If I could hope for but one thing for you, so you'd be curious in all that you do.
Cause love like a flower just wants to grow.
Oh, and knowledge like your heart just wants to be known.
If you like, please subscribe.
This is Bitcoin Study Sessions.
What is the importance of history in creating a network state?
And what is the importance of Bitcoin in creating history?
So today, Lucas and I are continuing our conversation of Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State,
How to Start a New Country.
We're moving on to chapter two, which is history as trajectory.
And it is going to be about that.
What is the role of history in the creation moving from a network startup to an actual full-fledged network state?
As in this whole book, Balaji advised us in the introduction that this is a toolbox, not a manifesto.
So chapter two, History of Trajectory, is like 200 pages or so.
There's a lot here.
And it's just it's lush with examples drawn from many different realms, kind of some detours that biology takes in some very interesting areas.
A toolbox. We can take what's useful.
I'll give a summary of, I think, kind of the grand themes of Chapter 2 situating it in the network state as it's kind of a whole.
And then Lucas and I will rummage through that toolbox to talk about some of the specific items in it.
Just to note, I guess, again, the network state available on Kindle.
You can also download it for free or access it for free on a website that we'll probably link to, I suppose.
So in the first part of the book, we saw the basics of what the network state is, that you begin creating a new society.
You begin first in the cloud as a network startup and then eventually materialize here on Earth as the end state being a diplomatically recognized network state occupying physical territory.
um bology gave us a one sentence definition of network state that quote 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 so this chapter is a focus on history
why focus on history in that one sentence definition a startup society is a highly
aligned community of people. So they are aligned around what Balaji calls the one commandment,
which is a historically founded socio-political innovation that guides that startup society,
just as a tech innovation might guide like a regular startup that's going to become a company,
a moral innovation that's historically founded guides a startup society.
You need the one commandment. You need a moral principle and a deep purpose to do a startup
society or a network startup that's going to become a network state, not just some new
technological innovation or product.
Because Balaji says, quote, you want to recruit producers, not consumers.
And for that, you'll need a purpose.
Also, to quote Balaji, the consumer citizen is coming to enjoy a great society, not to
sacrifice to make a society great.
So you want to get people who are citizens who are willing to sacrifice.
You need a moral idea, a one commandment to attract them.
And great tech innovations also often, even if a startup society is formed around a tech innovation, those often require a moral innovation in order to be fully realized.
You pair the innovation with the moral idea. Sanitation requires an idea that cleanliness is next to godliness. The moral and the technical often go together.
The moral innovation often opens the door to future technical innovation. So if AI research is evil, you're going to have a certain trajectory of AI research where it's centralized under government control.
so one commandment is necessary to catalyze support for the network state balaji kind of
summarizes it here every new startup society needs to have a moral premise at its core one that its
founding nation subscribes to one that is supported by a digital history that a more powerful state
can't delete one that justifies its existence as a righteous yet peaceful protest against the powers
that be. So that injects this idea of history, which is the kind of the purpose of this chapter.
Because a deep purpose is necessary in the form of this one commandment, history then becomes very
important as the foundation for the one commandment and the startup society. There's kind of two broad
reasons that history serves this purpose. First, history aligns us around the moral idea. It is
that highly aligned community. History is what aligns people. It gives us purpose. It reveals
and justifies a moral innovation. History provides us with the critique of our current society,
which then is the reason why we need a moral innovation, something new. You don't need the
moral innovation, something new, if you don't understand society as it is, if you don't
understand history and aren't able to tell the historical story. Bology refers to it also as
applied history, history that's actually used to determine morality and justify regulating or not
regulating something. So it is history that wins arguments. We see it employed in that way all the
time. It's history that tells us compelling stories. Some of the best movies are based on
historical analogies or metaphors. History is also written by the victors and is the story
of who is in charge, by who is in charge, that kind of justifies why they are in charge.
So that's the first reason history aligns us around this moral idea and helps us justify it.
Second, history has the more concrete purpose of helping us build.
We draw from the past to find alternative social arrangements.
Building a society requires knowledge of how societies have been built in the past.
To build Apple the company requires some knowledge, historical knowledge of past companies.
Building Apple the startup society requires some knowledge of past societies.
So history is very important for Bologi because it is a necessary tool for a startup society founder, the one who's going to create this thing, because they need to have a community of highly aligned individuals around a moral critique of the current society and then build a society around that.
To quote Balaji,
You don't have community, which is necessary for startup society as opposed to just a technical startup.
If you don't have a community around a moral innovation, Balaji says, you kind of have a Starbucks lounge, a soulless nullity with no direction save consumerism.
So we focus on history as well because Balaji points this out in detail.
we have seen how journalism, the first draft of history, has been corrupted recently, but also corrupted in the past.
And that's actually corrupted in the sense of telling us false things to justify the doing of things to us or by us.
Balaji compresses this in a phrase, if the news is fake, imagine history.
So if the news now is politicized and often outright incorrect, and the news is the first draft of history and is kind of composing our past history, then how we see history is easily compromised by the incorrect flow of info right now.
And history then becomes correctly understanding history becomes very important.
At a deeper level, biology also challenges the conventional view, which is that history is stable in the short term and that it moves kind of inevitably toward a certain end in the long run, that history is an arc that bends toward justice.
We get this idea, this kind of default idea, because we judge history based just on what we see during one lifespan, and so we don't see how history over multiple lifespans has a different form.
Once we begin to have this broader view of history other than what is just told to us through journalism in our present moment, we begin, Balaji thinks, to move to a view that history is cyclical and helical.
So a cycle essentially that has a Z axis that moves us upward through time.
A cycle will seem to reset to go back to the starting point.
But if it's also spiraling upward, there will also be a general tendency to change even as this cycle resets itself.
This also, I think, brings us to Bitcoin in Balaji's historical argument or argument for the importance of history for a startup society.
Bitcoin is worth what it is worth because of its history because it is a cryptographically verified history of who owns what.
A new society can be built on a solid foundation of truth only if it begins to write itself to an incorruptible ledger.
this kind of gets at this ability to write to an incorruptible ledger that bitcoin offer gets rid
of four problems that are associated with current journalism and social media in general the problems
are silos bots sensors and fakes so the problem it's siloed typically we see a historical log that
is siloed across different corporate servers different media kind of enterprises there's also
So bots, most of the content now is not cryptographically signed.
So it could just be, you know, bots employed by a malicious actor trying to spread their
version of the truth.
There's also lots of censorship.
We have centralized social media countries that companies that control and push certain
narratives in cahoots with the establishment.
We also have fakes.
We have an increasing power of AI to generate highly realistic fakes and kind of
propagate them throughout the network ecosystem. Bitcoin is a solution to all of these things,
or at least a partial remedy in that it allows us to build a robust historical record because
first it breaks silos. All the info is in one place on the blockchain. It defeats bots because
content can now be cryptographically signed by the author. It also evades censorship because you
don't have to go through a centralized social media company. Everybody has permissionless access.
and it protects from fakes because it's costly to write to the blockchain and because it's also
time-stamped. Bitcoin, this is an important aspect of it too, this is a technical point.
