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I do. Hey, welcome to this conversation.
So today, Lucas and I are beginning a new book, The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan.
It's available free online.
You can also buy a Kindle one off of Amazon.
I am incredibly excited about this book for a couple of reasons.
One, Bitcoin is going to change most things, if not everything.
So what will it do to the idea of the modern nation state?
We've already seen how it changed warfare and Jason Lowry's software thesis, potentially.
also how it can change the nature of settlements in our last conversation regarding Ivan's Instant Settlement series.
So now we're going to see kind of a theoretical work about the idea of the network state
and maybe the role that Bitcoin will play in changing our idea of what a nation state can be or what a state can be.
So I'm also excited because if you've heard Balaji talk, you have seen or heard rather that he has an incredibly broad range of reference.
You're always enriched, even if you don't agree with him, because you learn things about other things. He also has, he's an intellectual who speaks to be understood. Despite the broad range of reference, he's always in service of like conveying understanding. So this book, I think, and having read what I've read is that way as well. It's not just about powering through with intellect. It's about trying to be understood.
Which brings me to the third thing and kind of the bridge into today's reading is biology has an incredible power of compression to take a complex idea and make it into a thing that you can manage and understand and build out from.
So today we're going to read and discuss chapter one, which is entitled Quick Start.
There are five chapters overall we're going to proceed through in our future conversations.
This first chapter, Quick Start, it's a broad overview of the idea of the network state.
In the middle chapters, two through four, we're going to see a deep analysis that is going to uncover problems regarding our collective future.
And the final chapter then is going to be Balaji circling back to the idea of the network state and then in detail kind of going through how it's going to address the societal problems he uncovered in his deep analysis in the middle chapters.
So today we're going to do the usual plan of attack.
I'm going to give a short summary of this first chapter, and then Lukas and I are going to unpack and explore all the concepts further in conversation.
So quick start. Balaji begins by characterizing the nature of his book in a couple ways. As I mentioned, it's available online and for free. And so first Balaji says, look at this as a book app. Not only is it online, freely downloadable, it's going to be, he says, continually updated. And as you begin to read, you see it's also full of hyperlinks that take you out of the book back into the world to learn more.
Second, consider this book, he says, a toolbox and not a manifesto.
You don't have to agree with every single thing he says in order to find one tool or idea that you find useful and then build out from yourself.
As I mentioned, in this, Sobology has this incredible power of compression of big ideas and the smaller phrases, and he demonstrates that in this first chapter.
And he does something that perhaps all authors should do.
He begins with a one-sentence statement of the book. He says, quote,
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition.
So that's Balaji's one-sentence statement of what the network state is.
This book, though, of course, is over 400 pages, so this is obviously highly compressed.
But we can understand a lot from it as kind of a starting point, a starting and ending point, really, of where Balaji is going. So he's going to move from this idea of a highly aligned online community to ultimately end up with something that has territory and receives, quote, diplomatic recognition. That's going to be the network state.
Biology then proceeds to explain this compressed idea of the network state by comparing it to the nation state, which is obviously what we currently have, the prevailing paradigm of statehood.
Nation states, we could say, begin with the idea of land.
So you begin with a map of land and then assign each piece of land to a nation state.
It's like a giant risk board game where you have colored squares.
Each colored square corresponds to a state.
The network state, though, does not begin with land or the idea that we need to assign control of that land.
Instead, the board game map consists of 8 billion different minds, the minds of all humanity.
And these minds are what are then colored in with membership to one or more different network states.
Balaji then proceeds.
He gives a more pedantic, second kind of legalistic definition of the network state, which has like 12 to 14 different criteria, depending on how you slice it.
So it's no use kind of now rattling off the different criteria of what it takes to legalistically qualify as a network state because this is the first chapter.
He gives a very high-level account, and that's actually better to understand at this point for our future understanding.
Then in the last chapter, Balaji is going to return to the kind of legalistic clause-based definition and go through and show how a network state kind of really compares to a nation state in definition form.
so instead to help us get the general idea um biology compresses his idea of the network state
into one suggestive in an image he's given one sentence now he gives one image um he calls it a
dashboard i don't know in lucas we had this image i don't know if we can queue it up in some way if
if not you can see it in the in the pdf um he calls this one image account of the network state
a dashboard. There we go. As you can see, it consists of kind of a map of the world. There's
this network superimposed on that map with lines connecting different points. The different points
or nodes are located over major cities. Each of these points has a number indicating the amount
of people in that city that belongs to the network from that city. This picture also has three stats
at the top, population income in square meters, along with the corresponding line graph to chart
that over time. So this dashboard depicts a potential network state and its statistics,
I think, it kind of looks like a video game such as Civilization or SimCity, but for the network
state. What does this dashboard say about the idea of the network state? Well, so you should
regard these nodes as internet connected and decentralized. We see a physical archipelago,
islands of physical space connected by the internet.
You get what you measure, Balaji says,
and here we see the important stats that are being measured,
population, income, and square meterage.
And we'll see in the future he talks about further metrics
that can be measured because, again, from the one-sentence definition,
this is a highly aligned community, and they're going to be,
they can be aligned, they should be aligned around a purpose
or an idea such as longevity, increasing lifespan,
something like that, which is measurable. So now we have the network state in one sentence,
and here's the network state in one image. And the chapter concludes with two other efforts of
compression, but with more detail, the network state in a thousand words and the network state
in an essay. So to describe the network state in a thousand words, Balaji gives seven steps that
you can take to bring a community that consists of these minds that are highly aligned,
but connected only by the internet to materialize that community,
bring it from the cloud to land, make it real,
and bootstrap it into a network state,
like an actual type of state akin to the nation state.
So like the one-sentence definition,
again, in the one-sentence definition,
a movement from highly aligned minds to final diplomatic recognition,
these steps are a more fulsome description of how to do that.
So first, found a startup society. Step one, found the startup. A new business begins with a startup. A startup society is a network stake in embryonic form, basically a highly aligned online community with aspirations to be something greater, that thing that is greater, an actual network state.
So two, you then move from that network startup to a network union by organizing for a collective benefit.
Unionizing in this sense just means that your aligned community is going to seek the benefit of its members.
The third step, you then build trust offline and a crypto economy online.
Physical gatherings of these different internet connected nodes kind of occur with increasing duration.
So people build trust with each other. It's an increasing process of materialization from the cloud to land throughout these seven steps. And then an internal economy is developing as well, because we know nation states have their own economies based on their own currency. And we'll hear about, of course, how Bitcoin can assist with that.
step four then you're going to move from the network union to a network archipelago by
crowdfunding physical nodes so increasing process of materialization from the cloud
now the real world is being colonized in a sense first maybe a single bedroom apartment
of a person who pertains to the network state then houses then cul-de-sacs then neighborhoods
than entire cities, something like that.
Five, you begin to build out digital connections
between these physical communities.
Things like an NFT-based digital passport
that might grant unique access
to members of the different physical nodes when they visit.
Maybe an NFT on your cell phone
allows you to enter into an apartment
that is owned by the network archipelago.
Also augmented reality.
mixing this internet communities, internet perceptions with the real world.
VR can show people different things if you are a member of the community.
Maybe you see things in that, know a territory belonging to the archipelago,
if you are a member of that archipelago.
Then you, step six, conduct an on-chain census.
These are the metrics that you want to measure that were on that dashboard,
things like population income and square meters.
You do this on blockchain in some sort of cryptographically secure and auditable form so that the world believes and you can show people and they can see that your network archipelago is actually a very powerful thing.
This builds up to step seven.
You've done that census.
You've shown your power.
Step seven, you become a network state, which means real world diplomatic recognition.
That's the final movement from here, the network archipelago to the network state.
And this way you move from that highly aligned startup society in the cloud, materializing it down from the cloud into the physical world until it is diplomatically recognized.
This is kind of the opposite of the nation state.
Balaji writes, quote, unlike an ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which packs millions of disputants in one place, a network state is ideologically aligned but geographically decentralized.
decentralized. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their
hearts are in one place. So next, well, so that was the network state in 1000 words.
Balaji giving us the steps and stages to move from the network startup to network union to
network archipelago to network state. To add some more detail to that framework, Balaji gives us the
network state in one essay. This essay allows him to give some additional context and show that the
network state is more plausible than we might kind of think initially. So some context on how
to start a new country, he notes, he lists seven different ways. Some are violent, like revolution
and war. Some of them are more hopeful, have more potential, like seasteading or space colonization.
But the most nonviolent and most realistic, practical way to start a new country right now,
Balogy thinks is the network state because we already have the technology stack to make this
possible and it's already widely distributed. Millions are already connected online. We already
have digital currencies like Bitcoin. Crowdfunding online has already demonstrated success.
So we already have the tech stack to begin to put something in place like the network state.
