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Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show and my guest today is the one and only Balaji s srinivasa, and you can find him on Twitter at Balaji s apology 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 tune after three hours. I say with great confidence. Now formerly the see videos. Listen to them. That they do, they do people listen to them.
A
lot of people, these are two last two, appearances were two of the most popular episodes, certainly in the last year to 18 months formerly the CTO of going base and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He was also the co-founder of earn.com acquired by coin basis Council acquired by Myriad, teleport acquired by Topia and coin Center. He was named to the MIT Technology reviews, innovators under 35 want a Wall Street Journal, Innovation, award and holds a BS. Ms. PhD. In electrical engineering and an MS. And
Uncle engineering, all from Stanford University. Balaji also teaches the occasional class at Stanford and his spare time including an online mooc in 2013, which reached 250 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 Balaji with the current state of the crypto Market. 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, 1 2022, and then perhaps hearing your thoughts on the India sphere, but let's begin with those two prompts sure.
So I'm not
a traitor, much more of a long-term investor / Angels /vc. There's actually a fun tweet
today by a guy Travis underscore. Cling, I've been doing this for 40 six straight months have never seen one like this before, and you see space got a list of all
the
Carnage in the
markets and the thing is that Carnage is
in the crypto markets was 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 type kind of 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 are talking about, you know,
I was doing machine learning way before people were talking about machine on, 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 want to 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 root permissions are independent of the US and Chinese establishments?
That is the fundamental question is one of digital freedom, and I can kind of tease that out and but it's fundamentally. Do you actually have property rights on the internet digital property rights or can somebody with a police badge from the US or Chinese style, shrink
depending on what side of the world you're
on? Get into all of your stuff, surveil your stuff? Take all of your stuff,
freeze and sees 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 control question for you, in our first episode. I think, at some point you mentioned for someone who is not going to 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 50/50 Bitcoin eith. 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?
I'd say stick with that. I mean, 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, I think I said something like buy it and then hold it for ten years. Let's see where we are in 10 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 SE not. Just the source code is available, but the back end was available to 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 to eat, at
least if it was open State, and you could plot the number and the depth of interactions on bitcoin and aetherium and
all of their off shoots. Not just those keywords, but the thousands of
keywords, and memes and communities. And so on that will 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 up.
But
they are absolutely massive things with tens of millions of dedicated people around the world and they come out of nowhere. So yeah, I don't believe that they're going to go away. But again, not Financial advice is 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 may be obvious. But I'll just say, this is the worst thing to do is buy an asset with when it's in the news and sell it when it's in the news and what you instead want to kind of do is it's inevitable that something will Peak your
Action. And then what you do is you set a calendar, reminder, you know, let's say 30 days 60 days, 90 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 a sink to the market sentiment as famous cartoon is a guy. He's like this looks like it's a goodbye and it's someone over here. Is there like bye-bye, bye-bye. And then the guy,
Like this stock could really Excel and someone over here cell. So so, so you know, like this, right? And it's just hilarious, sort of loop, which you don't want to be the current thing. You're on. You don't to be the person who is buying high and 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 a sink decisions. You almost never want to sell on bad news by oh and good
news. That's my
macro.
Outside of any given you, no
specific thing. Let me add one thing to that which is humans in general and I succumb to this sometimes to over estimate, their predictive abilities. So what is very helpful is set a time. It could be once a year. Jan 1 Jan 5 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 class.
Is or stocks or indices. So, maybe it's Bitcoin barrel of oil, S&P 500, and make your predictions and then set a reminder to look at them, three months or six months later. When you met, 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 it. Can I talk about that for a second? The prettiest. Do you have? 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
laptop from
Apple and they quote you some price let's say I don't know what it is 1499 or 19 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 there, you know, selling it for but the price of aluminum is bouncing around the price of their Rare Earth. Elements on the back end that's bouncing around their cost of goods. Is if they were just buying at spot prices bounced around every day and so in theory
Neither margin could shrink or grow or whatever on a given day. Now, what do they do? It is 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 99.
Or 29 or 1499, 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 of the case. That's why you don't have mobs pillaging 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 a case? Sure, I believe there's a connection I just would love for you to elaborate
Absolutely. So, it's social and financial volatility and way of thinking about that. So, let's start with financial because it's more, it's a little more quantitative and people know about this is concept called Market depth. And if you've ever looked at coin based Pro or any crypto
exchange, you see this, like V like thing with the buy orders on one side and 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, 50 bucks or something to get rid of it. Is today, we are insane, right, okay. A gallon of orange
juice is I don't know some price, okay? And you're a price taker, it set price for 99 or
something like that.
The thing is, if you start emptying out the shells, if you buy 100 units of orange juice and then you go to the next door, it might be 550, 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 got 100 units at 499 and then 200 units at 5:50 and now you can get 300 units at 7 and your supply is a 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 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 Overton 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 gets pushed back that's kind of like buying
Cell 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 1,000 votes for this level of the policy and 5,000 votes. For this level of policy in 10,000 votes for this little policy and then you have some of the other side and when you can shift over those foot Banks you shift that midpoint which is a policy. Just like if you can shift over the order book you shift over to the
price. Yeah that's clever I like so much you kind of
see that is the man.
Crow 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 it just like, with the price? Example, most people are price takers, you know, as I said, you're going by the orange juice. Just like most people are lot Acres, the policy is just apply 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 taking example that's like out of our time and
This you know and so and so people don't get mad Singapore like two and a half decades ago I think in 1997 there was an American citizen. Michael Fay who is vandalizing things in Singapore? I remember this. Remember this right? And Singapore was going to cane him as per Singapore, law and frankly had he been a Singaporean or he'd have been anybody other than American? He would have been a lot acre.
Okay, the law would have just been
applied, but all kinds of pressure got applied on this side of the
See market and Lee Kuan Yew was like, okay we're going to like reduce the number of Strokes of the cane. He didn't set it to 0 because out of being too much of a give, but as a consideration for that like the US government made it like a diplomatic situation and like the president, got involved and all the stuff they're telling you 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 mass of people shift, the midpoint of a price. The thing is, as I mentioned earlier with Twitter that back end 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 pay a good amount of tension to this type of
Thing on a number of fronts so Google Trends. I mean, they're not open State, exactly but you can track certain types of sentiment or interest or fear is longitudinally. But continue, I didn't mean to
interrupt. 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 100 or 1000 x
left to go and the
reason is that think about the difference between
And this a tech
analogy. So your might be like well, think
about it, huh? Okay. But think about the difference between AT&T Unix and Linux, okay? Now, most people, all right, so if you're an engineer, you're like, yeah, dude, AT&T 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 then we have
Like you can kind of 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, it's over versus if that dataset was open, we'd have completely different understanding of society and history and politics. It would be at the same level as the unlock going from AT&T Unix to Linux, or the unlock of going from
like PayPal to pick one. So let me jump in because the next question I want to ask
Is what some of the to you most foreseeable technological developments are that you say almost treated assumptions in building out your vision for the future over the next six 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
Topic that showed up in my most popular episodes in the last 12 months. I'll let you take that. Wherever you like,
what's the stealth topic? So I saw the list of the top, 10, Tim Ferriss podcasts last year where I was, number one, and number two, despite how long they were. So, hopefully, your listeners got something out of it was an honor just to be nominated
like to thank the academy.
Very importantly, by the way, to my knowledge, the Tim Ferriss. Rankings are not Juiced or edit.
We realized and so on. Did you know that that you're probably aware? This may be your listeners. Aren't the New York Times? Bestseller rankings are an editorial product.
Oh, absolutely. I'm 100% aware of that, because I had just just to give an example 1 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 book / publishing World sold, I want to say 120,000 copies through Nielsen bookscan.
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 Jessica.
So do you know what the Exorcist
lawsuit? It don't do not.
So basically, back in the 80s, the guy who wrote, you know, the book, The Exorcist, which actually got turned into a movie sue, the New York Times because
Cuz his book hadn't been a different book, Legion 10 feet, including the bestseller list and in their explicit written defense in the courtroom. And Whitey 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 is like, Google's rankings. Google's rankings. You know, what is the number one hit for Sinatra?
Now that was 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 of 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 are probably looking for the web framework, but most people on the planet that
is the most Balaji statement ever. But continue, do you think that's
true? Alright. Alright, most people who are querying Sinatra as opposed to
To Frank Sinatra
ICICI using, okay. All right, fair enough.
Because, you know, it's like a very proper noun to Clary, right? So if you could measure it and Google is kind of cut me 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 that 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, they look for apples. They want the fruit. 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 kind of know that the ranking is not objective when you call it a best seller list. The impression is that it's a numerically rank thing, and it's not editorialized, but it is. Anyway, point being coming all the way back up. Tim Ferriss, has undone Juiced. Unedited list was interesting because I looked at that that's actually kind of some open source analytics itself. And when I looked at that, I was like, you know, this interesting there is a stealth topic here which I'm also really interested in that Tim's listeners are interested in
in and I'm not sure it's being named as such and that is transhumanism and that's human lab, that's life extension. That is brain machine interface and it's limb regeneration. It's all your Fitness stuff. It is all the recovery stuff and so on. All of that is sort of a whole growing positive in my view, positive trend, the problem is people have pathologize that they think of transhumanism is like, the I do the Klaus Schwab version from the world economic Forum, where all become Miss happened monsters. And
Edited and, you know, you're
harvesting adrenochrome from orphaned children and Romania. That's really sick. So
we need to 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, you know, he was righteously angry or he was incandescent lie, mad, or whatever, you know, you can like, you
can chew
Change that trend of higher glisten. Depending on
exactly. I, you know, I sweat, he perspired, She Glows, right? What are they saying? So
transhumanism and Alternate terms,
that's right. So, whatever else you might call it, you could call it. I'd like to use term optimism as opposed to optimism. You are optimizing yourself. You are being positive. There's an objective function. Transhumanism, you might say, it's just a change or that change is positive or negative is unstated.
But optimism is in a sense. You're improving your 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 for.
Right so that to me, if you ask about foreseeable Futures transhumanism is an all-weather thing or let's call it optimism. People will want to get better and I think science is now really starting to catch up there. And this is
Really one of the good things about, you know, the state sort of receding and coming back and not being able to like the Overton window on this is absolutely moving. People are much more skeptical of the FDA and that actually has good aspects because it means that more treatments and so on can get through. All right, so you asked about foreseeable future. So one of them is optimal is MM / transhumanism a second one, which I think is, this is, 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 augmented reality glasses.
Should I talk about this? Yeah, absolutely.
