TRASHFUTURE - Guns, Posts, and Steel feat. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Friend of the show Patrick Wyman (@Patrick_Wyman) joins the gang to talk about ancient state formation… and also a strange book written by a venture capitalist about how this entity called The Network (him and his friends) will replace God and the State as the Leviathan of 21st century society. It’s both History and Hegel with a head injury, folks! Check out Tides of History here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tides-of-history/id1257202425 And check out Patrick’s book THE VERGE here: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/patrick-wyman/the-verge/9781538701171/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *BERLIN LIVE SHOW ALERT* We're also doing a show on March 11 in Berlin! Get tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-in-berlin-tickets-525728156067 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. It sure fucking is. It's me, Riley, and I'm joined by Mylun Hussain, and we are joined by, I think, like 10- You're joined by two gentlemen. podcasting nature, and we are joined by another gentleman of a historical nature who will be making his, I don't know, 10th, 12th returning guest visit. It's Patrick Wyman.

Hello. Thank you again for having me. This is, like, my favorite thing to do. I'm very excited. A foreign national and American gentleman present at the scene, and like so many things, Tides of History, your show tends to go in seasons and have focuses, and right now your focus is on the growth of the Iron Age and the formation of some of those early states. And I thought it would be very interesting to, instead of talking, like we usually do

when we talk to you about how societies crumble, how states deform, for example, like, I don't know, let's just say picking something out of the air, deciding to completely obliterate all of your transportation infrastructure safety regulations, thereby making most of your territory uninhabitable and assaulting your own earth for some reason, that would be considered maybe state deformation. Yeah. I mean, we'd never do that. So I wouldn't worry about that.

No one. No one would ever do that. But we often talk about this, about states crumbling, collapsing, complex systems breaking down, the Bronze Age collapse, and so on and so on. This time, however, I wanted us to be positive. I wanted us to talk about state formation and making new kinds of societies. It's a good vibe show. Yeah.

Yeah. And to that end, I've actually found the newest and most important, and some would say most serious book written on the subject of creating a new state that I would say is available. Okay. And we are, of course, talking about... The Bible. Yeah, we're talking about... We're going to read and make fun of the Bible.

It's 2004, baby. Yo, this shit is crazy. We are Reddit atheists. There's a guy called Job. He's named after what you go to. And that book, of course, that we're reading, it's not the good book. It's what someone considered the better book because the author does favorably, even better, the author favorably compares himself to God throughout it.

It is... Andrew Tate's autobiography. Not that good. It is Balaji Srinivasan, a Bay Area venture capitalist book, the network state on how he's finally going to crack this libertarian intentional community problem and supplant the state for good. Now, Patrick, you read a little bit of this book because I'm very mean to people that I like.

What did you think? Well, once I got done wiping away tears of blood from my eyes and reattaching my tongue where I had bitten through it in the process of reading through this book, no, this legitimately is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. I mean that seriously in the sense that it's like the Dunning-Kruger effect made manifest where the author clearly does not realize how much he doesn't know about the subject at hand and has essentially worked backwards from the Wikipedia article on state and figured out that there are things that he doesn't like about that.

So he has imagined an alternative to his dumbed down imagined version of what a state is. It's really fucking stunning work. You have to work really hard to not understand how much you don't know about a topic like this before writing what I can only term a manifesto. It is delightful. Of course, for those of you who don't know, Bellagie is a prolific Twitter poster. He mostly gets mad at people for saying that it should be not a capital offense to be like unhoused in San Francisco.

And also, he is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. So given our understanding of Andreessen Horowitz and what we've talked about what they do before, that should tell you everything you need to know. Yeah, the guys who write the storm breakers. So, the state is dying, he writes, having served its function, displacing God as the Leviathan of the 20th century, we now enter- Which just, what the fuck does that mean? From what I understand of him, he's a five foot six brown guy who gets mad at people

online and is constantly worrying about God. So he's just like me for real. Because also, it wasn't the point that the point of the Leviathan was to replace God. So you can't replace God as the Leviathan. That doesn't really make sense. Well, you know. That implies that God replaced the Leviathan and then you're like the Leviathan was before God.

You have, we have already put more thought into this than he has. It does feel like something about like a good book editor would point out. This is a self-published work. Of course it is. Traditionally, basically how this works, right, is he thinks that the thing that is going to displace the state, which displaced God as the central organizing authority for life, is going to be this thing he calls the network. As far as I can understand, the network is a voluntary association of individuals based

on, based on posting and Bitcoin. And that's going to be God from now on. So if you, I mean, look, I've heard of disenchantment, right, the disenchantment done by science removing the magical or mystical understandings of like occluded wisdom or whatever. In this case, it's like the enlightenment process of attempting to understand the world through systematic observation, but attempting to understand the world through very, very deeply stupid and unsystematic observation. Yeah, awesome.

Yeah, it's very cool. Guy science. Yeah, it's fellow science. So before we... Joe Rogan. You've even joked, poked some holes here. Before we get into the talking about Balaji's writing, which we will get into, can we just quickly go through a definition of understanding from history, whether we're talking about

a sort of Bronze Age city state, a kind of nascent Iron Age state or even a Westphalian state, what do we mean when we talk about the state? What processes lead to them forming? So the emergence of states is a multifaceted and extremely varied process, right? So there has been this tendency in studies of state formation over the past couple of decades to stress this multiplicity, that there are a lot of different ways in which states can come into being. There is no one single path, there is no one single definition of a state.

States are a lot of different things, depending on the context, depending on where you're looking and when you're looking. And there's not really like a checklist of things that you can point to and be like, ah, state, ah, yes, it's got this, it's got this, it's got this, it's a state. In much the same way as conversations about urbanism and cities have shifted among people who work on this in the last couple of decades, that like kind of moved away from like an evolutionary checklist approach to something more, I would say kind of organic. It's a lot like porn, it's a lot like porn now, where like you look at it and if you

think that's a state, you're probably right. And if you look at it and you think that's not a state, then you're also probably right. Because states can do a lot of different things, they can be a lot of different things. You can have a state that emerges out of one single concentrated locale and it's defined very territorially in the sense that you've got, okay, you've got a defined center and then you've got a surrounding area over which that core area extends its dominance. This is kind of the traditional model of what a state is. But that's not necessarily the dominant model of state formation historically.

It's not the only one. It's not necessarily a good one, right? Like what you can have at other points in time are like a collection of villages, each that has its own leading family and that collection of leading families gets together at, say, a sanctuary, like a religious sanctuary. This is what happens in Iron Age Greece and they're like, you know what? We have common interests. Let's make a thing together.

And the thing that they make eventually evolves into the form of the city-state in Greece, this group of leading family. The podcast of its day. Yeah, it's a very posting related thing where you're like sticking something up on the wall of the temple or what will become a temple. You've got like five villages in a valley. You get together and you're like, ah, okay, let's make Corinth or let's make Athens or let's make Argos.

