolding to some of these events then you're you're on to something um where i think it
could probably benefit the most is as far as and i don't i don't know what when you went lucas but
When I was there, there was about 250 people in that month's cohort.
Okay.
And you've got sort of like two tiers.
You've got the long-termers and then the people who are like experimenting and floating in, maybe floating in and out.
Right And so I think that thinking back on it after I had some time to reflect the moment that you go from someone who bouncing in to a long termer I think that a super important and crucial decision to like say oh I actually gonna invest some of myself into this project
this network school, potentially network state project.
At that moment, having a spiritually laced ritual
of some kind that standardize the values
and the symbols of the group,
that's when you can introduce it.
And that's when it would probably have its most power
Because you need to have that moment where you're them until you're an us.
But you need something to let you know that you're an us.
And oftentimes what that ends up manifesting as is something very, very spiritual, to your point.
Yeah.
So I was there at the beginning of V2, so March 1.
And then I left like six days before you got there.
Oh, man, no way.
Yeah.
So my grandmother went into hospice and my dad wasn't doing it.
Right.
So I came back to the state.
Yeah.
So I literally I was I was really bummed out about that.
The long term program, you're right.
Like it created such a cohesiveness and such a.
Really like an in group, it created an in group within the group of network school people.
That was really important.
talking about the kind of the spiritual aspect of doing hard things together.
I've been thinking about this just kind of in my own, uh,
with the way that I look at the world right now. And I think that the,
I think we're kind of seeing like a rise of individual type sports,
rock climbing, mountain biking, you know, weight, powerlifting, weightlifting, CrossFit, you know,
these are all like very individual things. And when I think about, like you think about
the power of team sports and then the, all of the rituals that are involved in football,
There's the hub, right?
You know, and there's, you know, you clap and you break and you're swaying on the sidelines.
You know, all of these little things that are just like these little tokens and these little symbols of togetherness and spiritualness.
I genuinely worry about that because I think about, I got into weightlifting.
I really loved it.
And I thought it was great.
But the thing about weightlifting is that when you have a bad day, you have a bad day.
But when you're playing baseball or you're playing basketball, you can have a bad day and still win.
And that can be really, that can really change your view of yourself where you understand that, yes, there is a greater purpose.
And the greater purpose is to come together and win.
And if I had a bad day and we won, did I actually have a bad day?
I didn't.
You know, like we accomplished something together.
So I'm really happy to see like at the network school, there's a growing cohort of like basketball players and soccer where we have this team sport approach.
That's interesting, I think, that you can find kind of a spiritual aspect in that that you think maybe doesn't require religion, maybe doesn't require to have a joint Christianity or something like that.
Yeah, to that point, one of my most precious things,
social networks is a we'll call it anthropologically a sodality it's basically just a club of best
friends that have known each other for in some instances um over three decades so it it started
originally in the church and we had this like cauldron of top-down authoritarian system and we
rebelled against it and that that pressure we didn't like at the time but i'm so grateful for
that pressure because it forged this in-group bond that has transcended like space time and we
started using syncretism to leverage our own little in-group identity we had nickname we have
nicknames we had rituals we had induction like it's all i look back at it i'm like god we were
just dumb little apes going through the program that was already baked into our dna like this is
how we figure out how to become
from boys to men.
And the attraction of
the bonds that we
had has grown into
something super beautiful.
It's like one of my most prized
social possessions now. Every
year we get together and
we go out to a...
Depends on what the year is and
who's running the show. But we have a club
reunion and we're using
all this stuff.
And...
And it's incredible how powerful it is.
And it's incredible how desperate, especially men are, to find something like this.
I know for a fact, like, multiple guys in our group have reached out to me independently and been like, you know, if it wasn't for this group, I might have killed myself.
Like, I just, there was just something, there was something going off and wrong.
And then there was a hole that this filled just by way of going, you know, just being part of it. And it's really, really powerful.
What about people that find themselves without that sodality or having lost it from their childhood or teenage years?
Say that we dropped you into a random town, Kansas City, somewhere in the Midwest.
You have in the United States, suburbia, anime, all of these like loneliness epidemic.
What would you do to or how might one go about recreating a sodality or finding that if they had to be like, I'm missing this.
I don't have it.
I can't resurrect it necessarily.
What steps did they take to get that?
Gosh, now that I'm going to go back on all the things I said about syncretism and totally lean into what you were saying.
If I were starting from scratch, I would totally leverage all the preexisting, the old, old system.
I would probably start going to church immediately.
If I had no community, what a great way to like bootstrap that function.
So I would probably start going to church.
I would look for any physical outlet I potentially could for to find a group of like minded guys that I could at least rely on to.
To to be my sounding board.
Yeah.
Through the challenges of, you know, the life of a homo sapien.
And this goes both ways, like male, female.
It would be the exact same advice.
It just might be a different pathway.
But the end goal would be the same, to find a trusted network.
And for guys, that's probably going to be something relatively along the lines of maybe a softball group or weightlifting together or something like that.
Why BJJ is so popular.
BJJ.
Yeah, BJJ would be fantastic.
Muay Thai, any sort of MMA.
uh the one that the one that was it it almost overloaded my my friend's system it was so
successful was the society for creative anachronism the medieval martial art yeah because it's got i
mean if you've if you know anything about it when i went to my first pensick it's basically just
the tribe drive on steroids the whole thing like you're set up in a medieval camp the medieval camp
has you know all these flags denoting your your camp identity you just exercise the tribe drive
for two weeks nonstop at this event called Penzik.
20,000 people come, about 1,000 heavy fighters march on a field
and beat the ever-living crap out of each other for three or four days.
And it's just this really awesome exercise of ceremony, ritual,
physical exertion, mental, spiritual challenge.
And it makes, I mean, I just saw every year it's like just people
just becoming best friends, best friends, best friends.
