A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre existing states. Hello and welcome to how to take over the world. This has been Wilson. That was a passage from the network state by Balaji Srinivasan.

Today I am doing something a little bit different for this episode. I don't always read biographies. And so while I am finishing the video editing for my upcoming episode on Arnold Schwarzenegger, I thought I would do a mini episode. On something else that I have been reading recently. And that is this, this book, the network state by Balaji Srinivasan.

Like I said, not a biography, but I do think it will have some relevance for this audience. Um, it's subtitled how to start a new country. And so I thought it might have relevance for you because if you are the kind of person who is interested in a podcast called how to take over the world, you might also be interested in this idea of starting your own country.

Those are both very large, ambitious ideas that I think attract, uh, the same sort of thinking. Additionally, I think there is some crossover with many of the biographies that we have covered on this show. And that is because great minds are often drawn towards creating their own  Space, whether that is a city or a country or something like that.

I mean, uh, the classic example to me is Disney with Epcot. So Epcot originally was not supposed to be an amusement park. Like it is today. Epcot stands for experimental prototype community of tomorrow. And it was explicitly supposed to be a futuristic city, not an amusement park, supposed to have new futuristic forms of transportation, communication, working, eating, and everything.

You know, Walt Disney was really obsessed with this idea of creating a new city, like an actual city that people lived in. That's what Epcot was supposed to be, and unfortunately he died, uh, during its creation, and so, uh, the people following Walt Disney did not have the same level of ambition and vision, and so it just got turned into what it is today, which is, uh, an amusement park in Disney World.

You can also look at Alexander the Great, who founded something like 70 cities, the most famous being the current Egyptian city of Alexandria. And my favorite is Bucephalopolis, the city that he named after his horse. You can also look at Brigham Young, who I've done episodes on, someone who founded essentially his own kingdom in the desert of the American West.

You can look at Leonardo da Vinci, the last great project of his life. The last thing that he worked on was a new futuristic city, exactly like Epcot.

It was specifically designed for beauty. Yes, he was an artist,  but also for sanitation and cleanliness and he was trying to engineer, uh, both a cleaner and more efficient way to live. So  A lot of it was designed around avoiding many of the sanitary issues that cause diseases in so many medieval and renaissance cities in Europe.

You can even look at Steve Jobs and his spaceship, Office Park, uh, that Apple now operates out of, and that he designed. He also took a very close interest in the design of Pixar's offices, going so far as to be involved himself in the bricks in the exterior of Pixar's offices. He, uh, took a very close look at the colors and the layout of the bricks to make sure it looked accurate.

Absolutely perfect. I even find some similarities in the way that when he retired, Rockefeller spent most of his days designing and building this great property in upstate New York. He became an amateur landscape architect and was laying roads, building houses, designing golf courses. And this was much more than just his personal house.

The property had over 50 buildings on it. He really spent his time building this bucolic village for himself, his family and his And by the way, one of the reasons that Rockefeller built this entire complex is that he was getting more and more famous and he wanted some place that he could still have friends and associates and socialize with people so that he didn't have to totally close himself off from the world. Cause he was always worried about people snooping, people trying to dig up dirt on him, , to, to find anything that they could use against him, which is something that we all have to worry about these days because,  we all have data footprints now that people can use.

They can sell our data. Cyber criminals can even use it against you. And the good news is that you have the right to protect your privacy by requesting that data brokers delete your information. But that takes a lot of time.   And that's why I'm really proud to be sponsored by incognito. They go to the hard work of requesting that all these data aggregators take down your personal data and they get it out of the hands of data brokers and cyber criminals. They will provide reports to you on how many requests they have made and how many successful removals.

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That's code takeover to get an exclusive 60 percent off an annual incognito plan. 📍   So the idea of building a city or a country or a community Really resonates with many of history's greatest

leaders.  So what does this actually mean? What is a network state? What is Balaji talking about?  I read that definition at the beginning, but what does that mean when the rubber hits the road, what does it mean to found your own country? there Is a slightly more in depth definition that biology gives. He says a network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in person level of civility and integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, And an on chain census that proves a large enough population and income.

Okay. So that's a lot to digest. That's a lot all in one. So let's break it down. Here's how I would explain what a network state is. At least this is what it is in my brain.  A network state is a community, a group of people. Who want to share a way of life. That's kind of that simple. It starts with that.

And rather than coming together and trying to get thousands of people to move to a new city or a new country, or settle some new land, they will share a way of life by organizing on the internet and in small communities dotted all over the world. So Bology lays out a detailed process for how he thinks this will happen.