Bitcoin can record non-Bitcoin related events. Balogy calls this proof of existence. For the
price of a transaction, the Bitcoin blockchain can embed data that is not just the transaction
data of Bitcoin zipping from one address to the next. You can also embed other data
and therefore cryptographically verify the record of any historical event.
So two examples to kind of make this more concrete,
the way that Bitcoin can cryptographically verify history.
First, you can imagine there's these famous photos from the Soviet Union
where you'll have like Lenin or Stalin standing next to a group of people.
And then you'll see a later version of that photo
and some of the people are missing from it.
They've been airbrushed.
They've been literally purged and removed from history.
but if that photo at the moment of creation had been embedded on the blockchain then you would see
that later iterations would have a more temporally advanced time stamp a different time on them and
so you could see that at least one occurred before the other one and you could also tell
who the author of that photo was because it connected to a certain address so it makes
information that way more verifiable and more resistant to future censorship.
Second, the blockchain is just itself a history of the entire economy, at least all the transactions
on chain. And additional economies can also be uploaded to the Bitcoin blockchain. Because that
additional data can be embedded, you could actually update all of Ethereum to the Bitcoin
blockchain every 10 minutes, or you could update your own society's internal governance-related
blockchain to the Bitcoin blockchain to have that canonical version of events. So Bology calls this
an industrial use case of Bitcoin, and it's certainly something interesting that people,
I think, are building out. In this way, the Bitcoin blockchain can serve as a collective,
cryptographically verifiable memory, a type of history that Balogy calls crypto history.
So history, of course, is necessary for the foundation of the one commandment. And now
we're having this idea of crypto history. Crypto history is important because history
is often abused by those in power. As kind of indicated at the outset, history has all
these functions and legitimating morality. And so power cares about history because the
morality of the society is derives from the stories it tells itself, those historical
narratives. The history you hear about is what is politically useful. For example,
the Communist Party exhaustively internally reports on the opium wars when a coalition
of Western nations kind of imposed opium usage on the country, but not about the Uyghurs or
about Tiananmen Square. The U.S. reports on Tiananmen Square and the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian
war but doesn't dwell on the 1908 nation alliance where the u.s helped invade china to defend the
european imperialism or other events that make the u.s look bad so the nature of political power
in creating truth is then contrasted with crypto history political power gives us political truth
truth because the party says it is so it is that type of truth is true for everyone who believes it
what the dollar is worth is a political truth where the borders are is a political truth these
are based on power and kind of consensual belief. Tech power leads to tech truth. It's true even if
no one believes it, like math and science. And it also, through crypto history, is a type of truth
that at least is foundationally written onto the blockchain and is verifiable in certain aspects,
such as tying it to specific people through their cryptographically verified signature
and marking it at a certain point in time through a timestamp. Both of these are necessary,
biology says political truth is needed to build an in-group narrative to highly align that
community to decide things for the society but tech truth is needed as a sort of constraint on
political truth truth should always be constrained by what objectively is mathematically and
scientifically and tech truth is also kind of the history of what has worked in the past
the interaction between political truth and tech truth has historically determined what entities
or ideology is the ultimate arbiter of truth in society, the ultimate decider, the highest power
for that society. Bology refers to these as leviathans. The leviathan for society is that
highest ideology or power or thing you refer to to referee and decide any dispute. There have been
three of these in the past. God, there have been two in the past and one developing. God, state,
and then the network. These are the three Leviathans that are kind of the ultimate
arbiters for society. So God was first with major religions, God kings, things like that.
Then the state, what kind of came into power as Leviathan, the role of God diminished in importance
and we had ideologies that operated intellectually without an appeal to God, things like democratic
capitalism, Nazism, and communism. Now the newest contender for that Leviathan, the ultimate
arbiter is the network things like the internet social networks cryptographic blockchains
um another way to describe these just give you some mental traction on them perhaps
biology describes in this way is in the uh when god is the leviathan people don't steal because
god would condemn them um when the state is a leviathan people wouldn't steal because the state
would punish them when the network is the leviathan people don't steal because the network won't let
you. AI will detect you, the social network will mob you, or cryptography will outright prevent you.
So the people that appeal to these different leviathans as the ultimate arbiter also have
different views of the world, different values. Within the U.S., these divisions have cut across
kind of the typical ideological divisions. Balaji really does provide an excellent and thorough and
extensive taxonomy of different types of an ideological accounting of different types,
along with the fascinating discussion of how wokeness fits into that as a doctrine. But it
really, I think, boils down essentially to this. There are left status and what we could call left
networkists, like left libertarians, people on the left, but who bifurcate, either supporting
the stage or supporting the network. Same thing for the right, right status and right networkists.
A left networkist might be somebody like a deplatformed sex worker, someone who's engaged in risky public activism and so sees the importance of decentralized systems.
Anarchists and journalists who are kind of critique power but are consistent in that critique of power regardless of who is in power, people like Glenn Greenwald.
the left libertarians left networkists tend to have a value outside of the state where the left
status tend to worship the state itself right status and right network is in the network is
we would say right status reflexively support the state these might be neocons who supported
kamala even though they were on the right and then as opposed to right network is right libertarians
who would be people like tech capitalist innovators like Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen,
things like that. People who are libertarian and tech forward.
So when the dollar is inflating away, here's one way to understand the distinction.
When the dollar is inflating away and Bitcoin is on the rise, you're going to see the networkists,
the people of the network on the left and the right, both break to support something like Bitcoin,
a decentralized network. And you're going to see the status on both sides, the right status
and the left status break to support the dying state with things like capital controls and
related censorship. So the realignment that Balaji sees is not left versus right in America today,
but top down versus bottom up. So network values against state values, different leviathans people
support. We can cash this out and explain it this way. Balaji gives some examples. Ethnic minorities
are breaking to the republicans while neoconservatives are breaking to the democrats
this kind of breaks our old traditional matrix political matrix but helps show the state network
divide tucker carlson and glynn greenwald are both breaking away one way and fox and new york
times breaking the other way media conglomerates versus decentralized media bitcoin versus the us
dollar web 3 versus big tech things like that so the conflict between the network and the state
biology thinks is what's going to shape this century like the conflict between state and god
shaped the last the struggle these wrestling leviathans how is the network a leviathan in
competition with the state practically speaking biology gives some ways that the that the network
does compete directly with the state. So encryption beats state violence, he says.
It constrains state surveillance, allows organization and association outside of state
control, prevents government seizure. A crypto economy can be greater than a fiat economy. We
can see competition now between hard capped and scarce Bitcoin over inflating fiat.
Peer-to-peer can be better than state media. Social networks' identities can become stronger
than national identities. People often identify more with somebody they know online, hundreds of
thousands of miles away, versus somebody who is their next door neighbor who they don't talk to
at all. Networks are mobile and remote. They can move geographically. Of course, your nation states
are fixed geographically. These are types of ways in which the network as Leviathan is competing,
grappling with the state as Leviathan. As these Leviathans battle, part of the importance of
history is telling new stories, giving new foundations for a possible network-based society
to allow for us to align ourselves around a one commandment enabled by network-related tech
in the creation of a network startup. So Balaji gives four different stories that we can use to
see America's future as decentralized. I think it's kind of him showing that, yes, history is
important in order to tell the story of how we get to a decentralized and network-based future.
