The Aaron Day Show Episode 013

Free Russ! Free Russ! Free Russ! Free Russ! Free Russ! Is there anywhere on earth where a man can still be free? Will he bear the weight alone or will he have to bend the knee? Is there no one in this land who grows tired of the game? Where the wicked gather

stones and build up prisons in our name There's a story that you've heard before It's been told in every age Of a gentle soul misplaced inside a cave

And on this day.

And there's no

There's a fire inside That burns in you and me And the truth denied Is what we'll say it's supposed to mean I

can't be polite said Russell Rickford See, works better when it's unmuted. Welcome to The Aaron Day Show,

Episode Thirteen. Tonight we have a great guest, Sterling Lujan, and we're going to be discussing basically the network states, the future of freedom, Roger Ver, Ross Ulbrich, the whole nine yards. I'm very excited about this. I've wanted to chat with him for quite some time, so he'll be coming on here in a little bit. I'm going to walk through some housekeeping. It's been a couple of weeks. It seems like it's been a year since I did the last show just to get caught up on on what's going on. I do highly recommend you check out the last episode and you'll probably notice I'm certainly still focusing on CBDCs and CBDCs are still going to be. a very important issue. The election does not change

the outcome on that. We very much still have a CBDC and it will be increasing in tyranny regardless of which political party But just by way of background, fighting CBDCs is one way to stop global tyranny and to stop technocracy. But what I had been working on prior to COVID was really focusing on personal transformation and improving my own consciousness. And I think that is actually... the way forward ultimately. So no cryptocurrency is going to solve that. And so last week we had a really interesting show with Mark Passio and Michael Rechtenwald, where we discussed the agenda, and then also agenda,

which is essentially the next wave of kind of transhumanism. And we discussed it from an esoteric and an exoteric perspective. And I thought it was a great Great conversation. And I hope we continue the conversation because I think there's some important insights that hopefully will come from this that we might be able to factor into figuring out more holistically how we approach fighting this global technocracy. This is the last event I'm doing this year. So I will be at Mineratopia next week from the fourteenth to the seventeenth. Very much looking forward to this event. I think privacy coins are actually and privacy tech in general, is the best tool that we have for defeating this

technocratic state. And we certainly will be discussing that with Sterling this evening as well. But then I'm going to take the rest of the year off for a couple of reasons. One, I want to focus on doing everything that I can, you know, kind of behind the scenes to help with Roger Ver's situation. Now that Trump won, I think it's important to try to do everything that we can to get, you know, elevate Roger's situation for an early pardon, because these things, usually pardons happen at the you know, end of a term, but this is certainly a different situation. set of circumstances. And obviously, Trump has already committed to commuting Ross's sentence. But I think once he becomes fully,

truly aware of what's going on with Roger, it would be great to get him added to that list on day one. The other thing that I'm going to be focusing on is I'm writing a new book and redoing my CBDC workshops. And I want to focus on making the CBDC workshops so impactful that we're basically signing up merchants and in the workshop, setting up merchants to be able to take alternative currencies while at the same time onboarding new individuals to using alternative currencies. And at the end of the workshop, actually having somebody newly onboarded to alternative currencies, actually making a purchase from a merchant. Because to get to that level, it's very time consuming otherwise.

I mean, you actually need to get the people in the room and to get that set up so there's a lot of tech work and uh educational materials that need to be put put together to actually make that effective so I'm doing that and I'm also writing a new book The book, The Final Countdown, it was a great book for when I wrote it, but it's actually already out of date in many respects. And I think I want to incorporate more of the who's behind the technocracy. I think that one thing that we're missing here, and this is still the case, even with people that are on the front lines in the alt media, I think people are still looking at things like COVID and still looking at what's going on as being

one off accidents or if we could just replace people in government with better people, the problem would go away. And that doesn't really reflect what's actually going on. There is something much more going on for decades. systematic that's been And unless we can educate people about that and acknowledge that we're going to be fighting the wrong battle at the wrong level. So I want to incorporate more detail on that in the book and then also incorporate just more of what I've learned, not only about CBDCs, but that the plan is actually to tokenize all assets, not just monetary assets. So stocks, bonds and everything else and add the same control system to that. And so I really want to

elaborate the book in that regard. So there's going to be a lot So that's good. of so that the travel schedule is going to increase. slow down for a couple of months, and then we're gonna hit it really hard at the beginning of next year, probably mid January to February. So I'm looking forward to having an even more powerful and impactful workshop. I do encourage you to go to freerogernow.org and to sign the petition and to share that and share it individually. Just sharing a link on social media doesn't tend to get any reach because social media platforms tend to suppress anything that links outside of their ecosystem. So what I've found that works the best is literally

DM or text message or send something on Signal or Telegram. This is the best way to raise awareness. And keep in mind, you might say these petitions don't work or whatever. This is a waste of time. This is just virtue signaling or whatever. But that's not true. This played a very powerful role in helping Ross. Ross ended up with more than six hundred thousand signatures, and this did play a key role. in pushing this over the top so it really does help it really does matter and it's not a lot of work so I I encourage you to to do that right now if you can while while we're even on here and I also encourage you to do the same with with ian freeman at freeiannow.org a similar situation and you

know with both of these guys we're kind of late in the process here um and some interesting political dynamics at the end but we really need to raise awareness uh ian's situation as well and jacob hornberger has been doing a number of interviews and wrote an incredible article outlining Ian's case that I highly recommend that you read. And there's a link to that, I believe, on the freeiannow.org site. And we need to keep up the pressure on Ross, too. I mean, the commitment was made, but now we need to make sure that President Trump follows through. And the way to do that is to just keep up the public pressure. I know today on social media, a lot of people were doing hashtag free Ross now.

And I think it's important to continue to do that. And I would hope bring Roger and Ian and Julian Assange and Edward Snowden into the mix as well. And I will say, I'm not announcing anything official, but Dan O'Neill, who really spearheaded the enemies of the state event that I participated in in May, We're working on a new event, an Unlocking Freedom event. I don't know exactly when it's going to be, but we want to do a big event in D.C. sometime before Trump takes office to bring awareness to what I call the Freedom Five. So Roger, Ian, Ross, Julian and Edward Snowden

and make a really big deal out of that. So more details will be forthcoming soon. And I think as I've mentioned before, my dream for all this, I do believe in kind of setting a vision for what I would love to see all five you're trying to do. of these guys at Porkfest next year. And I actually think we can make, I think it is really within our ability to make that happen if we put enough effort behind elevating their cause. I think the circumstances are such we might very well be able to pull that off. I'm waiting for Sterling. He's on the other side of the world as I understand it. So while we're waiting for him, I think I might read just a few sections of this

article that I've written for The Brownstone Institute about Roger. You know, I'm not going to read all of it. I haven't figured out how to write a short article yet. Every time I try it, it doesn't work. And this one's no exception. It's about thirty two hundred words. But while we're just waiting for Sterling here, unless anybody has any other questions, I'll just read a few things just so that people understand what's going on. it's important to know the US First, government is attempting to imprison Roger Ver for a hundred and nine years for the crime of following his lawyer's advice. So his case represents an unprecedented attack on attorney-client privilege that threatens anyone who

relies on professional counsel. Today, Veer sits silenced in Spain, unable to defend himself publicly, while prosecutors use his own lawyer's records against him, records that show his meticulous attempts to follow the law. This isn't just about cryptocurrency. It's about whether any American can safely consult legal counsel without fear of prosecution. If this precedent stands, seeking professional advice could become evidence of criminality. Business owners, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens who rely on lawyers and accountants will be at risk. The time to act is now before this dangerous precedent becomes permanent. And I'm going to skip through some of this introductory part.

So, you know, hopefully Robert Barnes will be talking more on this. There's a great video clip if you go to freerogernow.org of Robert Barnes, who does an excellent job of explaining the legal aspects of this case. But to me, this whole thing is about it's kind of truth and truth plus love and gratitude is the way to solve this, in my opinion. And so I think part of the issue here is Roger can't speak for himself. I mean, can you imagine being in this situation? I mean, it's kind of like me. I'm outspoken. I've been in a situation lawsuit and I couldn't talk like this where I was in a about anything publicly because whatever I would say might be used against me in court. So literally,

I couldn't even go to liberty functions or tell anybody what was going on because the other side was actually trying to subpoena people who had just overheard me saying things. And so Roger's in this situation where he's been outspoken and principled and, you know, He's in a foreign country. He's arrested. And not only does he have to worry about the federal government using what he says against him, you know, he might get thrown back in prison. It might it might cause him to have his bail revoked because he's in a foreign country for making what are called. extra judiciary statements. And so I can't imagine what it's like for Roger to be particularly given how in that situation,

outspoken he's been. And if you also consider what's happened since he was arrested, you know, in terms of the timing of he puts hijacking Bitcoin out. And then there's this big Bitcoin conference. And now everybody, making Bitcoin or reserve currency. people are talking about I mean, what a, I feel I have a lot of empathy for Roger's situation. But I think one of the, part of what goes on when this happens is if the other person isn't speaking, often people assume that the person is guilty. And I know this happened even in my case because I wasn't going anywhere. And because I wasn't talking to anybody, people started believing what, the other people were saying. And in some cases,

making completely there was a guy out there defamatory statements about me and I couldn't defend myself. And if that goes on for too long a period of time, people start to believe this. And so, you know, in Roger's case, they're going to try to paint him as, oh, you know, he's just some crypto bro. He's some rich guy who left who left the country. And that is anybody that knows Roger that couldn't be further from the truth. section in here that I wrote about Roger. So I want to read the Roger Ver, where natural law meets human impact. When people ask me what I believe in, the answer is simple. Natural law, not the academic theory of natural rights, but the living, breathing reality that we

can make the world better through right thought and right action. That by aligning our behavior with universal principles of non-aggression, voluntary cooperation, and genuine care for human flourishing, we can create the conditions for freedom to thrive. In all my years of studying and advocating for these principles, I've never encountered anyone who embodies them more completely than Roger Ver. While others talk about freedom in the abstract, Roger has dedicated his life to manifesting it in reality. I first encountered Roger's work in twenty twelve at a Free State Project event called Liberty Forum, where he introduced many of us, including several who are now prominent voices in the

crypto industry. to Bitcoin for the first time. I've watched him In the decade since, consistently stay ahead of the curve, identifying supporting technologies that offer real alternatives to centralized control. But Roger's impact extends far beyond cryptocurrency. He's invested his heart and resources into more than forty companies that are transforming the world for the better. From groundbreaking medical technologies, making diagnostics available to underserved communities, to biotech innovations advancing personalized medicine, to projects re-imagining governance itself, Roger's work touches on every aspect of freedom and flourishing. The hidden champion of truth, All right,

