If I could hope for but one thing for you, so you'd be curious in all that you do.
Cause love like a flower just wants to grow.
Oh, and knowledge like your heart just wants to be known.
If you like, please subscribe. This is Bitcoin Study Sessions.
We'll dive into discussion.
So to get us to the third chapter, chapter one gave us the general idea of even what is a network state.
So to quote Balaji, the network state in one sentence, a network state is a highly aligned online community with the capacity for collective action that crowd funds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition.
So this whole book is about that.
That's the final iteration of the network state.
Basically, the first chapter says if you want to form a new state, the most practical approach at this moment in time, cloud first, land second.
Build in the Internet, build online, create a community, and then materialize that community in the real world and finally gain sovereign status.
Chapter two notes the importance of history in doing this.
So if you're creating a network state, you need to have a group of highly aligned individuals.
So you're going to align people highly around a common purpose, one commandment that is then substantiated by some form of history, by historical narrative that explains why your society has the moral purpose that it does.
So, I mean, history is necessary because a startup society really begins as a critique of some aspect of an existing society.
And history is what you use to describe an existing society and then identify the flaws and formulate the critique that is your new startup society.
society. It's also, history is also where you look as a sort of toolbox to find ways that you
can build a better society. See what's been tried before, try different things. Chapter three then
brings us to another framework for considering, a framework rather, for considering our present
moment and where network states are going to fit in given the ideological winds that are blowing.
Blowing in three directions, we'll see. This chapter is called the tripolar moment. But let's start a step back from that. What is the unipolar moment?
Balaji cites a journalist, Charles Krauthammer, writing shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, stating that the world is now unipolar. There's one dominant power, the United States.
However, nowadays, it's becoming more and more obvious.
We are no longer in a unipolar world.
We're also not in a bipolar world.
It's not U.S. versus China, not East versus West.
No, biology thinks that we are in a tripolar world.
There are three poles.
Each of these poles are networks that are upstream of states.
These three different poles in the tripolar framework are, to give the acronyms,
NYT, CCP, BTC.
NYT, New York Times, that's upstream of the U.S. establishment.
CCP, that's the Chinese Communist Party upstream of China.
And BTC, Bitcoin, upstream of the rest of crypto and of the internet generally.
Each of these three poles in this tripolar framework has its own source of truth and its own source of power.
So the New York Times, the source of truth is obviously the New York Times. The source of truth is paper, what the paper says, or maybe you might say even mainstream media writ large, which promotes, Bology says, a woke ideology.
New York Times, its source of truth is the paper, the mainstream media. Its source of power is as moral power. Truth is in service of morality. For the New York Times, you can look at the headlines and see that there are moral premises and not factual reporting supporting the narrative that they've used to do their journalism.
What does it mean to have moral power, to be a moral power like the New York Times? That means that you depend for your power on the moral lecture, on getting people to think things are good or evil, on censoring certain people, on canceling other people, on using perhaps a malleable idea of human rights to demonize other foreign powers in service of American empire.
the commandment for the moral power that is the New York Times as the network upstream of U.S.
establishment its commandment is you must sympathize what does that mean well to quote
biology after all aren't you white or male or straight or cis or abled or wealthy or member of
one of an ever multiplying number of privileged categories and therefore an oppressor on some
dimension, because you're powerful, you must sympathize and bow your head to those you have
ostensibly oppressed. So that's the first power, the New York Times upstream of the U.S. establishment,
a moral power whose source of truth is the mainstream media. The second pole in this
tripolar framework is CCP, Chinese Communist Party. It also has its own source of truth
and also is an expression of a certain type of power.
Its source of truth is the party.
What the party says is true.
The party is not the state, Bology emphasizes.
There are 95 million CCP members, Chinese Communist Party members,
and it's a rather actually arduous process to become a member,
and you have to even kind of dedicate yourself to certain future tasks
task of propagating the party message. Whenever the party emits a certain type of propaganda
message, party members have to copy it down a certain number of times. They have to write essays
in response to that. Why would anybody join the Chinese Communist Party? This is an LOL point for
me, but Balaji says, quote, what people would choose to constantly post new essays regurgitating
the latest in regime propaganda and indoctrinating their co-workers and family members. But it all
fits if you think of them as China's New York Times subscribers. So the Chinese, the CCP is the
party, is the source of truth. Well, the source of truth, the party is the source of truth for the
CCP network as a pull of power in the tripolar framework. It also expresses a certain type of
power. If the New York Times expressed a moral power, CCP expresses a martial power.
Balaji notes under Xi Jinping, the CCP has turned towards militarist nationalism. It has real power
to deploy in the real physical world, a huge manufacturing capacity, and it's making huge
investments in things like drones and AI, which are obviously precursors, if not weapons themselves.
the one commandment of the ccp the one commandment of this poll in the tripolar framework is you must
submit you must submit to the party you must be loyal and you must do what the party says you must
submit the third poll in this tripolar framework of nyc ccp is btc bitcoin its source of truth
is the protocol and its expression of power is as a monetary power as money so a source of truth
what is written to the protocol on the blockchain and protected by proof of work
is true, or at least is verifiable in a certain sense. It's also, as in its source of truth,
is inherently decentralized and accessible to anybody and permissionless. Its expression of
power is as money. And so that's obviously Bitcoin is a type of money. Less obvious,
Bology thinks is that this monetary power is giving rise to a media power. Bitcoin leads to
decentralized media, Bitcoin and kind of the internet that is downstream of Bitcoin. So once
you have something like Bitcoin, a stable money, you can have prosperity, you can have uncensorable
financing for whatever enterprise you want to do. And that gives people options, including to
become their own media establishment, decentralized media on Twitter, on podcasts,
things like that. If you can't censor somebody's way of receiving financing, they can do much more
daring things. And if people have personal prosperity due to a stable money, they don't
have to become a shill for the establishment. The one commandment of this pole and the
tripolar framework, the one commandment of Bitcoin is you must be sovereign. So broadly,
each of these polls is kind of framed up till now as distinct. NYT, CCP, BTC, NYT as
a moral power, CCP as martial power, Bitcoin as monetary power. But these are actually,
The truth is that Balaji says it's good to have moderation even within these poles and that they are bad at the extremes. You really do need a moral power in society for some sort of unity between the people. You do need some sort of martial power to protect from chaos and disorder. And of course, you need money power to allow for self-sovereignty and for people to guide their futures.
So this leads to biology's concluding concept for this chapter, the re-centralized center,
where within a tripolar framework, which you can see as a triangle, you can move around
within that triangle closer to two of the three poles further away from one pole.
People need to find for themselves where they situate in relation to these three different
poles, which are types of networks upstream of different things in society.
