Welcome back to Bitcoin Study Sessions. Today we're covering part two of Our Tribal Future.
In reading through this, the thing that hit me most was the emphasis on friendship and the importance of having those people that make you who you are.
The five people you surround yourself with are what define you.
when i post this episode at the end of it there's a line that i always put
share with friends and please consider us yours we're all in this together and as we build our
tribe first through camps then into bands and finally into the tribe of people that we
will walk through life with and meet the challenges that come to face us
it really strikes me the importance of defining those friends and being intentional about the way
that we have people in our lives the author david samson discusses one of the dangers of ideology
in that if we identify as a member of an ideology in something that we can't control
Republican, Democrat, MAGA, woke, Yankee fan,
then what we're doing is we're robbing ourselves
of the ability to have control over our own lives.
And so as I read through this,
I wrote down what it means to me to have an identity.
And my identity as a brother, as a friend, as a son,
as a band member. And I realized that being a Bitcoiner wasn't on that list anymore.
I can't control it. Bitcoin's out of the box. It's going to be what it's going to be. But where can I
make an impact in my community? And it's going to be through my tribe, through my camp, through my
friends. And so I wanted to start by reading this very simple quote.
in fact friends are evolved to be irreplaceable that's what makes them real friends and the
science to support this is only now coming to full fruition we're learning about the importance of
each other here and there's nobody that i'd rather talk about this with than mr grant record friend
Friend to all.
Enemy to none.
Beloved by dogs in the neighborhood world round.
So as Lucas mentioned, our tribal future.
We did the first part last time.
Thank you for that lovely introduction.
We're going to get into the nature of friendship here, how to build good friendships, how to build camps beyond friendships, how to deal with our own tribal nature.
The last discussion we have, we did the first part of this book, which was the science of tribalism, essentially.
And then in this part, we're going to go into kind of the practice of tribalism, how to use our tribal instinct in a good way.
So we'll do what we always do.
We'll give like a short introduction and then Lucas and I will hash it out and we'll continue on in that manner.
We like to make sure, kind of give you a bit of a summary of the reading because that's kind of our proof of work.
We invest a lot of time in reading these books.
We want to tie our discussions to the matter in the books.
We want to convey that to you, the dear listener, that what these books say is important and we need to attend to the words themselves.
And so in the first discussion, I'll kind of give a big recap just so we can situate the second discussion as well.
This whole book begins with the problem, who do we trust?
The first evolutionary response to this question is genetics.
You trust your family.
You have this drive built into you to want to help out your blood kin.
The second evolved response then, as Lucas mentioned, is friendship.
This requires larger brains and a social nature.
But then how do we scale beyond this small group?
The brain has a limited channel capacity with up to about 150.
That's Dunbar's number.
We discussed that last time.
Being a sort of cap on our ability to remember, catalog, a history of social reactions, interactions with the person in a way that makes us comfortable around them.
We do that with about 150 people.
To move past this Dunbar's number, then, we evolved the capacity for symbolic manipulation to emit symbols and read symbols.
The tribe drive is that instinct to build bigger coalitions by reading and emitting symbols that signal trustworthiness, sort of like social passwords, secret handshakes.
We evolved to judge each other.
We could, for example, suddenly be able to trust a stranger if they emit a symbol by making the sign of the cross.
We could feel relaxed that we're now with a fellow Christian, a tribe bigger than 150, a tribe where we can't know everybody face to face.
Yeah, we can still come to trust somebody.
So we moved to the tribe as the biggest social unit, a group of groups.
Samson in the first part described this kind of nesting structure, telescoping out with camps, the smallest nuclear unit, those with whom we find our calories and keep safe, maybe 20 to 30 adults in a hunter-gatherer camp.
bands then a group of camps up to about the Dunbar's number of 150,
which allow for genetic diversity so that these camp structures can proliferate over time.
And then those bands nest into tribes, this imagined community beyond face-to-face,
held together by symbols, linguistic, behavioral, gestural, ritualistic,
that provide for group identity so you can come to know and trust somebody who you do not know face-to-face.
We call that tribalism.
Usually it has bad connotations.
Sometimes it does, rather.
But it helped us to scale trustworthiness beyond face-to-face.
And in any case, it is an evolved genetic drive, a tribe drive, that is a basic constitutive
fact of our human nature.
So you can't just condemn or ignore it.
It would be like condemning being hungry or something like that.
It's simply a drive we have.
So in part two, Lucas and I are going to discuss today is called The Practice of Tribalism. It now applies, continues applying this evolutionary anthropology lens to understand how our evolved instinctual tribe drive can be used to help us build better communities, better social relations, better friendships, something referred to by Samson as camp crafting, how to consciously, intentionally craft a camp.
So before moving to that, though, Lucas, that was our kind of first discussion summarized.
Anything just to recap that conversation you'd want to add or continue forward?
No, it's he does a good job of basically giving us the background of the science behind it, how we evolved into this camp to band to tribe.
And now we're going to walk through some more things that are going to help us implement this, that are going to help us make this actionable and operational within our lives.
Part two is if you if you think about like a movie, you've got the first one and then the sequel comes out.
We've had this discussion that the sequels are rarely as good as the first one.
Part two is utterly phenomenal.
I think I really enjoyed.
He takes us through all kinds of different things.
We finally talk about Bitcoin.
We talk about Bologi's network state.
We talk about the examples that exist in the world today that have been around for decades of co-living and cohabitation, co-location, I think is the term he uses.
So, yeah, no, he did a phenomenal job with it.
And Lucas is a subject matter expert on camp crafting, having been at the network state.
So we're also going to dig into that.
So Samson kind of begins this.
In case you aren't convinced that community is even a good idea, Samson begins by making the case that we should see greater social connectivity and more communal ways of living.
Some people's suggestion is going to be just kind of duh, right?
I mean, it's good to have good social relations, right?
It's good to be in good community.
But actually, in the United States, we do have the ideal, the rugged individualist, the person who lives a life of absolute independence, the sovereign individual.
And even more practically in the United States, we tend to want single nuclear family dwellings, which are prone to what Samson calls dyadic withdrawal or cocooning,
which is when you have a married or an established couple that then begins to seek the majority of their social interactions with each other and kind of fall out of a larger social network.
They cocoon wife and husband and they seek, again, social fulfillment in doing things together and kind of lose friends.
And even within this, the men tend to have a more precipitously declining social network because of the nature of relationships that men and women tend to have.
And Samson kind of frames this in a nice way.
Men tend to have shoulder-to-shoulder relationships, which are activity-based, and females tend to have face-to-face or disclosure-based relationships.
And so those types of activity-based relationships that tend to form the core of male relationships after initial periods of our life where we have like team sports and things like that, it gets harder to carve out the time or so it seems to do these activities to build shoulder-to-shoulder typically male activity-based relationships.
we can also now just buy the benefits of camps you can allo parenting is one of the benefits
where you have other adults around to help look after your children and you look after theirs
instead people can just pay a nanny or drop their kids off at a daycare
therapists can come to replace close kith and kin friends and family for those types of close
conversations that one might have otherwise had with close social friends. So Samson goes into
depth. I won't kind of go into all the research here, but he does describe the benefits of living
in what he calls inintentional proximity with others. So in summary, the benefits are things
like improved psychological well-being. That's not hard to imagine. We all know what social
isolation feels like. Protection from the negative effects of dyadic withdrawal, which is again,
when couples withdraw into each other rather than having wider social networks.
Improving conditions for family and children to grow with cooperative alloparenting.
That's another benefit of living in intentional proximity.
Improved quality of life while consuming less resources.
If you have more people paying the same rent, you have more resources to use on other things.
And then, of course, increased access to human and social capital.
As you have wider social networks, you know somebody who's a butcher or someone who's a baker,
and you can reach out to them.
Somebody knows how to fix the engine that breaks down
when you don't know how to fix the engine.
So just to pause right there,
are there any, I mean,
do these seem like reasonable benefits
of living in close intentional proximity?
And are there others, I guess,
or other reasons why people should be concerned
with the way that we live now
and want to consciously try to live
in intentional proximity?
Yeah, I think we need to really focus on the framing of why this is important.
You did mention that we all know what social isolation feels like.
But to me, when I read through that, it was a bit of a revelation to me because that social isolation that we feel is a bit of a boiling the frog type of thing where we are living in it right now.
And most of us have this break in our memory that began in 2020.
And it's kind of the past is the past.
and then whatever the world that we're living in now has been, has taken over. And so when we
think about social isolation, I'm really struggling with that S, when we think about that,
it's hard to overstate the importance of the situation that we are living in right now,
where social isolation is the norm. And we've been conditioned to it. And, you know, one of the
things that, you know, you and I and a lot of other people are coming to the realization now is that
sleep is the most important part of your health. And I remember when I first got a good night of
sleep as an adult. It was, you know, about six years ago. I had completely forgotten what it
felt like to feel good in the morning, even though, you know, I wasn't doing anything that was
crazier order. But, you know, like a lot of other people, I was watching Netflix to fall asleep and
had the lights on and wasn't getting up with the sun, wasn't getting early morning sun in my eyes,
was it getting the sun at night? And it's a revelation because you remember something that
you had completely forgotten. You remember what it feels like to be ready to engage with the world.
It's social isolation. It's not just something that we should accept because it's not natural.
we can there is there's a much better life and I would almost liken it to like
escaping some sort of addiction yeah because the the power of engaging with a community of
having that knowledge that you have people around you that are supportive and are going to be
are going to be there for you.
There's so many people that they just don't have people.
Right.
So, and that leads into another thing that you mentioned,
which is that danger of cocooning,
which is something that we, I think we,
with the best of intentions,
we have heralded and celebrated, you know,
the good father who goes home to his wife and kids and doesn't go play poker, doesn't go golf,
doesn't, you know, engage with a group of male friends that we've somehow we have started to
look at those people, those men and women who they get married and they effectively remove
themselves from society and they lean upon each other for everything.