I'll just describe one of them here, the frontier thesis. The idea is that the concept of the
frontier in the past has been a crucial driving force in history. When people would go to a new
territory, when they felt stymied and suffocated where they were at. So when this new land dried up,
when there was no frontier, no physical frontier, as this vow for free thinking and entrepreneurial
people, now we're all cloistered together, it becomes zero sum, and this kind of leads to a
bloody 20th century, because people can't just go somewhere else, they have to stay and fight over
scarce resources. Now, though, there are possibilities for new frontiers, internet,
sea, space, with internet being the most practical, and that's the idea, of course,
an embryonic form of the network state as a hybrid internet land strategy that
network or that Bologi develops in this in this book. So with tech, we can now get
out of the cage of the American and Chinese establishments or wherever you
are And we can open a new digital frontier that can then become a physical frontier as startup societies become network states So that a summary of Chapter 2 History as Trajectory
which I think is a statement of the importance overall of the one commandment for a network startup,
that moral purpose, and then the importance of history in determining and substantiating that one commandment.
So, Lucas, I had one question I want to throw back to you.
the question is essentially you are a network startup founder
what is your one commandment around which your society is based
and biology describes the one commandment as like a pitch deck for a startup it's that one
specific issue where history and science has convinced you that society is currently lacking
in a way that you have high conviction.
So just as a startup society founder,
well, as a tech investor,
you'd be telling people about your tech innovation,
pitching that it's faster, cheaper, better.
But you are a moral entrepreneur,
a startup trying to found a network startup society,
telling people about your better way of life.
Do you have a one commandment to pitch us, I guess?
I think it would be self-reliance slash resilience or self-reliance through resilience, I think would be what I would start with.
when we lived in the world where the God was the ultimate truth
and then we moved to a world where state was the ultimate truth.
In both of those instances, we have an authority that is co-opted
by people who learn how to exploit the system for their own benefit.
And the way that they do that is to make the person, make the populace dependent upon whatever that Leviathan is.
So if the Leviathan is God, then you must do this in order to please God.
Except it's not God telling you that, it's the guy wearing the God hat.
and if it's the state then you must do this in order to please the state and it's not the state
telling you that it's the guy wearing the state suit and so I think if you look at if you look at
the reason I think if you look at the reason why those two systems failed it was because
they emphasized a reliance upon a higher authority for people to
for people to exist inside of whatever that leviathan was and so i think
yeah i think if you focus on self-reliance through resilience by
by marshalling your resources and clustering around huddling around the idea that the technology
exists for you to um for you to provide for yourself then you can have a god by choice
You can have a state and a government by choice as opposed to being forced into something that is slowly being co-opted and thus turns to abuse to the populace.
I think that's what I would go with.
How would you encode that moral innovation into a practical application that people would, by joining your startup society, begin to enable their self-reliance?
Why do people want to align themselves around that type of reliance, specifically in your community?
What is the founder going to offer people who comes?
Is it going to be, hey, everybody's reliant now?
Like what practically, I guess, did the founder do to begin to build out this idea of reliance as the one commandment?
Yeah. One of the things like reading on Bology's network school that they basically use as a selling point is if you come stay with us, you'll you'll be like just just by being here.
you'll learn things that give you skills that allow you to exist in this world um and stand on
your own you will um experience you know physical and emotional um growth yeah and so i guess just
some foundation the network school is like biology's practical application the network state that he's
like actually like doing right now yeah i i think that's what i would align it around which like i
I think that's a very good example, which is there's a multi-tiered approach.
I would say kind of like three tiers, which is, you know, like fitness and health is one
where they have like Brian Johnson and the Don't Die group that is leading everything
from the French press to the bench press.
I like that.
You know, the nutrition and the fitness.
And so that's covered.
And then, you know, the learning is covered.
Like the goal is to make this the techno Harvard that is starting from scratch and world class in what you're going to learn.
And you're going to learn simply by being there because when you're a small fish and you go get into the big pond, you have to learn how to swim with the big fish.
And then the third thing is probably the most important, I would say.
and I think we're seeing
we're really seeing this
as highlighting
what's
highlighting the failures
of the current system
which is the socialization aspect of it
humans are social creatures
they
truly desire to be around
other people, to enjoy time
with other people and so that would be
that's the third thing that they focus on
I'm not
creative enough probably to do better than that.
And so I'll answer you by saying that I won't give you my answer.
I'll give you Bology's answer, which I think is the one that I would hopefully arrive at
if I were really to sit and think about it, which is just to say,
you know, fitness, fitness, growth, and socialization.
growth in terms of emotional and academic growth,
and then socialization with other people that are seeking a community.
Yeah.
When we locked everybody down, right?
That was what kicked off this wave of depression, wave of social anxiety,
and social distancing really did cause distance within our society
where people seem further away than they were before.
It's so much of a hassle to drive 15 minutes to see your friend.
Yeah.
I wish you lived in the same building.
Well, that's what a network society is,
is, hey, let's go live in the same building.
Let's go live on the same block.
um let's uh you know we we have this connection and that connection that connection stays true
through technology because we're able to maintain it that way but we're finding that that is just
not enough right it's just not enough for people to experience life in the way that is satisfying
and fulfilling yeah i mean like i said that that's yeah no like the base impulse is like
we've always had that impulse all of us i think is would it be cool to have a compound with our
best friends and only our best friends and that's who will live by to consciously cultivate a
community i mean it was an unfair question to ask you like what startup society would you do
and expect you to come up with the one commandment right up front i do like you know your description
of bology's iteration on that which i think is like the meta network state where it's designed
around creating the network first identity in people, which manifests in really tech
kind of forward ideas about fitness.
He said, Brian Johnson's Don't Die.
I mean, that's a really tech forward vision of employing the latest, most advanced science
and tech to build out people's health.
And so I like that a lot.
But I also like, you know, mentioning COVID as kind of a foundational moment for the network state.
I think it's really good because there's something about the, you know, the type of citizen that's going to inhabit a certain state has a particular type of psychology.
In the God-oriented state, you have a particular type of person.
In the state-oriented nation state of nowadays, you have another type.
what we saw in COVID is that people are already networks people are not islands people are already
the connections they have with other people and this is a point Balaji mentions that
objects like the internet has kind of illuminated what objects are it's shown us that books are not
paper and covers that's not a necessary essence of books right and music is not a cd or something
like that the digital has dematerialized and changed to use the five dollar word the ontology
of objects it's also changed the anthropology of humans humans are not like this physically
bounded thing we see in the mirror not this you know hairless ape or whatever we are commute we
are networks inherently um like our you know even when you see facebook like the representation of
what a human is. The human in Facebook is not the profile of that human. It's the connection that
that profile has to other profiles. It is the network aspect. And I think that that's really
cool. And that Bology is giving us a new idea of a state, but also giving us a new anthropology of
what it means to be human, which is to be a network. Yeah. I want to change my answer now.