I'll just read this one section and then Sterling's on. This weekend, I had the honor of participating in Brownstone Institute's annual conference in Pittsburgh. For two intense days, I witnessed something remarkable, a gathering of some of the world's most courageous voices in the fight for human liberty and scientific truth. The accomplishments of Brownstone over the past three years are staggering. When voices of reason were being systematically silenced during the pandemic, Brownstone emerged as a sanctuary for truth tellers. They fought lockdowns and mandates, not just in the public sphere, but in the courts. They've exposed the machinery of censorship, revealing how government

agencies collude with tech companies to suppress dissent. Their research team dismantled flawed pandemic risk assessments and exposed how organizations like the WHO and the G-Twenty manipulated outbreak data to justify massive new funding through repair. Most recently with my addition as a fellow, forefront of warning about they've been at the the dangers of CBDCs and the weaponization of the financial system against dissenters. But Brownstone's story begins with a profound act of moral courage. Jeffrey Tucker, witnessing the collapse of scientific discourse and basic human rights during the pandemic, created Brownstone from a place of deep caring, caring about truth, about humanity,

and about protecting those who dare to speak out. He wanted to create a haven for dissidents like myself and many other Brownstone fellows who faced cancellation, professional destruction, and worse, simply for doing what was right, speaking the truth. What few people know, what I didn't even know until after becoming a Brownstone fellow, is that none of this would have been possible without Roger Verr. As Brownstone's founding donor and board member, Roger's support was crucial in getting this beacon of truth off the ground. In typical Roger fashion, he never sought recognition for this role. While others might have used such support for publicity, Roger quietly helped build

an institution that has important voices for freedom become one of the most and scientific integrity in our time. This is characteristic of how Roger operates. Behind nearly every major initiative promoting human freedom and fighting against authoritarian control, you'll often find Roger's quiet support. From Bitcoin adoption in the developing world to fighting against CBDCs, from supporting victims of state persecution to funding the research that challenges official narratives, Roger has been there. usually without acknowledgement or a claim. Now, in cruel irony, while Brownstone continues its vital work of exposing government overreach and defending individual liberty,

one of its key founders sits silenced in Spain, facing persecution from the very systems of state control he helped others fight against. The same commitment to truth and freedom that led Roger to support Brownstone now has him fighting for his own liberty. This parallel is stark and troubling. Just as Brownstone fights to prevent the financial system from being weaponized against dissenters through CBDCs, its own founding donor faces the weaponization of tax law against him. Just as Brownstone works to expose the machinery of state persecution, Roger faces that machinery firsthand. I'm not going to go through Sterling's here. the whole thing. It's a long article. Again, that's part of it,

but I wanted to read that part because I'm hoping others will share their personal story about how Roger has improved their lives personally or improved the world in general because I do believe love and gratitude can go a long way. With that, let me get to the stage here. Hey, Sterling, how are you? Yo, Aaron. Thanks for Thanks for having me, and sorry I'm just a tad bit late. I had a long travel day yesterday, so I was in recoup mode. Ready to rock. Oh, no worries. I've been looking forward to this for Awesome. Well, a long time, so I am really grateful that you could join. Yeah, let me go through a quick overview. my audience is kind of a mixed audience, And by the way,

so a lot of people might not be familiar with... your work or even some of these concepts. A lot are, but I'm kind of trying to bridge some interesting categories and demographics here. So maybe just keep that in mind. But let me give you a little bit of background on Sterling. Sterling Lujan is a psychologist, writer, and crypto anarchist thinker focused on building parallel governance systems and network states. His journey into anarchist philosophy began in two thousand and nine when he was arrested and faced forty years in prison for MDMA possession, an experience that revealed the inherent violence of the state. he's worked as communications Since then, ambassador for Bitcoin.com,

written extensively on network states and counter governance and developed frameworks for what he calls rational anarchism, governance models based on human psychology and voluntary cooperation rather than coercion. He is the author of Dignity and Decency, Rhapsodic Musings of a Modern Anarchist, which I highly recommend, and is currently writing a second book about the network state and other topics. He currently works with Logos, developing technology infrastructure for network states while writing about anti-Malokian government systems and ways to peacefully transition beyond traditional state structures. His work uniquely combines insights from psychology, technology and anarchist

philosophy to envision more voluntary and human-centric forms of social organization. Before we get into this, I want to say, and I was saying this at the beginning, I've been focusing on the CBDC issue really is kind of a defensive strategy given that what we're really fighting here is a move towards a global technocracy and the way I view the world is this is really it's free will versus determinism it is abundance versus scarcity it's love versus fear and it's decentralization versus centralization to me those are kind of the big uh big pieces of this and I've actually tried to talk to people earlier this year I actually gave a talk on You know, my opinion is America one point

is dead and this election didn't save that. And I started going through this exercise of, OK, well, where did we go wrong? And, you know, maybe we should rebuild from first principles. And and while I wrote something about that and gave a talk, it didn't really sit with me because, I realized that the problem with you know, this is this idea of trying to even rehab this behemoth and that the way perhaps to solve this a move towards complete centralization is even more decentralization. I started researching network states and then started reading some of Sterling's research and articles, which I've learned a lot from you. I actually encourage everyone to check out your Substack.

and actually subscribe to your Substack because your thinking is really on the cutting edge of this. So it's actually blown my mind and it's kind of put me on a whole new arc. So thank you for all of that. And with that introduction, it's great to have you on. And I guess to start, I mean, how did you get to where you are now? Yeah, sure. And thanks so much for the introduction. And the feeling is mutual in terms of your work too, my friend. So thank you for that. I will just mention briefly two minor corrections on the introductions. The idea is relational anarchism. And you mentioned, I think, just in passing that I was

a psychologist or maybe I said that. So that's not the case. I got my bachelor's degree in psychology and I was working on a master's in counseling, but then I quit to go work in crypto full time. So not technically a quote unquote actual psychologist but thank you so yeah let's let's get into it my I I became a libertarian or started thinking about libertarianism around and what let me and I'll back up a little bit further before we get into the full story and around I took mdma right you had arrested for mdma I mentioned that I got actually took it at that point for the first time and I snapped out of what consensus trance. Charles Tartt called the

I was basically sleepwalking through life. I wasn't really doing anything with my life. I wasn't here, not really. And it was strange because when I took the pill, it wasn't just that I processed my traumas. I was undergoing some type of quasi hallucination, right? Or quasi ecstatic state because likely what I took wasn't pure MDMA at the time. There was a lot of mixed pills. It was likely MDA, which has more psychedelic properties. So I had these minor ecstatic visions as well. And then I started

questioning things like, one of the first things I questioned was why is this drug illegal? It's, it's helping me process my traumas, try to understand who I am on a deeper level. And then I had this like Zen, Zen Satori. Well, it's a Satori moment, but also this moment of profound insight into how I was treated just universally as I was growing up. And I started telling myself that I'm a lot smarter than I ever knew I was. And then I repeated it kind of like a cone, I guess. And then on the come down, after I took the pill, everything changed for me. It was like a quantum personality shift. I immediately started reading, not just for escapist purposes,

but also for trying to actually understand. I was doing research. That's around the time I also decided to go back to college. I already went to college before and dropped out. And I went specifically to study psychology because, of course, now I'm profoundly interested in the mind. OK, so that happened. And then fast forward to two Right. thousand nine and things get really interesting. So I love the compound and the chemical so much that I started giving it to all my friends and everyone in my family as well that I could get to take it. I gave it to them and I became a bit of a techno shaman, except that turned into a business. Now I'm giving it to everybody and I'm selling MDMA.

And I finally, of course, that that caught up to me. And in two thousand and nine, my house where I was living in West Texas at the time was raided by the state police and the state marshal. I was I mean, they literally kicked my door and basically it was more like a veiled assault where they pretended to be the apartment owner of the apartment complex, opened the door or knocked on the door and I opened it. And the guy was basically pretending to be an air conditioning guy and then the, all of the police, uh, what is it? What are the, the word I'm looking for? All the police, they had, well, they had,

they had assault weapons, right? They had AR-fifteens. It's just a really tough experience to rediscuss as you can imagine, kicked in the door, pushed, pushed me to the ground. I was with somebody at the time. I won't name that person for their own protection. They were there, they were pushed to the ground too. And then we were split up and then. They opened a safe box, firebox that I had, and there was about five hundred pills of MDMA. It's kind of a long story. I didn't actually have the key to the box. I was working with another guy who actually had the key to the box and knew the exact amount of drugs that were in there. But it was this I was really lucky with this experience because,

of course, they were threatening me with forty years in prison. So I thought I was I thought my life was was finished. After I got arrested, I got charged with manufacturing and distribution of MDMA and also engaging in organized criminal activity. And they threatened me with forty years and I had to hire an attorney. Luckily, the drugs did not pass state lines. They did not go over into other states. So it was not a federal crime. And that was that ended up being a really good thing because the attorney that we hired was local. And it's like the greasiest, smarmiest guy I could find who was friends with the DA who knew the ins and outs and basically could play up the,

where the Trump card was the fact that I had never been arrested before and had no criminal history. So he ended up wrangling a deal to where I ended up getting. Ten years probation with deferred adjudication, which just in Texas means that there's not a felony on my record, technically. Right. If somebody looked me up, they could still find out that I had been arrested. That experience, though, it woke me up, right? Now, like I'm doubly woke. Now I had a direct confrontation with the state apparatus. And now I also had to get criminal justice system. criminal justice system. So this really gave me profound insight into how broken and corrupt the system is and the US government is,

and even on the local level, how broken it is. Because then I got shuffled through various places on probation throughout this time. Because that happened, I also felt at the time felt very victimized. And I don't really have a victim mentality. I'm not that type of person. But everyone in my family was telling me how bad I was and how awful this was. Why would you why would you do this? Why would you, Right. this kind of person Sterling. we didn't think you were And I argued back against that. I'm like, why should I be arrested for this? I was just engaging peacefully, voluntarily on a market, giving people what they want, voluntary exchange. And so it was that sort of

combativeness and those discussions I had with some people close to me that got me into anarchism, to the freedom movement, I started reading as Ron Paul's revolution. It was around the same time I started reading his books right in the Fed, read that. And what really changed my mind or helped organize my thoughts. I read as a result of Ron Paul's book, he referenced Murray Rothbard and I read Rothbard's book for a new Liberty. And that especially chapter three, the state really helped organize my thinking around what this, what the state apparatus actually is being an organization of, territory that has a territorial monopoly over violence. Right.

I had never thought about it that way before. And of course, because I was also very much a nerd and interested in communities online and being involved in online communities, I came into contact with the folks calling themselves cypherpunks and crypto anarchists. And this is now fast forward, So I got introduced to Bitcoin in two thousand thirteen. As a tool to gain financial responsibility and to figure out how to push back against the powers that be and to undermine the Fed. So I was one hundred percent in at the time. For Bitcoin in twenty thirteen and then in twenty fifteen,

I finally for the first time actually purchased. my first Bitcoin. So I was thinking about it, talking about it. money where my mouth was. I guess I didn't put my So I wasn't actually fully all in until twenty fifteen. And then I just ran. Ran with it, bought a bunch of it, started working in the space. got into it, That was the time I just started working with Roger at Bitcoin dot com. Twenty fifteen and also started writing articles on Steemit. That was when Steemit was popular. We could talk more about that if somebody wanted to or someone in the audience wanted to hear more about it. It's no longer really But I was making money on Steemit, trading tokens for Bitcoin,

also working at Bitcoin.com, getting paid in Bitcoin cash. And so everything is really history from that point. But that's how I got into this space, into crypto as an activist, as someone who started starting to actually think about using these technologies for their originally intended cypherpunk use case to undermine the nation state, gain us more freedom. So that's really, it's kind of a long story. I'm happy to go into details on certain parts if we want, Eric. Well, so one thing is I keep on looking at this. do you think that they're going I mean, after these drugs like MDMA and others specifically because they don't want us to be able to explore our consciousness,

specifically to kind of trap us into a more limited reality? Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say absolutely. One hundred percent. I think it's my conviction Yes. and it's a lot of people's conviction that the reason the state went so. Aggressive against psychedelics and even MDMA in the. Following the sixties and the countercultural revolution is that these mind expanding compounds were causing people to rebel and to push back against the system. It's no surprise that the fact that MDMA,

after Albert Hoffman's bike day, after he had synthesized the chemical, and then it found its way overseas into the US, that you started to see a lot of anti-war protesters. Sure, that coincided with some cultural trends as well but the hippie movement was largely catalyzed by lsd use and what lsd and a lot of these psychedelics one of their peculiar traits is that they can deprogram and dissolve the ego and so if it dissolves the ego this this also renders whatever cultural application that you're attuned to

as now irrelevant or it allows it at least gives you the capacity to start questioning that because you can now see things in more of an undistorted vision. You can see your own biases. You can kind of see culture for, for what it is. And that's just part of the part of the experience set of use of psychedelic use. So, yeah, I think that since time immemorial, these compounds have been deprogramming agents, right. Kind of get a, factory default reset as a result of using them. So I think if anything threatens the government's power or causes people to push back against the lackadaisical nine to five work week and the fact that

governments have all of these rules to admit to control you, it very much is a shock to the system. It's like, yeah, I'm going to, if I just, took this I'm going to suddenly start questioning things more aggressively and push back against the system and of course that creates a reaction right reactant psychology causes those guys to start thinking about what can we do to consolidate our power and of course in the you know the late sixties in the early seventies they completely just lost it over psychedelics started blanket blanket banning the chemicals and you know what with LSD with psilocybin mushroom with MDMA all throughout the late sixties and into the seventies.

