#606: Balaji S. Srinivasan — 5-10-Year Predictions, How to Start a New Country, Society-as-a-Service (SaaS), Bitcoin Maximalism, Memetic Warfare, How Prices Are Born, Moral Flippenings, The One Commandment, and The Power of Missionary over Mercenary

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Tim. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I also do personal questions. No, it's kinda. My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal enterc.

So Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. And my guest today is the one and only Bology S StreenyVoss, and you can find him on Twitter at Bology S. Bology is an angel investor and entrepreneur. He has The first and second place records for longest podcast episodes ever on this podcast. We will probably keep it to two and a half to three hours, I say with great confidence now. Formerly the CTO people listen to them. They do. They do. People listen to them. A lot of people these are two The last two appearances were two of the most popular episodes certainly in the last year to eighteen months. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreets and Horowitz. He was also the co founder of Earn.com, acquired by Coinbase Council, acquired by Miriad, Teleport, acquired by Topia, and Coin Center.

He was named to the MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, won a Wall Street Journal Innovation Award, and holds a BSMS PhD in electrical engineering and an MS in chemical engineering, all from Stanford University. Bology also teaches the occasional class at Stanford in his spare time, including an online MOOC in 2013, which reached Two hundred and fifty thousand plus students worldwide. His brand new book is The Network State How to Start a New Country. And we will certainly wade into those waters and explore all of the related topics in depth. But let us begin, if we can, Bology, with the current state of the crypto. I know a lot of people would love to hear your thoughts on what you're observing. And just to date this, we are recording July one, twenty twenty two, and then perhaps hearing your thoughts on the India sphere. But let's begin with those two prompts.

Sure. So I'm not a trader. Much more of a long term investor slash angel slash VC. There's actually a

There's a fun tweet today by a guy Travis underscore cling. I've been doing this for forty six straight months, and I've never seen one like this before, and he's just basically a list of all the Carnage in the markets. And the thing is that carnage is

In the crypto markets, but also in the in the non crypto markets. And It's a little more pronounced in crypto. But It is definitely like a

Systemic. Type of thing. And the way I I type uh kinda think about it is I was There's very few spaces that I get into

Where I don't have an all weather thesis. That works independent of the price. And so I was in genomics way before Like people were talking about genomics. I was you know, doing machine learning way before people were talking about machine, you know. It's kind of weird to see people talking about stuff that you're doing like 10 or 15 or whatever years ago. Not to say in a thump chest way, but just that

you wanna try to identify these things that have value independent of that. And the fundamental value of cryptocurrency Is Can you have a system Where the route permissions are independent of the US And Chinese establishments.

That is the fundamental question is one of digital freedom. And I can kinda tease that out and but it's fundamentally do you actually have Property rights on the internet, digital property rights. Or Кен собаки ви а полі бач?

From the US or Chinese establishment, depending on what side of the world you're on. Get into all of your stuff. Surveill all your stuff. Take all of your stuff. Freeze and seize all of your stuff, and so on and so forth.

So that fundamental question of whether digital property rights should exist and whether they will be valuable in the medium to long term. Is what gives me confidence in the space, not the specific price. I can talk more, but that's Prices down, prices up, I would only invest in those kinds of things.

that I believe further that aspect of like freedom and and control. Question for you. In our first episode, I think at some point You mentioned for someone who is not gonna make a full time study of things. splitting their allocation to crypto. And this is not investment advice. This is two people talking for informational purposes only, but splitting fifty-fifty

Bitcoin East. Does that still hold or would you based on What you've seen since and what you are seeing now. Maybe any developing theses

Change that. No, I I'd say stick with that. I mean, uh again, not investment advice and so on, but basically Those ecosystems are just still absolutely massive. If you look at As I said, you know, y I I think I said something like

Buy it and then hold it for ten years. And let's see where we are in ten years. The fundamentals in terms of not just number of users, but Conversation. If Twitter was open source, or rather, more specifically if it was open state.

That is say not just the source code was available, but the backend was available, the database was available. Okay, not just through an API, but that you could Just hit a key and see every tweet if you wanted to, every public tweet at least. If it was open state And you could plot the number and the depth of interactions on Bitcoin and Ethereum and all of their offshoots, not just those keywords, but the

thousands of keywords and memes and communities and so on that'll be built on these. These are like countries that have built out. And Those are things that just have mass to them. And you can mark them to market. They've got downs and they've got ups, but they are absolutely massive things with tens of millions of dedicated people around the world.

And they've come out of nowhere. So yeah, I don't believe that they're gonna go away. But Again, not financial advice, it's just my Personal belief. You can get much more sophisticated in that.

But like the absolute worst thing to do, by the way, and this is maybe obvious, but I'll just say this Yeah. The worst thing to do is Buy an asset when it's when it's in the news and sell it when it's in the news. And

What you instead wanna kinda do is it's all inevitable that something will pique your attention. And then what you do is you set a calendar reminder. You know, let's say thirty days, sixty days, ninety days. So that you are almost like retargeting yourself.

And then you go and you actually do research on it. Outside of the scrum. Outside of people yelling about it. You intentionally do it async. to the market sentiment.

There's a famous cartoon. It's a guy he's like This'cause like it's it's a good buy. And someone over here is they're like buy, buy, buy, buy, buy and then the guy's like this dog could really excel. And then someone over here sell, sell, sell, sell, you know, like this, right? And it's just Hilarious sort of loop.

Which you don't wanna be the current thing. You don't you don't wanna be the person who is Buying high, selling low. And I think the only way to not do that is set calendar reminders assess your portfolio, like whether it's a quarterly basis or something like that, and try to make async decisions. You almost never want to sell on bad news, buy on good news. That's my macro outside of any given, you know, specific thing.

Yeah, let me add one thing to that, which is humans in general, and I succumb to this sometimes too, over Estimate their predictive abilities. So What is very helpful is set a time. It could be once a year, Jan one. Gen five, doesn't really matter.

where you sit down and you identify, say I'm just picking a time frame. Six months from now. And you grab a bunch of Potential.

asset classes or stocks or indices. So maybe it's Bitcoin. Barrel of oil. S P five hundred. And make your predictions.

And then set a reminder to look at them. three months or six months later when you may as you are influenced subconsciously by chatter on Twitter. trends in the news and so on to think that you know where things are going. Let's see how successful you were over the preceding six months. So that's also a good way to check your cognitive biases. Let me talk about can I talk about that for a second? The predictability involving the

Okay, so This is something I actually write about in the book, which is we're sort of re entering high volatility times. And The thing about this is Most people don't think about it this way.

But companies and governments Shield people from volatility to an extent that we don't really think about that much, and now that shielding is going away. For example When you go and buy like a a laptop from Apple.

And they Quote you Some price. Let's say I don't know what it is. Fourteen ninety nine or nineteen nine. I don't know what the number is. Okay, I'm just making that up. When they quote you that price.

That's a price that they are they are you know, selling it for. But the price of aluminum is bouncing around. The price of The rare earth elements on the back end that's bouncing around. Their cost of goods

Is If they were just buying at spot prices. Bouncing around every day. And so in theory their margin Could shrink or grow or whatever on on a given day.

Now what do they do to to deal with this? They Buy in bulk. They have various futures contracts and so on. They buy and sell collars. So they give up some of the upside on that margin to bound their downside. They're getting aluminum for X dollars per kilogram as opposed to Greater than X or lower than X. So those companies actually buffer all kinds of crazy variations to give you that clean

Dependable ninety nine or twenty nine or fourteen ninety nine, whatever price. And governments do this as well in lots of other ways. That's why you don't have people walking down the streets with AKs. That's why you don't have mobs pillaging and and so on and so forth. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Can you tie those two things together? So I followed you on the futures contracts and maybe you know if they're dealing with currency, certainly they would have other protections in place, but how do we go from that to preventing people from walking around with AKs? Sure, sure. I believe there's a connection. I just would love for you to elaborate. Absolutely. So it's social and financial volatility.

Mm-hmm. And the way I think about that, so let's start with financial because it's more it's a little more quantitative than people know about it. There's this concept called market depth. And if you've ever looked at Coinbase Pro

or any crypch, you see this like V like thing with the The buy orders on one side and the sell orders on this side. And this is like How a price is born. Normally

Most people in normal life are price takers. You go to the store and you buy orange juice for whatever the price is now. Fifty bucks or I don't know what it is today, but you know what I'm saying, right? Okay. A gallon of orange juice is I don't know, s some price, okay? And

You're a price taker, it's set price, four ninety nine or something like that. The thing is, if you start emptying out the shells if you buy a hundred units of orange juice And then you go to the next door, it might be five fifty. And then the third store, here's your coming, and they set it to seven bucks. And so on and so forth, right? You start moving the market price, you are now a price setter, in a sense, when you start clearing out units.

So you've got a hundred units at four ninety nine and then two hundred units at five fifty, and now you can get three hundred units at seven, and your supply. Is of it increases as the price increases. And then conversely on the other side. And so that is actually how a price is born. Most people don't usually think about this because you're buying like single individual consumer units. You're not like a bulk purchaser. When you're purchasing in bulk.

suddenly people are negotiable. You know, they can they can make more money on it. They're they're okay with negotiating. Okay, what's my point? This idea of market depth Just like we see Like a price shift back and forth, you know, with sentiment. That's the same concept. In financial terms as the Overton window.

The overtune window is the set of what things are politically acceptable. And sentiment. shifts back and forth. There's a thing, here's the current center. And as radicals, you know, push. That thing that was totally unthinkable moves to the center.

Or conversely, conservatives push and suddenly it it gets pushed back. That's kinda like buy and sell pressure. In fact, you can think of it a lot like that on any given issue. And You have essentially almost like votes. You have a

A thousand votes. For this level of the policy. And five thousand votes for this level of policy and ten thousand votes for this level of policy, and then you have someone on the other side. And when you can shift over those vote banks

You shift that midpoint, which is a policy, just like if you can shift over the order book, you shift over the price. Yeah, that's clever. I like that. That is the macro Of how I think about

prices and policies you know when people say oh that's getting political What they're really talking about is Just like with the price example, most people are price takers. You know, as I said, you you go and buy the orange juice. Just like most people are law takers.

The policy is just applied to you. But if somebody is like powerful enough or it's like a weird enough situation That law flexes. Concrete example. Singapore, you know, a couple uh I'm taking an example that's like out of our time and place, you know, and so on so people don't get mad. Singapore, like two and a half decades ago, I think in nineteen eighty seven, there was a an American citizen, Michael Fay, who was vandalizing things in Singapore.

I remember this. You remember this, right? And Singapore was going to cane him, as per Singapore law. And frankly, had he been a Singaporean or he had been anybody other than an American, he would have been a law taker. Okay, the law would have just been applied. But All kinds of pressure got applied

On this side of the policy Market. And Li Kuan Yu was like, okay, we're gonna like reduce the number of strokes of the cane. He didn't set it to zero. Because that would have been too much of a give.

But as a consideration for the like the US government made it like a diplomatic situation and like a president got involved and all this stuff for tiny Singapore. So The pressure for Singapore was significant on the policy side, and so now. The law was negotiable. That's what it means for something to quote get political.

Is that you have huge masses of people That assemble and they shift the midpoint. of the Overton window. Just like huge masses of people shift the midpoint of a price. The thing is, as I mentioned earlier.

With Twitter That backend is not open state. So because it's not open state, we cannot see. Sentiment moving. as we can with price, not as easily.

Not as easily. There are other tools that I also you probably don't know this, but I pa I pay a good amount of attention to this type of thing on a number of fronts. So Google Trends, I mean they're they're not open state exactly, but you can track Certain types of sentiment or interest or fears. Longitudinally. But continue, I didn't mean to interrupt.

No no no you're right. In one sense, we've got far more information than we ever had. In another sense, I know we have A hundred or a thousand X left to go. And the reason is that

Uh Think about the difference between And this is a tech analogy, so You might be like Well, think about it, huh? Okay, but uh think about the difference between ATT Unix and Linux, okay?

Now most people Alright, so if you're an engineer. You're like Yeah, dude. ATT Unix was was good, but it wasn't hackable. I couldn't customize it. I couldn't take it apart, look at the engine block.

I couldn't make it work on tiny devices and giant servers. I couldn't make it mine. And so currently it's good, yes, that we have Google Trends and that we have Like you can kinda get some sense from the Twitter API and so on, but they're very locked down in a certain way where there's queries you can't easily run, you might have to pay a lot for the API and so and so forth. Versus if that data set was open. We'd have completely different understanding of society and history and politics. It would be at the same level. As to unlock going from

AT Unix to Linux. Or the unlock of going from like PayPal to Bitcoin. So let me jump in because the the next question I wanna ask. Is What's some of the

To you. most foreseeable technological developments are. that you say almost treat as assumptions in building out your vision for the future over the next X years. And you can choose X. And this might be a place also where we can sneak in and I'll let you do it. One very Primitive way.

Maybe it's primitive, you tell me, but it's lo fi way of identifying possible trends through you pointed out a stealth topic that show up in my most popular episodes in the last twelve months. Hm. I'll let you take that wherever you like. What's the stealth topic? So

I saw the list of the top ten Tim Ferris podcasts last year. Where I was number one and number two, despite how long they were. So hopefully, you know, the listeners got something out of it. It was an honor just to be nominated. Like to thank the Academy.

Very importantly, by the way, to my knowledge, the Tim Ferris rankings are not Juiced or editorialized and so on. Did you know that the you're probably aware of this, maybe your your your listeners aren't, the New York Times bestseller. Rankings are An editorial product? Oh, absolutely. I'm a hundred percent aware of that because I had just to just to give an example.

one launch week with one of my books, which came out through Amazon Publishing, which put me squarely in the crosshairs of almost everyone in the traditional books slash publishing world, sold I wanna say a hundred and twenty thousand copies. through Nielsen book scan. For that one week. And it was number four on the New York Times bestseller list in my category. And the book that hit number two sold somewhere between ten and twelve thousand copies verified through Nielsen's books. So do you know about the exorcist lawsuit?

I don't. Okay. So basically back in the eighties, the guy who wrote you know the book The Exorcist, which actually got turned into a movie, sued the New York Times because his book hadn't been a different book, Legion, it hadn't been included in the bestseller list. And In their Explicit written defense in the courtroom, NYT said the bestseller list was actually neither mathematically calculated nor was it an objective measure of sales, rather it was editorial content, and as such was protected as free speech under the US Constitution. So it's Actually

The most charitable interpretation It's like Google's rankings. Google's rankings You know, what is the number one hit for Sinatra.

Now what's funny is you'll get a different you know, if you Google it, you'll probably actually be surprised. For a long time it was the Sinatra web framework and now it's Frank Sinatra, you know, the Wikipedia article. And The thing is, that's a great example of what should it be. Most people who are looking for Sinatra

Or Probably looking for the web framework. But most people on the planet That is the most ballogy statement ever. But continue Do you think that's true? Oh, yeah, most people who who are querying Sinatra as as opposed to Frank Sinatra. I see. I see what you're saying. Okay, all right. Fair enough. 'Cause you know, there it's like a very proper noun to query, right? So if you could measure it, and you Google is the kind of company that when it was good, it was measuring this kind of stuff. Their intent, basically you could argue as to what was number one.

Is it the thing that people want to get? It's like searching for apple. Should it be the fruit there or should it be well, actually if they look for apples, they want the fruit. If they want Apple, then they want the company. That kind of thing. Anyway, but Sinatra is a good example. Point being that That's something at least Google people kinda know that the ranking is not objective. When you call it a bestseller list.

The impression is that it's a numerically ranked thing, and it's not editorialized, but it is. Anyway. Point B coming all the way back up. Tim Ferris's Unjuiced, unedited list.

was interesting'cause I looked at that. That's actually kinda some open source analytics itself. And when I when I looked at that, I was like, you know, this is interesting. There is a stealth topic here, which I'm also really interested in. That Tim's listeners are interested in, and I'm not sure it's being named as such, and that is transhumanism. And that's Huberman Lab.

That's life extension, that is brain machine interface, and it's limber generation, it's all your fitness stuff, it is all the recovery stuff and so on. All of that is sort of uh A whole growing posit in my view, positive trend. The problem is people have pathologized that they think transhumanism is like the I don't know the Klaus Schwab version from the World Economic Forum where you all become mishappened monsters and you're edited and you know you're harvesting adrenochrome from uh orphan children in Romania.

That's right. We need probably a different term for it and I've got some terms that I've been thinking about. Often You have the the positive and the negative version of any term. Like you can

You know, Russell conjugate it positively and negatively. Like um You know. he was righteously angry or he was incandescently mad or whatever, you know, you can like You can change the sweat, transpire, glisten, depending on the exactly. I you know, I sweat, he perspires, she glows, right?

What was I saying? Uh so Transhumanism and alternate Terms. That's right. So so whatever else you might call it, you could call it I like to use the term optimalism.

As opposed to optimism, you are optimizing yourself. You are being positive. There's an objective function. Transhumanism, you you might say it's just a change, or that change is positive or negative. is unstated. But optimalism is in a sense you're improving, you're getting better. It is like

Optimal physical fitness, it is optimal health. It is taking care of oneself, it is optimizing finances, it is optimizing everything, very in tune with I think what a lot of you know your listeners are are for, right? So That to me, if you ask about foreseeable futures Transhumanism is an all weather thing.

Or let's call it optimalism. People will want to get better. And I think science is now really starting to catch up there. And this is actually one of the good things about you know, the state sort of receding and and coming back and not being able to like the overturn window on this is absolutely moving. People are much more sceptical of the FDA.

And that actually has good aspects. Because it means that more treatments and and so on can get through. All right, so you asked about foreseeable future. So one of them is Optimalism slash transhumanism. A second one, which I think is this is uh this will be completely obvious to pretty much everybody who's in, let's say, big tech, but maybe not as obvious to people outside.

is uh augmented reality glasses. Should I talk about this? Yeah. Absolutely. So so in the like late nineties And I probably the early two thousands people talked about the so called convergence device.

And you can go and look at the Lexus Nexus archives and so on. Bill Gates would talk about the convergence device. And what what did he mean by that? He thought it was gonna be gonna be like a television. Which would combine like a computer and a phone and all of these other things. Why? It's'cause In the eighties and nineties.

Everybody had a TV and everybody talked about the TV. And The household gathered around it and they interacted with the remote. So it seemed like a reasonable thing. That people would be inhabituated to using a TV could Could do something else, right?

And it turned out to actually the convergence device was not the television, it was it was the phone. That acquired all of those characteristics. But they were correct that there was going to be a convergence device. And there were also people who were interested in quote mobile prior to the iPhone. Jack Dorsey actually, the reason Twitter, I believe, has 140 characters is it was some like SMS payload constraint.

That You know, he understood how important mobile was gonna be years before the iPhone even came out, right? Most people were not seeing that. Most people even after the iPhone came out, there's this great core thread that's a time capsule that's something like What's the point of mobile apps? It was like in twenty ten actually, and they were like, What's the point of mobile apps? Is it just gonna show me coupons as I walk by a store? Do you know it's right? Have I talked to talk to you about this? No.

Mm mm So my my friend Yishan Wong, he actually I think he reply to this, let me see if I can find this. Without mentioning coupons.

