OTNS: Network States is what you get when you have VC-brain
In this episode Primavera (@yaoeo), Tara Merk (@mpg_dd), and I speak to Jahed Monand (@againstutopia), co-founder and partner of Cerulean Ventures, co-host of The Ownership Economy podcast (@ownereconomy), and left wing anarchist. During the discussion we speak about Jahed's interactions with Balaji, the violence inherent to borders, and the real problem with heavily regulated industries like healthcare (hint: it's not the FDA). Jahed is also now officially the resident anarchist for the show...
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Transcript
Alright. Hello again. You are listening to The Blockchain Socialists and we are continuing to overthrow the network state. So I'm here today with two guests from, two cohosts from Blockchain Gov. I have the high priestess Primavera, and I have, Tara, who I don't know if I were to give you a role, what you would be. I think maybe like, I don't know, like a wizard or something like that. I think you know what I mean? And I have as our guest, Jahhed Monand, who, yeah, I've had before. I think now, like, it was a year ago the last time we spoke.
That's right. We did the quick little episode on
anarchy and DAOs, basically. Yeah. So you're the, you're the resident anarchist for the show, and you
gave the, Can I have that title? That's a good title. Yeah. Resident anarchist. There you go.
So we talked about that. And today, specifically, we wanted to have Jahad on to bring this more, left wing anarchist perspective, when it came to the network states. But maybe before that, I would love if you could tell the kind of the story of, I don't know, you first coming into contact with the concept of the network states in the book. And, I know you had an initial tweet and initial, message exchange with Balaji himself, over Twitter for a little bit. But, yeah, I'm wondering if you can talk about that. And then, you know, what were your thoughts before, and then what were your thoughts after reading the network state?
Cool. I I have to remember to moderate myself on this, man. So let me, okay. So first, I had a really admittedly stupid, like, I I'm saying I'm calling myself stupid here. Like, really dumb reaction to the book. It was like, you know, I saw the network state right there. Right? And I'm just like, look. If you if you want to build a new conception of a state, I feel like you really have to spend some time looking into what it is. How did it form? What is it? What does it do? What is its what are its goals? How did it spread across the world? And, having spent a little bit of time doing that, not much, maybe six years. Right? That's not a time. But, like, that's probably about how long I would call myself, you know, being anarchy pilled where I woke up with, wait a minute. That's the whole that's the thing I've been the whole time. I had no idea. So when I saw network state, I was like, I just missed Steven Post. I was like, look. This, this book is probably bad because it's right there in the title. It says state. Right? Like, if you've spent any time looking at this, it's bad. Right? So I I can name any number of reasons why, but come on. Right? And, you know, all my I have a weird collection of Twitter followers, you know, I don't have too many, but the ones of the, like, seven k or whatever, I'd say probably a thousand or really, like, when I tweet stuff about anarchists and that was their, you know, those people are like, oh yeah, absolutely. I gotta look at this. So, you know, people are like, you know, dunking on or whatever. And then Balaji messaged me because we are, we have co invested in a number of projects, which is really, really strange actually, when you think about it, because the kind of things that I like to invest in are, thing you know, new tools for governance, new tools for information processing for governance, new tools to make, inclusion of more people in governance more scalable, to, you know, tools to extend ownership, like, you know, in all the in the last bull run we were in. Right? You remember all this stuff, Josh, and I'm sure Primavera and Tara had this stuff around, you know, the ownership economy. Right? And it's like but it's it's but it's about as equal as North Korea, right, like, in terms of ownership. Right? So it's weird to say that Balaji and I are co investing a lot of stuff because I feel like we I I can't explain it. Right? Because from that perspective, I'm like, he doesn't really seem to get any of that stuff, but whatever. You know, it materialized in the sim in in some similar portfolio investments. And then he messaged me, and he's like, oh, yeah. You should you know, you don't necessarily have to, you know, dunk on the whole thing, but I think you'll find chapter four interesting, and the network union thing would be interesting. Right? Like, I'm not saying you have to do the whole thing. I see cooperatives and other things existing too and what have you. Right? And I was like, alright. Sure. Well and then I told him, like, hey. I'll well, I'll reserve the rest of my shit talking for actually reading the book.
Right? And then Until you've read the book.
But, like, in here's the thing. Like, I didn't read the book until you were like, hey. Come and talk about it because my interaction that interaction with Balaji was, like, last year in September, October. Right? And I tried to read it. I was just like, I can't do this. Because it's like, you get into it, and there's just things where you're like, man, if you this this law the, you know, the the pyramid, the structure of thoughts, the thesis he's trying to put together, it's like, if you just stopped, like, one or two steps in and said, you know, read Fernand Braudel or in James c Scott or anyone in that space where you're like, well, this is how I think the things have formed, and this is their current problems, and here are some solutions. I think where you go if you had just stopped and read some of the people who had really dug into the history, anthropology, and ethnography of this of state formation, you'd realize how unnecessary the other stuff is. Right? Like, so, you know, coming coming out of it, you know, on the other side of it now, I I it's very hard to make sense of, you know, not put the content aside, just the goal of the book. Right? Like, this is it actually meant to make a network state in the world? Because I can just we'll talk about this as soon as the podcast. I'm sure. But I'm just like, what? How how do you see this playing out, man?
Yeah. No. Totally. I mean, yeah, that was one of the issues for me reading the book was definitely it took me, like it was it was hard just to, like, get through it because I felt there was so much missing or, like, just so so many, like, like, so many layers deep of where shit went wrong or, like, where he thinks shit went wrong. It's hard to, like, take it's it's hard to, like, have a dialogue with it sometimes because it's like, we have to get our facts straight in the first place. But so one of the yeah. One of the perspectives that I think is interesting for you to bring is well, a couple of them. I mean, one is anarchism. So you call yourself an anarchist, but you're also in the kind of like VC world. I think the name of your firm is, Cerulean?
That's right. Yeah.
Do you wanna talk about a bit, like I don't know. Do you have any insight into I mean, for me, the only thing I can explain, like, Balaji and people who are really, really interested in the network states in kind of their I don't know. The thing that they have is, like, VC brain, I guess. Like, like, the model for everything is is is VC. But I'm curious for you since you do VC stuff, but you, I guess, from what I can tell, don't have as much of a VC brain as they do. Could you, like, talk about that that frame or that lens for a second? Yeah. Totally.
If I can add it to this question, like Please. I find it interesting that, many people I know, they they, they didn't like the book after reading it, but they were very eager to read it beforehand because the, not necessarily the title, but the underlying concept was interesting. I find it interesting that you didn't like it even before. And but but, of course, you were there. Like, what was the diff was the difference before and after? Like, because in some way, like, the way in which, in the does justice say, the way in which she describes the natural state is pretty much, like, let's create, like, a punctuate, as in, like, let's create, like, a corporate, VC backed type of, state, which which actually is different from the state. It's more close to, like, a a startup nation of actually, not nation because it's a state, startup state and stuff like that. So what what was the distinction between the dislike that you had before hitting it because of the statehoodness and the dislike that you had after hitting it?