And that seems to be how Iron Age Greek states form. They don't grow out of a single village that just gets bigger and bigger or a single family. They grow out of the cooperation of a whole bunch of kind of neighboring settlements. So that's one model of state formation. You can also have just separate towns that are already established that come together and say, okay, we're going to form a league. We're going to form a state that is entirely based on this archipelago of urban spaces, right?

Like a city league or a town league. This is really common in the Middle Ages. It's what the Hanseatic League is. It's what the Swiss Confederation basically is. This is an entirely different model of state formation where you don't have a top-down hierarchical assumption of power by an individual or a closely knit group. You have a kind of a loose alliance of different groups separated in space that come together to make a thing.

So there's as many different ways to make a state, essentially as you can imagine, what a lot of them share in common is that they are corporate and not individual efforts. So they are different groups of people with shared interests who put aside whatever their differences are to build some sort of coercive infrastructure. And Balaji has come along and said, what if we had a different way, which was basically a combination of a subreddit and a video game conference. But we accidentally alluded to backwards and again by accident and wrongly alluded to a lot of like, for example, what he describes is not actually on the surface level that

dissimilar from what you're talking about how somewhere like Corinth gets formed where a group of villages will suddenly meet together, realize they have a common interest and then entrepreneurially almost create for themselves a political entity that they will then go on to live in and under and then reproduce. Yeah. This is the kind of the core problem with his understanding of what a state is, is that he doesn't understand what a state does or who it's for. You know, just to really just to really put it out there.

Let's never stop to start up guy before. Come on. No, it hasn't. It really hasn't. The but he seems to think of states as things that are supposed to provide services or that are supposed to like serve a purpose. They're supposed to be like owned by their constituents and that is not and never has been what a state is. A state is states are mostly regularized institutions under the control of elite groups

that are used to extract labor and resources from the people living in living in some area. However, that's defined. Like they are they are of by and for elites and they're extractive by their nature. That is, in essence, what a state always has been democratic like modern democratic nation states often present themselves as something different from that. But the extractive coercive elite dominated function of states is still deeply present because it is what they are. So let's look at what what Balaji actually writes here.

He says, a network state is a highly aligned online community with capacity for collective action that crowd funds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from other preexisting states. So basically what happened is Balaji went on Reddit and said, what if I got a motorcade out of being really good at going on Reddit? What if that, you know, he is really just like me. And this is a perfect example of like the of someone being a venture capitalist to being so rich that you can like, you know, challenge God himself for your wealth.

And just thinking, well, it's insane and unjust that I don't have this status in other areas. I should be in charge of a country. The only problem is they won't let me take they won't let me be running one because they're all too stupid. So I need to think of a new and better kind of state and I know it will be better because it would have me in charge of it. Buddy, they won't even let me fuck the country. This is the insane thing about what he lays out is he's like, well, so like minded individuals

in different places can align themselves on the basis of their common interests, whatever those interests happen to be, and they create an archipelago of physical spaces that they control. So this is this is what this is. Am I am I mischaracterizing that or is that what you're talking about is an all elite society will have what will have no exploitation because it will be all elites. That's right. Yeah. So he kind of just wants to do like a members club. But what if a members club like owned some land?

Is that what the situation? What if a members club got to go to the UN? Right. OK. It's a last list society, but it's all upper class. But it's kind of like it's it's kind of the best way to I guess like one of the ways I would describe it and maybe I'm wrong. So Patrick, correct me if I've got this like mischaracterized, but it's sort of like the guy who kind of makes it to the members club because he's like rich enough

to finally be able to get there. But he wasn't quite like invited because of who he was. And then he realizes at the members, private members club, he still doesn't quite fit in despite paying premium membership fee. And so his his thing is not to sort of criticize them like the structure that he's now in. But to be like, I want to now be invited to the UN. Basically, I want to be invited to the UN. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to get together with my friends and other members

clubs, and we're going to start our own members club on our phones from the bathrooms of the different members. Yeah, the Red Day Alcapella guy. Yeah, the really insane thing about this is so he's like, OK, well, so at first the physical spaces that our network state occupies is like a house or a room. But then eventually we get whole towns and whole cities. It's like so the extractive and coercive function that he is that he is putatively trying to get away from has to be there as you expand, because you can't have

entire towns and cities that are all made up of people who have an equal say in the running of your network state. Oh, I understand. OK, you've committed one of the classic blunders, which is you haven't understood that once everyone starts doing this, no one will be exploited because you'll just go to a network state without having to move. You'll just be able to like sign up to another one by moving all your crypto assets from one blockchain to another.

I can't believe you didn't recognize this. Come on, that's the dumbest fucking thing. I I like that. Yeah, yeah, this is the longer definition. A network state is a social network with a moral innovation. And we will talk about moral baby, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civil association, an integrated cryptocurrency, consensual government limited by social.

Why does that have to be an integrated cryptocurrency? Oh, I'll tell you why, because it's that's the most important thing when he talks about the technologies that enabled the Westphalian state like map making print capitalism in the gun. For him, the cryptocurrency is the same as the gun, right? OK, because because the way you seize it, right? Used badly. It can end your life.

Well, the way he sees it, right, is his mental model of the gun is that the gun was hitting in my mind. But the gun was useful to state formation because you could then compel anyone to do anything that you wanted just by having the gun. And if you mass produce the gun, then you're in a state now. See, yeah, it did. Well, sort of you pay taxes to me and nobody else again, sort of. And so then he was saying, OK, so the mental model is one of is one of coercing

someone else to accept your reality, basically. He says, well, Bitcoin does the same thing because you can't be altered. So that means my version of the truth becomes absolutely unarguable. Therefore, Bitcoin is like a gun. Well, the thing about forming a state is you need to be able to buy child pornography with something. So. So he says it goes on. So he says the social smart contract and archipelago of crowdfunded physical

territories, a virtual capital and an on chain census that provides a large enough population income and real estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. How that happens is unclear. It's not like a Walmart doesn't have international diplomatic recognition, but it does have quite a bit of pop like people who work at it. A lot of income and quite a lot of state and a lot of also a lot of gun. Yeah, because it's funny that the Bitcoins are the guns in this metaphor here. I would also think that just guns would be the guns in this metaphor here.

The in this analogy here. So I want to take a step back real quick and please take a step back. Yeah. So he's just wrong about the relationship between firearms and Westphalian state formation, because firearms existed before the emergence of the Westphalian state system. Even after the emergence of the Westphalian state system, most guns are not being produced in state armories. They're being made by private manufacturers.

There is no there is no like straightforward connection between mass production of firearms and the emergence of a particular kind of state. Like the those things are incredibly decoupled from one another. They're the relationship between them has absolutely nothing to do with what he thinks it does. Like that's just it's fucking stupid. Like, yeah, because like before that, you could just coerce people to do stuff with other weapons. You could just be like, hey, I've got this pointy stick.