Why and how is mobile the future, or will the next revolution really be based around deals and incentives? I think it was from twenty ten or or something like that, right? And the thing is That Post is a great time capsule because from today's standpoint we're like But are mobile apps good for her?

Everything. Everything is good mobile, right? There's there's there's Uber and there's Airbnb and there's Google Maps and On and on and on. And then when you actually go and think about it. The issue is that a lot of the Because people have been so used to operating computer in sessile fashion, meaning immobile

Their imagination wasn't enough. They're like, Why would I just want to do that? On the go. I don't I don't have a full mouse. I don't have a keyboard. I have to tap on a screen and so on so forth. And Yashan's point was. Humans are mobile. And so therefore, even if the interface is smaller Even if your UX is worse

Even if it's more constrained and it can't do everything, it has that Thousand X value proposition that it's always available to you at all times. And that alone means that every app will become a mobile app. This is totally obvious. Today.

It's probably pretty obvious by twenty fifteen. It was absolutely non consensus by like two thousand nine, twenty ten when that thread came out. Except for within the tech people who are investing in mobile. What is kind of similar to that? And of course, not every future comes to bear and so and so forth. But what would I consider something which in like five years or ten years are gonna be like duh, super obvious, of course, huh? You know, and and now today they think you're a weirdo and that's never gonna happen. Okay.

You know, when it goes from You're stupid and insane, and that'll never happen too. Obviously, that would always be the way it was. I love that. Because there's there's a very short gap in the middle of that exponential. You know, other things that were like that were like masks during COVID or pseudonymity actually in the crypto community. You know, what what is it what is FiveCoin? So AR glasses. Air glasses

If you combine a few things So Snapchat spectacles, which To Spiegel's immense credit. He has persisted with after tons of criticism and Hardware is really hard to iterate on, right?

So, you know, he's persisted with that. He's made that a big thing. And I give him a lot of credit for that because it's very difficult to do that over multiple generations. It's the kind of thing that your CFO wants to cut. It's the kind of thing the street doesn't like. It can be low margin, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, spectacles are out there. I'm not sure what how well they're doing, but I I they've definitely improved a lot. I like them. I have no Snapchat stock, by the way, I'm just saying whatever thing that's a good product. Spectacles. Facebook's Oculus Quest, again something which Zuck deserves, I think, a huge amount of credit for putting two billion into that ten years ago. They're only now really starting to recoup it because there were several iterations and there was a lot of technology that needed to go into Oculus Quest to get it to Where it is now Oculus Quest too so Spectacles, Oculus Quest, Google Glass Enterprise, which I think is doing like reasonably well.

Boot glass enterprise basically They're using it for industrial applications, not walking down the street yet. But for industrial applications like a like a surgeon or a mechanic or something like that. Less likely to get punched in the face when you're using it then. Yeah. Right. Well, so come to that point. Apple's AR kit. A R kit is like uh you can hold your i phone up. And you can see like a glowing orb or something like that on the other side, or you know, for example, you've got a ruler app in the phone. And you can hold it up and it'll just boom, it'll show you

Blueprint style what the measurements are of your walls. And then uh you know, apps like Pokemon Go, right? Which are augmented reality apps. And you put all of that together. And what do you get?

You get something which Looks and feels just like a normal pair of glasses that you'd get from from lens crafter or something like that. But you tap it. And you get Terminator vision over the world.

And maybe you tap it again. And it darkens and you're in VR. And it's as lightweight as normal glasses. Which we know are a form factor that people do use. Millions of people use them every day. They look like normal glasses, so they don't like stick out to the world at large.

But What they do is they now take you they g make you hands free. So remember the thing we were saying, wh humans are always mobile. Well why would people want AR glasses? They want the use of their hands. They want to use their hands and they want to be outside.

And they don't want to be stuck inside all the time. And so this will make us truly mobile again, because you won't be you know, mobile phones will be seen as this intermediate stage where you go and walk around and you're like You know, like this all the time, right? And I'm not sure if it was Huberman who said this on your podcast or something, but he was like, you know, the way to wake up

To be alert is to like look up. D do you know that trick? Yeah, I I think he did uh share that on uh uh his and my first conversation on the podcast. I believe that was it in that episode.

It's almost like a you know, you you got like this primitive caveman and he's coming out of the cave and he's like Who will Aug Smash today? You know, and looking looking up like this, you know, and he's like kind of surveying and he's alert or whatever, right? That maybe that's the adaptation. But The opposite of that is staring down at your phone. And actually Sergey Brenn many years ago remarked that it was emasculating to do that. And who knows what the biomechanical feedback loop that's going on is but heads up is heads up. Yeah.

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Tim. How much of the purpose of Alexa as a device in the home do you think is just developing Training data. And

better tech so that it can be ported over to mobile use in some type of application with AR enabled classes. I mean, it's a really good business in its own right. I mean they've sold Tens, if not hundreds of millions of those devices. So but yeah, the training data.

Helps. Helps a lot. And All three companies, you know, Apple, Google and Amazon have You know, these smart speaker things. Which are oh they're kind of interesting, right? You know the you know, like some if you snapshot today and then you

Think back. thirty years, the kinds of things that have converged The clock radio. has become this. That's the like the the closest

analog to that in the nineteen eighties household for an uh Amazon Alexa thing is that And You know, the phone obviously has combined lots and lots of different gadgets. And then we're gonna now see You know, if you look at like uh the Solana crypto phone

When you walked out of your house in the eighties or nineties you'd have Your wallet and your kys. And then maybe your credit card. And then later you have your phone. And it literally be a physical wallet and a physical key and a credit card and so on.

And eventually that's all gonna converge into a different kind of thing because it's amazing that you're Cash and your wallet. And your Keys to your car and your credit card can all be thought of as a private key. On your phone.

Yeah, I suspect I suspect we're very close to that, right? I mean you have Tesla, which is phone tethered, and then you have, say, Apple. Wallets. And then you have, you know, fill in the blank. We're we're very close to that, I would imagine. We're close, but it's it's one of those things, it's sort of like gathering threads, you know, so you have to gather all of the skeins together so that Now A Tesla car

Can be basically open by your phone and then you have to sell so many Tesla cars that that's like Ten percent of the market, you've educated the market. And then you do it for w you know, your wallets for your private keys, and then you do it for your passwords and so on. So you're gathering all of these different schemes.

And then you You know, make that tapestry or that coil. What is that word that you're using? So skein. Uh S K E I N Yeah. All right.

New word. It's like a length of I think the official definition of tiny yarn. Loosely coiled and knotted. Got it. Maybe I'm maybe I'm mispronouncing it, but I think it's skein. No, you got it. Skain. All right. Yes, you gather the skeins. Sorry to interject. So yes for foreseeable future. So first is

Transhumanism slash optimalism. I just Tweet which is uh Super Soldier Serum Is Real. Have you seen this one? I have not.

Okay, so you'll like this one. I may mention this foot for, but if not. Superchill is the show misreal, okay? This article is from PLOS. It's like Fifteen years old or whatever. Possible. Yeah, exactly. And so on the left hand side, wild type mouse. On the right hand side myostatin null. And look at the chest on that guy.

Like holy moly. So that's why I put like the Captain America before and after. If you are able to work with knockout genes and so on, you end up with uh animals like bully whipets. So people who've seen a whipit will envision this very, very, very thin dog that looks something like a greyhound. But if you look up a bully whip it, you'll see something very, very different indeed. And there are also Cattle breeds.

That are have been bred selectively, which is the slow way to do it. for this type of myostatin inhibition. So they end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger times ten, basically. Exactly. That's right. And the thing is that Yeah, there's this movie Limitless.

That I really like. And the reason I like it is Yeah. changes a normal Hollywood formula at the end. See, normally many Hollywood formula uh you know movies about science fiction stuff nowadays have a sort of Icarus thing to them. He flew, he was too bowl, and he flew too close to the sun, and

His wings melted and he came back to the earth and and you know, as he should not have ever flown in the first place. And it's basically like You arrogant technologist, you Added. There's always some constraint and it will be subtracted from you. You'll never learn or right. This kind of intrinsic conservatism. And uh

What's awesome about I it's a ten year old movie, so I'm spoiling it for people. But what's awesome about the end of Limitless. Is that he engineers away that constraint? And because in real life, guess what? All of our planes don't crash either. We managed to outdo Icarus. It wasn't like some arrogance of thinking we could fly. We could fly, right? We could figure it out. Yes, there were some crashes.

We figured it out, we got it down to a you know, not just a science, but to an engineering. And so similarly, a lot of people when you show stuff like this Myostadin thing or whatever, they'll be like, Oh. But it'll give you cancer or, you know, steroids will screw you up, man, or whatever. I'm like That it may be the case if you are not throwing all the science and engineering in the world at it. Okay, so here's a kind of controversial statement.

You know, Lance Armstrong, the tour de France. winner who cheated and right. I may be getting some of the facts wrong on this, but my understanding is he had serious testicular cancer His doctors gave him Some kind of treatment.

And then he did You know, he came back to win multiple tour de Frances. Like he was out racing Other guys, many of whom were also juiced, okay. But The point is, yes.

Within the game. Sure, he broke the rules, should be punished, I don't dispute any of that. From an abstract perspective. I want to know what his chemists were doing because that is some like Nobel Prize worthy stuff. To bring back somebody from testicular cancer.

To that level of physical fitness. Is insane whatever it was that they were doing. Now, is it possible people again they'll come up with the Icarus line, what are you talking about? He probably dropped five years off his life. Okay, maybe he did. I actually don't know.

But if he did, I think a lot of people might still take that trade off in the trade off space to come from tessicular cancer to like ridiculously ultra fit and so on, but five years less in of life. Let me hop in here,'cause this is this is one domain where I have I have some familiarity. So for people who want to get an idea of how doping functions at the highest levels. Or the higher levels. At the highest levels you need to get uh the actually there's a film called Icarus of all things. Oh really? A documentary which goes into the Soviet state's use of doping and from a biochemical and also even just mechanical logistics perspective, it's just staggeringly complex and fascinating, I think. There's a book also, it's quite old.

but called Game of Shadows, Barry Bond's Balco and the Steroid Scandal about professional sports, which is also a a a quite a good read when it comes to assuming you don't want to get into too much of the biochemistry, but let me say just two things. So one is related to Lance their arguments have been made. That Until he lost. muscle mass through cancer treatment. Primarily in his upper body.

that he was an excellent cyclist, but not of the caliber that we saw afterwards, and that part of the success, not all of it. But a component to the increased level of success was I guess it's a it's a new version of like bulk and cut. of his body and distribution of muscle mass. I do think the Lance example is super interesting and I would just also pick up

On one lost skein. I'll I'll use skein from earlier. If people want to see examples of literally they're referred to as double muscled. Cattle. So these are mutations due to mutations in the coding sequence of bovine myostatin. Belgian blue. is the one that you can most easily find. And this the photographs of this are quite mind boggling. Oh, yeah, Belgium Blue is great. Yep. Yeah.

The the traps on that thing are just crazy. The the everything. It doesn't look like uh it doesn't even look like they should be able to walk. And in some cases. Due to selective breeding and other types of Interventions. chickens now who are bred for consumption. You know, they can't support their own weight on their legs past whatever it is and making it up. Something like week six. But I don't want to take us too far afield. We're going to come back to the network state. But I I I actually I w I was talking about this thing you just said and let's come to the networks here. So

So one thing that's kind of important about this is and this will relate to the network state thing. You know, the title of that book, Game of Shadows. In some of the words. C And you know, fraud and you know, so and so forth.

The fundamental issue and even with the Soviets and so on, right? All of this stuff is being done In the shadows, it's on the border of the system, it's by the bad guys. What it reminds me of is actually in the Soviet Union itself. There were Two kinds of groups that talked about capitalism.

The first Were the dissidents, you know, the guys who eventually you know became reformers and so on and so forth. That was a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of people. They're the people who could Get outside of Their childhood and all the propaganda on how evil those capitalists were, weren't they imperialists, weren't they pointing guns at us? Hadn't they killed our, you know, brave Soviet soldiers? Hadn't Lenin's revolution hadn't everybody sacrificed so that you, the worker, could have this bountiful life and you're so ungrateful and evil? So

Th there's that small group of academic types who could get outside their head, but there's a much Larger second group of capitalists. You know what those guys were? Tell me. The black marketers. And they live down.

to every stereotype of the regime, they would cut you for some vodka. They were totally unregulated shadow capitalists. So are those guys team Bology? I'm just trying to uh No. Ting this together. My point is that when Ar moral premis.

W in the Soviet Union, the moral premise was capitalism is bad. And if capitalism is a crime, only criminals will be capitalists. Yeah. And it took enormous amount of effort over seventy years. To t flip that moral premise and be like Look, capitalism is at least acceptable. If not good.

And then what happens is all of this stuff You unlock The basic Dispassionate. gears of civil society. You have accounting, and you have supply chains, and you have financing, you have all this stuff that we think of as like

boring corporate stuff where it comes out of the shadows. Into you have courts that deal with edge cases because in the abstract Basically once you've denounced capitalism and push it into a corner, the Soviets could say And what happens if someone cheats you, huh? Well, that's what happens under capitalism. And the answer is yes, it does. True, that scams or whatever do happen, but we have courts and we have mechanisms and you know in in the abstract, the whole thing can be denounced as obviously unworkable and so complicated. You have all these edge cases. You have the chancery court, which determines in the liquidation who gets what kind of outcome. You have senior debt, you have all this type of stuff, right?

Sorry, I know I'm mixing a few things. Point is you have like Deliver law and corporate law, you have liquidation preferences, you have Went from Belgium blue to Delaware corporate law in twenty seven seconds. I I like it. The range. Point is basically that there are a lot of details when you actually come and implement capitalism. And from the outside, if you haven't done that, it makes it sound like

Too complicated, a Ruth Goldberg machine that'll never work. Why don't we just, you know, seize everything, comrade, and and redistribute it from the state. And the thing that's already there is the thing that's functioning. And the thing that isn't there is the thing that seems can be attacked in a thousand ways is the system that doesn't exist. Point is Once that moral premise got flipped. Once it was allowed for the bulk of ninety nine percent of people to engage in this.

Yeah, there's a whole machinery that comes in. And so Once we can flip that moral premis. And we can say Look.

Life extension is good. And more muscle is good. And the whole Icarus narrative is wrong, the right brothers are right. Icarus is a myth, right? Right, brothers, that's a reality. We actually were able to fly. Icarus is just a mythical thing. The reality is a Boeing seven forty seven, right? Or or whatever, Airbus, you know, may name name name some recent aviation government that hasn't had some issues, but whatever, right? The overall, you know, planes work.

So in the same way, once we flip that moral premise and say Optimalism good. You know, enhancement good. Then we start shifting it out of Gamer Shadows and Soviets and

You know, the doping scandals and cheat all those negative adjectives and we start going to the positive stuff of, you know, what Herman is doing and what David Sinclair is doing and so on and so forth. I the reason I just want to identify this I actually think that moral language, that moral premise. is everything and it's often not articulated. No, I I agree with you. And just like making the market Setting the price depth charts. We we talked a bit about the Overton window and sort of uh Shifting that depth chart as a way of becoming political if you're an active player, so to speak. And I think

That also applies here. I just want to say a couple of things about the doping and performance enhancement just for people who may be interested in going a little bit deeper. Another documentary, and you can learn a lot just by watching. First I would suggest. Bigger, bigger, faster, strong. Bigger it well, it's it's bigger, faster, stronger, but I think for trademark purposes they probably flipped it. Bigger, stronger, faster is a documentary that was

that was made in two thousand eight and it is a fascinating exploration of performance enhancement and it it also shows The advantages that richer countries have in performance. And in a sense, doping and competition at the highest levels is very similar to

Let's call it tax optimization on the positive side. Tax evasion if you want to look at it through that lens or with the with that legal painting. is they they will look at something like in this documentary, use of erythropootin. So EPO used to increase the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood, right? Which is why athletes also will use blood doping. So they might have use of EPO banned by

wada, right? So you cannot do this in the realm of sports. That's against the rules. Then you have blood doping, which at different points and in different capacities has been either allowed or not allowed. It's the same thing, right? If you train at altitude and then you develop blood that has more oxygen carrying capabilities, and then you infuse yourself with that. That's kind of quadrant. Two. Then you have quadrant three, which is like sleeping in an altitude simulation tent. So and they're different paradigms. What are the axes? Sorry, I didn't I missed the axes. What are the axes? But forget about the axes for now. It's just comparing four to four different options. And then there are a few others. And it's just to point out that The

And again, I don't want to dwell on this too long. you can look at four approaches to achieving the same ends with different legal status or different status with respect to the rules. Which doesn't automatically mean all of them should be allowed, in my opinion. But secondarily, like there are countries that do not have Olympic sized swimming pools to train in and nonetheless have athletes who are sent to the Olympics to compete in swimming, right? So I I do think that uh there are

Uh in some respects Incentives that are aligned with athletes to preserve the current state of doping because with more money, with more state support, you can actually game the system more effectively than Not necessarily lesser players, but Less

Resourced. players. So I would just say that I don't think all athletes would want to agree to nor teams nor states to say the all drug Olympics. If people haven't seen the all drug Olympics skit From Saturday Night Live, they should look it up. It's actually pretty entertaining. So

Let me poke on this a little bit because I think I'm going to do it. Then you can poke on this too. I would also say Definitely I'm not a doctor, I don't play one on the internet, but people should Muscle mass is good to a point. Preserving muscle mass, avoiding sc uh age related muscle atrophy like sarcopenia, super important, bone density, et cetera. But there are arguments to be made that

Stepping on the gas with anabolism. Could be contraindicated for Longevity past a certain point. So I would just say there's a there's a balancing act between sort of autophagy and and a number of things we know work for longevity as it stands right now, at least in mice and and possibly in canines.

And that balance is something I think people should should look at there will be a future guest on this podcast, Doctor Matt uh Caberline. That conversation's gonna get into a lot of that. Uh but please uh feel free to push back or tease apart. One thing, just one thing I actually I love I love this is great, I'm learning stuff also. But The framing of it in terms of athletes and the Olympic Games or Drug Olympic Games and so on. The thing is, you know, as as you're aware, in this century or in this

We're moving away from spectator sports and I don't really care that much about the Olympics or the NFL or something like that, but I do care about physical fitness. and running and you know lifting and so on and so forth and fine for somebody who wants to go and do it professionally, but I do care about the average person's health. And for the average person, or you know, any person That's not a game.