That's a great, great question. I think that, you know, what what you were hinting at in terms of a startup society and what have you where you on it. You kind of almost have, like, a cap table of citizens. Right? And all that. Like like, that I find really, really distasteful because, like, most libertarians and I don't actually think I don't know if Balaji identifies as a libertarian, so I don't wanna see a lump of He keeps saying that he's, like, sympathetic towards it. Yeah. And then, like, only agreeing with libertarian takes. There's a major problem with a lot of libertarian philosophy and that it also lacks a lot of history. And then when you bring up that history, they're just like, well, it doesn't matter because prior property rights start at this point and go forward. And it's like, that's maybe one of the problems. Right? That you you don't address the original accumulation of capital and the primitives that that resulted in those sort of allocations that then determine who has the power to shape societies literally. Right? And so, like, going back to your question, Piero Verra, I think that's one of the main problems I have with the the sort of corporate structure and citizen cap table where it's like, all all that means is it accepts that the people who have exits, the people who have wealth, the people who have generational wealth from either theft, slavery, like, you know, capital flight, whatever, are correct or that they have some special asymmetric access to information that enables them to shape the future, which is just not true if you talk to some of these people. And it's like like, I'm not actually taking away from anyone who has, you know, who's made, who is actually, you know, what there are there are it's a very wide class of people. I can't write them all off, but, like, there are some like, when you talk about family wealth, there is some serious issues. Right? Like, if you just talk about Continental Europe, almost all of it is tied to this particular event that ended in 1946. Right? And so, like and so when you when you look at that and you're like, well, you know, they made some decisions and they now have the wealth. And if they wanna participate in my, in my network state, well, then they get this many shares. I'm like, the do do you perhaps think that might be a problem? Well, they can always leave. Where are they going to leave to? Like, there's a lot of really so I did that. You're up here, and I'm just like, there's not a lot of there isn't, like, there's been a lot of thought put into this, like, in terms of how it work, like, practically. Right? And maybe it's just supposed to be a manifesto. Maybe you're supposed to do that. Right? Like, when you when you think about, like, Marx, Marx has remarkably little work in his corpus about how society should function. He's done a like, 90% of his work has been on, like, what's wrong with capital capital accumulation and all that, which is totally fine. Right? Like, I don't think he ever sat there and said, I think this is how perfect social society should work and then laid out the principles. But when you put this guide out and there are people looking to implement it, there's remarkably little to implement in a thoughtful way. Right? I'm just kinda like my my my on the other side of it. Right? Going into it and then getting out of it on the other side. I'm like, wow. I really hope people don't do this. Or if they do, they I hope they realize that they should there's an onion with many layers that peel here. Pick one of them. Right? And then just kinda scope it to just that because, man, you try to do the whole thing. And as I've joked to Josh and a few other people, I'm I feel like it's almost like a a secret, like a poison pill to get people to Waco themselves. Right? It's like, hey. We're gonna make this this, cross border nation state, then we're gonna go to any pseudo nation state, and then we're gonna do a census. And then and then we're gonna be peaceful, and there's gonna be a lot of wealth we control. And then we're gonna go to some, like, you know, little island nation or someone who's not super, you know, influential that we can influence and say, hey, recognize our sovereignty. And it's like, have you have you even tried to play this? Like, the second you do that, you've created two enemies. Right? Like like what what is going on here? I yeah. So that's kinda where I got. I I'm kinda a lot. Maybe I'm stupid and I don't understand the practicalities of it, but I've just got on the other side of it and I'm like, there just seems to be so many issues here. Not accepting the original the original theft of enclosure, accepting that is totally fine, accepting capital distributions and allocations the way they are as to as some sort of merit based thing and not as being completely entangled with state violence, state privilege, all kinds of other things that anarchists have written a ton about, which I'm happy to get into. But, yeah, like, that alone, that's one issue. This sort of entanglement of, you know, merit with the sort of original sense of, the creation of property and and the rights to capital extraction accumulation. And then, like, in the other one, just the practicality of them saying, I'm gonna make this, you know, cross border shareholders state lit thing. And then just realizing that if you don't address that initial problem, anyone can just come in who has enough capital to buy enough shares of your network state and decide how the government should be and hijack it. And that's okay, apparently.
Yeah. This is, like, what I mean by VC brain. Like, the idea of exit is, like, that's something you can do if you have, like, the wealth to do so, to, like, invest in something and then take your money out, and then you can invest in somewhere else because you have, like, all this capital to to go ahead and do that. I don't know. I find it strange. I mean, I've had a couple of interactions with people who are I I I don't know. To me, I I feel like probably politically not like, people who are, like, free thinkers, I guess, but who are who are anarchism appeals to them, a lot of the time. So I think it's interesting that that you say all these things that, like, that you are so negative because the impression that I sometimes got was, like, some people who are into anarchism seem to be, like, find to to find certain things that they like about the network states, but I felt like it was from a place of, I don't know, missing missing a a few things. Yeah. And I think, like,
the the exit idea is one that I'm also interested in talking about whether now or later, but, like, I I'm kinda been on record saying, like, I think it's a good idea. I think there aren't enough exit methodologies, but I the person who talked about this on your podcast actually was the who's that fellow from, from Zargan's group, that you had on recent Eric Austin. Yes. I loved his appearance. I thought he he got into this a little bit where I think he's, like, solid he's solidly correct. Like, instead of like, I think you're right. To get to your VC brand thing, this is the other issue is that, like, it's Exodus thought of as from the perspective of, I have so much wealth. I've done so many things right. I have the right degrees and the strong network, and people still don't like me. I should be able to leave. Right? I mean, if I'm not able to get my way, I should be able to take the people who are like me and go somewhere else and do stuff. Whereas I think that we should thinking be thinking about exit in a in another way maybe too, which is that, like look. The only reason I'm here as a Afghan who is able to have started a tiny little VC and play around with some of these ideas is my mom was lucky enough to get, asylum in The United States in the Soviet Afghan war. We should just be we should have we should be have mass open borders for that kind of shit. It's ridiculous that people are born into situations like that, and they're they just, by the luck of the draw, end up living a completely different and ridiculously prosperous life. Right? I've had no real problems. That's how we should be thinking of exit in my opinion. From an anarchist point of view, exit is enabling everyone to have that kind of opportunity at their will. Right? Like, instead of looking at, you know, I sit in Barcelona. The the world's most dangerous border is over there on the on the beach, right, in the Mediterranean Ocean where, like, a thousand people die every year trying to cross it. Why, why doesn't that exit make it on anyone's radar? Right? Why doesn't it make you change it? Type of exit. Exactly. Well, I guess there's no money in it, or I guess you can't get what you want, but it's like I don't know. I guess you're perfectly happy having a bunch of, you know, Ghanaian and Senegalese servers and, you know, street merchants, but that doesn't register on your radar otherwise. Right? Like, I don't know. It's it like, it's also doubly frustrating because this is a guy who understands the promise of Bitcoin all re not even the promise, the real life usage of Bitcoin across places like Nigeria, Ghana, Argentina, Afghanistan, Iran, all these places where it actually does have a pretty solid use case even from the perspective of network transactions. And they just can't go that extra step and say, like, hey. That's cool that that's happening. Maybe we should really focus on getting this the you know, they always turn this into meritocratic argument, but, like, just being a person and existing, having the ability to use these tools to get somewhere else and escape is a way more liberatory and interesting idea of exit because it opens up so many more possibilities because you don't know who's the smartest person or the most deserving, yet you want to create that situation in brain drain places. Just make it like, what do you there's so much potential here, and they're only scratching this much of it. It's really disappointing.
I'd be so curious to hear because you just said this would be more of an anarchist conception of exit, this type of thing. And you said you didn't like the book even before you read it, which is, as P said, astonishing, because of the word state. And I'm just wondering, like, what sort of, like, just thinking about the book before and after reading, from this anarchist point of view, and, you know, some some sort of knowledge, actual knowledge about, like, anarchist theory and practice, what alternative means, so you say freedom of movement for people, but what other alternative means, does this way of thinking teach us to address some of the shortcomings that I think Balaji is using? Like, I don't know, our, we're not really satisfied with how institutions are working today. We're, you know, not completely happy with living in the states that we do, whatnot. But what alternatives do you wanna or can you talk to, that come more from the anarchist sort of side?