These were very important psychiatric compounds that counselors and psychiatrists and psychologists were using in a clinical setting to help people process their trauma, right? The MDMA was actually being used in couples counseling specifically in Chile, but also in places in the United States, all of that came to a grinding halt. whenever the federal government decided to put most of these drugs on the schedule one list, which is meaning that they're the most dangerous drugs now, They're up there on the top right? of the list with the most dangerous drugs, right? I'll have to look this up, but if memory serves, cocaine for a time wasn't even on schedule one, right?

Whereas cannabis was put on schedule one. the psychedelic compounds are Of course, put on schedule one. that when something schedule one the implication is that it doesn't have any medicinal use case but now finally in recent years some researchers right with enough power and clout to try to work with the fda have started working with psychedelic compounds again so the stigma around studying psychedelics for research for its implications on our consciousness has finally been reopened. Those doors will be reopened. But yes, governments, to bring it back around full circle, governments will do anything they can to prevent the greater population from using psychedelics because of how

they deprogram people, how they get people out of the stereotypical frames of culture that they're in. And I think that's a powerful thing. You hear people joke around a lot about, I know what we can do to create change oh, and just put LSD in the water. I don't know if that's the actual answer to our problems but it articulates the use case very well that these chemicals do cause substantial changes and they firmly shake up or any kind of solid grounding that we think we're on and it they're beautiful antidote for getting people they're a beautiful to see the consensus trance that they've been involved in for the whole time so yes I think and there's

some books on this too I'd recommend This is a book about tech LSD and psychedelics impact on the informational revolution and the information age. It's called by John Markoff. It's called What the Dormouse Said, recommended book on the subject. and that's a highly Great. I went through a kind of a similar situation that you went through. My wife actually in twenty nineteen kind of introduced me down this completely different path. I was in reading your book. I would say I was on the brutalist libertarian side, I guess, to use your for I was an objectivist and, you know, completely left brain. And, you know, my life circumstances kind

I won't go into all the details, of got out of control. ended up in a two hundred eighty million dollar lawsuit, so on and so forth. And my wife introduced me to the whole spirituality angle. And I went through this. There's there's a similar process that, it's about kind of letting go of the ego. you know, I mean, as you described, it's recognizing the fact that we are fundamentally programmable beings. but that we have all been programmed, everybody without exception. And the organizations and people that have been doing the programming, whether with ill intent or not, have not been serving our best interests. And so from before you're seven, whatever comes in,

you don't consciously filter out. So that becomes part of your subconscious programming. Then you go to public indoctrination, you know, through schools. Then you have the media. Then you have government and everything else. And so the thing is, these people understand how this works. They understand that we're programmable, and they're specifically trying to keep us in line. But my wife has been meditating since the seventies, doing transcendental meditation. And so I went down that path, and I ended up, Doing, you know, Joe Dispenza, I ended up going with her on meditation retreats, ended up doing all kinds of things that were completely outside of the like, not in an objectivist kind

of frame at all. And then even trying ayahuasca. And the thing is, it's not even just drugs that they try to, psychedelic drugs that they try to push away. They try to make meditation look like this woo-woo thing. Like it's somehow like this isn't scientific or this is something that is not real. And so it's just a full court press to make us not elevate our consciousness and become aware of who and what we are on all fronts. this is probably the biggest And to me, challenge that we're actually fighting. Even with this globalism versus network states, which we'll get into, I think at the core of it, it's about raising consciousness. And there are a lot of roadblocks being put in the way.

Yeah, absolutely. I think any time that we try to improve our psycho-spiritual health and reach what Abraham Maslow called in his book, hierarchy of needs, the very top of self-actualization. So whenever we try to self-actualize or self-transcend, that automatically spells doom for the cultural powers, because if you're self-actualized, that also largely means you're self-sufficient and that you don't necessarily need all the elements or all the cultural accoutrements of the government apparatus and the institutions take care of you you want to

care of yourself and I know do what you can to take we'll get into this in a minute but I think that is why a lot of people have a mindset now of exit ideology of trying to do what they can to get outside the scope of the system because they realize that it is an impediment to physical mental and spiritual health on many different levels right because this is something I've written about actually quite a bit you probably saw some of it in the book if you got to the second part where there's If you're fully embedded in the system and you can't embedded in the system, even see that you're it's also like battered wife syndrome, Or caged animal syndrome, right?

where if you feel like you're in a cage, you're more willing to act out in a quasi irrational or actually a fully irrational way because of how you're treated. So you're constantly being traumatized as a result of being broken and beaten down. And this is, this is the whole educational process too from square one, right? Going through the indoctrination camps that we call public schooling and then living in a household that's probably more violent and authoritarian, right? So then all of that is just simply repeated and, and then regurgitated throughout your life. And then you grow up, of course, and this is just the nature, by the way, of the,

the Prussian model of education, which is simply trying to churn out worker drones, people who are perfect, perfectly obedient, compliant, and plastic who the state can just mold to their, to their will. So you, you finish school. Now you just go to work and do your nine to five. Everything is just basically set, set up for you, right? It's all standardized, but the moment that you come out of that, That's the whole point of right? self-actualization. If you, are able to escape that in some manner. Either you have one of these like sort of magic bullet experiences like I did, or you gradually wake up over time, whatever method that happens. Now you're like really trying to figure out, okay,

this is awful for me. The system is a toxin effectively, mental, spiritual, physical, it's a toxin. Now, how do I escape that? that's trying to figure out So that, yes, ways to be healthy on the different Scales, super important, but extremely difficult to achieve when you're in environments that constantly cause psychological harm. And that's just the nature of being in a cage, right? It's really clear when you're in an abuse. The other analogy is just being in an abusive environment in general, right? If you're in a domestic abusive relationship, one of the things that crops up immediately too is Stockholm syndrome. Right.

It's almost like feeling like you're you have to stay attached to that person or love that person. And eventually they're going They're going to treat you better. to they're going to be OK. It's just how this person is. And it's constantly justified the same kind of. Thought process or thought form. People attach that to the state as well. Right. It can it can be better only if I vote in the right candidate or whatever the mechanism of thought is. There's a lot of overlapping similarities between the two. so so what do we do to combat this and I guess we network states but how do can start getting into we how do we combat this because on the one hand while people are looking to

exit the the challenge that we have is that the the opposition this movement towards a global technocracy has more resources more surveillance um and and more technology to kind of keep us imprisoned that at any point in in human history and in fact what the reason I jumped in on the cbdc front is realizing that you know once they can program and censor and control your money then it's basically because it's going to be the end of free will very difficult to get any reasonable percentage of people to rise up if if their access to money is it can be shut off with a click of a mouse button yeah this is a really challenging really challenging conversation and we can

We can talk about some of the initial solutions to this, things that you've talked about, of course, a lot before. And I hinted at it with my initial introduction to Bitcoin. I thought that ultimately, if I YOLOed into Bitcoin, if I started using it instead of fiat currency as much as possible, that this would be a way to undermine the state. What you and I have learned very clearly, though, over time, Aaron, is that the the state will do whatever it can to hijack and co-opt these movements and it will go after them with all of its power. Even if it can't actually on a fundamental level stop the technology, it's going to shut down the use of that technology on the on and off ramps.

It's going to do what it can ramps and it's going to do to control the on and off what it can to control it in general. But here's the beautiful thing. So it's always a cat and mouse race when it comes to this kind of tech. And other technologies typically will emerge that people can start using that have more of the properties that an anarchist would want to use to try to undermine the state, We can talk about Monero as right? being a potential one of those technologies. Zano, of course, is being a technology. So the good news is even if governments come in and they try to stop one technology there's that's better then of always going to be one course the government has

to recalculate right or has to change its calculus on how it's dealing with these technologies and figure out a way to stop them so it's just a constant race and it's kind of been like that since time immemorial now what else is happening and this is where we get into the really fun stuff is there's a lot of us who have said okay so if we can't I'm thinking about Alberto Hirschman's work, right? He wrote a book called exit voices, loyalty, and it's a really popular work right now in the crypto anarchist movement and people thinking about this, these particular problems with nation States. So a lot, and let's, let's, let me go over just a couple of parts of that book. One, one idea is okay.

So you can just love the system that you're embedded in, right? You can think that You, everything it does is good. And there are maybe some people who are brainwashed to the degree where that's the case. And that is loyalty, right? I'm going to be completely loyalty to the system. You're completely loyal to it. Obey its rules. And I'm going to be the guy that says, oh, you should just obey the law, whatever. Okay, good. That's that person. Or you can, you can use your voice. This is idea behind voice. And you can push back against the system with your voice, right? This is typically protest or using politics. In some way, you're using your voice to try to create change.