It's also best able to move from startup to an actual state because the tech has shown that it
can lead to similar types of changes in that some of the types of technology we have have already
gone on a similar journey from startup to a more developed thing, almost akin to a state.
There's really two types of recognition that a thing can have, numerical and societal,
Balaji says. Numerical is about scales. Those are those dashboard metrics, income, land,
population. Societal recognition is about legal recognition. So I said tech has already
demonstrated this possible transition from numerical to societal recognition.
Take a look at Bitcoin. We begin with a sort of numerical recognition, number go up,
increasing market cap, increasing hash rate of the system, increasing number of users,
wallet numbers, et cetera. From increasing numerical recognition, we move on to increasing
societal recognition. It's given like a stock ticker. It has legal recognition in certain
countries. It's placed in ETFs, things like that. So basically, numerical metrics of the Bitcoin
economy, the Bitcoin protocol rather, have bootstrap belief in the network into societal
recognition. The network state is the way that this can happen in the form of statehood.
Numerical, you get numerical recognition first as you begin to, with the startup society,
seeking to create, or rather a startup, a network startup seeking to make a network state,
you begin with numerical goals, putting stats on an auditable blockchain to show growth and
possibility of further growth in terms of population, income, land size, whatever other
metric you want to optimize for, like longevity. Then that numerical metric bootstraps your network
startup into these other stages, network union, network archipelago, network state, finally,
into further societal recognition.
So the thought is, given the tech stack we now have, things like Bitcoin, things like
the internet, it is plausible to seed a network startup, push that into a network union by
advancing the member interest, materialize that union into the real physical world in
a network archipelago, and finally gain societal recognition in the form of diplomatic recognition.
So to conclude this, Balaji gives a little bit further context, just to kind of really show us
the real world plausibility of this scenario, in that most countries are small countries.
20% of nation states have populations of less than 1 million. 55% have, the majority of countries
have a population of less than 10 million. And you begin to think, what do those numbers mean?
compare that to software accounts. Twitter has 650 million users. There are particular influencers,
pundits, talking heads or whatever on Instagram, on Twitter that can have follower counts in the
millions greater than the population of some countries. So it's plausible to think that a
highly aligned community of millions could begin a network startup, advance their interests into a
network union, materialize physically through decentralized land acquisition into a network
archipelago and finally achieve network statehood societal recognition. So that's Balaji's description
of the network state in one sentence, one image, a thousand words, and then one essay.
He does that all in 14 pages. Again, another effort of compression, given that the book is
over 400 pages long. So there's still a lot of context. If one disagrees with something here,
don't throw everything out yet. This is just to open your mind to the ideas, give you a high-level
summary. And then we're going to explore in detail in further conversations, kind of the
justification societal conditions that have led us to this idea of the network state.
So Lucas, I think like the question I have, I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on
is kind of the plausibility of a network state at this high level that we're getting it now.
It's kind of, I was thinking about this, like it's hard to describe, like part of the thing is
it's just hard to describe how a new type of object could enter into an old category.
Specifically, like the internet has caused the dematerialization of real world things.
Like a book we once thought was a thing made of paper bound in the real world.
The internet and digital technologies have dematerialized that, changing our concept of what a book is.
Maybe even our concept of what a friend is.
We might have once thought a friend is someone who you have regular physical contact with,
who you know in the real world.
Now, I think our idea of a friend has dematerialized. We saw in Jason Lowry's thesis how the idea of war is changing conceptually. And this is, I think, a big problem that people have with this thesis is they can't conceptualize how we can have a dematerialized form of war.
And so I think that's also something that Balaji, a hurdle he really has to get over is if the network state is in some sense dematerializing statehood, but also materializing a new state from the cloud down to earth.
I mean, does that fit into like how we think about a state or how we can think about a state?
Can a state be a network state?
Does that mean, does that sound like inherently plausible to you or what do you think about that?
Yeah.
it's difficult to first imagine
until you look around
and you see how the form function
of everything that is in our lives
has been rapidly dematerializing
and becoming digital
so Instagram digitized photography
Spotify digitized music, Netflix digitized media or movies, Facebook digitized friendships, Twitter digitized news.
Jason Lowry is showing us how Bitcoin digitizes war.
we still have all of these things that we feel make us human our art our photography our music
our our friendships our conflicts we still have those they just move to a different domain and
it's hard to conceive because you have to change your perspective on
the way that you view the world perspective is something that you don't realize you have
until it changes and then you don't realize what your new perspective is you only see that you used
to have one that no longer resonates.
And so perspective is a really tricky thing because you never really know what it is that
you're not seeing until, and once you finally realize what it is that you're not seeing,
then you have a new perspective.
You are a new person at that point.
um there's a quote that i heard from mark andreessen
talking about how artificial intelligence will from the ground up take over all of these industries
um and he makes the case he says you know you're seeing two types of companies right now
you have what he calls the sixth bullet point company,
which is the company that they're a startup. They're coming in. Hey,
we're going to do this, this, this, this, this, this, and AI.
And he's like, it's on the sixth slide.
And what you realize is that they made the slideshow before the AI.
Now they're, now they're trying to throw it in.
And then on the other side, you've got, which is, he says, this is what I'm waiting for, actually, is I'm waiting for somebody to walk in and I'll know this has changed when I see a restructured org chart, organization chart, where they come in for a pitch for VC money and they say, okay, so we don't have a CEO and a technical founder and a non-technical founder and a head of research and a head of engineering.
and a head of marketing, we have eight engineers, and they are overseeing 100 instances of artificial
intelligence that do all of these things. And that is our new org chart. It's engineers over AI.
It's not people supplementing what they do individually with AI. And
the network state has a lot of plausibility to me for a number of reasons one is the first
thought that I had when I first read about this idea was when I grew up on the farm
there were two jobs that I had to do every summer one of them was my favorite job the other was my
least favorite job and they were almost the exact same thing. One of them was building new fence
and one of them was fixing old fence. And I loved building new fence.
Quality was the only concern. Speed was not necessarily a concern. If you're building a new
fence, that means that there aren't cows running around in the pasture already. And so you're not
under a time limit, plus you're doing it for your dad or your neighbor or whoever it is.
And they care a whole lot more about, is this going to be straight? Is it going to be true?
Is it going to be done well, rather than they care about the speed? And the reason being is that
you pay for the job. You pay, you know, it's two miles of fence and therefore I'm going to pay you
X dollars per mile. Fixing fence is miserable. Fixing fence is typically done under a constraint.
You know, we got a 2 a.m. call from the sheriff. The cows are out on the highway.
we got the cows back in but now we need to go find where the fence was where they got out we
need to patch it nobody ever uses new wire to fix old fence you always get the shitty old
wire breaks in your hands and the thing is that when a fence breaks and then you splice it
it's never as strong as it was before never by you know it'll just never be as strong as it was
before you broke it, and it'll break again, it'll break in different places.
And Andreessen had this quote, he was kind of asked about like,
existing companies pivoting to use AI versus new companies that are coming native AI,
and bringing that org chart of here's engineers overseeing artificial intelligence,
and which one is more plausible, which one's going to be more successful.
and his quote was, if a technology transformation is sufficiently powerful,
then you need to start the development process over from scratch.
You need a new company.
And so that's the vote for the radically different thing
that is unrecognizable by today's standards.
That seems crazy,
but it only seems crazy because the perspective of being a nerd with and
holding holding close to heart and using as a first option and a default the new technology
is not yet there in the consciousness but when it becomes that you know hey i'm not going to use
AI to make my job easier, I'm going to have AI do this job. And then I'm going to have AI do it
better. Yeah. I mean, so like what I'm hearing is that it's plausible exactly because it sounds
crazy. Like we should expect in a world where things are changing rapidly, things like a network
state, which are going to sound implausible, like their plausibility actually stems from the fact
that they, you know, are really taking new technology seriously. Yeah. Yeah. And I think
you mentioned a couple of things in your summary. Um, one about kind of, you know, we're not going
to get into the legal definition of what a, of what a nation is. And, but I, I feel as though
Balaji is really doing his best to make a case.
Yeah.
And I omitted the legalistic definition he gave.
He did read, I mean, he does have that longer one sentence, like a network state is this
and this and this and this and this and this and this.
So I think, I mean, I don't want to say, yeah, I mean, you're not saying he is, but
just so, yeah, Balaji is very conscious of this.
Actually, that's a great.
So the network state in one sentence, a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowd funds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states.
So and again so that the order in which it happens right You start with a highly aligned online community You then demonstrate a capacity for collective action
whether that collective action is, you know, it's real life meetups.
It's developing,
developing your own kind of personality in the physical world as a group.
And then eventually, yeah, crowdfunding territory that at a certain point,
at a certain point when you crowdfund enough territory,
when you're big enough, then you're, you're hard to ignore.