The absolute metric is What is their personal muscle mass? What is that you know, when you when when a hundred people run around a track, maybe one of them wins. But all of them the other ninety nine also get a cardiovascular benefit from that. And that's kind of what I'm focused on is Not the zero sum aspect of

Who wins this zero sum competition where it's like this artificial and constrained environment. But rather the non-zero sum of how do we improve people's health across a population generally, even if it is true that these guys who are like extreme elite competitors have something to teach us broadly. Like uh nothing on the field really matters to anybody outside the field beyond the entertainment unless

There's some cool discoveries that come out of there, and we're curing testicular cancer, or or we're we're having treatments for them that make them You know, run around like Lance Armstrong after after his thing. That's that's kind of where I'm coming from. Yeah, I I think we're more on the same page than you might imagine. The Yeah, what what I would say also is the point I'm making is that the dose makes the poison, right? Paracels with so many things. And this includes volume of exercise. It includes drug intake and Much like we were talking about technology and looking around corners and seeing what will be obvious or at least

widespread, say five years from now, you can do that with performance enhancement in sports very easily, too. You look at race horses and then you look at, say, patients with wasting diseases who are using various interventions because it is their Or they view it as their means of last resort. And then you have Bodybuilders and then professional athletes, and then you have rich people. Right. So if you just kinda track that progression, you can spot a lot of things super early. I mean you can spot medafinil technology. Yeah, you can you can spot midafonil.

provisual things like that. Ten years before it's widely. known as a possible performance enhancer for cognition, which I would not recommend people do, by the way. It's still pretty poorly understood. Honestly, just monitoring that funnel And publishing that funnel on a quarterly basis would be one of the most important newsletters. Yeah.

That would be an awesome funnel to I put it into f the four hour body when I wrote it in two thousand eight, two thousand nine. It's still reliable. You can track that stuff. It does require some Manual labor just because uh uh competitive horse trainers aren't just gonna sit down with you over a cup of tea the first time you meet and tell you all about their doping regimen. Right. For a lot of a lot of understandable reasons. We need a different word though, but I agree with you on like You know, The exact

Dose of something more is not always b I agree with all that. The only thing that I'm seeing is just And it seems like a small thing, but it's like I just don't like to even use words like Doping shadows, cheating, et cetera, et cetera, because that is conceding

Territory. To folks that want to pathologize Improvement. That's the only thing I'm coming at is that like to sort of pull that chip that's that limiter chip That's in our heads, you know, and and remove that chip.

And basically like actually no limits. What uh So I think I think it is important to develop an awareness of the words you use, because at least if you understand those words, they sort of form the concepts and the boundaries of your thinking. At least the boundaries of what you deem acceptable and unacceptable. Right. So you should be very aware of the language you use. Again, I don't want to dwell too long on this. I will just say that if the opposite of pathologizing use of

just to choose one class, like anabolic Androgenic steroids. If the opposite of pathologizing it is Freedom in the form of Anyone taking however much they want whenever they want. I don't think

That swing to the opposite end of the pendulum is going to be a net positive for people. So so the awareness is important, but as is the due diligence, right? I have used a a whole slew of these compounds post surgically to ensure full recovery of my left shoulder, which I had completely reconstructed. And I've talked about this publicly because I'm not ashamed of it. I think it was absolutely Strategically, medically.

the right thing to do. I'm not recommending people do that. There are both medical and uh legal consequences that can follow from all these things. So Speak to your GP, speak to your physician, if you want to discuss this kind of thing. But

I just wanna make it clear that I'm not just an observer in this sphere. I do think there are times and places where it makes A lot of sense. Molecules, but they can be Misused with long term consequences.

Totally. So Two things there. One is The the reason that the Soviet example is actually quite good. Is They would also kind of jump to, oh, so you're four capitalism.

Well then. Everyone can auction everything at all times and everything is always, you know, prices and evil hedge funders will take your house and the thing is that All I'm saying is Лецна парізізи, снаподис а бокс. Let us actually

Think I mean You don't have to go to the other extreme of Roid it up, whatever, whatever, you know, the thing that jumps to people's minds. There's an entire infrastructure, an entire continuum that can be built out when we're not just balled up in the corner of Game of Shadows and Cheats and Doping and Pathologization. That's all I'm saying. It is a great title, though. It is a great title, just the fact that you remembered it and have said it so many times. It's a good title. You gotta be I mean, I know it's not your style of title. It's a great title. That's a Yeah, yeah. Well no no that's it's like death tax. It sticks. It sticks in your head, right? It's deliberate. So that's exactly right. I mean here

There's actually this amazing app, you know, that people it came out recently, Dolly Two. Okay. Yeah. And what I love about have you ever heard about this? So you can synthesize You've access to it. Great. Good. So and there's also like open source, not open source, there's there's more public versions that people can mess around. So the thing is. That shows the power of words. More it to somebody who's of a quantitative bent. More than anything I could say.

Because You can write Three words. In to Dolly Two. And get

An image. out from it and it's uh it's effectively like an extremely compact programming language. I say like I don't know, uh Bology uh you know, improving musculature. I don't know, something like that. Whatever, let's see. But point is that If you were to actually write that out in computer code to build some of those images, it would be thousands, tens of hundreds of thousands of lines of code for some of them, but you can literally do it in like

Three words. And you know, when people say, Oh, you know, I'm not a I'm not a number, I'm a name. There's actually a a wisdom to that because Birds are like these super high dimensional vectors. And you can combine them to these really complicated manipulations in just a few phrases.

And what's kinda interesting is that Three different technologies are all converging on the power of really, really short phrases. And those are AI as we just talked about. You know where you just give a few words and the computer is able to figure out All of this stuff.

Crypto Where you have twelve words or thirteen or fourteen words and it's mnemonic. Which stores all of your cryptocurrency. Right. I mean literally you could store like a hundred million dollars in like those those words, you know, you could store all these possessions.

And then Obviously social media. Where A few words. Can be a hashtag or a phrase that starts an entire movement and that is on every building and everybody quotes and and so on and so forth.

So those three points, by the way, why those three technologies I know it's almost Seems trite to say AI, crypto, and social. But those three technologies are in a sense cognitive or social technologies in a way that Rocket ships and Internal combustion engines are not because those don't interact with humans, these do.

You know, these touch humans in different ways. So basically I used to kind of Think that all the word games that they played in academia in the humanities weren't that important and it it was just bore me as to why they were doing this. And now I realize it's like insanely important. Because

A slight tonal shift. In a word, that Russell conjugation thing we were talking about you would get a totally different looking Dolly 2 image. Based on the tone. Sure.

Concrete. Right? Building our own vocabulary. And thinking about it consciously from the beginning, sometimes coming up with words. For example, you know, this guy, Peter Turchin, okay, who I like some of his work. Do you know him? I do not. Have you heard of him?

Yes, no. Nope. So he came up with a Cleodynamics. Cleodynamics is um

Clio is like the muse of history. And essentially the concept is he named this term. It's like the science of history. It's like a a quantitative form of history. And so he just took that term Clio and he put it in front of this kind of a Nice.

sound to it and it's kinda cool. And he just made that word and he's using that word and I think it's a great word, right? And what this is similar to, by the way. is if you're an engineer And you're writing code. Well you'll find is and you probably did this actually when you're writing your book, you'll find that you write

a hundred or a thousand or five thousand lines of code. And there's certain concepts, certain nouns and verbs that you keep using. And then you you know, at some time on line thirty seven hundred, you're like, Oh That noun. Is actually the core data structure of my entire program. And that verb is the core function of the whole thing. It's a little bit like you're writing a book, and on chapter three, you're like, Wow, that

should be like the title. Of the chapter. Yeah, yeah. Or the book. Yeah. Yeah, they c or the screenplay, right? They come they come up with the title on page seventy eight.

Where it somehow emerges as a theme. With a label. Mm-hmm. Let's start. But the simple question

Which is what is What on earth is a network state? We're just talking about words. And this is you know something which Yeah.

chosen for this purpose to kind of have Several different definitions. So I've got a I've got a definition of it and then I've got like several different ways of talking about it. So here's a definition and then it won't seem Informative and then I'll go through it.

Or at least it'll seem like a mouthful. So a network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness. A recognized founder, a capacity for collective action. An in person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories A virtual capital

And an on Shian census that proves a large enough population income And real estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. Okay. Yeah. You might be like, Jesus, that's like that's not a sentence. That's a that's a paragraph. That's a

You know, right? And the thing is that There's tons of things which are very Simple. Two.

Describe or interact with, but very complicated to implement. And you know, for example, Google has this really simple interface of you type something into it. But to implement Google Is actually quite

Difficult. And In particular, if you asked me to define not what a network state is, but what a nation state is. People will kinda have a tough time doing that. You know, they might say oh it's uh it's kinda like

regions on the map or something like that. It's a country. But When you you want to give like a precise definition, it's not like a circular definition. The the term nation state, for example, first, nation and state means something different. Nation. comes from the root word, uh same root as like natality. It's like from common birth.

And so A nation that's like a group of people with a common culture, like the Japanese people. And they have The Japanese language and Japanese culture. And they're ethnically Japanese and so on and so forth.

And the state is the system of laws and government That that nation Sets up. To manage its own affairs.

And they're as different as Лет цей Лейбор. And management in a factory. And the same nation could have very different states. On top of it.

They have had many different kinds of governments and so on on top. But In our Day to day language.

The nation and the state are conflated. For example, you'll hear hear the term National security. Or Multinational.

Or National is a synonym for federal. as national meaning like the entire but they're they're actually conflating things because Really a multinational It's not like

It's operating with the Japanese nation and the Catalonian nation and the Kurdish nation and so on. It's multi jurisdictional. It's operating in This jurisdiction and that jurisdiction won't it sound like so so the word underneath has kinda gotten abused. Similarly, like national security, it's really like

state security, it's not really the security of the people, they're sort of abusing a term, right? So there's been this drift and this kind of confusion. And the reason for that is that states want to identify themselves with the nation. In the same way that like You know.

Management wants to identify itself as being the same as labor and to not have a division between the two. Now sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad. It's good if management is actually aligned with labor. And economically aligned and so on. It's bad if management is disaligned, and in the, you know, stereotypical case of like the evil, you know, CEO exec with the golden parachutes, that's a bad case, right?

And so in the same way, when you know people try to make this extremely tight identification between the state and the nation It's not actually the case. The people can have a totally different government if they so choose. They shrug it off. And that tiny layer of folks that are in the government

just di gets deprecated and a new government is set up. If people pull their pointers away and they set up a new thing. That's what happened, for example, in the former Soviet Union. when the Soviet governments fell. Okay. So my my point is that These things that we interact with on a daily basis, we don't usually have to go to first principles. And define them from scratch, right?

You know, if we just talk about a The definition of a nation state this itself The reason I want to talk about that for a second is It will be more clear why the nation state is a complicated thing in why a network state has a multi clausal definition because each one of those clauses

Takes care. Of A different failure mode. 'Cause there's all these different people who've tried to start new countries. And

Just like a a venture capitalist deal. We'll have This term and that term it'll have It'll have drag along, it'll have liquidation, it'll have, you know, prorata rights, and so on. Every single term in this in this contract. Anticipate some conflict or failure that had happened in the past.

And that's why it's a more complicated contract. And the same way this definition of a network state goes through a ton of different kinds of failures from You know, just putting a flag on an oil platform and trying to call that a country. to going and trying to start a war and so on. There's many different ways that people have failed to start new countries.

And this definition I think is constructed to route around all of them. Okay. So that's why it's a complicated definition. All right, but first Let me just kinda talk about

Like the definition of a nation state. So first like The the nation itself. You know, we just talked about how that is This body of people that's united by common descent, history, culture, or language, and the state

Is the government. But Even that question of okay, fine, but what's what is a nation You can actually drill into it, and all of these thinkers, all these famous thinkers, Rousseau and Hegel and Marx and Mill, all these guys that you read about in in school, they may vaguely remember. All of them are now actually something that an entrepreneur or someone who's very applied would have to think about.

Why is that? Because If in the twenty tens we start to ask a question that we had never really asked. In the two thousands, and that question was What is a currency?

Okay. In the twenty twenties We're gonna start asking the question, what is a nation? And It it actually becomes something where you know the thing we took for granted that we thought of as sorry biologist, just just just a quick question. Yes. Nation or a state? Nation.

First. What is a nation, okay. The nation comes before the state. You could have a nation without a state. For example, the Kurds

are a group of people that h have a common ethnicity and culture and so on, but they don't actually have a state The Catalonians. You know, they're in the territory of the Spanish Where the Spanish state governs but there are people without a state. And actually when you think about this, right, like

The United Nations Is actually a misnomer. It's more like The selected nations that happen to have their states. There was actually a guy, you know, the guy who's currently running Kazakhstan and he's like

You know, we can't endorse The principle of self determination for every nation is 'Cause we'd go from a hundred ninety two in the UN to like six hundred nations. 'Cause all of these new states would pop up, rather, because there's all of these hundreds of nations around the world that do not have their own state. You know, the thing is when you start

Seeing it this way, it's a lens on the map. That Most people just don't think about it's uh you're turning a constant into a variable. And that is when we talked about earlier about volatility increasing. The biggest way that you can increase volatility is you turn something that You were at total consensus on and a hundred percent of people agreed on into something that

Only eighty or seventy or sixty or fifty percent of people agree on. And when you do that, when you take that constant, you turn it into a variable. All kinds of assumptions change. If you're a programmer, for example The difference between operating and assuming that it's just the United States

Or just in English. Versus Coding your program. To work in every country and every language? is an enormous change.

You know, it can be done. But it's like It's a significant difference. Concretely, why why do I say constants are becoming variables? Well There are PC examples I can point out, and there's un P C examples.

Let's do both. Alright, let's do both? Okay, well Constant? Two genders. Variable in genders.

Okay. That's a great example of a constant that became a variable where there was something that was simply an assumption In the two thousands. That very much turn into a variable. And

Literally all kinds of back ends and You know, databases had to get rewritten. Turning something that was assumed as a constant into a variable. Another example is The US dollar.

Before Bitcoin no one really thought that That was a variable. And now it is. It's a huge variable. It's something that a significant fraction Think of every day.

as something that they can swap in or swap out to at some percentage. And it's no longer, you know. It's no longer the thing that you must reform, it is the thing that you can exit from. And once you kind of start seeing this, that constants are becoming variables. You you start seeing it across life.

And Very roughly speaking. You have I'll just use this phrasing, right? But you have the woke in the tech. Who are both

sort of in different ways disaligned with each other. But also aligned with each other in terms of turning all sociopolitical constants into variables? And all Economic things into variables. Let me give the tech side because it's easier to talk about.

For example Is a meeting. Is it in person? Or is it virtual? Now We have to actually choose, right?

Oh. When you're reading that book, are you reading that book physically or you're reading the digital copy? Simply the digital version of everything starts introducing combinatorial complexity. Right. Oh, you're talking to somebody? Was it on the phone or is it one of these like 10 different apps? Oh, you're watching the news?

Well it's no longer C B S A B C N B C, but it's like Whatever number of different things. Okay. Now there's a good to that, there's there's alternatives, there's choice, there's all this type of stuff. Obviously, people have said there's a bad. Oh my God, you know, our people are living in their own filter bubbles. Really, they're mad that there's more than one filter bubble, but basically this is great decentralization, great fragmentation. So all these constants are becoming variables. On the economic side, and tech is pushing that.

And then on the political side. Woke is pushing that. And lots of things that people just sort of took for granted. For example The police.

Right. Do you have a society with police? People kinda just thought of that as a constant. And then you have A significant double digit percentage of the population, less today, but that was actually saying defund the police, right? Abolish the police. And you have an NYT op ed that says yes, we really mean defund the police.

That's a big variable. That's a huge, enormous change. That is a What I call in the book, I call that a moral flipping or moral inversion. Where

Something that was Good becomes bad. Or bad becomes good. And When you have something like that.

you start to actually create different nations. Because You have the fundamental premises. Of what are good and bad. In a population.

Change. And the US is not really a nation state, arguably it never was. But it's not really a nation state. At a minimum it's a bi national republic which has the red and blue nations underneath it. And you can see this. There's graphs like for example uh There's a CGR article.

From twenty seventeen that I link. Where you can actually see on social media Yeah, the red and the blue. Are literally like different cluster.

And it it pops out to you. You know, they just literally only link to each other. And one way of looking at this that's really unambiguous is If you look at Marrins.

People typically will say that they will marry You know, across their race. But you know what? Democrats will only marry Democrats to a higher percentage, and Republicans are tending to only want to marry other Republicans. And that is Being growing.

Right. And the thing is that you iterate that out one generation, and what happens? That becomes ethnicity. Ideology becomes biology if your political party is so important to you that you are ne not going to marry outside it. then in like one generation it becomes at a minimum like Protestant Catholic

Sunni Shi Or something like that. Huda Tutsi, whatever. You know, it it becomes something that's actually tribal. As opposed to ideological, the ideology changes the biology. So these are things where There extremely deep questions.

Where you just didn't even have to think of them as variables because You're born into a world where they've been fixed as constants. How does the network state solve for this Or

Codify it up front or allow for those types of moral flippenings. So short answer is That It says that the nation Is the network

That forms online. That Is defined by the moral premises they share. And you literally have like a survey. Which is

The good bad survey. And sometimes explicit is better than implicit. For example. You have The founder.

Actually Something which is like I believe, you know, capitalism is good bad. Law enforcement is good bad. Entrepreneurship is good, bad. Human improvement is good, bad.

Two genders are good, bad, and so on and so forth. You have a set of preferences, right? And some of them are gonna be not the extremely hot button issues, but they're gonna be things like Carbs. Good, bad, and so on and so forth. Okay, and I'll come to that actually. I know it sounds funny. But

One of the things about this is Once you define a community On the basis of what they think is good and bad. It's so strong. It's ridiculously strong.

Because they agree on the basic premises. And then they can crowdfund that you don't have politics in the same way because they don't have internal disagreement, they have alignment. They agree on what the good world should be. And then they can crowdfund things, they can appoint leaders, they are essentially organically aligned. For a cause.

And that filtering of the internet into these network nations Is actually the first step. What it's not.

And the reason this the whole, you know, the definition is all these clauses to give you some examples of failure modes, right? I if you go to YouTube and you look at like how to start a new country or whatever, you know what all the things start with? Like they're kinda joke videos, but they're kinda funny. You know what they all start with? Get some land. And they're like

But all the land is spoken for blah blah blah blah. So It just immediat like the first step they take. Is the wrong step. Why?

Because Land is the most contentious Zero sum Insanely fought over thing. I mean

You know, like Russia and Japan are fighting over like the Kurals and like, you know, there's little islands in the Mediterranean, the Turkish and Greek states are fighting over people fight over land so much over the stupid you know, Canada and Denmark. We're fighting over this stupid uninhabited piece of land. Did you know I'm talking about? Like this um No, it doesn't surprise me. But

Yeah. Humans like to fight. Yeah, Hans Island, okay. Here's the thing.

Why would they fight over something like Han's Island if you go and look at it, okay? It's this uninhabited Frozen island in the middle of nowhere. The non obvious thing, very non obvious, I think. is that they can see it on a map. In the eighteen hundreds there was this fight in the uh conflict was called fifty four forty or fight.

You familiar with this? Say that one more time? Prob probably not. Fifty four forty or fight. No. I was I was stuck looking up the Falkland Islands because I was thinking about the Falkland Islands in this context as well. The Islas Malvinas, but I don't I don't know fifty four, forty, or fight. Okay, so fifty four forty or fight.

was basically this mid eightin hundreds Conflict. over the boundary In the Pacific Northwest. And the thing is is basically like

The Americans wanted the border with uh, you know, what we would now call Canada to be at fifty four forty. Or They would fight a war. Now, in actuality it wasn't it I think it turned out to be like the forty ninth parallel rather than you know fifty four forty.

But the thing is, think about that. The latitude and longitude. This thing, this map construct that everybody could share. became something that lots of eyes were on, and then they were fighting over it. Now here's you might say that's like the most obvious thing in the world biology, why why which of course they'll fight over a map, they can see a map, et cetera.