This has also not been great, especially in totalitarian regimes or quasi-fascistic regimes like in the U.S., where even if you use your voice, nothing fundamental, nothing that matters ever actually changes. So that's, of course, the next part of Hirschman's thinking is that what happens in firms or states that are declining or that are in decline more people start to leave they start to exit those systems so that's one of the things that a lot of us guys in that have been in crypto a while the spiritual successor of the the parallel finance movement right which is bitcoin monero xanox etc right is creating parallel societies or parallel establishments and this has

been characterized by Balaji Srinivasan, and we can get into all the precursors because he's not the only one, as the idea of the network state, where, okay, and I'll define that. What this means is that there's a community who shares a certain set of values, come together online, right? They're highly value aligned, and they've grown and connected online, but then at some point, maybe they want to beam their community down to the land. They want to crowdfund territory. and actually build a quote unquote state, right? Or a society from scratch. And the beautiful thing about this, and there's a lot of things

we have to discuss in discussing this, especially when it comes to how do you even do this? But the idea is that once you beam this down to land, you get to craft the initial conditions, meaning you get to set up the governance modalities, however you want to. And that's an extremely, extremely important thing because now it's like a Petri dish where you get to experiment with a variety of different types of governance models. That could be, you and I are particularly fans of anarcho-capitalism and voluntarist thinking, but that doesn't necessitate, right? A network state doesn't necessitate that type of, you can build whatever type of governance model that you want if you want to have

a more like there's some that are neo-monarchist right like curtis yarvin bent if you want that type of governance system or institution you can build that if you want a if you want something that's more communistic you can build that as well and so there's all these experiments and hybridization of these experiments that are going to be tried and are being tried actually in conjunction because okay so there's a network state that i became part of as the initial experiment. And that's near Singapore, right? That's the network school that biology started, which is actually a thing that is happening. And then you have, I'll just name a few of them for people, for people to add to their

mental Rolodex. If edge edge city is one in the U S there's also one in Chiang Mai. I think edge city, Lana, you also have Prospera in Honduras, And Vitalia is another, it's a, right? or micro community working with Prospera. You have every, there's a number of these, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, started Zuzalu. And so you have a bunch of what's called zoo villages. These are typically pop-up cities, but some of them are looking to maintain themselves over time. And these are popping up all over the world as well. So there's a huge movement and a ton of momentum behind starting these kind of network state

pop-up city type communities where everyone first who is value aligned met online and they're starting their community somewhere physically and just a little bit of history of also how this kind of emerged over the aaron you probably know as well as I do over the last really just several years right especially after covid and during covet a lot of people left their their work this is the phenomenon of the so-called great resignation people left their work en masse and they didn't go back or a lot didn't go back. They realized that they could just work from home. Why the fuck would I go back to my nine to five office? So this was kind of a psychedelic experience in a way,

a realization that there can be a lot of different ways to work. So everyone left, some didn't come back and a lot of people became digital nomads. We can find some numbers too for the show notes later on, but there, I recently wrote about this in my last article and there are really high numbers of people who left work, did not come back. the number of people who went digital Now, nomad, it's quite a bit as well. Another thing that happened as a result of this is if people have already been feeling a bit sour with their government or their local governance, those folks probably took their businesses and left as well. This is a phenomenon that we refer to as human capital

flight or brain drain. When people are disgruntled or disheartened by the place that they live and they leave and they take their resources and their human ingenuity and their human capital with them, that drains resources from that local territory or that local nation right because now they no longer person's mind to work there have the power of that and so they're gone and a lot of these people now this is just the conclusion of this they started to fit right into the mold of these emergent network states a lot of the quote-unquote citizenry are people who are largely nomadic or at least quasi-nomadic and this was definitely the case of the network school because I was there

have come to these places to try to see if they can craft new societies and new territories. So the idea, the overarching idea is that we exit the system altogether instead of trying to confront it and to fight it head on, right? You can't really fight a nation state like the US or say China anyway. You can't even fight a smaller network state unless you have a significant army or you have drone swarms or whatever kind of autonomous or catastrophe weapons you need. In a game theoretic scenario, that would be mutually assured destruction anyway. You probably wouldn't want to go for that. So trying to figure out ways to leave the nation state, start anew, and then eventually gain

autonomy and sovereignty. And we could talk about how this can actually, this is a really interesting topic to me, We can talk about how these network states begin to sap power from the nation state over time. But I want to leave it there for you to get your thoughts. It's a lot to discuss. It is a lot to discuss. And I mean, I certainly like the approach and I'm actually doing more research into what you've referenced. One of the things that I was thinking about, I mean, it's a little bit of a distraction is I know a lot of people are going to be experimenting with different things, but it might be useful to have a resource where people have open discussion or discussion.

debate wherever you want to look at it about the values themselves from first principles, because I think that we're going to, you know, again, people can experiment if they want, but we don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. We, we, we know how certain things actually already work. And so it might be useful to have a resource where, uh, people that are kind of like an incubator, not an incubator, but a resource for people that are incubating, um, network states to to be able to share information so that they maybe don't make mistakes unnecessarily I'll leave it at that as an approach but I will say so this exit concept I love the exit concept but I look at like what's happened to

roger veer and states states don't want you to exit I well at least the united states it doesn't seem to want people to exit I mean in his case I mean they're going after him for he actually paid an exit tax on this bitcoin and they're they're going after him saying, well, no, you didn't pay enough, even though no one else was paying any tax and now they won't tell him how much he owes. And then they're violating his attorney client privilege and, and rating his lawyers. And so that statement, if you don't like America leave, um, seems to be harder to do in practice than, than in theory. Um, is this just a, is, is, is Roger being, uh, singled out or is this, is this a problem that

other people are having? Yeah, I've actually, I've dug into this a little bit, but I will first validate your claim that yes, especially for U.S. citizens specifically. And this also validates why network states are so important and why the idea of exit is so important is because when exit costs are extremely high and you can't leave a place very easily, or if you can't, so I just, and I want to be clear to everyone, when you leave the U.S., and this is the part about what happened with Roger, When you leave the US, you never actually leave. I'm across the world right now. I'm in Bangkok at the moment. I'm still a citizen of the US.

Even if I decided to try to settle here, I'm still a citizen of the US. What that means is I still owe taxes to US. In theory, I can go, I can leave and anywhere I go, no matter how long I'm still a citizen of the US, I still owe taxes. And also if I were to break a US law overseas, I would still technically be, that'd be, I'd still be committing a crime as a US citizen for the US and could be punished appropriately. So yes, that's the thing. To actually leave the US, you have to be able to renounce your citizenship, which is what Roger did. You have to renounce your citizenship. There's a bunch of bureaucracy that's involved with that. You have to file the paperwork,

potentially hire an attorney. And then, of course, an exit tax is created based on your current ownership and value, which is basically just a fictitious sale of whatever property that you have. when you exit. So yeah, to that point, it's the exit costs are really, really, really, really high notoriously though. This is largely just for us citizens. There's maybe just a couple, a handful of places in the world where you can't just leave and it's, it's easier, right? Like if you're Canadian, right. And there's like, there's only one. Yeah. Only one other place that taxes. Correct.

That has this sort of, Nasty chase you around everywhere in the world and tax you situation. Indeed, everywhere else you can leave and it's much easier. The exit costs are much lower. Still a little high, right? Because just having a passport, needing to have a passport, needing to have all these permissions is really difficult. Now, I will say that Roger, to answer your question directly, Aaron, I think Roger is a bit of a special case because of his status, the fact that he wrote the book. The fact that he's been pushing against the system for so long, the fact that he was in federal prison himself for a while, and that he's very antagonistic toward the system,

and thank God for him for that. But I do think, and his early involvement in Bitcoin obviously made him make a prime target for the ire of the federal government and the US to come after him. And it's really sad. So I think ultimately, just like in Ross's case, they're trying to make an example out of roger and also roger makes a good example because a lot of people know him they know who he is or they know of him and that also scares them from actually wanting to to try to exit and I was watching a podcast with a couple of attorneys talking about this not too long a few months ago and they're making the case actually that they're even more bullish on exiting the us because of what they're

trying to do to roger because they're trying to make it make the case that oh, well, we can go after anybody and everybody. That's really not true, right? They have limited resources. There's only some people that they're going to be able to go after. But they certainly can use Roger to scare everyone else from attempting to exit and to get out of the system. So they made the case that this is actually bullish for people trying to leave. And more people should try to leave the US and try to repatriate and get somewhere else around the world. So there's that case. Well, I think that's an interesting case. I doubt that's what's actually happening. The same is true with Ian Freeman.

And I support both of these guys, but it's had a chilling effect. It's absolutely had a chilling effect. And so for me, when this happens, my approach is, well, we can't let it have a chilling effect. More people need to be using cryptocurrency. More people need to be challenging this. More people need to share Roger's story and understand that the implications of Roger losing actually go way beyond expatriating, way beyond crypto, because in this process of going after him, they literally violated his attorney client privilege rated as attorneys. And so basically, if if they get away with this, then that means that you essentially can't rely on your counselor anymore.

You can't rely on your lawyers. You can't rely on your accountants without fear that the government's going to come in and violate that, even though in Roger's case, what they found were documents that actually back up Roger's position. But his case will set a horrible, horrible precedent for everybody inside and outside of crypto within the United States, outside of the United States, which is why even so vocal about trying to to get it out there because we really need to get it out there now um and I think you know trump I I don't believe in the political process either and I you know and I you know the thing is I've been saying you know I haven't voted for years and I and I did

urge uh I did endorse trump with the very narrow understanding that it's he's the only person that can pardon these people and so you can't exit and build while you're in a cage and so my my sole approach on this isn't I don't believe in any of the other policies I don't and none of the rest of it's going to happen these people aren't going to solve anything but he can let these people out of out of prison and and that's the best thing that could happen but it's got to happen sooner rather than later because the longer if it doesn't happen in the first hundred days then it's going to be well we'll wait until after the midterms and then and then it just doesn't happen because

this system's broken and, you know, the way that it works with political capital. So in any event, I just brief, not to get us too off, too off track here. So let's get back to network state. So I've been, I've been reading up on it. I've read Balaja's stuff and I've listened to a lot of what you have to say. Do you want to talk about the malachian dynamics uh because I think that where you were kind of going with uh with with some of the things to think through even with respect to the construction of network states yeah this is yeah this is really important because what I've been thinking a lot about recently being so involved in this space is so Assuming we're able to start

exiting and there's a lot of people who are right, because not all of us are Americans, right? There's some people it's a lot easier for them. And then some of us who are Americans will try to find a way to exit at, or at least exit in a way that minimizes our tax burden to the U S and that's certainly what people are attempting to do. But this is ultimately what a lot of us tend to think will happen. as we begin to exit and as more of these network states emerge. This is creating a dynamic around the world where these various governance services are being offered in a market environment. So in a way, this is causing governments,

this is creating the scenario where they're going to have to ultimately compete with these network states. for rivalrous human capital. And if they have to compete, that means that they can't just treat their citizenry like absolute dog shit anymore. At some point, at some point along enough scale, you have enough human capital flight, you have enough people leaving, then you're going to have to figure out a way to do governance without as much violence. the skills are gonna be more balanced. Now, this certainly isn't a short-term play. This is more of a long-term or a gradual play.

So let me discuss real quick why, yes, I've been an anarchist and a voluntarist on a fundamental level for a long time. And my conception of power structures have been through that lens for well over a decade. Now there's another component of this that I just learned about that helped me view a lot of the problems that we're facing right now under a completely new lens. And this, this particular lens is game theory, right? And this is also related to the social sciences and psychology, but also to computer science, right? The game theory, the original ideas were originally conceived by the computer scientist, John von Neumann,

but they're, easily applied to social and psychological settings. So let's talk about the idea of Molokian dynamics, which is a part of game theory. Molok is just so anyone who doesn't know, Molok is the Canaanite deity of child sacrifice, the deity of costly sacrifices. So the idea was that the ancient Canaanite people would sacrifice their children to Molok so they could win the, the next war against the neighboring tribe so that they could ensure that the weather is good enough for a good crop so that they can ensure that their people are aligned in their next migration or movement.

But the problem is, is there, this is a self cannibalizing idea, right? If they're sacrificing their children for these short term benefits, they destroy themselves in the longterm because they kill, they literally kill themselves. They're killing the future. is a way to look at how a Milwaukee and dynamic was. So it's really all about people. They're optimizing for local conditions at the expense of collective wellbeing. That's the crux of how to understand a Milwaukee and dynamic. And there's a lot of synonymous terminology that we can use to describe the same scenario. So coordination failure is another term. A red queen race is another term.