And so, yeah, I think Balaji is really laying out this brilliant case.
You also mentioned the compression.
Balaji Surnavasan is, to me, one of the greatest writers in terms of clarity that I've ever read.
And I find myself rereading things five or six or seven times and realizing that there is no fluff, there is no fat, there are no filler words the way that Balaji writes.
When you read this book, it reads at like a, honestly, it reads at like a sixth grade level.
It's very easy to read.
This is consistent with what we saw with Jason Lowry, although in some parts of his thesis, obviously, it had to get a little technical.
It had to get a little difficult.
This is very easy to read, very accessible.
Balji breaks things down into analogies and metaphors that are so easy for us to understand that it downplays the brilliance of what it took to come to that conclusion.
My favorite part of this book is every citation is hyperlinked.
And so whenever you see a blue link as you're reading in the network state, click on that,
and it'll take you to a news story that demonstrates the principle that he's trying to describe
or a Twitter post that shows the event that he's referring to
or a Wikipedia page that gives you the background that you need
in order to truly understand what he's going through.
Yeah, it's a sprawling monstrous thing too.
Reading it is like, I was like, ah, 14 pages,
not going to take a long time to read.
But you want to click on those hyperlinks and you should
because like I said, you're going to learn a lot of other things
aside from what you're learning about.
You're going to get this idea of the network state.
You're going to fill it out with examples.
But the examples themselves are rabbit holes.
If you have any amount of curiosity, I mean,
it's a deadly thing to read because you're constantly falling through the trap doors into
new ideas and you know biology a wide range of reference he's i mean very in in tune with
cultural trends but he's also um former cto of coinbase he's a startup of he had a startup
regarding like um something within like pharmacogenomics or something like that where like
pharmacy and genomics and some sort of tech thing related to that so just like this wide range of
technical references next to cultural references. And it's really interesting. And it does
substantiate his thesis in a very particular way. When I was asking about the plausibility,
this is one thing that leaped out to me. And I want to get your thoughts on this as well.
So we've had this discussion in the past before too. So Balaji says that a proposition is not a
nation, but it can become one. He says, I mean, I forget which section he discusses this, I think
in the final essay. And so that idea, a proposition is not a nation, although it can become one.
That kind of comes from Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address says that the United States
is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. So a proposition is an idea, right?
This country is about equality and freedom. So is a proposition an idea, some sort of
abstraction like that enough to make a nation or do you need something more so again biology says
the proposition is not enough by itself but that it can kind of seed the startup with purpose
and then you move to the next stage it's a highly aligned community um i guess you know you highly
align yourself around an idea like um maximizing optimizing lifespan or something like that
so this i mean there's like a there's a debate right now this is very alive um but is do we live
in a propositional nation or do we live in a nation? Essentially, is the United States an idea
or is the United States a nation? So Vance, and I think it was in one of his speeches,
he's talking about people in a coal mining country who love the country, not because it is a good
idea, but because it is their home and they would die for it. So America, in Vance's estimation,
is not just an idea or a set of principles, not just a proposition. It is a homeland where people
are from and they have those deep cultural roots to it. America is a nation in that sense and not
an idea. And Vance has said people will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their
home. And this is, you know, we've only read the barest high-level summary of what this book is
about, but can a network, can we really create a nation from a highly aligned community consciously?
Can we highly align ourselves around a proposition that we then build out into an actual nation?
Or does a nation have to arise more organically as nations have arisen in the past around a shared
historical narrative, a shared cultural or racial heritage that is then legalistically
recognized. And that's maybe where I'm wanting, you know, I'm eager to read the rest of the book
and see what Balaji makes of this. The network state, it is an intentionally, I mean, unapologetically
an intentionally designed state around a selected idea. But again, you know, I think Balaji is
acknowledging that a nation is more than an idea. And can he get us from seeding a network startup
up with an idea to actually becoming a state in a more fulsome sense. And I wore this shirt,
particularly, it's got some wheat on it. And so I come from Kansas. And I think that to myself,
often, it's like, I don't ideologically align often with or share the same beliefs, necessarily,
or have the same interests as the people around me. I come from a very rural area.
But I still have like this deep, you know, kind of passionate love for the physical land and the
heritage of the people and just who they are. And I see that and recognize that in a very full sense.
And so can a network startup, you know, can it proceed from a proposition to something like
my love for Kansas right now, which is not an abstraction? I mean, what do you think about that?
Yeah. I just want to, so in response to that, I want to read something that I wrote while going
through here because I think it demonstrates what you're talking about, what you're asking about,
which is, I guess, first off, what I would say is that I think the United States is probably the
first example of a network state. And I would say that the failures that we have seen with the
United States that have tried this sort of experiment is that the technology did not
exist at the time to allow for the proposition to be fully realized.
You think about the things that the United States was based upon, freedom of speech,
the ability to express yourself, your religion, your preferences, the ability to defend yourself
against an oppressive government. These things were great ideas that were eventually
made somewhat impossible because the technology did not exist that would give the citizens the
ability to actually realize that proposition. And now we, I would say we do have those technologies
and we are seeing this change. So let me read this and see if this answers kind of what you're
what you're asking about. So Balaji, he's building a case. He's leading us to this
inevitable conclusion supported by evidence from a multitude of life. We build new.
We don't fix the old. Now is the time that we are building. We're leaving the known world behind.
There's three competing systems at play. That's what he's trying to get us to realize here,
is that there are three competing systems at play,
but there's a surprise addendum to the three competing systems at play.
There's the East, which is the censorship, the communism, the atheism,
because why believe in a God when you can pretend to be one in real life?
There's the West, based upon freedom, meritocracy, religion,
whether that religion is a god or a woke religion or MAGA or Maha, psychedelics, money, some type of religion.
And then the third one is code, Bitcoin, substack, freedom of speech and freedom of the ability to protect yourself in the digital world.
So he's setting us up for this killer reveal.
And the killer reveal is that there are not three systems.
there's not the East, the West, and code.
There are two dying systems,
which are having their best parts taken from them,
and from that will arise, from their ashes, the replacement.
So there's many points of agreement.
This, I think, really talks about the question you're asking,
which right now we have a system where we have the red and the blue,
and there are many points of agreement with those people.
Yet we focus upon the points where they disagree
on these contentious one voter issues.
And you're effectively kicked out of the red or the blue side
if you commit this faux pas of viewing the other side as humane.
or human, or seeing them as fallible, just like yourself.
As this system continues to devolve,
we continue to refine the things that we disagree on
and forget about the things that we agree on.
A great example, I think, is abortion,
which is a highly, highly, highly contentious topic,
except it's really not.
Most people actually believe that abortion should be legal and safe and allowed.
It's something like 70 or 80 percent of the United States actually believes that abortion should be legal.
What we disagree on is what is this small line?
Is it 32 weeks? Is it 28 weeks? Is it only in this instance? Is it only in this instance?
We have refined the points that we disagree on to minute topics.
You had to hate brown people because brown people were terrorists after 2001.
You had to hate black people because black people were violent.
You had to hate white men because white men are abusive.
You had to hate Jewish people because Jewish people control the money.
You had to hate men because men are violent.
You had to hate women because women are conniving.
You had to hate Christians because Christians are hypocritical.
You had to hate Islam because terrorists were Islamic.
You had to hate Russians because Russians were godless.
You had to hate the Midwest, Texas, and the South because the Midwest, Texas, and the South is godful.
You had to hate Mexicans because they're lazy and violent.
We got to this point.
The problem is that you end up hating out your entire base of brilliant rebels.
people who identify with one of those groups that if you want to belong to one of those groups,
yet you are one of those identified hated individuals, hated groups,
then you have to come in apologizing for something that's out of your control.
I'm sorry I'm a man and I apologize for all of the man things and I'm going to play by your rules.
Therefore, please allow me in.
And then the grace on the other side is that they get to say you're one of the good ones.
Oh, you're it's OK. You're you're a man, but you're one of the good ones.
You're black, but you're one of the good ones. You're Islam, but you're one of the good ones.
And so there's this really patronizing sort of pet.
We're going to pat you on the head and it's okay as long as you stay in bounds.
Yeah, what results is that you hate out your entire base of brilliant rebels.
And the thing is you need to have brilliant rebels on your side.
You need brilliance to do things and you need the rebels to do things in a new way.
and to try things.
So what results is you have a replacement of the first two,
the red and the blue,
which draws the best of each
and leaves behind the glaring faults.
And what it appears to be,
Balji is setting us up for,
and he's going to give us a lot of evidence
and walkthrough for this.
What it appears to be is that this time,
it's the code group,
which is populated by the oppressed, brilliant rebels and some plain old just rebels and actually some not very rebellious, but brilliant people.
So all that's left in the old organizations are the non-rebellious people, the compliant people that don't think for themselves.