So in the like late 90s and probably the early 2000s, people talk about the so called convergence device and you can go and look at the LexisNexis archives. And so, on, Bill Gates, we talked about the convergence device. And what did he mean by that? He thought it was good me. Going to be like a television, which would combine like a computer, and a phone and all of these other things, why? It's because in the 80s and 90s, everybody had a TV and everybody talked about the Tea,
She and the household gathered around it and they interacted with the remote. So it seemed like a reasonable thing that people who being habituated, using the 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 are also people who are 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 going to be years before, the iPhone even came out right. Most people were not seeing that most people. Even after the iPhone came out, this is great core thread. That's a time capsule that something like what's the point of mobile apps? It was like in 2010 actually and they're like what's the point of mobile apps is just going to show me? Coupons is a block by a store. You know, it's sort of a type of talk to you about
this. No,
so my friend you Sean Wang, he actually I think he
Applied 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 2010 or something like that, right? And the thing is that post is a great time capsule because from today standpoint we're like
For 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 none. And then when you actually go and think about it, the issue is that a lot of the because people had been so used to operating who computer in Cecil 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 have a full Mouse, don't have a keyboard. I have to tap on the screen and so and so forth. And
John'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 is probably pretty obvious by 2015. It was absolutely non-consensus bike 2009, 2010, 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 would I consider something which in like five years or 10 years or to be like, do Soper obvious? Of course, huh? You know? And now today they think you're a weirdo and that's never going to happen. Okay. You know, when it goes from your stupid and insane and that'll never happen to obviously that would always be the way it was. I love that because there's a very short Gap in the middle of that, exponential, you know, other things that were like
We're like masks during covid or pseudonymity actually in the crypto Community. You know what is it? But it's difficult. So a our glasses are 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 is persist with that. He's made that a big thing and I give a lot of credit for that because it's very difficult to do that over multiple Generations.
Durations. It's a kind of thing that your CFO wants to cut. Its kind of thing. The street doesn't like it can be a little margin, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, spectacles are out there. I'm not sure what how well they're doing, but I, they've definitely improved a lot. I like them. I've no Snapchat stock. By the way, is interesting It. Whatever thing. It's a good product, spectacles, Facebook's Oculus Quest again, something which duck deserves. I think a huge amount of credit for putting two billion to that ten years ago there. Only now really starting to Riku it because there were several iterations
and there was a lot of
Need to go into Oculus quest to get it to where it is. Now Oculus Quest is the 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 Like a Surgeon or a mechanic, or something like that. Less likely to get punched in the face when you're using it that. Yeah, right. Well
so how come to that point? Apple's a our kit? A our kid is like you can hold your phone up and you can see look at
Glowing orb or something like that and 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 with the measurements are of your walls
and then, 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 says lightweight, as normal glasses, which we know are 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 to get, make you hands-free. So remember that thing we were saying why humans are always mobile. Well, why would people want a our glasses? They want the use of their hands. They want these
He's their hands and they want to be outside and didn'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 an intermediate stage, where you go and walk around here like, you know, like this all the time, right? And I'm not sure if it is 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. Do you know that trick?
Yeah, I think he did share that on his and my first conversation.
On the podcast and believe that was in that episode.
It's almost like a, you know, you got like his primitive caveman and he's coming out of the cave and he's like, who will augs 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 Brin many years ago, remark that it was emasculating to do that. And who knows what the biomechanical feedback loop that's going on. Is but heads up is head.
Zup.
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How much of the purpose of Alexa as a device in the home? Do you think is just developing training data and better text? So that it can be ported over to Mobile use in some type of application with a are enabled glasses. I mean it's a really good business in its own right. I mean if 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, this part speaker things which erode their kind of interesting, right? You know, the you know, like some if you snap chat today and then you think back, 30 years, the kinds of things that have converged, the clock radio has become this. That's that like the the closest analog to that in the 1980s household for an Amazon. Alexa things that and you know the phone obviously is combined lots and lots of different gadgets and then we're going to now see you know if you look at like the Solana crypto phone,
When you walked out of your house in the 80s or 90s, you'd have your wallet and your keys, and then maybe your credit card and then later you have your phone and it'll be a physical wallet, and a physical key in a credit card. And so on, and eventually that's all going to converge into a different kind of thing because it's amazing that your 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
Say apple wallet and then you have fill in the blank. We're very close to that. I would
imagine we're close but it's one of those things that sort of like Gathering threads, you know. So you have to gather all of the Skins together. So that now a Tesla car can be basically opened by your phone and then you have to sell so many tales of cars that's like 10% of the market you've educated the market and then you do it for, you know, your walls of your private keys and then you do it for your
Passwords. And so on as you're Gathering all of these different skins and then you, you know, make that tapestry or
that coil. What is that word that you use? So skein
SK,
Ein Reich. Ein. All right. New word.
It's like a length of. I think the officials have
length, the length of thread or yarn Loosely coiled and not it, got it. Maybe I'm maybe I'm mispronouncing. It is game. Now you got? It's Kane. All right. Yes. You gathered the scans sorry to interject. So you asked for
foreseeable future.
First is transhumanism / optimism at this tweet, which is super soldier. Serum is real, have you seen this one?
I have
not. Okay, so you'll like this one. I may have mentioned this before, but if not super soldier, Serum is real. Okay, this article is from place. It's
like 15 years old. Like ever myostatin Inhibitors or something pause.
Yeah, exactly. And so, on the left hand side, wild-type Mouse on the right hand side, my stat and null, and look at the chest on that guy, like holy moly.
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 animals like bully whippets. So people who have seen a whippet will Envision this very very very thin
Dog. That looks something like a greyhound, but if you look up a bully whippet, 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 10.
Basically.
Exactly, that's right. And the thing is that this movie Limitless, that I really like, and the reason I like it, is it changes the normal Hollywood formula at the end. See normally many Hollywood formula, you know, movies about science fiction stuff. Nowadays have a sort of Icarus thing to them flew. He was too bold and he flew too close to the Sun and his wings melted. And he came back to the Earth and, and, you know, she should not have ever flown in the first place. And it's basically like
You arrogant, technologist, you added, there's all these some constraint and it will be subtracted from you. You'll never learn or to write this kind of intrinsic, conservatism and what's awesome about its 10 year old movies. So I'm spoiling it for people. But what's awesome about the end of Limitless is that the engineers are way 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 figure 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 - a damn thing or whatever, they'll be like oh but it will 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 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 in this, but my understanding is he had serious testicular. Cancer is doctors, gave him some kind of treatment and then he did, you know, he came back to win, multiple Tour de France's like he was out racing other guys, many of whom were also Juiced, okay, but the point is yes, within the game short, he broke the rules should be punished. I don't dispute any of that. From an abstract perspective, I want to know what his chemistry doing, because that is some like, Nobel prize-worthy stuff to bring back somebody from to
Killer 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 Icarus online. 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 testicular cancer to like, ridiculously ultra-fit, and so on, but five years lesson of life,
let me hop in here because 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 the actually there's a film called Icarus of all things. I really like a documentary which goes into the Soviet States use of doping and from a biochemical and also even just mechanical Logistics perspective, it's just staggeringly.
Plex and fascinating. I think there's a book also, it's quite old but called Game of Shadows, Barry Bonds Balco. And the steroid scandal at the dock confessional Sports which is also 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 in that part of the success, not all of it, but a component, to the increased level of success, what I guess it's a new version of like bulk and cut. It was the recomposition of his body and distribution of muscle mass. I do think the Lance example, super interesting, and I would just also pick up on one lost skein, I'll use skein shark 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. Belgian police. Great. Yep. Yep. So people can tell, that's
good. The traps on that thing or
just crazy. The, the everything it doesn't look like it doesn't doesn't even look like they should be able to walk and
In some cases due to selective breeding and other types of interventions. That is the case with chickens. Now who are bred for consumption, they you know they can't support their own weight on their legs past. Whatever it is, I'm making it up something like week 6, but I don't want to take it too far field. We're going to come back to the network state,
but maybe I, yeah, I yeah, I'd like to talk about this thing. You just said, let's come to the Never
Say. Yeah, so,
so one thing that's kind of important about this is in this relate to the Network's. You think, you know, the time
That book Game of Shadows and some of the words cheat 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, we're the dissidents, you know, the guys who eventually became
Armors and someone's over. There 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 capitalist were weren't they imperialist weren't they pointing guns at us, haven't they killed, are you know, Brave, Soviet soldiers, hadn't Lenin's Revolution hand, everybody sacrifice to that. You the worker could have this Bountiful life and you're so ungrateful and evil. So that there's that small group of academic types who could get outside their head, but there's a much larger
Can group of capitalist, you know. Those guys were tell me the black marketeers and they live down to every stereotype of the regime. They would cut you for some vodka. They were totally unregulated, Shadow
capitalists or those guys team. Balaji, I'm just trying to note is the
tiniest here. My point is that, when our moral premise in the Soviet Union, the moral premise was capitalism is bad. And if capitalism is a crime, only criminals will be
Atlas. Yeah, and it took enormous amount of effort over 70 years to 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 education.
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 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, Delaware, law, and corporate law. You have liquidation preferences. You
have went from Belgian Blue to Delaware, corporate law, and 27 seconds. 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 of Rube Goldberg machine. That'll never work. Why don't we just, you know? See
Everything comrade and redistributed from the state and thing that's already. There is thing is functioning and the thing that isn't, there is nothing that seems can be attacked in a thousand ways is the, so it doesn't exist. Point is once that moral premise, got flipped once, it was allowed for the bulk of 99% of people to engage in this. Yeah, there's a whole Machinery that comes in. And so once we can flip that moral premise and we can say look, life extension is good and more muscle is good and the whole Icarus.
Narrative is wrong. The Wright, brothers are right. Icarus is a myth, right, Wright brothers. That's a reality. We actually, we're able to fly Icarus, is just a mythical thing. The reality is a Boeing 747, right? Or whatever Airbus, you know, domain name. Name name some recent Aviation, go to the 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 optimal is mm good you know enhancement good. Then we start shifting it out of Game of 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 human is doing and what David Sinclair is doing and so on and so forth. The reason I just want to identify this actually think that moral language that moral premise is everything and it's often not
articulate. No, I agree with you. And just like making the market setting the price depth charts. We talked a bit about the Overton window and sort of 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 could learn a lot just by watching first, I would suggest bigger bigger faster stronger. It wise it's bigger faster stronger but I think for trademark purposes the Bradley flipped it bigger. Stronger faster is a documentary that was that was made in 2008 and
And it is a fascinating exploration of performance enhancement and 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 will. Look at something like in
This documentary use of erythropoietin. So, EPO used to increase the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood right? Which is why I 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 2. Then you have quadrant 3 which is like sleeping in altitude simulation tent so they're different Paradigm where the axis. Sorry, I missed the axes. We're not forget about the axis 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 for approaches to achieving the same ends with different legal status.
So 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 do think that there are in some respects incentives that are aligned with athletes to preserve the current state of doping. Because with more money with more States support, you can actually game the system more effectively than not necessarily lesser players, but less resource.
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 let me add one more thing then you can click on this to 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 Sky, age-related muscle, atrophy like sarcopenia, super important, bone density, Etc, 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 otology and and a number of things, we know work.