A prisoner's dilemma is another term. A race to the bottom is another term. An arms race is another term. So the reason, yes, at a base level, the initiation of the use of force, using violence to get your way is all horrible. But what happens when that occurs over a long enough time period is that power consolidates. And then all of these guys who are in positions of tremendous power are just perpetually involved in Milwaukee and dynamics. Arms races, races to the bottom, right? If you're a, let's just use this example. If you're a powerful bureaucrat, your ultimate goal is to protect yourself, protect your power, and protect your family. You're at the upper echelons

of the halls of power. What you're going to do to make sure that happens is say you're in a political situation. You see the other nation state across the bay, right? Let's just assume it's China. These guys are developing autonomous weaponry as fast as they can, as quickly as they can. So what do you think in power? Oh, I need to protect myself. I need to protect my family. I need to consolidate my power. You position yourself so that your state also involves itself in the maximization of autonomous weaponry. You see now we're in an arms race because your concern is getting preempted. It's wars of attrition. It's having guys attack you before you can attack them. But here's the thing.

Most people who are in a Milwaukee and dynamic, they realize that what they're doing is shitty. They realize that they're in a horrible situation. And yes, it's true. Like two percent less of the population are psychopaths. Right. Psychologically around that around that number. That's a statistical it's been a studied measure. Read Simon Baron Cohen's book, The Science of Evil. Around two percent of the population are dark triad personalities who actually don't give a fuck if they're hurting other people or doing bad things. The rest of the folks who are in these positions realize that what they're doing is horrible. They realize that building autonomous weaponry, drone weaponry,

makes the world worse off in the long term just because of their existence. It's also a tremendous waste of human capital and resources. Imagine all the other amazing things that all that energy and usage could go to. So that, that is a, I'll give another one more example before we move on and discuss why this matters to network States and where my thinking right now is going. So in the Instagram world, in the beauty influencer world, given a more down to earth example, when people first started doing beauty influencing, especially women, they would, they, when they became beauty influencers, you know, they would use their makeup. They would, they would pitch their products.

They would, of course, try to look as good as possible because that's part of it. That's how you get followers and gain likes. You're trying to maximize for beauty. That's a short-term goal. Long-term goals potentially have a ton of likes and follows. That happens more or less on an even playing field as far as makeup, moisturizers, and natural looks are concerned. But then, then what happened is filters, beauty filters came into play and just general filtering online. So now you can tweak these filters and beauty influencers started to tweak these filters to change their appearance, to get more likes, more followers, more subscribers. Now you can see now these beauty filters can be

tweaked an incalculable number of times, of different beauty filters. and you can use all kinds So now you can see where this very quickly becomes a race to the bottom because What happens is everyone does this. Oh, I'm going to get more likes, get more likes. Okay, do it, get more likes. But the ultimate result of that and why it's a race to the bottom is because now you've become a husk or a shell of your former self. You meet the beauty influencer now in person and they look nothing like they look online, like at all. Even makeup or no makeup, it doesn't matter because they've tweaked their looks to a point where they're maximizing for their likes and their follows at the

expense of becoming an ersatz version of themselves, a facsimile, a fake, or a fraud. So that's another example of a Molokian dynamic. And they exist everywhere. And all you have to do is look around, and you can find them and observe them. And the reason why this idea, and I stress this, is so important and so vital to understand is because it's my opinion that these Molokian dynamics and the use of game theory It has tremendous explanatory power on a lot going wrong in our world. of the things that are Another thinker who's talked a lot about this is, and I don't agree with everything he says, I wouldn't expect you would either, and Aaron,

because he tends to lean a bit more left, but his name's Daniel Schmachtenberger. And he coined the term the metacrisis or the polycrisis. A lot of these massive crises that we're facing simultaneously, right? Nuclear arm in it. Drone weaponry, AI explosion, potential government maximization of power, one world government. All this stuff that's happening is all a result, races to the bottom in Malakian dynamics. So one of the primary solutions, of course, is that we bring our libertarian and anarchist principles to bear and apply them to try to prevent these Malakian

dynamics from emerging. over and over again. And how I, my calculation for this is that for the first time in history, in a very real way, we can start crafting the initial conditions of governance, leveraging network states, leveraging parallel societies and parallel establishments. Because the key point is that a lot of the people who get involved in politics and the political game The political arms races of nation states, those have been going on for a long time. You can't just get in and create change. I mean, you and I, we anarchists and volunteers have joked around a long time, like trying to get into the system and change it from the inside. Be like trying to join the

mafia and change it into some charitable institution. Work your way up. Right. I'm going to become the Don whole organization. and I'm going to change the Doesn't work like that. But now with network states, we craft the initial conditions. We get to determine governance, our experiments and governance. And we get to, and you mentioned this earlier, very importantly, Aaron, we get to learn from our mistakes of the past. Here's the thing. As a species, we have a tremendous amount of wisdom and collective sense-making tools that we've developed over the years in psychology, game theory, neuroscience. therapy, even the religious traditions and the great religious and spiritual traditions of our

time have a lot to teach us, especially things like Jainism and Buddhism, about how to organize a society with restraint and wisdom. And so now we can finally, in this most opportune of moments, try that with network states. And I think this is kind of already starting to iron itself out. We're starting to see this because we're seeing breakdowns microcosmically in governance to some degree in some of these network states. Just as an example of a minor case studies in Zuzalu, Vitalik, he didn't want to actually be the governor or the king, right? He's more of a crypto anarchist type of guy. And that first community in Montenegro actually kind of broke down and it splintered up into many

different communities. It kind of ended up being a good thing because now everyone who had different mindset are experimenting with different types of governance around the world. And What happens as a result of that now is that experimentation leads to finally we're able to ingest and understand different types of data points about governance that we haven't really understood before. And here's the reason why the various quote unquote experiments in government or governance that we've had over time, they weren't experiments really at all. It's not like we were ingesting data and doing it methodologically to understand what the best one was. It was just a coincidence. It was happenstance.

And it was also just based on people wanting to rule over others. There wasn't a designed approach to governance that has ever existed before. For the first time ever, we have a chance to experiment with these governance models and we get a chance to ingest that data and then apply it in a very potent way to each new governance or to each new network state or pop-up city that emerges so that we'll have the best form of governance that maximizes human freedom, human liberty, human flourishing and prosperity overall. And I think it's a beautiful thing. We can get into a bit more of the details of that, but the ultimate aim of this, these network states and being able to optimize for

good governance is that it minimizes people's attachment to power and thus their attachment to getting caught up in malachian dynamics that they know at some point they have no control over it becomes kind of a self-perpetuating machine or some sub subroutine in a system that they can't control and this has been a huge problem and I want to say one of the key components of why we get involved in organizationally as a species in self-defeating self-destructive and self-cannibalizing behaviors So, so what do you see as the solution to the Milwaukee and dynamics? I mean, is, do you, is, is, do you have a framework already or a proposed at least starting point?

Yeah. I, I mean, I wrote about this a, just a little bit on my, on my blog, but I haven't got into it as deeply yet. So there's, there's actually one of the plans for doing this and this is, yeah, this is just my initial initial approach. is that we have to develop it's like a pseudo pseudo regulatory type of environment and I say pseudo regulatory because it's not like government regulations where you come in with a gun and you tell people how to run their businesses but in order to craft these initial conditions we have to have research institutions right we have to have think tanks that are specifically dedicated to these network states that

also have people who have very real boots on the ground personnel that take that data, that do surveys, that connect with the people who founded the community as well as the locals. And they see what's working and what's not. They take that data, and then they build that data into various frameworks. Let's just call this framework a governance menu that can then be offered that has the best potential governance models. And I want to be clear too, for the audience, I'm going to step back a little bit. And this is in case Aaron, you and I want to have a discussion about it as well. There's a, there's a difference between governance and government for anybody who's not clear.

I'm using very specifically using government. Government is the guys who have a monopoly on force over a large territorial region, Allah. the Austrian school economists, voluntarists, etc. Governance is a system of human organization and coordination that is voluntary, that you choose and that you opt into. So if anybody was unclear on that, as I'm using that terminology, some people are like, oh, you're using governance, you want to force people. No, that's not the case at all. So back to the framework. So You have these organizations that are able to craft these actual frameworks and the framework. And here's the thing, Aaron, all the frameworks are going to be different and

can potentially be hybridized with other components of other governance modalities so that we end up creating patterns of human organization that probably haven't existed before. Because over time, we have only a very narrow set of quote unquote governance models. There's really just various forms of guys ruling over other people. that we can pull from. So it's very likely that we create novel organizations that leverage technology as well. Blockchain plays into this. We don't have to get into all the details of that, but it will ultimately play into it to some degree. But then these are offered up by these institutions and provided to network states to use. So the framework is really

an evolutionary framework that's based on data, that's based on the accumulation of data that we just don't have yet, that we're actually just now starting to have access to or to get, right? Because network school just started. Apology just rolled that out. A lot of these other places have started to develop their own frameworks. I'll just give you an example. So for Zoo Village, Georgia, that is a network state it's a really really a pop-up city with a network state component that is intended to be more crypto anarchist and cypherpunk and they have started what they are referring to as the directional protocol veronica who runs that particular network state just recently wrote an

article about it on and her partner it's on less wrong I think is the the title of the blog but they don't have to have to actually find it directional protocol is their version of governance using zoo villages or zoos, all of the zoo pass, which is a technology they have for governance. That's not completely built out yet, but they're working on it and they're ironing out what the directional protocol will look like. How can they maximize for freedom? It may include ideas like quadratic voting, breaking people down into groups or clusters so that no one person is able to maximize power. But the, That's the ultimate point, right? To figure out what produces the most harmony in that community,

what produces the most cohesiveness and the most human flourishing and the most economic success. And some of these are going to be failures and that's just how it's going to work out. But the point is, is that now we have the data points to actually build out and provide the frameworks, but the frameworks there into your point are to be all they're gonna there's gonna be a variety of them and they're gonna be a bit different there will be some that work that we don't agree with probably right and this is to your point earlier as well we you and I have an understanding politically and also apolitically of how we would want to live together with each other but there are some people

who don't right we realize want to go to these places that as well and if they and they can actually make their place work as long as exit costs are kept low that's part of the thesis then that's fine. They should have the right and the ability to do that. And maybe their governance model works and then maybe we ingest data from that modality and then we add it to another one and somebody could, and that's offered, of course, up as a framework that someone could implement very quickly if they spun up a new network state, network society. So this is how I see the future sort of evolving. And I recommend for anyone who wants to get into the headspace of thinking about how like an unbundled,

call this an unbundled state, How this would look like to read Trent McDonald's. Really great work on the subject. In twenty thirteen, he wrote an article called The Unbundled State. Highly recommend for anybody who's interested to read that particular article to wrap your head around what having disintermediated and unbundled governance services could look like. So does this research institution exist yet? Or is this something that, it sounds like a good idea. Actually, I'm going to send you, I'm going to send you the link. Some, some friends of mine booted this up. Okay. How can I send, how can I say, where do I send the link? Do you want me to send it to you here in the chat?

Yeah, you can put, you can put it in the chat. Oh. Okay. Let me say it's making me. Connect just fine All right, give me I'm just gonna send it to you on on Twitter All right, that's probably better that way. Yeah. Yeah, I can't even connect to the There you go, Polis Laboratories.