Go ahead. Shoot. I'm just going to riff a little bit on this. But so my new network society is
going to be centered around uh music um it's going to so it's not i guess it's not going to be one
so let me back that up if it's one guiding principle then i think because i was running
and it's got to be it's got to be a moral innovation that is also a critique of the
present society you're in okay so i would say um can can i can i somehow make creativity
for sure yeah absolutely i think creativity as applied to as applied to arts so music and comedy
creativity as applied to um as applied to how you live your every day of life how can i
how can i make it so that um i don't have to turn on light switches i don't have to shut doors i can
How can I brube Goldberg my existence into being this pieced together, brilliant, artistic cascade of thoughts and ideas?
So yeah, I'm going to organize mine around creativity and around doing things a different way.
Yeah, and I think you could historically present a critique of our modern society. And like he kind of does this with the digital Sabbath society where people agree, like their one commandment is we're going to have a dedicated digital Sabbath, we're all going to disconnect from the internet.
for a day or two days or whatever.
I mean, I think that gets you halfway
towards a more creative society
once people are disconnecting
from the consensual hallucination
that is actually projected
by God-King emperors like Zuckerberg and Musk
with now Twitter.
I have to blame them for this.
But yeah, once we're outside of the matrix
that we see in our computer,
we begin to become creative matrices ourselves,
generating new realities.
And I love that vision that if you could design a society around creativity, I'm thinking about what do I maximize? What are the most, what are the best feeling states of being that I generate? Those are when I'm feeling creative, I feel the best.
And so to be most human, I could be part of a network state where it was about how do we all make ourselves work together to privilege creativity as the guiding principle.
And then maybe we have a digital Sabbath.
Maybe we talk about how exercise plays into that.
Maybe we do all these things.
But I love that vision for a startup network.
network so much there's so much joy to be found in um the little things that you can do
in your life to make it just a little better for yourself that the kind of like it's so much
greater than the joy that you get from binging on a netflix show and consuming you know balji
makes the point that this needs to be um uh focused around producing and not consuming
and you know if you think about um you can watch a great movie you can read a great book you can do
um you know you can you can uh you can have you can go to a restaurant and have a great meal
but that stuff honestly it kind of pales in comparison to finding um a way to
I don't know to rearrange your closet so that it's more conducive to how you live your life
yeah you know I'm gonna I'm gonna order things so that I always know where everything is at so that
I'm I'm able to grab this out and I only need this one thing I don't have to waste this brain
bandwidth on everything else that's in my field of vision so that I only I don't like you can see
behind me, there's a, there's a mess because I'm, I'm, uh, I'm at my brother's place in Sacramento
and I've been traveling. And so I've got all my stuff, um, that's just kind of like laying on the
floor. And that's not how I, you know, I, I feel very out of my element because my, I have this
driving desire to have things in the right place. And, um, you know, to have the night before to
pull out the clothes for the next day so that you're not thinking about, um, what, what do I
have to wear? Where is it? Um, does this match this and stuff like that? So I think that, yeah,
I think that the creativity and creativity, creativity, I think really does trend towards,
um, reversing entropy. Um, and, uh, it, it, you know, creative chaos typically seems to result
in creative order. And, um, and so I think, yeah, that would be my, my driving. Do you have a,
do you have a driving principle, uh, a moral, a moral guide that you would use to base your
newly formed grant mustached, uh, bespeckled society? Yeah. Um,
thinking on this, I was thinking about this before, and I was going to ask you this question.
And I was like, what if he turns the tables on me?
That would be the most terrible thing in the world.
Be put on the spot like that.
By the way, that's like the sign of a good question, though, is that you ask it because you want someone to answer it, not because you have an answer that you want to give.
So kudos to you.
Yeah, or someone that's so bad you vindictively say, well, how would you answer that question?
Like how unfair is that?
No, but I do think that like I have trouble distilling down to one moral innovation, some vision I would like to propagate in the world.
And I like what you said about creativity.
I think maybe that's one level of generality, abstraction, too much to be a one commandment because it's not like it's a moral innovation to creativity.
but it's perhaps so abstract that people could substantiate it in like opposing ways.
Even if you have to design the architecture for a society, you don't want that dissension.
You want your moral commandment to be clean enough, I think, where you join it, you know what you're getting.
So I like that idea of creativity and thinking on like what type of network startup would I join
that would take that from a level of abstraction
down into a level of practical application.
And I mentioned the digital Sabbath.
I do like that because I've thought about, you know,
disconnecting specific days in the week.
And the reason it's tough to do that is because of the lack of coordination
with other people not disconnecting and then expecting to be in contact.
Your mom gets worried about you because you're not answering text messages.
Your work has got a question.
All of these things that through coordination you solve those.
I don't know that that would be what is the moral innovation I would specifically want to propagate.
But it's also –
Some sort of like agreed upon lack of urgency or some sort of agreed upon forethought, like foresight.
Like, hey, I'm not going, you know, like, it's not agreed upon expectations, maybe.
Yeah.
You know, like, you're talking about this, and you're making me think of, like, with my old job, we had a rule, rule, that if someone reached out to you, you had to reach back to them within 24 hours.
But in actuality, the rule was, like, eight minutes, you know, or something like, yeah.
I once got reprimanded by a higher authority within the company because it took me 24 minutes to respond to a message.
And I was like, this is insane.
A long shit takes that long.
And we want people to have good long shits.
A healthy power movement is very important.
We don't want people power pooping their way through the world.
No, that's not healthy.
I cut you off, but keep going. If you can pick up the train of thought where I decided to derail it.
What I'm trying to wind myself towards is a tension I feel in myself, and I raised this last time, between the idea of a nation state that arises organically and an identity you don't choose, and the importance of unchosen identities for generating real moral obligation, and the idea of a network state which is very chosen, intentionally created, non-organic in that sense.
I think Balaji, he's conscious to that. That's why he has this chapter about history. It's very important to create some organic extension from the past to your startup, right? You need to have that historical thread that ties everything together and prevents it from being just this new like, hey, I got an idea. Why don't we do it this way? It's like, no, this idea has arisen because current historical conditions are so bad for these reasons. This is the society we live in. Here's historical antecedents of that.
It's an organic story that then even maybe gets you to join the startup because you feel impelled to by those unchosen identities you have by, you know, the person who you are and not just some like abstract creation of the person you think you should be.
It's like you can't just change your gender by saying I am the other gender.
You can't just be a member of a new society by saying, I like this thing.
You really do need that history to back it up.
And that's, I see how Balaji is trying to resolve these things by, you know, giving this notion of history. But again, I just don't, it's just very tough for me because I don't see that reconciliation happening as neatly as he describes it.
And I do feel like we do belong to the unchosen things.
I have moral obligations by virtue of being a brother, a son, a male of working age in a society, things like that.
I think all of these things have generated obligations in me to protect and preserve the place where I'm from, the people I'm around.
And so the idea of consciously choosing new identities is a little bit tough for me. But again, I think Balaji's right, because I do think the correct way to construct a network startup is to have a deep connection with history so that it's a logical extension of who you are, and not some gulf, some declaration of I am a new type of person without historical antecedent.
does that make sense is kind of like trying to just trying to illustrate my tension about like
why network why this consciously created network society is difficult for me when i feel myself to
be an unconsciously created human being yeah i think that so when you're talking i was thinking
you know if you're posed with the question who would you be if you could be anyone the obvious
answer i think is i would be awesome yeah i would be i would just be awesome but what is awesome well
For you to define awesome, you kind of have to go to history.