You're in a state now. You pay taxes to me. Like it wasn't because when everyone only had pointy sticks, that was good enough. All the gun changed was now everyone had to have a gun. But the basic power relation didn't change. Yeah, most most people who were killed in the the Khmer Rouge killing fields were not killed with a gun. They were killed with a piece of sharpened bamboo, thereby disproving his theory of the gun and

hear that. Say what you will about Pol Pot. He was green, you know, so he didn't want to waste a bunch of heavy earth metals and cordyte on his genocide. You know what this is, right, as well? It's what we're talking about is we're talking about nerd Israel. We're talking about startup Zionism. Not just Israel, where the process of building a state before we have the state and the ideological goal is that the ordinary beliefs of the average

Redditor should be the law, but without the safeguards that keep that from happening in a normal society. And so he says, why now? Why do this now? After almost 400 years of the Westphalian nation state, why do we think the status quo could change? Of course, if you're a venture capitalist, it's because the Westphalian nation state doesn't hold you in enough high esteem.

And a lot of a lot of them seem to, you know, actually be kind of moribund. There's a reason why we usually talk about things falling apart. It's just the assumption is that they are going to be replaced by some kind of a utopian libertarian paradise, because that must necessarily happen. Again, it's like it's like Hegel, but, you know, with if you've just been run over very slowly by a Tesla. Yes. OK. The the I'm I'm still I'm I'm awestruck by this because, OK,

so I want to provide some real critiques of what he's saying here and not just make fun of him as hard as that is to do. The basic the basic critique, and I mentioned this before, is that he doesn't understand what a state is or what it does. He he understand he misunderstands at a basic level, like how a state functions, the the elements that comprise it and why those are meaningful. Right. So he he wants to replace the state with a network.

He doesn't understand that states as they exist actually are networks. Right. The network is the best way to understand what a state is, how it functions and how it how it actually interacts with the people who who make up the state. Right. So states are not he's got this idea in his head that a state is defined by territoriality. OK. All right. That's that's one definition of the modern nation state, is that it is territorially contiguous, that it exercises a monopoly

on force within its borders. This is this is one understanding of what a state of what a state is. He what makes him so so powerfully and completely wrong is that that's not the only facet of a nation state and that that is an idealized definition or model of a state and not its reality. So you want to replace it. He's trying to replace a an abstracted model of what a state is

with his own vision of what a state should be without understanding that the way a state actually works is much closer to what he has envisioned. Then then is yeah, he doesn't understand he's the what actually what already exists is already very close to what he wants. And it's it's just that he's not personally important enough in that network. Yes. And also that and that network isn't enough like a tech startup. He just needs to buy a gun. It's very simple.

You know, people if this guy was walking around waving a forty five people would be taking him a lot more seriously. I don't think so based on how we look based on his like first traps and stuff or his attempted first traps, because that's like my main memory when I think about him, just like the weird like Jim picture he took. I don't think anyone would take him seriously, even if he was holding a gun in the gym picture. No, I feel like people would actually take him less serious. I feel like a lot of this really does amount to the fact

for when he posted like his gym picture, a lot of people made fun of him. OK, I would like to know more about this. Please please describe the picture. The gym council is now in session. We've got our own course. Yeah. No, I mean, he was like working out like, you know, and clearly like he's kind of did he did some try this was like a couple of years ago. And so he just posted the picture of himself like without a shirt and like,

yeah, he had like decent abs, he was all right. But it was this very it was like one of those shots that guys who don't know how to take photos of their girlfriends or themselves take. So the mistake that he made was that he took a full body shot of himself, which meant they didn't matter how like ripped he got. Like you could see that he was not at all, you know, the height thing was the problem. And so there was a lot of just like dunking on him, not just for like the height stuff, but just sort of being like, you know, this is kind of a cringe photo.

And this is also around about the time that he lost a lot of money on crypto. So what he needs is a very small gun that will make him look big, like a 38 special. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So it just sort of felt that like those two things combined and just the fact that he was posting this stuff, almost to sort of say, like, you know, it didn't matter how much money he lost, he was still going to, he was still better than everyone else, but it just didn't hit because he has the post as mentality.

It's like you can be as rich as you want and you can sort of like be as ripped as you want. But ultimately, like you care about those quote tweets more than anything else. This is interesting because the next section I'm going to read sort of speaks to much of what you've said. I'm telling you, he's just like me. Like, I understand this guy on a very spiritual level. On a cellular level. So one of the reasons that he believes state formation takes place is periods is

that these organizations, states as corporations, as you say, are reacting to periods of extreme volatility. And so he says this, the reason that there is we are now at a time when a new kind of way of organizing society can emerge is because of social media and cryptocurrency. Social media, he says, is American glassnossed and cryptocurrency is American perestroika. What? Right.

Okay. You know, let's say it's it's American perestroika in that it's going to destroy the American economy. He's kind of he's kind of right in that sense. I mean, it destroyed some people's individual economies, certainly. Yeah. So there are two particular ways he says that the internet increases a volatility worth noting, social media and cryptocurrency.

Social media increases social volatility. Well, you can go viral or get canceled, experience large overnight gains or losses in status. This guy just he saw the Maddie Healy on the Adam Friedland show, Fiorore, and was like, I need to write a book about this. Fiorore is my favorite pizza. And then next, digital currency increases financial volatility. You can go to the moon or, quote, get wrecked, experiencing large overnight gains

or losses in financial status, certainly increased financial volatility. He is spitting. Yeah. But also again, this is this is not something that's experienced by most people. The vast majority of Americans are not on Twitter. And yet he's like, ah, Twitter's going to be American glassnoss. And I know that because me and all my weird friends are obsessed with it. We think it's going to usher in a new kind of state.

The smallest social network that we all happen to be on. He says, now it's very clear that the Internet is to the USA. What the USA was to the USSR. That's very clear to me. What? The main network of communication within the USSR? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, people used to love calling each other on the USA.

Yeah, and the USSR, people are all logging on to America to post pictures of the pig pooping on its own balls. It's what the reason is, is that it's truly free speech and free market. So he perceives the Internet as a kind of new continent that can be settled just by posting. You can create an like we can we can bring back the Patrick is head in hands. Like you can't you can't see this, but we can. This is this is Patrick has taken so much psychic damage, he's gone nonverbal. So it's truly free speech and free markets.

But the USA is trying to tamp down the American spring that's been unleashed. But it may be too late. Obama was, in a sense, America's Gorbachev, as he allowed technology to grow mostly unimpeded from till 2016 to billions of users without fully realizing what would ensue. And then he did a Pizza Hut advert. So does he think the president decides what technology gets to spread? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, OK.