Definitely. I think one of the things for me, which I'm actually super interested to get, you know, now that Primavera is on the pod, I'm also interested in getting her take on this and then the rest of you as well, is that one of the key things, one of the reasons why I formed a fund to invest in blockchain institutions for climate impact is I think there is a discrete lack of institutional diversity in the world. Right? Like, you look at, things like the LLC and the couple hundred years or more it's been around, and you look at things like, the private proper the private public property divide and nothing very few things in between. And then I look at stuff like, they're not anarchists, but they do really great work. Jen and Ilya Mertasashvili at the University of Pittsburgh recently released a book called Toward a Political Economy of the commons where they look at, a number of use case a number of case studies around six or seven of them around governing forests, governing mineral mines and minerals, governing watersheds, govern and these are all, like, case studies, ethnographies, that kind of stuff, across Jen's work in Afghanistan and other places. And what they where they land is really interesting from an anarchist point of view because they say that, hey. This book is not about anarchism. Right? But, like, they actually say from an anarchist point of view, it's interesting because, they do find a solid evidence basis for private property rights in the management of common pool resources where there is a sort of, a public institution of acknowledgment around private and of our private property rights. A public institution does not mean that there's, like, a department of private property rights at the land registry necessarily. It just means that people will go respect each other's property rights. Alright? And so when you have that and you have a government that isn't predatory, which is really funny to me because I I ever read those words in the book, and I was like, yeah. Show me one that isn't. But but, anyway, that that aside, I I looked at that and I was like, well, what are the other opportunities here? They point to so many. Right? Like, commons based, management for governing forests has worked way better in many and continues to in many parts of the world. The private the public sector, sorry, is catching up. Right? Like the the forestry management bureaus of various, states. And so you look at that and you're like, well, what do you mean by governing forests? I mean, conserving them, using their resources wisely, not using them only to meet the needs of a foreign market, which is not always bad, by the way. I don't always believe that's bad. It's just that when they become the overriding thing and then a predatory state says, yeah, we're gonna turn this entire area into palm oil forest and fuck everyone who lives here, that becomes a problem. And so having a different view of this is the, you know and this is happening right now across Paraguay, across at the Amazon, across Suriname, across many places in the Amazon, where for thousands sometimes thousands of years, there have been hundreds of indigenous groups who understand the shaping, the agroforestry, the principles of what they're actually working on to maintain and also grow their usage of. Right? It's not just sitting there being like, we can never grow growth as bad. Some of these people have managed a way to have found a way to do that. And so these are things that are literally not legible to some of the people who writes who write and read stuff like the network statement. I'm like, buddy, it's already happening. Like, there are third, fourth, fifth ways in between your strict view of public and private.
Yeah. So I I I love what you're saying, because this is actually very related to, the work we are doing, with regards to providing the alternative to the network states, which is more like the common nation, coordination, etcetera, which is indeed exactly that. We're like, if we don't like the state, is the only alternative the market, can we think of alternative, which are more based, etcetera? So, yeah, completely completely on board with that. I wanted to, to just before we dive into this, which I think we we should, get still a little bit on the question of, like, the things so there are some things that we can deal with as a commons, which is we can organize and, you know, decide to, to stew out a particular land and forest and whatnot. And this is something that does not require at all any type of autonomy from the state. It's something that we can deal with without having to declare independence or without having to be a communist state. What I wanted to to discuss, with you is maybe, like, two questions which are more challenging. And those are two two interesting question because tie those might be two questions that somehow might, justify more, the creation of a network state or just an alternative, state like, institution. And one of them is, the question of immigration, which you which you discussed earlier. And this was also coming from some of the feedback that we got from, after perhaps a fast episode, which is the question of, like, immigration laws are something that are obviously inherently, decided by the state, and it's you cannot really manage those as a commons. And that might be something that kind of justify the idea that, well, if I want to if I want to help people come into my territory, I cannot do that. Even if I own the land, they still need a visa from the state in which my territory lies. And the idea that two network states or maybe two other type of contraption, we could delegate the capacity to issue some kind of visa, not just to the state, but to either alternative, entities. Therefore, if if that's not the case, then we might need to create a network of states so that we can help people come into a particular territory that is currently under the jurisdiction of the state right and this this was an argument specifically by Italy, but I thought I also so held by some other people. And and I was curious, like, from a perspective and whatnot, like, how do you feel with that? Is that something that resonate with you and that somehow might be an an alleged argument of of, of accepting this discussion about network state, or is this something that, nonetheless is not justifiable to you?
But before you answer, I just wanted to note that everybody in this call, I think, comes from a family of immigrants. I think that's, interesting.
Yeah. And I think, like, man, I really respect Vitalik as a thinker and writer, you know, so I'm not about to say anything stupid about him. I'm just saying, like, I think that that is a very this kind of points to something I've talked to Josh about quite a bit, which is the, like, I with many of these thinkers, I absolutely agree with their diagnosis of the problems. Right? Like, yes. That is a problem. Right? I just don't conceivably see this is it's just like it's like, this is a super American, like, meme I'm about to drop, but maybe Josh will get it. But, you know, it's kinda like the the underpants gnomes from South Park, you know, like, where it's like, hey. Step one, we take the we steal the underpants. Step two, question mark. Step three, profit. And it's like, well, what's the question mark step? Right? Like, how how are you gonna how are you how is the network state gonna be able to actually, address the refugee problem and the human migration problem that is a pure consequence of the violence of borders? Right? Like, I I just don't see it. I mean, like, okay. Okay. Alright. Let's just you know, like, we can get pretty practical about it or not, whatever. But my point being, like, I agree with the concern. I completely share it. Right? I just don't see how a digital statelet can command that kind of, you know, that level of sovereignty over its own territory within another sovereign place and then say, yeah. We're gonna enable this. Right? Like, you know, other thing is just show it to me, man. Like, look. None of these people, from what I can see, maybe we'll look at their transaction. None of them have have they donated a cent to any of in crypto to any of the things happening in Ojava and then in Syria and Afghanistan to get people out of those places. You would think that that's practice, the praxis based on their theory. Right? Like, hey. I can do that now. I can get, you know, I can get crypto to somebody who can spend a thousand dollars and get a human life out of a place of misery to a place they wanna go. That's kind of in line with their are they doing that? Right? It's kind of the first question I'd ask. And then because you wanna give it a little bit of a try and say, like, how well does this work? What am I actually working on? What's what's what's involved? Right? Because, like, you know, from my perspective, I think smugglers are awesome. I mean, sorry. I should take that back. Someone's gonna cut that and own me with it. But, like, there's really good scholarship on this. Right? Like, Nandita Sharma is wrote a great book on this and talking about, like, if you wanna take a market based perspective on smugglers, you would actually end up with their almost most of their activity, like, 90% of it. ProPublica did a study on this as well is, like, completely above ground and good. Right? Like, there that that five to 10% is where the people go, oh, you know, it's like, rapists, traffickers, all that kind of stuff. But the vast majority of it is people saying, I wanna go to this place, and then a person who actually cares about them going, I'm gonna help you get to that place. Right? And so, like, that's, again, already happening in front of you if you want. And you're running through all these steps. We're like, I'm gonna get diplomatic recognition and do this. I'm like, dude, we could just actually figure out a way to make mutual aid net smuggler networks work today and make them more efficient. Why don't we do that? Right? Like and and we're addressing the same the same core issue.