Samson does a great job of going into not only the kind of the first principles idea
of it, but also the, just the, the reality of it is that if you, if you forge with someone,
And if you're fused together, then there's no longer a connection.
If I'm so close to someone that they are my everything, that they are my heartbeat, they are literally everything to me, then we no longer have a connection because we truly are one.
I think when I read that, I thought about welding and just fusing two pieces of metal together.
And when you do that, it's no longer flexible.
Yeah.
Right.
It can no longer bend.
It can no longer adjust.
It can no longer have any give.
and so that when we exclude all those things from our lives these as men when we exclude our
our group of friends as women when we exclude our group of friends then we're no longer able to
connect with our spouse or our partner because we have fused with them and we talked about this
last night that there needs to be that mystique that you you have to have something interesting
about that person that you you still want to find out you still want to you always want to be
continuously learning about this person and never feel like you've reached the end because then the
book is done and you want to move on to another book and that's it's it may sound counterintuitive
But this idea that being with one person and making them your everything is laudable is actually the cause of a lot of fractured relationships and poor parenting and poor childhoods and poor marriages.
Yeah. Samson refers to it as the paradox of intimacy, that you do have to, as much as you want to know every contour and aspect of a person, there needs to be some mystery of them to make you want to continue to learn and know about them, to have something to learn and know about them.
It was interesting that you began your remarks noting kind of the analogy to sleep, how it was a revelation to suddenly have a good night's sleep in the same way that when you come out of social isolation, it can also be a personal revelation as to well-being.
And Samson, he, in his other research as an evolutionary anthropologist, talks about the nature of beginning in our early kind of our early ancestors, whatever ape, slept in trees.
And then we became ground sleepers after that.
And when you become ground sleepers, there are certain dangers you have to attend to that you're when you're a tree sleeper, you're kind of safer in your branch or whatever.
When you're ground sleepers, we then have to become more social.
We have to look out for each other.
And so that the nature of sleep is also part of this evolutionary history that makes us more social and that brings us together and inculcates in us this tribe drive.
Yeah. Just another thing about that was the research into the social.
We're just going to I'm going to say loneliness because I'm struggling with that.
But loneliness literally has a genetic effect on your body in that your genes no longer express characteristics that make you, that raise your immune system and protect you from illness.
And they protect you from, you know, actual physical maladies that you're going to suffer from when you're alone.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, you said an addiction. There is a social craving you have when you're in isolation.
And as we're going to see later on here, there are surrogate forms of community tribes that are going to latch on to that, make people you want a sense of belonging.
Join our larger tribe, our political tribe, our religious tribe, our cult, whatever.
Instant acceptance.
Yeah. You're going to get that craving to be in intentional proximity with other people satisfied one way or another.
So there are healthy ways to do it.
So those are the kind of benefits of being in intentional proximity with others and the dangers of withdrawing from that, falling out of intentional proximity of social isolation.
So then what is it that makes a camp or group survive?
If you want to form these bigger coalitions, these bigger groups, what are the parameters of that?
So we are humans.
We've evolved as specific types of animals, social, symbol, using apes.
There is a specific, like, you know, state space of possible social relations.
There's not just, we can imagine an infinite number of types of camps, of bizarre rituals, behaviors, and customs, but only a finite range of those are actually things we can put into place, just given the types of beings that we are and our behaviors.
Samson calls this the social suite.
Any group that you form is going to have to satisfy certain dynamics.
And these are things like basic things like love, friends, social networks, cooperation, but also things, a couple of interesting ones, in-group bias, things that pulled the group together, a mild hierarchy.
Even he says individual identity.
Being in a group is not, and this is kind of, again, that paradox of intimacy.
It's not about completely losing your individuality, but about everybody having their individual identity so that they can form some relationship with other people in the groups.
Can I read the quote?
Yeah, if you got a quote, read it.
The quote is that, let me follow this.
The more we depend on each other, the closer we come to independence.
More effectively dependent people, the more effectively you are dependent upon the people around you,
the more independent and daring you are with the world.
So it is this paradox of the tighter you have this group around you and the more that you depend on other people around you to be that person that is going to raise you up when you fall, the more free you are in order to become your true self and express your, you know, chase your dreams and follow what you want to do in the world.
Yes. He calls that the dependency paradox and why it's important to specifically build strong camps and honor groups, tight groups of friends before you develop or seek like an intimate relationship with a pair bond, with a male or female who's going to be your spouse.
because you want to not be totally dependent on another person.
You want to like form this reservoir of confidence before you stride out into the world.
The individual identity that is part of the social suite that defines the state space of potential groups
is also just like about the potential to reciprocally engage with other people.
just even as basic as that just even to have something to like give and to be able to receive
something from a group you have to be something separate and apart from it um before we look at
larger groups samson does he focuses on like smaller combinations and like i just mentioned
though so when i get into that one of the first is the honor group that's like a small group of
close friends bound by honor you consider this like a chosen or he says a forged family um this
group and we're just kind of talking about this should precede in a sense your dyadic pair bond
that you form with the wife a husband once you have that honor group in place you will relate
better to a potential spouse and to the world because you have certain basic needs on maslow's
hierarchy of needs satisfied and so you can self-actualize in relation to others rather than
like going out into the world existentially vulnerable and seeking everything, falling
on the knee to the first girl or guy you see and declaring your love because you just need
it so bad, you know?
And that, that, the importance of that honor group, this is when I read this, I think like
these are in your mind, these are the people that you call to hide the body.
Like if the worst thing happens, it's like, who are the five people that I can call and
be like, oh, shit just went really bad.
Yeah.
Yeah. And on hiding the body, the third part of the pusher trilogy, hiding the body is not a trivial ordeal. It's a very messy thing. Continue, though.
Remember, you've been here. You've heard me talk about this many times on stage. We should all have a murder plan. You shouldn't plan on the murder, but if it happens, then you should always have a plan to dispose the body. So make sure that you develop that.
But the importance of that, developing that honor group, is that without those people around you, then you have not yet outwardly defined your moral existence.
And by having that honor group, you're able to navigate what is the personal morality by which I want to live in the world.
And then you can have that as a baseline to go find a mate.
You said this very well, you know, that if you don't have that in the absence of that, then you will fall prey to finding someone who purports to or who you project upon your need to fulfill everything.
Yeah.
And that's a fail.
Like, no one can be everything to one person.
this was my bros before hoes note where you as a woman you need to have these friends
that are your support group that help you know what is the line and who am I and as men it's
it's also incredibly important because otherwise then you just wander out into the world alone
with someone else who is alone and two lonely people are just going to fuse together and be
aimlessly floating in a sea of trouble you know so yeah it's tough but yeah date after you have
a defined honor group um because you are going to remove yourself somewhat from that group when you
have that person. And so you need to have a solid understanding of who you are as an individual
and what are the morals that you value. Right. And not just dating. I mean, that's one
application that's very helpful in that. But just even to be a strong, independent individual in the
world, to know the profession that you want to enter into, to be able to help others in the
community, you need to be, you know, have your basic needs satisfied. And one of those is not
is company is being with others. And so that honor group helps in so many ways. So then how do we
forge this honor group? And then here we get begin to get into earnest this idea of camp crafting,
which is a lot of what the second part of this book is about. So to quote Samson, in essence,
humans are wired in a way that makes a group experiencing adversity stronger and mentally
more resilient where the adversity itself is recollected with fondness and nostalgia i read
that to introduce the first way that we can't craft which is adversity there's many ways we'll
go through a few here i'm going to say adversity is the first so therefore if you want to create
stronger bonds do challenging things together with the people who you want to be in an honor group
with to find new friends, seek out experiences that simulate adversity or that maybe are
actually adverse.
He mentions Samson does hot yoga, martial arts, or even tabletop role playing, like a
literal simulation of adversity and seeing how other people team together in that role
playing simulation to deal with the situations that you're all communally as a team confronting.
In addition to adversity, Samson notes that there are maybe a simpler way or an accompanying way rather is to create rituals of a different sort that can forge an honor group.
There can be, for example, time-based rituals is something as simple as every week on Wednesday evening, we're going to go to the same restaurant and get a meal, all of us together.
We're going to hold that time sacred.
We're all going to be sure to be there.
And we're going to do that.
Or maybe an annual one where we're all going to do a retreat, a vacation together, a trip, a hike.
And it's going to be something where you have to pool resources, plan it out.
Again, hold it sacred that time.
Keep it that it is something you're going to do.
There's also specific types of consecration rituals.
We've probably you've heard about being a blood brother, maybe getting a tattoo, things like that.
You consecrate this new bond that you forge with somebody by something to mark that in a very ritualistic way.
So those are a couple adversity, ritual. I'll pause there. Those are kind of camp crafting on the friendship level. Do you have anything to add to that as far as like how to build those bonds?
Just experiences. Two months in to my stay at the network school, there was this period. We kind of entered a lull. You know, everybody.
So you're going to be talking about the network school. Maybe just like define what it is just a bit.
Okay, so Balaji Surnavasan, the idea that we have moved past the foundational structure of a nation state into what are called network states, that the church was the source of information for everybody.
and then the printing press came along and we could all get information. And that democratized
information a little bit, but it got re-centralized because power always moved to a single source
in order for protection. So the nation states arose, which is the world that we ostensibly live
in today. United States, Russia, China, El Salvador, Suriname, these are nation states.
But the internet has further democratized information to the point that you are the media. We're a perfect example of this. We are the media now. And we are the source of information by which everyone can individually check against their own life experience to find, to move themselves closer to the truth.
And so the organizational structure of society in Balaji's thesis is that we move from the church state to the nation state to the network state.
And Balaji is building this in public with the network school which is currently about 150 to 200 people from all across the entire world who are techno who believe that they can come together
that they have met in the cloud, and now they are on land together building a community
that will give them basically a values-based system with which to navigate the world.
Yes. So you were at the network state then. And then what did you learn then about this?