Look 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, dr. Matt cable line, that conversation is going to get into a lot of that, but please feel free to push back or ties
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,
Is you know, as you're aware in this Century or in this phase of humanity, 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 find 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 it? You know, when 100 people run around a track maybe one of them wins but all of them the other 99 also get a cardiovascular benefit from that and that's kind of what I'm focused on is not the zero. Some aspect of who wins this zero-sum competition where it's like this artificial in constrained environment. But rather the nonzero-sum of how do we improve People's Health across the population? Generally even if it is true that these guys who are like extreme Elite competitors,
Jurors have something to teach us. Broadly, like 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 to singular cancer or we're having treatments for them that make them, you know, run around like Lance Armstrong after his thing. That's, that's kind of where I'm coming from.
Yeah, I think we're more on the same page than you might. Imagine the yeah, what I would say also is the point I'm making is that the dose makes the poison.
Poison, right. Paracelsus was so many things and this includes volume of exercise, that 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 Sports very easily to you look at race horses and then you look at say patients with wasting diseases who are using various interventions because it is there 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 kind of track that progression you can spot a lot of things super early. I mean you can spot modafinil tests a great panel. Yeah you can you can spot. Yes, daffodil provigil, 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.
Oh, and Publishing that funnel on a quarterly basis would be one of the most important
newsletters. Yeah. That would be an awesome funnel to put it into the 4-Hour Body. When I wrote it in 2008-2009, it's still reliable. You can track that stuff. It does require some manual labor just because you're competitive horse trainers aren't just going to 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
Different word that but I agree with you on like, you know, the exact dose of something more is not always better. I agree, though. That the only thing that I'm saying 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 said of because that is conceding territory to folks that want to pathologize Improvement. That's only thing I'm coming at is it like to sort of pull the chip?
That's that limiter chip that's in our heads, you know, and remove that chip and basically like actually no
limits well. 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 you
Use of just to choose one class like anabolic androgenic steroids. If the opposite of pathology izing, 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 whole slew of these compounds.
I 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 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
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 to use these extremely powerful molecules but they can be misused with long-term consequences.
Totally. So two things are one is the reason that this Soviet example is actually quite good. Is they would also kind of jump to oh so you're for capitalism. Well then everyone can auction everything at all.
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, let's not pathologize. This is not put this in a box, let us actually think. I mean, you don't have to go to the Other Extreme of roided-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
Sheets and doping and and pathology Jason. 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 got to be I mean I know it's not your style of title great title.
That's a yeah yeah well do this it's like death tax, it sticks, its sticks in
your head. Right it's
deliberate. That's exactly right. I mean here there's actually this amazing app you know that people came out recently Dolly to okay. Yeah. And what I love about if ever heard about
this size
Access to all can synthesize
if access your great good. So and there's also like open source, not open sources. There's more public versions of people can measure out. 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 into Dolly to, and get an image out from it. And it's, it's effectively like an extremely
Pack programming, language, I say like, I don't know. Balaji, you know, improving musculature. I don't know something like that before it, whatever is he? 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 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 wisdom to that because words are like the super high dimensional vectors
And you can combine them to these really complicated manipulations in just a few phrases. And what's kind of 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, we're just give a few words and the computer is able to figure out all of this stuff crypto where you have 12 words or 13 or 14 words, in Santa Monica, which stores all of your cryptocurrency, right? I mean literally you can store like 100
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, it starts an entire movement and that is on every building and everybody quotes 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
No 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 I 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 to image.
Based on the tone. Sure, right? That's, that's what makes it concrete, right? Building our own vocabulary and thinking about a 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 Jenna him. I do not fear them. Yes. Nope. So he came up with a term, which he calls, Cleo Dynamics, Cleo Dynamics is Cleo, 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 quantitative form of history. And so we just took that term Cleo and he put in front of his, kind of a nice sound to it and it's kind of 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 we will find is and you probably did this. Actually in your 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.
If you keep using and then, you know, some time online 3,700 you're like oh that noun is actually the core data structure 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 3, you're like, wow, that should be like the title of the chapter. Yeah, you abstracted out, use how a
lot of people, or the book. Yeah, yeah. They cut worth screenplay writer. Come they come up with the title on page 78, right? Somehow emerges.
Theme with a label. Mmm,
let's start
with 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 is chosen for this
purpose to kind of have several different definitions.
So I've got it, 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 won't see him informally.
Native, they'll go through it, are they still seem like up 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 and in-person level of Civility and integrated. Cryptocurrency, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and a nan, Chi and census. That proves a large enough population income and real estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition, okay? Now 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 to 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 status,
People will kind of have a tough time doing that, you know, they might say oh it says it's kind of like regions on the map or something like that. It's a country. But when you want to give like a precise definition, that'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 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 a Japanese language in Japanese culture, and their ethnically Japanese and so on and so forth. And then, 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 let's say, labor and management in a factory and the same Nation could have very different states on top of it. The some, you know, places like France is aware of this because they have had many different kinds of
Parents and so on on top. But in our day-to-day language, the nation and the state are conflated, for example, you'll hear her the term National Security or multinational or national is a synonym for federal.
As national meeting like the entire but they're actually conflating things because really a multinational. It's not like its operating with the Japanese nation and the catalonian nation and the Kurdish nation and so on, it's multi-jurisdictional. Its operating in this jurisdiction in that jurisdiction, what that sounds like. So the word underneath this kind of gotten abused, similarly, like National Security, it's really like State security. It's not really the security, the people they're sort of abusing a term, right? So there's been this,
Drift in 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 it'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 dis aligned and in the, you know, stereo typical case of like the evil, you know, CEO exact 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 a shrug it off. And that tiny layer of folks that are in the government just to gets deprecated and a new government is set up.
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 government's fell. Okay. So 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 talked 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 my network state has a multi clausal definition because each one of those Clauses takes care of a different failure mode, because there's all these different people who tried to start new countries and just like a venture capitalist deal will have this term and that term it will have will have dragged along. It will have liquidation. It will have you know, pro-rata 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 try 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
Initially, all right. But first let me just kind of talked about like the definition of a nation-state. So first like 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 in the state is the government. But even that question of, okay, fine, 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
You read about in in school and met, vaguely. Remember, all of them are now, actually something that an entrepreneur, someone who's very applied would have to think about why is that? Because if in the 2010s, we start to ask a question that we had never really asked in the 2000s and that question was, what is a currency? Okay, in the 2020s, we're going to start asking the question, what is a nation and it actually becomes something where, you know, the thing we took for granted that we thought
Sorry. Balaji just just, just a quick question. Yes,
Nation or a state Nation? First, what is a nation of what is a nation because the nation comes before the state you could have a nation without a state. For example, the Kurds are a group of people that have a common ethnicity and culture and so on, but they don't actually have a state. The catalonians there in the territory of the Spanish or the Spanish state governments, but there are people without a state. And actually when you think about this, right, like the United Nations is actually a myth
Nomar. It's more like the selected Nations that happen to have their states. There is actually a guy, you know, the guy who's currently running kazahkstan. And he's like, you know, we can't endorse the principle of self-determination for every nation because we'd go from 192 in the UN to, like 600 Nations because 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 its 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 a total consensus on. And 100% of people agreed on to something that only 80, or 70 or 60, or 50 percent of people agree on. And when you do that, when you take that constant, you turn 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 an 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 do I say constants are becoming variables? Well, there are PC examples I can point out and there's NPC
examples, let's do both. All
right, let's do.
It's okay. Well, constant two, genders variable, and 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 2000s. That very much turned 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 or 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 thinks 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 all under the thing that you must reform. It is the thing that you can exit from. And once you kind of start seeing this, a constants are becoming variables. You start seeing it across life and very roughly speaking. You have, I'll just use this phrasing, all right? But you have the woken, the tech who are both sort of, in different
Is dis aligned with each other, but also aligned with each other in terms of turning all socio-political constants and variables and all economic things in two variables, let me give you 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 are you reading the digital copy? Simply the digital version of everything starts, introducing combinatorial complexity, right?
Oh, you're talking to somebody? It was it on the phone? Or is it one of these like 10 different apps? Are you watching the news? Well, it's no longer, CBS, ABC NBC, but it's like, whatever number of different things, okay? Now there's a good too, that there's, there's Alternatives or choice, there's all this type of stuff. Obviously, people have said there's a bad. Oh my God, you know where 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 kind of 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 called it, a moral flipping or moral inversion where something that was good becomes bad or bad, but
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 u.s. 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,
There's a CG our article from 2017 that I link where you can actually see on social media that the red and the blue are literally like different clusters and it pops out to you, you know, they just literally only link to each other. And one way of looking at this, it's really unambiguous is if you look at marriage patterns 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
Bookings 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 not going to marry outside it. Then in like one generation, it becomes at a minimum, like, process and Catholic or Sunni Shiite or something like that, who do Tootsie, whatever, you know, it becomes something that's actually tribal as opposed to ideological the ideology changes, the biology. So these are things where they're 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? Breakfront, or allow for those types of moral flipping things?
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 of this community, actually has 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 going to be not the extremely hot button issues but they're going to 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 Nation.
This 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? 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 kind of joke, videos are kind of funny, aren't 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 immediately like the first step they take is the wrong step. Why? Because
Land is the most contentious 0, some insanely fought over thing. I mean you know like Russia and Japan are fighting over like the Corrals and like you know those little islands in the Mediterranean, the Turkish and Greek states are fighting a people fight over land. So much of the stupid, you know, Canada and Denmark were fighting over this stupid uninhabited. Piece of land, you know I'm talking about like the
some no it doesn't surprise me but humans like to
Bye. Yeah, Hans Island. Okay, here's the thing. Why would they fight over something like Hans Island? If you go and look at it, okay, it's is 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 1800's there was this fight in the conflict was called fifty-four, forty or fight. We familiar this so that
we're tuscans probably not
fifty-four forty or fight. No,
I was
I was stuck looking up the Falkland Islands because thinking about the Falkland Islands, yes context as well, the East Las malvinas, but I don't know, fifty four forty or fight,
okay? So fifty-four, forty or fight was basically this mid-1800s conflict over the boundary in the Pacific Northwest and the thing is, is basically like the Americans wanted the border with, 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 49th parallel rather than, you know 5440. 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? Which, of course, will fight over a map. They can see a map etcetera, but let me complicate, that picture.
First is that map was actually not always visible in you know, pre 1492 much 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 are 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 as a frontier to the nth power because you even know the land existed and it kind of seems like we'll never actually have that again until we get to space.