I just wanted to go just because we've now spoken about migration, exit, smugglers, and mentioned the word anarchy a few times. And I guess some of this podcast is also about like debugging or like critically reflecting at least on what this book is about. And maybe just to go back a little bit because Balaji does mention especially American anarchy as kind of like a dystopian future scenario a bunch of times, throughout his writing, and just to make really clear, maybe what is your core conception of anarchist practice and thought, and how does that very much differ from from what we have in the book? Because maybe that, you know, also informs, some of the the later conversation.
Well, it's kind of shocking how he jumps right into that American anarchy section and links out to some I think it was he links out to, like, some tweet about his about it about it and not even what it is. Like, at least in the European conception of it, it's almost 200 years old, and there's, like, too many books written on it.
It's crazy the amounts of sources are just, like, his tweet threads.
Like, other people's tweet threads. But Yeah, man. I'm like, you wanna write you wanna talk about anarchy. Can you just get the can you just get the definition right? Right? Like, I don't I don't need to define this, do I? Like, it's just people who who, you know, if you just look at the word an arc, right, like, it goes back to basically saying, hey. It's right there in the word. Right? Hierarchies of domination, anarchists are against hierarchies of domination of all types. Right? And so it doesn't necessarily mean that we're against all higher all hierarchies. Although, having said that, I'm sure there's gonna be an anarchist who captures that sex. Look at this guy. He's into some hierarchies. Right? Because they're, of course, within every milieu, there's all kinds of, you know, arguments, discussions, whatever. You work against all of them, work against none of it, whatever. But at its core, it's basically just that. So then when I look at something like American anarchy and the c c the CCCP, or I don't did I use too many letters? CCP? Right. But, it all it means in his usage of it is just, a chaos. Right? And, like, there's a famous saying amongst anarchists called anarchy is order, which is that all of the stuff that you're seeing around you is, like, you know, that that Balaji points at is, like, there's gonna be anarchy, chaos. It's like, no. If you actually kinda like, there's so there's such immense violence holding together all these things to make it appear as if there's order. They're, like, actually enabling people to freely organize, to have, you know, to have their access to resources and e the one angle of democracy that no one ever talks about, economic democracy, which only really, like, a handful of people even give a shit about trying to actually do anything about. I'm, like, talking about, you know, platform cooperatives, couple others. Like, you look at that and you're like that his conception of it is just chaos. Right? And it's like but if you actually enabled institutional diversity and complexity, there would be pockets of order across all those things that form spontaneously. We've seen this many times. Some call it stigmergy. Some call it, you know, whatever you wanna call it, but there's so many examples of this. The only problem is, you know, and then you run into the question of, like, well, show me an anarchist society that's made an MRI machine. And I'm like, come on. That's like, I'm like, you know, the I can get into that as well. We have an answer for that. But my point being, I feel like it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the term with no bibliography whatsoever on it where it's just like, dude, that's just not what anarchy is. You mean, America is turning into a, you know, despotic predatory state. That's that's what you're talking about. With putting on its own citizens, that's not anarchy, my friend.
And and so, one question then, because we like to we like to kind of, like, I explore the various alternatives. So, in your perspective, like, from a perspective, if you wanted to, I don't know, conceptualize, you know, reflect on what would that look like, something that something not like network state because Hollywood and be called states, not network, but some kind of, like, these alternative infrastructure for human coordination. How would you envision something that does actually maps, with the anarchist well, one of the several anarchist thinking, and that somehow achieved that function of, like, let's let's emancipate from those existing nation states and let's find alternative ways of, local and global coordination.
I think, like, funny enough, I actually think some of this stuff is already happening in the real world in in his in his intellectual backyard. Right? Like, I think Bitcoin is an interesting example. So, like, I'll talk about this one in particular. So, there Bitcoin gets a ton of bad press and what have you, and I'm not here to be a Bitcoin maxi about it. But what what I think is interesting in this conception is, so I'll give you one example here. Like, here's an alternative. Right? So, there is, I'll talk about a couple things. So one thing I think, Josh, you and I talked about this the last time I was here as well. We're I mean, we may have talked about How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. That's one of my favorite books because it really helps you explain why Africa's transport networks and electrical grids look the way they do. Right? Because they were built for extraction. They were built from getting things from the center of Africa to the oceans and into Europe. And so now people turn around and say, hey. Why can't Africa get its act together? Why why why is the grid so poor? Why like this and the other? It's like, well, you kind of have to understand how it got to be that way in order to understand why it is that way and what we can do about it. And so one of the interesting projects in Bitcoin that I think maps to this sort of, you know, mutualist, anarchist school of thought is, there are a number of initiatives from China, from Russia, from other, you know, sort of f d foreign direct investment, FDI, that's basically looking at how do we electrify, how do we put down solar, you know, America may be doing some of this too, and then there's a bunch of private sector activity. Now the current way that works is people say, we will give you African, you know, business, usually in Western Africa or Central Africa where there's a lot of sun. We will give you a twenty year power purchase agreement, PPA, right, where you have a small business, we're gonna put some soul we're gonna we have solar installers, gonna come put solar on your roof, and then you're just gonna pay for it forever. Right? And so an alternative, you know, what that ends up being is just standard rent extraction. Right? You're gonna be paying for this power for twenty years. Do you accrue any ownership in the asset? No. Right? Like, there's and so what we've looked at with Bitcoin and with decentralized finance is there are folks now who are looking at this and saying, well, I could probably get a better deal if I work with the local people and say, actually, everything you pay will goes into an escrow account and builds equity in this, and at the end of twenty years, the solar is yours. Free power forever. And then on the other side well, as long as the panels last. Right? But, like, I'm skipping over a lot of details. But the other part of this is that, you know, people like me who have, you know, capital allocators, so to speak, this is such a gigantic market opportunity that you could put in less than 1% or 2% of the equity of the company, never take any control of it, and, basically tokenize the infrastructure and get the rich people in in Switzerland and Germany to invest in it, which is actually happening, and then and then say, hey. At the end of '20, you get a steady stream of that per power purchase agreement. The way it works is that small business puts a solar in, they're paying for it, you get a 10 to 12% yield on the money you invest in the project over twenty years, then you're out of the project. The difference here then is that you are out of the project. You're turning over the ownership of the asset, and people are totally fine with this, Taking 10 to 12% yield over it. This is just how the entire industry works now, and people had been trying to do it in an extractive way in Africa. And so this I look at and say, great. So you're telling me that we can have a polycentric stakeholder network that can say modify even the economic rights of this over time by saying, hey. I you know what? We're actually you know, this was designed for us in, based on calculations, you know, for Senegal, but we're in the we're in the Democratic Republic Of Congo. We get way more so. We wanna modify economic rights, you can do that. Right? And, like, you can call a vote. You can have an equal stakeholder network thing. That's not token based governance, you know, only. It's actually built on, you know, bat there. We can get into weighted voting, all that kind of stuff as well. But, like, I think of this as way more democratic because it includes the people who are privy to it as people who can govern the provisioning of power and the economic rights, and it's not based purely on where they started. Right? Because what I mean by where they started is they had no capital, so they have no say. Right? That's how it works. And so instead, if they have clear title of the land, which I can also another issue we can get into, land rights across South America and Africa, happy to talk about that. But this is like another conception of saying like, hey. We can still find a way to take the capital that was extracted out of Africa over the past four hundred years, mostly in the last hundred fifty. We can design a governance system that includes the people who are gonna be a part of it. We can have an economic design to it where they become owners of the infrastructure and the people who are investing in it are happy with where they end up. And we're including people both in the governance and the economics. Right? And so like that, I think is very much more interesting. Right? You're from an almost from an anarchist perspective because if you look at it, it's like no one's coming here necessarily and saying, you know, well, these people own the land rights, and they they don't have shit to say about the infrastructure being built on it because the infrastructure is owned by an absentee landlord on the other side of the ocean. Right? So, just to make some of these some of these things a little clear. And then I left the Bitcoin part out completely just because a lot of this is also being financed with additional compute from Bitcoin. So let's say you have this stuff laid down. Now the major issue I'm getting into economics more than your question on governance. You know, you pretty much stop me if you want to. But, what I think is interesting then on this side is that a lot of the arguments you hear from people in the global North, investors in the global North, is that they said, well, we would love to electrify Africa, but there's just it's just not profitable. Right? Completely ignoring the history of electrification in their countries. Right? None of it was profitable. It was a public good. Right? It was and then over time, the governance was handed over to, like, Westinghouse or whatever. Right? Like but it was purely a loss leader. Right? But, we just would love to electrify a can't. So what's happening in a lot of these places now, what we're interested in is sparking, catalyzing these movements with and then saying really simply, there are a couple of people working on this where that group now can decide, and in some places being decided for them, in other places, it's on the table. But you can basically say, with the excess power generated, we can direct it towards compute, which is either going to be data storage, Bitcoin mining, or training of AI models with distributed energy, with distributed grid energy. Right? So now now you can go to investor and say, well, that thing that you didn't want to invest in because it's not profitable, it actually becomes fantastically profitable because we found a $30 per megawatt hour blast resort purchaser of energy, which is usually a Bitcoin miner who set up on-site. You can then provision the economic rights of that Bitcoin to the local community as well if you want. There's a whole bunch of but you notice every time I say if you want, that's where I perceive this this sort of, like, participatory side of this. Right? It's to say it's not purely token governance. It includes the people on the ground. Right? And as the and that's where I see a lot of the interesting parts of this where I just feel like they're completely missed or completely blind to it when you when you're looking at it from the perspective of things like in the network state.