Specifically, I apologize also, although he says you do have to situate yourself in relation to these three polls and each has something to commend of them.
He does think the future is located closer to the Bitcoin poll in that people that feel some poll guiding their lives towards sovereignty are going to find some appeal in the Bitcoin network.
And so even the people within the CCP or the NYT polls who feel some urge towards self-responsibility and self-reliance sovereignty are going to feel some pull towards Bitcoin.
To quote Balaji, that is, one of our premises is that the Indians, Israelis, American dissidents, Chinese liberals, tech founders, investors, and people from other countries that want to maintain their own sovereignty will need to avail themselves of BTC slash Web3 for decentralized communication, transaction, and computation.
so that gives us an idea of the three polar of the tripolar framework it also of course illustrates
or we hope hopefully helps us show see how the network state as a phenomena is going to arise
from some coordination people choosing where they want to fall between these three poles
while being pulled towards bitcoin and decentralization as a necessary precondition
towards asserting their own sovereignty within a network state. So that's the summary. Lucas and I
both read this, and Lucas did a really good job of going three-dimensional here. The network state
is a book app, as Balaji calls it, and it's full of hyperlinks that become rabbit holes. The
hyperlinks help substantiate points that Balaji is making, obviously. They serve the point of
endnotes. You can go directly to the source and see that what he is saying is true, or give some
colorful anecdote that helps helps the person understand what he is saying so we lucas definitely
went through this reading and came up with and found some good good metaphors and anecdotes from
the notes uh what do you think lucas or anything that you think helps shed some light here what you
Yeah. So first, great, great job on the summary here. So the tripolar moment, we, we have three competing ideologies. And those ideologies are not distinct from each other. They have overlap.
Yeah.
The BTC, the crypto capital people, you know, they have, if you look at it from Jason Lowry's perspective, they have military power, even though they are the money power.
They have media power because they have decentralized media.
And so therefore we have, you know, the biggest media in the world is Joe Rogan's podcast.
That's the biggest media in the world. Right.
And that's very much, I would say, at least leaning in that direction.
It's they're not all there. But but then also the New York Times, they have that as well.
You know, they have their podcast. Clearly, they don't. Clearly, they don't resonate as much with the populace because the.
Listening numbers, the participation numbers are not there.
And also, I just know on that, so we listened to the Curtis Yarvin interview for the New York Times podcast. And it's even just interesting to see how the New York Times as an ideology manifests in the way that the podcaster asked their questions, the sort of sneering superiority and then the assumption that the person they are talking to because they're on the right is somehow evil.
and that what, you know, they have to almost
prophylactically distance themselves
from the person who's saying,
who's going to respond to the question
to note that I'm asking this person questions,
but I'm still one of the good guys, you know,
because they have this whole idea of platforming
and de-platforming.
And so it's interesting to see that they're,
even they're quote unquote decentralized.
If they're entering the podcast sphere,
they still are navigating it from their voice,
their woke NYT, US establishment voice or whatever.
Yeah, that, so something that I wrote about that,
the submission, sympathy, sovereignty portion of this,
which is the second, I believe it's the second part of this chapter,
or second or third,
the CCP is you must submit.
You must submit, you silently imply powerlessness,
and that's the secret handshake,
which becomes the public handcuffs.
It imprisons minds, and it lacks creativity.
The New York Times is the sympathize.
which is that you must apologize.
You must publicly, so it's not silent now,
you must loudly and publicly announce your privilege.
You talked about this before.
You have to profess your sins.
Oh, I want, you know, before I say anything,
I must let you know that I have sinned in this manner.
I have sinned because I am white.
I have sinned because I am male.
I have sinned because I am heterosexual.
I've sinned because I, um, I'm able-bodied, right?
Um, I'm sinned because I am, what would it call height advantaged or something like that?
I'm over six feet tall, right?
So you have to line up all of your sins and that is the price that you pay to get into
the club.
Getting into the club though.
And that's like a price you pay for getting to get into any moral club.
Like if you're an AA, you have to profess your sins, right?
You profess that you have a problem.
If you're in the church, you have to confess your sins literally. So it's kind of like the nature of a moral power is you have to, yeah, note the black spots of your soul so they can proceed to be cleaned by the new baptism you're undergoing.
Yeah, but I think it's a little, I think it's different.
I think it's different from AA in that when you profess your sins in AA,
then you, like one of the things that you do is you talk about how you're powerless over your addiction.
Basically, you're admitting that you're no better and no worse than anybody else.
the the nyt the sympathize the woke is it's saying that i am better than other people yeah but i am
going to intentionally handicap myself so that you will recognize me as one of the good ones
right like that's always the kind of like derogatory term that people most often i would
say associate with um with blacks black americans oh one of the good ones right or um or even um
you know now now you'll see a lot um i i experience i would say i experience um people in the lgbtq
community that don't align with the um very strong rainbow flag waving etc so you know they
distance themselves from that so that they can see that they're one of the good ones because you
you you still implicitly recognize that there is something wrong with that um there is something
wrong with ordering people in a hierarchy based on things that they do not control
supposedly that they do not control right because what we're saying is that this is
no different than your race than your height than your um the money that you were born into
none of these things are choices right and you know so leave it at that um but yeah so nyt you
have to sympathize that that's you're announcing professing your sins that's the shibboleth that
is the cost of joining the victimhood it imprisons people's hearts um because it it
forces them to lack empathy for others while professing that they have sympathy.
And then BTC is the sovereignty.
You renounce the victimhood, which is the shibboleth that affords you entry into the
the based place.
I tried to be fair here and say that, you know, the CCP that imprisons minds, the New
York Times imprisons hearts.
BTC doesn't necessarily imprison, it sort of sends the souls wandering, where now you're untethered from that groupthink, but you do have to now find your own way.
and it does, I would say, it lacks sympathy.
So, you know, I will recognize whatever that you have,
whatever shibboleth that you want to say,
however, I will not grant you special affordance for that.
Yeah, but there is an extreme to which the BTC as a pull goes to
to the extent that it's one commandment is sovereignty.
Exactly.
Yeah, I mean, Balaji mentions that, you know,
extreme sovereignty means digging your own well, all that stuff.
So no one wants to be a well digger.
That's,
that's mad.
That's mad max.
Crazy.
Yeah.
Um,
I want to put up on the screen.
Um,
I want to put up on the screen just so people see this because I,
I think he did such a fast,
a fantastic job of it.
Um,
which is a chart.
Um,
yeah.
Can you zoom in there just a tad bit?
That is a great chart.
Um,
yes,
I can.
Oh,
it's going to be tough to get us.
You don't cut off the margins,
but it's right there.
So,
So over here we have the communist capital, woke capital, and crypto capital.