But I argue, it's actually existing, again, already in an obvious way, and that is on the internet point. Is, when people can see something they will fight over it, you know, the concert of mimesis, right with. 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 near the border, you can't see is the border between Twitter and Facebook. And what 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 3.6 billion Facebook users, 330 million, Twitter users, the total is 3 point 9, 3 billion Max. It might be like 3.7 there might be an overlap there. Okay. For each person, you can define a zero to a hundred percent in terms of the time that they would spend on either their 100, Twitter or 100 Facebook. The Border region would be those people who are
And that might be a group of 70 million people in the world who spend exactly 50% of their time. And there's people who are farther from the border who are 30, 70, and people who are really far from the border near the capital who are 100 0 and vice versa, okay? But 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 the 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 a choir, they wouldn't be able to literally find out who was on the border region they could do sampling and stuff. But there's a cloud that has 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 fight over,
The visible things like you know, the use of the network and so on and so forth. But they're going to fight over border regions less only way they can fight over border region is to make their products 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. 330, million people, Facebook's 3.6 billion. Both of those are bigger than France and Germany combined. 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,
How humans operate is actually changing. You have to kind of, remap how you think about geography because in physical space, for example, to people, you know, 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 to 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 going to be adjacent to.
To Japan and Ukraine and Iran and so unlike 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 since the Russian Federation and 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 height of its power, but it's not like projecting power all over the world by contrast. Somebody like vitalik of aetherium, his network of people or you know, the
Solana Network suddenly, this network can be adjacent to another Network Solana. Can start taking users from etherea. It's like this huge island of like 30 million people just surfaced out of the ocean next to Japan and started like pulling people
from them Gojira, yes Godzilla. Anyway continue. 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
You're thinking kind of be like, hey, you know, we want to, we want to cut off those Network relations of going to move our Island somewhere else. So the thing is that I'm downloading one of about, I don't know how many 10, 15 different things that turn constants in two variables. One of them is the nation that 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 of those things are in flux, you kind of 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 situation. It's like closing the barn door and then expect to get all the horses back inside when
Our forces that were more powerful than that thing, that, that spread them all out that there's entropic forces, you have to kind of go to where those horses are, and loop them up, and maybe have new ranches or wherever they are 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, if you're teaching someone a golf swing like you should 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.
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 of the network States. So 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 10 years or whatever timeframe. But let's just kind of 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 to shoot. 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 your
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 Balaji you're full of shit. Blah blah blah. U.s. is going to be this this and this and not much is going to change and I'm going to bet a million dollars that this network State thing is not going to be a
And you said, okay, I'm going to take a million dollars on the other side of the BET. And here's the picture. I'm going to 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 likey, citizenship and Estonia and how that might be tweaked because most of the people are getting to see, citizenship have no plans to actually reside in Estonia and then I'm thinking on the other hand of like, kristiania this basically started as a sort of squatters
As territory with, in Copenhagen in Denmark, that has its own social structure of sorts. It's own 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 u.s. 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
The
rest of it. So let me start with the first part. First. This is just a scenario analysis. Do I see it's a base case? Let's say, I think it's probable. I can't say it's 100%. 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 reactions. But here goes, I call it American, Anarchy Chinese control, the international intermediate and the re centralized Center. Okay, this is my sort of base level worldview for what happens next 5-10 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 2021? But the short version is some groups. Think everything will basically be as it is, the so-called metallic phone calls base, Raiders. It just think everything is going to be the same. Everybody's kind of agitated, or paranoid, or whatever, and it's just all going to be okay, what? And then you've got folks who think that the u.s. is descending into either fascism or communism or something like that. Respectful essentially.
Right or left authoritarianism.
And they are reacting to that and they're like, oh my God, you know, and you 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, there's 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 have both pointing anti-authority, they're pointing against hierarchy. And so the left might say we are all equal and the right might
You ain't the boss of me, but both of them Point towards this kind of concept of you can't control me. 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 conceptualize 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 excist, 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.
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 physical world is very chaotic but you
of a digital world and digital property rights that are there for us to some kind of structure online. But the issue here is, we have sort of seen what the transition to enter key looks like in many countries around the world over the last couple of decades, there's a book by Barbara Walter called House, Civil War start, which, you know, is a lot of things I disagree with her on but actually give her credit for essentially, pointing out that many American interventions and other interventions overseas NATO and you know, their stuff over the last few decades.
They've been in the intent of spreading democracy and they've caused Anarchy. Like Mexico is way more chaotic than it. Was he on Grillo. Has this book called el Narco re talks about how Mexico's democratic transition attended. This huge burst in the narco-terrorism and violent gangs and so on and so forth, Tunisia, Libya Egypt, a bunch of these countries have essentially we've sort of seen them go from reasonably, okay? To kind of inaudible.
Arctic. And there's a playbook for how that looks. And if you before and afterward, if you just teleported somebody from 2005 or 1995 97 essentially today, you know, you can track it back and be like, well, Oklahoma City happened in 1995, and there's Unabomber, it'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 open to the right.
It is it is something where it's like surge in 2020 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, woohoo. So over you know, like that. Crypto thing is done but it's not done. It's coming back and that surge of Anarchy in 2020 that came down. Yeah, 20 21. 22 is more peaceful than 20/20, but it's way more anarchic than 2017, which is itself. More anarchic than 2012. 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 going to be something like, maximalist versus books in the u.s. 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 it's like a Bitcoin maximalist versus books
are there enough. Bitcoin maximalist in the u.s. to constitute a critical mass for that.
So I think Bitcoin maximalism is the most important ideology in the world.
People don't know
about, mmm. Okay. And
why do I say that? I can hear people
clapping through the soil, as a lot of people listening are going to be getting out of their seats for that one. So please continue. Well,
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 a statist cuck. Okay, so I'm because I am I'm fundamentally like like a pragmatist
Hist basically right?
And you're very middle-of-the-road crypto Anarchist of skid. Well, but I'm not a cripple. Assess thing is in this book,
actually not accurate. You don't know what you're seeing is, actually, it's extremely important, because all right, so much, I could say, let me see if I can download it. First, is one of the chapters in the book is centralization, decentralization re centralization.
and the thing is, when you say re centralization,
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 Establishment exist CCP exists. Why would you want re centralization? We have an operating centralized system here, okay? In the decentralised going to be, like, why would you want re centralization? You know, we're talking about taking power away from these totally illegitimate establishments with Bitcoin. But I'm about breaking the state and defunding the government.
So on, we're giving them defunding the police for defining 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 re centralization has the smallest constituency right now, but I think it's the right constituency in the reason is I believe the 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 so forth. There's something to be said for this on some a
Maxi's 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 it, but it's like up into the right, okay? Then you have the cyclical theory of History which is and actually one of the things that talk about the book is about 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, man, a weak man, create Hard Times, Hard Times create strong men, where it's basically like, you know, this nietzschean band of
Spartans,
This is the for turning,
right? Yeah, yes, it's nietzschean band of Spartans, It 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 managed 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 lid
Tech libertarian has a version that's also like this, which is the startup founder goes and Rebels against the bureaucracy. They managed to build an operational thing. That is actually much more egalitarian, and it's got a flat hierarchy and takes care of all the bureaucracy and it's actually more competitive. And then what happens is the bureaucracy in crusts, this and the libertarian founded rebuilds the state. And one of the points that make is all three of those Cycles are the same cycle, because it's not just the right cycle of being like strong and it's not just the left.
Cool being zealous. And it's not just a Libertarian cycle of having an innovation, you kind of need all those at the same time to actually go all the way around the cycle to fight that
establishment. So what do you think? The u.s. looks like in five years just if we could paint a picture. Oh sure.
It's like
BLM and Jan 6, Al 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. This is a five years might be ten years. I don't know the exact time frame. It could happen, faster Could Happen slower, but fundamentally, I think the catalyst is if you look at interest rates and you look at the graph, have your look 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 you want to find this graph long-term chart. So if you go to this graph and you click
Max, all right, so this is trading economics.com / United, hyphen States /, interest hyphen
rate. Yeah. So United States interest rate United States fed funds rate of trading economics.com, right? And the click Max
on this chart, I'm looking at Max,
okay? And so what do you see, you essentially see something where
Over a, you know, 40 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 one of the things I write about is,
And Dahlia is actually also talked about this. There are trends that affect humans that are
longer than the cycles that were intuitively familiar with. For example, you're familiar with the cycle of your breath, this is few seconds, right? You're familiar with a 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 familiar with frankly, our Venture Capital funds or startups are like 10 year cycles. That might be the longest thing where you can run an experiment and see a few reps of it and a five or ten year time frame over your
Fred a venture capitalist might see, hundreds or thousands of 5 or 10-year long experiments? That most people don't really track things over that time frame. And any normal, human cannot really track things over 40 or 50 years. You have to kind of 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
Have run out of juice, the 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 going to be forced probably to bring interest rates all the way to the floor, maybe before the 2024 election and I think you will see very soon.
Serious inflation as a function of that because they'll print money and will actually have genuine good shortages because we have all these supply chain things that are hitting you have China doing, it's crazy, you know, stuff with the ports and the covid lockdowns, you have the Joan, the slow steaming regulations,
do not know this list, deeming regulations,
basically like you know some ESG thing this is a great example of how like moral you know the moral flipping. I'm getting the second hand so I might have it wrong but
I believe it is reducing the speed of cargo ships to cut down on carbon
emissions. Let me just Define two things real quickly so you mentioned Dolly. Oh, just for people who don't know, Ray dalio former let's just call them head principal at Bridgewater Associates at least at the time that I interviewed him largest hedge fund in the world but 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
Is it basically, we have more money. They'll eventually going to 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 covid lockdowns, their 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
It 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 u.s. Because, I mean, people have been so freaking angry at each other. During the 2010s, in a relatively booming market, like in the 2010s up until 2019, things were like, decent, decent economic. 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 is destroyed your career.
And so on and you have a country where people are heavily armed and they're yelling each other on social media and you've got 50 Governors for, like you've got a very potent cocktail for bad things and we've sort of seen this in lots of other countries that 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 that people just really do believe on some level quote. It can't happen here but I
I think American Anarchy unfortunately is sort of where we're heading and what exactly does that mean? You know, try and paint a picture. So first of all in 1861, if you go and look at the map in 1861, 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 burn,
And so on 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 and reconstruction, they uninstall the software in their heads and installed software with new moral premises, Seaman World War to invade Nazi Germany. D not, Sofia 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,
That it's not in clean States. It's very fractal. It's at the individual county level. You've got little red here, little blue here, purple here, it's extremely group together, it's fractal, and so that means is that in physical space. These two nations are cheek by jowl but in digital space. As that graph, I showed you show those to social. Networks are just cluster depart in digital space. They are separated in digital space to show you the graphic. Do you see
it? Yeah, you did.
Yeah, I got it. Fucking did. Well and we'll put this will put this in the show notes for everybody.