It taps into their real lives.
so much so that they many people dedicate their entire life to the sport as opposed to they call
they call the actual real life that most of us enjoy day to day they call that mundane life
there's an actual term for it um so yeah yeah it's no yeah that's i mean such excellent advice
to find a pre-existing community or tradition church and then also to find a hard experience
something physical as you were saying that i was thinking about another type of community that maybe
some of our listeners you know we bitcoin study sessions we're bitcoiners a lot of us and that in
itself is kind of an ideology now and it's something that if you are a bitcoiner for a
certain amount of time people have passed through certain stages they may have had what you know
like the shit coiner stage where they weren't focused they didn't understand bitcoin so they
lost money gambling on different types of tokens and then they have the stage where they learn about
the nature of the financial the monetary system then they have the stage and this is we talked to
a guy named Sal Pineda. He's a Bitcoiner and he's really talking about how Bitcoiners need to
be honest with the pain that they feel that underlies a lot of their motivation to get into
Bitcoin, which is having been financially exploited by a system they don't understand.
So it's like a shared communal sense of pain too that people are trying to redress and a
redemption they're trying to seek. I don't know. That's beautiful. Yeah. I don't know if you think
that like those types of ideological communities we kind of find in seemingly niche internet
things can realize in
meet space as well.
I'll update what I said
by adding, and I would also
go to the local Bitcoin meetup.
The most, for real,
one of the
things that I personally took away from going
to the network school for that
it was three days, three day
period, four day, three night.
It was the
number of authentic
deep conversations I had
was
an order of magnitude more than my day-to-day
and going to a place where those conversations
should be had daily.
It was incredible.
And I struggle with it because I'm like,
how much of it was our tribal ideological alignment
that made us already predisposed
to cooperating with each other?
Would a communist feel the same way
going to a communist party meetup, right?
They probably do.
They probably get the same dopaminergic.
Oh my God.
These homo sapiens think exactly the way I think that's all this is, right?
It's just tapping into the same root subsystem, just looking for community at the end of the
day.
Um, but there was another thing.
This brings up a really good topic guys.
And I wanted to explore this.
Lucas, you said something that blew my mind at the end of the last or at the very beginning
of the last podcast, you said that.
the experience during the book it got you to redefine or reconsider your identity as a bitcoiner
yeah which was so profound my i like slapped my wife's leg i was like oh my god that's incredible
and i struggle with this one a lot like in my bitcoiner chat with my boys i'm like guys remember
you know because when number goes up it's like you know apes beating chests you know it's like
oh this is awesome it's like guys we're as i just i'm here to be the friendly reminder that
because we're actually enjoying identifying as bitcoiners our ability to see veridical truth
is compromised and so one of the one of the best ways you can improve your purchase on reality
is to remove the identity structure from the thing you're trying to analyze do analysis on
which is fascinating because lucas that move writes in and of itself that move of dia identifying
as a bitcoiner which i i have effect i have effectively done with all ideal ideologies in
my life because i find it unuseful so i don't if my feet were held to the fire i don't personally
identify as a bitcoiner because then i know my capacity to measure what's going on is reduced
but god do i love the space and i love people i love the people who've been thinking in this
face right um so do you think then how do you feel about that decision yeah and
how could we springboard that idea to talk about metatrib because that was a metatribal move
you literally were you said i am going to shed this identity in favor of uncertainty
I'm going to be a little bit more less tied to this identity such that I'll be able to see the space more clearly.
And so I just thought I would love to hear your response on that.
So I think that letting go of being a Bitcoiner and embracing being a truth seeker is maybe the proper perspective.
perspective, much like letting go of, um, being a Christian and instead embracing someone who is
pursuing love, um, might be kind of the right or kind of a useful thing to do. Um, so to leave
behind like I just realized like how limiting being someone who defines themselves as a Bitcoiner
is because it's superseding everything else it's it's just like you know there's so many things
to life there are relationships and there is health and there is spirituality and there is
sleep and there's finances and there's doing your chores and you know mowing the grass and
all of these different buckets and bitcoiner is just like looking at that financial part of it
and going i've got that right and you can't um you can't it's just one slice of the pie
um you can't and and and what it should do i think is give you give you purchase enough on
the cliff that you've been dangling off of you know being pushed off of we talked about this you
know we all sal panada talks about that we all seem to have this somewhat like hidden shame and
it's like a victim of, uh, it's like having been victimized at being financially raped by a
extractive system, uh, that we all share this victim shame of being abused and not understanding
it. Um, and, and coming out of that in order to find other victims that we can then, um, move on
with. But if you just keep this identity of being a Bitcoiner, it's like keeping the identity of
being a rape victim. And you're not, what you're doing is you're focusing on the pain and you're
focusing on the trauma. And in all actuality, what you really want to do is you want to be able to
just grow from that. And you want to be able to let that part of the thing that once defined you
to let that be in the past and to move on and to grow and become more from that, I think is,
is what I, yeah. So it really like, it got me to thinking like, what, what is important to me,
you know, to, to be a friend, to be a brother, to be a bandmate, to be a musician,
to be an educator, to be a shaman or a teacher.
You know, these things are far more important than what I now,
I think of like people who identify as Bitcoiners.
There is, and credit to Sal Pineda for opening my eyes to this,
because I wouldn't have gotten there without it.
But to be able to to recognize that, you know, identifying as a bitcoiner is a lot like identifying as a victim of trauma and a victim of, you know, and to just to just maintain that identity is to continuously hold that shame.
And you want to be able to let go of that shame because that's – and by the way, that's psychedelics for you is that it allows you to shed that shame.
It allows you to move on and move forward without that.
Yeah.
The trick here is realizing that identity is an illusion.
It's actually not real.
It's a shared hallucination.
and it's remarkable given that that is objectively the case how powerful it is
I here I'm gonna I think that's so beautiful truth maximal truth seeking as the end goal
and identifying as a maximal truth seeker I think that that is a very very powerful move
I wonder, and this is the one thing I worry about, does something like a Bitcoin, does it need almost a religious substrate around it to ensure its survival long term?