And each of these, one of the things that I wanted to explain was the Hirschman value.
So the Hirschman value refers to a book that was written by Albert Hirschman I believe is his name Exit Voice and Loyalty And I want to actually I would really like to play this clip from I found a dude who has like
I think he literally has one subscriber on YouTube, but he does a fantastic job of explaining.
Hi everybody.
He does a fantastic job of explaining the game.
So the game of exit voice and loyalty.
And I'm going to go and start it right here at 34 seconds
and cut it off at a minute 52.
Can you see that?
It was super loud the first time you started.
Just make sure.
I don't know how it's going to sound coming out.
But if it, yeah, tap down the volume a notch
if it comes out super loud.
Okay.
All right.
Let's see how this goes.
It did play the first time.
What's that?
Yeah, it's not playing right now, but it played...
Oh, it's not playing?
No, it began to play.
Oh, there we go.
Yeah, now I see it.
Okay, share this tab instead.
Okay, here we go.
So, in this Exit Wars loyalty game,
we have two players.
We have the citizen marked by C,
and we have the stick marked by S.
You see that the citizen has the potential to be two chimes.
There's two no's there.
The state only moves once.
There's only one no here.
We know that we need to account for two possible strategies for the state.
And we need to only account for one possible strategy for the state.
Okay.
So at the beginning of the game, a citizen has three options available today.
You can either choose to use their voice.
You can choose to remain loyal.
or two things.
If the citizen chooses to use their voice,
the state gets to use.
The state has two options available.
They can either respond,
the citizen gives their voice,
or they can choose to ignore.
And if the state chooses to ignore,
the citizen gets to move.
And as they do,
the citizen gets to choose between loyalty and exit.
Loyalty and exit.
Okay?
Okay.
So I'll cut it off there.
But so what he's explaining here is that this is a game and it goes in moves.
The citizen has the first move when you're when you're oppressed by the state.
You can do one of three things.
You can voice your displeasure.
If you voice your displeasure, then it's the state's turn to move.
So once you say, hey, we don't like this, we want something different, then the state has the option.
They can either respond to that and they can move in that direction, or they can ignore that and they can continue on the path of oppressing.
I would say that right now, what we have seen in the United States is we've seen that voice become very loud.
And now we're sitting at this node where the state is, it appears that they're starting to respond.
and as they are responding, I'm referring to Doge and what they are uncovering.
As they're responding, what they're uncovering is that the state has, up until this point, been ignoring the voice.
It has been intentionally doing things that were not voiced as part of the plan, I guess.
and should that continue to be the case should the state continue to ignore then at that point
the citizens have two choices again so they can submit this is the ccp route loyalty or they can
exit now what he what he notes here is that exit and these are arbitrary values but they do serve
a purpose. If you're keeping score, then the greatest gain is gained by exiting. Because
then that, if you don't exit and you voice, then that leaves you constantly at the mercy
of the state as to whether they will respond or ignore. And then of course, if you just
simply stay loyal and you allow the state to do what it will, then you can continuously
become more and more oppressed. I just thought that was an interesting thing to share because,
um, uh, I mean, a fascinating to find a guy with one YouTube subscriber that is, uh, um,
doing something well. I like this. I like to highlight that by the way, I'm going to,
I'm going to reshare this, um, because, um, I just saw something that's really important that
I have to show this right here. It looks like a butt. Um, and I thought that we should talk about
that um but the parentheses here anyways um i think it's i think it's fantastic um that was the
one thing on the exit voice and loyalty um or sorry on the
on the on the chart here that i didn't really understand yeah and it's it's interesting that
But within, yeah, the woke capital emphasizes voice, but the kind of the purpose of woke capital is to ensure that we all speak with one voice.
It's like woke capital is upstream of the voice.
The New York Times, it kind of gives the marching orders to the mainstream media that then propagates them throughout the rest of the citizens.
So you feel like you're exercising your voice, you feel like you're voting, but you've actually just been programmed with a historical narrative that has been pre-decided and diffused by the centralized media.
So, I mean, that's kind of one of the interesting aspects of it. It's kind of deceptive to say that because like voice is often think of like democratic voice, make your differences known, whereas actually it's about monolithically uniting us under one voice that the state then continues to lurch along as it is and was and ever will be.
Yeah, to that point yesterday, I was listening to Mike Bin's talk on Joe Rogan, and he was talking about one of the organizations that was funded by USAID that was a truth teller organization.
And so they went to their website and they literally read off of their website.
And it said like, basically, like since since 2020, since COVID, we have identified over 19,000 different rumors about the like origin of the COVID virus and things about it.
And, you know, we've we've suppressed those 19,000, you know, so that, you know, like this is this is what they're proud of.
Right. Yeah. Is that we have, you know, don't worry.
You don't need to think because we've removed the options that would we've removed any options for you to think.
Yeah. Here's here's your opinion.
and we'll take care of all the, you know, all the sausage making of how you form an opinion using fact and using experience and stuff.
So, yeah.
Yeah, that's pretty terrifying.
The idea is you should not be making a hypothesis yourself and attempting to see if the data is to support it.
We will tell you what the hypothesis is and retroactively have already discovered all the evidence you will ever need to support that.
Yeah.
Yeah. One one thing that I thought was really fascinating here, I'm going to keep sharing, was one of the linked one of the linked articles under the moral power, martial power, money power section was this this internal document from.
it was
compiled for the Warren Commission
so this was
a document compiled by
United States Intelligence Services
and
in the service of
talking about
did the United States
or someone who killed
Kennedy right so this was
like a supplementary document that
they added and this is basically
laying I guess
laying the groundwork for the idea that perhaps Kennedy could possibly have been assassinated by
a foreign actor. And I thought this was fascinating. One thing, first off, they misspelled
kidnapping, so it's kidnapping, and that's awesome. So the Soviet State Security Service,
the KGB, resorts to abduction and murder to combat what are considered to be actual or
potential threats to the Soviet regime. Pretty standard practice for a somewhat oppressive
government. These techniques frequently designated as executive action, they're known within the KGB
as liquid affairs. I found that fascinating because these techniques in the United States,
executive action is referred to as black ops. I think of an executive car. An executive car
is always a black town car.
And action is an operation.
Those are synonyms as well.
And also liquid affairs.
What we refer to it in the United States
is it's called wet work.
Liquid and wet, affairs and work.
What's wet work specifically?
So wet work would refer to assassinations.
By U.S. special ops and stuff like that.
Exactly.
Yeah, by U.S. Special Ops. So the terms, although they use slightly different words, they even have like the same type of derivation that you can walk them back to, that they come kind of full circle there. I thought that was really fascinating.