You have to go to, well, who are my heroes?
And who are the people that have lived a life that I think is awesome?
I think it's awesome for somebody to be able to pick up a guitar and make someone cry.
Or make someone laugh.
Or make someone smile.
with whatever ability that they're able to put into that and let it flow.
I think it's awesome to see someone walk forward with a smile
to greet their wife, their children, their family, their friends,
and to be completely untethered to any sort of obligation but to do it out of do it out of excitement and joy um i think that yeah i think that it awesome for someone to be able to uh be be generous um with other people
and and you know generous with their time generous with their resources yeah um you know that that to
me is awesome. Um, I think, you know, just all of those, all of these little things that I think
about, like, what are, what are the awesome things that I've done in my life? Um, you know, big,
big hikes, um, a camping trip, um, uh, the feeling that you get after you've beat yourself to pieces
in the gym and you've got like nothing left. Like those are awesome feelings, um, overcoming
something and overcoming i think is a is a really big thing as well so like if i were to be
if i were to be and and yeah if i were to choose something like what what does it mean to be
awesome it would mean that i would have the capability to overcome the things that
make me not awesome yeah and so that you know that again kind of goes back to this
focus on growth.
Yeah.
You know, EAC, right?
Effective acceleration.
I think accelerationism or, you know,
it's like growing more than what you are.
No, I think, again, as an abstraction,
growing creativity,
and even as a one level abstraction
on top of that awesomeness,
these are all guiding principles.
It's just, you know, rubber hits the road.
What does it mean to embody those practically
into an app that is the first stage
of a network state, like just a network startup. And I know you've worked on this, Lucas, like you
have consciously thought about what it might take to align yourself to all of your life in a really
conscious and intentional way. And I do, I mean, I think like the creation of an app that you
download and then use day to day in a way to improve yourself. I mean, that's the first step
of a network state is just like a network startup, right? It's just like a startup with a tech
innovation that's leading towards a moral principle that you want to see increase in the world.
And so if you, like me, still have some difficulty with joining a network state,
you can still see the value of a network startup because you do see the value in joining a highly
aligned community of people who are aligned around that moral innovation that you want to
see in yourself. Maybe it's learning a language, maybe something very specific and tractable like
that, a community that you joined for a specific time or something like that.
But did you want to mention that in more detail, Lucas?
You did work on an app, and I do think it's a good example of what a startup, the first
stage of network state, again, just that kind of embryonic form, a network startup, how it
begins with the moral idea that then becomes, you put it in tech to try to help people embody
that.
Yeah, sure.
So the quick, or hopefully quick, background was, like, during COVID, I lost everything that I had in terms of I didn't have a work community, I didn't have a gym community, and I didn't have my music community.
And those were the three things that I really, my identity was truly based upon, because your identity is, you know, we are what we repeatedly do.
So if you get up and you go to work and you're around those people and you go to the gym and you're around those people and you go play music and you're around those people, that becomes your identity.
And with lockdowns, that was taken away.
So during lockdown, the first thing I did was I went and I saw family.
I lived on a sailboat in Florida for three weeks.
And then I went to Colorado and I hiked mountains for like three months.
And I didn't design what I was doing.
It came about very naturally.
But what happened was that I very naturally fell into this rhythm of getting up very early, going to bed early, being physically active every day, learning every day, reading every day, and being social.
Reaching out to other people and being social.
And so I, um, that, that was wonderful. It was like the, the most peaceful, uh, growth oriented,
healthy, well-adjusted time of my life. And then when we were called back to the office,
um, immediately, um, fell into, uh, what was, I would say misdiagnosed as ADHD. Um,
But was was actually just, you know, depression, just being pulled away from those things.
And so I was seeking a way around that, a way to go back to whatever that was.
And one of the things that I had noticed was that I I had started to journal a lot.
And so I wanted to combine the, I wanted to combine a journal and a workout tracker and a scheduler and a journal, workout tracker, scheduler.
And basically, yeah, that's pretty much it.
And it was all based around this idea of we are what we repeatedly do, rituals, these rituals that make us who we are, that define us as, oh, you know, that's the person who's up at 5 a.m. drinking a cup of coffee, watching the sunrise.
That's the person who every week is out taking care of their garden and making a consistent effort to reverse entropy in their life.
And so it was a big challenge, obviously, for somebody who didn't have any coding experience.
However, as of now, I don't know if you've seen the Replit agent, which is a company, one of the companies that Andreessen invested in.
You can just talk to it and it will help you create an app.
And so I'm very hopeful to be able to finish that because what I realized during that time was that one of the things that I tracked was my screen time.
And I got my screen time down to under like 30 minutes a day.
And it was, again, this was a very, it was just happenstance.
I forgot my headphones and I was too cheap to buy new ones.
And so I just, you know, I wasn't constantly taking in media, taking in content.
And I realized that if I wasn't using my phone for that, and I also didn't have to do all these other things with it, that I could just shut it off.
And I could turn it on and check it whenever I need.
Wait, wait, wait.
You can just shut it off.
Oh, yeah.
They have it off.
They have a power button.
I did not even know these things turned off.
I thought you wait until they die and they just kind of like, oh, got to recharge it.
Yeah, that's what most people do.
Yeah.
But no, you can squeeze it and then punch it and it'll go away.
So I think that you're like – the app that you designed is like – it really integrates well into the idea of a network state.
The network state begins as this startup society with moral innovation.
and the next stage is the network archipelago where you begin to be geographically dispersed
you're a highly aligned community that begins in the cloud and then like has geographical
materialization around the world what happens when you travel to different places you lose the
routines that make you who you are and so if you can take those routines with you in your pocket
in a sense that's a huge innovation that enables people to become citizens of the world of the
not citizens of the world, citizens of a network state that is geographically dispersed,
they can move around and yet maintain some integrity of identity, some coherency,
because they bring with them the habits that make them who they are.
Hopefully the good habits, right? You put those in there.
Yeah, because it's so easy to, you know, we are creatures of our environment.
And so whatever environment you're in, you are going to adopt.
I mentioned this before, but one of my favorite quotes is by James Clear,
from Atomic Habits that he's never seen someone consistently maintain good habits in a bad
environment. And so you have to, A, be very conscious about the environment that you're
putting yourself in, but B, once you're in that environment that does allow you to,
it does kind of reinforce good habits, then you have to be conscious about what are these habits
that I want to instill,
these habits that I want to maintain and grow
and move forward with.
So, yeah.
And that's important for a person like me
who very much does,
like I say it was misdiagnosed,
but very much does have like ADHD tendencies.
And so, you know, very creative person
who is like drawn toward in different directions.
And if you're that,
then you can very easily be drawn in too many directions and yeah when you're drawn in too many
directions you're considering too many possibilities when you're considering too many possibilities you
have anxiety and so that um anxiety is something that uh will make a person stand still uh when
they should be moving anxiety is the thing that keeps the frog in the water as it's boiling yeah
Um, and, and so you, you look to people who are, um, and you're a great example of this,
you know, so when we, when we shared, when we shared a living space, um, you know, very,
you don't want to say regimented because regimented makes it sound as though it's not
enjoyable.