But Let me complicate that picture. First is the map was actually not always visible. In you know, pre fourteen ninety two, much of the world was unmapped. The entire quote new world was not mapped.

And maps actually just got better and better. And you know, for a long time there was like there be dragons. You know, there were parts of the world that were unmapped. There was what's called Terra Incognita. And there's this time of mystery. It was the frontier, but it was a frontier to the nth power. 'Cause you didn't even know the land existed.

And it kinda seems like we'll never actually have that again until we get to space. But I argue it's actually existing again already in a non obvious way, and that is on the internet. Point is, when people can see something, they will fight over it. You know, the the concept of mimesis, right? If they can see it, they'll fight over it.

So you can see Hans Island, they fight over it. They see a border, they fight over it. And you can see, for example, the Franco German border between France and Germany. You know the border you can't see It's the border between Twitter and Facebook. And what do I mean by that, what is the border between Twitter and Facebook? Well

Twitter has like three hundred thirty million users. Facebook has three point six billion. And for each person You could define the border as For their time. Spent on so let's say there's that's three point six billion Facebook users, three hundred thirty million Twitter users.

The total is three point nine three billion max. It might be like three point seven. There might be an overlap there, okay? For each person you can define Zero to a hundred percent in terms of the time that they would spend on either their hundred percent Twitter or a hundred percent Facebook. The border region would be those people who are fifty fifty. And that might be a group of

Seventy million people in the world who spend exactly fifty percent of their time. And there's people who are farther from the border who are thirty seventy and people who are really far from the border near the capital who are a hundred zero and vice versa. Okay. What I'm describing there is literally something that you could compute. It's not an abstract thing if you had access to all of Twitter's data set and all of Facebook's data set. You could compute this.

Here's the thing. Nobody has access to both. So nobody can compute it. Or you can estimate it and so on. But unless

Twitter and Facebook got acquired, they wouldn't be able to literally find out who was on the border region. They could do sampling and stuff. But s there's a cloud that is descended. These gigantic networks cannot really see their borders that well. They can see themselves.

But they can't see what people are doing outside. They have less Control in a sense. And Less visibility, and so instead what they'll they'd fight over

Are the visible things Like you know, the use of the network and so on and so forth. But they're gonna fight over border regions less. The only way they can fight over a border region is to make their product so attractive, they can pull people from that border region. Now by the way, lest it me said that these are like trivial things to talk about. Twitter's three hundred thirty million people, Facebook's three point six million, both of those are bigger than France and Germany combined.

These are these are enormous, enormous networks. It's like a huge chunk of humanity. And the fact that we cannot see the border region. means that the entire geography of like how humans operate is actually changing. You have to kind of remap how you think about geography'cause Yeah. Physical space.

For example, Two people, you know, they're they're near each other, there's a physical distance metric and so on. In digital space. It's like a bunch of islands that can snap too. Like I can be near you as I am right now and then Snap away and be really far.

And that applies not just for individuals, but for entire continents. So for example In the physical world. Russia is basically always gonna be adjacent to

Japan. And Ukraine and Iran and so on. Like Russia, the country doesn't move around that much. I mean its borders can expand and contract, with the Soviet Union it's bigger, when's when it's the Russian Federation it's smaller. But it's not like it's suddenly adjacent to Argentina. It's not suddenly adjacent to Mexico.

It was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis at the at the height of its power, but it it's not like projecting power all over the world. By contrast. somebody like Vitalik of Ethereum, his network of people, or you know the uh the Solana network Suddenly This network can be adjacent to another network.

Solana can start taking users from Ethereum. It's like this huge island. Thirty million people just surfaced out of the ocean next to Japan. And started like

Pulling people from them. God Yah Yes, Godella. Anyway, Yeah, exactly, right? So it's like Atlantis is real, digital Atlantis is huge island. What the heck?

And and it can then disappear and vanish. And you can also vanish. Your your thing can kind of be like, hey, you know, we want to We wanna cut off those network relations and we wanna move our island somewhere else. So the thing is that I'm downloading one of about

I don't know how many ten, fifteen different things that turn constants into variables. One of them is the nation that we we take for granted, the single group of people is breaking up into multiple nations that are defined by networks. Another is the currency is breaking up. Okay.

A third is The geography is changing. A fourth is The moral principles That underpin society are changing.

And so when like all those things are in flux You kinda need Something to catch it on the other side. Because otherwise what people will do is they will sort of try to assert That old thing that just doesn't exist anymore.

It'll be something that does not acknowledge the reality of the situation. It's like Closing the barn door and then expecting to get all the horses back inside. When There were forces that were more powerful than that.

that spread them all out, that those entropic forces. You have to kind of go to where those horses are and loop them up and maybe have new ranches or whatever there to to extend the metaphor. Okay. So what I'd love to do Is And this is just how I like to think about teaching in general. Like if you're teaching someone a golf swing, like you show you show them once, you do it side by side, then you have them take a couple of free swings and then provide feedback after that. What I'd like to do is just paint a picture or get your help to paint a picture.

Of where we might be going and then we can back into digging into some of the nuts and bolts and concepts. I'd like to Break that into two pieces. So let me let me just set a framework, if I may. So it could be five years.

It could be ten years or whatever time frame. Well let's just kinda pick a time frame. Maybe it's five years, but you can pick. The first is just take a few minutes. to paint a picture for where you see America. In

a handful of years. And again, you can pick the the distance just sho so we have an idea and you have had some predictive accuracy with a number of things over the last handful of podcast conversations. So just to set the stage for like okay. If you're Default is kind of do nothing, don't move. This is what you might see coming based on A, B, and C. And then just a few minutes on that. And then after that, painting a picture of If you were taking the pro side of a bet, so let's just say you're talking to

Some politician and they're like ah Bology, you're full of shit blah blah blah. US is gonna be this, this, and this, and not much is gonna change. And and I'm gonna bet a million dollars that this network state thing is not gonna be a thing. And you said, okay, I'm gonna take a million dollars on the other side of the bet. And uh here's the picture I'm gonna paint as a possibility. And because when I hear network state, you know, a lot of things come to mind. I'm listening very carefully. I'm thinking on one hand of like e citizenship in Estonia and how that might be tweaked because most of the people who are getting this e citizenship have no plans to actually reside in Estonia. And then I'm thinking on the other hand of like Christiania, this uh basically sort started as a sort of squatter's

territory within Copenhagen in Denmark that has its own Social structure of sorts, zone economy of sorts. I have a lot of these free floating ideas, but if you could just talk about like okay. Handful of years out. what your vision of the US looks like and what might change. And then if you had to paint a picture of like

If I had to bet on a nation state coming into existence and getting some traction, this is what I could see happening. And then we can back into the rest of it. So let me start with the with the first part first. This is just a scenario analysis. Do I say it's a base case?

Let's say I think it's probable. I can't say it's a hundred percent. And there's always there's things that happen. That are reactions to trends you predict, but it's hard to predict exactly what that reaction is. But here it goes. I call it

American Anarchy Chinese control The international intermediate and the recentralized center. Okay. base level worldview for what happens in the next five, ten years.

So what is American anarchy. So I actually wrote about this for Barry Weiss's newsletter last year, how we changed our minds in twenty twenty one. But the short version is Some groups think

Everything will basically be as it is, the so called Tyler Cohen calls base rater. They just think everything is gonna be the same. Everybody's kind of. agitated or paranoid or whatever, and it's just all gonna be okay. Whatever. And then you've got folks who think that the US is descending into

Either fascism or Communism or something like that respectively. Essentially right or left authoritarianism. And they are reacting to that and they're like, Oh my God, you know, and you're seeing this every single day on social media, people are pushing back against this. And the thing is that While those two groups

All share You know, they've got huge differences. One thing that is true verbally, rhetorically, conceptually, cognitively, is even if You know, there's left and right vectors that point like this. They're both pointing anti authority. They're pointing

Against hierarchy. And so the left might say We are all equal, and the right might say, You ain't the boss of me. But both of them point towards this kind of concept of You can't control me.

No no hierarchy is legitimate. I do not trust authority, and so on and so forth. That is a subtle vector sum on one axis, even if the left and right cancel. The anti authoritarian aspect is summing. And

If that is the case. then it's the thing that is not conceptualized that we're actually driving towards. The consensus is for anarchy. Because

The left and the right can agree That the hierarchy is illegitimate in some way, that the institutions are illegitimate Whether it's institutionally exist, or if it is You know, it's all the deep state and so.

Both of them are tugging on it in a certain way where there's a vector sum towards Taking it apart. And the thing about that is American anarchy is like the ultimate in liberty and equality. Everybody's equal because there's no bosses.

Everybody's free because there's no laws or hierarchy, you know. There's an aspect of this that is the ultimate of democracy and the ultimate of capitalism. Yeah, everybody's doing whatever they want. And that strain exists in American culture on kind of both sides, you know, there is a deep Liberty, you know, kind of thing. And then you've got folks who will, you know, actually say anarchy is good.

And they might say it as good as anarcho-communism, or they might say crypto anarchy, where you're you're imposing you know something like Bitcoin on top of it. Basically it's like a The physical is very chaotic, but You have a digital world and digital property rights that are there, right? So some kind of structure online. But The issue here is

We have sort of seen what the transition to anarchy looks like. In many countries around the world over the last couple of decades. Uh, there's a book by Barbara Walter called How Civil War Start. Which You know, there's a lot of things I disagree with her on.

But I actually give her credit for essentially Pointing out that many American interventions and other interventions overseas, NATO and s you know other stuff Over the last few декадs. They've been in the intent of spreading democracy and they've caused anarchy. Like

Mexico is way more chaotic than it was. Ion Grillow has this book called El Narco, where he talks about how Mexico's democratic transition attended This Huge burst. in the narco terrorism and and violent gangs and so on and so forth. Tunisia, Libya

Egypt. А банч have essentially we we've sort of seen them go from Reasonably okay to Kind of anarchic.

And there's a playbook for how that looks. And if you before and after If you just teleported somebody from two thousand five Or nineteen ninety five, ninety seven essentially. You know, you can track it back and be like, Well, Oklahoma City happened in nineteen ninety five and there's a unibomber. There's always something that you can say.

Was a trend line all the way through? But Visual capitalist, for example, has a graph of Riots and Shootings and

Bombings and stuff like that. And it's up and to the right. It is it is something where it's like surged in twenty twenty and it came back down. But it's rising. And it reminds me a lot of crypto. Where what happens is it surges and it crashes and then people write it off and they're like

It's over, you know, like that crypto thing is done. But it's not done, it's coming back, and that surge of anarchy in twenty twenty that came down Yeah, twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two is more peaceful than twenty twenty. But it's way more anarchic. than twenty seventeen, which is itself more anarchic than twenty twelve. So American anarchy is on the rise.

And what does that actually look like? There's lots of ways it can play out. I happen to think it's gonna be something like Maximalists versus wokes in the US. There's lots of different triggers. Okay. This is just a sci fi scenario right now. I'm just spitballing, but by maximalists you mean like BTC maximalists or what kind of maximalists? Yeah. Bitcoin maximalists versus wokes. Are there enough Bitcoin maximalists in the US to constitute a critical mass? For that?

So I think bitcoin maximalism is the most important ideology in the world that people don't know about. Mm-hmm. Okay. And uh why do I say that? I I can hear people clapping through the silence. A lot of people listening are gonna be getting out of their seats for that one, so please continue. Well I

The thing is that from the outside, people would think I'm a Bitcoin maximalist. But it's a log scale. To a truly devout orthodox Bitcoin Maximalist. I'm Astetus Cook. Okay, so I'm

Because I'm I'm fundamentally like Like a pragmatist, basically, right? And You're a very middle of the road crypto anarchist. I'm just kidding. Well, but I'm not a crypto. See, that's the thing is in this book I'm actually not a crypto anarchist. No, no, it's not what you're seeing is actually. It's extremely important because Oh, so much I could say. Let me see if I can download it.

First is One of the chapters in the book is centralisation, decentralization. Recentralization. And the thing is when you say recentralization What happens is both the centralized and decentralized guys look at you like you've got

Four eyes. The centralized guys say, Wait a second, we're running America, we're running China, the US establishment exists. C C P exists. Why would you want recentralization? We have an operating centralized system here, okay.

And then the decentralized Why would you want recentralization, you know, we're talking about taking power away from these Totally illegitimate establishments with Bitcoin. We're talking about breaking the state and defunding the government and so on. We're giving them defunding the police, but defunding everything, right? And You know, we're talking about breaking these tyrannies and getting away from the surveillance state. Why would you ever want to rebuild something like that, right? So the thing is that Recentralization has the smallest constituency right now.

But I think it's the right constituency and the reason is I believe Helical theory of history. So The linear theory of history is we're just progressing, we're just improving, we're getting more equal, we're leveling up, everything's getting better, and so on and so forth. Something to be said for this on some axes, on some measures, humans have been improving. Like our knowledge of math, for example, that is like a roughly cumulative chart, it has drops.

When you have the dark ages and stuff like that, it's not all the way up to but it's like up and to the right. Okay. Then you have the cyclical theory of history, which is And and actually one of the things I talked about in the book is both the left and a right and a libertarian cycle of history. But the right cycle of history is Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men, where it's basically like

You know, this Nietzschean band of Spartans built it. This is the four turning, right? Yeah, yeah, so it's Nietzsche and Banana Spartans, they go and build a great society, and then these degenerates take it down, and then you know, we have to like from the chaos and ashes rebuild again and so on, right? What's funny is the left has their own version of this, which is The zealous revolutionaries manage to fight the man And overthrow it? And then a Stalin like figure comes and compromises the revolution, and the new boss is the same as the old boss, and then it comes back to this, right?

And then the liber tech libertarian has a version that's also like this, which is the startup founder goes and rebels against the bureaucracy. They manage to build an operational thing that is actually much more egalitarian and it's got a flatter hierarchy and takes care of all the bureaucracy and it's actually more competitive. And then what happens is the bureaucracy encrusts us and the libertarian founder rebuilds the state. And one of the points I make is All three of the cycles. are the same cycle.

Because It's not just the right cycle of being like strong. And it's not just the left cycle of being zealous. And it's not just the libertarian cycle of having an innovation. You kinda need all of those at the same time to actually go all the way around the cycle to fight that establishment. So what do you think the US looks like in five years?

Just to if we could paint a picture. Oh sure. It's Like BLM and Jan Sixth

All the time. You mean in terms of events or in terms of discussion? In terms of There will be mobs that are gathered online. There will be it's like stochastic network warfare. Between two groups.

Is it five years? Might be ten years. I don't know the exact time frame. It could happen faster, it could happen slower. But fundamentally I think the catalyst is If you look at interest rates and you look at the graph, have you ever looked at look at like the long term graph of interest rates?

Yeah, I have, actually. But we should put it in the show notes for people. We should put in the show notes because I just wanna find this graph a long term chart. So if you go to This

Graph and you click Max. Alright, so this is Trading Economics dot com slash United Hyphen States slash interest. hyphen rate. Yeah, so United States interest rate, United States Fed Funds rate at TradingEconomics dot com, right? And they click

Max on this chart. I'm looking at Max. Mm. Okay. And so what do you see? You essentially see something where Over a you know, forty year time frame You have

A trend which is very much down into the right. Yeah. Yep. And What that is, is it's basically This is something where

Is And Dalio's actually also talked about this. There are trends that affect humans. That are

longer than the cycles that we're intuitively familiar with. For example, you're familiar with the cycle of your breath. That's a few seconds, right? You're familiar with the day. You're familiar with Basically the seasons of a year.

And That's actually what most people are familiar with. Beyond that, maybe the election cycle, you know, in four years. Or The longest thing somebody might be filming with, frankly, are

Venture capital funds or startups, which are like 10 year cycles, that might be the longest thing where you can run an experiment and see a few reps of it. on a five or ten year time frame over your life, right? A venture capitalist might see hundreds or thousands of five or ten year long experiments that most people don't really track things over that time frame. And any normal human cannot really track things over Forty or fifty years.

You have to kinda dedicate your life to that, right? Same thing that's happening over multiple decades. You really need Really good charts and stuff to see what the heck is happening. This graph is one of the best and most important because it's so unambiguous. And what it shows is essentially that the US

Economy We have run out of Juice. Federal reserve being able to print money and so on, it just keeps going down on this trend, like interest rates. And

If you notice every time they try to jack it up. It has to be pushed back down and kept down for longer and longer and longer. If you're seeing that in that graph. Yeah. And now the next time when they're they're gonna be forced probably

Two Bring interest rates all the way to the floor, maybe before the twenty twenty four election. And I think you will see Very serious inflation as a function of that. Because they'll print money. And we'll actually have genuine goods shortages.

Because we have all these supply chain things that are hitting. You have China doing its crazy, you know, the stuff with the with the ports and the Covid lockdowns. You have the uh you do do you have the slow steaming regulations? I do not know the slow steaming regulations. Basically like, you know, some ESG thing, this is a great example of how like moral You know the moral flippening. I'm getting this second hand, so I might have it.

Wrong, but I believe it is Reducing the speed of cargo ships to cut down carbon emissions. Let me just def two things real quickly. So you mentioned Dalio, just for people who don't know, Ray Dalio, former let's just call him head principal at Bridgewater Associates, at least at the time that I interviewed him, largest hedge fund in the world, about hundred and seventy five billion dollars or something like that. ESG environmental, social, and governance. factors. So just that bleeds into the

what you were just discussing. So please continue. Just to summarise it, basically. We have more money, they'll eventually gonna need to print again. We have literally fewer goods. Where China's cutting off supply

There's sanctions, there's wars like Ukraine. There are covet lockdowns. There's stuff like slow steaming, which is this huge self-inflicted wound by the ESG thing where every single container ship in the world has to slow down now. So you have A lot of things That can sum up into something where it gets nonlinear fast.

And If that happens and you do have Not just the inflation we have now, but genuine serious inflation or even hyperinflation. That is when society comes apart in the US because I mean r people have been so freaking angry at each other during the twenty tens

In a relatively booming market. Like in the twenty tens Up until twenty nineteen, things were like decent decent economically, but man, were people mad at each other. And when there's like actual genuine scarcity, if that does happen, if physical goods are hard to come by and your inflation, you know, inflation destroy your currency and so on, and you have a country where people are heavily armed and they're yelling at each other on social media, and you've got fifty governors res like. You've got a very potent cocktail for bad things. And we've sort of seen this in lots of other

Countries. Yeah. Frankly, America was involved in in, you know, partially destabilizing, like look at Libya or something like that. Or Mexico or what have you. But I

People just really do believe on some level quote it can't happen here. Um But I think American anarchy, unfortunately. Is sort of where we're heading. And what exactly does that mean? You know, I'll try and paint a picture. So

First of all In eighteen sixty one, if you go and look at The map in eighteen sixty one. You have The Union and you have the Confederates and it's

The ideological and the geographical coincide. You have the north and you have the south. And we take for granted that the victory condition Was For the North to just

Invade the South. Because by invading their capital and burning and so on, they didn't just destroy their supply chain, they also killed their morale, and eventually they got the entire south to concede and they could flip them ideologically and Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, they uninstalled the software in their heads and installed software with new moral premises. Same in World War Two. Invade Nazi Germany, denazify them, capture the capital. The ideological and geographical coincide, and that's how we think of wars as working.