So I was just having this memory of, like I said, about two months in, you know, the newness and the novelty had worn off a little bit for people.
And we'd kind of entered maybe a little bit of a lull.
And I remember that there was a group that started a Dungeons and Dragons get together.
and uh there's this fella named tim trutna who's there who is like the most interesting man in the
world and and uh just as he says uh once you've completed the main quest it's just side quests
all the way out and he became a dungeon master and i i watched it in the matter of days go from
oh there's six nerds in this group to now they're meeting off site and there's 20 people and um
They're spending hours a day planning and crafting and there's pizza and there's beer or whatever.
They're going to get together.
And it really became a cohesive thing that brought people together.
Yeah.
And it was fantastic what it did for the group morale.
And so that's one of the that's an example of building through ritual.
Yeah.
And that's because Dungeons and Dragons is all about creating an imagined community.
So it's just so directly a type of camp craft.
That's very interesting.
Yeah.
And I had the other example of when you and I first reconnected after 15 years of, you know, not really having, I think, seen each other.
One of the things that I had mentioned to you was I had read this guy.
He had this great idea.
Not his idea, but it's this Japanese term called, I think it's a masogi, which is like every month you do something difficult that takes you out of your comfort zone.
And I had mentioned that to you. And we decided that we would start cold plunging in the Columbia River at 430 in the morning in the dark, ice floating by river otters crawling by homeless guys in the bushes, you know.
And it started with you and I, right?
And it certainly was kind of terrible.
Like you're out there, it's completely dark.
There's sounds that you don't know.
You're utterly free.
We had literally no clue what we were doing.
We left it up to me to determine how long we were going to stay in the water.
If you're cold plunging anything more than three minutes, you're just working on your brain.
We just arbitrarily was like, oh, 15 minutes seems like a good time to start with.
So we're just dying out there.
But it started with you and I, and within a month, we had 10 to 12, 15 people.
There was a story written about it in the newspaper.
And through that, we built this group that was super tight and really leaned upon each other because we did, we braved that together.
And it was incredibly difficult.
Yes.
You know, and it really built those bonds between people. So real life examples of those things, you know, yoga and the working out together, just go camping and do something that takes you away from the creature comforts that you otherwise, without doing that, you can't appreciate the abundance that you have around you.
Yeah. Adversity. I mean, another word is suffering. And in Samson, I don't know if it's his coinage or if it's another thesis somebody else has. It's the community of sufferers idea that when you're with other people and you're suffering together, you build strong bonds.
And we saw this after 9-11, people that went through that together.
There was this nationwide pause in mass shootings and a lot less suicide around the nation.
People came together.
We experienced this moment of communal adversity, maybe literal suffering for many people.
And yeah, it brought us together.
And like Lucas said, we can stimulate that.
If there's a cold river, go jump in it.
Plan this out with some friends.
Do it together.
And it is something that builds bonds.
Now, so that's kind of adversity, rituals, just some ways that with individuals you can kind of begin to forge these bonds.
And Samson continues to move more in earnest into this whole camp crafting science.
What Samson wants to give us in part two is a scientifically grounded guide on how to create an ancestral home,
A space with capacity to transcend generations and bring people you most care about together.
So it's not just, it's very important about friendship, but it is about building this idea of a home, a place where you can have communal and generational contact with people.
More succinctly, camp crafting then is this act of building intentional community.
Camp crafting, unsurprisingly, is about the camp, which is an honor group situated in its environment.
There's different sizes, estimates he kind of gives, different points, maybe up to about 50 people.
You don't all have to be friends, but there has to be transitivity where everybody's a friend of a friend, essentially.
And there's a high degree of like, OK, I'm not, you know, the best friends with Kevin, but Kevin is friends with Alan and Alan's my best friend or whatever.
So there's that high transitivity where you're all connected like that.
In camp crafting, that group cohesion is incredibly important.
And it stems from having not just that transitivity, but a strong group purpose and a shared identity.
Some ways that this can be done, define and ritualize membership and onboarding process and initiation ceremony, something that demarcates entry and makes people feel that they've entered and belong to something.
Create a space for personal, meaningful communication with rich psychological safety.
Consistent meeting times where people can bring and plan projects and related activities together without judgment.
Without bad judgment in any case.
Enhance similarity in the context of diversity.
You can have shared like t-shirts, rituals.
Everybody can have their own nickname that's individual to them, but you all have nicknames.
He also notes that as a source for these types of things, you can draw from religion, existing ones, past religions, create ritual without religious context.
And that's why, you know, your emphasis on Dungeons and Dragons there or mentioning that's very interesting because within Dungeons and Dragons, in a situation like that, you're focusing on fantasy and you're often drawing from the history of like the medieval ages or some specific era that was very rich in rituals and religious types of symbols.
And you're creating a literal form of imagined community.
So one last note on this, perhaps even more important than maybe ritual or adversity for camps, and you mentioned this in the introduction, Lucas, is co-location, living next to or near those who will be in your honor group.
take many forms, buying houses in the same neighborhood, pooling together to buy a house,
communally constructing a new house or compound together, doing this by giving in doing this,
giving consideration for people having their own personal space while also preserving a shared
communal space. And then considering things like urban versus rural, which often comes down to
not one is bad or good, but access to culture, which is often in the urban setting, or access
to cheap space, which is often in the rural setting.
So those are some ritual adversity, co-location, creating rituals, membership, enhancing similarity
to the context of diversity.
Those are some ways of camp crafting.
I guess, is there anything?
And he gives a lot of other ones.
He looks at the big five psychological characteristics, how those fit in.
And he even gives an evolutionary account of group governance.
But what do you think?
Is there anything I guess you would add to those aspects of camp crafting as a science?
Or do you think that those are good considerations?
I think they're natural.
When I read the book, what I'm doing is I'm thinking about how does this relate to the life that I've lived and what I've experienced?
And the hazing is, you know, it's got it's all it's it's had such a negative connotation.
But hazing is is really important.
A group initiation is a problem.
And an initiation of an individual to a group is a better way to say it.
but it's important to distinguish yourself as you join a group because it lets everyone else know,
you know, look, we suffered to get here and you're going to suffer just a little bit,
but once you have, then you're in. And yeah, you just think about the importance of that
and having that community of sufferers. I had a football coach who actually explained to me one
time. We all hated the guy. And he explained one time that it's really important to give
everybody a common enemy. Yeah. Because then they can bond together. And once they bond together,
then all of a sudden he moves in and he flipped from being the enemy to being, okay, now you guys
have forged yourself as a team. And here I am to be the person that will be a guide for you.
But you have to go through this together. You have to experience what it's like to suffer individually.
And then the nicknames like, yeah, you know, I just I love having nicknames for people.
I in when I was teaching a man camp and we're in the band when you're on the baseball team, you know, that's how you know that you're you have something.
It is that secret handshake, but verbally said, that signifies that you're part of a group.
And yeah, it's just really important, you know.
So I guess the lesson is, you know, haze each other, give each other nicknames, you know, create these rituals.
Yeah.
Were any of these types of things present at the network state?
Was there an onboarding process that reinforced the solemnity or the identity of the group that you were joining, if you recall?
or like any sort of shared t-shirt ritual or some sort of shared, yeah,
like a thing that gave a person an identity individual to them,
but also as a part of a group, any of these things?
So I think that the number of people there, which is, you know, like 150 to 200,
that kind of exceeds that camp size.
And so maybe, you know, we all have this initiation where we come in
And it's chaos for the first couple of days where you're trying to find where the gym is and get into your schedule.
And Balaji speaks and give his overall vision.
But then within that, the camps start defining themselves, you know.
And so I think like that was probably a reason why Man Camp was such a success was because.
What was Man Camp?
So Man Camp was an evolution of me fixing stuff.
I was there and there was a cold plunge, but it hadn't been put together yet.
And so I wanted to use a cold plunge.
So I put together and then we got a sauna and it came in pallets and 4,000 pieces.
And I recruited four Indian dudes that had never swung a hammer and didn't know that there was more than one type of screwdriver to help me put it together.
And they came Donovan, who's the co-founder and Jackson, who's the founding director, came to me and said, hey, this is actually really useful.
A lot of the people that are here did not grow up in an environment where they needed to have these practical skills.
Most of the people there were from bigger cities and oftentimes from cultures where labor is so cheap that it just makes more sense to pay someone else to do all that stuff for you.
But the joy that these guys had, and the girls, by the way, that they had in participating in this was such that it raised the morale.
There was a lot of excitement about it.
And so they came to me and they said, hey, would you be interested in creating a curriculum around this?
And so we created Man Camp, which is, you know, we had a course on tying knots.
We had a shop Olympics where we took, I'll never forget my friend Juba, who went from, it took him eight minutes to saw through a board.
The first time that I gave him a handsaw and the next day he was doing in 45 seconds.
And there was just so much appreciation and accomplishment.
I meant another time I remember handing a guy a power drill and thinking, oh, I'm just going to teach this guy the fine intricacy of using a power drill, you know, to be able to keep the torque proper and keep it straight.
And I gave it to him and the first thing he did was try to hammer a screw in with the power drill.
It's like, oh, OK, we got to start.
We're not starting at zero.
We're starting at like negative five.
But it was it was difficult for these guys.
We did another one where I taught him how to rope. And you had Matt Berman was this kid from England who stayed an extra two hours the first time and had never been able to even rope something three feet in front of him until he was able to consistently do it.
And in learning what we taught, because they built their own lariets, in learning that, he took that knowledge and he used it to build his own community, which was a badminton group.
Because by knowing how to tie these knots that we taught and he applied that and he said, oh, I can go into the gym and I can clear away the space where we do our workouts and I can string up a badminton net temporarily.
And then all of a sudden we had 45 people playing badminton.
Yeah.
You know, so it had such a huge effect on that.
I can't remember.
It's interesting because I began asking you, like, does the network state have these types of things that characterize camp crafting?
Yeah, but also like you make a really good point.
Like the network state is 150 or above.
It's like hitting Dunbar's number.