Regimented makes it sound as though it's enforced.
Um, but very, um, just, uh, true to, uh, what, what you're going to do.
you know these are the things that I'm going to do I'm going to do them with gusto and joy
I'm going to do them before I do the other things that are calling for my attention because I know
that these are the things that are the building blocks of my resiliency my ability to withstand
change. So you, you kind of have to, you kind of have to force some sort of, or force or put in
play some sort of ritualized approach in order to give yourself the resiliency to withstand change.
You have to, you have to do the same thing over in order to resist entropy. Yeah. So, and give
yourself. Yeah. Give yourself openings for that. No, I think these are all really, this is a really
relevant conversation to the network state in that, like when you begin to think about what it
means to be a citizen of a state that you're consciously choosing in that state is designed
around the moral innovation, you have to ask, who am I? What are my flaws? Who do I want to be?
Who is my ideal self? You called that awesomeness, just like that ideal version of myself that it
could be if I was fully deployed along every front. Another aspect of this chapter I wanted
to get your take on. So, you know, Bitcoin is what brought us into this book. And it is a worthy
study to expand one's consideration of what Bitcoin can do to the idea of the nation state
of statehood. What do you think of this idea of Bitcoin as a truth chain as this thing that
is the cryptographically verifiable ledger for the cryptographically verifiable history
for a specific network state where you update it onto the ledger.
That's the version of history that's canonical,
except for to the extent that you're using,
you don't facially accept everything just because it's on the blockchain,
but you then, when it's on the blockchain,
are able to evaluate primacy and time and see who it's from,
who is cryptographically signed by,
other things that give you an ability to begin to excavate the truth of a notion.
So, I mean, do you think that there's some, you know, substance to this, that Bitcoin will serve as a necessary aspect of this idea of a network state?
Yeah, I do think it's important to clarify that, you know, there's the Bitcoin, not blockchain, there's the blockchain, not Bitcoin people.
But this is more of the the only way that this idea really has validity is the proof of work part of of the blockchain of Bitcoin.
because what we're saying is that it's not necessarily true
if it's on the Bitcoin blockchain,
if you decide that it's worth the cost of a transaction
in order to put something on there,
to put the photo on there,
to put the news story on there,
to put something on there.
It's not necessarily true.
however because there is a cost to it um then we we like why do you lie like you lie because you
think you can get away with it you don't you if there was a cost to lying if you knew the cost
of sullying your soul of um the of the future repercussions of not telling the truth you probably
wouldn't do it. If you knew, if you could feel at that moment, what it was going to feel like to be
exposed, then you probably wouldn't do it. And so that's kind of what the cost of putting something
on a proof of work blockchain resembles. So I really was excited about rereading this part,
because I didn't really get it the first time that I read this, like two, a year, year, about a year
ago, year and a half ago. But Bitcoin's blockchain is a technology for robust macro history.
And so what we're talking about here is that Bitcoin is the best source of truth that we
have. And it's the best source of truth because it, to our knowledge, cannot be altered without
without a very large cost.
And there exists in people a desire to not lose,
to not lose in order to maintain a lie.
Like, again, you wouldn't lie, you wouldn't do something untrustworthy
if you were faced with the cost of what that lie would ultimately impart upon you.
And so what the proof-of-work aspect of the Bitcoin blockchain allows us here
is an unimpeachable, true, or at least costly history.
And so if we have a costly history, if we have something that closely resembles truth or is at least not untrue, then we are able to have a much more clear picture of what our past is.
And that's going through this chapter at the same time that the Department of Government Efficiency is posting all of these things that they have found.
All of these payments to, you know, nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine were funded by USAID.
So do we really think that we were getting accurate news out of USAID or do we think that we're out of Ukraine?
Or do we think that we're, is it more likely that we were getting news that aligned with whoever ultimately was writing the check?
And I get, I'm sorry, not ultimately, ultimately giving the money.
The taxpayers were ultimately writing the check.
But if you can.
I don't think the taxpayers are writing the check.
Future generations are writing the check.
They don't tax us, right?
They inflate.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's money that doesn't exist today.
Right.
So, yeah.
So, yeah, it's just – it makes it resistant to the rewriting of history.
Yeah, could you – go ahead.
I was just going to say that the revision of history is something that is – it's very dangerous.
because it allows us to whitewash the things that got us to the point where we are,
which the thing that got us to the point where we are was that there was something that was bad enough
that the pain of change was less than the pain of staying the same.
And so we moved past that.
We fought against something.
We did something.
but when we rewrite this history to leave out all of the bad things um then we just move closer
and closer and closer to going back to whatever it was that we're trying to get away from
um he makes the point that what you know there there really isn't a whole lot of difference
when you zoom out and look at it as the institutionalized power of the state of the
USSR and how it was justified by its own history in the same way that the institutionalized
power of the United States has been justified by its own history.
And its own history is not accurate history.
Its own history is carefully curated, carefully chosen history.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
What were you going to say?
I wanted to expand on one of the notions you mentioned at the outset.
You said macro history and you had a quote about Bitcoin helping to constitute macro history.
Can you read that again?
Do you have that ready?
I wanted to expand on that specifically if you have that verbiage.
You're talking about the Bitcoin block.
Bitcoin's blockchain is a technology for robust macro history.
Yes.
Is that what you're talking about?
That's the title of the subsection there.
Yep.
And so this idea of macro history, Bology has a section called micro history versus macro history.
micro history is history on a small enough scale with few enough variables that it becomes a
reproducible system where you could go back see what went wrong run new versions of that and
improve upon it the like an example might be um he gives example like at the most basic a chess game
is a reproducible thing because you can go back a certain number of moves and then run the game
again to see how it would have played out differently macro history this now becomes a
thing where there are too many variables it's not reproducible bitcoin then how that makes for a
robust macro history is more the more and more information you begin to accumulate um between
people and make into a solid robust history once all transactions are on chain once sub chains are
you have say you have like a sub chain that records everybody's data regarding like um continuous
glucose monitoring under different conditions so the reactions to sugar once that's all part of
you know you bootstrap that onto the blockchain by updating a sub chain onto that you create this
then biology thinks a fuller version of history based on like really minute data about people
and how they're reacting to things so if you begin to build a macro history based on this micro
history through this robust accumulation of cryptographically verifiable data and you know
then macro history becomes something where maybe it's not a fully reproducible system, but you begin to see more patterns and begin better able to act on your historical predictions because you have a more robust data set to build your predictions upon.
And Bitcoin can help us do that again because we can begin to collect a bunch of data and then have some way at least to ensure that it's the canonical version of it because it's time stamped and on the blockchain.
I just want to note that.
And I don't even know.
It's interesting that microhistory versus macrohistory, biology does seem – it's a question I kind of have for you.
Is history predictable?
Can we ever get to like a law-like statement of past events such that we can predict the future?
I don't think Balaji thinks that it's perfectly predictable.
There's too many variables.
But he does, again, think that history has this cyclical and helical structure where you can see past the cyclical nature of history.