Now Today though. If you go and look at a map of the US and you look at Republican Democrat. It's not

In clean states. It's very fractal. It's at the individual county level. You've got a little red here, a little Blu here, purple here. It's extremely Group together. It's fractal. And so what that means is

that in physical space These two nations are cheek by jowl. But in digital space As that graph I showed you showed, those two social networks Or just

clustered apart in digital space. They are separated in digital space. Did I show you that graphic? Did you see it? Yeah, you did. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I got it. And we'll put this uh we'll put this in the show notes for everybody.

Mm-hmm. So when you see that graph, you're like, oh, okay, so in physical space people are cheeked by gel, but in digital space they're far apart. And that's where the battlefront is. And you can reconceptualize the last several years. as a social war. Because if in a physical war The goal is to invade territory. In a social war, the goal is to invade mines.

And now when we think about cancellation, deplatforming, hashtags, et cetera, et cetera. The point is Yeah. What you're trying to do is get A node on their side to flip from blue to red or red to blue.

And how do you do that? Because they're now uttering Your hashtag slogan. Right, BLM or MAGA or something like that. They're h uttering that slogan. That note is flipped. It's like capture the flag. You're seeing from their utterance. That they are seeing the thing that indicates that are now on your team. They're raising a flag over their company, et cetera.

And You are able to cancel in silence. Those people who are saying things that are contrary to your view and so on and so forth. It is essentially something where Because you are constrained from using physical violence. Since what are you gonna do? Invade a cornfield, invade a city, that doesn't actually work.

You're winning. Digitally. It's digital warfare. Now when I say constrained from using physical violence As we've seen, that's actually we're starting to see stochastic digital violence. You know

The Proud Boys in Antifa and so on punching it out in the street. That's actually An extremely unusual thing in the nineties and two thousands America, you just never saw like Left and right wing militias Punching it out in the streets. But you see that now, that's actually something which is

De regour. I don't know, we're on the hundredth or Three hundred th it's like it's like an event. You wouldn't be like sh totally shocked that that's happening, that political violence is happening in America, but it is. And it's on a ramp. And so you put all that together and basically what I see is Serious inflation.

You know, Bitcoin mooning. And then the US government trying to freeze or seize the bitcoin. With something that's similar to Executive Order six one oh. Six one oh two. My question for you just quickly on Bitcoin mooning.

So We have not yet seen, I don't think. in the charts bitcoin act. as an inflation hedge. As an inflation hedge. And in the same way that say gold perhaps has. Why would that be different this time around? So this is not a hundred percent. It's possible that I'm wrong about this.

And I say this as someone who owns quite a bit of Bitcoin. Right. So totally. So here's here's the fundamentals argument for that, right? As sometimes there's certain things where the correlations only are visible over the very long run, you know, like the interest rate graph we were just talking about. In this case, you know, we haven't seen a long run with Bitcoin. But what we have seen a long run where this gold.

And the fundamental thing is Bitcoin's core value proposition is seizure of resistance. That's to say. All stocks. Can be seized.

By hitting a button. As was done with the truckers, the Canadian truckers, or as was done with the Russian sanctions on one hundred forty five million people, billions, billions, you know, uh hundreds of billions of dollars, I think, was just frozen because Those assets existed on servers that the US establishment had root control over. When I say the US establishment, that's not exactly the US government. There's the government, but there's also the network of people

who are loyal to the US establishment. Those are certain tech CEO, certain newspapers and so on, it's all the folks who are Basically supporting the current order. If those folks can hit a key and freeze your assets, you don't really own your assets. In a wartime scenario.

As what happened With Russia just now. The assets aren't theirs. Now outside the US This has meant that a lot of countries are re examining whether they want to have so much exposure.

to things that the US government has root access to. Powell actually had Speech On the dollar's role and competition. Just

A few weeks ago. Where he mentioned actually stable coins. You can f probably find a better version of this than you know, but it's basically Rapid changes are taking place in the global monetary system that may affect the international role of the dollar. A central bank digital currency is being examined to help the dollar's international standing. So that is

Not some random person. That's the chair of the Federal Reserve. Mentioning A that the dollar's international standing is Being called into question. And B

That Cryptocurrencies and stable coins are related to the preservation of that standing. So like when you zoom out, signal and noise. That's it. Vremarkable.

Relative to where Bitcoin was in twenty ten, ten years later. The Federal Reserve saying The dollar's role in international finance is being re examined and cryptocurrencies are part of the Mix of policy responses. That actually shows we are

What do you want to call it winning, certainly affecting and changing things. So the thing is only those Assets that can't be Frozen or seized are your assets. And

Bitcoin has a root system that extends way outside the United States. Two Hundreds of millions of people around the world. They value it.

And that is not the case for your frozen assets on a stock exchange for your Valueless dollars, your chair that you can't move across borders and so on and so forth. There's a shelling point. that has been built up, which is probably gonna be Bitcoin. Now why is it not gold?

Well The thing is there's either physical gold Or you have you know, some certificate which has counterparty risk. So if it's a certificate, you're back to square one where it can be seized and and even with physical gold

Executive order six one oh two showed that A sufficiently motivated central government. Can defeat gold. We have not yet seen That bitcoin can be so defeated, it is in question.

Executive Order six one oh two, for those who don't know, is F DR's gold seizure. So The very organized US government at that time. So to seize the gold and then resell it. on international markets at a markup, there's just this giant tax

On all Americans. And something like that I think is quite likely to happen because it just takes all the rhetoric on Abolish billionaires, tax these rich guys, blah blah blah. All that type of stuff. Which is people won't care that someone took on risk to invest in Bitcoin or hold Bitcoin during the drawdown. They won't care about any of that. They will care if Bitcoin is a million dollars and the dollar is inflated.

And it's Twenty twenty seven or twenty twenty eight. And you need this to fund the US government. I know that sounds crazy, but Think about it like this. In twenty ten.

There are people who had seen The Arab Spring and they'd seen how important social media was abroad. If nevertheless, having seen that, you projected That by twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, the most important political issue in the world Would be whether the president could tweet

For a time period. That literally one bit flip. On a server in Virginia. Dad, you remember the thing we were talking about with mimesis and what people fight about? fifty four forty or fight.

This account, like the bytes on this server in Virginia. When I say Virginia is probably Amazon's you know servers there that Twitter's hosted on. The bytes on that server, those little bytes that record what somebody was saying. That's where the fight is. Whether this person can or cannot tweet

Is literally a matter of like Billions of people around the world Wanted to know whether that bit would flip this way or that way. That's insane from the perspective of twenty ten, even knowing That Twitter and Facebook had done the Arab Spring, that they had caused social revolutions abroad, that they had connected hundreds of millions of people.

If you had ridden that The entire politics of the world would depend on whether the United States president could tweet. It would be an extrapolation. But that's what I'm trying to tell you is I do think that if In the twenty ten, social media became what all politics is about.

By the end of the twenty twenties, crypcurrency becomes what all politics is about. You will not be able to fund your government without it. All right, let me let me hop in here. So there are three things that I'd I'd really love to to cover and we'll see if we can do it. So the first just'cause I don't want to let this go too quickly because I know it's a question that is on a lot of people's minds. So you're painting a picture for

Bitcoin. appreciating and value based on The difficulty in seizing Bitcoin by a central actor like uh like a government. Many people, right, not your keys, not your crypto, will have their crypto in

Trusted third parties and will not be will not have cold storage and be going through all the Jason born steps necessary to sort of implement all of that well. Or they'll do it in a a B minus fashion and it'll all be trackable anyway. So if they throw you in a jail cell, you're gonna give up your keys. Probably. But my questions are so I wanna I I do want to make sure we hone in on bet on what the feeling is. Very important question. Yeah. Yeah. So let me just lay out my my kind of menu, my wish list here. So and we can we might tackle it in reverse order, but

The first successful network state. What does it look like? Right. That that I would love to to hear your answer to. Then you have Bitcoin maximalism is the most important ideology no one has heard of. I want to double click on that and understand why that's the case. And then coming back to the most recent Conversation we've been having. what would need to change for Bitcoin to actually behave from a pricing perspective

as an inflation hedge because it has seemed to be up to this point A risk on asset with instant liquidity in a market that never closes and when shit goes sideways or people get afraid There's a sell off. So it doesn't seem to mirror. The

behavior of say. gold in the perhaps traditional way that some investors view it. as an inflation hedge or hedge of other types. And so I so I'm just wondering if if a lot of people who participate crypto are not going to have Cold wallets.

And therefore not a critical mass. Perhaps enough of a critical mass to move the market. And again, there's a there are a lot of assumptions baked into this question, but what would need to change for Bitcoin to suddenly behave in the way that you are describing? Is it the international devaluing When I say devalue, I mean more perceptually.

Of non US governments and Central banks and so on. With respect to the US dollar. Even if that happens, I kinda fail to see how that makes the hop. So could you just paint a picture of

What needs to happen for for Bitcoin to behave in the way that Bitcoin holders would like it to behave. The reason I'm not a maximalist is I Many reasons. But one of them is I don't think everything can be reduced to money. I actually think Maximus Alfons in some ways

Sure how Wokes are like the opposite of Nazis. They're both racially obsessed, but they white people are the best, white people are the worst, and you you but you get a lot of the same things like separate graduations and all this stuff. Um, Maximists are like the opposite of communists. In the sense that they're both economically obsessed and the communist thinks everything is uh should be

within the state and the fault of business and the maximist is actually often the opposite. And The issue is, why am I not a maximalist? Well, for example There's many things you can't just buy, like If you're in Syria.

And you have a hundred BTC, what do you actually want to buy? You want to buy piece. You wanna buy a block down the street in a high trust neighborhood. Where there aren't bombs flying around. Bology, just for people who don't have the definition, could you define what a what what is a Bitcoin maximalist? What is that ideology or that belief system? There's different definitions.

But I would define it as Somebody who thinks that any digital asset other than Bitcoin is a sin. And it is And it's so you know, people have made the comparison of like wokeness to a religion. In my book, I actually talk about it as a doctrine. Which is

uh related to religion but not exactly the same. More than a technicality, the wokes They actually don't worship God, they worship The state and or the network. You know, that's to say they are They're not about thoughts and prayers, they're about pass a law.

And They're not All employed by the state, they're outside of it and they act Threw it on a net. Right.

Maximalists are similar in that they've got The zeal. Of a monotheist. Or of a monostatist like a communist. But they're a mononomist.

For a coin. And one of the things that's interesting is you know, like a communist Would be Pathologizing profit. And a Christian fundamentalist or religious fundamentalist

We pathologize interest. And a maximalist pathologizes Digital issuance. So just to kinda click on that, right, look a communist They think of all profit as exploitative.

That boss is obviously screwing somebody because, you know, he did a markup, didn't he? Why couldn't he give it away for free to the community? He's stealing some for himself. There's fifty arguments you can make against this, but the problem is that it's intuitively appealing to people that profit is sort of getting a You know. Aye is getting one over on somebody, right? Feel like a scam, right? And communists were able to

Get hundreds of millions of people to buy into this notion. And It was something where rather than say, look, there's good profit and bad profit and manage this They just pathologized the whole thing. Interest is similar.

Christian fundamentalists, other religious fundamentalists, uh there's things about usurious interest rates. Are you familiar with this concept? Like usury? Yeah, usury. Yep. I am. Yeah. So

was the concept. It was basically like They take the good And true thing that debt is bad. And I would actually also agree that most Americans are in way more debt Then they're supposed to be. Or should be.

And it's like a power tool. They take the valid concept that interest can be abused, is being abused, has been abused. And they turn it into something which says Interest cannot happen. Okay.

But if interest cannot happen and interest is banned. And because all interest is usery. You break the economy. Yeah. And let me just hop in for a second. So usury, I'm just gonna give a definition here. The illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest. Yeah, and everything is in unreasonably.

Yeah. Yeah, everything is unreasonably. Right. So if if anyway, we g get into what that means. But yes, yeah, exactly. Because any rate of interest is unreasonable in some under some religions, like you know, Islamic finance, for example, or very religious Christian, you know, groups were against interest of any kind. At all. Then what what happens is every single financial model breaks. You cannot Sigure out

Okay, should I allocate money into this building project or this tech like Basically the power user tool goes goes away. You might say, and I might agree with you. that the average Joe should not be buying all the stuff on credit and debt and they're getting screwed by it. And I might agree with you on that.

But I don't think you can take away the power tool. Because it just breaks the economy. And then we go to issuance, right? It's a communist pathology's profit. And the fundamentalist pathologizes interest. The maximalist

Pathologized digital issuance. They're okay. With the issuance of equity, paper equity. That's to say, you know, you can go and incorporate a company and pre mine The shares of the company for the founders. That's like an accepted thing to do. Every single company is like that. You know, you're pre-mining the shares. Oh my God. And The thing is that you get people to buy into it or not.

And it's your own efforts. Why do you issue that new currency? Why do you have that stock? Why doesn't everybody Just get paid dollars in your company, why is it not all dollars? Why why equity? Equity is a scam, right? Like, you know, that's what You know, lots of folks on Hacker News will say they'll say, All startup equity, market is zero, it doesn't it's not worth the

Well. The reason is that if again going back to first principles. The value of an equity. Or stock. is the net present value of

you know, the future dividends that would go to that share. And so, you know, basically you buy a stock and then you assume that in ten years or fifteen years Facebook goes public and it pays out dividends and you pay ten dollars down and you get You know. fifty dollars uh in dividends in in fifteen years and that's actually that's a win, right? Now, of course, in practice for tax reasons, other reasons, companies will do buybacks and there's lots of ways where that

Econ one hundred one or micro econ one hundred one cons of the dividend has been abused. Granting all that. But fundamentally there is an income stream there. And the reason that you don't Just have somebody Just give dollars to everybody at a company.

Is that Труе ефет. They can go and close sales, they can close deals, you can go and close a sale for ten million dollars. That brings in revenue into the company. In theory, that could be dividended out.

to the shareholders and therefore your individual efforts Can boost the value of that equity. In a way that you cannot really boost the value of the dollar. Your elasticity The dollar economy is so massive that your individual efforts

will be a drop in the bucket relative to a million other people who are doing things, right? So your effort results in results. Effort and results. That's capitalism. That's the Thing that Deng Xiaoping's key insight, the reason that China boomed, is he allowed the farmers to keep some of their grain that their effort led to results. So effort leads results, that's what equity is. It gives you a shot. I know I'm explaining like super basic things, but honestly. This community has

gotten its head into this sort of religious fundamentalist mode. This community meaning B BTC Maxwellism. Maximalist, yeah. Because They've gotten their head into a religious fundamentalist mode where and by the way, some of the faultier lies with the SEC as well. Fundamentally We have not been able to make

The analogy between Digital equity and paper equity. Why? Because The SEC and these has tried to say

Oh, they're all unregistered securities and so we're gonna throw everybody in jail and so on so forth. So does it mean. That means that Look, d do I think that A digital asset is the same as an equity.

No. I think it's like A horseless carriage versus you know a horse drawn carriage at first you make the analogy But it's also got fundamental differences. You know, with a digital asset, you can issue it to all of your users. They can use it in programs, it's on-chain. It does.

All it slices, it dices, it does tons of things that paper equity does not. But it is similar in one sense, which is that a paper equity is something that incentivizes people to build out a company and a digital asset incentivizes people to build out a network. Yeah. The problem is that the SEC you you've got a pincer attack of the journalists and the maximalists, basically, okay, the bureaucrats and the maximalists, because on the one side you have these guys who are stuck in the past with

Orange Groves and how we the SEC guys who are trying to pathologize the issuance of digital acids and saying, ah, we're gonna go after that. That's like unregulated, you know, issuance of of acids. And the crucial thing, by the way, is they're not like going after the bad actors in the space. They're going after, for example, they went after Kick. You know, which is uh Like a fairly reputable, you know, company. They just randomly targeted them for enforcement. They're just going after not the bad actors, the actors they can get the maximum headlines on. What that does is it forces web three people to not make the analogy to equity.

When they can't make the analogy to equity. And they have to like shy away from it with all kinds of stupid word games and so on and so forth. People do get the sense, oh, there's something up here. Hmm, they're not being totally straightforward with me. And then that pushes it, it's like this Trampolining

Yeah, then the maximumists attack it as ha ha it's actually equity in disguise like an illegal crowdfunding or whatever. And the thing is that same maximalist is typically Anti Fed Yep, pro SEC. Right.

They're like the most Selective crypto anarchist ever where It's you know, you're You're against the Federal Reserve.

You know what I'm saying? For the for the discerning crypto and regulate them. I don't often engage in crypto anarchy, but when I do, yeah. Right. Yes. And the thing is it is fundamentally, in a sense, unprincipled, right? It is basically something where it's like there is a rationale for it, which is number go up technology. Anything that seems to make the price of Bitcoin goes up is good. And if that means banning every other coin, so the only coin people can buy is bitcoin, well that's good. Again, though, this is like the communist zero sum mentality because If the web three crypto economy didn't exist, I don't believe that Bitcoin would be where it is. You need all of this infrastructure around it to to build a thing up. I think that's super obvious. You need more cultural awareness, you need the zeitgeist to shift, like all these

All of these things or a lot of them contribute to the rise of Bitcoin. Also indirectly. To me that's Insanely obvious, but The thing is that the twenty one million

Again, there's an aspect of it that's zero sum, like the communists, which is one person's gains, another person's loss. If you're getting Bitcoin, I must be losing Bitcoin. One of the ways you see this is in the Bitcoin community, you don't see that many crowdfunders. You see actually fairly large crowdfunders in Ethereum and so on, right? Now What does the Maximus community have I've criticized it. But let me actually say certain things that It's very complicated because

Maximalism. has Many of the things that they say Are things where I agree with Some or all of it.

But it reminds me of It's like somebody who's a progressive And they would agree with many statements about how You need to have equity and You know, not discriminate against people and so on.

But then they see people who saying those things going in burning down black businesses. And it's like Completely the opposite of what you actually seem to want ideologically, right? This is harming these people that you're claiming to help, right? So the words. Don't match the actions necessarily. If the words are

In this case for greater freedom and so on. Why are you arguing for like governments to crack down? Why are you arguing for Willing buyer, willing seller to stop. Why are you trying to pathologize capitalism?

That doesn't seem to make any sense. And that's because I think it's got an Sort of maximalism have gotten twisted in this ideological knot. Which unfortunately is gonna be very helpful. That's that's the paradox. You're like, what? Why that's an unusual Here's the thing.

I know I'm digressing, but let me I'll bring it I'll bring it home. I'll bring it home, okay? And then I also want to hear what Bitcoin would need to do or what would need to happen. Or what will happen. To make Bitcoin behave in the way that so many holders such as myself would like it to behave. Totally.

So the answer is one of the things I've learned over the last ten years, fifteen years is the value of irrationality. All the other people in web three. Are in it for technology or finance or something like that. Maximalists are in it for fundamentally political slash moral slash social slash ethical kind of things. I think there's a continuum.

Where as I said Some of the words I agree with, but a lot of the actions and behavior I don't. Still. I recognize the zeal. And zeal really, really, really matters.