I don't know. I don't think you can naturally care about code and be passionate about code
and the way you can be passionate about the land that you're from and the heritage you have.
I see what you're saying that maybe there are a small subset of people who are brilliant and contrarian
and they will want to be in a network state because they don't give a shit about where they're from,
their own physical, they have no loyalty. And this is me, of course, kind of amping this up a bit.
They have no inherent loyalty or patriotism for the space of Earth, Earth that gave birth to them, that formed them, that raised them throughout their childhood.
And instead, they're ready to abandon all loyalties and become some sort of denatured person who believes in something abstract like code and joins up with a highly aligned community who wants to maximize for some sort of, you know, rational target like lifespan.
Maybe there are enough people willing to die for that idea.
I don't think so, though.
that's my, that's the one thing I want biology in this book to convince me of is that the network
state will actually encourage a level of patriotism and loyalty on kin to an actual nation state,
which is based upon unthinking criteria, like patriotism and loyalty and religion and family,
like the things that we actually care about in life, I feel are those like things that are
almost sub rational that form our rationality during our formative stages, like our childhood.
And so the network state seems like we're just very much at the beginning of this, but it seems like too much of a rationalist construct, almost the attempt like communists, you can redesign society in a rational way or something like that.
And where I just see that humans are irrational, we love, love is irrational, and you can't get people who are willing to die for a nation state without also having them believe in something that's irrational and having them be fueled by irrationality.
So does that make sense? It's like the implausibility of the network state is that it seems like a cold abstraction. It seems like an attempt to intentionally come down with a top-down criteria like longevity that no one really actually cares about except for in some cold rational sense.
I think every – well, okay. I get where you're coming from. I think everybody cares about longevity in a very real sense.
Yeah.
but i i guess i would say one you don't code i don't no so so that's one that's one thing where
it's like i i do handwriting i write which is like coding and i wouldn't go to join a civilization
that is like premised upon we're gonna write or like writing is our foundational principle or
something like that yeah but you i would i would say for is coding a religious experience does
coding demand fealty? I think books are very religious to you.
No, I don't think so. I see what you're saying, that books are important, but I would never join
a society that's around the preservation of books. I would join a nation state, rather,
that's like other nation states don't take seriously that books are what is important.
Our nation state is formed around the principle of preserving books and advocating for books and
making people read books. Like I would not join that nation state. I would stay in the one I have
that's shitty along various axes that demands things of me that I disagree with, um, rather
than join the one that I abstractly, like the kind of abstractly propounds things that I agree
with superficially. Um, I would say if you question that people will be passionate, loyal,
patriotic willing to die for code yes look at the bitcoin community have you ever seen a
community more passionate loyal patriotic um you know i i think that there are numerous examples of
people that are more than willing to give the last full measure uh in order to defend
Bitcoin.
To defend Bitcoin or a society constructed around Bitcoin as a religious or foundational
principle, I believe in Bitcoin because I believe in the people around me and want them
to have a sound money and want the nation that I'm a part of right now to become better.
I don't believe in Bitcoin itself as some sort of religious principle.
Maybe some maxis do have that belief.
I think some do.
But I see Bitcoin as a technology to help my friends and loved ones and make the world
better and not as in itself something that I religiously adhere to or have loyalty to.
What I hear you saying, though, is no different, I don't think, from what Vance is talking about
with the coal miners.
Yes, exactly. I'm with him. My belief is akin to Vance's belief that coal miners don't love
the idea of equality or liberty. They love the shitty piece of soil that they're from. They love
the hills of Appalachia, not New York, even though New York City might be superficially more
glamorous like where you're from despite how shitty it is a lot of people love that merely
because it formed them in some way and they defend that even though they could have come from a cooler
place and they can maybe now go live there and so that's the thing that the network state has to
convince me of is that it can get that type of irrational loyalty to support it because i think
that's necessary for statehood nationhood rather they couldn't have come from a cooler place you
don't have a choice. Right. With the network state, though, you do. You can join a network
state at any moment, become part of that archipelago, and reorient yourself to a new
form of nationhood that's not Virginia coal miner, but that is instead longevity maxi or something.
Yeah. So if you think about what these people in Kentucky are willing to die for, it's this
tie to this ground, this property. What is Bitcoin defined as by the IRS property?
Right. And so it's the highest form of property.
You hear sailors say that. And then when you and it sounds crazy and then you kind of analyze it and you're like, well, it's the only thing that can't be taken away.
You have to give it away. You know, we could we could go in there and we could take that land away from the people in Kentucky, just like the people in North Carolina had their land taken away from them after the hurricane.
You know, they went back to their homes and they found, you know, found fences and gates and signs that said this is now the property of the United States government.
So you you want to have that thing that you are willing to to die for.
But it also helps if that thing does not require you to die for it.
Yeah, I prefer to have it without the dying.
Yeah.
It was just all is equal to you.
I'd like to do that but not die.
Yeah.
Let me just finish this only because I rattled this out.
So the thing I wanted to say is that – so we're talking about like in my opinion, I feel like what we're seeing is this hollowing out of this stealing of the brilliant and the rebels and the brilliant rebels from the old groups.
Who is stealing them?
They are migrating on their own.
To something like a network state or to something like just a new territory.
What is stealing them is the proposition.
Okay, I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
It is magnetized.
It is drawing power to this thing that is new.
If you identify with the code group, you're probably very well aware of this.
Think about the Bitcoin community.
It has voices from every single walk of life.
Hillbillies, hippies, foreigners, natives, God-loving, God-ignoring, everything under the sun.
this is a short-term problem because brilliant people and rebels are both very rare and so that
means that this group is very small right now it's easily crushed it could be put down it could be
squashed most people are not brilliant enough to do things most people are not rebellious enough to
try things most people are not brilliant and not rebellious this does not mean that they are bad
people. But the non-brilliant are easily misled and the non-rebellious are easily led.
So all you need is to queue up a few people to lead the led and mislead the misled. And you've
got a full-blown machine synchronizing masses moving in a generally speaking same direction,
which I feel is a good way to look at where the Republican and Democrat parties had been moving
or at the very least where the extremes of both sides of those which had taken over had been moving.
If you now find yourself agreeing with people you would normally disagree with,
unless that person is Dick Cheney, then you're probably brilliant, rebellious, or both.
If you find yourself in the Bitcoin community and you're talking with somebody from Brooklyn
who is brash and aggressive and drops F-bombs and talks about making sure that you can get one over
on the guy and get your place and you're a dude from the Midwest and that doesn't really resonate
with you, but however you find yourself agreeing on all of the things that they say with,
you're probably brilliant, rebellious, or both. If you don't know which, it's probably brilliance
because brilliant people spend most of their lives thinking that they're crazy instead of brilliant
because they're living in a system where they aren't recognized for their brilliance.
They feel like they're walking around in a world gone mad.
And anyways, all of that is to say that we're being drawn to this conclusion.
This is not a battle between two giants and a plucky contender.
This is the slow slaying of the old way.
It's the death rattle of the matrix, the exposure of deadly hypocrisy
revealed through the deadliness of uncritical thinking.
This is not over. It's not a fair fight, but it will be won because once you suck out all of the brilliant, rebellious people, you run shit. You just run shit. They do things. They have sayings like fuck around, find out. You can just do things. You can just make things. You can just do –
So how is the network state necessary for that? To the extent that one thinks the new incoming Trump administration is bringing in on board people like David Sachs, Elon Musk, and others from the tech community, issuing a flurry of executive orders. That's not a network state. That's just the United States, a traditional nation state, has had an election, and then the elected officials are responding to the expressed will of the electorate.
Yeah, I would not put Elon and David Sachs. Probably not J.D. Vance. Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy. Definitely not Tulsi Gabbard. Definitely not Robert Kennedy.
I would not put those people in what I would consider a view of someone that I think is going to engender a network state.
I do believe that these are, I mean, really mostly by nature of their age and kind of what you're talking about, which is that, you know, you have this native draw to the thing that is familiar that you grew up with.
And it is so powerful.
Yes. The instinct for one to return to their home, the instinct for one to maintain their home. Right.
The instinct to hold on to the past is so overpowerful and strong. Yes.
And it does. To leave that behind, you walk around wandering listless and untethered and unmoored from reality in the world because that is what makes you who you are.
Right on. Yeah.
And so, yeah, I wouldn't say that. And I personally, I don't believe that the United States is going to be at the forefront of any sort of network state.
I don't believe that we are going to be leading the charge into, you know, two and a half decades in when we finally start living in the 21st century.
I don believe that the United States is going to be either leading that charge or catching up to those who are No I mean like it The network state begins as a network startup which has a founder
And so these are new things.
The United States already has a founding, founding fathers, an ethos, a particular set of physical territory.