So when you see that graph, you're like okay so in physical space, people are cheek-by-jowl, 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 world. The goal is to invade minds. And now, when we think about cancellation, d platforming,
Hash tags, etc. Etc. The point is that what you're trying to do is get a node Underside to flip from Blue to red or red to blue. And how do you do that? Because they're now shuttering your hashtag slogan, right? BLM or mag or something like that there, huh? During 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 Etc, and you are able to cancel and silence. Those people who
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 going to invade a cornfield and Vada City? That doesn't actually work. You're winning digitally. It's digital Warfare. Now when I say constraint from using physical violence, as we've seen, that's actually, we're starting to see stochastic digital violence. You know, the proud boys and antifa. And so on punching it out in the street. That's actually an extremely unusual thing in the
the 90s and 2000's 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 rigueur. I don't know where on the hundredth or 300 swear. It's like it's like an event, you wouldn't be like totally shocked that that's happening. That political violence is happening 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 receives the
Coin with something that's similar to executive order. 6102 610 to
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 inflation hedge, inflation hatch and in the same way that say gold perhaps has why would that be different this time around?
So this is not 100%. It's possible that I'm wrong about this
and I say this as someone who owns quite a bit of Bitcoin itself. Oh yeah, 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 you in this case, you know, we haven't seen a lot.
I'm going to bitcoin, but we have seen a long run with is gold. And the fundamental thing is, Bitcoins core value proposition is seizure resistance.
That is to say all stocks can be seized by hitting a button as was done with the trucker's. The Canadian truckers are, this is done with a Russian sanctions on 145 million people, billions billions, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. I think was just frozen because those assets existed on servers that the u.s. establishment had control over my say The u.s. Establishment. That's not exactly the US government. There's a government but there's also the network of people who are loyal to the US.
Establishment. Those are certain Tech CEOs or newspaper Publishers 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. There's now outside the US, this is meant that a lot of countries are re-examining whether they want to have some exposure to things that the u.s. government has root access.
Stu Powell actually had speech on the dollars role and competition. Just a few weeks ago, where he mentioned actually stable coins, you can fight probably find a better version of this then, you know, but it's basically rapid changes are taking place in the global monetary system that may affect International role of dollar the Central Bank. Digital currency is being examined to help the dollars International standing. So that is
Not some random person as the chair of the Federal Reserve mentioning a that the dollars International standing is being called into question and be that trip currencies and stable coins are related to the preservation of that standing. So like when you zoom out signal and noise that's remarkable relative to where Bitcoin was in 2010, 10 years later the Federal Reserve chair saying the dollars role in international finance is being re-examined and cryptocurrencies.
Part of the mix of policy responses that actually shows. We are where you want to call it winning certainly affecting and changing things. So 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 to hundreds of millions of people around the world that 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 going to 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 even with physical gold, executive order, 6102 showed that a sufficiently motivated, central government can defeat go
We have not yet seen that Bitcoin can be, so defeated it is in question.
Executive order 6102 for those who don't know, is FDR's, gold seizure. So very organized US Government at that time, still to seize the gold and then resell it on International markets at a markup is 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 the type of stuff which is people won't care that someone took on risk, to invest in Bitcoin, or hold Bitcoin during the draw down.
They don't care about any of that. They will care if Bitcoin is a million dollars and the dollars inflated and it's 2027 or 2028 and you need this to fund the US government. I know that sounds crazy, but think about it like this in 2010, 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 2020 or 2021, 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 that humor the thing we're talking about with mimesis and what people fight about fifty four forty or fight this account. Like the bites on this server in Virginia. When I say Virginia's probably Amazon's you know servers are the Twitter is hosted on the B on that server those little bites 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 2010 even knowing that Twitter and Facebook had done the Arab Spring to. They've caused social revolutions abroad that they had connected. Hundreds of millions of people. If you had written 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 2010 social media became what all politics is about. By the end of the 2020s, crypto currency becomes
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 really loved to cover and we'll see if we can do it please. So the first, just because I don't want to let this go too quickly because I know it's a question, mark is on a lot of people's minds. So you're painting a picture for Bitcoin appreciating in value based on the difficulty in seizing Bitcoin by a central actor like like
A government. Many people write that your key is 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 Bourne steps necessary to sort of implement all of that well, or they'll do it in a b-minus fashion and it will all be trackable and yes. So if they throw you in a jail cell, you're going to give up your keys, probably. But my questions are. So I want to I do want to make sure we hone in on our if you had to bet.
Extremely important question. Yep. So let me just lay out my my kind of menu. I 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? Well, that that I would love to eat 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
A change for Bitcoin to actually behave from a pricing perspective as an inflation hedge because it is seem 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
In hedge or hedge of other types. And so I'm just wondering if a lot of people who participate crypto are not going to have
cold wallets and therefore not a critical mass, perhaps enough of critical mass to move the market. And again there's 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 d value, I mean, more perceptually of non us, governments, and central banks and so on. With respect to the u.s. dollar.
That happens at kind of fail to see how that makes the Hop. So could you just paint a picture of what needs to happen 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. Actually think Maximus often in some ways, sort of how woke soar like the opposite of Nazis. They're both racially obsessed, but the white pillar the best. Why? People are the worst and you you but you
get a lot of the same things like separate graduations and all this stuff Maximus are like the opposite of communist. In the sense that they're both economic obsessed in the Communist thinks, everything is should be within the state and it's the fault of business. In the Maximus is actually often the opposite and the issue is, why am I not a maximum as well? For example, there's many things you can't just buy. Like, if you're in Syria and you have 100 BTC, what do you actually want to buy? You want to buy piece? You want to buy a walk down the street in a high trust neighborhood? Where there?
Bombs flying around
about you, just for people who don't have the definition, could you define? What a, 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, you know, people have made the comparison of like woke - to a religion in my book actually talked about as a Doctrine which is related to religion, but not exactly the same more than a technical.
Anak ality the wokes. They actually don't worship God. They worship the state and or the network, you know, that is to say they are, they're not about thoughts and prayers are about passed a law and they're not all employed by the state there outside of it and they act through it on a network, right? Maximalists are similar in that. They've got the Zeal of a monotheistic or of a mono statist like a communist. But there are Manu missed for a coin and one of the things interesting is, you know, like a communist would be pathologize.
Prophet and a Christian fundamentalist religious fundamentalist would pathologize interest and a maximalist pathologize has digital issuance. So just to kind of click on that right? Look a communist date, think of all profit as exploitive, that boss is obviously screwing somebody because you know he did a mark of Denis. Why couldn't you give it away for free to the community stealing some for himself? There's a 50 arguments you can make against this, but the problem is that it's into
Lovely appealing to people that profit is sort of getting a, you know, he's getting one over on somebody, right? Feels 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 pathologist a whole thing. Interest is similar Christian fundamentalist, other religious fundamentalist. There's things about azureus interest rates. Are you familiar with this concept,
like Usery? Yeah, Usery. Yep, I am. Yeah.
So what?
Concept is 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 than 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 use your. I'm just going to 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 any way we could get into what that means but yes, exactly.
Because any rate of interest is unreasonable in some under some religious like, you know, Islamic Finance, for example, or very religious Christian.
No groups were against the interest of any kind at all. Then what happens is every single financial model breaks, you cannot figure 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 issue.
It's right. If the Communists pathologize profit and the fundamentalist pathologize has interest. The maximalist pathologist is digital issuance. They're okay. With the issuance of equity paper Equity, that is to say, you know, you can go 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 your 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
Why do you have that stock? Why doesn't everybody just get paid dollars in your company? Why is it not all dollars? 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 started, back ready Market is 0. It doesn't, it's not working. Well, the reason is that if again it going back to First principles the value of an equity, our stock is a net, present value of, you know, the future dividends that would go to that share. And so, you know, basically buy a stock and then
You assume that in 10 years or 15 years, Facebook goes public and it pays out dividends and you pay $10 down, you get, you know, fifty dollars in dividends in 15 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, 101 or micro econ, 101 concert, 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
Dollars to everybody at a company is that through their efforts? They can go and close sales, they can close deals. You can go to close the sale for ten million dollars, that brings in Revenue into the company. In theory, that could be dividend 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 boom, does he allow the farmers to keep some of their green that their effort led to results. So effortless 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 the sort of religious fundamentalist
mode. This community, meaning BTC.
Maxwell's. Max - yeah, because
They've gone their head into a religious fundamentalist mode where and by the way, some of the fault here lies the SEC as well, fundamentally, we have not been able to make the analogy between digital equity and paper Equity. Why? Because the SEC in these has tried to say, oh, they're all unregistered Securities. And so we're going to throw everybody in jail and students open. So what does that mean? That means that look 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, just tons of things. A paper Equity does not, but it is similar in one sense. Which is that a paper Equity is something that incentivize people to build out a company and a digital asset. Incentivizes people to build out a network. Now, the problem is that the
SEC. You've got a pincer attack of the journalists in the maximalist basically. Okay. The bureaucrats in the Maximus 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 assets and saying, ah, we're going to go after that. That's like unregulated, you know, issuance of assets and The crucial thing. By the way, is there not like going after the Bad actors in the space? They're going after? For example they went after kick, you know which is a liquid fairly reputable, you know?
We 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 after 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, they're not being totally straightforward with me. And then that pushes it. It's like this trampolining and then in the Maximus attack, it has ha ha. It's actually equity in Disguise like an illegal.
Crowdfunding or whatever. And the thing is, that's a maximalist is typically anti fed yet, Pro SEC, right there, like the most selective crypto Anarchist ever where it's, you know, you're, you're against the Federal Reserve, you know, I'm saying,
right? For the, for the Discerning crypto and I don't often engage in crypto Anarchy, but when I do yeah. Okay,
great. Yes. And the thing is, it is fundamentally in a sense, unprincipled, right? It is basically something.
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 coins, the only coin people can buy as Bitcoin. Well, that's good again that this is like the Communists zero so 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 you till the thing up. I think it's super
obvious. You need more cultural awareness. You need these icons to shift. Like all these, all of these things are a lot of them can
Tribute to the rise of Bitcoin. Also
indirectly to me, that's insanely obvious but the thing is that the 21 million? Again, there's an aspect of it, that zero-sum like the Communists which is one person's gains and other 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 a fairly large crowd funders in ethereum and so on, right now, what is it? 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 saying those things going and burning down black businesses and that'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 necessary.
Sara Lee. 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 gotten sort of Maximum can twist in this ideological. Not, which unfortunately, is going to be very helpful, that's down. That's a 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.
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 10 years. 15 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 /, moral /, social /f
Goal, 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 recognized the Zeal and Zeal. Really, really, really matters. Seal matters. Because Zeal is a difference between selling, when it's low and zilla's difference between selling, never Zeal is a difference between talking to everybody about it all the time and making it your life and just having it be one component of an 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 cycle.
Really precious space. You know what you identify yourself? As you might live in Missouri but you're not mine identify yourself as a Missouri, and you might identify yourself as as a Bitcoin, ER, or as a Christian or is a Republican or something. That top identity thing is really important and that's something that Maximus have. And so what I think is actually going to happen is the political Spectrum will rotate. I think imagine adding yellow the splash of yellow so that red blue becomes orange versus green and orange versus green rotates. It. And so it's big
Cohen, Orange versus dollar green. And on the dollar green side are actually quite a few Republicans, a lot that, 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 will actually choose this side and for example like Jack Dorsey, like Glenn Greenwald
Like a lot, the sub stackers. Like a lot of the tech Founders, these are folks who would never fold into Trump 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.