Hi, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the episode or find the content I make important, you can pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist to help me out. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode and access to bonus content like Q and A episodes you can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. In the last bonus episode, I analyzed applying an anti capture framework originally made for DAOs, but applied it towards left wing organizing. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this interview to help spread the message that blockchain doesn't need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it, so if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. Also, in case you didn't see it yet, I recently wrote a book review for Outland Magazine on, no surprise, the network state focused on Balaji's misunderstandings of the role of land and statecraft and his insistence to think of everything as a codebase titled Fork Your Society, I Want Out. Additionally, I've written the piece under my real name, so I'm now officially doxxed. I can officially stop bleeping out whenever people say Josh, my name. It was time I came out of the Anon closet since this is all in preparation for announcements for a book that I've been writing over the past year and a half titled Blockchain Radicals, but more on that in a later date. For now, let's get back to the interview. What I think is I mean, you're what is interesting when I, like, talk to you or hear you talk about, like, VC stuff, I mean, for me, what you talk about are things that are, I guess, more participatory, more like this I mean, you mentioned earlier, like, this ownership economy stuff, but I think from a slightly different perspective. But, yeah, I think it's it's interesting. I wonder I mean, do you do it because you feel that it's like one of the only places where but just because of the context and the situation that we've come to at this point of the world of, like, we've had neoliberalism neoliberalism for so many years, like, markets have basically taken over a lot of what people like, how people are are able to, like, influence the world is, like, it's become so much dominated by markets because we don't have institutions that allow for democratic input. Like, I'm curious, like, I don't know for you. Like, do you do venture capital in a in a sense, like, in order to hopefully create a world in which nobody has to do venture capital?
Why? That's a really good question because it's funny. I don't remember if I had this conversation with you, but I feel like, especially with the advent of large language models and other things that will come after it, there's both a case for and a case against, having VCs even exist in our jobs. Right? But the reason why I I've done it is very simple. I think that most people who don't like the model but then do are doing something else, become are becoming dead players. And what I mean by that is, like, they're kind of taking themselves out of the game. And I think that this the capital machine is just eating everything up. Like like, why not? It's I don't even say software is eating the world like Andreessen says. I'm not like capital is eating the world, and software is just one of the ways. Right? And so I feel like this gets into a lot of things. But for me, my fundamental disagreement with a lot of people on the left is that I do think markets have to be used somehow. And I think that because when someone says, oh, market's bad, my next question becomes, how do we stop them? Right? Like, do we legislate them out of existence and do the thing we already know happens with black markets, which even existed in the Soviet Union where you had multiple Soviet bureaucratic administrators going, hey. Give me that the CPI index for that thing. How much does it cost? Right? They were behind. And so yeah. Like, capitalism capitalism is already busy digesting the world. Can we hijack it from the inside and point it to other things? I think that that's honestly one of the only things you can do. I'm not saying don't do the other things. Right? We have to when because, like, I mean, I have a child, then I I can't be this negative. But, basically, I do think that with the way it's going, one of the major problems with it is I would love to have a capitalism that understands its externalities and the full cost of operation because it doesn't. Right? Like, it has its buddy, the state, to sit there and say, oh, yeah. No. You can totally destroy that that land those indigenous people live on. Totally fine. No one cares. That's not gonna cost you anything. Right? So if you look at, you know, why do I do this? We have a we exist in this complex society of international trade where we just we're just closing our eyes and going like, la la la la and completely ignoring the externalities. So if we have a way of accounting for those, pricing them, and getting the true cost of something like chocolate or coffee, those are the those are the easy cases. The real easy the really hard cases that I'm interested in with the fund are things like, how do we make, carbon positive steel, plastic, cement, and, ammonia, right, for for agriculture? These are four things that if you zoom out in every one of those, maybe I'll just pick one. Like, let's go with ammonia. You have essentially what I think is the worst of capital, which is why, you know, it's often I describe myself as an anti capitalist in many ways, which is then you have the global, big big ag food production systems the way they are because of privileged access to laws and markets that determine what gets used and where. So you take India as one example, and there's this you see these memes once in a while on Facebook, like, Indian farmers are committing suicide, and you kind of investigate, and you're like, why? And it's because, the Indian state in many ways has made, privileged deals with Syngenta and others to say, you're gonna use these seeds to grow, and then you have to buy them every season. And we're gonna change them recombinant or we're gonna use recombinant, biotechnology to change them ever so slightly. And then all that is doing is the exact thing that capitalists say they they they hate. That's not a free market. Right? Like, if you actually had a free market in agriculture, you would be able to have 200 types of potatoes flourishing and not just the handful that are on the global market. Right? Like, I would love it if there was a free market. We don't live in that. Right? So, like, that's kinda, and that's what we're kind of exploring in the interstices of some of these things, which I'm like, well, maybe one of these governance systems, this MRV system, this ability to own attractive land, for a DAO and to produce a particular type of, you know, commodity and you find every single bit in the in the supply chain to get it somewhere and have it and have it actually be competitive. Right? That's the thing. Right? As I wanna you know, maybe you have read some of this theory, but my whole thing with it is, one of my favorite books is Joanna Bakwin's, markets in the name of socialism, where she talks about the left wing origins of neoliberalism. And one of the key things she talks about in there is Stiglitz, the famous economist. He he looked at the the post Soviet Russia and the immediate aftermath of it, and he's like, god. They just wrecked this country. It was, like, 50 to 60% cooperatives that were not even really eligible to the Soviet state, but we could have learned a lot here. And they just said, nope. All of this stuff is gonna be turned over to the gangster private warlords, and and and the rest of it we'll call we'll provision to the state who will then give it to them. Right? So but his whole thing his whole thing was, actually, market socialist firms seem to clear prices better than market capitalist firms. There are more, price takers than there are price makers, which from the from the theory of even, neoclassical economics means that the that economy is functioning, you know, better, so to speak, than than a market capitalist economy. And so that's really the fundamental reason why I'm like, we need to play around with this and see what we can do here. Because I don't think if we just say, hey. That thing is totally worthless. It's gonna continue
digesting the world if we don't design new incentives for it. Yeah. One of the things that I'm an idea that I've had in my head that I've wanted to I'd love to talk to you about at some point is, like, the idea of thinking about, like, a decentralized social wealth fund or, like, using crypto as, like, I don't know, a way to think about allocating capital in a way that is, I guess I mean, yeah, the only word I can think of is, like, market socialist. And, like, yeah, my my for me, it's not like that I'm for or against markets. I'm just like, I want to understand the world how it is today and, like, where are the points where people can have leverage and, like, make influence and do action to create a world that you want rather than trying to think of, like, the ideal situation that you want and trying to, like, go from there. Like, to me, it's I just want to I don't care how hard the truths are. I want to know what they are and, like, go forward.