So first you have an online community and there are many of these, these already exist,  and then those communities start holding meetups. You know, they start getting together on an ad hoc, temporary basis, uh, in person,  then that community starts to acquire some sort of physical land or space. So you think, all right, we're having these in person meetups.

Why don't we actually just buy a little house? We'll all pitch in and these are where we can have our meetups and we can spend some time together. And then they form what he calls a network union. So what is that? It's a way of taking collective action and participating in collective bargaining. So let's say that maybe you and a million of your closest friends were in one of these communities, and most of you are remote workers.

Maybe it would take the form of bargaining tax rates with various governments saying, Hey, we have these remote workers and we like to live together and we mostly work remote. So we're very mobile, but guess what? If you Portugal, Columbia, El Salvador, Canada, the U S if you offer us a better tax rate, then we will encourage more of our members to move to your country.

And this will stimulate your economy. Um, we get a better tax rate, um, for ourselves. So win, win, et cetera. So this is a network union. That's the next logical step for biology for these online communities.  And then you start acquiring more and more land,  you know, little cul de sacs, office buildings, apartment buildings, neighborhoods.

And these are all over the world. They're not centralized in one single city. And then finally you get to a size and scale that you've got property all over the world and millions of members. And so you can get diplomatic recognition as a state,  not a nation state. Not like the U. S. or Mexico or France or England, but a network state with distributed territory in many different locations.

So that is how he imagines these things coming into reality. Uh, I think that sounds really fun and interesting. Balaji has a good quote about why people would want to do this. He writes, we want to be able to peacefully start a new state for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh startup, or a clean slate, because we want to build something new without historical constraint.

And I think that really resonates with me. I love starting something new. Um, and this is like the biggest kind of coolest thing you could start.   Starting businesses, starting charities, you know, these other things that you could found are very cool. Very interesting. That's a large part of what we talk about here on the show, but starting your own country, like that is kind of on another level. Right. And I just think that, you know, St.

Peter's or St. Paul's or Notre Dame or the Washington monument. Are cooler than Facebook or Twitter or anything like that. So, , I think it's an interesting idea, but of course, , there's more to it. It's not just the thrill of starting something new at the beginning of his definition. Biology defines a network state as a social network with a moral innovation.

Okay. A moral innovation. What is that? And a moral innovation could be anything, but the point is  moral innovations must serve as a critique of the current way of doing things. Otherwise, what's the point, right? So this is a major key to what he's proposing. It's one of the most important points, but also one of the most daunting, because it means you're going to have to develop a new morality. In some way, and that is of course going to be very challenging to the status quo, and therefore probably very controversial.

So what could that look like? What is a moral innovation? So a few examples, um, he gives some of these. You might have heard of effective altruists. These are people that are Most of them are located in the Bay Area, who believe in doing good, in alleviating suffering in the world. They are altruists, you know, philanthropists, but they are effective altruists.

They believe in being extremely rigorous and quantitative in measuring  the impact of what you're doing and reorienting your life around how you can possibly have the maximum impact possible.  So as an example, probably the most famous effective altruist, for better or for worse, is Sam Bankman Freed.

And he, before he went to jail, explored the idea of how much money would he have to pay for Donald Trump not to run for president.  So he starts quantifying, all right,  how much money would it take first of all? And then how much good would it do? And so I think he started to come down to a number like 5 billion.

And so then he runs the analysis of, okay. Um, would that 5 billion do more good convincing Donald Trump not to run for president? Or spending those 5 billion building wells or buying mosquito nets in Africa. Now, obviously you hear a story like that and you start to think, okay, maybe these effective altruists are not always as smart as they think they are.

But we're just using that as an example. Right. And I think effective altruists is a great example of a type of community that you could possibly create a network state around on the flip side of that, uh, kind of similar, kind of very different community are effective accelerationists. So these are people who believe that the greatest good is created, not through philanthropy, but through technological progress.

So instead of spending all your time thinking about how to philanthropically improve the world,  you should be thinking according to them about how to make better robots, better AI, cheaper energy, more efficient transportation, stuff like that.

And so similarly, this is a moral innovation that has a strong critique of the current system. Hey, we spend too much time on regulation and redistribution. Actually, the most important thing is technological progress. And we should orient our lives and our society around that.

Okay. Again, I'm not advocating for either of these worldviews.  I think these are two worldviews that do have a strong moral innovation and therefore good candidates to start a network state biology also describes a few other groups that could have relatively simple moral innovations. So you could have a network state or a community built around dietary ideas.