So like, you know, Michael Saylor in 2020 said, Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, eating on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.
like that is biblical in its in the way it is worded and that's the kind of thing that if you
if you get like a cluster of homo sapiens buying into that to the level that they think which is
so you know the story of satoshi nakamoto is compelling in and of itself there's this
you know it's it's messianic in turn it very easily um used in that in that framing
that's how you get like stable oxide mining being sent into space and ensure that bitcoin you know
survives the heat death of the universe you need people that believe in it so much that they're
willing to put everything on the line for it so in a way i'm like i'm wondering oh maybe do we use
the you know do we use the tribe drive to bootstrap bitcoin survival odds it's something i struggle
with or do we just go for maximal truth seeking it enables so much you know the the theological
component that you know the theological bitcoin path is really fascinating and if you listen to
michael saylor's interview with jordan pearson he goes he goes deeper into that um and really
kind of talks more about his spiritual side um you know obviously without um without compromising
his ability to communicate with people who don't align with that.
And it's like on a conversation with Natalie Smolenski, she's an anthropologist as well.
She wrote an essay towards an anthropology of money.
He also is deeply embedded in the study of the sacred from an anthropological perspective.
And maybe it's not Bitcoin.
It's any sort of monetary system is based on the transfer of value through time.
And it kind of goes back to these ancient notions of sacrifice.
And like Swalinski does a really good job of talking about this. I couldn't offhand recount her theory or her discussion of maybe how, again, value transfer itself, value preservation might have really deep roots in notions like sacrifice that are inherently religious.
So it's not just that Bitcoin needs to bootstrap through a theological phase of conviction, but that any sort of monetization is going to require us to transfer our beliefs from one thing of value to another thing having value.
And that's going to require, again, a belief system that really relies on a notion of the sacred or something like that.
Yeah. David, so you asked me this question about, you know, kind of disintegrating my belief as a Bitcoiner in order to accept something of a larger identity.
And then you wiped clean the idea that I have an identity, right? It's this short hallucination.
um there were some questions that i had just like this is this is more like small scale but like
at a camp level um and you can talk specifically about your camp or you can talk kind of in the
general theme i had questions about like what what direction do we take or is there like um
is there like a, like what role does, what role does alcohol play? What role does physical fitness
play? Um, what role, like, where are we with like romantic relationships? Are they, um, are they
couples? Are they, you know, is this going to be the throuple polygamy type thing? Like, is there a,
is there an anthropological basis for that? Um, well, like, because I've, I've, I've read about,
you know, there's, uh, what was the book? Um, the, the man from the man from Mars. Um,
it's, it's on apologies. Uh, it's on apologies, like recommended reading. Uh, but anyways,
It's like the guy comes from Mars and he teaches all the people the Martian ways.
And then he becomes.
Stranger in a strange land.
Yeah.
Stranger in a strange land.
Right.
So you read that book and like he basically ends up turning everything into an orgy.
Yeah.
And they.
When was that book written?
It was 1960.
Things were happening, dude.
Things were happening.
They outlawed psychedelics.
Yeah, for sure.
They were having too much of an impact.
And then we got shitty music and ugly cars.
Yeah.
Lucas, you're hitting on topics that could eat independently be explored in other podcasts.
I'll try and hit my best thoughts on each of them.
The alcohol thing, it's interesting you brought that up.
It's one that as somebody who grew up, at least during my core developmental years in greater Appalachia, southern Indiana,
Um, you know, the, the alcohol culture there is very strong.
And so we like, as, as the way I've landed on it now, because I love a good whiskey.
I love a good beer.
And I've always found that these things enhance pro-sociality until they don't.
Right.
and uh where i've landed on that is alcohol is great to use perhaps in as a as a ritual signifier
of something that important that has happened not to use as a crutch or as a medication but like
lucas grant we meet each other in meat space right i the act of us pouring a pint into the glass
sitting face to face there is some sort of almost sacred bubble yeah that is wrapping around us now
we're in a circle of trust now we can we can take the mundane universe that is all around us and all
the things that have been distracted us and maybe we can just engage in each other totally non-distracted
for a while incidentally why i love cigars as well um you like that cigar and it's like a 45
minute timer of whoever your interlocutor is you've given them that space that time and also
for me because i love nicotine uh a 10 point bump in my intelligence and eloquence so it's like
i'm like and the thing is it's kind of you know bad for you so you don't want to do it every day
so there's this an inherent like yeah um spiritual component to these things that if prop they're
just tools in your shamanic toolkit, if properly wielded, can create set and setting, right?
Psilocybin adventures and exploration, if you're a shaman that is trying to create a good
psilocybin experience, you know the two things you have to take into account are the set and the
setting, right? The setting, the environment is going to dictate, be the cues by which the new
state of consciousness is going to go on its exploration and then the set is the dosage and
the spiritual preparation beforehand right all these things are just tools to help augment the
the the output of the actual event itself so i think alcohol can be one of those things
if properly used in the right dosage in the right set and setting does that i'll i'll leave you
guys to respond to that if no i'm just curious because i i grew up northwest kansas you know
incredibly hard drinking society um and um you know and i i never i never liked it but i engaged
in it because i had this uh social anxiety that i used alcohol to help me get over when i played
music to fit in. And, and there is that bonding thing, but I also think about it as kind of like,
you know, from the extreme crazy level, there is the conspiracy that, you know, all of the
world leaders are engaged in some sort of pedophilia because there's, that's a way to
compromise each other. And therefore, if you're all shared compromise, then you can trust each
other and then scale that down to a lower level of like, oh, if I'm, you know, eight beers deep
and everybody else is eight beers deep, we're all compromised and we can all trust each other.
And so there's this, the ceremonial part of it is something that I think is really powerful.
Yeah. I'm just curious about it because I'm, you know, I'm just rethinking all these things
about my life and about the habits that I had and why I did it. You know, I am too. And actually
to your point um i've been laying off the drinking strategically relatively recently it also
you know my wife is a fun drinking buddy to have and she's pregnant right now so i'm trying i'm
trying to help out there too and what i remind something that's been super helpful has been
reminding myself actually that the people are the drug the drug isn't the drug the p when you know
I don't need the beer because the neuro endocrine response of being surrounded by face to face relationships I care about is the drug.
That's the that is the actual positive feedback loop you're trying to engage in.
If the alcohol can improve, if it has a pro social component to it, if it somehow makes that connection just a little more fun or strong in that moment, that's fine.
But it can also do just as much to distract.
So just what is the – we always have to take into account what is our goal?
Why are we doing it?