I think that's a really great great way to be, man, because I think, like, that's honestly exactly kinda where I come at it is that, yes, we can have some far flung, like, ideal, but I feel like if we don't change this thing, we have precious little time. If you believe the climate science, then we're kind of fucked anyway.
I really love that idea, but I just wanted to come back to you said, you know, I'd love a free market that but produces positive externalities and, maybe use that as a bridge to zoom into one of the types of network states discussed in the book which is the non FDA one where, you know, essentially or the way that I get it, the core idea is like the FDA being an institution preventing a free market in healthcare and medicine and longevity and whatever it is to prevail. And if we can just form this other state that doesn't have that institution, we will get so many net positive externalities within that and beyond. So curious to hear. I know you're interested in any thoughts on on is that the kind of transition that we're looking for?
Yes. I love this topic because it belies so many things in in Balaji's thinking on the FDA where I just think once again, if you had read a handful of the people who do this for a living, the there are literally anthropologies of pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical marketers and markets. You know, people who study how decisions are made, people who have got in in entrance to the room, people who study the quantitative side of it. And to come back to it and say the FDA is the only problem, which, by the way, I completely agree the FDA is a big fucking problem. Right? Like, I'm I'm not, like, I'm not giving them a free pass here. But, it it this idea that we need a network state that's non FDA in order to enable pharmaceutical innovation really misunderstands what who does innovation and how the possibilities of innovation are structured, right, like, in the economy. So, like, I'll take a second maybe to talk about the pharma industrial complex, which makes it sound evil, but, I mean, it's just whatever. You know? I say that. You're like, oh, yeah. Okay. Virotech, pharmaceuticals, the state, you know, patients, all everyone's kinda lumped into that. Right? So I think in order to really get at it, you have to understand how how and why drugs are made. Right? So, let's take I'll give you some of this for the show notes too because it's always interesting. But, you know, one of the things that a lot of the folks, who look at something like Molekule or VitaDAO, right, which are both great. I I'm disclosure, I'm an investor in Molekule. Big fan of those guys and what they're doing. But, you know, why do we need something like Molekule? It's not necessarily because of the FDA. Right? It's not only or or the the European, European medicines. I forget the name of the The EMA. I know who's I forgot the name of it. The EMA. Yeah. The European. Yeah. Exactly. It's not because of them entirely. Right? What it is is just the the fundamental economics of investment and what and what that enables for innovation. Right? So I'll give you a very concrete example. Many of the ways that that drugs are conceived of and markets are conceived of for them is through a key concept called number needed to treat, NNT. Right? And all that means is essentially how many patients do I need to treat in the population in order to observe the effect size of a particular primary or secondary outcome for a drug. Right? So now you look at that and you go, okay. That's not so far so far so good. Great. Thing is that many pharmaceutical marketers design the they look at the process from the endpoint. They look at the FDA's process, actually. Right? And they go, well, if I'm gonna get this thing through stage three trials, I'm gonna need to have a market. It's gonna cost me about, you know, this much and that's hundreds of millions. And and I need it to if I'm gonna make that investment, it's gotta be, you know, efficacious for x amount of people. And that x is gonna be in the millions usually. And that doesn't mean efficacious like it's gonna cure them. It means that I can observe the effect in the drug. And so the thing is that roughly, NMT is anticorrelated with the efficacy of a drug for the most part. Right? Like, this is roughly true. The more people you target for a drug, the less efficacious it's going to become, the less personalized, the all all that. So your incentives from the structure of the system in front of people, like, you don't even have to believe anyone in pharmaceuticals is evil, and I'm not even saying they are. All I'm saying is that NNT forces them to think in a particular way. Right? And so if that's the case, then that means that you're really selecting for drugs that have a massive, massive markets and tiny effect sizes. Right? And so that bladders back to we would really love subscription revenue and chronic diseases. Right? And and that, I think, more than anything else, explains why you don't have a lot of investment going into Cures because there isn't like, you can see the ratings agencies and the people who rate the guidance for the ratings for stocks quarterly. They put this in their reports. They literally say, hey. We should downgrade Gilead because that new hep c thing they're working on is gonna cure hep c. And our cure is good for the stock. Like, how is getting rid of the FDA going to change that? Right? Like, I don't get it. And so now on the flip side of that, if you look at something like Molekule, you could do something like which is interesting because Pfizer, by the way, invested in Molekule. I think they realized the threat to their model. They realized that they structurally can't address things like this. If you want to go for a rare disease, an orphan disease, orphan drug, what have you, something that has maybe a population of 50 to 500,000 people in the world who are affected by it, and then you maybe have, by by extension, a crowd of 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 people who care about or affected by or wanna do something about that. They do not have the apparatus today to say that's the thing the market should answer. And that's really what something like Molecule was designed to do. Right? Where you could say, I wanna form a DAO. It has a legal wrapper. These are its KYC investors. This is the thing they want they want to fund the production of five to 10 orphan drug drugs for this for this rare disease that then, if any, demonstrate efficacy, we can use a smart contract to decide how we commercialize it or if we do, or maybe we sell it to your pharmaceutical company who now has a derisked and they can do it for us. Right? But I think that if you don't fundamentally look at what are the in strengths of the incentive structures of why the pharma behemoth produces what it does, then you just go, ah, FDA bad because they're the ones who make us go through all these stages and they make drugs expensive. That's not true.
Yeah. It's funny. Like, I think that's so, yeah, I in a in a previous life of mine, I worked in health economics and and market access. And it's interesting, like, once you know how the system kind of works, you understand, like, why we have, like, a 100 different types of dick pills and, like, you know, one type of cure for, like, you know, all these different types of rare diseases that only have, like, a few people or that are, like, but like really hurtful and like an actual disease that kills people. Because yeah, it's the incentives of capital like way more than it is like the I mean, yes, like states, they create the regulation and like the the the boundaries of the market, I guess you can say, and, like, the railing that you have to follow and whatever. And it's it's very different in The US than it is in Europe. I have plenty of stories about about, like, the differences there. But yeah, I mean, even I mean, Europe has has has a similar problem as well of, like, trying to fund these types of, like rare diseases or just, like, things that people actually get affected or fact or funding, like, real cures because, I don't know. For me, I mean, you might not I don't know how if you would agree with this or not, but, like, sometimes I'm, like, maybe there just needs to be a nationalized pharmaceutical company or, like, just a pharmaceutical company that is, like, cooperatively owned or, like, just, like, not, like, the because the incentive structures are so are just, like, kind of fucked and you can yeah. You have to put in so much investment for something and you need to have, like, you have to prove so much that this is going to be profitable. And so, like, yeah. Dick pills are way easier to prove that they're they're gonna be profitable than, like, curing real diseases.