All right, that explains a lot. Like maybe like maybe in 2009, Obama would have been like, people are going to they're going to stop believing the woke ideology of the New York Times. And we got to ban Twitter. That seems to be the logic here, right? Is that there is a cathedral like woke ideology in the New York Times. And that is an elite ideology, not a democratic one. And therefore, what the this great opening enabled by social media and cryptocurrency

is that you can escape all of these structures that you don't know why they're there. And then in the case of Balaji, you can build a kind of castle in the sky where you do a virtual version of what ultimately is kind of a dumber version of the same thing. Yeah. OK. Yeah. All right. Yeah, yeah, pretty good. You build your own version of a state where you gradually work out why all those structures are there and then build worse versions of them, like at very short

notice because you're like, oh, shit, oh, fuck. I just keep that. I just kept thinking while I was reading this, it's the it's the poly side version of the Silicon Valley guys invent the city bus thing that keeps going around where like every, you know, like every couple of years, the Silicon Valley guys are like, what if you had a car that just went to a series of stops in a set order and you could go from one to the next in this car and then there was an app and it's like, that's that's the city bus.

That's what a city bus does. You have reinvented the city bus. That's that's very much what his conception of the state is and how it works, because the best way to understand most states is as co is as coalitions of interest groups that control levers of power at various scales. Right. Like that's that's the best way to understand what a state is and how it works. So there is no the state.

First of all, that's his that's his biggest mistake. What you have are various levels of authority and government find it on the map. Come on. This is Christ. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I I I can't believe this is the most damage we've ever dealt you. This it's this is like having an ice pick shoved through my ear.

I that's the only way I could describe this. Be because why state violence visited on one man. You were saying there's not just one state there are many. Yeah, there's there every every quote unquote state is comprised of multiple levels of authority, right, that overlap. There are multiple networks of authority that all overlap. And sometimes they rub up against each other. You have in the United States, you have, you know, local, county, state,

federal jurisdictions, all of which are all of which are are are this state. They are all doing their own thing at varying levels. Right. If what he's talking about is the federal state, if what he's talking about is kind of the highest level of state authority. Well, that doesn't exist to the same extent in all places. Right. Like if you go to Wyoming and you're out in the middle of fucking nowhere,

you're going to have a lot less contact with the United States government than you are if you live like in Washington, DC. Right. Those are very different levels. And so there there are ways that in which people who actually think about these things talk about them. So you talk about like the capillary action of the state or the dendritic action of the state, right, where you if you understand a state as a network,

you understand the kind of things that tie the various territorial regions of the state together. State power flows into those different regions in different ways via different pathways, right? Obviously, he hasn't considered any of this. Like he had this. This has never occurred to Patrick. That would be hard and wouldn't spit out the answer he likes.

Yes, it wouldn't. It wouldn't spit out the idea that a bunch of guys who share a subreddit would be able to buy a bunch of apartments and eventually get a seat at the U.N. Yeah. The chat GPTS idea of state formation here. So what are the steps do we think of founding a state of a state? Excuse me. What are the steps of founding a network state?

Step one, create a Reddit account. Sort of, yes. Actually, Milo, you sort of did. Oh, I've done it again. I've done it again. So number one, found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater. Anyone can found one, just like anyone can found a company or a cryptocurrency.

The founder's legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow them. OK, so step one, meet people in the Pornhub comments. Like damn, this guy has an impressive dick. And then someone else is like, well said, sir. Shall we go? I feel so safe in his arms. Shall we make a statement? Shall we start a startup society?

Yeah, so the example he gives is like a really popular fitness influencer could like could like get people to follow them and then they could all live in the lifting state, the lifting state, which basically is just sort of like a workout call. Are you are you coming now? Because I'm coming. It's what again, what he's describing is CrossFit. He's just describing an archipelago of CrossFit boxes across the country. At the UN, what if it was at the UN?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The CrossFit Archipelago. They would all have abs and terrible knees. Number two, organ. Yeah, there's just so damaged by something called speed cleans. Well, yeah, that's that's muscle confusion. And this book is brain confusion to organize it into a group capable of collective action. Given a sufficiently dedicated online community, the next step is to organize it into a network union.

So you've taken your like guys who are big fans of blowing out their knees from speed cleans, and then you're doing collective action to try to promote the idea of working out badly. Sure. Three. And this is just CrossFit. Yeah, build trust offline in a crypto economy online. So it's CrossFit with a crypto economy.

Like maybe the faster you do deadlifts and the more you use your upper back in deadlifts, the more you get ouch coin. Yeah, I love ouch coin. I'm a ground floor investor in ouch coin. So build trust offline in a crypto economy online. Begin holding in-person meetups at the physical world, increasing in scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency. Again.

In-person meetup. That's just meetups. What is a non-in-person meetup? Also, the idea of like building an internal economy using cryptocurrency, an economy for what? Of what? To buy and sell what from where? Why?

Why do you just need an economy? What's the cryptocurrency? What it really does is it creates models of economic systems, right? That don't actually ever interact with a thing. It's news when they interact with a thing. What are you trying to interact with a thing for? What is this in case it might be a bloke? Penny arcade, the webcomic penny arcade, right?

They have charitable stuff that they do. They have an expo that's like a gaming expo. They're like two and a half Hurtzels into being a state according to Bellagy's definition. There you go. Maybe they should be a state. Okay. So one observation real quick is that the social club metaphor that you used earlier, that's not wrong.

What he's describing is a fucking Elk's Club. Like he's- But what's the Bitcoin? Yeah, but I'm sure they had some kind of currency at one of the Elk's Club's swinger nights. His guy just wants to hang out with other guys. He just wants a guy's club. And it feels like if he says I want to just hang out with other guys, people might call him gay. So he's like, no, actually, it's a state project and we're doing some really big things

and we're going to get invited to the UN. But he just wants to hang out with some dudes. That's fine. And the third thing you need, of course, is a big bowl for all of the car keys. It's like you just want to hang out with some friends, but you're unable to do that without it being versus the entire world, basically. You're unable to just hang out with some friends without wondering if you've created a new kind of social organization.

Back in the day, if you want to hang out with a bunch of guys, but you wanted to be on your computer, you could have a LAN party. But ever since the woke went wireless, you can't have LAN parties anymore. Because otherwise you'll get called gay and that's why you need to build a state. Step four, crowdfund physical nodes. Once sufficient trust has been built and funds have been accumulated, start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities.

You know, like that one time in Guyana, they did that. Yeah, you know. So what we're going to do, right, is we're going to start a Reddit account. We're going to do a subreddit. And then on the subreddit, we're going to build a lot of trust. We're going to create an online crypto economy. It's unclear what the economy will be based on centered around. How will we connect to anything material?

But we are going to build one. We're going to hang out enough until all these people start moving in together, maybe in the same building. And then all of a sudden, everyone who believes in this one thing lives in this building. And we're one step closer to being a state somehow. Political hanging out. Then all of those buildings that we've politically hung out in and now have sort of taken over, right, we now digitally connect them.

Physical access is granted by holding a Web3 crypto passport. And mixed reality is used to... So instead of a key, you would have a Web3 crypto passport that would function in much the same way. Yeah. And then to celebrate the new community that we've created, what we do is we make a bunch of punch for everyone. And then everyone drinks it.