So like a paleo community or keto or vegan, you could also, uh, Just work with preexisting groups that have some sort of moral innovation. So for example, religion is an easy one to go to. So two examples that he brings up frequently are Jews and Mormons,

And you could see pretty easily how those two groups could form into network states, you know, both of them with the exception of Israel, but, uh, Mormons and Jews are minorities in every country in which they live.

They often form close knit communities that have a lot in common. And so it'd be pretty easy for them. To, um, come together in little neighborhoods and areas and form this sort of international community.

So in Baloji's mind, everyone from effective altruists to Mormons to vegans are a good candidate. For forming a network state.  Another part of the definition is he calls for a sense of national consciousness and national identity. And that is a high bar to clear.

As he says himself, he says, as noted, primary identity is precious. It's the identity that supersedes all others to build anything great, a company, a currency, a civilization, an affiliation must beat out the rest of the identity stack to become someone's primary identity.

And that is a high bar to meet. So you can understand what he's saying. You know, I think about my identities and you, there are dozens that you could say, right? I'm an American, I'm Mormon. I consider myself a Christian, even though some people don't. I'm a Wilson. I'm a Utah and I'm a dog lover. I'm a basketball player.

Um, I'm a warriors fan. I'm a 49ers fan. You got all these identities and some of these are very weak. Some of these are very strong. And so your moral innovation has to be powerful enough that people are willing to make it one of their. Primary identities, if they're going to go off and join a network state.

And so you've got these twin ideas. You need an innovation. You need an identity. And, uh, but, but why would you want to do any of this? I get the idea of a blank slate of starting something new. But man, starting like a whole new way of life is a difficult thing. You better have a strong critique of how things are going right now.

If, uh, if you want to do things differently,  so Bologi does. Bologi has very strong critiques of the current order. They come from a right wing, sort of libertarian ish perspective. Uh, I'll read you what he writes. I think this is sort of his most striking and harsh condemnation of the current American led order. He says,  Conversely, woke America is to America.

As Soviet Russia was to Russia. It is the most left wing country in the world. The place where whites go to the back of the line for vaccinations and the self admitted sponsor of global revolution. Its core premise is ethnomassacism,  which can be paraphrased as white people.  So, um, he takes this very strong racial view, saying that America is far too woke, and that makes it impossible to get anything done, , at least anything productive. And, um, so that's one of his main reasons for wanting to You know, new systems, new, new states, new ways of doing things. Um, and what he envisions is an escape from this ethnomasticism and also an escape from ethnocentrism, uh, which he says is kind of a China model, uh, towards something different.

He says, is it the ultimate evil for a state to consciously represent its majority race as America contends, or is it the ultimate good as China contends? Or should it be neither?  And so he goes on to imagine a state in which it's animating force is neither to demonize nor support a particular ethnicity, but one, which is freed to think about much more important and interesting.

So, you know, this is not a political show. I'm not going to comment on Balaji's critique, but I will say I agree with him that there is a lot to critique about our current system. I think everyone feels that way, left or right. And in my mind, the current system falls short.  Most of all, I think the thing that bothers me most  about modern life,  uh, it doesn't seem to do a good job of giving people purpose or meaning or belonging.

I think that is one of the reasons that I am most excited about this idea. of a network state,  uh, is because I think these could  give people belonging and purpose.  Um, so, you know, that begs the question, why is it, what is it about the current way of doing things, uh, that leads us to feel like, oh, we don't have purpose or meaning and stuff like that.

And I think, um, there's a lot of different answers. One thing that always comes back to is I think a big part of it is the end of what I call Uh, and I'm not the one who coined this phrase owned space.

So go through a mental exercise with me. Uh, you walk outside your house. And there is a sidewalk, a street lamp, uh, a road. Do you feel like you own that sidewalk, that street lamp, you know, at least in part, like obviously it's not your personal property. But do you feel like this is something you have a stake in?  I think most people don't feel that way. Um, we don't feel like part owners of our government.  I think for most people there is an adversarial or at least an orthogonal relationship with the government at every level.

And that is what citizenship is supposed to be, right? You are a part owner of a political entity. And I can't say that I feel that I feel like I am a part owner of. My city, my state, or my country. I have a right to vote. Yay. But that feels relatively meaningless. In the system as it's currently constituted.

I think for a positive example, a good example of citizenship in action, all you need to do is turn back the clock a little bit. On America itself.