It's not going to have a new founding proceeding from the cloud down to the real world, materializing as an archipelago, which becomes a network state diplomatically recognized because it already has its path dependent history.
It is what it is.
And so if there is going to be a network state, it's going to be people like RFK or Vivek or whoever deciding not to go into government, deciding not to join the incoming administration.
Instead, starting a startup saying we're going to unionize around a collective purpose. We're going to acquire, build trust, start an internal economy, decentralize, acquire physical nodes, and then try to seek diplomatic recognition.
And I know there are places that are trying to – I don't know, that seem like they're doing similar things. I think you're more familiar with – than I am actually. You listen to a lot of these network state conferences where people are talking about their specific plans for their network states. I mean, can you expound on a couple of those? I'm really curious. I just don't have any up mind.
Yeah, one of them that I'm hoping to actually visit some of the sites across the United States.
So there are, for people who are unaware, this is not a theoretical idea.
There are network states that currently exist that have effectively gone through all the steps.
Except for, I would, yeah, except for diplomatic recognition.
I would just bracket that.
There kind of is one that actually has diplomatic recognition, which is the Knights of Malta.
So the Knights of Malta is, I believe, it's just a small group of very wealthy Catholic families that have that own, basically they have their own country and they have their own government.
They have their own passports. They have recognition from certain authorities.
So this is not a new idea. This is not a completely outlandish thing.
A couple of them that pop to mind. So Cabin is the one that I think is really fascinating.
um cabin has um cabin has sites all across the world primarily they're in the united states
primarily they're in the western hemisphere um but all across the world um and they're
co-living communities and so what it it sounds a whole lot like a hippie commune
Um, except it's, these are not hippie commune people.
These are, um, brilliant coders and founders, um, who also happen to, um, find benefit by
doing the hippie commune thing, organic food, yoga, um, getting together to, uh, play music,
educating your children together.
Um, and, and, uh, the original one started outside of Austin, Texas.
I know that there's one near Denver. There's quite a few. I think there's close to 4,000 members of Cabin so far.
Prospera is another great example. Prospera is a pop-up city that has come kind of a permanent city.
It's only about 1,000 people. It's down in Honduras. It is located in an economic legislative sandbox.
And so they get a lot of leeway with what they can do.
What's happened in Prospera is you have seen a flood of uber geniuses go there with their –
there's a lot of, like, longevity startups that are going down to Prospera
because they're actually allowed to do work there.
whereas in the United States, because of the regulations that we have,
being innovative with technology to make people's lives healthier and better is illegal.
And so you've seen that.
Cul-de-sac is another one.
It's in Tempe, Arizona, which if you're going down to Arizona,
we should meet down there sometime and just go check out Cul-de-sac Tempe.
um that one i think is a planned community which is like it's you know effectively just think of
um uh a whole lot of you know apartment complexes but also a gym and a grocery store and a um
a place to get your hair cut yeah all this stuff right um and it's a carless community
and so you you know everybody walks rides bikes um it's very tight very close-knit there's just a
ton of these um i and and they can go very very small i actually have a friend who's a founder
um i'm going out to see him in la and he had lived in san francisco and had done kind of the san
francisco thing which was the it's so ungodly expensive to live there that you had to get
creative. And so he got creative. He and his boyfriend moved in with another couple and they
eventually enjoyed living together so much that they bought a house in San Francisco together.
And then when the other couple decided that they wanted to have kids, my friend and his now husband
decided, hey, we'll have kids. And so now they moved to LA, bought a different house and they
both have kids. They're raising them. They, every year they switch who has the master bedroom.
That's a, that's a very, very, very, very, very small idea of this, but it's just that exploding.
And if, by the way, if that makes you uncomfortable, then you know, it, it probably shouldn't.
It's different than what you're doing, but it's not, it's not bad. It's not, it's not,
not heartless or godless or soul.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think...
These are people finding a way to create a community.
Yeah.
I mean, and biology makes a good point.
You know, I mean, I've been kind of postulating
as if the network state is something that is,
you know, at the exclusion of the United States
or in competition with it.
But the network state is kind of a different idea.
All the startups you mentioned are ideas that,
you know, one can be, you know,
have dual membership in the network state
and the United States or wherever they're at.
And also a network state,
it doesn't need to convince some ignorant person like me
that it's good.
A network state only needs to convince like a million people,
10 million people,
and you're already bigger than 55% of the countries out there.
So, I mean, that's a really good point.
I like the examples that you described.
Those make it very real in our minds
when we see individual real world startups
already organizing out of principle,
acquiring land and people voluntarily living in them
and doing it on a propositional basis in a sense
in that they're flocking to those places
because like Prospera, they want that freedom.
They disagree with certain fundamental things
like how the FDA approves drugs.
They disagree with the current consumption
of maybe sugar even.
Like biology gives the idea of the keto society.
They have a keto Sabbath or something like that.
They don't eat sugars.
They don't have those types of carbs around them.
So yeah, I like those real world examples.
And it makes me also tone down and understand my initial critique that the network state doesn't have to have people ready to die for it just yet.
And it still can get a lot of traction and in the future come to equal something like the current nation state.
And you can have dual membership.
I would join a Bitcoin-related nation state, have dual citizenship in that sense, and have my Bitcoin password and go down to El Salvador and the Bitcoin community is there, etc.
Yes, I think I think it's helpful to kind of frame exactly how challenging it would be to turn the ship around.
Andreessen talked about one of the questions that they ask in interviews for he's helping interview people for the new administration is pop quiz.
How many government agencies are there?
and by the way nobody gets it right and and and nobody gets it right because no one actually knows
it's between 480 and 530 depending on how you define them so we have created
over two government agencies around around two government agencies per year for the entire
existence of the United States. Um, the, uh, I saw this, the, the number of regulations
that, uh, existed in 1950, uh, I believe it was like the, the total pages was like 9,578
or something like that. And now it's like 180,000. Um, and so you have this plaque that
has built up in the system that needs to be scraped away.
And that's what we're trying to do with Doge, right?
That's what we're trying to do with Doge.
But Doge would be considered a victory if it was able to get the number of government
agencies down under, say, 400.
But how is that going to compete with the startup that comes in and says, the network
Society that comes in with, instead of 400 government agencies, and that's a victory,
they come in with a decentralized autonomous organization, a DAO code, and it has zero
people involved in it.
And we all agree on it.
It's very clear what is and what is not.
It's very clear what we do when there are disputes.
and and so it just becomes at a certain point the weight of the current system becomes too
great for it to turn around and i think maybe an analogy is a good way to think about it
is that you're trying to create something that is palatable to all those who partake in it
so you're baking a cake and you're trying to bake a cake that people will like and um this would be
like trying to change the proportion of ingredients or withdraw some ingredients or add some new
ingredients or change certain things about the recipe once the cake has already been in the oven
for 30 minutes baking. And that's really hard to do. In fact, you would probably say it's,
it's somewhat impossible. And what you should probably do at that point is consider that a
learning exercise, throw that cake out and start new mixing up a new batch and take what you learned
from that and say, Oh, you know, that didn't work. Um, when I was in eighth grade, I was in economics
class or it was called, yeah, we had home economics class back when they used to try to teach you a few
life skills, learn how to sew and learn how to, how to bake. And this one time we were making
biscuits and I forgot to put the yeast in. And it turns out if you don't put yeast in biscuits,
they don't, they don't look good at all. And, um, you can't fix that. You know, they just come out
and, uh, and then you start over. Right. And so if you've got the ingredients wrong,
and especially if you've put too many ingredients in you got 480 government agencies um it's really
hard to pull those out of the cake once it's been all mixed up together and put into the pan and put
into the put into the oven to start to bake and and so i although it doesn't it doesn't sound like
i love the way that the american flag looks i think the american flag is beautiful i think that
the things we stand for are wonderful. But I also think that if I had been raised in, um,
someplace different, I would think the same about that. I think I tried, I try to recognize my own,
my own bias to that. Um, it's certainly not that I'm cheering against, uh, anything. It's just that
I recognize the difficulty of trying to fix something that is, it may not be broken beyond
repair, but it just may be that the cost of repairing it is so great. And the result of
repairing it is that it will never be as good as building something new. And so at that point,
it's an emotional decision. When we make emotional decisions, then we need to have a really strong
justification for doing that. You brought up love and love is a perfect example for that.
if you love something, then you're willing to do things that are irrational.
Yeah, I see what you're saying, that maybe it is and certainly sometimes can seem easier to start
with a blank slate. And Balaji mentions that. I think that that is part of the motivation that he
has, that it is, in fact, easier sometimes to begin that way. But I do think the institutions
we have are reformable, or maybe I'll, you know, give me four years, I'll let you know at the end
of four years if I still think that's the case. But one of the things, even believing that even,
you know, having that view, even if I don't think a network state can is something I would join,
or would gain traction, or something like that. It's still an excellent critique. I think network
states have a lot of value even towards the established nation states because, I mean,
there's this usually dichotomy between exit and voice. Some people believe that what's important
in a country is the power to exit that country if you disagree with it. That gives you the freedom.