You can be comfortable with the people at the network state, but maybe you don't have that personal relationship.
A tribe or groups is like nested groups of groups within that camps begin to arise.
Man camp literally.
And then you have these moments of adversity.
We need to learn a skill to take care of a problem and then you do it together communally.
And then there's the D&D camp and then there's the badminton camp.
So these camps are nested within a bigger identity, which is the network state.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
It's interesting that that's how the network state is kind of – it's this bigger identity and all these camps on which you have the face-to-face relationship kind of emerge within that.
Yeah, and they said when you show up, Balji is going to be very up front.
Like this is Frontier.
It's not fancy. We're going to learn through adversity. And I wanted to give one more example,
because this one I think was the one that really, really brought us together, was three weeks in.
So the first week I was just figuring stuff out, but I went and bought myself a guitar on the second
day. And two weeks in, I was like, if I don't play music, I'm going to lose my mind. And so
I hosted a concert. It was awesome. It was a big success. We had all these people.
and the first thing I did was like, I don't want to do this alone. I don't want to own this. I went
to my friend Leo, who is a guy with two PhDs in philosophy that dresses in a cape and walks around
and reads tarot cards to people, but he also makes fine Italian food. And so he started La Dolce Vita,
which was this little pop-up kitchen. And then we had other people, Manasa and Adam, these people
that came in and they helped with setup and they helped. We had five people acting as waiters and
waitresses in order to serve everybody that were just volunteering and they were coming together.
And the third week, the air conditioning went out. And, you know, this is in Malaysia. It's very hot.
And we're up on the 11th floor. The air conditioning had been out for a couple of days
And we're in this room and it is pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit. People are sweating and they're just, it was miserable in there. But we decided not to cancel it. We went ahead and we pushed through and we had this like great bonding experience that I still to this day, and so do the people that were there.
They still remember that because that was when we defined a theme song, kind of, which was a, there was an instance we had a lost and found box to put the stuff that people left laying around.
And we showed up that day and the stuff was there and somebody had stolen the damn lost and found box.
And I have a lot, I have a song called Lost and Found.
And so we reflected on the hilarity of that.
And that became kind of our theme.
It really bonded us together and really brought us together.
We're up there sweating like crazy, but gathering together to rejoice in fellowship and play music.
Yeah, I'm glad you give all that context about regarding what the network state is about.
We read and discussed Bology's online hyperlinked series of essays that is kind of the network state book, which is kind of an evolving sort of book.
one of the things that struck me throughout the discussion, very interesting intellectual thesis,
but there was like a sterility to it of like a nation for me was not just a set of people
together, but it was about this almost unchosen set of bonds that you have with a group of people.
And so to hear you talk about the emergent camps within the network state, it fills out
Balaji's thesis in a critical way, I think. You can talk abstractly about community,
But when you see, oh, community can arise when people place themselves in intentional proximity, they can consciously create it.
And, you know, they're probably going to create it because that instinct we have this tribe drive, people are going to want to build the groups that they're a part of.
There's a really good quote here.
Samson is talking about kind of the role, I believe he's talking about the role of like shamans, shamanic figures in helping to craft the identity of a group.
And he notes, this is kind of from our evolutionary history, we literally survived and thrived as a species because some leaders of our past told good stories about what made us special.
So it's that feeling of becoming special by sharing in a story with others that people who are leaders have taken the time to either consciously or unconsciously tell a story about what we're all doing here together.
And then you have you're infused with a shared purpose and a shared identity.
So, yeah, I just want to note that it's really cool.
I hope you keep on talking about that and that this network state idea is kind of enriched with the actual community that's involved in it and not just an intellectual thesis.
Yeah, a country, a nation, to me, it's three things.
It is borders, because without that, then you don't have, you know, this geographically defined area.
It's property rights, because without that, then you can't prosper.
But then the third thing, it is it's that narrative.
It's that we are collectively going to agree to the same basic story because without that, then we don't have this inherent trust with each other.
We don't have this inherent similarity and the bond that comes from comes from living in the same.
Yeah.
Living in the same movie, I guess.
That's a good way to put it.
That same shared story that makes us special.
The same movie.
There's another, I wanted to get, I know I'm giving a lot of examples, but there, I did want to give a shout out to Sam who runs the gym there, came up with a bootcamp.
Like a, it's just like it was a more aggressive workout program for people who really wanted to make a physical transformation.
And that group, you know, these are guys that, and girls, that came in, a lot of them had never lifted weights before.
many of them had never really these are keyboard warriors by and large there are some phenomenal
athletes there but by and large they were keyboard warriors coming in and coming together at the same
time every day in order to work out and having the group chat where people are sharing their
progress and when they go off campus they're sending back proof of workout yeah you know
They're showing, hey, look, I'm still with you.
I'm still, I found a gym or I went outside and I did my work out there.
And that group got really tight as well, too.
Yeah. And so this, these examples are all great.
And I hope someone listening can, when one, maybe in one sense, maybe they come to understand Samson's thesis.
In other sense, maybe they see what the network state is about.
But in a third, very real sense, we can take whatever community you're in.
We can begin to camp craft within our local community.
We can get some workout partners together. We can do a practical skills course. None of that is impossible. You don't have to go to the network state to do that. These are all just fantastic ideas because I think we do all find ourselves in our modern, as Samson mentions and describes, in a suburban society of single nuclear families where we begin to lose the community that if we don't consciously create, we're never going to have.
So those are some of the—that's camp crafting in a nutshell.
There's a lot of stuff we kind of left out of the discussion by necessity.
We kind of saw the good part of community.
In the last two chapters, Samson describes how the tribe drive, though, can be bad, and then how we can address the badness of the tribe drive by kind of bootstrapping the tribe drive itself to move beyond tribalism to a metatribal era.
so to continue and kind of summarizing the book recall that tribalism arises as a solution to
this need to how do we trust how do we know who to trust we evolve first genetic kinship we trust
the people we're related to then friendship we trust the people in face-to-face relationships
and then we develop we evolve the tribe drive the civility disability to believe to trust people who
believe the same symbolic stuff that you do, participate in the same larger stories.
So we move from the kinship era to the friendship era to the tribal era, and that's where we're at
right now. We are still living in a tribal era. In this tribal era, we have tended to become more
and more centralized and authoritarian to kind of coerce and control and enforce cooperation among
members of different coalitions, different groups within the larger tribal identity.
To quote Sampson, the chains of centralization with elite autocrats and tyrants commanding bureaucratic thralls that hold the keys to our shackles has been a favored stratagem.
Around 4 billion humans currently live under authoritarian regimes.
And alongside that, we just got finished reading the Satoshi papers. And in the introduction to that, we learned about how the U.S. founding, our Republican project, was an ad hoc system of kind of checks and balances to rein in authority and give individuals living within – who wanted to start a new project together under the values of democracy, the enlightenment values, free markets, freedom of association, as kind of a reaction to that authoritarian.
way that groups are held together and how we kind of need now a refounding given the
authoritarian drift and centralizing drift of the last 250 years.
That's kind of the general picture in any case.
Things can look even bleaker for us when we think about what it means that we are in a
tribal area, that we're all still essentially tribal.
On one hand, we have the evils of in-group tribalism, us versus them, in-group versus
out-group, racism, genocide.
On the other hand, to combat that, the evil of increasing centralization, authoritarianism to deal with our tribal impulses, the increasing attempts to dismantle our private associations and ignore our very real genetic impulse to care more for those closest to us than we care for strangers.
And I kind of describe that as evil in-group tribalism, evil centralization and saying evil. But one of Samson's key points is that the tribe drive and tribalism really is not an ethical crisis. It's an energy crisis.
And what he means by that is that it's cognitively difficult, energetically costly to think equally of everybody, to think of everyone as friend and family, because we evolved to have a channel capacity mentally to see a certain subset of people as irreplaceable, as valuable.
Despite what people say, you really can't love everybody equally.
It's kind of a good abstract notion to consider, but we don't literally have the brain capacity to do that.
We don't have the energy to process that number of social relations.
We have limited bandwidth for empathy and a larger but more energy-intensive set of mental processes
that allow us to deal with people who we don't have that empathic bond with, with strangers.
So Samson then suggests a new moral framework to deal with this tribalism that we still have in the tribal era we're in, in which we can still embrace the good parts of tribalism to a degree while curtailing its negative aspects.
And he calls this view the concentric circle.
So in this view, this moral theory, we can imagine an inner circle with our honor group and then greater circles around that kind of proceeding outward with more and more people added up to like Dunbar's number, the number of people we can process and be comfortable around, then expanding beyond that.
Those are the concentric circles. So the moral principle behind this theory is essentially that it's okay to privilege that inner circle, your in-group, as long as you don't cause the outer circle pain or harm them.
So it's kind of like a negative liberty conception where the freedom to swing my fist stops at my neighbor's nose.
You can privilege your in-group, but you can't do so in a way that harms the out-group.
um this it's not necessarily problematic to privilege the in-group it's actually very
important we should be allowed to love friends and family more than we love you know some stranger
we've never met um and if we focus on our individual health before helping others then
focus on our in-group before other groups we tend to build a stronger world because we're focusing
on communities where we can move the needle a bit and actually influence and impact things
so again on this view as long as you don't cause pain or loss of human thriving to an out group
you can continue to operate with your in group and shower you know your attention and gifts upon them
so i guess what do you think about this either the framing of ourselves living in a tribal era
or and or samson's response that we should reframe our morality as a sort of concentric circle
privileging an inner circle but not harming the outer circle
the beginning of having good relationships with other people is having a good relationship with
yourself and self-care and self-love is a caring act for other people because when you
take care of your body when you take care of your mind when you take care of your responsibilities and
focus on your spirituality and your ability to navigate the world with confidence.
You're building yourself up, but what you're also doing is making yourself less of a burden
to other people. If I'm healthy and in good shape, then I can come help you move.