Zeal matters. Because Zeal is the difference between selling when it's low and deal zeal is the difference between selling never. Deal is the difference between talking to everybody about it all the time and making it your life and just having it be one component of a otherwise healthy life. Zeal means putting it at the top of your identity stack, putting it in your profile, having it be part of your existence. Like, you know, the top of your identity stack, that's really precious space. You know, what you identify yourself as.

You might live in Missouri but you not might not identify yourself as a Missourian, you might identify yourself as a as a bitcoiner or as a Christian or as a Republican or something, that top identity thing is really important. And that's something that Max must have. And so what I think is actually gonna happen is The political spectrum will rotate.

I think imagine adding yellow, a splash of yellows to that red blue. Becomes orange versus green. And orange versus green rotates it. And so it's Bitcoin Orange versus Dollar Green. And on the dollar green side are actually quite a few Republicans

A lot of the you know, security state people Military people, neo cons, folks who basically side with At the end of the day, they will choose the American flag and they'll choose the the US government and so on. And the other side is Bitcoin Orange. And here actually lots of Democrats

We'll actually choose this side. And for example, like Jack Dorsey, like Glenn Greenwald, like A lot of the sub stackers, like a lot of the tech founders. These are folks who would never Fold into trauma.

But they also are just fundamentally anti-establishment. They have that rebel DNA, that fundamental rebel DNA. Just like a lot of those Republicans who will side with Dollar Green Don't really like the current US government, but fundamentally it's my country right or wrong.

So it's a rotation. Of the spectrum You know, if the normal political spectrum is left versus right. This is like top versus bottom. It's like The authoritarian

is dollar green and the libertarian is Bitcoin orange. And that rotation Is it pretty big shift. You know, I'm not sure what percentage of both parties shift. It might be that

You know, orange is like sixty percent Republican and forty percent Democrat or something, but one of the most underappreciated aspects Is many, many non white people We'll shift to Bitcoin Orange. And the reason is is that inflation hits African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Whites all at the same

You know, and if you look Uh you know the the more equities and other assets you hold. In some ways you're kind of more buffer from this, at least you can have some ups as well as some downs, but Inflation is absolutely crushing

People of colour. And that is something I think, you know, for example, Jack Dorsey who has Square Cash That's actually very Popular Among the African American community, among other communities

And it has a different user base than your typical like tech app. And in fact he he's you know gone and and talked about that, given talks about that. And in tweets about that. And so he's probably seeing this in the numbers that inflation is hitting this group harder. So because of that.

The moral legitimacy of the establishment Is called into question. Because they define themselves, if you read again, like something like Barbara Walter's book or something, she imagines that this future civil war or conflict. Will be between a Tolerant, diverse establishment.

And some like 4chan Nazis. But that's a wash. That's a that's an easy win. That's a ninety ten win, right? That's ninety five, ninety nine, one or whatever, right? When you've rotate it and instead It is Basically all

Pro freedom people. who are Bitcoin orange and against inflation and probably maybe more people of color than not than on the other side. And then you have Well it's still our flag, it's still our country, it's still our state. That's now set up.

For something that's much closer to a fifty fifty. Right that's actually something where a lot of people Would be torn. Between those two groups. And

When it's fifty fifty. Unfortunately, that's when conflict is maximum. So that unfortunately is how I anticipate things to go. When do you think? Digital gold will behave like gold.

If if ever. All right, so now let's talk about that. So no practicalities. These practicalities really matter. Why do they matter? Well

The question of Whether Twitter could censor somebody's account and so on was an abstraction'cause people just assumed that You know, they wouldn't hit it. You should assume every single thing gets weaponized. In crazy ways. We have not yet had total cyber war. We're gonna see some crazy things as a function of that. And

That's gonna push people to truly not your keys, not your coins type stuff. Problem is right now. Yes, a lot of coins are on exchanges. What I think we're gonna see is Every possible edge case in failure mode will happen.

But Maximalism is not simply a technological thing, really it's mostly a political thing now. So First, what are all the things that will happen? Okay.

I think you will see. Freeze and seizure orders. given to centralized exchanges. They may have, however, The moral

support from their community to not comply. They may be located in red states. Where the governor says this is a sanctuary state for crypto. Because if you think about the concept of a sanctuary state for immigration Or for abortion.

Or for gun laws. All of that groundwork has already been laid. One of the things I predict in the book I talk about is I think that Maximalist will introduce a constitutional amendment. Four.

No seizures of bitcoin, just like free speech. Or You know, right to bear arms. Can't see Bitcoin. Fundamental right.

And I actually think you'll probably be able to get that through in a fair number of US states. Maybe not The full constitutional amendment ratification process? Like you may not get like the quorum that's necessary, but I think you'll get that ratified in some states. And then those states that are ratified, it can point to that and say, We've ratified it. Therefore it's a law of our state. Therefore we're not seizing the Bitcoin and companies could put their servers there. I mean, this is the level that I think things are gonna get to. They're gonna get really intense. Or they keep them in El Salvador. Or they keep them, you know, somewhere else, right? And then the question is

You know, like the Andrew Jackson thing, the court has made its judgment, let them enforce it. So in twenty ten, would it have seemed insane To say that Billions of people would care about the position of some bytes on a server in Virginia. Where

Trump has access to tweet or not? You know, like that would be insane. I'm telling you, people are gonna really care. Where that money is in five or ten years, they're really gonna care, you know, if they can freeze it or not. Few other things that can hit. Quantum computing could hit. It is possible that the Chinese who are working heavily on this

This is the thing about the book. I talk about there's so many different billiard bowls in this Theater? It's like A world war, you know, in the sense of there's all these different theaters happening and you could just be absorbed with the American theater. But there's like the Asian theater and there's a this theater and there's a that theater, you know?

The Chinese are working very aggressively on quantum and there's a scenario I'm not an expert in in in quantum computing. I know enough to be dangerous, but there's a scenario where quantum decryption Advances. Fast enough. And quantum encryption isn't there or it's expensive and you can do Decryption with these

high qubit systems that are in one location, but encryption you can't do outside or something something like that. Quantum safe algorithms just don't get distributed in time. I I've seen people argue about this. I'm I'm not saying I'm strongly on one side or the other. But that's like a wild card that could come through that breaks some of the assumptions on the cryptography. There's other attacks that can happen, fireball attacks. where you try to block the packets that are going through and then the people pipe them over Starlink or they try to do

you know, port randomization or they try to encrypt the traffic so it looks like And so you're saying an email when you're sending a Bitcoin transaction. People could try Oh my there's so many things people try one of the issues is the Bitcoin network itself is not extremely high capacity for on chain transactions

So It's hard for everybody to use it on chain all the time, but People can go and hold large amounts of money with one transaction. I am seeing stats which show coins coming off exchanges. Since I think early 2020 or thereabouts. I am seeing those numbers. I think GlassNode has some of those numbers. So you can see, I think a decline in this. Why? Because

Actually, you know when the funny of things it's hilarious, it's actually Pulling money off of exchanges. You know what it is? DeFi. DeFi. Because you can only engage with it.

Through like a decentralized wallet for the most part. I mean, there are centralized exchanges that let you do it, but regulations make it hard. Because of that, people have moved funds more and more funds locally. There's been a financial incentive to pull funds locally. And that I mean incentives ultimately or work. So it's a funny thing where DeFi May actually the thing that lots of maximalists hate may actually have pulled more funds. Okay, that's a hypothesis. It'll be the the avenging the the unknowing avenging angel.

For the entire sector is this demonized, decentralized. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like exactly. It's sometimes things are like that, you know? I can't prove it, but my my strong hunch is people will Bring the BTC locally, they will transform it into something like WBTC or RENBTC or something like that in a DeFi thing and then do something with it, right? There's several different operations that are that are like that. I don't have Probably somebody like Doom or

Nansen or something could support my hypothesis, shoot me down or or confirm it. Anyway, coming back up. So The thing is The Bitcoin seizure resistance point. There's many holes in the story.

In the sense that there's many things that people can and will press on, from central exchange seizures to lower capacity on the chain and whatnot. But the pushback to that, and this is the um uh kind of an important and subtle thing, I'll try to articulate it. When you have The state coming after you. You can double down on the network.

Okay, meaning internet type technologies, but also peer to peer network of people and so on. And you can do things like Z cache. Which encrypts all transactions. You can do digital nomadism. You can move overseas, you can do all you can do all these run and escape and exit things, and those can be good, but it's a tactic and ultimately you can't just only exit. Sometimes what you're doing is you're exiting with a tactical retreat and you then get to higher ground, you get to a more secure position, then you can push forward. Like

The Puritans made it all the way to the US. and escape persecution. And then a hundred seventy years later, the US the power they had built up, they were able to invade Europe. You know, or Google They escaped this corner which is search.

And they built up their resources there. And then they had billions of dollars they could invade Microsoft's territory with Google Docs. Sometimes you retreat to a corner You fight hard enough. So that

You know, you're not being invaded yourself, you build up power there, and then you can come back. That's kind of what the Maximalists have done, though not super conscious necessarily. Maybe some of them are conscious. Fundamentally Their innovation, lots of everybody else's thinking zero knowledge and all this stuff, you know, and I think that's good. That's the network innovation. The maximalists are actually Taking some of the state's playbook and using it.

So The El Salvador thing. Various bitcoin bills. Their innovation is actually on the political level. Not technological.

They're basically like a quote political party, but really a political network. In this sense, they're like the wokes. The walks exist. Really as a network thing. They exist in academia and so on. They're like a ghost that can animate

A democrat sometimes and make them do something. Sorry, it's good. Yeah. I good like the image. Exactly image, right? And here's here's why I see that. If you look at Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden and you look at what they were saying in the nineties or seventies or something, like they're saying completely different things. These are, in a sense, a politician is like

Inhabited by a ghost that speaks through them. In fact, a lot of things. This is actually a very powerful model for thinking about a lot of things. When you think about Ideologies are like ghosts that occupy a huge number of hosts, and then they like animate them and their eyel a certain color to fight each other. And

Often, you know, for example, like Russia versus Germany In you know, the nineteen forties, we think of that as communism versus Nazism. But

Now it's like flipped and the Germans are liberals and the Russians are nationalists, but they're still fighting. So the ideologies flipped. But the tribes are like still fighting and sometimes one tribe picks left tactics, other tribe picks right tactics, and then you know it flips and one tribe's t picking right tactics, other tribe's picking left tactics. Point is This concept of like a ghost that's like inhabiting a politician is also happening with maximalism. For example, the guy who's running against JD Vance

In Ohio. Josh Mandel. Did you see his like tweets on Bitcoin? I I assure you I have not. See, the thing is, this is the kind of stuff I track and the reason I track it is'cause it's like we're friends.

That's why I can have you on the podcast and then I can ask you Yeah, so he like sort of casually tweeted something which was like Mandel was like Ohio must be pro God, pro family, and pro bitcoin. And the thing is that

Uh look, as I said, I think Bitcoin will Draw. significant support from The working class democrats Because of the inflation thing, I mean the fundamental thing about that is

It doesn't matter what the establishment says. How good their propaganda is When you're seeing your money crumble underneath. In fact, the more they say it's transitory, the more they say things like, you know, one of the things that's gonna be a big message, unfortunately, censorship is gonna increase dramatically if inflation happens. Do you know why? Because in Argentina

In other countries where inflation has happened The government argues that talking about inflation Causes it. Because You're causing people's price expectations to rise, therefore you're disloyal.

If you talk about inflation and you're undercutting the stability of our society, And so therefore they publish public inflation stats that are fake. And then you have to actually have stats outside Of Argentina that are real. And so now we are faced with the issue of that's something which

The two thousands or whatever you could tut at Argentina, Banana Republic, blah, blah, blah, you know. Once you need shadow stats That can have to sit outside not Argentina, but outside America. shadow stats on inflation that are powerful enough To resist attempted censorship by the US government.

I actually wrote this post last year. With the spec on this at One seven two nine dot com front slash inflation. That actually goes through the whole problem, which actually quite a non trivial problem, because you need censorship resistant hosting. Need to scrape lots of prices.

You need to Have maybe some instrument. That is like an actual not a stable coin, but a flat coin. You're you're tracking oranges, you're tracking bread, you're tracking milk, and you've got a coin that remains flat against those things. That's what actually people care about, maintaining their purchasing power, not so much, you know, whether it's flat versus a dollar that's inflating away. And that post actually it integrates

It takes everything that we've been doing in crypto and puts into one thing. It's the it's the price signals, like all the price feeds. It is the decentralized hosting because states will try to take it down. It is obviously Bitcoin, but it's also Ethereum with the dApps, blah, blah, blah. It's all it's it's crypto oracles, it's everything into one app. Which is the inflation app. that I think becomes like the new coin market cap. It's like the thing people refresh Every single day. That mainstreams kind of web three and BTC.

I know that sounds like Oh my God, that's terrible. Right? And There are bad aspects to it, s no no no question about it. One of the things that I'm talking about with this book is anticipating that level of instability. What do we build on the other side?

Can we actually pause for one second? Just I'm gonna share you been sharing while we're talking, we've been sharing things in the chat. I'll share one that you might enjoy. Uh and we we don't need to spend a lot of time on this, but you'll you'll probably enjoy it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is a post I put up in uh January twenty twenty one. And it's picture of the reserve bank of Zimbabwe with a one hundred trillion dollar Note. And uh in the description, I just say I had it framed years ago to remind me of how quickly quote unquote money can change in value. And uh then went into a discussion of ultra inflation and Yeah.

The belief that some people have of that can't happen to a reserve. currency and on and on and on. So I'll I'll include that in the show notes. What do you think one of the first successful attempts at a network state will look like and Related to that, because you mentioned the Carb's good, carbs bad is

decision to be made that is woven into the fabric of a network state, just as an example. And I'm wondering how you Preserve if this is important. sort of rational adaptability. in the face of new evidence, right? Because evidence could come out, uh turns out

Carbs are good. Right, or whatever it might be. And so how do you prevent, you know, wild, wild country And some disintegration. into or not disintegration, but uh the formation of a calcified religious state.

when setting the parameters for network state. So what is a first what might a successful network state look like? What you what would you wager And how do you prevent the calcification that I mentioned? But you were gonna say something else with respect to the Zimbabwean hundred trillion dollar note. There's people who say oh the reserve currency can't fail and so on and so forth. They are actually like the inverse of the maximalists. You're not having a rational argument with them. You're having an argument about faith. And the reason is

One of the chapters or subsections in the book is I call it. God state. Network. The question is

What is the most powerful force in the world? Is it An almighty God? Is it The US military? Is it the government?

Or is it encryption? Or in the past you might have said capitalism, peer to peer networks, and so on. Okay. God State Network The thing is, it's a generalization of religion.

Religions worship A god. But a doctrine, if you look at that in the dictionary, it could be a political or religious or other movement. A doctrine. You know, you have as your Leviathan, it could be a God, it could be the state, or it could be a network, right? So communism is not a religion, but it's a doctrine, because they worship a state.

Maximal is not a religion, but it's a doctrine because they worship a network. Bokeness is sort of like partially state, partially network, where they live on the network, but they animate the state. Communists was actually also partially state, partially networked, because they had this international network of communists, but they were primarily state. The mid century US, for example, was like Half God, half state because it's like

For God and country will fight the godless communists. But it was like mostly state, but with a God, you know, dosing. So you can make hybrids not just pure forms. But God State Network He's actually a really

Useful lens. To start looking at movements. 'Cause the reason that guy is saying to you that the reserve currency can never go away Is he worships the US government in a sense, even if he doesn't understand it. He really thinks it can never go away.

You know, there's this series of books or no series of essays. When communism didn't work out. And it was called The God That Failed. People put religious level faith into that. You know, people you've probably heard the term America's civic religion.

You know, yeah. The constitution as similar to the Bible. And so one of the issues is That Those people who are really asserting that the reserve currency won't fail. are often the ones who kinda suspect on some level that maybe it could

And they just can't imagine a world without that and they don't want you to undermine their God. And you're kind of a traitor or you're like unpatriotic and so on and so forth. And sometimes if you talk to somebody who's very religious, they'll say, Well, if you didn't believe in God People just commit all kinds of crimes and so on, right? There's actually by the way, there's there's more argument for that than you might think because

If you actually believe in hellfire Then it's like decentralized law enforcement. You know, the law might only catch you at some probability, but if you actually believe in hell Then Doing this little crime, even if the law doesn't see you, well, you're going to hell and that's more of a penalty than the it's like scalable law enforcement if you can get people to really believe in it. It's actually like a meta logic to it.

But Okay, people who don't believe in in God, what do they believe in? They believe in the boys in blue, they believe in the state. Okay, what if you don't believe in either? You're not just an atheist, but you're an asetist. Then you believe the network, then you end up in something like maximalism or or cryptotribalism. So

The thing is that That dispute You know, Carl Schmidt wrote this book called Political Theology. And he's like All these religions, I mean, he himself, you know, was like a a Nazi jurist or whatever, right? So but basically Nazism, communism, et cetera, these are all.

You know, many people have observed these are all effectively like religions. They're either religions themselves or they're God replacements. And they animate huge numbers of people to fight as if uh a religious kind of thing. So therefore we're not just having like a A scientific discussion.

It's like a fundamentally like religious discussion. So just something that one should think about when you're ha when you're talking about this kind of thing. There's some folks who look at it dispassionately. And why would you be able to look at it dispassionately? It's because you may not realize this you have some island of stability on your own. You're either you had this great phrase before, you're like a technology Jason Bourne. And I actually I thought about it after I'm like, that's much more you than me. I'm not gonna be doing all the stunts in the movies in the same way that Tim Ferris is, right? But The thing is If you have very high

Sense of agency If you're like a CEO or you're a founder or you're president or you're very driven and so on. then you can kind of find your footing on something. You kinda you know, you're not a joiner of a movement. But if you need to have If you don't feel like that, and most people don't, for lots of good reason, you need to have a movement that kind of supports you in some way.

Where You know, you can't just create one from scratch. That's actually one of the things I wanna help build. So that brings me to your next question. Basically If it's not these ideologies of conflict. 'Cause in an era where everything is is

Cracking People like these ideologies, these ghosts Set up to recruit. They're set up to pull you in. And you're like

You know, i for example, if you were If you were unfortunate enough to be in Eastern Europe Between nineteen thirty nine to nineteen forty five. All these guys have to choose between like the Nazis and the communists. That is an absolutely horrible tr you know, the answer is neither.

Like the answer is GTFO. Good both of those are dead ideologies and on the Ashy what are you gonna say? No, just for people get the fuck out is what that stands for. Yeah. Exactly. It's true, like those people who were caught in between that vice.

Nobody ended up Well off, right? And and so there's this false it's like the Iran Iraq war, you know. Who wants to be in the middle of that? That's like Shiite versus Sunni, my answer is neither. I do not want to be involved in this, this false dichotomy, this giant conflict.

David Hines had a good thread which I quote on this, which is like um What political violence is actually like I'm just gonna quote this at length is from like seven years ago. No, sorry, five years ago. He was like People

Have a fantasy of how political violence works. You smite your enemies in a grand and glorious cleansing because of course you're better. But Grand and glorious smiting isn't actually how violence works. I'm not sure how to really describe it so people get it, but

This is a stupid comparison, but here Imagine that one day Godzilla walks through your town. The next day he does it again, and he keeps doing it. Some days he steps on more people than others. That's it.