The country can do what it wants. You can do what you want. Some people believe that voice is what
is important. You need voice in a country to be able to change it. And the cool thing about a
network state is through the power of potential exit to a network state. It also presents like
you're exercising your voice when you exit to saying, I don't like the way things are being
run. And network states have the additional aspect of they're designed around a specific
critique of the state. And to the extent that people are exiting to a network state,
They are saying a lot of people that the current nation state is deficient in this very specific way. Like it's deficient because the FDA is overbearing. It's deficient because it doesn't manage health in the correct way. It's deficient because people, you know, lifespan is decreasing instead of increasing or something like that.
if enough people do that, I think you, I am not, I guess I have more faith in you that we can reform
the cake that is already being baked, that the nation state is a different type of thing.
You know, we have had moments in our history where things have changed. Decisive presidents,
FDR signaled a change in one direction. Maybe Trump signals a change in a different direction.
I do think that change is possible. I'm not as romantic to think that it's as easy as voting
for change. But I think, you know, we're seeing attempts at change. And I'd like the idea of the
network state again, as a critique that can help motivate and reform our current institutions,
not just present the opportunity for total exit from a disaster we've created.
What? So I'm just going to be contentious then. What evidence do you have that you can reform
country. So I guess two parts of that, that I can do it, maybe not great, that it can be done
as part of a concerted effort with like-minded people. I mean, again, I don't agree with
everything that the incoming Trump administration is doing or wants to do, but I agree with some of
the things. And there has already been change just simply through executive orders on the
fronts of DEI and transgender issues, things that we thought that those issues, some people
have thought that culturally we had just gotten so far advanced that it's now like looking back
at segregation or racism in the Deep South in post-Civil War. And you can never go back to that
because we've already changed our moral values. I mean, I think we've seen that this nation state
in the United States is now capable of saying those things are not fixed and we can move in
different directions. So we do have the ability to reform in some ways. Again, give us four years,
I guess I'll let you know at the end of the Trump administration, if any of the reforms have stuck,
or if the United States is simply on an inevitable trajectory towards a sort of,
you know, vaguely leftist socialism, increasing deficit and stuff like that, I guess.
yeah i i mean i'm trying to think of it like i'm i'm not i'm not trying to be um against what
you're saying so like i i would say that el salvador is probably a good example yeah of a
massive shift and you brought up fdr um now two things that were very similar about fdr or one
thing that's very similar about FDR and Bukele is that they're effectively dictators. FDR was
very much a one man. We were living in a socialist dictatorship under FDR, one that we're taught not
to question a country where you can never be president more than two times, but this guy was
elected four times, right? Kind of wild. We just made an exception for him because he was so awesome.
Yeah. Right. It didn't happen to be that he threw all of his enemies in jail and silenced the
opposition and used the, you know, weaponized the, weaponized the court system and weaponized the,
the legal system or the, uh, um, the police and, uh, and the FBI, you know, the newly formed FBI,
um, didn't happen to be that he weaponized that against all of his enemies. Um, and Bicaylee,
um, you know, yeah, they, they took their murder rate from like, what it was like 170 for every
hundred thousand a couple of years ago. And now it's like less than one. It's like, I think it,
I think it technically is the least murderous country in the world now.
And it had been the most murderous country in the world.
And he just did that because he's awesome.
He didn't, you know, build giant prisons and throw, what, 40,000 people in jail in a day or something like that.
Like, you know, there certainly wasn't any, like, the dude's a dictator.
He's a democratically elected dictator who has a massive approval rating.
He is the most popular president in the world, higher than Vladimir Putin, which is really impressive because, you know, those stats are probably a little doctored.
Maybe the ones coming out of El Salvador are too.
But these are people that ruled with an iron fist.
They did not keep anything about the old way.
They gutted it the same way that Elon gutted Twitter when he took it over.
And I think that's a perfect example.
In a company example, I think that's a really good example of you can have reform, but what does it take to have reform?
And what it takes to have reform is a gutting, is a, you know, from what Elon says, you have to take away so much that if you're not adding things back in, you haven't taken enough out.
And that's how you know that you're moving forward in the right way.
And so I agree that I'm optimistic for what the United States looks like four years from now when we have, you know, when we have outlawed institutional racism and heterophobia and sexism by the means of getting rid of DEI.
when we have properly identified collective delusions and decided not to recognize them by failing to not failing,
by stopping the promotion of trans idealists.
I agree with that.
And I would say, yes, I think that is a vote that you can have change.
But also, I would say, take a look at it. Does this look anything like the old system? To me, it looks nothing like what has existed for the past 50, 70.
The only thing that this current administration in the United States resembles to me is the founding fathers.
It is those people who were brilliant business people, brilliant engineers, lawyers, philosophers, inventors,
who came together for a common cause, who did not have consistent idealistic beliefs.
There were people on very much both sides of belief spectrum, yet they came together and they had two things in common.
They were brilliant and they were rebels.
And they were leaving the old system behind, taking with it, taking with them the things that they did love and appreciate about that system that gave opportunity for people.
but also writing code in the form of the Constitution and the amendments that was meant to minimize those abuses of power that they had experienced, which forced them to leave.
Yeah.
And the difference today is that we now have the ability to enforce that code.
We could always write code.
And this is Jason Lowry's thesis writ large, is that you can write all the code you want.
You can create all the abstract hierarchies you want.
You can't enforce them.
You just can't.
Somebody comes in with a bigger stick.
They've got more power.
They now own that hierarchy.
Yeah.
But technology has now advanced.
we have seen a sufficient change in technology that will allow us to enforce the code that we write.
Yeah.
Instead of writing the code and then hoping for the best against human fallibility and or not even human fallibility,
just like what Jason Mowry says, which is that, look, if you exploit the code, then you're doing what the code was meant to do.
You're not you're it's not a bug. It's a feature.
so it allows you to write better code.
So you're not joining any seasteading communities
even though you're fresh off and tanned
and just glorified walking around
flaunting your sea legs to all of us
who weren't on a cruise.
But you could see yourself perhaps
joining a somewhat like network state type of thing
so long as it doesn't require you
to leave behind everything about the world that you currently live in.
Right.
I want to,
yeah,
right.
Right.
Anyways,
that's what I,
I guess those are my thoughts on it is that it,
the network state allows you to bring that with you.
It allows you to bring Western Kansas and Eastern Kentucky and,
and,
and downtown New York and East Memphis.
Like it allows you to bring those things into whatever it is that you go to
next.
it just provides you with the opportunity to not be abused.
And I think, I guess my last kind of like plea,
and we're going to be able to get into this,
and I'm so excited to get into this in further conversations,
but my last plea just coming up front for why I truly believe in this network
state idea is that when you think about the relationship that you have with the authority
around you, you basically will obey that authority until they break trust with you.
And then you start to question. And I think after COVID, we saw a massive realization
by the subjects of oppression who had become violently aware that the trust between them
and the authority had been broken.
And trust, you've probably heard the saying, you know, what's something that's once it's
broken can never be repaired.
And I would say that trust falls into that category.
Yeah.
So I don't know how.
I just don't know how you change these things. And if the United States looks fundamentally different after four years of MAGA and MAHA and DOJ, then I would say that it is fundamentally different because it is not the same United States.
Yeah.
I think we'll probably see that because we'll probably see some people secede and form their own society.
Yeah, no, I agree with what you said on the large. And I just take a few things in particular, I guess, and also to frame, we were talking about the effects of the election, what that says about the ability of a nation state to change, and almost maybe positing that as a critique on the necessity or the idea of a network state. At least I was, maybe initially, but it's actually not.
In this chapter, Balaji says how to start a new country, and he gives multiple ways.
And one of them is an election.
You can win and rewrite the laws or carve out a new state.
And Balaji does mention the New Deal there.
He says that's a popular but a crowded option.
So that is one way.
He is just talking about a different way.
So these aren't mutually exclusive.
You can change create a new nation state through an election You can also do it through the network state So it not really a critique on Balaji to say that we can also vote and have changes that way
Again, he's just saying, that's cool. Here's another way. Another way is the network state,
which is why I like this. It's like a change in perspective on what the state can be. And you
mentioned that how important perspective is in this. In an interview, I heard Balaji holding court
on the idea of a network state.
And he has so many references
and he dropped a quote from somebody
that perspective is greater than IQ.
And like that is a really sound principle
because if you have a lot of kind of
intellectual computational power,
your IQ is very high,
but you're using it in this sort of tunnel vision
sort of way, that's not good.