Because the people are the drug.
That's been very helpful for me as I've been trying to, you know, modulate as a tool more and more as I grow older.
There's such a strong connection to shame and to the drug, be it alcohol or psychedelics or whatever, that allows you to be silly without shame, to be fun, to be open and be vulnerable without shame.
And, you know, we we do we we especially in the Western culture, we live in such a shame based society where it is a useful tool to keep people from going out of line.
But then we've gone to the point, I think, now where people don't try new things because there is such a shame associated with failure when we should be interpreting failure as simply feedback as a mechanism to allow us to further hone our skill.
So, but yeah, we, especially today, right, especially in the era of the woke kind of Puritan approach to thing where it's, you know, who can be the, yeah, you know, like who can be the most pure?
And the most pure is the one that hasn't failed.
And the one that hasn't failed is just the one that hasn't tried because there's no such thing as a born winner.
There's just people that kept losing until they were able to finally succeed.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I'm just curious.
It's interesting.
That shame component is super interesting.
It makes me think of the Japanese tradition of getting absolutely wasted with your boss after a 14-hour workday.
And it's the only time you can kind of talk shit to your boss.
It's like, you know, it's such an honor-based society.
And shame is one of the mechanisms by which you punish others.
And so it's like this little window where you can do exactly that.
Your permissible outbursts that don't necessarily tie back to a shame mechanism.
That's fascinating.
I hadn't really thought about it that way.
And shame is also the way that you punish yourself.
Bernard Williams has this book called Shame and Necessity.
And it's about the ancient Greeks.
And the thing about shame is you can experience shame when you're by yourself.
and there's nobody to shame you for having done something.
And he ties that to identity.
Like shame is a compromised identity.
When you don't act in conformance with the identity that you want to have,
you experience shame.
It goes to this ability to metacognitively shed an identity that's not helping you,
that you're feeling shame when you don't act in accordance with.
If you could have the ability to leap over that shame to the identity that's causing you,
that is the source of shame because you're not complying with it and say,
that's not, the truth is not in line with that.
I want to get rid of that to maybe like that consideration like you did of maybe I'm not a
Bitcoiner and so it has to shame if I don't like the shame I'm holding on to, I can let go
in relation to that identity or something like that.
Oh, that's great, Grant.
That makes me think of, I've been reading the child development literature a lot.
A lot of it is the pro-social execution of identity.
So, you know, just imagine your kid, six or seven, he shoplifts or something, steals a candy.
It's like, do you identify as a thief?
Are you a thief?
Like, you use identity as a way to be like, oh, no, that's not my identity.
And by the reinforcing of a clear delineation of what the identity is with something that's positive versus negative ensures that that likely antisocial behavior is reduced in the future.
Nice.
Yeah.
Power of shared hallucinations.
That's it.
The power of shared hallucinations.
Speaking of this shared hallucination, though, I know your drinking buddy is outside right now with your kid giving you the space to talk here.
And we said two hours.
We're a little bit over the two hours.
So I wanted to be mindful of that, I guess.
And if there is anything else that like you wanted to talk about that we didn't or if you wanted, I don't know, just wanted to not not not cause an incident with your family.
So, no, I'm very appreciative of that, Grant.
The physical stuff and the pair bonding stuff is actually super rich.
let me let me pass that really quickly with some thoughts and then we'll end with a slide about
there's one slide i wanted to pop up about what is evidence and how i perceive that because that
ended up being such a juicy part of your guys's conversation at the end of the last podcast
um so the physical stuff to your question lucas uh for me personally and for our honor group
absolutely crucial. It's our kind of our church, you know, um, we meet up for what we call a,
a wheel of pain every, every Wednesday when we're together and we do physically challenging things,
usually that involves some level of coordination between the two of us or, or four of us,
depending on how many people we've got there. And it is, it is a sacred space. We do, uh,
These guys who are in my honor group, they're also participants of this medieval martial art.
So we do like katas, essentially.
We go through our forms, our medieval sword forms before and after as a ritual to open and close.
Then we go out and slam some Mexican and have a couple beers.
So it is truly crucial.
And the thing is, in the norms that we hold very sacred are the concepts of we need to be strong to each other.
If you're weak, not only are you weak to yourself, but you're a weak chain in our honor group that makes you a weak foundation by which to build anything worth building.
And so we very much use those framings and those terms and we do it, you know, as bombastically as we can because it's fun and it drives the point home.
So physicality is definitely something that I think is a powerful driver of group bonding and coordination.
The pair bond thing, I'll just say this because this could actually be I had a lot of questions about this at the network school, actually.
I'll just say this.
if you look at say the hunter-gatherer literature something along the lines of
slight polygyny is probably what we would call classic like a typical pattern so say you're a
hunter in the Hadza tribe right most males throughout their lifetime will have something
like 1.2 wives and this is expressed kind of like the side piece yeah pretty pretty much um you got
another camp you might be such a good hunter so you have multiple camps yeah and you've got you're
such a good hunter that you can provide enough calories not only for your core camp but for
another potential pair bond right and there that's in the hunter-gatherer literature that is
somewhat typical a generalizable pattern but it gets pretty wild and when it gets wild it's always
into response to extreme ecologies so for example you can have the reverse where you have multiple
husbands per female this it happens but it's like 0.02 percent of the time of all the cultures that
have ever been measured, you might get this. And it's when the land is so hard to work and calories
are so scarce that you actually need two typically actually related brothers, kin blood brothers,
as the husband to till enough agriculture to be able to survive So it really is ecologically dependent And it relatively clear to me that marriage as a construct has been one of those innovations like large religions in and of itself a way that once you scaling
the challenges of lots of dense population living on top of each other you have to solve
for certain problems and one of those problems is stability if you have an extreme mismatch
of high-powered males dominating with all potential reproductive mates,
that's the grounds for an incredibly unstable society.
In the same way that what you see monotheism
as a very clear post-effect compensation
for having over a million people in the same area.
And so you go from polytheism as sort of the standard,
then you get these clumps of tons of people living on top of each other.
And how do you coordinate that behavior?
You have a more consolidated ideological intersubjective belief network that's,
that enforces things like marriage, right?