He discusses the fourth turning in that vein that history – he gives different versions of the cyclical nature of history.
There's that kind of basic statement that many of us have heard that strong men create good times.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Weak men create hard times.
Hard times create strong men.
And so that's a cyclical version of history.
You can then begin to predict how things are going to be in the future because you can see where you are at within that cyclical history.
So I think Balaji does think that history enables us to make predictions about the future, but not as an exact science, I would say. I don't think he's saying that, but his notion of macro history kind of begins to blend the two. But I don't know.
History, what do they say? History does not repeat, but it rhymes.
There we go. That's a good way to put it.
And so when you think about that cyclical helical structure, so think of the threads of a screw.
Yeah.
There is a point where when you're on this part of it, you're also aligned with this part up here.
So the bottom is aligned with the top.
Yeah, the bottom is aligned with the top.
And by the way, it's not a different thread, right?
when you look at a screw, there's one thread.
Like people talk about oh you know if you or a bolt or something you know like I stripped the threads there actually just one thread There is one continuous cyclical helical structure that goes around it
And so it is all related back down to where it came from.
You know, history, you can't, I would not say that you can predict history.
And he gives some examples of things that make it impossible.
There's like the train wreck.
Let's see.
There's like the...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you've got the...
This leads a different set of tech folks analyzing history from different lenses.
There's the technological determinist model.
which is that technology is the driving force of history.
There's the trajectory model, which is histories are trajectories.
So you're going, you know, the first is saying that the technological model,
which is saying that history changes when technology changes.
The trajectory model, history or trajectories,
that's saying that history moves in a certain direction.
Then you've got the statistical model,
which is that what happened in the past is likely to happen again.
the helix model, this is the linear cyclical history, can coexist.
The Ozymandias civilization can collapse.
We are just the most advanced player in a video game, essentially.
Others have lost a video game before.
The Mayans, they screwed up.
They game over.
But we are the furthest ones to play it so far.
Our civilization has not collapsed.
That's like the tragedy, right?
Yeah, kind of the tragedy model.
the Linsky model, which is, this one was fascinating, which is based upon this, um,
this experiment that a guy took a bacteria and he froze it. And, um, he conducted experiments,
uh, to see where, how the bacteria would evolve. And then the ones that were frozen,
um, so he left some frozen, some were not right. And then the ones that he had frozen later on,
he unfroze those and they didn't have the same type of evolutionary path.
And so it's not, that's not, what we're saying is like, that's not predictable.
You can't, you can't predict, there are so many different variables.
This is the combinatorial explosion that after you get like five variables,
then it's just, it's too much.
There's just, there's too many options for anybody to, maybe it's possible for AI.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Another thing that was interesting about the Linsky model.
So it was, I think, E. coli.
And then he froze them at different states in their evolutionary history.
Bacteria evolves quickly.
Whatever reproduces the quickest at that moment is most evolutionarily fit.
But he freezes it at different moments in its evolutionary journey.
And then when you unfreeze one of the older stages and then reintroduce it, it's not that that older stage is not necessarily be outcompeted by the most latest stage. It was just outcompeted by some prior stage. So it's not like the where you see evolution or history at a certain point is the best, most fit version of history.
It's like there are specific discrete points in history that were outcompeted by the next step, but that could have outcompeted like a further step down the road.
So it's just an interesting way to look at history as like, oh, it's not just this giant bracket.
We get to the winner and then everything before was inferior.
Yeah, because we have this misled notion that whatever stage of human evolution we are at morally and societally, etc., we have this misled, misguided notion that that is the apex.
that because we're here today and because today is the present and the past was in the past,
that this is what is best.
Because as you said, it's like, oh, we have this view of like it's a competition
and what exists is what survived because what survived was strongest.
That's very much not true.
You know, I think there's very strong cases to be made that, you know, with regard to society as a binding force for people, that we've had moments in history that were far more evolutionarily evolved than we are today.
where, you know, the village really did raise the children,
where the people were much more tied to each other.
And again, this is part of modern society,
is that you can live in an apartment and never have to leave.
Like, you don't need to go anywhere.
You can have everything brought to you.
You can have your food brought to you.
You can have your entertainment beamed to you.
You can get on your phone and beep bop beep and get some companionship if you want.
So you don't have to depend on the rest of society to be part of your existence.
And that has led us to a moral decay.
a moral decay that has to be recognized in order to want to change and you know like people are
suffering under the moral decay that we are living in right now and they're suffering because it's
not satisfying it's not hurt it's not helping them and network states are a outcry of that system
Network states are a flag being waved saying the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.
And so we are moving in a different direction because the one that we are currently living in is not serving us.
So, yeah, that's really fascinating.
The last two on these were the Linsky model, sorry, the train crash model is that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
It's like, yeah, you just, you, if you don't pay attention to how other people failed before, you're probably going to fail again, just like them, because they weren't planning to fail. Like, you have to realize that, like, they, they were probably doing the thing that seemed logical at the time, just like you're doing the thing that seems logical at the time.
and then the last is the idea maze model which is that those who overfit to history will never
invent the future so basically it's just if you only rely upon the past then you'll never move
forward and so yeah really fascinating oh actually there's another one right jesus there's a whole
bunch right fisher model yeah and what survives that's the one that we're talking about the right
fisher model which is to say that um you know we live at the apex of morality just because we
are alive yeah and so computation right too many another so more important than like defining all
the specific historical lenses one could use to interpret the past it's i mean biology again a lot
of times what he does is he gives a taxonomy of all the ways that one could do a thing he outlines
a conceptual space of here are the different things so in the manner of a toolbox you can find
these different historical lenses, pull one out, use it to analyze a current government agency,
say the FDA, and then come to the conclusion that the way that we're regulating currently
novel drugs is very harmful. And then you can use that historical story to create a startup society
where you say, our moral innovation is, we are going to allow people to use drugs that they think
are good for their health. And people can, you know, go in eyes wide open about the dangers of
that, that's fine. And if you've had that historical story to talk about the failures
of the FDA using one of those lenses, then that helps people to align themselves to your
community because they see how, yeah, things are pretty, I mean, as you said, Lucas, moral
decay, that's a common phenomena we think about or a common kind of way we have to put
that notion into words that things aren't as good as they could be. And they're in fact
getting worse. And here's the history behind that. Here's what we should change to make
it better.
Yeah. One question that I think, because as we've been going through this series and probably before this, one of the things that I think we find as a difference in our approaches is that I think I am very convinced that you do have to leave behind and build something new.
and you've sort of elucidated that, you know, I have ties to these things.
I want these things to exist.
I want them to maintain.
I want them to persevere.
So I think we're living through right now what appears to not just be local,
but truly kind of like a global, although not entirely global, in certain, you know, Argentina and the United States.
And there's certain places in the world right now that are really making an effort to change direction.
And in doing so, we are, I think you have a lot of people that are expressing hope
and a lot of people that are expressing an approval of the new direction.