So citizenship here used to be very strong. Uh, there's a great story that I think illustrates this. It's from Alexis de Tocqueville, who was a French aristocrat who came to America and wrote a book called democracy in America, and he was writing to a European audience, especially a French one.

In the early 1800s about what made America unique and there's one passage that I find striking about criminals in America. So he writes during my stay in the United States. I witnessed the spontaneous formation of committees for the pursuit and prosecution of a man who had committed a great crime in a certain County.

In Europe, a criminal is an unhappy being who is struggling for his life against the ministers of justice, whilst the population is merely a spectator of the conflict. In America, he is looked upon as an enemy of the human race and the whole of mankind. He's against him.  And I think that's an interesting point, right? You can see the difference there between people who are subjects. So a crime happens and they're like, all right, that's got nothing to do with me. Okay. Okay, I'm just a bystander. I'm just watching. And people who are citizens who say, Well, this is my town, and so if there's a criminal on the loose, then yes, you know, if I feel like I'm literally a part owner with a stake in this particular place, then I want to catch this criminal.

You know, I'm going to grab my gun and help go look for him.

You know, certainly if a criminal was loose in your yard, A place that you really do feel ownership of, you would never think that this is none of your business and leave it to the professionals. \

Right. Like you have an actual responsibility for this place because you own it. And so the fact that none of us are tempted to do this, to like pick up our weapons and go look for criminals and like, we just don't care for our towns and cities like we would if we were actual citizens with actual owned space.

And so I think a lot of the modern lack of meaning, purpose, and belonging comes from that lack of owned space. Now, maybe I'm an extremist in this regard. I am an American. More than an American. I'm a westerner. You know, my, I was born in California.  My dad was born in Idaho. His dad was born in Utah. And, you know, it's just a slow march across the United States.

Every generation. Left and started somewhere new because they liked this idea of,  of starting a new thing out on the frontier. So maybe I am genetically pre programmed to want this own space and, and, um, to want to build something new, but I don't think so. I actually do think that this is a common yearning for almost all people.

And so I think a network state is a wonderful chance to recapture that. A new deliberate community freely entered into easily left with an explicit proposition and a particular way of life,

You can just see how that would lend itself towards thinking, okay, I'm an actual, uh, participant in this, in a joint project and not just a spectator, a subject in a system, which I have no real input in.  In fact, if I were to start my own network state, I think it would be to resurrect this very ideal, the American ideal of citizenship and owned space.

And I  And I say American, it's not really an idea that's owned by America. It's as old as the idea of citizenship itself. The idea came to us from Rome. I mean, go look at America's oldest federal symbols. They all evoke Rome when Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison wrote the Federalist Papers in defense of the American constitution.

They did so with what pen name? Publius, you know, hearkening back to the Roman Republic. When you go to the rostra of the house of representatives, what do you see? Roman fascists go look at the columns of the Supreme court building. America is nothing if not Rome reborn.

So yeah, America has, uh, no monopoly on this idea of citizenship.

Of course, I think of it as American because I am American. That's, that's kind of how it comes to me. But, um, I think this is an ideal that would appeal to a lot of people.  I don't know. What do you guys think? What do you think of this? Would you embark on this journey into the classical Greco Roman world of true citizenry with me?

Would you pick up your Gladius and your scutum or your Doru and your hoplon and follow me into the cloud to reclaim your right as a citizen and your right to a public baths and a gymnasium that you can work out in nude at public expense  or is this socialism? I don't know, maybe it is to have a, an all marble gymnasium, uh,  and a public sauna and, uh, and cold plunge that, uh, that all citizens can work out at.  Um, I am semi serious about this idea. If you would be interested in building or funding a return to true citizenship, Email me. Let's, uh, let's talk.   Even if your vision differs significantly from mine, maybe you are an effective altruist or a vegan or whatever. And you want to build a society all around these types of ideas.

Whatever it is that you are interested in. I think that a world where people are governed In a way that they want to be with people that they want to associate with in pursuit of a vision that they find compelling. I find that future to be beautiful. Uh, Balaji puts it this way,  unlike an ideologically disaligned and geographically centralized legacy state.

Which packs millions of disputants into one place. A network state is ideologically aligned, but geographically decentralized. The people are spread around the world in clusters of varying size, but their hearts are connected. Are in one place.  And so I think that's a, a very beautiful idea of people around the world whose hearts are in one place, united in collective action.

Um, so let's make it happen or not. Uh, either way, hopefully you found this to be an interesting episode. Uh, that does it. I hope you enjoyed it until next time. Thank you for listening to how to take over the world. 📍

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