Yeah, and I just watched Sicario, the second one, not as great as the first one, but it's a representation of this when the executive wants to get something done, but doesn't want their fingerprints on it. And so it's conducted by special ops and groups in cahoots with other special actors to operate outside the state, give plausible deniability, things like that.
One of the things that Mike Binns is fond of saying, and he repeated this a number of times during that Rogan interview, was that there's a saying within the community that if it's too dirty for CIA, then you turn to USAID.
Yeah, I saw that clip.
Yeah, you said it four times, actually.
And I think we're seeing more and more evidence of that.
Yeah, so that took us down an interesting road.
I had this question.
But also it's a good illustration of how the moral power is connected to the martial power within the U.S. establishment, USAID being a way to launder U.S. ideas abroad and kind of foment dissension and things like that through ideological constructs, you know, purporting to spread liberty, but really trying to, from within the inside of a country, work to cause instability.
often, I'm not all USAID thinks, but it is like morality and the martial aspect of a
state often move hand in hand, right?
Yep.
Another thing.
So this is the little triangle chart that Balji has in the book.
And it shows the, you know, at the top, the CCP is the authoritarian.
The bottom is more libertarian.
To the left and to the right, you've got the economic left.
economic right. And then you've got the polls here. And he demonstrates how they, like what
sectors they fall into. And this is a question for you, but we, I don't know that there's a great
answer, but we see that the New York Times and the Woke Capitol is listed down here. And it's shown
to be somewhat more libertarian leading than authoritarian.
And I question if there's much veracity to that.
The only thing I can think of is that the kind of the libertarian side of woke capital is,
you know, when I think about libertarian, what I think is,
I want to do what I want, and I want you to do what you want.
And I would say that the woke capital is, the NYT side is just the first part of that,
which is I want to do what I want.
I also want you to do what I want.
Yeah.
And so I could see how maybe you could,
maybe you could whitewash that.
Pardon.
No, I also, go ahead.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
No, when I saw this,
I spent some time trying to move myself around
within this framework to see
what would it mean to be situated here
close to the NYT,
libertarian according to this model and economically left but i i also didn't see i think that that's
not this isn't a helpful way to put it to have authoritarian at the top and libertarian at the
bottom because in the last chapter regarding history biology really helpfully split like
there's a bipolar aspect within the u.s left there's left libertarians and left authoritarians
and i tend to think of nyt as more left authoritarian with dissidents like glenn
greenwald who are kind of left libertarians tending toward the btc crypto capital or maybe
just like yeah i just don't think left and right it's hard to graph those on here and you know
objectively the ccp maybe is like more authoritarian in its explicit controls over speech and movement
association the nyt its authoritarianism is more soft authoritarianism based on censorship
cancel culture and de-platforming things like that but i still i don't know that that's it's
not helpful for me to understand Balaji's idea, although maybe, I mean, I'm sure if he were here
to describe it, it would make perfect sense. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, that's, yeah, that's the one,
the one thing reading through this that I thought I could use some clarification on,
because I didn't quite understand. A quote, a quote from, from the reading is you don't want
the New York times run society where everyone has no recourse, but to sympathize with the current
thing because that results in what matt iglesias has called the great awokening the emotive and
irrational breakdowns that set america on fire and continue to royal u.s society and i was unfamiliar
with this with this meme oh yeah support the current thing yeah so i wanted to put that up
just to give you a lot of people um so this is from from knowyourmeme.com yeah support the current
thing um you know to mock people who change their profile you know and you think about this these
are the people that oh they've got a french flag oh they've got a you know an grayly flag they've
got uh black lives matter me too um occupy um you know that a constant a constant revolution
of what is the current thing that i need to virtue signal yeah and so this is what the uh
this is what the meme looks like i support the current thing so if you see that um then obviously
you can uh you can now know what we're talking but it also like it's very comfortable to say
the new york times establishment and those that are downstream of its reporting have a support
the current thing mentality but as of two weeks ago no like there was an infinitesimal percentage
of people on the right or left that had an opinion about usa id and now the like the dominant paradigm
is, oh, irredeemable agency, oh, this is all evil and corrupt.
You know, part of it is there's just reporting and new things come to light.
But I think people need to be careful that, you know, there are narratives that appear
from both sides and to go fully on board with anyone at any time does put you in the
I support the current thing, non-player character NBC meme.
And so it's always like, be careful with that.
If everybody's saying now USAID is total filth, maybe the truth.
but really try to find the good faith commentators on both left and right and try to filter out what is a perspective that's valuable to have that makes you a PC, a player character rather than an NPC.
Yeah, I always think about things like that in terms of, I think about two cups, one cup filled with dirt and the other cup filled with milk.
If you've got the cup filled with dirt, that's the dirty, awful, it doesn't really matter how much milk you put into it, you're still not going to drink it.
yeah and then um you've got but the flip side is that you do have this you know beautiful
glass of of of milk that's pure and white and un unsoiled and then you put a little bit of dirt
in it and if you know that there's dirt in it you don't want to drink that yeah you know to you it's
dirty it doesn't really matter how much and so um you can really put a stain on something i'm not
defending USAID at all. It does appear to me that USAID is very much a front and a cover for
overt and covert foreign and domestic direct action and propaganda and money laundering.
That is what it appears the objective function is, and I believe that there may have been some accidental benefit to a few people that could be considered generous or wise.
But yeah, it does appear to be pretty wholly soiled.
Yeah.
So anyways, yeah, moving past that.
So one of the last thing of that quote, or sorry, the last part of that quote from Balaji from the book was that you don't want the society.
Also, you don't want the society where no one sympathizes.
Yeah.
Because that looks like the grand theft auto environment of 1990s Russia, which is a low-trust post-communist society where any cooperative endeavor is regarded as a scam.
And this link, 1990s Russia, it takes you to an article written in The Guardian from 2018 by Mark Gagliotti.
the title is Gangster's Paradise
How Organized Crime Took Over Russia
Under Vladimir Putin
gangsterism on the streets
has given way to kleptocracy
in the state
so this is
looking
post fall of the Soviet Union
and then the wild west
of the 90s
in Russia
and then Putin comes to power
and restores order
I just want to
I just want to read this
and then I've got a question for you
so this is an excerpt from that article
he is
this guy was interviewing
people during the 90s
interviewing a lot
of
I think he was a
psychologist I'm not sure
he was interviewing a lot of the people
that were in the mafia
he says one of the men I got to know during this time
was Volodya, wiry, intense, and morose. He had a brittle and dangerous quality that, on the whole,
I would have crossed the road to avoid. I love that line, I would have crossed the road to avoid.