And it's it's funny to addict pills, but specifically, like, they're so much more lethal than anything else, than many, many other things. Right? And but because they went through stage three, and this is one of the problems of the FDA. Well, they went through it. I mean, we don't have anything else to say. If someone wants to do a class action lawsuit and put it on our desk, we'll look at it. Right? But, like, that it it it fundamentally selects for this really narrow view of, like, safety as well, where it's like, well, did it make a two stage three and with everything? How what are the numbers? The what did the, what is it? God. There are all these companies who literally build the really janky software that that structures the the trial process, process, and I forget the there's an industry within it. I don't remember the name. But they they they're structured just so that you have the data uploads and the calculations of everything you need to get to the to the FDA. Alright? And, and if you can get through that period of, like, you know, five to seven years, then great. You know? It's safe. No. It's not. It's not, like, you know, are you when you talk about publicly owned or cooperatively structured, this is kinda what I mean when I say, like, the you're just trying to replace the current state with a more network state where it's like, actually, we just need more institutional diversity, period. Right? We need to have more ability to feed back into the system. You You know, maybe something that the block science people could help us, you know, design. Right? We need more feedbacks. We need more people having input to it to say, this is what happened to me. This is how it affected me. This is maybe not a good thing, and then have really rapid loops around that market information that say, that's a really terrible thing we put out there. And I just I don't even need to point that far. Right? Like, Netflix made a great documentary on this. I fucking hate Netflix, but put that aside. The bleeding edge. Right? And then the bleeding edge is about the medical device industry and how many people it is absolutely wrecked. And they go through three or four, case studies where, you know, there was the one that was, a inserted a spring, loaded type device to plug up the, the the, women's cervixes. And then what that ended up doing is creating scar tissue and eventually inflammation, and sometimes those things will from would be so constrained that they would actually blow up inside of women and and to shrapnel. Right? And so that's not a thing that you would see, right, in your little trials. And theoretically, you're like, oh, well, that can never happen except it did. Right? And then what ended up happening is, like, you they actually had this information in the process. They're like, oh, it's so small. It's so like, here's how the decision ends up being made, as you said, Josh, around capital, is that there's another group actuary's job to sit there and go, now I have all of the exports from the data. I have all of the adverse outcomes. I have everything in front of me, adverse events and reporting. Let me calculate what it's gonna cost for us to continue with this drug if we observe this many adverse events in in the broader population versus how much we're going to get when we prescribe this. And if there is I'm not but I don't set the multiples. I don't know what they are. Right? But if there's some balance there, then, the worth of, human experience and bodies on the line is not gonna matter. Right? And so all I'm saying is I think I'm not I'm not for or against the public option. I am for more feedbacks, more information processing, more free markets. This is not one. This is not a free market. Right? Like, you you can't enter that and say, you know, I'm gonna design something that takes all the adverse outcomes and prices them and makes it makes that information available to the stock market. And then we can say, which one of the pharmaceutical companies harms people the least? And then we could make a maybe we can make a negative premium on them or build an ETF. That's not a market we exist in. Right? So I gotta talk the hell out of here with your free markets. When you say free market, though, it sounds to me like you're not meaning it in,
the free market sense that usually on the left we refer to when we say free markets, like free as in the free movement of capital, but free as in maybe, like, your freedom being a subject within the market, I guess, if that makes sense, and being able to, I don't know, have have input into that. I think that that that sounds more like what you're describing than than than it is, like, no regulation, I guess. Correct.
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Because I think, like, I don't necessarily think that a centrally regulated market is a great idea because of any number of reasons. The FDA's behavior in the bleeding edge that I talked about is obviously why. Right? What like, we need to have more mechanisms, right, that actually say, hey. Like, that's a part of this. Right? Is the be able to say, can I actually have even a market based mechanism that feeds back this information and makes it obvious who's harming who? Right? We don't live in that. Right? When we when NeoLips talk about free markets, they talk about, free access to theft, basically. Right? It's kind of like what what the way I pre perceive it. And what I mean by that I'm being, you know, being a little facetious. What I mean by that is, like, you know, Ecuador, you're gonna accept these terms for your chocolate or go fuck yourself. Right? Like and and that involves a level of, privileged access to, you know, bureaucrats state to state to say, hey. We want this free trade agreement where none of the people who are doing the growing, who are doing the distribution, who are bringing to market things have any say in how that how that how that thing comes together. It's I think it's it's that, but it's also like in this example you bring out of, like, I don't know, Ecuador, you have to accept these these conditions. It's like
you cannot regulate your economy and you have to have like open your market has to be open for foreign capital to be able to come in. So it it ignores kind of like the already existing, imbalances of power and and wealth. So then if you just say if you and it's always predicated in being neutral. Like your country needs to be neutral to other countries to be able to come in in this globalized world, but it ignores, well, like, oh your country also doesn't have like the ability or, like, the any company or any, like, institution to be able to, I don't know, make money off of out of off of, like, some materials that you have in your natural resources. Like, oh, but we do. You know, like, so it becomes it could becomes de facto, like, a form of colonialism because you're not acknowledging
previous capital accumulation. Exactly. And the the thing is too is, like, you're you're saying, hey. This is this is how we you're there's no way for you to just not to even not participate too. Right? Because then you're like, well, everything around me has been enclosed as well. My access to that my to the market next door to me now is being regulated through this. They made an agreement with whatever. Now I can't even trade with them. Right? So I have to go through this route to do it. And I just wonder why that isn't the target of some of the criticism and thoughts in this space. Right? Where you we have these proven technologies to enable cross border finance, and we're thinking about them in such sophomoric ways. Right? We're like, oh, the problem is that I can't start my own thing and do that. And it's like, there's so many existing problems with the way that you can't start your own thing and do something. Like, why would it not you know, like you said, it's interesting, though, because I feel like state you know, a lot of the states in Latin America, especially in Africa, have realized how much of a raw deal this is. Right? Like, the, America is trying to fund the World Bank as we speak to do a bunch to do a bunch more of this stuff, and even people are are are we don't want that stuff. Right? We'd rather take the the belt and road initiative even though it also sucks. It sucks less. Right? And so, like, the that you know, if you if you believe that there's, agency and intelligence in those decisions and rationality, then it tells you already that the stuff that had been happening since the mid seventies, with that sort of, you know, tidal wave of neoliberalism and market access, Yes. There was some wealth and prosperity and lifting up of everyone's boats as they like to say. But on what terms and for whose benefit and who is able to actually demonstrate agency in those in those things. That's freedom. Right? Like, that that's free markets. Right? To actually be able to that's exit. Right? To be like, you know what? Fuck this. I don't wanna be able to part I don't wanna participate in in now having to sell my coffee for fractions of a cent per per, you know, per kilo or whatever compared to the 10 I was getting before. Fuck that. There is no exit. Why isn't that exit registering on people's radars? Right? I just maybe wanna connect that back to the health example and the kind of concept of the hierarchies of domination
and the idea of we do not wanna be replicating those hierarchies of domination. That's kind of the issue and those hierarchies emerge from like free trade agreements or World Bank funding, Belt and Road initiatives, there are these hierarchies and it is not on equal terms and people do not have the agency to say, and the capabilities to say, no, I'm not gonna do it and do something else. Similarly to, people in the health sector, like that woman who that new medical device was tested on, you know, why did that happen? Or people who actually have some rare disease and then again become part of these trials. And for me here, as you said, and I just maybe more of a comment, I like the idea of, like, we need a diversity of institutions, to to address the issue, especially in the health sector. On the other hand, we should be a little bit conscious of these hierarchies of domination and getting rid of the FDA is not gonna dissolve that hierarchy of domination in a sense of like the patient, the company, the person who is being tested on, the fact that certain drugs do not exist, the fact that like female health is still such an under, resource sort of space in the world. And so we're not getting rid of that, and ideally we wanna see institutional diversity that does try to subvert exactly those hierarchies, so that in the end we have an agency and we have the capability to say, I wanna exit that because actually I have this other thing built up. Where at least the regulating entity is accountable to what I think or in some sort of way, you know, something new, built in there. So I really like that. Yep, absolutely.