And so my question to you then would be,
when you do look at the global landscape,
to whatever extent that you do,
where do you find yourself landing in terms of,
do I feel that this boat, can we bail the water out fast enough
can we swim underneath and patch the holes in order to keep it moving so that it doesn't sink
or do we simply jump off and grab all of the you know take the take the take the furniture that's
useful take the pictures you know take the whatever fine bottle of wine is left and bring
that along with us towards something new. Obviously, we're going to have a couple more
discussions on this, but right now, what are your thoughts as Balaji has presented his thesis here?
What are your thoughts to the potential for the current system to
maintain a semblance of recognizability into the future?
Yeah, and the way you framed this question, I think it's relevant to consider the transition between Leviathans from state to network because regardless of whether we balkanize, break up into a bunch of different network societies that are archipelagos around the world, even if that doesn't happen or happen with any sort of prevalence, we're still going to have the state transition into a network.
be inflected more in the direction of networks.
And so what that mean is kind of to be decided.
But I do think that it's going to mean, like right now,
the Department of Government Efficiency, or Musk himself at least,
has suggested possibly putting some government department on the blockchain,
on a blockchain, to make transparent and public all the transactions
and things that are occurring.
So I think that I do feel hopeful, if that's kind of what your question was getting at too,
that even the state that we had is, if Leviathan is the state, it can transition to having the
network be the Leviathan, the arbiter, the guiding principle, as we replace state institutions
with networks. And in that way, there's not any one moment where suddenly you're the member of a
new network state, and yet you have hollowed out and recreated the state itself into the network
by changing the institutions one by one to be network inflected.
So that's kind of the direction I see it going,
is that we steadily StranglerVine style,
wrap up the old system in a new StranglerVine
that then leaches functionality out of the old system
and migrates that functionality into a new system.
So the state is replaced by a series of networks
just because that's what's going to happen.
Technological progress is going to show that
if you want to have this moral progress of openness and transparency, you're going to need to move to
decentralized networks. And so I guess that's where I'm at, where I think the modern state,
as we see it, can update itself to state 2.0, which is the network state, without me having to
join a network archipelago, network society, where I'm on some physical patch of land, but connected
via statehood, network statehood, to somebody else who's currently a Mongolia or whatever.
Not that there'd be anything wrong with that.
It'd be fun.
I just don't think that that's what's going to happen.
I feel like we're, I don't know.
To me, I feel like we're already there.
It's just not really recognized.
But people, we are in a stage of human history that is very ideological.
and most people I think would not list their national affiliation as their top ideology
or even if they would I think that the way that they live their life would would maybe
insinuate otherwise.
I think
people align more with
whatever the community...
My brother works at a climbing gym.
The gym, same gym
that Alex Honnold learned how to
climb at. That's in Portland, right?
No, it's in Sacramento.
Oh, I thought it was. Okay, cool.
It's called Pipeworks.
And the
climbing community
These are people that I would say very much identify as climbers.
They probably don't identify as Californians.
They probably don't identify, I mean, I'm sure they identify as Americans in some way.
But, you know, it's what do you spend your time doing?
And if you spend your time saying the Pledge of Allegiance and wearing an American flag shirt
and going to parades and watching the president on TV,
then you probably do identify as an American.
But if you spend your time winding rope
and thinking about what crevices to put your fingers in
in order to keep yourself from plummeting to your death,
then you probably identify more as a climber.
And so, yeah.
I think that's the wrong way to put it, though.
It's not, being American is not the Pledge of Allegiance.
Being American is adhering to certain foundational values
values regarding liberty, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, these types of, in that
sense, like a mountain climber is doing what Americans do, which is the having the freedom
to do what they think is, you know, it's like, the United States is kind of defined in
contradistinction to the China, what we perceive there, at least the CCP to be, which is a
lack of transparency.
And again, like the UDS has failed miserably at a lot of this in the very recent future.
But that's not to say that you can't be American and fight for what you think the best iteration of those values are.
And as we talked about last time with Pine's article, like, I think appealing and grafting decentralized systems like Bitcoin onto the US, you know, using transitioning in the US to decentralized systems is a way that we then appeal, reappear to those foundational values, rather than just like mechanistically encanting the Pledge of Allegiance, you know, millions of times.
Well, I do agree that I brought this up before that, you know, the United States is, is it itself a network state? It is itself.
Yes, agreed. I think for sure.
All these different non-connected entities who are united solely by what you said, common values and common virtue, not by a common ethnicity, not by a common race, not by a common God.
But, you know, it truly was.
And I think this is, you know, this is the reason to defend it so fervently
and to do everything we can in order to revive the original,
you know, to adapt the technology of today and apply it to the original virtues
that the United States was aligned upon, aligned under,
because the technologies of today empower those virtues,
and they strengthen those virtues,
and they give us an opportunity to, I think, really live out the dream of,
not the founding fathers, but all of the founding people who came together, who were daring and
took the risk of, um, of, of leaving something that they knew in order to start something new.
Um, so yeah, I, I, I do agree in, in that, you know, the United States is,
it really is something special.
There is something
very special about the United States
that has not existed before
and it's
questionable whether it would
it's questionable whether it would exist
again if it was
lost.
Because
the technologies that allow us
to empower those virtues
can also be used to
disempower
any sort of uprising.
This is the surveillance state
of the Chinese Communist Party
and exporting autocracy.
How are you ever going to rise up
if literally your thoughts...
And to a great extent,
this has happened in the United States too,
where I've had such a change of the way that I think about the woke culture
as not an enemy but as something to really be pitied
because all of these are good people who have...
One of the consistent things I find when you talk to somebody
who has every dyed-in-the-wool woke talking point,
they, you know, if RFK has mentioned that,
like, oh, I think he's crazy. If Elon's mentioned, oh, I think he's a dick. If Trump is mentioned,
then oh, he's a criminal. Like, one of the consistent things that all of these people,
I'm not political. I don't really engage in politics. I'm not really involved in it. It's
not really my thing. But yet they carry the programming of the higher order of that ideology.
and so um these are good people these are people that aren't political um yet they have been
programmed and the mind uh the mind the mind is not always looking for a way to disprove reality
and so if you are presented with something that appears to be real um then you're probably going
to accept that first. And so these, you know, blockchain technology, the surveillance technology
that we have, as China exports that to other countries, and to a certain extent, the United
States, because we're doing a lot of it here too, then it becomes harder and harder to distinguish
reality. And that's where we do need something that is inviolable, that is hard to change,
much like the Bitcoin blockchain, the proof of work aspect of it
where there's a cost
because if there's a cost to, like I said
if there's a cost to lying that you have to pay up front
most people aren't going to do it
people lie because they weigh the probability of being caught
down the road with the advantage of perpetuating the lie right now
and so there's a recency bias towards that
Yeah. Well, that's great. That's all I got. I think your comment there, though, highlights the whole purpose of this chapter is that history is incredibly important because it shows us how our default programming is not a transparent lens onto the world but is colored by the stories that we've been told for very particular reasons by people in power to maintain that power.
And so if you're going to start – if you're going to do something like a network startup and you're going to bring a moral innovation to the people, you're going to need to tell them historical story to kind of scrape off the implicit historical lens that they already have that's been, again, just fed to them by people who know how to craft a story and who control the news of the day because they control the organs of journalism.
I agree very well said
very well rounded out
and I look forward
to chapter 3
me too thanks man
have a good one
Thank you.