So where does that bring us with the camp?
I don't know, sort of dealer's choice, but realize where,
be mindful of your ecology, right?
If you want and always be seeking stability,
Because if you're going outside of systems that are there to enforce stability, it's not just like you're not just affecting you and your pair bond.
You're affecting everyone else in your community too.
And that can be a very powerful glue, all things being equal.
Like I think maybe the marriage and divorce rate might be a little bit different if we have stronger communities.
You know, just as an organic outcropping of not wanting to let other people down and keeping a stable, stable construct. So that's my one passing thought on that.
Yeah, I was yesterday I was listening to Brett Weinstein talk about the rise of activism and he traced it back to the sexual revolution, the advent of birth control and abortions, which allowed people to put off childbearing.
It allowed people to put off marriage and they still had all of that energy that previously would have been directed towards building family and building a marriage.
And instead, as he says, take all that mama bear energy and put it into climate or transgenderism or something like this.
So where it typically leans very liberal because it is that mama bear energy and, you know, and then females lean more on that side.
But it's just kind of fascinating to think about like how kind of playing with our biology by toying with these little innovations can have a wide scale effect on the stability of a society.
so yeah and and i think about paul duroff you know like the telegram guy he's got like 103
children or something like that you know it doesn't you know no um you know well he's got
nothing on genghis khan his uh genetics are signature so they actually they've mapped out
15 of southeast asia is a descendant of genghis khan yeah that is 15 of 1 billion people
Yeah.
Because he had a very specific strategy.
It was him and his boys going over to another group, killing all males,
and expanding the official set of wives for each of his 10 offspring were 40 other wives.
He had 40 wives.
40 legitimate heirs, right?
So, yeah, that's one strategy to do it.
There's lots of strategies.
As an evolutionary anthropologist, I mean, do you are you ever just cynical and say that the whole reason we camp craft is sexual access?
Like that's the reason that's the evolutionary motive to propagate our genes.
And so camp crafting is subordinate to, you know, access to a to women or to men as a be to put your genes forward or something.
Well, I mean, I wouldn't even call it cynical on a on one kind of level, on the level of the genes.
if you're just looking at it from the perspective of a gene,
that could be a viable strategy, right?
You could say that.
But when I look at Genghis Khan's strategy,
I wonder if you were to let Genghis simulate
a hundred different lives,
and one of those lives was living
in a peaceful hunter-gatherer camp,
face-to-face, where he had...
people he trusts in his life and got,
you get to let him simulate that as a full life versus the life he had.
I wonder which would have generated the most wellbeing. And I don't know.
That's, that's an open question. Yeah.
Yeah. That's fascinating. I think if you're comfortable,
Oh wait, you have a slide.
I want to talk about this, this idea of evidence. I had to go.
Exactly. Yeah. Let's, let's get onto that. Yeah.
because you guys
oh man it was such a good conversation you guys
were having. It'd probably be painful to sit there and listen
to us butcher your book at some point
to your ideas and just unfairly talk
about you without you there. Oh no no no
I loved it. I felt like I was with
my honor group and we had a
beer open and we're all just
trying to figure it out. And that's of course
how we meant it too. It felt like you were
there as well. We were with your book and your ideas so
There we go
where are you and but i mean as long as you're not getting divorced take as much time as you want
yeah i wouldn't we're in a really good spot right now guys we're all right we're all right um
you're not sharing i'm not sharing you were and then it went away okay
there we go there we go you're popping up uh there it is yeah okay so this is what it made
me think of looks like a merkle tree it it is a kind of tree and it just disappeared again i think
you can't zoom in on it i can't zoom in on it yeah just make it make it a full slide okay or good
yeah go to like slideshow however you were at before before we kind of said that it wasn't
working where it's just kind of like you see this and then you see nope it's not up no okay
okay let me let me reshare
window let's try window that'll do it that will do it okay now i'm gonna there it is great success
yeah okay we'll just leave it there okay um all right so
so one key thing grant that you you mentioned was like by what evidence because you were this
was in the greater conversation of sort of the meta tribe yeah um you know and trying to i guess
i should say i'll back up for a second here right and say that you know you really try and swing at
the fences after you've written a book for five years you're like you're going for a solution to
a big intractable problem that's probably impossible to solve yeah so there's a component
there's a component just just to lay it out for people who aren't to get us to this point of the
What's the problem we're solving and what's the solution that was that big swing?
Yeah, it's effectively how do we edge closer to pro-social communities that can thrive without killing each other?
That's the basics we're trying to get to, right?
And the concept of the Metatribe is basically to turn the logic of tribalism, the worst components of it,
that thing that makes it embed into our psychology and be willing to kill or murder an outgroup,
let's use that against itself. And so it's sort of like a terminal tribe. It's like the
last possible tribe that you could ever appeal to. This is being the team human or a meta tribe,
because you're taking identity and you're gluing it to an open mindset.
Yeah.
Basically a worldview that states that if evidence appears that is of enough weight
that it disproves my current understanding,
I change my prior and I adopt a new, less erroneous worldview
in the pursuit of maximalizing truth, right?
And I'm not Pollyannish here to think that, you know, you're ever going to get 100% of homo sapiens to adopt to this kind of like symbolic intersubjective belief network.
No chance in hell.
But you don't need a lot.
I'm thinking more or less along the lines of like, you know, the foundation.
Have you guys read Asimov's Foundation?
Yeah.
Back in high school.
I read it a couple of months ago at the network school.
Yeah.
That's awesome, man.
i'm i'm literally rereading it now i'm in the second book right now i read it back in high
school too and when i think of the network school and of what biology is doing i mean it's really
hard not to make some sort of like killer metaphor to him being harry fucking selden of the yeah yeah
the selden plan yes plan like the guy is definitely his thoughts per minute are such that
you could imagine he's engaging in some form of psycho history analytics himself right like this
guy is definitely next level and what he's doing is really cool and what i the reason why i was so
attracted to the network's school and potentially the state is because i think it is a true
embodiment of this sort of meta tribe as a concept baked into it is decentralization
baked into it is empiricism he's all about decentralized science this is something that
I want to dedicate the rest of my scientific career to.