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 in might be that you know, orange is like 60 percent of Republican and 40 percent Democrats coming. But one of the most underappreciated aspects is many. Many non-white. People will shift a Bitcoin orange and the reason is is that inflation heads African-Americans, Latinos.
Asians and whites all at the same, you know. And if you look, you know, the more equities and other assets you hold in some ways you're kind of more buffered from this. At least you can have some UPS as well as some downs, but inflation is absolutely crushing people of color 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's, you know, gone and and talked about that, given talks about that and 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 Walters book or something, she imagines that this future, Civil War or conflict will be between a tolerant diverse.
Talisman and some like 4chan Nazis, but that's a wash. That's, that's an easy win. That's a 9010 win, right? That's 95, 90, 91 or whatever, right? When you 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 50/50. Right. That's actually something where a lot of people would be torn between those two groups and when it's 50/50, unfortunately, that's when conflict is maximum so that unfortunately is how I anticipate things to
go
Wendy's think digital gold will behave like gold if if ever?
All right. So now let's talk about that soon as practicalities these practicalities really matter. Why do they matter? Well, the question of whether Twitter could sensor somebody's account and so on was an abstraction because people just assume 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 we're going to see some crazy things as a function of that and that's going to 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 going to see is
every possible Edge case and 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 centralize 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
Make sure he stayed for crypto because if you think about the concept of sanctuary state for immigration, or for abortion, or four gun laws, all of that groundwork has already been late. One of the things I predict in the book I talk about is I think that maximalist will introduce a constitutional amendment for no seizures a Bitcoin, just like free speech or you know, right to bear arms, can't seize Bitcoin fundamental, right? And I actually think you'll probably be able to get that through in a fair number of u.s. states. Maybe not the full.
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 have ratified it can point to that and say we 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 going to get you. They're going to 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 2010,
And would have seemed insane to say that billions of people would care about the position of some bites 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 going to really care where that money is in 5 or 10 years of really going to 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 this. This thing about the book I talk about. There's so many different billiard balls 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 this year and there's that theater, you know, the Chinese are working very aggressively on Quantum and there's a scenario. I'm not an expert in Quantum Computing. I know enough to be dangerous but there's an area where Quantum decription advances, fast enough and Quantum encryption isn't there or it's expensive. And you can do decription with these high qubit systems that are
One location. But encryption, you can't do outside or something like that, Quantum? See if algorithms just don't get distributed time. I've seen people argue about this, 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 break some of the assumptions on the cryptography. There's other attacks that could happen firewall attacks, where you try to block, the packets are going through and then they 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 in. So you're saying an email, when you're sending a Bitcoin,
Action. People could try. Oh my God, there's so many things that 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 would show coins coming off exchanges since I think early 2020 or thereabouts. I am seeing those numbers. I think glass node has some of those numbers so you can see, I think a decline in this. Why? Because
Was actually you know in the funny things is hilarious. It's actually pulling money off of the changes in order this
D Phi, D, Phi because you can only engage with it through like a decentralized wallet for the most part. I mean there are centralized changes that you do it but regulations make it hard because of that people have move funds more and more funds locally. This being a financial incentive to pull funds locally and that I mean incentives, ultimately our work. So it's a funny thing where defy may, actually the thing that lots of Maximus 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 decentralised?
Yeah, exactly. Like exactly. It's sometimes things are like that, you know, I can't prove it. But my strong hunch is people will bring the BTC locally. They will transform it into something like WBT, see or NBC or something like that in a defy thing and then do something with it right. There's several different operations that are like that. I don't have probably somebody like
Like Dune or nansen or something could support my hypothesis shoot me down 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 push back to that. And this is the kind of an important and settle 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, cash, which encrypts all transactions. You can do digital. No Madison you can.
Move overseas, you could do it. 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 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 than you can push forward. Like the Puritans made it all the way to the US and Escape persecution and then 170 years later. The US, the power they built up there able to invade Europe, you know, or Google, the escaped this corner which is searched 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 our there and then you can come back. That's kind of what the Maximus have done, though. It's not super Consciousness early. Maybe some of them are conscious fundamentally their Innovation lots of everybody else is 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 play.
Look 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 wokes exist, really? As a network thing, they exist in Academia and so on there like a ghost that can animate a Democrat sometimes and make him do something.
Sorry, it's good. Like a lot of
damage that came Israelites
Here's here's what I see that. If you look at Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden and you look at what they were saying in the 90s or 70s or something, like they're seeing 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 very powerful model for thinking about a lot of things. When you think about ideologies are like ghosts, that occupy huge number of hosts. And then the like animate them and their eyes glow, a certain color to fight each other and often.
You know, for example, like Russia vs. Germany, in, you know, the 1940s we think of that as communism versus Nazism, but now it's like flipped and the Germans are liberals. And the Russians are nationalist but they're still fighting. So the ideologies flipped but the tribes are like still fighting and sometimes One Tribe picks left. Tackles their tribe picks right tactics. And then, you know, two flips in one, try to stick picking, right? Text or tribes picking left tactics point is this concept of like a ghost that's like inhabiting, a
Is also happening with maximalism. For example, the guy who is running against JD Vance in Ohio, Josh Mandel. Do you see is like tweets on
bitcoin? 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 because it's like, that's why we're friends.
It's good. So I can have you all the podcast than I can ask you.
Yes, he likes her too, casually, tweeted something, which was like Mandela was like Ohio must be programmed.
Oh God pro-family and pro Bitcoin. And the thing is that look 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 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 going to be a big message.
Censorship is going to increase dramatically if inflation happens, you know why? Because in Argentina, in other countries where inflation is 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
Really have stats outside of Argentina that are real. And so now we are faced with the issue of that's something which the 2000's, whatever you could tut-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
179 conference session. Flashin that actually goes through the whole problem was 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 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 and not so much. You know, whether it's flat versus a dollar that's inflating away and that post actually it
Is 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 a theorem of the daps blah blah blah. It's all its crypto oracle's. It's everything into one app which is the inflation app that I think becomes like the new coin market cap. It's like thing people refresh. Every single day that means streams kind of web 3 and b TC. I know that sounds like, oh my God, that's terrible.
Well, right and there are bad aspects to it's 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 going to share even sharing. While we're talking, we've been sharing things in the chat. I'll share one that you might enjoy, okay? And we don't need to spend a lot of time on this, but you'll probably enjoy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The post, I put up in January 2021 and it's picture of The Reserve Bank of
Boy with a 100 trillion dollar note and in the description I just say had it framed years ago to remind me of how quickly quote-unquote money can change in value and then went into a discussion of ultra inflation and the belief that some people have of that, can't happen to reserve currency and on and on and on. So 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
Waited to that because you mentioned the carbs, good carbs, bad as as one possible 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 turns out carbs are good, right? Or whatever. It might be, the only important. So how do you prevent, you know, wild wild country and some disintegration
Into a not disintegration, but the formation of a calcified religious State when setting the parameters for a network state. So what is a first, what might a successful Network State? Look like, what do you, what would you wager and how do you prevent the calcification that I mentioned? But you were going to say something else with respect to the Zimbabwe and hundred trillion dollar
note. There's people who say oh the reserve currency can't fail and so on and so forth, they're actually like the inverse of the Maximus.
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 sub sections 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 that 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.
In 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 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 boldness is sort of like partially State partially Network, where they live on the network, but they animate. The state communism is actually also partially State partially Network.
Because they had this International network of communist, 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, we'll fight though Godless communist, but it was like mostly state. But with a God, you know, dosing so you can make hybrids, not just pure forms but God said network is actually a really useful lens to start looking at movements because 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
Did he really thinks it can never go away? You know, there's this series of books are a 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 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 kind of 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 your kind of a traitor or you're like unpatriotic and so on and so forth. And sometimes you talk to somebody 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 Hell Fire, then it's like decentralized law enforcement, you know, the law might only catch you at some
Only if you actually believe in hell, then doing this little crime even if the law doesn't see you while 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's actually like a metal logic to it but okay. People who don't believe in God where 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 in a sadist then you believe the network, then you end up in something like maximalism or crypto tribalism. So the thing is that that dispute You Know, Carl Schmidt wrote this book called
A Theology and he's like all these religions. I mean, he himself, you know, was like a Nazi jurist or whatever. Right. So, but basically, Nazism communism etcetera. These are all your many people have observed. These are all effectively, like religions. They're either religions themselves or their God Replacements. And they animate huge numbers of people to fight as if religious kind of thing. So therefore, we're not just having like a scientific discussion, it's like a fundamentally like religious discussions, it's just something that one should think about when you're
When you talk 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 tech, nabal, Jason Bourne. And actually thought about after. I'm like, that's much more you than me. I'm not going to be doing all the stunts in the movies, in the same way, that Tim Ferriss 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 president or
Or you're very driven and so on, then you can kind of find your footing on something. You kind of, 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 want to help build so that brings me to your next question. Basically, if it's not these ideologies of conflict because in an era where everything is cracking people like these ideologies, he's
Most are set up to recruit their setup to pull you in. And you're like, you know, for example, if you were, if you were unfortunate enough to be in Eastern Europe, between 1939, to 1945, all these guys had to choose between like, the Nazis. And the Communists, that is an absolutely horrible to. You know, the answer is neither, like the answer is GTFO good. Both those are dead ideologies. And on the a sheep, what do you
say? No, just four people. Get the fuck out. Is what that stands for?
Yeah.
Exactly, it's true. Like those people who are 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 or 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 what political violence is actually. Like, I'm just going to quote this at length is from like 7 years ago. No, sir. Five years ago, he was
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 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. Trudging through your town back.
And forth your towns, 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 giant Riot, it's not like some surgical, you know, kind of 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 where it's like, people get blown up, people get blown to Smithereens, immense damage and destruction.