The converse of that is if I'm not, if I eat myself into a wheelchair, then I'm now a burden
on the people around me. And so self-care is a loving act for other people. And that concentric
circle starts individually with the person and then expands to the honor group and then to the
sympathy group and then to Dunbar's numbers, that tribe. I love the thought example that Samson gives,
which is the sympathy group is the dozen or so people who,
if they were to pass, you would be crushed and it would,
it would truly, it would truly wreck you emotionally.
And he says, well, you know,
I think it's like 180,000 or however many people die every single day.
And imagine trying to live in a world where you're,
you had the same, like if you were to pass away and that would just wreck, like imagine if I felt
that 180,000 times a day, every single day, I wouldn't be able to navigate the world. And so
he does a good job of framing to us why why you can love everyone equally and why it important to prioritize your in your close concentric circles as long as you not and that the litmus test is as long as you
not hurting those other people around you yeah um yeah it's just uh
yeah self-care is a loving act is the thing that i that i start like he
I think that it's important to take it all the way down to the atomic level of you don't start with your honor group.
You start with yourself.
And a lot of times you need that honor group to help you find yourself and help you keep moving morally in the direction that you want to go.
You know, it's moral to be physically fit.
It's moral to be educated.
It's moral to go to bed and get up early in order to be the best person you can be for the people around you.
Because the more you can do that, the more you can elevate the group and build concentrically around.
I had a question for you because he talks about the – I believe it's the MetaTribe and he gives the example of the conquerors of the past.
What they did was they completely erased any sort of like tribal, you know, we're going to take your gods, your statues, and we're going to take them away.
We're going to kill the entire line of your royalty.
And we're just literally going to wipe away any sort of tie that you have to the people that you were before we conquered you in order to effectively force you to integrate into what we have.
And success was finally found when the approach became that we're going to allow for that to be part of the story.
And not a fracture of the story, but literally like, look, this was part of the fate.
Part of the fate of your story was to become part of our story and that we're going to build.
And so what it makes me think of is like back at the network state, you know, there's people from 120 different countries there. And I'd love to ask, and maybe we'll get the chance to talk to Balaji someday about this, but I'm curious about, is it necessary to leave behind your previous identity as an American, as an Indian, as a Japanese or Chinese?
Is it necessary for us as we move into this era of network states to leave that identity behind and to identify as a network state, you know, primarily?
What do you think about that?
On the first part, that's very interesting.
That is a story that Sam relates in his book about how Cirrus the Great in the past invented a new mode of empire creating.
Before, it was, as he said, symbolic genocide was the way that conquerors did it.
They came in, rolled through, destroyed all customs, local gods, and everything.
Cirrus the Great had a new mode of empire building where he let people keep the local gods, but they essentially had to recognize him as kind of a meta god over them.
He integrated them into a new symbolic structure while allowing them to keep their old one.
And that's a lot easier to do because, as Samson notes, identities are very sticky.
You try to do a symbolic genocide, but you really can't root out from the human heart all of those associations that people have.
You know, people will die for their God and they'll continue to believe in their God even if the representations are destroyed.
As to whether we can integrate our own identities into some new notion of a network state.
one of the things about the network state it's like the idea is society as a service is a
subscription model is exit is the primary aspect of it where if you don't like it you can leave
marked against loyalty and voice which are the other modes of operation where you can be loyal
to something and not leave it and think you have to stay in and build the house that's burning down
or whatever to repair it.
And I think that there's some,
how it felt to me
when we were discussing the network state
is there's some conflict there
with being able to freely leave,
being able to freely choose
who you will associate with
and the notion of identity being unchosen,
which is how I kind of deeply feel.
I have a book up here by Alistair McIntyre
that's kind of facing the camera.
We have a lot of books by Alistair McIntyre. He's my favorite philosopher. And one of his quotes is, if you want to know what you should do in life, first ask yourself, what stories am I a part of? These are stories that you find yourself a part of. You don't create the story. The stories are already there.
He critiques existentialist philosophy, saying, if you think that existence precedes essence, that you can freely choose every aspect of who you are, on what criteria will you choose?
Do you choose the criteria by which you're going to choose?
There's an infinite regress if you think that every aspect of who you are can be freely chosen.
There's a bedrock-bottom foundational aspect of you that is unchosen.
unchosen. That's like you are born as a son. You are born as a member of the local religion,
the local physical, spatial community. All of these things are unchosen. You can later go on
in life to develop and elaborate the stories that those unchosen identities impart on you,
but I don't think you can exit them. I think you'll always bring them with you.
Maybe a network state, can I integrate those to a certain degree? But for me,
exit has always seemed less important than loyalty or voice. Then working within the narratives you
find yourself a part of to help elaborate them is much more important than trying and much,
from my own perspective, much better than trying to leave those stories and find new stories that
are better. The things that you choose, you're always going to end up choosing based on criteria
that in some sense were unchosen. And so just accept that. Accept that we have identities we
don't choose and then work within those to realize fully the potential you can have.
Yeah.
The creation of no fault divorce in the United States is what I'm thinking about right now,
which is that's the exit.
You know, previously you kind of had loyalty.
I'm just going to suffer through whatever this relationship has become or voice, which
is, you know, that I'm going to try and assert my position and make things better.
But adding exit to the institution of marriage seemed like a great idea at the time. But what we have observed since then, obviously skyrocketing divorce rates, but also people that generally speaking are less happy in their relationships and they're less.
they're less because they have the option of just leaving then you don't have to put
into it that type of investment that you do when you when you don't have that option yeah
um that you can you can um yeah you there there is a negative um there is a negative
unintended consequence of exit, which is that you lack the forcing function of,
I have to figure this out. You know, I'm going to sentence you to another year of hard marriage
and then come back and see me. Maybe you guys figure it out. And some people did and some
people didn't. But, you know, marriage as the institution is, as we have it in the Western
in society is you made a vow before your family, your friends, and your God that you're going to
do this till you die. And then we put this loophole in that would just like, well, unless you decide
not to. And I think that the consequence of that has probably been negative overall. It's, you know,
we don't want to force people to stay in something that's horrible, but it turns out that maybe giving
them the option to just throw up their hands and exit is not helping anybody.
Yeah, no, for sure.
Another example, in the West, we have really developed this idea of autonomy, your ability
to choose freely every aspect of your being.
You're allowed to exit everything up into including your gender.
But the question is, even if you find these institutions oppressive that you find yourself
a part of, being born in a gender that you don't feel identified with.
Another way to respond to that is to say, I'm not going to exit.
I'm going to continue to elaborate the institution I find myself a part of.
Institutions grow.
Change organically comes from within based on understanding.
And this is kind of the idea of common law, that the principles build based on their own
logic.
And the system elaborates from within.
Instead of leaving the system and trying to build the new one, you instead work within
the system, to reform and to find the parts of it that are good and promising and encourage
and grow those and to, you know, try to diminish the focus on others.
So that's, I don't know if that's a critique of camp crafting as such, probably not, because
whatever group you find yourself in, you're always going to want to, you know, grow through
adversity, have certain sort of bonding rituals.
I guess the one qualification I would put on Samson's framework is, I don't think you
can invent religious rituals to give significance to a group. Maybe you can find old rituals that
had some symbolic potency and repurpose them. But, you know, if you draw from outside of a framework
that you're already a part of, they're going to lack some essential meaning that they had as part
of the framework that they were a part of. Like symbolic relics from another culture, if we bring
them into the West, maybe they have some sort of exoticism or something. But at the end of the day,
rediscovering the own, the traditions that you find yourself already a part of, learning about
those, I think is probably for many people would be a much more fruitful way of camp crafting
than to try to draw in a bunch of traditions that they're not a part of.
Yeah. It's interesting what you bring up about, I know you gave the example of like exiting your
gender, but there's, you know, anything that you exit, what you're doing essentially is you're
admitting to yourself that you don't have the power to change within that structure, that you
can't be impactful within that institution in order to evolve it. And if you go through a Tony
Robbins seminar, like the first thing that they talk about is that the most powerful force in the
world is your brain's desire to stay consistent with the narrative that it's telling itself,
that your beliefs build your identity. And if you want to change your identity,
then you need to change your beliefs. James Clear has really systematized this in Atomic Habits,
which is in order to change your actions, you need to change your identity.
if you want to quit drinking if you want to quit overeating if you want to quit doing these things
that you know are negative or if you want to start doing something that you know is positive
you need to identify as that it's not i'm going to start running it's i am a runner and and tell
yourself that it's not i am going to try and learn how to play guitar it's i'm i'm a guitar player
And you first have to tell yourself a better story to align with the identity that you want to bring into the world because the identity is not static.
That identities can change and they can evolve over time.
And an institution is just an expression of the identity of the people that come together.
And so you do bring up a really good point there in that, you know, it's admitting powerlessness.
It's admitting that you don't have control to make a change.
And we all have control to make a change.
We all have the ability to change at the core level within our own mind and then to affect people around us.
And through that, bring, you know, be the light that you want the world to see.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's very well said. Tribalism. So we've been talking about tribalism as an evolved solution in the next part of the book. We're just moving directly on from this. So tribalism evolves as a way to solve this problem of how do we know who to trust? If we can read the symbols of another person, I can say Lucas is somebody from by the way he dresses from Northwest Kansas. Look at the boots and everything. I know I can trust him.
This doesn't look San Francisco?
You know, the Livestrong Polo is nice, but maybe not Silicon Valley nice.
But there's also, in addition to this tribe drive that's an evolved solution, we also are now developing technological solutions to the problem of trust.
And now Bitcoin enters the chat.
It's awesome.
It's so great.
Like, it took 400 pages to get to it.
But it's a culmination, though.
But it is the technology. I know you're going to say this better than I am, but it is the life-changing technology that allows us to scale trust beyond the tribe. And it changes everything. It changes everything about the way that we're going to interact with the world.
Yeah, and you said, you know, it takes 300, 400 pages to get here. It takes, you know, what, two, two and a half hours of conversation for us to get to this point where we can cogently talk about Bitcoin's role as far as trust facilitator, given our evolved need to know who we can trust.