Nice.
And really just trying to be as truth maximizing as possible and having that as a sacred mission of the enterprise itself, of the society itself.
So I really do.
The foundation metaphor is really nice.
So that's the big problem, right?
And I think if you just have a few foundations around that have this, it's just backing up the probabilistics of our survival as a species.
It's really sort of a it's a it's an existential issue.
Right. So when when you said by what evidence, Grant, this is exactly and then you said by what evidence and then Lucas, you brought in some appeals.
they were beautiful poetics appeals to like love um purpose and meaning and i was like okay
if i were in the room right now what i would bring to our shared attention is something along
the lines of like this these are two different categories and you've got here um effectively
the human you know this is the branch of information information communication all life
from its beginning iterations two billion years ago is about figuring out what information
to share through space-time. Basically, what information is worth saving, right?
And once you get to the human branch, you've got two kinds of branches that emit from this tree of
data that has been ongoing since really even before life because it's all just data it's all
just information going through infinite iterations of natural selection so what i heard you guys
appeal to a lot was the left part of the tree so religions to inspire you know songs to enjoy
jokes to laugh but there's also a dark side to faith and to to unchallenged faith unchallengeable
faith that's all sort of like the the the malicious cult you were appealing to before lucas like all
the things that can happen when you use untruth as an identity and manipulate others this is what i
was talking about there's shamans and then there are witches or wizards or warlocks right are using
it for good or evil so what protects us from the dark side of this appeal to to faith itself so
imagine this this is the thought experiment you've got 10 000 different independent cultures
they're in their petri dishes they have maybe their own maybe they have their own planet they're
just running their own experiment, right? They come up with 10,000 different ways of knowing.
This is a very popular term in sociocultural anthropology. This culture has a different way
of knowing, right? This indigenous people sees this is their worldview. This is what it generated
over the life history of its cultural evolution. And then on the 10,000th, you have one that uses
empiricism effectively creating the scientific method.
This is a way of knowing.
It's a methodology of knowing, of coming to understand and reduce error in our understanding
of veridical reality, assuming there is a veridical reality.
And I don't think we have to have that debate here, that there's something to work towards
to, and we call that truth.
if out of all 10,000 of those cultural experiments,
there's only one that can test the veracity,
the veridical truth of the other ways of knowing,
whether or not those things are objectively,
measurably, empirically true or false,
which is what makes the empirical line,
the empirical tree so crucial.
and you would have to have that at least as a stop gap in our species.
And this is the appeal to the meta tribe as a concept.
If you have enough people that understand how to execute the system,
you're just protecting, existentially protecting the other groups
from running roughshod over you with potentially malignant forms of untestable belief.
That's sort of the idea.
This makes sense. And I love the analogy to the foundation and that there are, you don't have to have all the groups that have this metatribal identity. You can just have some that are guardians or protectors over the others or something like that.
Where I disagree, I think, is that I don't think even that Metatribe has truth-seeking at the top of its metacognitive pyramid.
They have faith in a value, and that value is the equal dignity of humans, something that can never be proven empirically.
If you try to empirically prove that, you're going to arrive at some notion of scientific racism.
You're going to see that humans are not, in fact, biologically similar.
this is what adorno and horkheimer were getting at in the dialectic of enlightenment that
enlightenment if you understand it purely as instrumental reason of rationality ends up
inverting itself into totalitarianism because you need to have just like this unthinking
faith in human dignity even if the evidence comes up that humans are different in some way
you say i discard that evidence because i believe this human is my brother he's my moral equal
That morality, that can never be empirically substantiated.
You can give me all the science you want in the world, but facts and values are different.
Values are superordinate.
And the most superordinate value there is is human dignity and like equality amongst individuals or something like that.
Yeah, but Grant, and that's well put, that is an ideology.
That's not truth maximization as a foundational savior.
I totally agree.
That is what can happen if you lose the thread.
Yeah.
Right.
But I wouldn't say that human dignity has anything to do with truth.
I agree.
And that's why we have to assume it as a value.
Like if you want to have any notion of human dignity, you have to have faith in it.
Science can never prove that.
And I say the worst for science.
And so that's where I disagree, I guess, with you is I'm not a truth seeker in that sense where I'll follow the empirical thread wherever it leaves.
Because if the empirical thread purports to lead me to a realm where I'm now looking at some humans as having less dignity than others, I'll stop following the quote unquote empirical thread and fall back on my faith based value that humans are possessors of a metaphysical thing I call a soul and that can never be substantiated empirically.
Yeah.
But that's, I mean, it's, I'm not just, I mean, I guess I am disagreeing and just, I agree.
I see you have a framework and I guess my framework is just different where I'm not a truth seeker.
Well, if you're.
If you're measuring human dignity on metrics that are showing you that there's a difference in human dignity, but you fundamentally know that having a soul makes you equally worthy of dignity as anyone else, then you're just measuring the wrong shit.
Go ahead.
So as a spring worry off of what you just said, I think that if you want to get to a world where human dignity is maximized, if that's the world that you want to, you actually need truth and truth-seeking as a fundamental sacred value.
Yes.
And here's why.
because the best measure we have for whether a society or a group is good or bad,
and I think you can actually measure these things, is well-being.
And we can empirically measure well-being such that you can imagine some societies
that create peaks of well-being and some that are trials of well-being.
But the only way to do that is the same way that we would measure, say, your health. If you posit that we can empirically measure whether or not you are objectively healthy or not, then you can do the same for psychological and spiritual well-being.
These are the kinds of surveys, actually, granted, I use in a lot of my work.
And I'm using at the network state to see how the network state – this is a great scientific experiment we're going to be running, actually, as soon as I get ethics approval, which is ongoing right now.
Treating the network state and the network school as the intervention.
So you got people pre and then we're measuring sleep.
We're measuring activity.
We're measuring their day to day sense of life evaluation of and other metrics that corroborate well-being.
That is the empirical use of the right branch to derive and to come to a empirical understanding of how to maximize human dignity and human well-being.
You can't do it without truth.
You can't do it without truth, but you can't maximize well-being in the correct way if you don't have a superordinate value that everybody matters.