And then we'll get to be in the metaverse. Well, then you get to put your Web3 passport into the bowl. Ever since they made Tornado cash illegal, that's what it's for now. It's for Web3 key parties. Yeah, your Web3 key is just in the shape of an upside-down pineapple. But it also says, and mixed reality in VR will be used to seamlessly link the online and offline world. So then you're going to go into the holodeck with all your friends.

And that's going to be a state. Yeah, it's PlayStation home, but it's like France now. It's weirdly, here's the... PlayStation home, PlayStation Maison. The PlayStation, c'est moi. There's two more steps. Sassiné par une PlayStation. I really think I tickled Patrick for that one.

Oh my God. So there's two more steps to forming a state. Just two. Once you've got the PlayStation home, you only have to do two more things. Number one, conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically auditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population income

in real estate footprint. This is how a startup society proves traction in the face of skepticism. How that is supposed to prove traction in the face of skepticism is unclear. What we can say is there's certainly skepticism that they're in the face of. And here's step seven.

Step seven is my favorite step. It's the best step of all of them. So you have all of this, right? You have PlayStation home, you have a blockchain, you're hanging out in apartments. Step seven, and this is just one step, a black box of a step. Gain diplomatic recognition.

First of all, this has really done irreparable psychic damage to me. Like this, it really has. But what's hilarious to me about this whole thing is that he has kind of figured out some aspects of how to think about a state without knowing that he's doing that. So he's managed to entirely by accident

stumble onto some sense of state functions and definitions of stateness and how states work and what they're about. But he is also confused that with an Elks Club. A subreddit and various other kinds of forms of voluntary association. So he's managed to put all these things together in a way that is just on the whole tremendously dumb.

It's, I can't overstate how fucking stupid this is. But he's managed to weave his way around these things and he thinks he's the first one to ever figure them out. Or like, okay, as much of a dead-eyed psychopath is like Tyler Cowan is, right? At least Tyler Cowan's thing is there is always a literature on that, right? So whatever the thing is

that Tyler Cowan is going to be a dead-eyed psychopath about, he is aware that people have probably done work on it and that you need to read those things in order to understand the field before you make your dead-eyed psychopathic intervention in that. The Silicon Valley guys, like, they never do that, right? They read one Wikipedia article and then they're off writing their fucking manifesto.

Like, I can't stress enough. I think one Wikipedia article might be a bit generous for this one. It might be. It's the Noah Smith way of understanding things. It's like there's absolutely zero awareness that these are issues that anybody has ever thought about or written about, theorized about, might have something valuable or valuable to say on the topic

that is not to be found in a Twitter spaces or a subreddit. Like... I'd say what he has done in terms of his reading is that he has looked at writing about the state and state formation that supports his thesis. So, but anything that says, for example, that the state is fundamentally a compulsive organization or a compulsive social form, he has just ignored that.

And he said what the... Clever. Because then it's not real. Yeah. He closed your eyes, then it can't hurt your argument. Well, and that's why when I closed my eyes, my mother went away. And I don't know where she went when I did that.

It's a lack of object permanence as a life strategy. And so, for example, like he does favorably cite someone like Benedict Anderson who talks about imagined communities like connecting to nationhood, right? He does favorably talk about that because then he'd say, yeah, we're going to do that, but through Reddit, basically. And because he can say the mental model of like a shared print capitalism, a shared language,

these kinds of shared cultures of being able to have a fellow feeling with someone who you have never met, he's able to say, what if we did that? But it was through Reddit. And so he says, unlike the ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state, which packs millions of disputants into one place, the network state is ideologically aligned

but geographically decentralized. And I've realized what he's invented, and I know this because I've listened to too much tides of history, he's invented the Holy Roman Empire after the Reformation. Yes, that's basically, yeah, yeah. This idea of territorial continuity that he keeps coming back to is just so fucking fundamentally wrong.

Unimportant. Yeah, it's part of the process of rationalization of the state, like that happens in especially in the 19th century but in the 20th century too. You have to have some sort of rationale for why you have the lines on the map. And this is the rationalization that you get is that the state is a geographically contiguous unit.

It's a continuous territorial unit. But that's not what states have ever been and it's not traditionally what anybody has cared about because almost all states throughout all of history have contained areas that nobody gives a shit about. So the territoriality aspect isn't important. If you want to understand how states actually function, states are networks because there are concentrations

of people in different places linked by roots. You have nodes and you have hubs and you have connections between those things that form into the pattern that we call a network. But they are of their nature discontinuous. And a town league or a league of city states is just a more formal version of what every other state also is.

So you have this territory out there that's just not important. Like the extent to which a peasant farmer is integrated into the state is a function of how much interest the state has in him and whether they can actually get a tax collector up there. You know what I mean? You know what it would be?

It would be imagine you are a peasant in 16th century, the Holy Roman Empire. And you're living in a Catholic sort of realm. You're living in a Catholic county, you say. And you're like, thank God we haven't gone woke. And you would effectively be able to, you would be able to in this model, just turn yourself into a citizen of a Protestant district

by just switching your beliefs. Maybe by like, I don't know, sending a raven with a hashtag with your QR code over to a different elector. Because that's the idea, right? Is we have these geographically discontinuous, the states follow the people around. I can just switch one wherever I want. And everyone agrees on everything

because if I don't like my state, I can just go to a different one. And then all the best states will have all the best people. And then those will become powerful. But then anytime someone's dissatisfied with that, they can just start a new state. So eventually what we have is we have no states at all, just individuals.

What we've done is we've taken an idea of society and we have said, what if we abstracted the society out of it? Yeah, great. I don't see any issues. I don't see any problems at all. Because if you're going to be a committed like libertarian, volunteerist Silicon Valley guy, like then you have to reckon with the fact that at some point,

a state and the way that it works is going to have to compel someone to do something. You're not just going to be able to choose what state you're in on the basis of what you feel like on a given morning. Honestly, on some Saturday mornings, the state ironman is fucking atrocious. So it says.

Absolutely massive on a Friday. He does say, however, this understanding history is crucial because his understanding history. Understanding history. Patrick, hold on to something, please. The understanding of history in a company is crucial to debugging code. You need to know what happened, when and why, at a micro level.

But it's also crucial to debugging situations at a larger scale than companies like societies or countries. Awesome. Once again, we've given you some ouch coin. Yeah. So there are a lot of problems here. A lot of issues. What?

A lot of problems. Come on. I thought we were done with the problem. It seems fairly solid. In the same way, you diagnose societies in the same way as you diagnose code, which is you organize them in lines instead of spaces or vice versa. The issue is there's a lot of filling in this

complement sandwich and not much bread. And we really need to put some bread at the end of this. Like this is the thing, right? The entire premise of this book is that he thought this, this exact conclusion, this insight occurred to him, which is looking at history is a bit and fixing things, is like debugging code. And what if you could debug a society

like you debug software? And that one shower thought has now been expanded into a very large book. This is a bad book. Bad thought, bad book. Because so first of all, sometimes bad shit just happens, right? There are occasional times when things go terribly wrong

for reasons that people couldn't really have seen coming entirely unintended consequences. So how do you debug that? How do you just debug something that went wrong? Second and more important, a lot of the time, the, quote unquote, bad things or things that have gone wrong are often things that are good for one group while being bad for another group.