If you have the perspective
and you can see in a broader sense
that you're using your IQ in a bad way, that's good.
And so the perspectival shift can be
network states are possible, at least admit of the possibility that things are dematerializing,
the ontology of objects that we typically are used to interact with, like books, artistic
productions, even the nature of warfare, these things are changing. Also, the nation state,
there is a new type of thing that could exist called the network state. And I really like this
book for that reason, offering that broadened perspective. And I don't, again, disagree with
despite what I kind of posited as critiques, I might, in fact, you know, if it didn't require,
of course, renouncing U.S. citizenship, I could see myself joining a network state of some sort.
And, you know, if it had its own sorts of privileges connected to an NFT-based passport,
enjoying those and, you know, being part of a highly aligned community that was organizing for
itself, even decentralized physical possession of land, trying to create something more. I could
see myself being a part of that, believing in a cause and believing in it enough to want to
do more to instantiate it in the world. But even if I didn't, I still see the value of network states
as laboratories and experiments in new ideas, right? Again, a network state can say,
we think there's a better way to do things. We think this whole health matrix that the United
States is currently in is just flawed from first principles. We can do it better. If they do,
in fact, do it better, that enriches the whole world. You can see like, oh, these people in this
new network state, network startup even, have realigned themselves on certain health-based
principles and they're living like five years longer or something. Then the rest of the world,
This stuff feedbacks. We're all in a grand dialogue with each other. I do think it reforms and enriches the United States. It would inform and enrich the United States if there were network states that arose, advanced a principle, and showed the world that you can live by a principle, and this principle does improve things.
So, yeah, I mean, I think you bring me on board with this discussion more, you know, I want to see where Balich is going. I want to see the examples and I want to see him do that deep dive as a critique into the current functioning of things that's going to motivate in the end his final statement of the network state.
Yeah. I want to share my screen again because I had thought about this.
So I think one thing that we have to keep in mind is that things change and change is constant.
Do you see my screen?
I do not.
Okay. Hold on. Let me see if I get it.
And just make sure when you share your screen, you also do not activate that microphone.
You're going to be caught in an echo chamber.
Yep.
Should be good.
That's right.
Share.
What about now?
I can see that.
Yeah.
New scientist.
All right.
So this is a video.
Is there any sort of copyright thing on this we have to worry about?
Who knows?
We'll find out.
Yes.
That's one way to do it.
Yeah.
So this is showing how Europe's borders changed over 2200 years.
And I think one thing to keep in mind is that as you watch this, what you see is, I would say, more change faster.
So we are, you see how we continue like decentralizing, decentralizing,
then you go through periods of centralization and then you decentralize again.
But borders continue to change.
We talked about this in actually our last discussion.
Borders are always changing.
It's the thing that frustrated me about geography and made it my least favorite subject.
And so one thing that I think we always need to keep in mind is that the past predicts the future.
There is no evidence that what is will be.
What is is constantly changing and evolving.
And so, yes, we will continue to reshape the world both geographically and digitally.
but I think the reason
again this goes back to Jason Lowry's thesis
the reason why this is such a hard concept for people
maybe to think about at the outset
is because
it's not even in every lifetime
it seems to be more like
every few centuries
is when we have the sort of technology
that allows for some sort of change.
We previously had church states and then the printing press allowed for the dissolution
of information to other, the decentralization of information, which killed the strength
of the church state and allowed for the rise of the nation state.
And the nation state then got a lock on propaganda as well and started to abuse that.
And out of that arose the Internet, which has cut the legs out of the nation state by revealing its abuses and its lies.
And that's taking us into this network state.
So we it's so hard to recognize these things simply because they occur so infrequently.
It's as though you're seeing a comet that only comes around every 800 years or 600 years.
But every time it comes around, it looks different.
This time it's a comet. Next time it's a horse and cart. The time after that, it's a microchip. And so it's just very difficult to see these things, perhaps for what they are, but they leave clues. And the way that they leave clues is by showing us the result of their work.
So does this new technology, you know, decentralized money, digital money, decentralized government with DAOs, does this do the thing that it's replacing faster, better, stronger, cheaper with less failure?
Is it an order of magnitude better in every way?
those are ways that you can really take a look at something kind of this the the the features of it
and use that to define what it actually is because what it looks like is not something that you can
identify because it is by nature transformational and therefore has not been seen so I think when
me push towards that you know i i guess my my question i wanted to ask you was you know you say
uh i might i might look at doing this if i don't have to give up my my united states citizenship
and i'm this is partly tongue-in-cheek but my my question because i want to hear you elucidate it is
what are the benefits of united states citizenship
like i i that sounds like a dumb question yeah it sounds like well do you uh you know usa number one
no there's two there's there is two things too i mean there are like the legalistic advantages
like free movement and entry free movement within and entry into the united states um there's
maybe other things associated with that that like benefits and things like that but for me even
even acknowledging those things, what I meant more so is a certain irrational, unthinking,
moral affiliation with the historic entity known as the United States, because I was indoctrinated
that way in my formative years, and acknowledged that and believed that all forms of moral value
come at us kind of in our formative years from things that you cannot, you can't more, you know,
you can't rationally justify everything all the way down.
You just get to kind of bedrock principles.
And we learn those as part of our culture.
And one of those things that I've imbibed from that Kool-Aid is an irrational
fealty to the United States, which we typically refer to as patriotism.
Yeah. Or love.
A love of your country, right?
Love of your country. Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's the beautiful way to look at it.
I think the realistic way to look at it is that you have the highest tax rate of any industrialized nation.
So you don't get to keep hardly anything of what is yours.
But it's like, do I want to flee the country and leave it in the hands of those parasites, though?
There's also that.
Do we come from a nation of people that flee from those who want?
Maybe we do.
We literally do.
Gosh dang it.
Okay, back up.
Our nation is now different.
So we also have like the civil war. We didn't run from that or something. I don't know. There's an analogy or metaphor to substantiate that we're not absolute cowards. And we do stand and fight as well. That's the principle I want to appeal to.
You know, that's not cowardice, right? It's not cowardice to leave the thing that's abusive. It's not cowardice to walk out of a toxic relationship or an abusive relationship when you realize that, you know, what you're doing is you're wasting your life trying to change something that won't change.
and you realize at a certain point, I've talked about this before, with toxic relationships,
you can see the change in people in an instant when they realize that it is not the other person
who is making their life miserable, it is that, or that the other person has power over them and
it's that they realize that they are giving that person power and once they stop giving that person
power. Once they say, Oh, I'm just not going to answer the 2am text. I'm not going to do something
for you. I'm not going to, um, submit myself to your abuses. Once you stop that, you realize,
Oh, I have the power. Um, and that is the courageous thing to do. The courageous thing
to do is admit your own power. Um, and, and then use that power, um, for the good of yourself
and then expanding the circle of influence you have to use your power to help those immediately
close to you. Yeah. Riffrey and those, you know, further and further out. How can you,
how big, how wide can you make your circle of influence when you're doing something good?
Yeah. I mean, that's one metaphor we can use as a toxic relationship, but I just think that I see
myself as having a complex, unchosen identity, this like tissue of moral obligations that I
inherit simply by virtue of my very contingent existence, born in a certain place, born to
two specific individuals, born into the family of blood relations with other individuals,
having had accidental interactions with the people around me. And I do think you pick up
moral obligations you do not choose, and you have responsibilities that are not based on your own
autonomy and choice. And so like, just like my deep conception of identity, kind of my anthropology
of what it means to be human is as an unchosen thing, as a thing that has aspects that cannot
be freely walked out of in the framework of a toxic relationship. So just in more practical
terms, having lived in a different part of the United States, and then seen how taxing it was
on me and also those around me when I wasn't around to fulfill certain obligations in relation
to family members or friends that I had back in kind of homeland territory. You know, again,
it's an irrational thing, but I felt a sort of guilt and saw that maybe I could have myself
made things better if I had been closer to this fountain and source of my moral obligations and
therefore able to fulfill them in a way that just given my maybe, you know, Catholic upbringing or
traditionalist upbringing or kind of whatever sort of roots I have growing up in Western Kansas,
you know, being in a specific place that you do not choose often, you know, is necessary for you
to fulfill all of your moral obligations. So I just do just think that as far as the moral framework,
I guess. Yeah. You mentioned one thing that I think is really, is really prescient to,
to acknowledge, which is that those moral obligations that we have are typically not
chosen. They are, um, imbued and, uh, we are kind of subject to something that we
maybe would not otherwise choose. Um, or at least if we were to choose it, we,
we would probably go about it, frame it in a different way. So, um, yeah, I, I think, um, I think,
you know, families, religion, relationships, obligations, a lot of what they do to
obligate people is to utilize guilt and to utilize that, um, that feeling of, of, uh,
of a moral obligation, um, when it's something that you don't want to do.