For example, if the aggregate well-being of a society was increased by having a minority slave caste, then as long as the well-being was overall maximized, then the truth seeker who maximized overall well-being would say, we should have a minority slave caste because it's going to maximize overall well-being.
But if you have the value that even if overall well-being is maximized by having a minority slave caste, we're not going to do that because there's something greater than well-being, which is dignity and equality.
Yeah, and also neither of us are utilitarian, so neither of us would do that.
There's not a alternative.
I'm not going to establish that like the opening 10 minutes.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's a great idea, and I'm not anti-true.
I say that rhetorically, dramatically.
I'm not anti-truth.
I just, at the end of the day,
I think I am kind of just like,
I got some ignorant values.
I'm never going to give up.
And that ignorant value again
is that humans are morally equal.
Grant just wants to own slaves.
No, I'm saying the opposite thing
that if you maximize well-being,
then you are in the position
where if a society has the most well-being
and it has slaves,
then you got to endorse that
because it's not,
I mean, you're not,
Concerned.
That's presupposing.
I'm sorry, Grant.
I've got to push back.
Yes.
Any society, unless you're making the category error of only measuring those who are benefiting from the slaves, the lives of the slaves are, I would predict, if we were creating a scientific hypothesis, I would predict would drain the wellness of the overall mean of the population such that that would never be the winning society.
Especially if you're measuring human dignity.
You don't measure the dignity, though. You measure the well-being. And so you just I agree with you, though. It's something you would have to measure scientifically. We couldn't presume it one way or the other. There are some like studies of I don't I can't say studies. I've heard discussions of caste societies where people come to access, accept their caste and believe that they are inferior. And so if you interviewed them, they might say, I like being a pariah or I'm simply a pariah and that's who I am or whatever.
Whereas overall, you know, someone looking at it from the outside might say, I don't accept that someone should have to accept that even if they've come to be brainwashed into it and so feel a sense of well-being from it because I believe that human dignity is superordinate to an increase in well-being.
What's the difference between dignity and well-being?
Dignity is unmeasurable.
It's a moral quality.
It's a value, not a fact.
But I could tell you whether or not I feel as though I have dignity.
what do you mean by dignity that's the thing it's never i can't cut you open and find the dignity
but you can't cut me open and find my well-being spiritually you can't cut me open and find my
well-being mentally and so in david's point you can measure that though with um like some sort of
like interview instrumentation are those just the composite factors that give you dignity
maybe there's a philosophical those things are going to be my prediction here yeah me relying on
my worldview that the truth branch is important, my prediction would be that those things would
be tightly correlated, that a sense of dignity is intrinsically linked to the quote-unquote
things that you could measure spiritually about autonomy, control over one's life,
meaningful and valuable relationships in one's life, day-to-day work that has purpose and
function and provides value. All these things are going to create an index that I think is
empirically trackable. And I think and well-being would be tightly correlated if we were to run this
properly, like a really, really clean, steady design.
Can you say any more about that? Like, do you have like a start date? Do you have anything
that you can talk about as far as like, what are the components that you're measuring? How many
people are going to be involved like if you can yeah i know you might want to keep stuff
keep stuff in your pocket but if you can please do uh share what you want to do here i'm pretty
sure i mean so biology and i had uh the office hours and i in five minutes i pitched this steady
to him and he was like that sounds cool and then um man to his and jackson's credit we kept the
conversation going on discord and we had it ironed out in like five days of just back and
forth messaging on what it would look like what would be required and so this is the gist of it
you guys got the the core set design is the network school as an intervention right so it's just pre
and post you're measuring everyone's um you know like different physiological and uh well-being
measures, their social networks, their different aspects of their identity, worldview, you're
controlling for age, you're controlling for sex, you're controlling for employment, socioeconomic
status, and you're getting all that data beforehand.
Then they get the network school as the quote unquote treatment.
And while they're there, so me, my team goes in with a bunch of the stuff that's been my
bread and butter scientifically for the past decade.
So the stuff I worked with,
with the Hadza were,
they were called actigraphs.
They're effectively like super science Fitbits.
They can quite accurately measure sleep,
sleep efficiency,
sleep quality and circadian function.
And these things are prime drivers,
obviously of like the core metrics of health and wellbeing.
And I know actually you guys have dropped sleep as a concept before.
the second book which is going through production now
The Sleepless Ape is all about the evolution
of sleep in our species
I'll make sure and send you guys a couple copies
not for podcast purposes
just because I think you guys will get a kick out of it
so the idea here
is to put these super
science fit bits
and then if I can
I'm outreaching to a good buddy of mine
a collaborator of mine who does hormonal biomarkers
as well and we can get things like
cortisol
we can get
testosterone
estradiol
all these really cool measures
we'll do that as a
subsample of those who are doing
the earn burn learn
sort of like actually engaging
in it and there'll be participants enrolled in the study
and then for the subsection
that leaves
we'll have an exit survey
and then we'll have a longitudinal for the long
termers and the whole
idea here is to map
These objective measures of health and well-being with the network school as the primary intervention to see if it has any positive driving effects after controlling for key metrics like age, sex, socioeconomic status, country of origin.
To see if after you control over all those things statistically, if it's actually driving up well-being.
Which is fundamental to bringing it back full circle.
Yeah.
Is literally what I'm trying to say is like, I think we can measure this stuff.
Yeah.
I think we can measure whether or not biology is actually making the foundation or not.
Like that's a, it's a hypothesis and we, it's all supposition until we measure it.
To final thought on this.
Lucas mentioned the, the world series, right.
With the Royals.