Oh, they would just on another state. Yeah, in this case. Let's see. I am a fuck. All right. They're on a different subreddit. So the basic, but think about this, right? The basic premise is just so far off the idea that

there are obviously objectively good or bad things and that you just decide that they're good or bad and then you go back and fix the bad ones. Like that's a fucking infantile. If everybody agreed that things were good or that certain things were good or certain things were bad, there wouldn't be any conflict and we wouldn't have this issue in the first place, right?

Like I think- Yes, because we're stuck with legacy organizations that keep people that disagree bound together when they really shouldn't be bound together at all. States. Fuck. States are like the Walmart when you think about it of the world.

Yeah, because they have lots of guns. Yeah, why do we have eggs and guns together? That's a legacy organization. Yeah, well, because how did you get all those eggs? Well, with the gun. I went around with my gun and I said, give me those eggs. I coerced the chicken.

Like producer else. It says, we will use these tools, the tools of studying history, to discuss the emergence of a new Leviathan, the network. This guy is the tool of studying history. A contender for the most powerful force in the world and a true peer to God as a form of social organization. Because like that, but that's the thing also, right?

Like when the church was your main method of social organization, that was because it provided you a way of fitting yourself into a society of understanding the infinite and of reassuring you that what you're doing was okay. And then we secularize that with the state. And then all of a sudden, the state takes over in the power to kill you.

But then you have to deal with the terror of the fact that you don't know what's going to happen to your soul. The church is still networks, man. It's still networks. It's still just like the fucking definite article here makes me want to just club my eyes out with a stick. I like not like poke them out, like literally take a club and bash my eyes

until they don't exist anymore. Like it's these things are all still best viewed as networks. If he was just like, huh, I wonder how I could understand these other things as networks. Then he would have a much better understanding of them. They would make a lot more sense to him as opposed to being strawment argue against instead of thinking that he's replacing them with the network.

It's not the network. It's a multiplicity of them. Networks are a way of thinking. It's not a thing that has an objective fucking existence. Well, it is when it's based around a subreddit. And I think you'll find that the Avignon papacy was just a big spaceship that landed in southern France and started doing things.

It wasn't a constellation of interests. It was just a legacy organization. No, it was a hot new startup organization that was challenging those fat cats in the Vatican. Yeah. If you'd seen the clothes they were wearing, you'd know just how hot a new startup it was. Oh, yeah.

They were wearing Patagonia fleeces. Here's another one. A key point is that we can apply all the techniques of startup companies to startup societies. Financing, attracting subscribers. I don't want to apply the financing bit. Calculating churn, doing customer support. There's a playbook for all of that.

I call it Society is a Service. You know, Society is a Service. Also, why is he writing this book? Patrick has just gone away. He's taken his headphones off and discussed. He's just given up. He's okay. He's given up.

I'm trying to get my head around with this book as the dumb guy on the show. Is what is the point? Like, he's written this book about his insane idea for how you would make a society. Even he must surely know that this is never going to happen. He wants to hang out with guys. Literally, this is it.

He wants to hang out with guys. And because he doesn't want to be called gay, he has to justify it. And this is what he's done. It's the only thing that makes sense because none of this does. Society is a service doesn't make sense. But crypto shit doesn't make sense.

And it also is unnecessary. It feels like the crypto bit is kind of... I don't understand why this could work without the crypto. I can tell you why. It's because in order to have a society that doesn't have any compulsion, you have to have everyone agreeing on a version of the truth that doesn't need any kind of enforcement.

Again, if you are a stupid person, you think that that's the case, right? And so you'd say everything is cryptographically on a ledger. Then we basically can have an organization that just provides services and will always provide the right services because we'll know exactly what people want. What this really is, right?

What all of these guys sort of theories about a post-state, more individualist libertarian world, whether it's like William Reese Mogg, whether it is the guys who created Prospera on Roatan that we talked about earlier than last year, or whether it is Bellagie thinking about his startup society that's as a service. It's all just these guys want to be able to influence

the governments that they have to live under because the state is compulsive, right? That they are compelled to live as part of a state. This is them fantasizing about being freed from those constraints. That's really what we're writing about here. They just have to do what your normal fucking lumber baron out in rural Washington does, which is buy a city councilman.

It's not complicated. If you want people to listen to you, you just buy a politician. They have done that, but they've done that, but San Francisco still isn't to their liking. It doesn't matter. That's the part that just absolutely fucking blows me away is it's like you already have what you want. None of this is hard.

You could just move to a rural area someplace and buy the country club and you'll get exactly what you want. Because I think we've discussed this on previous episodes and various things, and they don't ever want to do that. We've heard all the time they complain about LA and they complain about New York, and all these metropolitan liberal cities, but they don't actually want to go anywhere else.

You're right in the sense of, well, their strategy then was just to buy politicians. On a policy level, they've done very well out of it, because you have politicians that don't really want to do anything, are very happy to leave tech to fill public services. On a monetary level, these guys are great, and this is where I think I come back to Reddit Brain and just the idea, number one,

the idea that just the fact that they have to deal with politicians and the internal Reddit guy that hates the moderator and just doesn't want to deal with the moderator. So logically, their thing is like, well, why don't we just set up a different subreddit where I'm the moderator, and then I will bring justice to the forum. But then the second part is this much broader thing among tech guys who have to accept a reality that they don't want to,

which is that they have to deal with other people. But they can't exist in a society without other people. And so this seems to be this perverse fantasy where they can live in this imaginary place, where they don't have to deal with people that aren't their friends. And so this is where we end up with the members club. And the idea that we can definitely set up a members club where everyone gets to sit in their box apartment

in the building that we've bought, and have really fun times in hybrid virtual reality, and have everything delivered because what was it? Society as a service. Society as a service. Who's spreading the service? Who knows? And so ultimately, it really just... I guess what I'm thinking about this,

what this really comes down to, is the fact that they don't want to deal with what they consider to be as NPCs. And for them, NPCs, people who are less than human compared to them, is literally anyone that isn't their friend. Yeah, I think that's it. They are unable... They've gotten their 150 people that they know,

and they're like, well, no one outside this exists. All I'll say before I move on is, on this subject, is they're living in a society that is designed at every level to give them every single advantage, and they're loudly fantasizing about how high they could soar if they were freed from the confines of this annoying airplane, basically. So the way that they say that you should structure society,

because remember, this is all about having a moral purpose. You have a charismatic founder with a moral purpose, and he calls that the one commandment. So you have to start a new society with its own moral code based on your study of history that you're going to do something to debug, right? So just like a startup, it will be like, we're going to provide faster API support to Salesforce.