He had been a marksman in the war. The other Afghansti I knew tolerated Volodya, but never
seemed comfortable with him, nor with talking about him. He always had money to burn, at a time
when most were eking out the most marginal of lives, living with their parents, juggling multiple
jobs. It all made sense when I later learned that he had become what was known in Russian
crime circles as a torpedo, a hitman. So this draws us back to Sicario, you know, a hitman
in the cartel, a torpedo in the mafia. Some of these guys are bodyguards, some runners,
some leg breakers, and some were killers. That decade saw the emergence of a tradition
of monumental memorialization as fallen gangsters were buried with full godfather style pomp
with black limousines threading through paths lined with white carnations and tubes
tombs marked with huge headstones and um i there actually there a link uh there another link to um all of of the they refer to them as tacky burials like headstones and stuff
To be honest, I think scratching pictures into granite is just a difficult thing to do.
I don't think it's that tacky. It's just, it's very overdone.
But the question I have for you are, you know, are there are there similarities that we can draw between this over the top state funeral style of memorializing fallen soldiers turned hitmen that we saw in Russia with what we now see in Mexican, South American, Central American cartels?
cartels um you know are are we is that just the modern version of that and if so so if that is
true that that's the modern version of it then who are the other players so who's the crumbling
bureaucracy um and who is the great man so um is is the crumbling bureaucracy bureaucracy
the failed state apparatus that fell in upon its own weight, it was collapsed by corruption?
Is that liberal democracy? Is that the United States?
And then who is the great man rising to occasion?
Previously it was Putin, and he restored authority through centralization.
So now is it Trump who's restoring authority through decentralization?
if it's not Trump then who is it? Is it Bukele in El Salvador? Is it Malay in Argentina?
Is it Elon in technology? Is it Satoshi in encryption? Is it Balaji in society? Is it
Joe Rogan in culture? Kind of frame us, take us from what we know about the fall of the Soviet
union and what arose out of that and then kind of compare and contrast if you would the modern world
um and kind of lay the groundwork for are we going in the same direction are we going in a different
direction is this a remake where we just change the script a little bit or um is this something
completely new is there is there any there there um or or is it just is it just that i'm drawing
comparisons where there where there are none to be made so there's a lot of interesting questions
embedded in that um i want to go back to the first part of the question um so this idea of
gaudy state funerals or tacky state funerals, really showy maybe, within, as I understand it,
a society that has disintegrated. Is that the point that now they begin to have these really
gaudy state funerals? So I would just say, I would frame it as, I think, I think that the reason for
this memorialization for this state funeral type of thing is that you have an illegitimate apparatus
that's rising out of the crumbling, the falling legitimate apparatus.
And one of the ways that it can help legitimize itself is to adopt some of the practices of the previous state enterprise,
which is, oh, you know, we are going to make these people look as though they are fallen soldiers,
fallen heroes, in order to sort of sell you on our legitimacy, I guess.
Yeah. I mean, I think it is the state funeral. The funerals that we give are for people who were soldiers for a cause, even retroactively defining them as soldiers for a cause rather than mercenaries or criminals or bandit groups, I think is done to encourage future loyalty for people around a new cause.
so loyalty i've often heard this said or read that loyalty is the first political virtue and
if you want to have people to advance your cause you need to have a sort of unquestioning to a
degree loyalty first and foremost and so one of the ways you can do that is pick the people who
did egregious things for the cause and define them as good these are the revolutionaries that
shed blood and if you then define what they did as very good for the cause you've redefined a new
morality people can advance the cause even through violence or here are people who were on the vanguard
of a new moral sentiment i'm watching a documentary now it's called africa adio i think that's italian
for goodbye um and it's about how africa changed after the british left essentially and part of
that in Kenya, after the British left, they freed this kind of bandit or revolutionary,
depending on how you want to define them, group called the Mau Mau's, who were responsible for
incredible violence against the British and against other blacks in Africa. But as soon
as the British left, they then began to be valorized as kind of foot soldiers in the new
movement. And I think that it's part of that idea of you tell, you look into history,
and you begin to tell a story that justifies the moral idea that you have. Certain, you know,
violent people become revolutionaries because they led to the creation of a new state. And so I think
that state funerals, if they are gaudy in an attempt to really show that what could be perceived
as a violent or bandit or mercenary group actually were, you know, revolutionaries, ideologues,
actually were people advancing society in some way.
I mean, I don't know how, I love this article,
Volodya, wiry and tense and morose.
I mean, what a beautiful characterization.
It sounds like some Dostoevsky character
where he's kind of brooding
and he has this complexity to him.
And I think that that in itself is kind of,
you know, a characterization of, you know,
people are not just one dimensional constructs within any of these frameworks, loyalty, voice,
exit, morality, money, or power. We're all agents within them that, you know, maybe we're intense
and morose in equal measure, because we believe in what we're doing, and yet are afflicted by
a sadness or something because of what we have to do. I don't know, it's really interesting. It's
tough to give a neat answer to all the interesting questions you pose because history is not neat
but i mean that's the best that's the best i can do is that it's all an attempt to rewrite history
to justify the new state or society that people want to create one of the points that you hit on
one that i found really fascinating was that the moral power so the soviet union was the moral
power today the moral power is the new york times um and being the moral power gives you license to
be immoral because if you are i i you know this is kind of i think related to you know the fall
of religion the rise of secularism and individualism where um you know god is dead and now
the individual is God. The individual is, uh, is wholly self-determined supposedly. So, um,
if you are God and you have God-like qualities, then God, you know, God does not sin, right? God,
you know, whatever God does is God-like. And therefore, if you do hold that moral power,
then that justifies any means to whatever end.
And so all of the things that morally you will profess against
are things that you will do in order to maintain your position of power.
I think that's just kind of interesting how being the moral authority
leads you down a path of immorality.
If morality is superior to truth, then the ends will justify the means. And yeah, if you're not bound by any sort of platonic moral idea or ideal or real fact about the world, then you can't advance any sort of abstract ideology to its bloody end very quickly, for sure.
So one of the other questions that I threw at you that I want to restate, because I do want to get your thoughts on this or just to hear you spitball on it.
But so The Fourth Turning, which is a book that I think quite a few people in this space now have become aware of.
If not, they have probably heard some of the tropes and some of the recited lessons from The Fourth Turning.
And Balaji specifically mentions it in the previous chapter and ends with the discussion of it as one potential thesis for the way history is, along with the frontier and some other ideas about the directions of history.
Yeah. And in the fourth turning, it talked about during the, you know, one of the things that is a one of the things that you may expect to see during the fourth turning, which the fourth turning is the the chaos before before you basically rise back up.
It's the winter before the spring. It's the death before the growth.
one of the things that is mentioned as a strong possibility is that there will be a great man
or great woman rising to the occasion during the crisis to restore authority and so the example
previously was that it was Putin rising out of the out of the crumbling apparatus and the chaos
of the mafia rising to restore authority through centralizing power.