That's all he does. Trunch through your town back and forth. Your town's not your town now. It's a Godzilla trudging zone. That's kind of what it's like.

And That Is I mean if you think about BLM or a giant riot. It's not like some surgical

You know, kinda thing. It's just like Burning things down, blowing things up, it's in the name of some higher cause. That's why people do it, but it's extremely non-targeted. It is simply you know, that's why friendly fire happens worse. Like people get blown up, people get blown smoothies. Immense damage and destruction on both sides. War really, really sucks. And

I know that's super obvious to say. But all the worst that, you know, with the exception of the military class that's actually gone overseas and fought. Just Like hasn't actually had experience with that.

In living memory. It's got all these violent video games. You know, I I like some of these games and so on, but it's all fantasy type stuff. And it's not like a reality. And once you actually live through that in World War Two or the Korean War or something. You don't want any more of it and you go back to like kind of a peace mode, you understand you understand that things can spiral in a bad way. But having had that go for seven years.

People are now being drawn to these ideologies of conflict. And what is the alternative, right? So The thing is And this is I think one of the more important concepts in the book the these abstractions I pulled out. One of the concepts I have there is

The one commandment. Okay. So I mentioned God State and Network and how you can make hybrids of them. So The network state actually requires a one commandment. So you actually have something that's like it's not just technology and politics, but something that's similar to faith.

Okay. So what do I mean by a one commander? I mean You take Society at large.

And you have one Focused moral innovation. Relative to society at large. And then you have an opt in startup society. It could literally be you buy some land in in rural Pennsylvania or Minnesota. It could start as a digital community that crowdfunds land around the world. Okay, so it could start digitally, it could start physically. I recommend starting digitally for a variety of reasons.

But you have this community Where you have a moral premise. Let's say I give a several examples, but There's different tiers of how aggressive that moral premise can be. It could be something like

Cancellation is bad. You know, cancel culture is bad. It could be so that's something that you could do purely online. How'd you do it purely online? You form a guild.

Where people are there and they're helping each other out in in just some general work matters. But if one of them is canceled at one point, which is a rare event, That group all defends him as one. So that's something where there's a moral innovation relative to society at large, where uh society at large is sort of neutral to negative on cancellation, but isn't actually able to stop it. This group actually says

That is a danger to our life. It's a big enough deal that I'm going to join a society that's like an anti-cancellation society. I'm gonna pay some percentage of my income effectively. In cancellation insurance by being part of this society? I have a thousand people and I will work with them. On just normal fun stuff.

Ninety nine percent of the time we'll just Share each other's content, launch each other's products, advise each other, one percent of the time we'll have to defend each other online and it's like a guilt. So That moral innovation crucially

That group is not saying change the traffic laws. They're not saying change everything else. They're just innovating on one focus dimension. It's very similar to a startup, right? A startup is all about focus. One thing you're changing.

Let me give a second example of the one commandment. Carb's bad. So this is something if the first you you would need what I call a network union, like a digital only thing. Carb is bad. You need actually some physical component. You need what I call a network archipelago. So you've got like a physical network of spaces.

It could be small cul de sacs. Or gyms. Things that your community has crowdfunded around the world. And what do you do with the moral premise carbs fat, that moral innovation? Well

You basically implement Keto kosher At the border. You have you introduted, you take it seriously. And if you really seriously take

Sugar and carbs bad. And you take that to the nth power. And you have a small town. That Really think sugar is bad?

What happens? Well first of all It changes everything on the store shelves. Every single grocery store there's no cookies. There's no Candies.

There's also no high fructose corn syrup stuff, a lot of the prepared stuff. Lot of that stuff goes away. It changes every restaurant. They can no longer add syrups and things to their Food to make it tastier.

It changes every meal. So first of all, you basically that alone is a lot. Changing every single meal and every single grocery store and every restaurant within these borders is a pretty big deal. As I said, keto kosher the suppressant for it, which is kosher. And changing food. But that's pretty big.

You go further. Once you've got this done, probably people lose like thirty pounds coming to the community. So you have photos. That showed before and after that your moral innovation led to a technological innovation. Progress used to be thought of as moral and technological progress together.

For example, the public health innovators in the early nineteen hundreds Public sanitation like sewers. That was Both you know, cleanness is next to godliness. And it was a obviously a technological innovation for all the pipes and stuff.

But the will came first. And then the way. You know, those things were actually like highly related. Then what happened is those split over the course of the twentieth century. And so now you have the tech innovators over here who do startups and stuff

Then you have the moral innovators who are political activists, social entrepreneurs, and so on and so forth. We don't actually think of those as the same kind of thing. But actually there's a market for revolutionaries. So on the tech side, it's obvious you have venture capitalists and you have founders. Do you know what it looks like on the political side?

Uh tell me. Do not. It looks like uh You know, activists and philanthropists. So you have

activists on right and left, and you have philanthropists on right and left. Who are backing these activists? And those activists can be activists, activists. They could be Uh, you know, aspiring young politicians, they could be NGOs, uh, they could be like, you know, various kinds of things, folks who want to foment social change of some kind. Like a technological innovator who sees a problem in the market and wants to build a change here, these people see a problem in the law or in society.

And they they wanna take something that was a one and turn it to a zero, something that was bad and turn it good, or vice versa. And they get funding from a philanthropist or they do it themselves, and it's like bootstrapping, and they try to drive change in society. And when you start thinking of them as like a moral innovator, just like a tech innovator, so what is the ultimate Win of a moral innovator? It's like Obama's a community organizer and then he becomes president. That's like

A guy starting a you know company in their dorm room and becoming Zuckerberg. And when you see this, you're like okay. There's actually a term that we use both in the corporate world and in the Political world, you know what that term is? It's president.

You know, like the president and CEO of a company. And the president of a society. So The president of a start up society has aspects that are similar to the technological innovator.

But they also have aspects that are similar to the moral innovator. And they started that moral innovation. So I've mentioned two so far, like the Cancellation. Proof culture. Or the carb free zone. Now you take the carb free zone, you start iterating it, okay? So first is everybody's drop 30 pounds, there's no sugar, you're buying more and more territory.

People are like, Whoa, this is amazing. And crucially, you have border control. Right, you have an immigration and application process. People sometimes get mad about this and like look. If Harvard can do it. If the New York Times can do it, if they can filter aggressively Everybody who steps into Harvard Yard

Or into the New York Times company Slack. then you have license to it. You have complete moral license to be as Ruthlessly selective as they are. On the institutions they care about, they're highly, highly, highly, highly selective. So You have moral license to do that. You have more license to be selective.

Yeah, by the way being selective on entrance Is different than not letting people exit. It's like You don't let everybody into your house, but if they want to leave your house, of course you let them leave. So there they are different entrance and exit.

So you have selective migration in. And you're looking for people Who have written about keto stuff. You mean physical migration or is this d is this digital presence? Yeah, digital and physical. Basically you don't they don't just get an account. See the difference is In the two thousands

People just wanted everybody to sign up. Online. Social networks were just about quantity, quantity, quantity, quantity. Just get everybody online. That was the right decision at that point. They were just meant to be super viral.

The thing is there's a network effect, but you know what we also have is we have a network defect. When you get to a certain scale of a network, everybody starts fighting with each other because they're they weren't selected on the basis of Aligned moral values. What happens is The network effect normally, the the whole Metcalf's law at N square, the more people, the more interaction, assumes those interactions are a positive sum.

But you have to very carefully engineer a network for that to be the case. Something like Twitter has a global leaderboard, which is inherently zero sum. If you're rising the leaderboard, I'm falling, or vice versa. So that results in coalitional zero sum behavior, a group of people align with each other to get to the top of the leaderboard and knock others down. That means that you have a network defect because people polarize it around certain moral beliefs.

And the network actually starts becoming less valuable as it increases in scale. Just like a company, you just hiring more people is not necessarily the optimum strategy. So the network defect means that you in this era You don't just want to be super viral and grow to the moon. You wanna grow to the

limit of What makes sense? For your community to work. And that can be very different for different kinds of one commandments. I'll give several other examples. So the carb free one, right?

If you take that further. So first you've Uh we say carb free, obviously, I should really mean sugar free. Low cars actually, Balgi, may I pause you for one second? Just to ask a logistics question. So on the physical migration piece, I'm wondering How that would need to be formatted so you wouldn't run a foul

Of Exactly. Right, discrimination laws. And I would imagine, I mean, if let's just say it's a small town, you mentioned archipelago, so they could be a distribution of islands that are very small, like private residences or uh gyms or whatever it might be, but if you want to make it a little larger such that you could actually have a sizable community it seems like it would have to be maybe privately owned such that the town was actually considered a sole residence or something like that.

That's right. So There's the intra US, outside US, so on. So there's something call the bona fide private club exemption. to those laws. Which basically says If you are a bona fide private club

With dues paying members. Then you can have restricted access to facilities. For example Twenty four hour fitness.

Basically has dues paying members and and not, right? Harvard. Is very selective about their admissions. New York Times is selective about their admissions. So you you have

You have a genuine community online. That you start with. That you're selective on admissions. And then that community goes and buys laying together. Yeah.

Might there be lawsuits and stuff like that? It's possible there's lawsuits. But this is a global thing. And just the concept of a selective online community I mean Every

Facebook group is selective. Every single Google Doc where you can add and remove permissions is selective. Every Twitter group DM is selective. Like that's actually something which І собed інте культур і соціально. that we t sort take for granted that you have permission control over things. So I do believe that that is

Coming. That you're gonna be able to take those opt-in networks that people can select into online and then materialize them in the physical world. Yeah. Laws are gonna be different all over the world and people will, you know, lose their minds in different ways and different aspects of this.

Other things you can do, by the way, is You could if need if you need to. Just literally set quotas. And so You are hyper selective.

subject to having X percent of Y group and and A percent of Z group and so on and so forth. That's also potentially an approach. And different countries actually do things like that. They just literally set quotas Schools do it too. Even though they don't like to talk about it.

Yeah, that's right. So Quotas are actually not terribly bad necessarily because at least it sets a numerical target. You have to hit that target. Then subject to the target, then you're done and you've basically shown that you're fine. So Point is, I do believe that

If Colleges and workplaces and private clubs and so on exist. If Facebook groups and

Twitter groups and signal groups, if selective admission exists of any kind. Which it does. Then That group should be able to crowdfund territory. And if it can crowdfund territory.

then it can erect a border around it. Now crucially, this is not a typical corporation. It could be literally a co op. There could be many structures. It could be all coin holders. So it has more legitimacy. than just like a company doing it. Okay, so it's a it's like a hybrid.

Where It is really a group of people, it's hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of very highly motivated zealots and activists. Who believe in this. So it doesn't feel like, oh, it's just like some CEO or whatever doing it on their own. This is why I also wouldn't call myself a libertarian.

You know, going back to that thing about oh just go and get some land. A lot of people We'll try and be like, Oh, I'm gonna be the Prince of so and so and I'm gonna go and Put a flag in some random unclaimed territory like like sea land is like this, or there's a spot in Eastern Europe that's like this, or a spot in the Sahara Desert. I'm gonna be the prince of this, right?

And the fundamental thing that libertarian so they get they have half the picture, which is yes, starting new countries is good. But they don't have the other half, which is the obvious Thing. Which is Okay, you and what army?

Or more specifically. You and what nation? They don't have a nation, they don't have a community, they don't have a people. And they start with these tangible things like land and laws that actually come last in the evolution. You know what it be it's like is people have

Lost such track of history, they don't understand the organic formation of communities. And they just skip to the laws and the Explicit stuff. As plus all the implicit Agreement.

That precedes those laws, of which those laws are simply And encoding of those agreements and acculturations that happened over a long period of time. Right? Yeah. So far, right? Yeah. I am. I have another question in a few moments, so I might jump in in a sec, but please continue.

Okay, so I've talked about one a one commandment society, which was like the cancel proof one, just to extend the sugar free one for a second, like Keto Kosher Sugar Free Society. So step one is All meals change, all restaurants change, all grocery stores change. On the one hand, that's a big thing. On their hand, it's focused.

You're not seeing again, you're not seeing traffic lights change. You're not saying There's 50 other regulations, thousands of regulations that apply. You're not seeing any of the you're not saying trying to change building codes, you're not trying to have self-driving cars, you're focused on one thing in that community. Do one thing really well. And

That one thing of sugar free After people lose thirty pounds, then what happens? Maybe then everybody gets equipped with a CGM. Continues glucose monder. Right. Or you start rolling out other quantified self stuff to the community. That moral innovation unlocks another moral innovation and another, and you start going from one commandment to one point five and you start actually building it out.

Now to your point earlier about How do you know that this isn't like a like some kind of cult? How do you know that it doesn't go wrong? It's checked by exit. Everybody can leave at any time. It's literally gotta recruit subscribers. And if you don't like it, you don't subscribe.

And if you do like it, you keep your subscription. And if you liked it but now don't like it, you cancel and you leave. It's society as a service, SAS. The next ass. Except Isn't that good? Yeah, that's good. Clever. And

That is Something where It also does something else, which is it's a hundred percent democracy rather than fifty one percent democracy. Fifty one percent democracy Is

What it sounds like. Fifty one percent democracy is forty nine percent dictatorship. Forty nine percent of people did not vote for this guy. At any time, nowadays. And for the last thirty years or something like that, these elections have been very, very close. And

They feel Rightfully so, that they did not get Their guy in power. And they do not feel empowered. This is not just in the US, it's in lots of countries.

At any time on the order of fifty percent of the country feels the election, you know, they don't agree with the election, right? I'm not I'm not talking about any particular situation, simply the fact that you just keep getting fifty one percent, forty nine percent, forty nine percent, fifty one percent. The alternative to that Where it's like the Fosbury flop of if you talk about the Fosbury flop of democracy. is a hundred percent democracy where every single person in this community has agreed to be there and can leave at any time.

They have consented. And it's a consensual society, the consent of the governed is actually the upstream thing. Of which voting is only this very downstream thing, and voting can be manipulated. Voting in the Soviet Union, you know how they voted in the Soviet Union? You you went there and you had A ballot? And it had

Nothing on it if you wanted to vote. For the communist. And you could write the name on it if you wanted to vote for a non communist. And everybody You really want to do that, right?

The poke is in that. Quite a few counties in the US, there's also only one party on the ballot. So it's actually not as dissimilar. In the sense that the smoke filled room of the primary is the actual election

And then the public just simply ratifies whoever's at the top. of that party's You know, selection process. So that's a poke is that laughable communist process that we talked about. Is not that far away from

A primary Or like a party selection process that's a real election and then People just pick their party candidate in the general. Okay, go. Okay. And go. Here Alright, I'm warmed up. So

I am Just to be clear to everybody listening, very deeply interested in this entire conceptualization of the network state, which is why I'm asking all these clarifying questions. Yep. Hundred percent democracy. People have to be recruited. If they don't want to be part of the community as a subscribing member, they can leave.

Now One could say Well Even if we will look at the forty nine percent. Ruled by dictator.

A fact. If we want to call it that in the United States. People could leave. They could leave. Now, taxation would follow them, unless they renounce citizenship and so on and so forth. But they could physically leave, but a lot of those people either don't have the means or the will.

Uh or fill in the blank. To relocate. So I'm imagining you brought up El Salvador earlier. It's like all right, if someone burns their bridges socially and professionally, moves to El Salvador to be part of a cryptocentric community. Yeah.

And then they End up I'm not saying this is the case, but they're like oh shit, this is turning into the mosquito coast and like animal farm all wrapped into one. This is a mess. They could in theory leave, but there may be any number of factors. Maybe they married someone and had kids with someone who doesn't want to leave. There are all sorts of attenuating factors that that could influence their ability to migrate. So my question following up on that

Is What are some of the most interesting attempts at anything? related to network state. That you could mention and the the the reason I bring it up is for a while I remember in Silicon Valley

There was a lot of talk of seasteading, seasteading, seasteading, seasteading, and people can look to stuff but look. Yeah, right. And uh and certainly there are experiments being run and have been run for a long time with intentional communities. That have On some level. uh let's just call them tenets of a doctrine, right? Or agreements or commandments.

So where would you point? What are some interesting things that you're seeing? That you think are worth mentioning. One important Thing I just wanna say is that In the book I make a distinction, I talk about

Startup societies and network states. I define a network state as actually one that has Diplomatic recognition. From an existing sovereign. Which is an unusual definition because you might say, Wait a second

Why do you care whether Florida or Denmark or the United Nations. Recognizes you Why should that matter? You should be able to just do it totally from scratch, right?

And the the reason that I have that that's that's a very high bar for diplomatic recognition. The analogy would be Bitcoin starting as a pure internet phenomenon. And then eventually getting list on Bloomberg and eventually eventually becoming the sovereign currency of El Salvador. It attained diplomatic recognition, but it took like ten years.

The reason is that that As I can get into diplomatic recognition is actually very important because it means the Existing it's almost like uh the crypto fiat exchange. You know, the exchange between crypto and fiat. The ability to be halfway

dollars or ninety five percent dollars and five percent crypto, that exchange turns out to be like a critical part of the entire transition to crypto. exchange or the interface between crypto countries and fiat countries is the diplomatic recognition of a network state. Okay.

So that portability Is one dimension of it. Another dimension is the one you you're talking about, which is physical migration. And The thing is that

So first is If somebody plans Poorly? You can't be uh their keeper, you know, you can't necessarily look out for them on everything. But you can do

is you can try to reduce the cost or the barriers to exit. And one of the things I mentioned when I s talked about earlier I said American anarchy On the other side of the world, what's burgeoning is the opposite of that, which I call Chinese control. And the scenario that I think might happen in China Is there's this book by Roger Gar side called China Ku.

And you know, various guys, George Soros has kind of hinted at this you know, there's this group the Cy War group in the US that put out a video about a month ago that's talking about cybor and has like Photos of China and how they're doing cybor in China. Do you see this video, this ghost video? No, but I would love a link. We'll put it in the show notes as well.

So Short answer is or short version is I think it is possible. I can't say a hundred percent. But that Some kind of China coup will be attempted against Xi Jinping or the Chinese Communist Party.

So whether it's like actually US backed or not, I don't know, but For Garci to put out a book like this, for Soros to make the comments he's has. For this J SOC to put that video out there. For all the talk about oh they're you know not a democracy and and you know so on and like a lot of the Same energy versus Russia.

It's quite possible. That some kind of China coup will be attempted. I don't think it's gonna succeed for a variety of reasons, but that's like the the the thing that the Chinese system is armored against. And I think that the response to an attempt like that

Would be An AI Okay, the AI I of the Chinese state Ripping out Any piece of civil society

By the roots. That possibly collaborated with that. Kinds of consequences of that I I couldn't imagine, but it'd be like Did it could you cut offs of physical goods? as targeted reverse physical sanctions, you know, like

Okay, we'll sell you chairs, but not these Key screws that you need for certain military things. Like. It be viewed as this insanely hostile act. And you might say.

Well, well I mean the US government is smart enough that it won't try that, the U establishment is smart enough that won't try that. Mike. Have you noticed nuclear brinkmanship with Russia? Have we seen, you know, some of the stuff even if you agree as I do that the Ukrainians deserve freedom and so on.