You're going to be like, we're going to finally live beyond the confines of the food and drug administration, and that's your one thing that you've changed in the code base. It's a little mind, here we come, baby. That is right. He says, so start your new society with its own moral code based on your individual study of history,

and recruit people that you agree with to populate it. By the way, his individual study of history says that the main problem with the US is that it's controlled by woke capitalism as personified by the New York Times. That's right. Wouldn't have happened to a peasant in the Holy Roman Empire. They didn't even have a gender.

Every new startup society needs to have a moral premise at its core, one that its founding nation subscribes to, and one that is supported by a digital history on the blockchain that a more powerful state can't delete, one that justifies its existence as a righteous yet peaceful protest against the powers that be. Concrete examples of one commandments include 24 seven Internet bad, which he recalls a digital Sabbath society,

or carbs bad, which he says leads to a keto kosher society, or even traditional Christianity good, which leads to a Benedict doctrine society. And again, it's like, yeah, he can imagine ketosis Israel, but he also can't imagine like free healthcare society, for example, because who would want that? It is really striking to me the extent to which he has just kind of imagined Calvinism into existence.

But no one's done it for a while, I guess. Yeah, I mean, but a lot of doesn't doesn't this really like strike you as Calvin's Geneva, where like it's you have a charismatic founder, you've got your holy texts, you've got a blockchain in which nobody forgets anything that you've ever done. Like the if you if you pissed in an alley and your neighbor saw you like that's in your person, that's in God's blockchain, like God doesn't forget.

Like and the sense of the elect and the not elect, like the it's it's God, it's just it's always fucking Calvinism all the way down. It's like that's it always is. Could you believe that someone who sort of rose to the heights of American capitalism to become one of its famous like God emperors is fundamentally a Calvinist, but being too stupid to realize it.

That's nothing more American than that, baby. So others other examples of societies include renewal culture, which is the cancel culture proof society. Oh, my boys are starting us. We're going to start a country based on how much we don't like cancel culture. And we're pretty sure that we're going to get diplomatic recognition from like Al Salvador and then build from there

until we're a great power. I mean, what was Hobbes' Leviathan? If not the original woke cancel mark. It's a very Brendan take on that. Yeah, exactly. I walked by a a truck in my neighborhood today, this park. There's a lot of like housing construction in my neighborhood and building really big like 4,500 square foot houses

on what used to be like a 2,000 square foot house lot. And this guy on the back of his truck, he has a sticker that is just Rick from Rick and Morty giving the finger, big decal. And then right next to it is a stick figure urinating on a big block of text that says your feelings. And this guy, so I want to know. That's the flag of the anti-cancel culture country.

Yeah. So first of all, I know what country this guy's going to belong to. I could also hear him yelling from inside the half-constructed house you fucking. So just to give you just in case it was unclear what kind of guy he was reading this book. I want to know what society, which state that guy belongs in. Like which one is he going to choose?

Is he a ketosis? That's the thing is he will choose one because the idea is right. You take an existing code base of an existing society, you make one change to debug it and then you'll know if it works because people will join it and eventually go through the steps and then like El Salvador will recognize you and then you'll slowly work up the chain and then you'll be like France. He can go to builders Valhalla.

So all the builders, you know, the state where every tea or coffee has like four sugars in it. Yeah. But it'd be great. So but the idea right is that if then, if that doesn't work, someone can take your code base, make one change, make one commandment and then start a society of their own. So I think what would happen is this guy would join the

anti-cancel culture society, but very quickly would find that cancel culture has taken root in the anti-cancel culture society and then create the real anti-cancel culture society, the real unwoke society. Yeah. The provisional anti-cancel culture society. Until eventually. Until eventually anti-cancel culture society.

All of these guys. They're picking London Dairy. Like yeah. Split out into their own individual anti-cancel culture societies and then they're just Americans again. A form of woke ideology has taken hold in the cancel, anti-cancel culture society and we've had to start the provisional anti-cancel culture society.

So another one. The anti-cancel culture volunteer force. I did say there's another one, which is the your body, your choice, the post FDA society. The post FDA. Yeah. No regulation on food or drugs. So he says, if you want to start this society outside the US,

your startup society could ride behind, for example, the support of Malta's FDA for a new biomedical regime. For the case of doing it within the US, you need a governor who would declare a sanctuary state for biomedicine. That is just like a sanctuary city that declares it won't enforce federal immigration law. A sanctuary state for biomedicine wouldn't enforce FDA RIT. Which means again, imagine this practically, right?

You have a network state of people living all over the world and you're going to like, you know, just be able to do whatever to any, to anyone in your house because you and some redditors agreed that this is like a country. That's, that's okay. So first of all, that's kind of Delaware. Second, the, no, I, I don't know, man. I, I'm too, I'm too stupid for this.

Either I'm, I'm way too dumb for this. I'm going to call up Ron DeSantis. Hey, Meepo, Ron, Bellagie here. Please declare independence for the FDA from Florida so I can get elf ears attached to my girlfriend. Thank you. That's right. I want to, I want to consume more carcinogens.

So yeah, with this diplomatic recognition, you could then take the existing American code base and add one crucial new feature. Your absolute right to buy or sell any medical product without third party interference. Yeah, that's how you get it. That's how you get an FDA free zone. Before we end though, you might be wondering,

how do they talk about policing and the use of violence in the network state? Because that's usually a pretty touchy issue if you're going to be living inside the territory of a legacy state for a while before you replace it. So do you want to know how he handles it? I would like, I would very much like to know. Yeah.

So how he says, look, we assume at the very beginning, we're going to have to just piggyback on the legacy state for law enforcement, right? More ring. But what happens when all the legacy states sort of drop away and they're replaced by this like global holy Roman empire of people who like, maybe people who like CrossFit, people who like Keto,

people who hate cancel culture. You know, these different people who would all belong in different states based on what they want, the one thing they like most. Is that they would say, well, advances in robotics, such as the Boston Dynamics Dog and other forms of automated law enforcement solutions would be able to be deployed to react differently as they pass through

different state territories. So the Boston Dynamics Dog, as it's walking through my anti-cancel culture state building, it will see me, yeah, it'll have the big swastika on it, and then it'll see me eat a cookie, it'll see me eat a cookie, and then it'll be like, citizen, that is fine. And then, you know, or maybe Ed 209 walks in to like,

the Keto Society's room, sees him eat a cookie, and then blows him away. Yeah, just mini-gum. So again, what he's describing with these robots is literally what like the hot dog next guy from high school does now going from neighborhood to neighborhood enforcing the laws. Like, oh, is that a rich white lady blowing coconut Mercedes?