And so if we are going through a fourth turning in the United States right now,
and if there is power that needs to be restored,
if there's authority that needs to be restored, who is that great man?
Is it Trump? If it's not Trump, is it...
I'm just giving some examples and maybe it could be someone else.
So it could be, could be Bukele in El Salvador,
really kind of leading the way in, in, in a lot of different, you know,
very much centralizing power through authority,
but also doing some decentralizing things.
Malay as well in Argentina.
Is it Elon Musk in technology?
Is it Satoshi with the encryption, which is a power projection,
which is we would be like being the unassailable military power.
Is it biology in society?
Is it Joe Rogan and culture?
Is it a combination of all of these things?
You know, is this great man theory hold water in the current time that we're in?
And kind of what do you think about that idea?
I mean, I wouldn't.
So as a way to think about history, the great man theory, as I understand that, is just that individuals can interject themselves into history and change the course of events.
And that it's not all this, you know, inevitable dialectic moving forward, bending toward justice in a very specific way in which humans are kind of atoms and one is the same as the next.
I'm going to cut you off just to reference what you just said, which is the, what is it, the arc of history inevitably bends toward justice, which is a quote from Martin Luther King.
I think he left out inevitably, but yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the arc of history bends toward justice, which is something that Martin Luther King, an idea that he promoted, which is that, you know, look, the longer we're here, the closer we get towards justice. I don't know that that's necessarily true, but it's a beautiful sentiment, right?
yeah the arc of history constantly redefines justice to the current thing i think is a more
maybe cynical but more correct way to do it to state that but i think you know just understanding
the great man framework as that idea that a single person can stand in front of the wave of history
and divert its path i think you saw that in the centimeters head tilt that trump engaged in that
prevented the bullet from smashing through his skull. I think history would have been very
different if that had happened. A great man is great, not just in the sense that their
actions are great, but that history has, in some sense,
forked, you know, because of one person.
It's not to say that Trump's going to be good or bad, great in that sense, but he's
great, certainly, in that history is, I think, going to be very
different for the fact of his having been and acted
than it will if he had not done so.
Again, whether that's good or bad,
it's probably just to be TBD by which party wins
and retroactively writes the history of Trump.
Yeah.
I think if I was going to Vegas
and I was laying down $1,000
on who the great man of this era will be,
I think I'd want to split my money.
I don't know that I could make a bet.
I think that I'd want to put,
I think I'd want to put 500 bucks on
500 bucks on Trump and 300 bucks on Elon
and 200 bucks on Satoshi.
Or maybe it's a thousand bucks on Satoshi.
I don't know.
One of the things about Satoshi is that
he is changing the world without being here.
So that I think that my...
He or she, they or them.
This is one of the few instances where pronouns are very apt.
But, you know, like, I think you're right to say that, you know, the head turn of Trump was a fork in history.
You know, if he doesn't move his head, he's dead.
We are in an entirely different world.
Biden, I think, was still running at that time.
I think.
Yes, he was.
Yeah. So we're, you know, we are very likely in a second Biden, in a second Biden administration.
You know, I think, you know, I still think Vance could have pulled it off with Trump as a martyr, right?
But I still, even if that happens, the administration looks vastly different under Vance than it does under Trump.
Like Vance is undergoing a sort of apprenticeship right now.
And there's just certain things that you will never get a president who's demanding the things of Panama and Greenland changing the names of things. This is all sui generis Trump. This is not something that even if you voted for Trump, you weren't ready for those things.
I saw somebody break down. They listed like 10 or 15 things that Trump had said that were just, you know, off the wall, bombastic, over the top. And then they listed what the result of that.
Right. No, for sure.
No, like, look, you know, like you, you need to understand that this is a, he's very consistent in what he does. And this is a well-proven, historically supported, not created by Trump. This is a negotiation strategy.
strategy the art of the deal yeah and and what it what it allows it's it's actually gracious um
to the to the other side because you say something insane like oh we're going to take over gaza
and the other side is like hold on like wait a second like we didn't know that was on the table
right yeah cut the baby in two yeah and and it gives them it gives them cover yeah to settle
for something that is still a concession,
but much more palatable than the crazy thing.
And so it really gives them space to negotiate.
Yeah.
Shane Gillis talks about this clear back to when Trump was campaigning
in the first election in 2015, 16, 15, yeah,
where you know he's like you get up
and you've got this
debate between
12, 15 different candidates
or whatever and they're all standing up there
like they're you know in the model you in
and they're saying this and he's just up there
going yeah your wife's ugly yeah you're fat
yeah you're stupid
we didn't know that you could do that shit
he's like this is unfair
like it was just unfair to see
this dude who was like yeah
I'm just going to play by my own rules
and just mollywomp people with ridiculous statements.
Yeah.
He's a great man in that sense too,
just does things with a dynamic that's,
it's not of the institution that he is now part of.
So he changes things.
Yeah.
I have a question too.
Like,
I'm glad we're double cooking and following these rabbit holes.
There is one overarching question I wanted to ask.
Maybe not overarching,
but it kind of generally deals with the substance of the chapter that I found it very interesting.
NYT, CCP, and BTC.
Balaji, in that diagram you put up, notes that NYT, state, CCP, state, BTC, network.
But in the chapter, he does say these are actually all forms of networks that are in NYT,
upstream of the U.S. establishment, U.S. state, CCP, upstream of the Chinese state.
And this is because, he says, as in the last chapter, we learned that the Leviathan, that force that is the ultimate source of power, the ultimate arbiter for a society, that Leviathan is changing.
It was God. There was a point when everybody looked to God as the ultimate arbiter. Then it was state. There was a point when everybody looked to the nation state as the ultimate source of power. Now it is the network. Whether you believe in the U.S. state, you look to the network for power, the NYT mainstream establishment that has power over the state. Same thing with China.
If you believe that China is powerful, you look at the CCP and not just China, the nation state. It is the network. This era is the era of networks as Leviathan.
Leviathan. I mean, it goes back, we read Matthew Pine's Global Power Competitions. It talks about,
you know, the nature of that competition is the competition for what network we're going to be a
part of. Authoritarian techno stack, techno authoritarian stack, or kind of liberty based
one. And at the end of the day, you have to choose the network, choose what network you want to be a
heart of based on who what you want to give dominion over your life morality kind of the
martial spirit or the monetary network and so we are entering the age of network as leviathan and
the question is just which network do you want to belong to i think i think what you just talked
about really encompasses bology's thesis which is that networks are above the state that yeah
They are inherently stronger than the state.
They cannot be broken up like a state can be broken up.
You can take down the borders.
You can move the borders.
You can bomb the capital, et cetera, et cetera.