I don't think that some of the stuff where it's like being very casual about nuclear war is smart. And I I also think that the fact that they're still poking on things like Taiwan and so on, while they're in the middle of the Russo Ukrainian war, you know, there's various statements are being put out on Taiwan. I think Biden put out some statement and pulled it back and put out some statement This is not show a degree of caution on this topic. My point is

I think while American anarchy is happening, or before it gets underway. Chinese Control could follow a Chinese crackdown, and what does that happen? What does that mean? It means Chinese people can't leave the country.

It's already happening where passport issuance is like down ninety five percent over there. They're using the QR codes that they set up. For The Covid stuff for internal lockdowns. There's already the pre existing Kukau system of internal passports.

They know that lots of Hong Kong people want to leave But they don't want people to leave with their money. And a lot of Chinese people now wanna leave with their money. Okay, it's called Runzu, R-U-N-X U E Or run philosophy.

It's like basically there's three responses, you know, for the upper middle class, middle class, you know, Chinese liberal. And those are Rat race. Lie flat. Get up.

Runs you. So Run you. The problem is there's reactivity on everything and the more popular that becomes The more it's gonna be portrayed as

Some combination unpatriotic, some combination trying to take your money and leave after all China has done. So they're cutting off the exits in their own way, to your point. So Chinese control is on their side of the world. And you know what they're gonna say is they're gonna say Look. We just stopped.

You know, this American style anarchy And they're gonna export that surveillance state. to lots of countries and they'll say, look, this is just total stability. And you will never have anarchy.

And you will just be able to rule forever. Because our AI I will pick up every possible form of organization against you, any possible form of descent. And that's just total order. without any feedback signal whatsoever on power. Whereas anarchy is the total opposite of that.

So you're gonna get, I feel, this world of I'm seeing things tracking towards that. Where you have just total disorder over here. Which will be justified by saying it's not the Chinese all seeing eye. You have the Chinese all seeing eye. Justified by the fact that it's not the total disorder here.

And it's like the Nazism versus communism thing, except it is total decentralization versus total centralisation. And the alternative to that is Many different examples of recentralization. What I mean by that is You know, you said

Pick El Salvador, pick another country. The thing is that if you didn't like Jim and you didn't like Ford and you didn't like Chrysler, Well you could found Tesla. You could found something that actually I mean it's very hard. You know, Alan's the first carpet but it's like you have to be Alan, maybe. But it was possible to do so.

And if you know, with software If you don't like Some Software company, even like uh Google Docs, people could found Notion. Even a big company you could tackle like this.

So the thing is that that ability to start that startup society Even if it doesn't have the full diplomatic recognition of a network state. is how those options actually increase. Because you mentioned oh if you don't like the current options, go to El Salvador, but

El Salvador's fine. No, I didn't say that. And I'm fine with El Salvador. I don't have personal issues with El Salvador. I'm just saying that most of the experiments we're talking about. But I mean is of the menu Yeah, the menu, I'm just like it seems like the crypto tail is wagging the dog a bit in the same way that the tax tail wags the dog when people are like, Yeah, it's great in this place and I'm looking at them in z in zoom and there are like tires on fire in the street behind them with razor wire around their compound. And I'm just like what the fuck are you doing, man? Like to save whatever you're saving. Anyway, that's all I'm saying. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so so that's the thing is also one of the big things about what I'm talking about here is It's

Absolutely morality first. And money second. And it's you know the same missionary over mercenary? So There's this great interview.

From several years ago With Charlie Rose. Had an interview. With this historian called Paul Johnson.

He essentially points out that the for profit colonies in America mostly fail, but as the religious ones that have the cohesion and commitment to make it through the brutal winters. Just like the religious Maximalist community has the cohesion and commitment to make it through the brutal crypto winters. And you know, bringing it back around to what we were talking about earlier.

And just like The situation that we're potentially entering in the US It could be You know, like the next great depression, it could be the great stagnation or the great stagflation or the great inflation. It could be not something that bounces back in a year or two years like our previous experience. But something where the government cannot print money and cannot fix it.

And it has to actually be fixed. With Genuine innovation. And not Top down control and silencing of all descent.

And not Anarchy and shooting people. But actually innovation that is That could be, by the way, very non consensus. The reason, by the way, I bring up something like Carb free.

Right, or or or or sugar free rather. Is If you think about great startups. Some of them. Are very ambitious sounding like SpaceX.

And oth sound incredibly stupid and trivial, like a hundred forty characters. But now today, both Twitter and SpaceX are big companies. And a lot of start up societies will be similar. They'll either sound totally trivial Like carb free. Or insanely ambitious.

Like FDA free. And The thing is you don't necessarily know which startup societies are gonna work. You just have to run the experiment and allow people to set them up society as a service.

Allow people to opt into them. And uh that's what a lot of this book is about. Mm. So I wanna take

One quick sidebar and then we're gonna come back to the main thread. In the very beginning of this conversation I asked you to comment on the current state of the crypto market and the India sphere, and we did not get to the India sphere. Would you mind just taking A few minutes, not very many, but just a few minutes to share

Any and all thoughts, first defining what Indiosphere means and then uh thoughts on The Indian sphere. Here's what I'll say about India. I will Just give A single

A couple of links. Because I can talk about it verbally. But Sunjiv Sanyal Actually

Put out An economic survey of India. Here I'm just gonna link that here. About Three or four months ago.

And it just has Tons of maps. Those maps show like Nighttime Luminosity. The national highway network.

You know, the airports The water connections. The issue is like this is obvious if you're on the ground. But It is the most obvious for somebody who knows India.

Enough to have visited But it's not there every single Day. 'Cause if you're there every single day, it's kinda gradual. It's an improvement, but it's gradual but you don't necessarily appreciate it. And if you've never come and you have nothing to

Benchmark it again, so you don't see the changes. But for the intermittent visitor, it's astonishing what's happened. set of graphs is it shows it for the whole country, right? So lighting, highway build outs, airports Basic infrastructure has been dramatically improved over the last 10 years. Yeah. Tap water, potable water.

Right. Total water exactly. Like so the thing is India is becoming like and and you know, 4G and all the i internet stuff, if you look at this whole thread. The second reference I point you to is um is a Article called The Internet Country by Tiger Feathers. substack dot com. Okay. And that is a ton of graphs and just the digital story.

And showing the build out of Literally like a billion people now. It's like eight hundred million, something like that. got on to Some of the fastest, cheapest mobile internet in the world over the last five years. And so the H one B visa doesn't even matter anymore. What matters is the T C P I P visa. The labor shock that this represents, the culture shock this represents, most people haven't game this out, but

The majority of English speakers on the internet. R Or soon will be India. English speaking culture. is going to be influenced by like Indian culture.

It's just like this total thing that's not on people's radars, they have not priced this in. Most of your followers Well probably be Indian by like twenty thirty or something like that. Most of your upvotes

Most of your Comments and stuff. A very large fraction already are But It's like two giant tanks of water.

That are now connected. by the internet and that are like diffusing into each other. The other thing is also during that process For many years Indians had, you know, like a like my parents generation.

Because they grew up in India, they came over with accents and and so and so forth. And they had portable technical skills in engineering or medicine or something like that. But they weren't really culturally fluent. You know, they knew how to operate it in India, but not really in the US. Or in in the in the globe. The internet dramatically changes that because

All those kids in India. Understand. Instagram memes. And TikTok. And all that stuff.

They are Internet native. They they've learned it as a second language. And maybe if they speak. They might have an accent, but even that, it's like you know, you're getting AI audio generation and and so on and so forth.

So The cultural fluency Is there in a way that Was absolutely not there, so they won't be like foreigners. You know?

You won't know that they're Indian in a thread. That's a huge Ever before. So that's like On the Internet component I don't think people have thought about

And then the government component. You know, look there's there's pros and cons of any government and in many ways I think India's government is like Two steps forward, one step back. There's a saying India disappoints both the uh India disappoints both the optimists and the pessimists. But two things about that. That's a good one, right? It's not mine, but somebody that came up with it was pretty good.

So This link that I just pasted in If you just go and you read The India budget Government document.

And just to pause to tell people that I'll put all of these links in the show notes at Tim.blog slash Podcast. So you'll be able to find all these very easily. Please please continue. Yes, so it's like It's got Дижіл Универсії, Дрон Фарм.

Telemedicine Open source. It is an extremely tech savvy future forward. Thing, right? Like It's insane how

How smart it is. Don't take my word for it, read it yourself, and then as contrast Go and read Mike Solana's article. Mike Solana's great guy, smart guy from Founders Fund. He's got a Subset called Pirate Wires. His article he wrote called Trillion Dollar Paint Job from

Last year, August eleventh, twenty twenty one. Yeah. Piratewires dot com. Uh yeah, PowerWriters.com and the article is called Trillion Dollar Paint Shop. And What he pointed out about six months before that set of tweets about nine months ago.

Is This gigantic multi-billin dollar budget is What are they building? The only thing they were doing was banning cryptocurrency. He was like The one exciting thing

In the entire Bill were the charging stations for electric vehicles. He's like Charging stations for electric vehicles account for a tiny fraction of expenditure and appear in almost every recap of the bill. Why such relentless focus from the media on so minor an element of our bold new infrastructure strategy? I think we're all desperate for a sense of forward motion. The charging stations at least represent something new, a physical change that alters the world for the better. Beyond that, it's not at all clear what our political leaders are trying to build.

I do, however, have a sense of what they're trying to destroy. Bingo. Right? Essentially, like the East Coast establishment, the US establishment Basically hates these tech interlopers.

And rather than figure out how to have everybody take a cut or whatever and level up together. Has decided to try to fight it. Which is now resulting in I think gonna be a bad like some of it actually worked where they managed to woke if I and capture Google and these big companies, which is really bad because it means that they are gonna be turned into surveillance machines or already. Have you seen the Google A I thing that's trying to say landlord is

Bad language in your Google Doc. Do you see that? No. But happy to link to it for people. Yeah. Yeah. No, so it's like Google Docs, Landlord. Suggest. I mean the thing is look it it's Google, right? There's this apocryphal story, which I believe is not actually true, but it's like the reason that Spanish people speak Spanish with a lisp is because supposedly the king spoke with a lisp and wanted people to do that, right?

That mythical story Google has literally billions of users. It has if it decides to use it. The power to shape. Language and speech and thought.

With its suggests. With its auto completes, with things like this. So That power In centralized hands.

It's an insane thing. It's almost almost impossible to because undetectable you you kind of You think of yourself as paranoid. This is an explicit example where the suggest is explicit, right? Anyway. Yeah, the the sanitizing of cognition, yeah. It's wild. So that will be a way that the social war is tr g gonna be fought, where Google and things like that are weaponized against the population, which is why we need these

Web three and other services so that you can get off of Google and get off of Amazon and get off of these woke five things. Anyway. Coming back up. Rather than trying to work with tech, they wanted to fight it, kill it. Wulkify it, antitrust it. capture it, they've been partially successful in that.

What they've also done is they've turned the latest generation of tech founders very much against the US establishment. All the guys who are running companies that are Worth less than a hundred billion. are basically pro Bitcoin and less aligned with the US carbon. I should say all

But let's say I don't know if it's If they manage to capture Google They did so. At the cost of Splitting, alieniting, and polarizing a generation of up and coming founders

Not just in the US, but very importantly outside. Tech is being pushed outside of the US and the US is no longer The majority of tech. Most tech actually happens outside the US. So the whole concept that's very America centric. Yeah.

It's all in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is have you heard the term metonym? Nope. It's like an antonym or a an or a synonym, but it's a metonym. So it's a word that what? Is it like an umbrella term that captures a bunch of things? So a metonym is when you use a place to stand in for a concept. So like You know.

Hollywood is movies and Silicon Valley is tech and so on. And I had this tweet which was Deprecate metonyms via decentralizing technology. So Finance is not Wall Street, advertising is not Madison Avenue, film is not Hollywood, education is not the Ivy League, space isn't NASA, cars are not Detroit. And technology's not Silicon Valley.

As obsolete as Broadway. And the thing is, you can already see some of those things happening, like Cars are not Detroit, it's Tesla. And space. Isn't NASA, it's SpaceX.

And you know, film it's starting to move away from Hollywood as well. Advertising's already not Madison Avenue or it's arguably moved away all all quite a bit. But once you see that, you're like and you apply the told them, you're like, Oh All of those Things were like points in the US which dominated certain industries and all of them are getting decentralized by technology at the same time. Anyway. Coming back up.

So With the India thing. A there's San Jeff Sanyal's survey Economic survey of India, which shows all the maps. B, there's tiger feathers which surveys

On the digital build out. See There is this link to the Indian government's Spending bill. It's not just spending bill. It's bas it was basically their It is their budget, basically.

And then D, the comparison of that to the American budget. of this I think the same fiscal year or plus minus one. And an enormous gap. Absolutely enormous gap where technology is seen as a tool to make India and Indians more prosperous across the political spectrum. And

It's basically like seen as the opposite in the US. With I understand why it's because The rise of technology correlated with a relative fall. Of American standards

Globally Relative to the rest, but it didn't have to be like that in my view. Right, with better leadership it didn't have to be like that. So That's a quick summary on India.

Hopefully that's enough data. That's great. That's great. And we will link to all these things in the show notes. So Bology At Bologs on Twitter. Oh. Wait. Can I say one more thing? I'm gonna say one more thing. Well you absolutely have to also mention where people can find the network state how to start a new country.

Yes, you can say another thing. I will say one thing and I'll say that last thing. So the one thing I was gonna say is Going back to that God State Network framework. I'm bullish on Indians. And

modestly bullish on India. That's to say The Indian state? I'm like very modestly in favor or or very modestly bullish on. But the Indian network

of the global diasporic Indians connected to certainly many Indians Territory. But not necessarily. The Indian government per se, or Indian establishment even. The Indian network I'm very bullish on.

And actually One of the dark horse projections I have in the book for the future is that By nineteen forty five The twentieth century was The USA versus the USSR, right? The Americans versus the Russians, you know, the two guys who are on the edges

Everybody could see growing. Huge populations in the eight in hundreds. But they were kind of on the periphery. Europe just slugged it out between themselves. And eventually, like in that title fight, you know, the it was it was the Americans versus the Russians.

I kinda think that by twenty forty or twenty fifty Maybe sooner, maybe later. That there's a chance that this century is The Chinese state versus India Network. So the centralized cynic

State. Versus the dharmic decentralized global network. I kinda think that's how things line up. And the real sort of you have to sort of squint to see this as an edge case, but

The same way the UK sort of handed the torch to the US, which is an English speaking Kind of thing. In some ways the US I think may hand the torch because the global English speaking internet Is going to become India.

And in so far as the US as a country doesn't exist and you have all these startup societies and so on, That decentralized English speaking internet will have very strong Indian representation around the world. And the opposite of it will be like the Chinese control. Now, I know that's like very speculative and I'm connecting a bunch of dots and so on, and that's not at all like One very important thing here is

It's probably it'll come out on the fourth of July. None of what I'm saying or I'm thinking in the book, I would not call any of it like anti American Any more than I'd say then. Washington was Anti British

Or that Hurzel. Or Ben Gurion was anti British, or Liquan Yu was anti British, or even The Indian independence movement was anti British. They were critical of the British for a time.

But afterwards, after a little bit of distance America India, Israel, Singapore all have good relations with Britain. They're basically post British. They weren't anti British. And

The key question is rather than be like pro American, anti American If this Won't last if this current Pax Americana won't last. What does post American look like?

Without any hostility really towards the old thing, indeed with gratitude towards everything it contributed, But recognizing that not everything can endure. And people realize that the currency won't endure, but perhaps the state won't endure either. And we need to Think about positive new models for the future.

That do not involve condemning the past, I mean, any more than we we don't condemn Britain. All the time. We're basically grateful towards it. Or positively inclined towards it, but we've We're moving along another axis. So rather than be pro or anti British, rather than define it as post British

Right on pro Anto American, what does post Americ look like and prepare for that and you know what? Maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe all the base raters are right, maybe everything just continues. And so on? But if you think that we might want to actually try to build an alternative in the same way the founder or an activist doesn't simply let things happen, but takes things into their own hands.

I think I've got a model for that, a positive model. Putting it out there? That's a The networkstate.com. You can also read it at one seven two nine dot com And that's like an online book and so on. So by the time this

podcast goes out, you'll that'll probably be live. Alright, so one more time, what were the URLs just so people catch them? So go to one seven two nine dot com. And you can read the book. Online.

Download the PDF. You can click and if you want to buy it on Amazon. So it's free to read online. You can check it out. Oh, and also subscribe because We're gonna be releasing more chapters and so on. I I know that

Normally. An app is supposed to be dynamic. And a book is supposed to be static. But I think of this as a book app. Because

You put something out into the world and people are gonna react and there's gonna be incomplete things or things I wanna say differently and so on and so forth. And so I'll keep editing it. And I'll keep setting out new stuff. So you can subscribe and get all that for free if if any of this interested you. One seven two nine dot com. And we talked about the origin story of that separately, so we won't get into it right now. But this is basically the publisher of the book. Yes.

Bology, very nice to see you again. And for those who aren't watching the video, you know these are two contrasts in style. You've got sort of my floral pattern full of all sorts of embellishments that I need to keep my mood stabilized to get even emoticum of anything done. And then you've got Bology in his in his Spartan what looks like Tech war war tech war room preparing for the future with no no golden fetters no no draws. I do have I have a plant here. It's just out of frame. And I have Uh it's like you know the Canadian girlfriend, right? My plant that's just out of frame. Right. And um

Did you know the reference? I don't. I like it even though I don't understand it. It's basically like Oh oh I have a girlfriend, but she's in Canada. Yeah that's that's Bala G's plant which is a cactus that needs water once every seventy years just as a as a symbol of resilience. Actually right, that's right. That's right. It is highly resilient.

And I have my whiteboard on the back for my math. So that's my Oh man. Well, Bology, I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm excited for you. I'm excited for people to read the network state, how to start a new country. You can find it on one seven two nine.com Check it out. Bology, of course, you can find on Twitter. He is insightful and prolific at Bology S. We will link to everything we mentioned in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. And

Thank you. Always fun to see you. Thank you so much. And to everybody listening.

Be safe, be kind. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then

I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything anywhere.

giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day to day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods, Shopify has thousands of integrations and third party apps, from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine. they probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008 when I became an advisor, and it's been spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time. time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding$400 billion. What does that really mean? That means every 28 seconds, more or less, a small business owner makes their first sale on Shopify.

more people in more places of all ages every single day. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. You would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store again with no coding or design experience required. Access powerful tools to help you find customers, thrive sales, and manage your day to day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed, and I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the day, which was awesome, the build a business competition and other things, plus the 24-7 support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support. You have resources, you don't need to feel alone in this case. More than a store, Shopify grows with you, and they never stop innovating. providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to shopify.com slash Tim, that's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y dot com slash Tim, all lowercase for a free 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to Shopify

Right now and check it out. They have a lot to offer. Shopify.com slash tip. This episode is brought to you by ASleep. My god, am I in love with ASleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad fruit. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nozzle, but now

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