Ah, great. Oh, wow. Yeah, because what has to happen is that... So I think a lot of people who start network states as well, there's a huge movement, and you're probably familiar with some of this, Aaron, in tech right now for this idea of effective accelerationism. Mm-hmm. And also Vitalik has written about techno optimism. And so there's not a lot of like endemic restraint, or risk, whatever we call risk management, built into what a lot of these guys are doing. And that's, that's perfectly fine. From a market and capitalist perspective, we don't really we don't want to be regulated, right?

Because regulations are horrible for innovation. But we do want to be We want to exercise caution. You just build everything super fast. That doesn't, especially in network state environment where there's human wear, right? It's not just software and hardware, there's human wear. And if you just move as fast as you can, there's a potentiality for a lot of things to break and a lot of people to get hurt. So taking recommendations, advice, and a considered approach to the development and construction of of a network state is just going to be so important because we really do have the capacity to move at lightning speed. And this is because we're always going to be tempted

and certainly we will involve the use of artificial intelligence and the development of our governance networks, blockchain technologies. Even in Prospera, they have a huge focus on biotech, but that's mainly like a research focus aside from the governance. But at the end of the day, all of these things get They get re-enmeshed. That's the phrase I'm looking at. They get re-enmeshed with the governance apparatus and how that irons itself out. And if we're not careful, these network states won't automatically have an immunological response to just growing as quickly as possible. And bad things certainly can happen. And this is just my realization from studying Malakian dynamics and arms

races so quickly. So having an influential organization that can offer of a risk-based approach recommendations advice and I even offer frameworks that have worked is just going to be so important for the development of these these network states because they a lot of people who get involved they they have the vision to build these these things out a lot of times they don't have a full grasp of the governance and they certainly don't have a full grasp of all the things that could go wrong And you and I being voluntarists, we've seen and studied for a long time how things go wrong. We see it in real time and we understand it. A lot of people don't even really understand it

because they haven't studied it. It's just they think they can go and build something. Let's go build it. Let's do it without thinking about the repercussions and harms that can cause. The last thing we want to do is recreate Leviathan over again. And all this is just for naught. Yep. Yeah, exactly. And that, that, that concerns me as well. I mean, this could, I mean, you know, how do you avoid it becoming the technocratic state and that, that being reinvented, which actually that gets me to kind of exploring consciousness is I think important to this and actually factoring that in, because when, when people are sitting down and saying, you know, you mentioned, you know,

one is a zoo village, Georgia. So, uh, maximizing freedom, cohesiveness, human flourishing. I mean, it is interesting to sit down and talk about, well, what is, what is the whole purpose of existence? I mean, to actually have that fundamental question, is there a natural law? I think part of what we're, what we're up against is, uh, moral relativism. And at least from the people that are pushing a global technocracy is kind of a, you know, uh, there are no natural laws. We're going to be play God and create our own natural law. And that, that's its own issue. So I don't have the answers by the way. I have, I have a whole bunch of questions

in general that I'm constantly thinking about, but it does seem like we've, we've lost any, we don't even have that as a framework for discussion. And it seems like maybe it should be there at some point. Yeah. And just so I'm clear, Aaron, you're really referring to like, our behavior or like the ultimate guiding principle around human behavior on a fundamental level, right? And of course that involves consciousness, that involves also our psychology and how we think about solving problems, how we think about living on a daily basis and how this plays into this kind of greater theme. of what we're trying to do

in terms of creating new societies and social orders. Is it even possible as a result of who we are? So there's, it seems to be like an element of human nature and is that there's such a thing as human nature. And if human nature is bad or good, how do we optimize for the best of us? How do we push forward in ways that maximize those potentialities in ways that maybe we haven't thought about, or if we have thought about them, now we have that knowledge. to be able to actually use it. So is this kind of what you're getting at? It seems like a bit of a human nature. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a human nature. I kind of go back to hermetic principles, I mean, maybe. Is there some kind of

foundational set of laws that kind of govern how things work and even consciousness? And I don't have the answer to it, but it seems like we need to spend more time exploring consciousness and understanding even what it is. Because I think there are a lot of people that are trying to reinvented or create their own without understanding what currently exists. They're trying to apply technology to something that we don't even fundamentally understand or have a shared understanding of. There's nothing tangible to talk about here. I've thought about this. Over the last five years or so, I'm like, well, I remember listening to Patrick Byrne talk about a blockchain tech stack for

human civilization. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I've thought about this a lot, but I haven't gotten to the point of doing anything yet. And now that you're kind of working on this now, I've been spending a lot of time looking at studying consciousness, studying natural law, studying kind of the hermetic principles. Are you familiar with Mark Passio at all? I am. I've been looking at a lot of his stuff. I had him on last week. We had a very interesting conversation. He was on, and Michael Rechtenberg was on, and we had kind of an exoteric, esoteric approach to talking about the Agenda there's kind of a conversation to have even before you start talking about governance,

you know, which is like, what is the true point of, of what we're trying to do here? And obviously this is why it's great that there are a lot of different models being tried. Anyway, I don't have more to come on that. Yeah, no, Aaron, I really, I think I, yeah, I definitely see where you're, To me, this translates as where you're getting at. before we're able to actually push these new agendas forward and try to create new, really wholly new societies based on values that actually improve the human condition rather than degrade the human condition. I think that's the best way that I can describe that. But the question to me seems,

how do we actually do that if we don't really understand ourselves? It seems like there's a huge component of human self understanding. And to me, that is one of the perennial problems of our time. I don't think any one of us can truly ever fully grapple with who we are and what we are. I mean, this is the most existential exit existentially alarming question that philosophers have asked for a long time. But one thing I, I do, I do believe is that we all have the power to maximize our sense of what the greeks called eudaimonia right or joy and and happiness with the

component of self-love and self-care and the idea that we want to push forward not only for ourselves but for the community as well because I think as a species one of the ultimate problems that we have is this goes a bit back into malakian dynamics We're very self-obsessed and self-concerned. This is traditionally and stereotypically more of a problem for the West, but it's really for everyone. And there's good reason for this. Everyone wants to maximize for their own benefit, for the protection of themselves, for the sustainability of themselves and for their family. But it seems to me that if we're able to include at

very least our local communities or those that we care about that are not in our direct proximity into that calculus, then we're automatically improving our positioning as a species. I don't think it's possible that we Again, ever fully completely understand ourselves to the degree that we can stop being so self-driven, right? And again, there's some components of that that are really good. So self-driven attitudes that helped invent and perpetuate the capitalist ethos, which pulled us out of centuries of depravity. Right. But I think what it boils down to is the understanding that we have to maximize as well for

collective wellbeing. We have to attune for how we can organize that coordinates our ability to work together in ways that creates a sense of non non-self-destructiveness in ways that we don't try to destroy each other in the process. And this also goes back to our discussion of psychedelics and compounds like MDMA a bit. I think a lot of us growing up in the societies that we grew up in have had our emotional worlds completely cleansed during childhood, right? It's this whole idea as you're growing up, don't throw a fit, Don't, you know, don't cry. Don't have an emotional life or an emotional world. So we've lost our ability to

connect very deeply with other people. This is the relational anarchist piece. reading about too in my, in my book. I think that you were One of the things that is vital in thinking about this relational anarchist component as well is that if we all have our emotional worlds cleansed and we've been hurt and we've got an really a historical wound as all of us growing up in a result of this, really traumatic environments, what happens to our governing and governance apparatuses as a result of that, and I've discussed this at length as well, they become reflections of who we are and how we grew up and what we experienced. And this is, of course, also why a lot of times people refer to their

governments with kind of parental terminology or paternalistic terminology. Right. It's the fatherland. It's the motherland. It's Uncle Sam. Because we want to see our parents in these systems of organization and government. But the irony, of course, is that a lot of times our parents hurt us in some way. Right. Whether that's emotional or physical. And a lot of times it's in both cases. And that just gets reflected in the states and in the systems that we create. This is why a lot of people look to governments to guide them and to protect them. They're really looking in a very, at first a metaphorical or figurative sense,

but then in a very literal sense, someone to help them through life, to help them through the existential terror that is life. So coming to awaken to how we think about our parents, right? Also how we think about children. There's a really great book by lloyd de mouse he's a he invented the field of psychohistory psychohistorians his work is extremely controversial by the way the book is called the emotional life of nations and so he made the case that because of the origins of abuse in childhood that completely skews the the nation state it is effectively the precursor to mass warfare

mass destruction and mass murder is abuse in childhood. And he's not the only one who's talked about this. There's a psychologist. Oh, what's her name? Alice Miller. Alice Miller was an actual psychotherapist. And she wrote a book called For Your Own Good. And she did a ton of case studies on Hitler, on Nazi Germany. And it specifically looked into their childhood experiences. their childhood experiences And invariably, were mired in violence, in authoritarianism, And a lot of times they weren't allowed to feel. I think if we don't have the ability to connect deeply with each other as human beings, to have an emotional connection, to be able to empathize with other people and put

ourselves in their shoes, it's very difficult to become self-actualized. It's very difficult to rise out of the brutish savage that Hobbes talks about into a more civilized type of human being. And so again, a step toward this is also freeing up our resources and our ability to create societies where we can now experiment with different forms of parenting and teaching and education as well because it starts in childhood. Really, just like a governance modality or a governance mechanism, we are also tabula rasa in a lot of ways at birth where our brain is wired around our environmental conditions in a real way. This is the idea of

It's not nature versus nurture. It's nature via nurture. The environment really does say a lot about how we're going to grow up, what our thought processes are going to be like. And then some genes, of course, are expressed based on stimuli from the environment. So I think that human nature is a beautiful and veritable portfolio of potentiality and experience. And if, and we have to learn to maximize for the best of that on a base level, this is again during childhood, right? And our growth experiences, the same way new governance models have to have the same kind of instruction on a base level as a growth experience,

as well as the metaphor is really keen and insightful. But I, yeah, this is a really, I really love this particular discussion because there's a lot that goes into it. And at the end of the day, we can't really know fully who we are. as a species, because even existence is a mystery. Being here is a mystery. Consciousness is a mystery that we haven't solved, as you so eloquently pointed out, Erin. But I certainly think that we're on a path to figuring out that we can control a lot of the initial conditions, right, in the early stages of life, in the early stages of governance, that helps us pave a path to more prosperity, more happiness, and more flourishing. And that's what

flourishing is it's really the ability to work with each other in the most peaceful manner possible to have economic prosperity as a result of that and to even more important to me is to have an internal sense of being healed or being fulfilled to where your connection and your relationships with other people are maximized you know this is another point I want to mention one of the reasons too that of biology and a lot of different people in the network state space are at first trying to keep their communities really small because there's this idea that robin dunbar came up with it it's this organizational coordination number it's called dunbar's number he said that we have

we can have most maximally optimal and connected human relationships if those communities stay below people right so there's an argument to be made for a miniaturized localized communities the society of building and architecting our communities to the human scale if you have that human scale then you have the ability to connect more deeply with people if you have some guy thousands of miles away telling you what to do who already doesn't have any kind of empathy and probably is a dark triad personality you're going to have the breakdown of society and the breakdown of nations so tangent there but I think anyway went on a bit of a some of the most important that stuff was probably