So, yeah, I would say shame also as well.
Like there's a very complex distinction between guilt and shame and shame,
I think is the emotion that has deeper roots in antiquity and that shame is
present in classical cultures, whereas guilt is a more modern thing.
So I would say I would revise what I said to say shame instead of guilt,
maybe a mixture of the two.
I like that a lot better actually. Yeah. Shame.
Cause when you think about what shame, um,
what shame keeps people from doing. It's basically everything. Basically anything that you
fear to do, you fear to do because you fear some sort of shame.
It's like when you think that you're going to commit a sin against your very most authentic
being, that's shame. Shame is the feeling you have of having violated yourself because you did
something that doesn't represent who you believe you are. Tony Robbins talks about the most powerful
force in the world is the need for people to identify or the need for people to act according
to what they believe their identity is. And so if you believe that you are something,
if you believe that you are a constant failure, if you believe that you aren't good in relationships,
if you believe that you can't get up early, if you believe anything, anything that you believe about yourself that is somewhat irrational but is evidenced by your past,
to break free of that there is both a liberation and a sense of of that of that guilt or sorry that
shame of you are killing the thing about you that you believe so long that made up your identity
yeah so yeah it's very very difficult for people to leave those things behind and and and also by
By the way, this is what makes it so very difficult for anyone to change while staying in the same environment.
Yeah.
Because you're constantly having the people in that environment and the environment itself, the physicality, the geography of it, reaffirming the thing that you're trying to break free from.
Right.
We've talked about this before.
When you get out of prison, when you get out of rehab, what do they tell you?
Do not go home.
Yeah. Do not go to the environment that got you here. Yeah. You know, to quote James clear, I've never seen someone consistently maintain good habits in a bad environment. Yeah.
And you don't have to label your environment as bad, but you can look at the outcomes that you're realizing and then apply to that back.
Look back and go, what environment was I in? Was that environment supporting outcomes that I desired, outcomes that built me up, outcomes that made it easier for me to fulfill obligations that I want to do?
or was that environment pushing me in a certain direction that I didn't want to go?
Yeah, no, and this idea of shame as guiding us at a very deep level, I think it also can be,
as you mentioned, utilized in favor of the idea of the network state because to be in a community
of highly aligned cohorts is sometimes necessary for people to not do something that's going to
cause them shame, like relapse into drug use, like not follow the precepts of their religion.
Like, yeah, sometimes in order to remain coherent and principled at a very deep level, maybe you do
need something like a network state because you need to find a way to get out of the environment
you're in. And so, yeah, I can see how the network state does allow for a deep conception and maybe
aids in a deep conception of our own moral identity. And so I guess that's what,
I don't know that I have more to add to that on that front, but I think that this is a very deep
concept, the network state, and it can, yeah, pattern onto our deep moral ideas.
I just, I love the direction that we've gone here with shame because shame keeps you in that system,
But it also, when that shame reaches a breaking point, it's what gets you out and it's what brings you to change.
People don't change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing.
and the shame of being part of a system that you don't believe in
or that you feel is hypocritical or that you feel has revealed its abuses to you
in a way that you can't forgive.
And by continuing to be a part of that,
then you would be implicitly condoning that sort of abuse, that sort of toxicity.
then that you know there's something great about shame as well because shame is the thing that will
get you to the gym when you um when you realize that you're fat shame is the thing that will
get you to stop watching netflix until 1 a.m when you oversleep and miss something important
and you lose your job, right?
Here's a way to funnel that shame into practical action.
This is the best tweet I've read in probably a year,
so I just want to throw it out there because it's very helpful.
Just ask yourself, what would I do if I had 10 times the agency?
It's just a formulation on the question.
What would I do right now if I was doing the right thing?
It's incredible how you can ask yourself a question like that
and realize that I would be doing something different,
and then you do go on to do something different.
And so like these very, it's a very practical tweet that I, I really liked that. I do. I think
it like helps give form to our shame in a practical way and guide us to who we want to be.
Not that it matters, but who's the source of that?
It wouldn't matter. It's the source is random tweet person who I do not remember and do not
recall. It kind of, it bounced around for a bit and hit some different iterations on what the
question you ask yourself is. But I think at the most abstract is just like, it's a question that
prompts you to do what your ideal self would do. And so, you know, any sort of very short prompt,
you can remember to at any moment, remind yourself of that something always present to mind.
Because it's something that, you know, in the morning, sometimes I have difficulty
getting up out of the comfort of my bed. But and, you know, and not because I even realized that I'm
having difficulty. It's just I don't have that thought that what would my ideal self be doing
right now? And this is such a simple formulation of that question that it occurred. It just occurred
to me in the morning and I did what my ideal self would do. I didn't even realize that I had the
choice in the moment until I posed it as a question to myself. Oh, that's a great, because
that's something that I've struggled with. You know, before I left my job, I was getting up at
420 in the morning every day, 421.
Yeah.
You know, going to work out.
I was teaching myself speed rap in the morning.
I was like, learn how to do alphabet aerobics by Blackalicious.
Yeah.
So you just need an alarm clock that instead of going beep, beep, beep, plays the audio.
What would you do right now if you had 10 times the agency?
And so instead of waking you up with the discordant sound, it wakes you up with a thought that
summons the best aspect of yourself.
yeah yeah just but i mean what you really need is you need someone standing over your bed
ready to lash you and but you also need that person to be the ideal form of you
that that external punishment or like modification from someone who is imposing is not the same thing
of you self-imposing this vision of yourself of who you could be unless you like have the perfect
model if i have like david goggins above you know like or standing there or whatever like
then maybe, but unless it's like a really an ideal consistent with who you are.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. How do you, I, I, I do that. A lot of this takes us around to
like, to me, it takes us around to how do I, how do I view my life as a game? How do I make it? How
do I make it a game? How do I make it? And how do I score points? How do I, how do I keep track?
Balaji, I say that there's no throwaways in this.
There's this one, he puts it at the very end of, I think it's the network state in a thousand words.
But talking about what kind of network states could begin,
And one of them would be, oh, it could be like a longevity network state.
It could be a whatever.
And he ends with the very, very simple acknowledgement.
I forget where it's at, but you get what you measure.
You know, that which is not measured is not improved.
And so if you want to get out of bed earlier or if you want to get out of bed in less time, then you just start tracking it.
Today it took me 45 minutes. Tomorrow it took me 37. There was a time when I was trying to quit a bad habit, and I realized how difficult it was because it was an addictive habit.
and I'll leave it to people's imagination what it was because it doesn't matter
because I found by relaying this technique to other people that it worked for them as well to quit their bad habit,
which was that I decided I'm not going to try to go cold turkey and just walk away from it.
What I'm simply going to do is I'm not going to engage in that habit
until after the time that I did the day before.
So if I did that bad habit at 1130 a.m. on Tuesday,
I can still do it on Wednesday.
I just can't do it till 1131.
And on days that you have a little more willpower,
that 1130 goes to 215.
And if you can just make it to, like, all you have to do,
this is that premise of you don't need to be, I don't need to be better than you. I just need to
be better than I was yesterday. So all I need to do is make it to two 16. And then you just simply
find that by doing something like that, you, you find that you end up not needing it as much,
not caring for it as much, not, not being engaged in as much. So, um, yeah, we've, we've gone down
a different path. But the shame talk is, I think that is, I think it's such a great vector for which
to consider why would someone ever want to leave the thing that they're currently involved in?
And shame might be a good reason for that. Shame might, maybe it started out with great precepts
and great intentions, and it's just turned into something that you're no longer proud of.
Yeah, and I think also the discussion just goes to show that this idea of a nation state or a network state, the idea of membership in a state of some sort is an emotional thing and does involve us at a very deep and moral level.
And so the thought of a network state shouldn't just be viewed as some cold embodiment of code, but as that alignment around a higher purpose.
And that actually is something that Balaji is very clear on.
It has to be around a higher purpose that actually motivates you.
And so we shouldn't lose track of that.
In fact, this is a good transition to maybe ending, given that the next discussion is over Chapter 2, which is History as Trajectory.
And so we are going to get – again, we're on page 14.
This is an over 400-page book.
We're going to get a much deeper substantiation of the idea of network state, move it out of the realm of abstraction into the very real world of history, what has happened and what will happen.
And so, I mean, I think this is, I'm very excited to see where this is going to go.
Some of the initial concerns I have been allayed by this conversation alleviated.
And I think that hearing biology give a really deep accounting of what the network state is as a result of the problems our society currently has.
I guess I'm just very excited to see where this goes.
Yeah, so am I. Any closing words that you'd like?
That's all I got, man.
All right. Well, everyone, what would you do if you had 10 times the agency that you do now? And I hope that you go out today and you do something magnificent, motivated either by shame or by that which you could be. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you for chapter two soon.