If we don't have all this prehistory, all this discussion, we're talking about the tribe drive, how it evolves as a solution to resolve problems of who to know, who to trust, then you lose an essential aspect of the power of Bitcoin as a technology.
And so, I mean, that's why it's really important that I think we read books that don't have Bitcoin on the cover.
Even if you're looking to read something about Bitcoin, you're going to need to learn about sociology, anthropology, evolutionary theory.
If you really want to understand the system of incentives that is the Bitcoin protocol.
So Samson here discusses how Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, had a solution to the trust paradox, this problem of how do we know who to trust?
So Satoshi gave us a way for strangers to interact with strangers and know beyond any doubt that the interaction is trustworthy.
With the integration of proof of work into the Bitcoin protocol, he gives us a way to develop a globally shared consensus view that is established without any particular person having to trust any other particular person.
So without going into like the nitty gritty of proof of work, all that's involved there, for our purposes here, we can simply observe that Bitcoin, the protocol, allows the creation of a ledger, a way of conducting and recording transactions where zero trust is required of the people participating, who you are transacting with, and you don't have to trust equally anybody to maintain the overall ledger itself.
So with this trust technology, with Bitcoin as a trust technology, we have something that scales beyond Dunbar's number. Our limited cognitive channel capacity to process social relations is something that makes Bitcoin very well suited as a technology to allow us to interact with strangers who we can't keep in our head essentially as one of the 150 people we're comfortable with.
We don't need to personally trust everybody who we contract, who we transact with through the Bitcoin protocol.
Because we don't need to trust them, because we don't have to trust them, we don't have to read their tribal symbols and judge to see if they're a threat or a potential ally.
We don't need to make sure the person is a member of the same tribe.
We don't need to know the color of their skin, the ideological contents of their brain, their faith, any of that.
Instead, we can rely on a technology that scales trust without creating an in-group or an out-group and without involving a centralizing tyrant to enforce it.
So there's some more there, but I guess I'll pause there because it's quite the pain to Bitcoin to put it at the culmination of our evolutionary history trying to find a way to solve this problem.
Who do we trust?
Yeah, it takes away the need for ideology.
This is a callback to the introduction that I gave, which is that in reading this, I had this revelation of, you know, I've been for four and a half years, I've been thinking of myself like first as a Bitcoiner. And that's why we're that's why we're reading this book. It's not because we're Bitcoiners, but it's because we are approaching the world from a Bitcoin perspective.
And in doing so, what we realize is that it's merely the base layer. And there is so much more richness on top of that with developing a community, with understanding that, you know, my primary identity is no longer.
That was the revelation I had at four o'clock in the morning when I was finishing the reading like a like a kid before a test was that I I'm not I'm not going to identify as that anymore.
I'm not going to let that be my ideology, that my most important identity is as a brother and a friend and as as an honor group member to these people around me, because I no longer need to have an ideology.
in order to signal myself as belonging to an in-group because there was not a solution for
the trust dilemma. And so now I can just accept Bitcoin like I accept gravity. I can accept
Bitcoin like I can accept the sun coming up. And this is just something that I live in,
but it doesn't define me. The things that I do define me, the actions that I take, the
way that I interact with the people around me in order to refine my morality, promote those values
and surround myself with other people who do the same. That's so much more important than being a
Bitcoiner. I know this podcast, you know, is called Bitcoin Study Sessions, but it's, it can't be the
thing that defines us. We can't limit ourselves to being a Bitcoiner. We can't limit ourselves to
just reading books that are solely about how Bitcoin changes everything, we are still going
to have to be that change.
We're still going to have to be the change that we want to see in the world.
And it's so impactful to have that realization that I can let go of these ideologies.
Yeah.
And Samsung continues on.
He doesn't stop at Bitcoin.
So he continues the dialogue in the direction you're going that Bitcoin changes things.
But then what direction is this change going to take us?
How further are we going to change society?
So Bitcoin introduces this decentralized ledger that we can record transactions of value.
There's this then decentralized ethos is a direct check and balance to the developing authoritarian centralizing trajectory we find ourselves on as a way to control all these kind of different groups and tribes.
So Samson describes four different pillars of decentralization that we get from jumping off from Bitcoin as a technology.
Decentralized communication, decentralized law, decentralized production, decentralized finance.
And decentralizing all of these areas permits the possibility of a network state.
And here, we've already talked about this, but here in the book is where Samson discusses this type of state, as you've described it.
in more detail, lying on a continuum of development of what a state is from a church state to a nation
state to a network state. He describes it as, you know, what it is, an intentional community of
people. You gather in the digital realm and then acquire real world property to organize a society
around moral innovation. Samson has Balaji's one sentence recapitulation of what the network state
is. It has all the different elements that
Bology considers kind of
significant or necessary.
Generally, as we kind of mentioned, it's a type
of society that is also like a subscription
service where exit is very important.
You can leave and join a different one if the
current one does not meet your
needs.
We already kind of talked about
the network state and how it fits in.
Is there anything to add to that?
One of the things that
of those four pillars that I find really
interesting and why
I know this would be a very contrarian thing to say,
but why I would bet against Amazon is decentralized production.
Because what we have right now are products,
I think it's 55% of all the things Americans buy come from Amazon or 45 or something like that.
Literally everybody else, Walmart, Target, everybody else,
they fight over the remaining, say, half.
but the model is centralization here's the production it's going to a distribution facility
and then it's getting on a plane or a truck and then it's getting to you and if you break down
the cost structure of what you end up paying a lot of what you pay is delivery and transportation
cost and just simply the energy to get it there. And so with 3D printing, where you have the
ability to have a factory where you have in one side, we're putting in goods. Sorry, we're putting
in raw materials. And in the other side, out comes finished goods. And we can do that in Osborne,
Kansas and we can do that in Manitoba and we can do that in Chile, then I think you see that
the logistical advantage that Amazon holds over competitors that evolved as
when they took that to scale, like that's what they beat people on is we're going to get it to
you fast. And we're going to get it to you with a wide variety of selection. Like that's when
Jeff Bezos talks about people always make the mistake of looking into the future and saying
what's going to be different. And he says, you know, what you should do is look into the future
and say what's going to be the same. And what's going to be the same is that people are going to
want a wide variety. They're going to want it quick and they're going to want it cheap. And
And if we can decentralize production such that there is in every town, every village, every hamlet, they have their own little production facilities that makes their shoes, makes their rugs, makes their their furniture, et cetera, et cetera.
Then we have solved all of those problems at a local level.
Yeah.
So I find that one to be like a really fascinating potential consequence of technology, which is that the decentralized everything.
It's not, hey, we're going to have decentralized money, but Amazon's going to rule the world.
I actually think that it's going to go the other way.
Yeah.
And maybe it'll be Amazon that puts them all there, that puts all these little ones there.
But in the end, I think it's still going to be more advantageous for a community to individually purchase that, run it, and that removes the added layer of the profit incentive of Amazon.
You still have to maintain the equipment and stuff.
But we're just going along this path of removing middlemen.
We're taking middlemen out of banking.
We're taking middlemen out of law. We're taking them out of health care. And so I have no reason to believe that it wouldn't continue with production.
And maybe it continues further. Decentralizing technologies may be even more disruptive than we can imagine. Samson continues on to discuss something we've discussed, Jason Lowery's software thesis. We have six or so podcasts going in-depth into that.
But Samson noted on Twitter that he had initially a lot more space devoted to Lowry and Bology.
He's got like now like half a page on Lowry here.
I could just read the entirety.
But I'll give kind of a summary of Samson's summary of software, which is useful, I think, because software is an often misunderstood thesis.
I don't know that I even fully understand it perfectly.
if you look at the Twitter takes on it there's a lot of hate towards it but it's often by people
who you know haven't done the time to really consider what it means and so Samson it looks
like he did do the time and so here's kind of my summary of Samson's summary the generalize so
generally ownership of a resource is determined by who projects the most power over it you own
something if you can project power to forcibly prevent others from taking it from you war is the
current power projection protocol that determines ownership of societal resources we verify who owns
something according to who is able to project the most military power to control it control access
to it control who has it but war is ineffective against data secured by the bitcoin protocol
No amount of tanks or drones or military violence of any sort can breach the protocol and take the resource that it secures.
We can now, therefore, determine the owner of a resource in a way that doesn't require the projection of kinetic military power.
Samson concludes in one sentence,
Bitcoin is the first property in human history that you cannot take with violence.
So, again, that's a huge condensation of a very complex thesis. But do you feel, I mean, that the software thesis does fit into this accounting of our tribal nature in the practice of making tribes?
Yeah. And we're going to look back on Satoshi Nakamoto as maybe the Wright brothers who invented flight. And we're going to look back on Jason Lowry as the modern day Billy Mitchell who recognized the importance. Satoshi obviously recognized the importance, but Jason takes it to another level that I don't think Satoshi even envisioned.
which is that to understand war you have to understand resources and he does it in software
from a biological level from single-celled organisms all the way up to the most complex
individuals humans that war is controlling access to and denying access from resources
And the way that we, it's a competition and the winner of the competition gets the resources and then they have to continue competing at all times in order to control access to and deny access from those resources.
And the place that we end up going is that we find ourselves realizing that on the outside, war looks like an ideological battle.
You know, capitalist countries don't really go to war against other capitalist countries. Communist countries don't really go to war with other communist countries. It's typically a battle of ideology.