And I remember that play.
and when
Grant when you said by what evidence
I was like well Lucas
said by what evidence something that
he definitely didn't want to believe was
true reverted his
opinion on it and that was
the measurement in feet
by how far off
he was
running the bases so
I don't know like
the core here is that
empirical measurement hypothesis
testing and truth seeking as a sacred value or something we i we lynch pit we connect to our
identity yeah if we don't have that as a species guys at some level whether it's a foundation
pocket somewhere or something we're screwed yeah we're i think our number our numbers up and you
know what i've taken psilocybin that's okay it's all right if our species goes extinct so is 99.9
percent of all life on this planet and other forms of consciousness will emerge it will be okay you
know what i mean like i'm not i'm not too worried about it but at the end of the day if you think
there's something cool about human consciousness and we want to preserve it and preserve its light
for future generations so that different iterations can improve upon it then i think it's a crucial
component so do you have a uh first off does your scheme for the network school does it need a do i
need to come back do i need they need a shaman and and i would go ahead go ahead i don't know
now we're getting down to brass tacks i'm just trying to get i'm just trying to get paid in your
study dude um you know pending i i there's no reason i shouldn't have a job at the university
Toronto here and I won't get this a couple big grants that I'm trying to apply for right now.
If I can get a there's one I'm applying for in particular that should be enough to fund this
study for a few years for several years and that's where things could get really interesting.
We could actually introduce I think as a secondary study we could introduce things like well what
happens with a cohort that we start playing around with some of the things that we were talking about
like ritual initiation and being mindful of how the school scales in numbers.
That's something we didn't get to talk about today, but I would love to talk to you in the future,
is that there's this value at 150 where things get really dicey.
When groups scale beyond 150, it's precipitous.
And so you have to be super mindful about the ways in which you help cultivate healthy growing of the tree and don't snuff out the life before it has a chance to really grow.
And so it would be great to have you out there, Lucas, and we could collaborate together on this project of improving human wellness.
You're awesome, man.
Like, this is being so fantastic.
And I would say Lucas has a Ph.D. essentially in rituals.
He was working on an app called Rituals.
Wow.
Like three years ago, because he so deeply believes that people need to have that in their life. So he's been, I told you this in a DM that Lucas has been doing this wherever he goes. He was doing it in Washington State when I was living up there. He came and visited me where he went from knowing just me when he got there to like I mentioned, like a month later, inviting a whole yoga studio to my tiny apartment for a party. And they showed up like people that didn't even know him were so like, they just saw this is a person who's creating a
a type of community that doesn't exist and we want to be part of that.
It was really cool to see.
So yeah,
it's interesting that you and I both have like my,
my thought on rituals is more of like,
you need to do the same thing often so that you can offload the mental brain
power that it requires to make all those decisions so that you can focus on
doing the things that are truly important that are going to move you forward
in life.
Two quick things I want to,
You talked about knowing, and then you've also talked about really kind of leaning into sort of the physics of things with like Jason Lowry.
So you have a colleague at the University of Toronto, John Verveke.
He's still there, right?
And I was just curious if you've explored his work, because when you're talking about knowing, it's like diving right into his awakening from the meaning crisis, like a 50 video lecture series.
And it just sounded like you've been experienced in that.
And then on the physics side of things, as you talked about circadian rhythm and stuff like that and the importance of that, the guy right now, I would say kind of leading the charge in the physics of biology would be Jack Cruz.
And I'm curious if you are familiar with the work of either of those two individuals, because if you're not, then you're already in the same vein of these people.
That's fascinating.
No, I'm unfamiliar with their work.
Dude, okay, man.
I've got homework to do.
That and reading the Satoshi papers, I just cracked it open,
and I cannot wait to get into that because I'm a fan of Natalie Selinsky's.
A conversation between you two would be that.
That would be phenomenal.
Yeah.
She was just too far above our level, but you two, I would watch that so much.
That would be fantastic.
Two anthropologists talking about that.
It would be fantastic.
Absolutely incredible.
I'll throw it back to you.
Anything you want to say before I sign us off here?
No, not at all. You guys, besides thank you very much, you guys, again, the proof of work on the book. It was such a pleasure to see you guys work through it with such an open mind and with such energy.
and I you know ever since the network school I was I knew that our paths would cross sooner or
later I just didn't know it'd be so fast and so hard and I'm really excited about it we'll keep
the conversation going because I really do think there's something special going on out there and
it'd be fun to collaborate and to figure out what the mechanisms are that could you know improve its
chances and its odds because it's a great experiment that we're running as a species yeah cool there
There truly is something special going on at the network school.
And it's because of intent, but it's also because of just utterly beautiful people like Jackson Stegger, who is an absolutely incredible individual.
When I sat down and I was thinking about like an honor group for myself, he was like the only guy outside of Grant that I felt was part of an honor group for me that was not my band.
You know, just that is those words right there.
You just summon a magical incantation like that.
That to me, like if you if the network school has human beings like you that feel about each other as the foundation to it, as the pillars, it will succeed.
Yeah, it will have much harder road to travel if it doesn't if it can't cultivate those foundational honor group cells.
that keep the thing going so i yeah that's that's a really high praise um for jackson there and for
you too grant like that's that's a friendship summoning spell right there that's awesome
i do i i uh i want to i i recently did a psilocybin trip and i came out of it and i
one of the things that i want to do is like i because i had read your book and i was like i
have to write down all the people that I love. Like I have to like, okay, who are the hundred?
There's probably, honestly, for me, there's probably like 150 people that I think are just
utterly incredible. And then how do I get, how do I get 10 of them to go buy cabins in the
mountains with me and, you know, and do something for community. Right. Yeah. So anyways, um,
God, it's been an absolute pleasure. David, thank you so much. Just for everybody listening,
go read Our Tribal Future and dig into it. I know that we have Bitcoin in the name of this podcast,
but this is what, you know, my realization was that Bitcoin is not about money. It's about
truth-seeking. And what we're doing here is we're truth-seeking from a society perspective,
a community perspective, from spiritual well-being, dignity.
And we're trying to find truth there.
So for all of you that have made it to this far, we appreciate it.
Thank you for listening.
David, thank you.
Grant, as always.
Yeah, I would say get the book, man.
It's so fantastic.
I loved it.
And there's just not many books that are truth-seeking in the sense where you lay out the evolutionary history,
and it does take, I think,
courage to talk about
Balaji and Jason Lowry and these people
who are not within the
mainstream of the type of studies that you
do. And so the book is a courageous
affair and it's a beautiful book. I loved it.
I want to throw out mainstream and just
label it for what it is, which is a
e-logic being captured.
Just like the cowards hiding within
the system. And this book is not that. It's very good.
Thanks so much, man. I love the conversation.
Thank you so much.