The state may die, but the network will live on.
And so in one way, I think this really supports the tripolar thesis of NYT, CCP, and BTC.
In another way, where you mentioned, so NYT is network over state, CCP is network over state,
Bitcoin is network over network. And so network over network trumps network over state.
I would say, so when I look at this, I think of it less as a tripolar moment,
And I think of it more as the two bases the CCP and the NYT and arising out of that comes the third which is replacing the both It the child So this goes back to the you know the one the one moral commandment or the you know the one commandment of the society which is yeah
that you have to have something there has to be something wrong with what is currently existing
for you want to create something new and you have to be able to um elucidate that you have to be able
to say what that is. And that's what I think BTC is doing, is it's saying, you know, the thing that
is wrong with both of these models is that they don't allow for sovereignty, they don't allow for
freedom, they don't allow for liberal democracy. In order to survive, those things have to,
they have to quench and quell. Yeah, but the NYT and CCP also say to the BTC,
maxis are not correct you do have to have a certain amount of um loyalty and you have to
have a certain amount of morality i guess to unify people yeah yeah extremes are undesirable
yeah i think yeah i think he said that very well i want to move to another quote here continuing on
in the in this um in this reading um this linked article about the fall of um the fall of russia
and the chaos in the 1990s.
So the, quote,
During that time, murder was a depressingly common way
of resolving business disputes.
The notorious aluminum wars of the early 90s
saw thugs occupying factories,
a string of murders and lurid accounts
of organized crime activity across the metals industry.
Recent research suggests that the contract killings
related to those wars likely numbered in the thousands.
So, one, and then to go further, the racket has disappeared in its hard form, although there are kickbacks and raids, but now he's talking about Putin's Russia.
Now, business does not solve conflicts with the help of bandits and red-hot irons, but in the courts.
Raiding the seizure of assets and companies through physical or legal coercion remains a serious problem,
but it depends less on violence than it did in the past.
One British businessman told me that he had had two separate occasions where he had to go back to Moscow
because of attempts to steal his properties.
On the first occasion, thugs appeared at the door and marched their way past the security guard.
He had to call in favors, pay off local police in order to get them thrown out.
The second time, the raiders came in through the front door in the form of lawyers and bailiffs with documents
alleging that the property had been signed into their possession in order to discharge a non-existent debt.
And so using lawfare in order to accomplish the means of the state where previously violence had been used to accomplish the means of the mafia.
So they are well aware that they appreciate a degree of predictability within the system.
And also, now that they are rich, they appreciate a state apparatus dedicated to preserving property rights.
Who is they in that?
This would be those benefiting the state apparatus and the oligarchs that are associated with that,
benefiting from the property rights that allow them to keep what they have stolen.
but they are they are also well aware that an honest well-functioning police force and a
dedicated incorruptible judiciary would be a serious threat to them so they're kind of in this
in this weird space where as a result they have a strong interest in preserving the current
compromised status quo um so one of the things that i i wanted to i was trying to think about was
if the aluminum wars were kind of the kickoff for some big, big violence. And I looked up,
I kind of queried chat GPT. I was like, why, why was it aluminum? Like, what was the point?
And aluminum at that time was a highly valued, scarce resource for defense and for, you know,
for building weaponry, for building airplanes, for building, and so to control that really
allowed you to control the defense of your assets.
And so I wanted to know, what would the modern day equivalent of that be?
Instead of aluminum wars, do we think of it now, will it be the like Bitcoin hashing wars,
energy domination wars?
Will it be chip wars?
for AI?
Will it be maybe rare earth
minerals?
Where would you
see that? Or when you look
at the global landscape now and you see
conflict arising
over resources
and assets that could
lend
themselves towards
protecting, to be
a defensive or an offensive
capability, what
do you feel is the modern aluminum war? Is it Bitcoin? Is it chips? Is it rare earth? Is it
something else? Is it all of those? I think it's membership in a monetary network. So I think that
what we're fighting over in all of these trade wars is the United States trying to slip out of
the Triffin dilemma being the issue of the global reserve currency that we seem to be losing our
industrial base, all of these things, trying to change the nature of the monetary network that
the world is a part of, so that we're not subject to that dilemma, while China also tries to change
the nature of the monetary network to control it with a CBDC, central bank digital currency. I think
all this conflict we see is downstream of the money. And what people what we're what we're all
fighting over is the perversities that arise from a fiat-based economic system, that it's not about
a scarce resource anymore. It's about the lack of scarcity and the fact that it gives certain
attributes to the monetary system when it's guided by a fiat currency. You need a global reserve
currency issuer, and that issuer then is harmed in very specific ways, even as other aspects of
that same society benefit the financial class, real estate, insurance, fire, abbreviated as fire,
those tend to benefit as the manufacturing base is lost. And so conflict arises due to, again,
I think just the nature of our changing monetary network and what the future monetary network is
going to look like. So we're back to fix the money, fix the world. But for anyone who missed
our previous conversation, explain the Triffin dilemma. The Triffin dilemma, in its relevant
sense, so I think it's George Triffin, an economist in the 60s comes up with this idea,
it is that if you are the global reserve currency issuer, you're going to have an exorbitant
privilege of being able to print value, essentially, and people around the world are going to want what
you printed, they're going to want those dollars that you can just print like monopoly money.
And so you can send them that and they will send you back real world goods in exchange for the pieces of paper that you're sending them. That's the exorbitant privilege. It also, there's an exorbitant burden, though. The country that has that privilege of printing value and sending it throughout the world to get back real world products now has no internal, has less internal incentive.
It's more difficult internally to foster that manufacturing base that would allow you to make products yourself.
So manufacturing then goes abroad where people will work for less.
It makes less economic sense to make those things in the United States or whoever issues a global reserve currency.
So that's the tripping dilemma.
You have the ability to print value and get goods from around the world, but then that leads to the manufacturers of goods domestically to go to other countries.
So you lose your industrial base, even as the financial sectors of the society that are making use, that are benefiting from the printing of money closest to it, tend to grow very, very rapidly.
That's one explanation of the Triffin Dilemma.
Yeah. So Triffon dilemma, if you have the ability to be the world's reserve currency, you will abuse that ability. And in abusing that ability, you will lose the world's reserve currency after losing your industrial capability.
And I don't even think that it's abuse, though. The dilemma is that the world needs dollars, like liquidity is required to enable global trade. And so you have to, the world needs dollars. And so the reserve currency provider has to supply it with dollars.
But that goes against, you know, so the concept that is somewhat hard to grasp is that any amount of money, so long as it is consistent, will serve a society, so long as it meets the characteristics of money.
So it needs dollars. It does not need a ever increasing amount of dollars. Right. It just needs dollars. So I see what you're saying.