Both sides were really really sucks and I know that super obvious to say but all the wars that, you know, with the exception of the military class that's actually gone overseas and fought the u.s. like hasn't actually had experience with that in living memory. It's got all these violent video games, you know, 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 and World War 2, or the Korean war or something, you don't want any more of it and you go
Go back to like, kind of a piece mode. You understand, you understand how things can spiral in a bad way but having had that goal for 70 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, these abstractions to pull up one of the concepts I have there is the one commandment, okay? So I mentioned God, state of network and how you can make hybrids of them. So the network State actually requires it 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 one command? 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 rural, Pennsylvania, or Minnesota. It could start as a digital community, that crowd funds land around the world, okay? So could start digitally 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 us several examples, but there's different
Tears of how aggressive that moral premise can be, it could be something like, cancellation, is bad, you know, cancel, cultures 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 just some general work matters. But if one of them is cancelled at one point, which is a rare event that group all defends him as one. So that's when we was a moral Innovation relative to study large where you say, a large sort of neutral,
Oral to - on cancellation but isn't actually able to stop it. This group actually says that isn't 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 going to pay some percentage of my income effectively in cancellation insurance by being part of the society and have a thousand people. And I will work with them on, just normal fun stuff. 99% of the time, we'll just share each other's content. Launch each other's products. Advised each other. 1% 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 start-up, right? Startup is all about Focus. One thing you're changing, let me get a second example, the one commandment carbs bad. So this is something, if the first you would need what I call the 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 is crowdfund around the world. And what do you do with the moral premise carbs? Bad that moral Innovation. Well, you basically Implement keto kosher at the border you. Have you interdite it? You take it seriously and if you'd really seriously take sugar and carbs bad and you take that to the nth power and you have a small town that really thinks 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 the 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 base, that alone is a lot changing every single meal, and every single grocery store in every restaurant within these borders, is a pretty big deal. As I said, keto kosher to suppress it.
For it which is kosher and a changing food but that's pretty big. You go further. Once you've got this done, probably people lose like 30 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 1900's, public sanitation, like sewers. That was both, you know, cleanliness is Next to Godliness.
Yes, and it was 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 20th 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 activist, social entrepreneurs and so on and so forth. We don't really 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 capitalist and you have Founders. Don't look
like, on the political
side, tell me do
not. It looks like, you know, activists and philanthropist. So you have activists on right and left, and you have philanthropist on right and left court backing. These activists, and there's activists can be activists activists. They could be, you know, aspiring young politicians, they could be ngos, they could be like you know, various kinds of things folks, who want to foment social change of some kind like a
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 want to take something that was one, and turn it to a zero sum of those bad and turn it. Good or vice versa and to get funding from a philanthropist, or they do it themselves. 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 in here. So what is the ultimate win of a moral innovator? It's like Obama is 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, that term is its 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 there similar to the moral innovator. And they started that moral Innovations have mentioned to so far like the cancellation proof culture or the carbs free zone up.
You take the car free zone. You start iterating it. Okay. So first is everybody's dropped 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 application process people, sometimes get mad about this, I'm 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
The institutions they care about their highly highly highly highly selective. So you have moral license to do that, two more license to be selective. Now by the being selective on entrance is different than not letting people exit. It's like you don't let everybody into your house. If they want to leave your house of course you let them leave. So 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 is this digital
presence? Yeah, digital and physical. Basically you don't they don't just get an
Out. See the differences 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 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 weren't selected on the basis of align moral values. What happens is the network effect, normally the whole metcalfe's law and square, the more
People, the more interaction assumes, those interactions are positive some but you have to very carefully engineer Network for that to be the case. Something like Twitter has a global leader board 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 aligned 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 polarized ants 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 the show.
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 want to grow to the limit of what makes sense for your community to work, and that could be very different for different kinds of one Commandments. I'll give you several other examples of the carb-free one, right? If you take that further. So first you've obviously a carb-free obviously issue, really
mean sugar-free low-carb. It's actually buzz. You my apology 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 state or federal laws. 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 distribution of islands that are very small, like, private residences or gyms or whatever it might be, but if you want to make it a little larger such that you can actually have a sizable Community, it seems,
Like, it would have to be may be privately owned such that the town was actually considered a Seoul residents or something like that. That's right. So there's
the entry u.s. outside US soil. So there's something called 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, 24 Hour, Fitness basically has dues paying members and not right Harvard.
Is very selective about their admissions. New York Times is selective about their admissions. So, you have, you have a genuine Community online that you start with that your selective on Admissions and then a community goes and buys land together. Now my therapy lawsuits and stuff like that. It's possible. There's lawsuits but this is a global thing. And just the concept of these selective online community I mean every Facebook group is selective every single Google doc where you can add and remove permissions is selective every
Our group DM is selective like that's actually something which is so baked into the culture and society that we sort of take for granted that you have permission control over things. So I do believe that that is coming that you're going to be able to take those opt-in networks that people can select into online and then materialize them in the physical world. Now, laws are going to 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 knee, if you need to just learn
Early set quotas. And so you are hyper selective subject to having X percent of Y group 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 quarters are actually not terribly bad necessarily because at least it's a numerical targets. You have to hit that Target then subject to the Target, then you're done. And you basically showing 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, in 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 crowd from territory, then it can erect a border around it that crucially, this is not a typical Corporation, it could be literally a co-op, there could be many structures could be all coin holders. So it has more legitimacy than just like a company doing it.
Okay, so 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're going back to the thing about, oh, just go and get some land. A lot of people will try and be like, Oh, I'm going to be the prince of so-and-so. And I'm going to go and put a flag in some random unclaimed territory, like like,
Land is like this or there's a spot in Eastern Europe, that's like this was a spot in the Sahara Desert. I'm going to be the prince of this, right? And the fundamental thing that Libertarians, they get, they have half the picture, which is yes. Starting new countries is good but they don't have the other half which 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, to be it.
It's like is people have lost such track of History, they do understand that organic formation of communities and they just skip to the laws and the explicit stuff as opposed to all the implicit agreement that precedes those laws of which those laws are simply an encoding of those agreements and acculturation that happened over a long period of time, right? Tony so far
right. Yeah, so am I have another question in a few moments? So I might jump in and it's dark but please continue. Okay,
so I've talked about 11 Commandments,
Which was like cancel proof one just to extend the sugar-free one for a second, the 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 saying again, you're not saying traffic lights change. You're not saying 50 other regulations. Thousands of regulations that apply. You're not saying that you're not trying to change building codes, you're not trying to have self-driving cars. You're focused on one thing and that Community do, one thing really well.
And that one thing of sugar-free after people lose 30 pounds, then what happens, maybe then everybody gets equipped with a CGM. Continuous glucose monitor, 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 1.5 and you start actually building it out. Now, to your point earlier about how do you know that this isn't like, like some kind of cult? How do you know that it doesn't go wrong? It's check by exit everybody can.
Even any time, it's literally got a 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 I don't like it. You cancel. And you leave it society as a service SAS, the next SAS.
Except isn't that good? Yeah, that's good.
Clever. And that is something where it also does something else, which is its 100% democracy. Rather than 51% democracy, 51% democracy is
what it sounds like 51%. Democracy is, 49% dictatorship, 49% of people did not vote for this guy at any time nowadays. And for last 30 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 and in lots of countries at any time on the order of 50 percent of the country, feels the election. You know, they don't agree the election, right? I'm not talking about any particular.
Simply the fact that you just keep getting 51% to 49%, 49% 51% the alternative to that, where it's like The Fosbury Flop. If you talk with The Fosbury Flop of democracy is 100 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 in voting can be manipulated voting in the Soviet Union. You know they vote in the Soviet Union you went there and you had
add a ballot and it had nothing on it. If you wanted to vote for the Communists and you could write the name on it if you want to vote for a non-communist and everybody would look at you and be like you really want to do that,
right?
The Polk 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 is at the top of that party is, you know, selection process. So that's the 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 the real election. And then people just pick their partners.
D candidate in the general. Okay, Go.
Okay and go here. All right, 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. So you mentioned 100% 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 49 percent ruled by dictator effect, 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
Bill 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 crypto Centric community, 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 heck 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 could influence their ability to Market. 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 reason I bring it up, is for a while. I remember in Silicon Valley, there's a lot of talk of CC
Getting seasteading seasteading seasteading and people are like chocolate like yeah yeah right and and certainly there are experiments being run and have been run for a long time with intentional communities that have on some level. 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 want to say is that
In the book. I make a distinction. I talk about startup societies and network States. I Define a network state is 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 a 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 at all salver.
Diplomatic recognition, but it took like 10 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 a crypto Fiat exchange. You know, the exchange dreamtrip tone Fiat ability to be halfway dollars or 95% dollars in five percent crypto. That exchange turns out to be like a critical part of the entire transition to crypto. In the same way, the exchange or the interface between crypto countries and Fiat, countries, is the Diplomatic recognition of a network seat.
Okay. So that portability is one dimension of it. Another dimension is the one you're talking about which is physical migration and the thing is that
It's like several things I can say. So first is if somebody plans poorly you can't be there keeper. You know, you can sell. You 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 is to 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 Garside called China coup. And you know various guys George Soros is kind of hinted at this you know there's this group the cyborg group in the u.s. that put out a video about a month ago that's talking about side war and has like photos of China and how they're doing side where in China to see this video. This ghost video.
No, but I would love a link. Will put it in the show notes as
well.
So, short answer is or short version is. I think it is possible. I can't see 100%, but that some kind of China, KU will be attempted against zou zhen ping or the Chinese Communist party. So whether it's like actually us backed or not, I don't know, but for Garcia to put out a book like this for Soros to make the comments. He's has for this jsoc, put that video out there for all the talk about oh they're you know, not a democracy and, you know, so on and like a lot of the same energy versus Rush.
It is quite possible that some kind of China cou will be attempted. I don't think it's going to succeed for a variety of reasons, but that's like 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 of the Chinese State ripping out any piece of Civil Society by the roots that possibly collaborated with that.
Kinds of consequence of that I couldn't imagine, but it'd be like that. It could you cut off the physical Goods? As targeted, reverse physical sanctions you know like okay well Sally chairs but not these key screws that you need for certain military things. Like it would be viewed as this insanely hostile act and you might say, well, I mean, just Carmen is smart enough that it won't try that the establishment won't try that like, have you noticed a 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 smart and 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 russian-ukrainian war, there's very statements are being put out on, Taiwan thing, bite, and put out some statement and pulled it back and put out some cement. This is not show a degree of caution on this topic. My point is, I think, while American Anarchy is
Being 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, 95 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 Kook how 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 want to leave their money. Okay it's called run Zoo Ru n XU 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 life lat, get out or runs you so runs. Ooh the problem is there's reactivity and everything and the more popular that becomes the more it's going to be portrayed as some combination unpatriotic, some combination trying to take your money and leave.
Leave after all, China has done. So they're cutting off the exits in their own way, to your points Chinese control is on their side, the world. And you know, they're going to say is they're going to say, look, we just stopped, you know, this American style in turkey and they're going to 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 roll forever because Rai, I will pick up every possible form of organization against your knee, possible form of dissent. And that's just
Order that any feedback signal whatsoever on power, whereas Anarchy is the total opposite of that. So you're going to get, I feel this world of I'm seeing things, tracking towards that. You have just total disorder over here, which will be justified by saying it's not the Chinese All-Seeing Eye and you let the Chinese All-Seeing Eye justified by the fact that it's not the total disorder here and it's like the Nazis and versus communism thing. Except it is total decentralisation forces, total centralization and the alternative that is many different examples of re centralization.