Totally fine. Oh, is that two black youths smoking a joint? Time to get my beaten stick out. Like, that's literally what police already do. They really shouldn't call it the beaten stick when I give it to them. I think it gives them the wrong idea. I think it's that the particular,

the turd and the punch bowl in this case is that they're unable to get rid of this idea that if everyone just volunteered, if everything was just reduced to personal choice, if you could just be shopping for everything, then all of the problems in politics would automatically be solved. That's the one weird trick. And that's why he keeps ending up describing things

that actually exist, but very stupidly because he's unable to recognize that that that that voluntarism isn't just going to be the one weird trick that fixes all of it. The turd in the punch bowl suggesting that in this society, you know, the the suicide punch doesn't actually have poison in it. You just drink it and then you get dysentery.

You just got like really bad E. Coli. What's what's fucking hilarious about this is okay. So I may have mentioned him on the show before, but I train with a 50 year old second amendment absolutist and vegan named Rob. Nice. And Rob rides a bike 15 miles to and from the gym three times a week, even when it's 110 degrees outside.

And again, he is 50 years old. Rob is a former competitive strongman. He was shot while he was in the shoulder, while he was bouncing outside a bar in South Africa. He again, big time firearms enthusiast was at one point sponsored by Winchester and gave up that sponsorship when they got too woke in the mid 90s. So just to give you some sense for for for who this guy is,

his his life philosophy could best be described as keep your head on a swivel. So he's very much like he's he's like a dedicated hardcore libertarian, right? Like that is dedicated a libertarian as you're ever going to find. And this guy who never went to college, may not have finished high school actually, is much more in touch with the realities of how personal choice in the state intersect and conflict than our man Balaji.

Rob, Rob has a lot of opinions on meth use. What you should do when you're hit by a car, most of which revolve around, you know, personal use and ownership of a firearm. He's like, well, if somebody hits you with a car, you just you pull out your gun and you shoot him. So Rob at various points has like, what I say when I mean he like keep your head on a swivel, he will wear a bulletproof vest while he's riding his bike,

15 miles to and from it's so hot. Right. But but you gotta keep your head wearing that. He's like Winnie the Pooh, except the only Garmin he's wearing is a bulletproof vest. Well, and he always, he always has not one, but two guns. And one time I was like, Rob, why do you have a second gun? He's like, well, what if something happens to the first one? So, Have you ever considered what if something happens to the second one also?

He has, but he feels like that's that's an unlikely use case for Rob. But like, Guys carrying three guns looking at him like this guy's a fucking amateur. Yeah. He's not prepared. Why aren't you wearing like like series four body armor? Like you really think a vest is going to get it done? Like covers. Yeah.

So a guy in a mech suit looks down at both of them derisively. Yeah. Guy in an Abrams tank just like, this guy thinks he's a prat. If Rob could drive an Abrams tank without any environmental consequences, he would. He absolutely 100% would. But like that guy is a much more realistic libertarian in terms of like living in a society and the shortcomings and benefits of that than Balaji is. Like Rob, whom I adore, I love him. I just I think he's the funniest motherfucker that I've run across in a very long time.

And like I learn things from our conversations all the time. Like his perspective on life as a as a practice, a practicing libertarian, you might say, is much more realistic and libertarian, but not practicing. Like that's a much but like that's a much more enriching, enlightening libertarian perspective than whatever the fuck this network state shit is. We have one because with Rob, he hangs out with guys at the gym and probably hangs out with guys at other places. And Balaji doesn't hang out with guys.

Yep. I'm telling you, this is what it comes down to. He wants dude friends and he's trying to justify why that's not gay. That is I don't think you're wrong at all. Like I don't think you're wrong. Like it's that's it. It's just it's a guy who wants to hang out with friends in a very political way, specifically directed at all of the things he doesn't like about California.

That's sort of what the network state is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you want to suck a guy's dick, just do it. Just enjoy it. Don't say it's like a node or whatever. Just do it. They've got that node. They've no but see, they've gentrified that out of San Francisco now.

He can't just go down the street and do that. Like they that's the unintended consequence of tech's takeover of San Francisco is they've removed all the removed all the good spots. Yeah. Anyway, anyway, I've noticed we've gone over time. So they've ruined the tendinob. I want to put gravy. So I want to say no longer tender.

I want to say Patrick is always a delight to have you here on the show. Thank you so much for having me. This really has done permanent psychic damage to me, which I thank you. So if you're a fan of Tides of History, sorry, it's about to get worse. It's much stupider. I think you're a fan of Tides of History. Sorry that you had to listen to that. Also that if you came here for that reason.

But I do recommend that you listen to Tides of History. It is possibly my favorite podcast and what I recommend to everyone. A show that's about to go downhill. Yeah. No, my sincere apologies for that. No, I really appreciate it. It is as always a pleasure. I hope that I wasn't too face-palming to make any sort of sense about these very serious issues. You know what? Only we could see it.

So also, also, also, also, if by the time you're listening to this, it will be too late to go to our live show in London. You have missed the boat. Or alternatively, it was great to see you yesterday for those of you who came. However, we may have more tickets released for the Berlin show. So probably just check the link because we won't know until then. Yeah, that's right. We don't know now. We don't know.

Don't miss the boat to Berlin. In what is the future for us, but will be the present to you. Well, the near future, I think, for you because you're about to go check. Unless you've already checked. Whether or not the tickets have been released will be, you know, the fact that in the future, slightly in the future for you finding out, but it's in the present that like Schrodinger's cat is now out of the box one way or another. And it's coming to the show.

We've got Schrodinger's cat as a guest in Germany. And we're going to kill it or not. You have to go in there, yeah. And also this is a free episode. So there is a Patreon. You can subscribe to it. It will be five dollars a month as per usual. Our theme song is here we go.

That's in the present for you, but in the future for us. I remembered to say it this time. Don't forget to check out Tides of History and check out The Verge, which is available wherever you can find audiobooks. For a minute, I thought you were plugging the tech news website, The Verge. No, no. I realized you meant Patrick's book. A book that a book that I allegedly wrote have very little memory of writing for whatever that's

worth. cocaine will do that. I got on antidepressants halfway through writing it and it radically changed my perspective. And so I feel like there was like a shift halfway through the book where I'm like, okay, I don't remember anything that I did before this. And then when I finished the book, it was the first few weeks of the lockdown. And so my kids were home and I don't remember what I wrote then either. Like no idea.

So Patrick, I recommend you should check out The Verge. I should. I know that I put a reference to a blade line in the conclusion. I skating uphill and I don't remember doing that as I was writing the book. So we can all learn something by checking out Patrick's book. Also, Berlin, I'm doing stand-up, 9th of March, two days before the TF show. There are tickets for that. Please buy them.

Perfect. Yeah, it's in English. I think there's some confusion. Some people thought the show was in Russian because the promoter is Russian. It's not in Russian. Don't worry. It's not in Russian. It's in...

Please, but I've sold so few... I don't understand why I've sold so few tickets to this. It's in safe, good old fashioned England. That is right. Anyway, we've done the end matter for far too long. We have. Thank you again to Patrick. Thank you to our listeners and subscribers.

And we'll see you on the bonus episode in a few days. Bye. Bye.