I think but increasing volumes of trade
require increasing dollars
because it's not like you can split up the cent
into an infinity of other cents
because it is not infinitely divisible
it's nearly infinitely divisible
like Bitcoin
that you have to go the other way
you have to go up
which is why we see the printing
of trillion dollar notes
in societies that have hyperinflated their currency
because they are continually trying to go up the stack
in order to make money, I guess, more usable.
Yeah, but even then, the Triven Dilemma is not implicated for those countries
because they don't have the global reserve currency,
so it's not a dynamic in other countries needing their currency.
It's just internally they want to inflate and tax away and steal value from their own citizens.
Well, that's what we're doing too.
And we just get rid of the penny.
Yeah, yeah.
Get rid of the penny, print a thousand dollar bill.
That's probably the next thing, right?
Yeah.
No, but the only thing is I just want to, I'm not saying that the U.S. financial system is not rife with abuse in every sort of way.
But I think the Triffin dilemma is more agnostic in that even if you're trying not to abuse it, you're just stuck at the bad end of a certain dynamic that has to play out because the global reserve currency issuer stands in a special place in relation to the rest of the world.
Yeah, I think, I mean, hearing the Triffin dilemma explained, to me, makes it very obvious why you would, if you were the world's reserve currency, you would want to be making plans to not be the world's reserve currency.
because if you were able to learn from the lessons of history
and see how that has hollowed out the British Empire,
how it will eventually hollow out the Chinese Empire, I would assume,
as they continue the Belt and Road Initiative.
But yeah, I think that if you can learn from the lessons of history,
then you would say that, oh, we are in this place of exorbitant privilege now,
but we need to make plans because we don't want to be the ones left holding the bag after everyone else has left
and moved on to the new monetary network, which is obviously happening right now.
So, yeah, I think that was about all I had on my little rabbit hole down.
down the Russian mafia hole.
One of the things that I wanted to bring up was,
so how are things different this time?
Well, one of the things that's different is that...
Different from what?
So in the previous tripolar moment,
which was Soviet Russia,
Nazi Germany, and the USA,
where the Soviets were the moral power,
the nazis were the martial power usa was the monetary power what happened was that the
moral power and the monetary power joined together to defeat the military power
there was an advantage during that time and the advantage was that the combination of the moral
and the monetary power outnumbered the martial power five to one.
350 million people against 70 million.
What's different this time around is that the martial power,
which is China, outnumbers the combined moral and money power
by about four to one.
So instead of a one-to-five ratio, it's now four-to-one.
1.3 billion Chinese against, say, 400 million combined on the other side.
And so quantity is a quality all its own.
I believe that was Stalin. I'm not sure.
But quantity is a quality all of its own.
And so there is a cause for concern here, right, in that just because it played out in a certain direction the last time does not necessarily mean that it will play out in the same direction this time.
and the this time I would say the authoritarian like yeah you are seeing the split within the left
where you are seeing liberals distance themselves from woke capital NYT that kind of thing and you
know the woke NYT that will align more with the authoritarian Chinese CCP and the the liberal side
that's the Greenwald side will align a bit more probably with the sovereign BTC.
But do you have any thoughts on that as far as the global landscape now?
Now that the teams are different and there are a lot more players on the military power team
and they appear to have a substantial lead in terms of both numbers and military power.
Yeah, I think some hope, just given the way that working within Balaji's framework is,
the new Leviathan is the network.
So these are all three expressions of a network.
It's no longer nation-state versus nation-state.
It's now different iterations, possibilities for a network versus other possibilities.
And networks have less neat boundaries. They kind of, I think, sometimes connect to each other through certain nodes and so bleed into each other in a certain way.
I just think that there's hope there because BTC decentralization can begin to clave off, draw off members of the other two poles in a way that maybe interconnects everybody.
It becomes like a Kevin Bacon level of association.
The networks begin to intertwine where I have somebody who's less extreme than me as a friend who has somebody who's less extreme even than that person.
And so like BTC begins through network connections to connect to NYT and CCP. And there's a way in which maybe then that draws out a sort of aggressive militarism and people are more interested in winning within the network, which is just a software idea that being part of the same network broadly writ makes us all want to compete within the network.
and if there is a way to do that
like Bitcoin that is non-kinetic
then maybe we don't need
violent war to
be the decider
if network is Leviathan
then maybe non-kinetic warfare
is like the arbiter of truth
under it in the form of like proof of work
or encryption or something I don't know
yeah what Balaji says
at the very end of this chapter
speaks directly to
what you're talking about here which is
One of our premises is that Indians, Israelis, American dissidents, Chinese liberals, tech founders and investors, and people from other countries that want to maintain their sovereignty will need to avail themselves of Bitcoin Web3 for decentralized communication, transaction, and computation.
Yeah.
So in the next chapter, he'll go on to explain why and how to frame that scenario and kind of what that looks like.
And is that next chapter, is that called the re-centralized center?
The road to re-centralization, I think.
Right, cool. So it must be like he ends with this idea of the re-centralized center, trying to find the place within that triangle of poles, the three-polar system.
You have to find a re-centralized center. And so I guess, yeah, cool. The next chapter will bring us to that.
Yeah, yeah. So moves us down this path. I think a great job of laying the groundwork for understanding, as he states in the beginning of the chapter, you know, it may not be that this model is correct.
However, it is almost certainly usefully wrong, even if it is incorrect, in that it gives us a place to start from.
Nothing is clearly defined.
The monetary power does have martial power.
It does have media power.
It does have moral power.
Yeah.
The moral power has, you know, each of them has components of the other, yet there is one thing that is expressed greatly over the rest.
Yeah.
Pulls us into a new discussion, I guess.
So if this is the premise, then what are the next steps that play?
Right.
And that's what we're talking about next time.
Cool.
What else you got?
That's all I had.
I'm eager to see the recentralized center
it's an interesting trajectory to start with
this book we're going to talk about the network
state how to create
a startup society
begin in the cloud and then create a network
state in real life
and then he's taken this foray
through history and through ideology
and now we're getting to
next chapter and you know
the recentralized center to
see even more
what a startup
startup society founder needs to be conscious of as they triangulate the position of their
network society um and find yeah and to be able to find people who want to join it yeah uh again
it's a good it's a good read it's fun um the hyperlinks are just uh utter joy i think in terms
of someone who wants to dig deep into this and find some rabbit holes i pulled out like two
hyperlinks of, you know, say
100 or 150.
And if you're
reading along with this, then
definitely delve into it and
start tracing your own path
and finding your own
commonalities and similarities that either
prove or disprove what you believe
and adjust your thoughts.
So, yeah, moving
on, we will cover
chapter four next time.
Right on.
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