But if you extract out and you understand what Samson introduced before, which is the idea of the in-group and that what we're doing is we're simply directing our energy to the benefit of our in-group and then recognizing that doing so makes our in-group stronger,
even though it comes at the expense of the out group. That's what war is. I'm trying to make my
in-group stronger and I'm going a little over the edge in that I am swinging my fist where it
connects with your nose and I am causing harm to the out group. But because I prefer my in-group
to my out group, then I have no moral problem doing that. And that's all of these wars that
we've been involved in in the United States for the last 80 years they're all moral wars they're
all this is a battle of values this is reportedly moral yeah exactly sold as morality yeah where he
even talks about that there somebody that was fighting and I think the Iraq war and you know talked to some people from the other side and was like oh I didn like I was shocked to find out that they thought of themselves as
the rebel alliance in Star Wars and we were the, you know, we're the Death Star. When over here,
we think of the exact opposite, you know, we're, you know, we're freeing these people, we're
giving them democracy at the point of a gun. Um, and yeah, just the importance of
not having to use physical violence and take lives, um, in order to,
in order to preference your in-group, um, is elevating to all of humanity. Um, and it gives
another just giant feather in the cap of hope.
Yeah.
And Samson, maybe he would have elaborated more had he dedicated the space to it, had
his editor not cruelly forced him to remove that portion.
He might have gone on to Lowry discussing how Bitcoin itself is power projection and
is going to continue the competition.
We all have a tribal drive, in a sense, to compete against the outgroup.
We can now do so peacefully by participating in a hashing power competition through Bitcoin miners out of the loop warfare in which machines do all the fighting by participating in the Bitcoin protocol.
As envisioned by Nikola Tesla.
That's right.
I can't let that opportunity pass that, you know, Bitcoin is not something that we've been working towards this for over a century or it's been the path that we've been on for over a century.
And as Lynn Alden notes in Broken Money that the need for Bitcoin, the need for this has been around since I think it was like 1856, which was the invention of the telegraph.
Yeah.
I probably got that date wrong, but...
Although Samson, so Samson does laud the role that Bitcoin can play here.
He does even talk about Jason Lowery's software thesis, which can sound utopic to a certain degree.
But he does, I mean, he does know and continue on to discuss, I mean, Bitcoin doesn't truly eradicate tribalism as such.
The tribe drive is who we are.
It's part of us.
It's a genetic thing.
At most, of course, it's a set of incentives that plays well with who we are as tribal creatures.
The true solution, in Samson's estimation, comes when we can bootstrap the tribe drive itself to eradicate the malevolent forms of tribalism and help humanity enter a new era.
So we have to be the surgeon doing surgery on ourselves to use this tribe drive to better ourselves, to redirect it to useful ends, so to speak.
so to restate the problem that we're going to that we're going to use tribalism to solve
ideology has been at the center of a lot of 21st century violence ideology is a form of tribalism
is an expression of the tribal drive of the need to tribally signal to see who to trust
ideology is a set of symbols adhered to as a way to signal trustworthiness to other adherents of
the ideology. Ideologies aren't usually a set of arguments we accept. They are just a set of
symbols we buy into so we can determine who to trust. Ideologies have led to a lot of impaired
thinking and bad ideas, in Samson's estimation. Religious ideologies have given us terror bombings.
Religious racial ideologies led to discrimination and racism. Political ideologies, dissension,
cancel culture, political violence. Ideologies have this effect of compromising our cognitive
immune system, our ability. A bad idea is a mind virus. It travels mind to mind like viruses travel
body to body. Ideologies compromise. They weaken the immune system we have to bad ideas.
Samson gives this framework, drawing on Andy Norman's work to discuss cognitive immunology.
Ideologies do this by inducing in us a state of what Samson calls willful unreason, where we refuse to consider.
So willful unreason, when you're under an ideological thrall, is the refusal to consider evidence and instead to defend our ideological group identity at all costs.
Samson calls this the tribe virus when willful unreason is attached to an identity that we will not give up.
In those cases, the tribe trumps truth because the tribe is what ensures our survival.
There's evolutionary reasoning behind this.
There's a reason why we adhere to ideologies even when the evidence tells us that our ideology is bunk because they help us survive.
Samson believes then that the solution is for all of us to join or subscribe to a metatribal identity.
An identity that sits on top of all of our other identities.
It's the top of the identity stack, so to speak.
The metatribal identity has only one principle.
It is the metabelief, a belief about beliefs, the metabelief that beliefs should change in response to evidence.
that is the meta the metal the meta tribal identity is designed to surgically remove
the willful unreason portion of all the ideologies we might adhere to so in this view you can still
adhere to whatever other ideology you can still be a progressive a christian whatever
but you have to subject all of them to the meta belief the overriding commitment that you will
be willing to change your commitments those other ideologies in response to the evidence so in this
view, if you have the metatribal identity of revising your views based on evidence, if you
believe that Donald Trump is an evil authoritarian who's trying to become king, you can still believe
that, but you have to be open to evidence that would disprove that. And then to actually change
your mind if you do receive such evidence, the overall idea of the metatrib is to create a tribe
that is simply called Team Human. So one final and universal tribe to rule them all and to restate
what that entails, Samson gives us the creed of Team Human, the MetaTribe. This is the belief that
everybody's a member of Team Human, the MetaTribe would have to have. That is, I'm a member of Team
Human. Our creed is that beliefs can change in light of evidence. We are a community of inquiry
where beliefs are deemed reasonable if they can withstand reasonable challenges to their veracity.
We are the MetaTribe. My question to you then, Lucas, is do you find that, I guess, viable
practical, realistic, beautiful, whatever. Do you think that you are a member of Team Human
and do you have this metatribal belief? Yeah, I think we all want to, we all aspire to be
the person who sees the world as it is unaffected by your bias. And this is the value of steel
Manning, the other side's position where you make the case for the side that you are opposed to
from their side using their best argument in a way that they would not object to.
And what this makes me think of is just you sit next to somebody who's a rabid fan of a football
team and there's a penalty on their team. And of course, they think that it's spurious and they
think that it's wrong. And then the exact same thing happens for the other team. And of course,
it's deserved. I'm a Kansas City Royals baseball fan. And in 1985, they won the World Series,
but they won the World Series on a blown call at first base that when you review the tape,
the guy was clearly out by like six to eight feet like it's not it is not justifiable at all
yeah um and and so you know as a royals fan i'm glad that i was not only alive but um able to
participate in 2015 when they won their technically second world series but to me it was the first one
because I saw that video.
And I looked at that and I goes,
there is no way that I can justify
supporting the end result of them becoming the champions
when that was the call that gave them the opportunity to win.
Without that, then they lose.
And so we all want to aspire to be that person
that is comfortable in the face of opposition
and that's able to face their own bias.
And Samson does a good job of giving us these examples where, you know,
if you, in the scenario that Donald Trump is accused of tax evasion
and there's, you know, a misdemeanor is elevated to 30-some felonies
because it's passed the statute of limitations, is that deserve it?
And, oh, you know, on one side, of course, that is, you know, this is a horrible person who's doing horrible things.
And, OK, well, what if it's Joe Biden or what if it's Barack Obama or Donald Trump is a racist or not?
He's a racist or he's a rapist.
You know, that's horrible things.
You know, it's just a terrible person.
Well, OK, but, you know, Bill Clinton settled like a half a dozen rape cases.
Is that something that you also feel the same amount of fervent emotionality about or that you also see as just as legitimate?
the benefit of steel manning is just that you make yourself more comfortable in the beliefs that you have
because you've put them to the ultimate test of fighting the war for the other side with the best weapons that are available.
Yeah, he calls that the moral mirror test.
When you imagine one figure of the opposing tribe doing something and then imagine a member of your tribe doing the same thing,
do you have the same emotional interior reaction to that?
And in that way, you can evaluate your tribal identity.
But I want to get you on record with the response to this question.
Are you a member of Team Human, the Meta Tribe?
Do you think that adhering to a meta belief that all beliefs should be revisable based
on openness to the evidence, that that should sit atop the identity stack, so to speak,
and that that is a commitment that you think for yourself is valuable, or you should commit
to that and other people should as well?
And it's tough because the example he gives in the book is, you know, a debate between an atheist and a believer in Christ.
And he asks the atheist what it would take in order to change his opinion.
And he says evidence.
And you ask the believer what it would take to change his opinion.
And he says nothing.
And Samson calls that out as, you know, this is the thing that causes our problems, you know.
Yet there, to me, is something so beautiful about faith.
There is something beautiful about not needing evidence.
It's hope, and hope is what moves us forward.
Hope is what gives us the, hope is what gives us an ability to better the world and think that there's a reason to get up in the morning and not be in constant existential dread.
so I
I'm glad that you're putting me to the fire on that
because I do really struggle with that one
because I
above all else
what I want
I think is the ability to believe
in something without requiring evidence
and just because
I think it's beautiful
I think it's romantic
and I think it's
yeah, it's, it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful position to be in. So I, yeah, I'm, I don't know
if I'm, I don't know if I could come around to that just because I think it is, I think,
I think that it is what drives us as humanity is that we do have hope, that we do have faith,
and that our reach doesn't exceed our grasp.
What's a heaven for without that?
And so, yeah, I don't know.
I think I may fail that more, whatever you call it,
moral mirror or whatever.
No, that's the meta-tribal,
the meta-belief for the meta-tribe of team humanity,
that commitment.
Yeah, I wouldn't, I think it's,
I disagree with Samson on this.
I don't think, he has that dialogue you mentioned
between Bill Nye and Ken Ham.
Nye says, I'll change my mind based on the evidence.
Ham says, I'm a Christian. Nothing will convince that the word of God is not true.
Nye's response, I find to be glib, trivial and wrong.
Like, who decides what evidence is? Evidence of what?
Why does evidence work?
Does evidence itself presuppose a law like observable objective reality that one can only accept based on faith?
I mean, that's kind of the natural law theory.
Like this idea that you can be a scientist without and that that can supplement or like can like supplant your whole substantive view of reality.
I just find that to be very, very wrong.
Neil deGrasse Tyson had this idea at one point that we could have a virtual country called Rationalia where all policy was decided on the weight of the evidence.
And it's just like that's like evidence does not work in that way.
And again, there's all sorts of metaphysical arguments about like, what is this evidence? What's going to be sufficient evidence? Who decides what the evidence is? Like evidence of what? Does evidence presuppose that there's a non-material truth or no truth? Like you said, that our reach can never exceed our grasp or whatever, that there's no truth beyond human kin.