Yeah. I I completely and absolutely. Like, I think and just to even make sure that, that people, get get the example. Right? It's like, what does institutional diversity mean? Well, so I think molecule is a great example in the drug development side. They launched a thing called AthenaDAO. Right? And so AthenaDAO is is is women led, and it's trying to aggregate funding for very specific unaddressed women's health needs. And so, like, what does institutional diversity in that context look like? Well, it looks like Molekule provides a couple of primitives. Right? There's a programmable NFT that enables the own the for the community crowd ownership of intellectual property that comes out of a, trial. And so now you can say, the stakeholders of this trial are these women who want this outcome. Right? It's not someone coming in and saying, actually, the stakeholders of this trial are my shareholders and my board and the this guidance from my stock in the next ten years, right, like, that the CEO said, which, by the way, maybe that's also a part of the input, but it's not all of it. Right? Like and so having a actual, governance network around the production of this would include things like that, would include the commercialization step, but the commercialization step wouldn't dominate the entire logic of what's produced. Right? And that's where I what I mean by institutional diversity. You have a stakeholder network that has some kind of input into this. It could be through a DAO. It could be through honestly, it'd be very interesting to see if a DAO could purchase enough of a public pharmaceutical company's shares that it could place someone on the board. Right? Like, that that could be interesting too. And then then then the way that climate activists have done that with very little money comparatively, like, $19,000,000 got them a seat, I believe. I remember the institute. I looked this up. But a few years ago, they they placed, you know, a few, I think it was Exxon. Is Exxon or Chevron? That they placed two activist, board members with nearly $19,000,000. That's really not that much when you think about it. Right? And so, you know, can there are so many approaches. Right? It's just my summary of where I I'm sort of let down by the network state is that the conception of, you know, network governance just falls so flat at the when when you have so many other things happening. And, Josh, you've covered this in previous episodes. Just like all this stuff is happening in DAOs. All this stuff is happening with IP and NFTs. All this other stuff is happening with crowd ownership of assets, and none of it gets mentioned. Right? And, like, in all of those tracks, all those threads of the future have so many other intersections that I think lead to something like what a lot of these folks want when they read the numbers, think, oh, I really wish we had more of this, that you're just not gonna get through like a a a corporatist cross border shareholder state.
Yeah. I'm I'm curious, maybe to to start winding down what your thoughts are because I've had a couple of, conversations with other people before about, like, the network states, but, like, if we were like, whether or not it's worth to try and make an alternative to it or try to, like, conceptualize, to identify an an alternative or trying to just run with the network state word, but do something completely different with it. Do you have any thoughts on that? To run with it, but do something totally different with it. To me, I feel like it's I'm I'm I'm more in favor of the first one at least, for now. Yeah. But, yeah, what do you think? I I think that,
honestly, this is maybe this is one we should do in maybe another episode on rebring Zargam and, maybe Austin Robion together. That'd be an interesting mix where we can do it on this. But my my where I stand on it is basically, like, I rather stupidly, as I've already mentioned, if you're if you're trying to get me to put any of my time into it, you when you put state in it, I'm, like, immediately allergic to it. Right? When I'm like, oh, how because, like, the you know, we didn't even cover it too much, but what is why am I so negative on it is the, you know, the the the state was formed in many places in the world when it was not European. It was a project of, basically, control, corvee labor, slavery, and resources extraction to bring to homogenize and bring under control, large amounts of people for ongoing the previously forementioned things. Great book on this is the art of not being governed by James c Scott where he looks at the history of, Upland Southeast Asia, which is he looks at Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and just covers pre and post colonial, statecraft. Right? And so when you include the word state, I look at it and say, cool. Who's a citizen? How are they a citizen? What happened to their not a citizen? Hate the FDA.
That that would make sense.
Yeah. And then when now that they know and then maybe they maybe they changed their view on the FDA and they like it now, what happens to them in your court? Excuse me. All kinds of exactly. Right? All kinds of really horrible shit. Right? And so I feel like just coming at it from that perspective really almost answers why I think it's a bad idea because I'm just like, look. This this thing that you're attached to that dominates our imaginations or we think it's eternalist and it's been here forever, it's only 200 years old and there are so many better ways to organize things. Better for human flourishing, better for the members who make up these states because they're categorically not meant for the things that you want to achieve with them. They're meant for control, extraction, tax saving, a whole bunch of other things. They provide some services as a side effect. Right? And so, like, and so maybe we can look at those services and say, how do we provide them for each other? How do we provide them in places where we no one have you don't have to do a revolution. I kinda think that's that's kinda, you know, I wouldn't say dumb. There's some people out, you know, whatever, but that's just you don't have to wait for that. You don't have to be like, let's make a mass movement, do the revolution thing. You could just actually say, what do I need to do today to help other people put it in practice or to put it in practice myself?
So you're for the first option?
Yeah. Pretty much. Like, let's let's, I I I don't really wanna, you know, reclaim it. I just wanna be like, yeah. Let let's just start building more of what we wanna see. Right? And let's not do it in this thing that ladders up to anything that can be hijacked by a person who has enough money and likes the and doesn't like the FDA. Yeah. That that that's what, like, is for me, like, if you try to
like, Vitalik's approach of, like, non Balaji network states to me is like, well, if you look up network states, the first thing that's going to come up is Balaji. Like, he's way ahead of the curve on like, he has defined the concept. Like, he he's defined it both very strictly and very vaguely. So, like, it's like a really it's a weird mix of of of both. But it's going to come up first, and so he's going to have a lot of influence over how people conceptualize this, and he's going to, like, set the standard for what that is. And I think that limits how we think about, therefore, the things that we actually are interested in, which is, like, institutional diversity and, you know, global governance through, polycentric, you know, all those buzzwords.
Yeah. Definitely. Like, the it it absolutely. And I think I actually think it's a benefit of manifestos to be too overly detailed and not detailed enough because they let people fill in the cracks, but then you also have to critically examine them and say, well, what are the cracks? What are people gonna fill in? And that's where I'm like, doesn't look like it's gonna be very good. But, hey, we get to find out. Let's go see how Praxis is doing in a couple years.
Yeah. Any any last things, Tara or Jahid, that you want to close it off with?
I think for me, only like, thank you so much for coming on. This has been super interesting. I've learned a lot and I, I look forward to the to the numerous, other podcast episodes that have been teasered and, and sparked off in here.
Awesome. Yeah. And and Josh, we should definitely we should do that for sure because I think you do have a number of ideas. Always happy to come back on for that. And my any parting thoughts for me on this are really just, honestly, I I kinda hope. Don't take my word for this. Go out there and read the book and then go try to put in practice. Tell please tell me how it goes. Right? Because I would love to know. I I kinda want to because I'm like, look. I've got my own, you know, both, you know, somewhat dumb and somewhat sophisticated, you know, conceptions of it. But go just go out there and do it and see what happens. Right? And then, like, maybe I'm totally wrong. But, like,
I don't think so. It's a it's a dare for those who still aren't convinced, and still put a network state. Please. Cool. Well, thanks a lot, Jahad. Yeah. I always appreciate you coming on, and I'm sure we'll have more conversations in the future. Yeah. Thank you, Jahad. Thanks for and you are now the official, resident of Anarchist. Oh, great.