And 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 Gem, and you didn't like forward and you didn't like, Chrysler, well, you could found Tesla, you can found something that actually, I mean, it's very hard. You know, along the first carpet boats, the gift be a lawn maybe, but it was possible to do. So and if you know what software, if you don't like some software company even like Google Docs, people could found notion, even a big company. You could tackle like this,
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 they'll have those
fine. Just to be clear. I didn't know, I didn't say that and I'm fine with all Salvador. I don't have personal issues at the El Salvador. I'm just saying that most of the experiments were talking about. I mean, it's of the menu. Yeah, the menu. I'm just like, it seems like the crypto tail is wagging the dog.
Ugh, a bit in the same way that the text tail wags. The dog when people are like, yeah, it's great in this place and I'm looking at them and in zoom and they're 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, no. 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 thing 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 and essentially points out that the for-profit colonies in America, mostly failed. But it was a religious ones that 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, bring it back around to where we talked about earlier.
And just like the situation that were 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 grade 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 descend and not Anarchy, and shooting people. But
Julie 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 sugar-free rather is if you think about great startups some of them are very ambitious sounding like SpaceX and others sound incredibly stupid and trivial like 140 characters. But now today both, Twitter and SpaceX are big companies and a lot of startup 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 start of societies are going to work. You just have to run the experiment and allow people to set them up Society is a service. A lot of people to opt-in to them. And that's what a lot of this
book is about. Hmm. So I want to take one quick sidebar and then we're going to 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.
And the India sphere and we did not get to the India's fear. 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 India is fear means and then thoughts on the India's fear.
Here's what I'll say about India, I will just give a single a couple of links that can talk about it, verbally, but Sanjeev son. Y'all actually put
Doubt an economic Survey of India here. I'm just going to link that here about three or four months ago, and it just has tons of maps and those Maps show like, nighttime Luminosity, the national highway Network, you know, the airport's, 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
But it's not there every single day, because if you're there every single day, it's kind of gradual, it's an improvement but it's gradually, don't really appreciate it. And if you've never come and you have nothing to Benchmark it against, you don't see the changes, but for the intermittent visitor, it's astonishing, what's happened and what's really good about this set of graphs, is it shows it for the whole country, right? So lighting Highway build out airports basic infrastructure has been dramatically improved over the
last 10 years. Yeah, tap water, put it.
The water at
puddle water. Exactly. Like so the thing is India is becoming like and and you know for G and all the internet stuff. If you look at this whole thread, the second reference I'd point you to is a is a article called the internet country by Tiger feathers sub stack.com, okay? And that is a ton of graphs and just the digital story and it's showing the build-out of literally like a billion people. Now it's like 800 million, something like that got onto some of the fastest cheapest mobile internet in the world over the last
Five years. And so the H-1B visa, doesn't even matter anymore. What matters is the TCP IP Visa the labor shock. This represents the culture shock was represents. Most people have been game this out, but the majority of English speakers on the internet are 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. Have not priced this. In most of your followers will probably be Indian by like,
20, 30, 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. They're 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 so in seven, they had portable technical skills in engineering or medicine or something like that.
They weren't really culturally fluent. You know, they know how to operate in India but not really in the US or in the globe, the internet dramatically changes that because all those kids in India, understand Instagram, memes and Tick-Tock and all that stuff, they are internet native that 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 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 their Indian in a thread that's a huge difference that many people has not been culturally acclimatized that quickly 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 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 the saying India, disappoints, both the
He disappoints about The Optimist and the pessimist, but two things about that, that's a good one, right. Sound - that's something that's pretty good. So this link that I just paste it in. If you just go and you've read the India, budget government document
and just a pause to tell people that I'll put all of these links in the show notes, at Tip, Top log / podcast. So, you'll be able to find all these very easily, please. Please continue.
Yes. So it's like it's got digital universities.
He's drone Farms, 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's Alana's article Mike's Lawn is great guy. Smart guy from Founders fund, it's got a subset called pirate wires is article. He wrote called trillion-dollar paint job from last year Aug
11
Between one. Yeah. Pirate
wires.com.
Yeah, partners are come in. The article is called trillion-dollar paint job and what he pointed out about six months before that set of tweets about nine months ago, is this gigantic multi billion 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 where 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.
Recap of the bill. Why such Relentless Focus From the media on so minor and 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. It also has ruled for the better beyond that. It's not at all clear but 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 u.s. 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 going to be a bat like some of it actually worked where they managed to walk a Phi and capture Google. And these big companies is really bad because it means that they are going to be turned into surveillance machines are already. Have you seen the Google?
A I think that's trying to see landlord is bad language and your Google doc. Did you see that?
No, but happy to link to it for people, ya know. So it's
like Google Docs landlord suggest thing. I mean thing is look at its 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 list and wanted people to do that, right? That mythical story Google has
As literally billions of users, it has, if it decides to use it, the power to shape language and speech and thought with its suggest, with its autocompletes with things like this. So that power in centralized hands is an insane thing. It's almost almost impossible to because undetectable 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 why.
So that will be a way that the social war is going to be fought where Google and things like that are weaponized against the population, which is why we need these web 3 and other services so that you can get off a Google and get off of Amazon and get off at these book. If I'd things. Anyway, coming back up, rather than trying to work with tech, they wanted to fight it. Kill it woke. If I it antitrust, It capture it. They've been partially successful in that. But they've also done is, they've turned the latest generation of tech Founders very much Against The Establishment. All the guys were running.
In companies that are worth less than 100 billion, are basically Pro Bitcoin and less aligned with the u.s. 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 alienating and polarizing a generation of up-and-coming Founders not just in the US but very importantly, outside Tech has been pushed outside of the US and the u.s. is no longer the majority of tech most tech actually happens outside the US. So the whole concept
It's very America Centric that it's all in Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley is if you heard the term
met him.
Nope. But I'm guess it's like an antonym or a, or a synonym, but it's a metonym. So it's a word that what is like an umbrella term that captures a bunch of things.
So, mad at him 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 deprecated, met animals via decentralizing, technology. So Finance is not Wall, Street, advertising is not Madison Avenue films, not Hollywood. Education is not the ivy league.
Space isn't NASA. Cars are not Detroit and technology is not Silicon Valley, as obsolete is Broadway. And the thing is, you can already see some of those things happening. Like cars are not Detroit's Tesla and space isn't NASA it SpaceX and you know, film it's starting to move away from Hollywood as well. Advertising is already not Madison Avenue or it's arguably moved away all quite a bit. But once you see that you're like, can you apply the told him you're like, oh all of those things were like points in the US which dominated certain industries and all them are getting
biotechnology at the same time. Anyway coming back up. So with the India thing a there's some chips on y'all's survey economic Survey of India which shows all the maps be. There's tiger feathers, which surveys on the digital build-up? See, there is this link to the Indian government's spending bill is? I'm just saying build space. It is basically, there 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 1.
An enormous Gap. Obviously, 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 opposite in the US with. I understand why? It's, because the rise of Technology correlated with a relative fall of American living 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
That's great. And we will link to all these things in the show notes. So, biology at Balaji s on Twitter.
Oh, wait, can I say one more thing? Let me say, one more
can I was, well, you absolutely have to also mention where people can find the network State, how to start and Char tree. Yes, you can say another thing. I
will say one thing, and I'll say that last thing. So the one thing I was going to say is going back to that. God State Network framework. I'm bullish on Indians and modest.
Only bullish on India. That is to say the Indian state. I'm like very modestly in favor or very modestly bullish on but the Indian network of the global diasporic Indians connected to certainly many Indians within the Indian 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 1940.
I've the 20th century was the USA versus the USSR, right? The Americans versus the Russians, you know, the two guys who are on the edges where everybody could see growing, they had huge populations in the 1800's, 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 kind of think that by 2040 or 2050, maybe sooner, maybe later that there's a chance that this century is the Chinese state.
India Network. So the centralized sinec State versus the dharmic decentralized global Network. I kind of think that's how things line up and the real sort of gift sort of squint to see this as an edge case. But the same of the UK sort of handed the torch to the US, which is an English-speaking kind of thing. In some ways, the u.s., I think May hand the torch because the global English-speaking internet is going to become India.
And insofar 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 office 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 the come 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.
More than I'd say, than Washington was anti-british or that herzl or Ben-Gurion was anti-british or Lee, Kuan, Yew is 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 intimate. 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 don't condemn Britain. All the time we're basically grateful towards it or pause.
Ghibli inclined towards it, but we've removing along another axis so rather than be Pro or anti British rather than Define it as post British Grand Prix. Inter-american, what is post-american look like? And prepare for that and you know what, maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe all the base, Raiders 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 deposit. Some model putting it out there, that's it. The Network's eight.com.
You can
also read it at 1729.com and that's like an online book and so on. So by the time this podcast goes out, you'll they'll probably be life.
All right. So one more time, what were the URLs? Just so people catch
them. So, go to 1729.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 going to be releasing more chapters and so on. 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 going to react and there's going to be incomplete things or things. I want to see differently and so on and so forth. And so I'll keep editing it. I'll keep setting up new stuff so you can subscribe and get all that for free. If any of this interested you
1729.com and we talked about the origin story of that.
Separate least we won't get into it right now but Balaji the publisher of the book. Yes, Balaji very nice to see you again and for those who aren't watching the video, you know, these are two contrasts and style. You've got sort of my Floral Pattern, full of all sorts of embellishments that I need to keep my mood stabilizers to get even a modicum of anything done. And then, you've got Balaji in his in his Spartan what looks like tekwar War, tekwar Room preparing for the
A future with no, no, gold in Fetters. No, no
drawers. I do have a plant here, it's just out of frame.
Have
it's like in the Canadian girlfriend, right? My plan
is just out of frame,
right? And doing the reference,
I do it. I like it even though I don't understand it.
It's basically like oh I have a girlfriend but she's in
Canada. That's, that's Paula Cheese plant, which is a cactus that needs.
Or once every 70 years just as a symbol of resiliency,
right? That's right, that's right. Is highly resilient and I have my white board on the back for my
math. So that's what this is. Oh, Manuel. Balaji, 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, could find it on 1729.com, check it out. Balaji of course, you can find on Twitter, he is insightful and prolific at Balaji s. We will link
To everything we mentioned in the show notes at MDOT blog, / podcast, and thank you. Balaji always fun to see you. Thank you sir, appreciate the time. All right. And to, and 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 with 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 Below 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 found or discovered for have started exploring over that week kind of like my diary of cool. Those it often includes articles and reading books, I'm reading albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on, they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcasts guests.
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And we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing now, for me. And for many people, the result eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32 percent faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep. Overall, I can personally attest to this site racket in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed and now my dear listeners. As you guys you can get $250 off of the Pod Pro.
Cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eight sleep.com Tim or use code Tim that's eight all spelled out. He IG HT sleep.com Tim or use coupon code temp, TI m 8 slate.com Tim for $250 off of your pod, Pro cover.