I think it's very important. I mean, you touched on a lot of things. I think the importance of epigenetics, I mean, that is crucial and that's largely missed. I mean, largely what we're taught is that we live in this world of Newtonian physics and everything is around biology. And there's a lot more that's deterministic and material than is probably actually the case, which has been known for a long time. And that's factored into fundamentally how our governance systems work. And what I was trying to express is just this idea, it sounds like you've gone through, the people that I've talked to that have gone through personal transformation, I almost wonder, is the purpose maybe of us

being here to go through that process of, of kind of moving from a state of fear to a state of love that that that process itself is the learning experience which isn't to say that we should have these traumatic things or whatever but what I worry about with when you when particularly when you hear about technocracy and what they're trying to do it's it's let's assume they have positive intent which I absolutely don't think that they do and that that needs to be explored and exposed but even if they did have Positive intent, their whole approach is, well, we're going to use a social credit system and the control of digital money to basically make your decisions for you

because we know how to make the best decisions. So you will be a happier, healthier person. because we are making the most optimized decisions for you. And to me, I believe it's the exercise of free will that is part of consciousness itself. And I would just say, I hope network states factor that concept in, because I could see how network states could go off, again, on a path where they essentially become technocratic in nature. This is why, to me, the importance of, not that there's a definitive answer on consciousness, but more, we should have more conversations and open conversations about it and more research on it. I spent a lot of time, when I went through my process, and again,

my wife's been doing this for a long time, but I went down all these rabbit holes. I ended up looking at the Monroe Institute and a guy named Tom Campbell who wrote this three-volume set called My Big Toe, My Big Theory of Everything. I don't know if you're familiar with the Monroe Institute. Fascinating stuff. So they basically, this guy Bob Monroe started this facility in Virginia to work on doing meditation. And he basically started out having out of body experiences and wanted to find out what all that was about and wanted to start studying it scientifically. So he brought in this guy. Tom Campbell, who was an engineer who worked on simulations, actually worked with NASA

on developing simulations. And so they tried to scientifically figure out how to engineer these out-of-body experiences. And it got into doing birenal beats, where you basically put in headphones, and one ear is slightly off from the other. And so you can basically get your brain into alpha state or theta state or whatever that state is, which is the same state you're in when you're doing a meditation. And so they could kind of teach people how to go through all these different states. In fact, they have, I don't even know how many there are now, twenty eight different states out of body experience. You can do a whole variety of different things when when you're in these states.

And then Tom Campbell you know, wrote his book, you know, and he can like flip in and out of these states without, he can simultaneously be in multiple different states. So he can code and then like tap out and he's like, all right, I'm basically tapping into the Akashic network now and I'm getting a download while he's doing stuff. And it's now inevitably, I guess the CIA ended up getting involved in this. This was released, you know, every now and again, people are like, oh, you can do astral projection. Here's the FOIA request. that stuff was all tied back to the Well, Monroe Institute. And so anyway, this is a complete sidetrack. But this Tom Campbell guy basically has been talking

about the idea that we've been living in a simulation and teaching people meditation techniques to basically access different layers of the simulation. I have no idea where we put that in this conversation. Other than before COVID, this is what I was spending all my time on. So I was actually working on... Not only meditating, but there's this concept that Dr. Joe Dispenza came up with that was part of his meditation retreats called a mind movie. And so basically the idea behind a mind movie is you create an elevated emotion and a thought married to an elevated emotion about something that you want to try to manifest. And then you get into a meditative state. to make that happen and so I

kind of married the bayern old beats with creating a mind movie and started playing around with that and I actually came up with a group mind movie um and in part this is just based on my experiences you know for a while I was the chair of the free state project I I've been around enough stuff where it's like Stuff decays, like these organizations, and then I've studied a whole bunch of other things, and it's like everything seems to, you know, devolve into a sex cult, right? I mean, whether it's NXIVM or Landmark, or now I just saw something, there's Kundalini Yoga, that turned into a cult. Osho, like every one of these things, And so you study these things, it's like, Scientology.

is there a way to... actually put together something that doesn't devolve in what seems to be a very predictable way. And so I worked on this mind movie with intentions and elevated emotions, but around something that you might try to do as a group. And then it's interesting. I mean, I'll show you at some point or I'll actually post online, but I'll share it with you. And then COVID happened and I stopped working on that and then ended up working on CBDCs. But that was actually where I was very passionate. And I had spent just a couple of years just doing nothing but that, nothing but reading and meditating and doing all of this stuff, doing a deep dive. And then COVID happened.

And I want to get back to it because I actually think it's important even to this conversation of nation states, because I think the further exploration of some of these things around consciousness and the very helpful in informing how to maybe experiment with some of these things absolutely so I think you hit the nail on the head right there aaron because I'm really interested in this stuff as well and the first thing that came to mind so already the the network state and the parallel establishment community one of the ideas that biology has in his book is this notion of having a like a one one commandment right and his idea of one commandment is that any given network state can have its

own goal or problem that it's seeking to solve and that it organizes around. And just an example of this is in Prospera, right? Prospera is specifically focused on human longevity and biotech and to solve problems in that particular field, right? So governance is kind of almost a tangential component for them. It's vital. But what is more important is the fact that when these network states emerge, they have the capacity and the adroitness to focus on one particular issue. And they're all passionate about it. They care about it. It's something that if they solve is going to have an

impact on our species. It's for the betterment of the world and the community. And so I see this very clearly with what you're talking about. with the Monroe Institute, with looking at consciousness, trying to solve for consciousness and understand who we are to a higher degree. And there could certainly be network states that focus particularly on that problem, right? There's a lot of people who, just as another example, a lot of these people in the game theory space, they're really concerned about climatological change, right? Some of us would maybe be skeptical about that because of the government, whatever, fine. But if they wanted to work on those problems, where you don't have to have

a bunch of politicking and infighting to get to that point. You just spin up your network state around climate change, right? And now you're super focused in tunnel vision on that problem and you can go to solve it. So I think that's where it all comes around full circle is that we're creating now the ability not just to solve human governance and to get out of these really onerous and brutal systemic forms of infighting that we call politics within the nation state to where we can just focus on the problems that we want to solve. And we can do that as a general, relatively small community that probably grows over time because I'm with you. Listen, Aaron, before I got into,

before I got arrested, my interest was also consciousness more from a neuroscientific and psychological perspective. But after I took MDMA and I had that wake up call, one of the first things I started questioning is the nature of the mind because all of a sudden I was zapped out of this ordinary state of consciousness and into this extraordinary state of consciousness, which was completely unexpected. I did not know my brain, my mental capacity could change so rapidly and that could be in that kind of state of flux, right? So that was an amazing experience for me and it made me start thinking about this stuff as well. When you were talking a minute ago also about how very,

various ways consciousness has been studied to try to figure it out. One thing that came to mind was the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote a book called Flow and is the pioneer of the idea of flow state, which is that state of mind that's like quasi-meditative that we get into when we're trying to achieve at high levels. If you're doing a bunch of writing, and I do this all the time, when I write, I get into flow state or I try to get into that state because that's when the best material is created. Athletes do it all the time too. It's called being in the zone. And that kind of reminds me of like a, a step in that direction with those similar brain

states and brainwaves is being in that, that flow state. So it's trying to re and it doesn't surprise me that the stuff you were looking at, of course, on a bit of a higher level is really the same type of high end experience while we're in flow state. Cause we're achieving at higher levels. We're doing things that seem almost superhuman in that, in that domain and that congealed slice of time. So it's beautiful, but yes, we're at a stage now where I think we're going to be able to experiment more rapidly with a lot of novel and interesting ideas. And we're going to be able to do it without being as negatively impacted because, and this is an important point, the amount of energy and

time that humans put into politicking, right. In looking at a candidate and bickering with each other and in, in fighting. All of that is time wasted that could be better spent on things more productive that produce results toward the betterment of our world, toward authentic progress. Instead, you know, here they are spending all their time fighting. And of course that ends up erupting into like real fighting. Right now you're murdering each other, which is absolutely antithetical to everything decent and dignified and trying to push our species forward. But it starts out as just a time drain. Just, complete insanity. I mean, I'm kind of reminded a little bit,

well, we don't, it's kind of a bit of another side tangent. I won't get into it, but that's, that's where my mind is right now. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we make thirty five thousand decisions every day. And by the time we're thirty five, we basically make ninety eight percent of the same decisions as we did the previous day because we're that much locked into I mean, habit stacking can be a good thing. But, you know, for most people, It's something that was done it's not a good thing. unconsciously. And then by the time you're thirty five, you're basically you've ossified. I guess to use a Michael Saylor term. And that can be changed and that can be opened up. I really, I do like the idea of these

network states focusing on specific problems. And I'm gonna read into this, the Dunbar's number makes sense as well. And I know you actually often quote, I've never heard anybody else quote Charles Tartt, but actually my favorite quote that I say almost, every time I do a podcast, I think one of the problems that we have is whether it's libertarian or whatever, everybody's like, oh, my idea has to go mainstream right away. My idea has to get mainstream adoption. Somehow we're going to go from zero to mainstream adoption, which isn't how anything works. And I think this quote fits to even with this idea of... Area specific network states and Dunbar's number my favorite Charles part quote

is when an audience is presented with a theory That's one level above their understanding. They find it inspiring when the information is two levels above their comprehension They fall asleep at three levels. They become angry and when the data reaches four levels above the level of the audience They want to kill the presenter and I and I that is that's true and that even maps to how you know technology adoption curves work and everything else but but I think understanding this and then just focusing on and not worrying about mass market, but actually just saying, all right, look, this isn't an innovator stage. How can I just pursue this? And instead of trying to convince the world when

it's at a nascent stage, just focus all of your energy and attention and acknowledge that you're at an innovator stage. And network states seem like probably the best shot we have at doing something like that. Absolutely. And that quote just recontextualized in the tech world is just like, you know, know your audience, minimum viable audience, minimum viable product. And just to kind of put a funny turn on it, minimum viable network state, right? Where you're focused on one target, you have a target goal, you have an audience, you have people who are interested in that problem. You get together with those guys and you solve it. And then those people who are interested come to it

and maybe it grows and maybe it becomes more relevant for other people as well and also more palatable. and then they can get involved, fine. That could happen, but yes, keeping it really targeted and really focused is key to success. Well, we could go on a whole, I don't know how much time you have. I know we could talk forever and I'm glad I'm gonna see you next week as well, but let me see. Yeah, I mean, I have like, we can chat for like another fifteen minutes or so. Okay. All right. Well, where do you, with, you talk about parallel polis. Well, actually, logos.

Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, we can talk. We can talk a little bit about logos because we can, what this discussion will inevitably go into is, so some of the weak points of network states currently is not just the fact that you I mean, a major weak point is the fact that you're physically materializing an area, right? You're coming to an area, physical territory, you're there, your community's there, and now you're in a, that's an attack vector. A point of failure is your physical bodies are there, right? But another thing that some people don't think about is aside from that, these network states often start as what Bology called network unions, where you're together in

the cloud and you're exchanging ideas in the cloud. But even when you physically materialize, you still have a cloud component of that community, right? For the network school or network state, it's ns.com, right? So one of the huge problems in that environment, and this gets into Logos directly, is that the technology stack that we often use is highly centralized and is a single point of failure. One example is data, right? Who has control of the data? Almost all of our data that we have, this is one of the hugest problems for internet culture, internet subcultures, and just internet at large, is that all the data is likely warehoused, controlled,

and owned by the likes of Amazon and Google, right? Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud slash Google Drive, just adjunctive companies of Google own all the data. So what that means is data censorship is a huge concern. If you have a network state and a nation state that wants to get aggressive toward you, they typically aren't going to immediately resort to violence, right? They might, but unlikely because that also creates global problems and tensions and geopolitical conflict and turmoil worldwide. what they're going to do is just have, Instead, why don't they just have Google just shut down your data, right? Hit a button and you're basically, you're gone. So one of the things that

Logos is focusing on as an organization is building the infrastructure, digital infrastructure for network states and actually creating more, a more decentralized web. This is all, this is also applicable to web three in general, not just network states. So what this looks like is, and I mentioned the decentralized data component logos. And by the way, logos is a organization that houses technology products toward these, these ends. And one of them is called Codex. It's a Codex dot storage is the website and Codex is, specifically focused on building a decentralized storage marketplace so that data people who have storage capacity can actually spin up a node

right and then people who stored can store the data want to have their data there and you can also it's a protocol so you can build on top of it so if you wanted to build a streaming platform on top of codex that would be feasible the project right now is in its testnet phase so you could actually go and join the the test net and actually use it at a very rudimentary piece. So this is all still in development. By the way, it's really difficult. Really, really, really, difficult it is to build a I can't underscore how decentralized storage protocol. So typically, doing data storage centrally on a centralized server, It's pretty easy. But one of the concerns is that data could get wiped

from an outside source, right? So what do you do to protect it? So what those guys do is they replicate data to another location. It's replicated across servers. So there's redundancy. So if someone attacks a particular server location or that server goes down for whatever reason, the data still exists. It could be rebooted from elsewhere, right? You can't do data Really hard. replication not in a way that's mathematically and computationally sound and that doesn't drain resources in a decentralized fashion just won't work so you have to use things now like erasure coding and zk and a bunch of fancy cryptography right to figure out how to

distribute that data across the network so that the redundancy remains and that building up to that innovating around that is not for the faint of heart. And so that's what these guys are doing. There's a bunch of cryptography wizards that work at Logos. mathematical and Anyway, I just wanted to go on a little tangent about data because I'm actually doing a panel in, what is today, the eighth, two days, two days doing a panel at the Decentralized Data Summit that we're having here in Bangkok. And it's going to be on data surveillance and the data economy. So this is an important subject that's near to my heart. The other two, another two important projects that I'll mention

that Logos is running is one has been around a long time and is kind of, most people go, duh, that's important, is Waku. Waku is a decentralized communications protocol with privacy enhancing guarantees. People are already building on top of Waku. It's been around a while. It is actually the spiritual successor of Gavin Wood's Whisper protocol in the Ethereum network. The important thing to know about Waku is that you can build a chat application or any other kind of application that uses human to human or human to machine communication. And you can have privacy and potentially anonymity in those transactions. So you can look up, forget Waku's actual website off the,

I mainly work with Codex by the way. So it is just a huge organization. And then lastly, and this, well, Before I move on to the next one, I will mention Waku. The obvious use case for network states is clear, right? If you have a network state, communication channels for you probably want your people who are online as well as on the ground that are potentially anonymous. That just, it's a foregone conclusion in my opinion. And then the last one is the last technology piece is called Nomos. Nomos is the, actually the consensus layer. It's the, the technology where you're going to build the digital piece of network states on top of for governance. It's the governance layer. Because right now,

everyone's kind of building their own thing, like Zuzalu has Zupass, right? Prospera has their own, I think they have a proprietary application for governance. Because you want to eventually what you want to be able to do is maybe have tokenization, token holding for voting and allocation. Treasury management, potentially a lot of different use cases governance wise for having these kind of systems. The thing, and people always ask me, why do you need another blockchain? And it's not really that we need another blockchain. That's a good, always a good point. Nomos is being built out in a way that makes it way more scalable than a lot of other blockchains. you're as well as where as I am as

Aaron, the problems with scalability on blockchains. So when you're building out a thing, a blockchain for a network state, just imagine the scalability that's going to require as the network state idea itself scales. So that's the basic idea behind Nomos is to have a governance architecture and to build network state applications on top of and then have governance. Wow. Okay. That's incredible. I'm going to be doing a deep dive into all of this. I've also heard you talk a lot about DarkFi. What are your thoughts on that? Ah, yes. I'm glad you mentioned that. So DarkFi, you probably, if anybody in the audience

hasn't heard of Amir Taki, you need to go and look up his work like yesterday. Amir is a OG in the crypto world, and he is probably one of the world's premier defenders of of privacy and anonymity in technology. And he actually runs the organization, DarkFi. And what DarkFi is building is a couple of things. I think they just released what they call DarkIRC, which is a dark communication platforms for anonymized communication. Specifically, I think targeted for developers, right? Because, and I'm glad we got to this, this is so vital. Right now in the cryptocurrency world, governments are coming after developers en masse and targeting developers who are working in this space and actually

going after them and arresting them for running different types of protocols. Just an example is Tornado Cash, right? The Tornado Cash developers were arrested. One was already convicted in the Netherlands, I believe, and is now in prison, has a prison term. And then Samurai Wallets, the other one, which is a recent case, the developers of Samurai Wallet who were allowing people to anonymously remix their Bitcoin wallets Those guys are also on the chopping block. I don't think they've had their trials yet. I haven't kept up with the case lately, but they're probably waiting pending trial. Not looking great, I would say, though, probably for those guys. So what Amir is doing is saying, hey,

why don't we have this anonymous, truly anonymized communication that has very little points of entry or ways for government to get involved and surveil it? And his idea, they've really nicely they've really put a nice philosophical lens over this thing they're calling this like the dark forest apparatus the dark forest is this idea where you can have these cyber gorillas under the cover of darkness doing their their work and not being spied upon or surveilled and they're very difficult to pinpoint or to triangulate via the government so that's their very much their open-ended agenda is to create as much darkness as possible for the gorilla engineer to build without having

concerns because Aaron, you used a really important term earlier, this idea of a chilling effect. If there's one thing that's caused a chilling effect right now, it's the government going after all of these developers and engineers where I've actually talked I'm not fucking doing this anymore. to developers who are like, It's not worth it. That's a chilling effect when they don't want to work on their projects anymore for fear that government will come after them. That's a horrible position to be in. So we need tools that provide more anonymity and more protection for our developers. And these guys are not, They're not ubiquitous. You can't just find these guys everywhere.

Some of this technology, especially in the zero knowledge world, these guys are really hard to find who have the skill set to work on these problems around these issues. Another thing about DarkFi and Amir is that Amir also used to work with Cody Wilson. If you guys aren't familiar with Cody Wilson, who in Texas created Defense Distributed and was responsible for creating the Ghost Gunner. And then he has a website called Death Cad where he released all these files online. Government's gone after that guy a bunch too. So Amir worked with Cody in the early days of Bitcoin. They worked on a project early on, I think, called Dark Wallet, Reaching at the Recesses of Memory. And Dark Wallet was a

cryptocurrency wallet that was going to be anonymized, but that ended up not coming to fruition for whatever reason. And I think the guys are still friends to this day, though, to my knowledge. So that's, yeah, that's Dark Find in a nutshell. really important to look into. Well, now I'll add to this. I think Amir stated that if anybody watched the HBO documentary on Bitcoin, trying to claim that Peter Todd is Satoshi, I believe Amir said that, because Amir worked with Peter Todd and claimed that Peter Todd was trying to get involved with DarkFi and was actually trying to infiltrate it for Feds. So if I heard that correctly, or if that was a joke or not, I don't even, I don't know,

because I follow him on Twitter, but In any event, Peter Todd is not Satoshi. Wow. So there's a lot here to digest. This was incredible. I really appreciate this. I've got my research cut out for me for quite some time. There's a lot of books and a lot of things for me to follow up on. Do you have any final thoughts that you want to share? And then also how people can, how and where they can find you? Absolutely. And I think in terms of final thoughts, I think everyone knows that technology is moving at an exponential pace. The whole Ray Kurzweil singularity is near ideas. I just want everyone to bear in mind that in terms of governance and human society and organization,

all of that is going to change drastically over the course of the next decade and further into the future. Already people have way different and unique living conditions people are traveling more these new communities are propping up it's very likely that society in the way that we currently conceive of it is going to be radically different in in the years to come and to anticipate that I think it's important to think about because it also means that how we coordinate with each other how we organize and how we govern governance how we have governance with each other is going to change radically as well so I would say everybody definitely anticipate that how you can find me

So my website is sterlinluhan.com. Really need to give it a refresher and an update, but that's the website. And then I'm most active on Twitter right now. It's, I think, what is my Twitter? It's either sterlinluhan or luhansterlin. Sometimes I have it backwards. Let me look. At sterlinluhan. So you can find me on Twitter. And then you can find my material over at Logos as well, specifically codex.storage because I work with Codex most closely. And yeah, those are the, I would say the primary place. I'm also on Facebook. If you want to, sometimes I post there, Sterling Lujan. Excellent. Well, thank you. And any, any final comments on Ross and Roger? Ah, yes. Uh,

So we talked a little bit about Roger. So I'll just say again, as I've said before online and elsewhere, I work with Roger. I know him personally. He's a fantastic person. He should be set free immediately. I would say Aaron started the petition, signed the petition for Roger, and let's try to get him out of that really shitty situation. As far as Ross is concerned, now we're in really interesting territory because Trump was elected president. He promised on the first day in office that he would free Ross. So Ross has a very real shot at getting freed. I am personally skeptical of any politician to keep their promise, even if it is Trump. I don't care. But the good news is he did

make the promise multiple times in front of a lot of people. Even Vivek probably put this in his ear, and Vivek's a friend of his, and he's been talking about freeing Ross for a long time. And I'm talking about Vivek Ramaswamy, who was trying to – he was going to be a contender for president at one point. Anyway, so I think the chance for Ross to get free is actually real this time. I do think things could go south or sideways if Trump makes an excuse, but we'll see. But one million percent, Ross does not deserve to be in prison for life. Double life sentence, forty years in prison, completely unheard of, completely unfair, draconian, as his mother has said so many times with the sentence.

So we should just continue to push forward and we should make sure to scream as loud as possible on Election Day or sorry, on his first day in office on his birthday. Well, yeah, we're actually putting together we did a enemies of the state event at the Libertarian Convention promoting Roger, Ian, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Ross. And we're actually setting up another event for D.C. for before the inauguration. And we're going to try to get as many of those guys to show up. as possible virtually or whatever to try to really rally attention around this. Because I agree, I'm skeptical on politicians as well, but it has to get done right away or it's not going to get done at all.

And so the one thing we can do to flip the levers is to make as much noise as possible and we know how trump works trump is going to if trump feels that there's a vibe and that there's a good pr hit out of it like it's it's not like this guy's complicated he's not principled but he's also not difficult to figure out so I think we can have an impact on on increasing the probabilities um if nothing else and I think it's worth it because because these five should I call them the freedom five they should absolutely be uh not in a cage and not an exile One million percent, my friend, and I'm right there with you. We got to do whatever we can to get these guys. And you're right about Trump.

There's a real, real shot here that we get Ross out to start with. All right. Well, awesome. Well, I really appreciate the time. I hope we can do this again because I feel like we could have talked for another five hours or more. But great, great information. And I look forward to seeing you next week. Look forward to seeing you as well, Aaron. Sit down and chat. Have a drink, man. All right. Sounds good. Cheers, brother. Bye.