Can we, I mean, I just find that such a blinkered and small conception of what the human experience is to say that evidence will rule over everything.
I certainly have commitments that I would say no evidence could convince me because what I mean as a shorthand is no evidence I could receive through the modality of my five senses could convince me that this truth that I perceived in a different way is not true.
So in James, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he talks about how the mystic who has had an encounter with God is, in some sense, you can't argue with them because they had an encounter.
They had an experience.
They received evidence.
The religious person who says, I'm a Christian, they have received evidence.
They feel God's presence.
And so like Ham wasn't saying when he says nothing will convince that the word of God is not true.
What he means is I've had a mystical perception of a truth that is not going to be disproved by you showing me how, you know, humans evolve from apes.
There's different types of evidence.
And like that perception of a spiritual reality sits atop the stack for me.
And so like there's a sign from a Neutral Milk Hotel song, like how strange it is to be anything at all.
And that's like a truth that sits atop my stack that like there's an utter strangeness to every moment of existence.
Just to be here now is so utterly strange.
And like that repels any sort of evidence to disconfirm that there's something distinct about this.
And so like I don't agree with evidence or science, I guess.
love love is the answer and love requires faith beyond what the evidence shows because
to love someone is to disregard that one day and as long as we're quoting from songs
And Jason Isbell has a song called If We Were Vampires.
And in it, he talks about, you know, one day one of us is going to be alone.
And, you know, that's that realization that this isn't going to, I'm entering this knowing that it's going to end.
I'm entering this knowing that you're not perfect, that you're going to fail me.
I'm going to fail you.
Yet I'm going to move into that direction of love because of the faith that I have,
that things will become better because I'm participating in this.
I just quoted this on X this morning, which is this is Derek Sivers wrote a book called
useful but not true, but there are also things that are true but not useful.
And while it may be true that there is no evidence for God or there is no evidence for
the perfect relationship because the perfect relationship doesn't exist,
it doesn't mean that you shouldn't pursue it. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't
move into that direction because it does.
It comes back down to, you know, am I team human?
I'm team human because I believe in the power of love and that is faith.
And it does not require evidence and it does not care about it.
You know, I don't need evidence of love to know that it exists.
and to experience it is ineffable.
It is not able to be shared.
You know, this is why I think it's like 99% or 97% of all songs are written about love.
We're just trying to explain this thing that we can't explain
and we're going to keep doing it forever and ever and ever.
The scientist glibly responds, well, it's just a set of hormones, Lucas.
Yeah.
Yeah. And that's the naivete and the ignorance that is so obvious when you hear someone talk about psychedelics who's never done psychedelics, who's never had that out-of-body experience that you experience during meditation or breath work or even during like incredibly vigorous exercise when you are leaving this.
thinking part of yourself and you're just being, um, it is like, I've, I've heard people, I won't
say who, um, cause hopefully we'll get them on the podcast sometime, but I've heard people dismiss
psychedelics. Um, and as someone who's, who's done, it's just you, like what you said about God,
um, is that you don't, it's very obvious when you haven't felt that experience because the way
people talk about it. And if you hear somebody talk about psychedelics or, you know, having an
out-of-body experience, however you access that, to hear someone who's ignorant of that talk about
it and try to justify a position on it is, it just sounds silly. And you're like, I,
another, you know, is there any way to learn from what you've been told or do you have to really
You hold the experience.
And you do.
You have to hold the experience in order to understand what it means to be loved, what it means to feel God, what it means to truly be a part of team human.
Yeah.
And I will say that Samson, he does endorse entheogens in this book.
Not endorse in the sense that you should do them, but he notes that as a camp crafting experience, entheogens, hallucinogens, certain types of compounds that stimulate certain sorts of experiences can be useful.
maybe as adverse experiences or team building or to give you your group a sense of identity and
purpose um so he's not i see what he's doing here like you know he's identified what is bad about
many ideologies they induce a sense of willful unreason that's has caused a lot of harm a lot
of pain you know a lot of death there's a lot of blood flowing in rivers for this very reason that
we're willful we we have willful unreason and won't revise our opinions about certain things
but i just don't think that this idea of team human is a useful one um that we can have a
commitment to revise everything based on the weight of the evidence because even that conception of
the evidence it presupposes like an enlightenment tradition that people would say comes from the
Judeo-Christian, like, this time in European history where a specific conception of truth
arose that has an antecedent tradition that brings us to that point. And you can't just divorce it
from that thing. I think that, like, truth always occurs within a specific tradition.
Another Alistair MacIntyre reference, even just the title of this book,
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? You can't just appeal to rationality or evidence. Rationality
evidence only makes sense within a specific tradition that defines like what you know he
endorses the concentric circle conception of morality that's based on utilitarian moral
reasoning he talks about peter singer in here i just disagree with utilitarianism as such for
reasons that i mean like we could get into as far as alistair mcintyre and his description of virtue
ethics stemming from aristotle and so i don't find the concentric circle you know to be persuasive
I think that it's trying to graft on a philosophical tradition that one doesn't need to have to recognize the evils of tribalism.
And again, like this idea that evidence will save us.
Nothing is going to save us from who we are.
It's going to be an irrational enterprise we all embark on together to save ourselves.
Yeah. And the arguing over truth is just tilting at windmills.
We talked about this with Jason Lowry's software thesis and the understanding of what science is.
I had looked this quote up yesterday. I'm going to butcher it. It's from Richard Feynman. But science is, you know, the science is the process of believing in the ignorance of experts or something like that.
And with Jason Lowry's software thesis, when he does this grounded theory methodology, as opposed to the hypothesis approach, the hypothesis approach gives us two things.
There is no truth.
We either prove something to be false under certain conditions or we prove it to not yet be false.
and we never introduce the idea of truth because we we can't we can't say with certainty that
something is a truth and with the grounded theory methodology which lowry does and i would say that
samson absolutely has used that type of approach in our type of tribal future is that you come at
it from different angles and from every attack surface that you can find. And in doing so,
you don't find a truth, but you get further away from the false and hopefully closer to the
direction of truth. So yeah, this, you know, we just need to move beyond and dismiss this idea
that we're fighting over what's true and what's not, because there is like, we have to accept that
there is no truth, that we are just existing and we have things that we know that are false
and we have things that we know not yet to be false.
But as we enter this era of quantum, you know, I'm sitting here and you're sitting there,
but not in the quantum world.
You know, everything is everywhere all at once.
Everything is affecting everything all at once.
And that totally breaks our ability to understand the world as we see it now. But that is not false. And so it may not be true, but it's certainly not false that this particle here affects this particle here at the other end of the universe instantaneously. And we know that to be not false.
And so divorcing ourselves from the need to wrap ourselves in a blanket of truth is paramount in moving forward and being able to understand more about the world around us.
And there's beauty in that understanding.
And that's another Feynman quote, which was,
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars mere globes of gas atoms, but nothing is mere.
I, too, can see the stars as masses of gas, but they are mysterious masses of twinkling lights,
and their motions are determined by laws which we didn't invent but discovered.
And we find that, you know, the more that you understand something, the more beautiful it is.
The deeper you get into the law, the more beautiful law is.
The more I get into music, the more beautiful music is.
So we just move closer and closer to truth.
But we need to accept that it's not a place.
It's a journey.
And we're on that destiny.
We're on that journey together.
Wow.
From quantum theory to the nature of truth as a journey.
I don't know that I – my head's not big enough to fit these thoughts.
So I'm just a mere Bitcoiner.
That's all I do.
I just stack my coins, man, stack my stats.
So I evolved just for that reason.
Out of my depth, brother.
Is that you tapping out?
I think I tapped out long ago, man.
I couldn't – no, this is a fascinating book.
I'm not saying I'm tapping out.
I'm just saying it's gone beyond my grasp to comprehend truth here.
And I think it's a great book, I guess.
I don't know how to recap the conversation because it's been sprawling and a lot of fun.
I disagree with parts of the book, obviously.
I agree with a lot of it.
And whether I disagree or agree, it's very useful.
If you want to craft a camp, very good kind of contours for how to do that, outlines, parameters.
Very interesting science as far as like why we're tribal creatures.
and highly recommended for Bitcoiners exactly because you're only going to hit Bitcoin, you know, 360 pages in.
Yeah. You know, as we leave, there's one thing that we didn't talk about, which is not the overarching thesis or anything,
but it's what I want to leave people with, which is the importance of having a goal.
Samson notes, you know, all every study that has ever been conducted on goals versus not having goals.
is if you state a goal, then you're more likely to achieve something.
You know, it may not be the goal that you state, but at least you are,
you have given yourself a target, you know, as Jordan Peterson would say,
you know, you've given yourself something to aim at, you know, a peak to ascend.
And as you move in the direction of that goal, you start to marshal your resources
more efficiently and direct them into the purpose that you're trying to accomplish.
And it's not achieving the goal that is important. It's moving closer to it. It's not
ascending the mountain and being on the plateau. It's this step and this step and this step. It's
not the mountain. It's just another step. And so if you've made it this deep into the conversation
and you're looking for something that is a takeaway,
just one thing to walk away from this,
set a goal.
Set a goal and identify the steps
that it takes you to reach that goal
and give yourself something that moves you
in that direction, start to lay that groundwork.
You know, that was, you know,
We first started having these conversations and we didn't have a goal.
We just had a, well, it was a goal.
It was, hey, we're going to put these up.
You know, that's a goal.
Like a goal is there.
And then you can move to a different goal.
And every time you climb a mountain, you can just climb another mountain.
And every time you reach something and accomplish something, you can just go higher.
And so, yeah, that's what I would say is set a goal and find yourself in a better position today than you were yesterday.
Right on.
Practical Goal.
Buy Samson's book, read it, and let us know your thoughts.
But yeah, appreciate that, Lucas.
All right.
Thank you.