#158: Inside Network School 2 | Conversation with Neter & Mili
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Welcome to the Chewy Journal podcast. To start with, can you give me a brief introduction about who you are and what are you working on? I am Netter. I'm Black Netter on socials. I do Web3 growth marketing for Web3 companies, early user acquisition, brand development, and working on kind of building some of the connective tissue for all of these startup societies, parallel societies, smart cities, all these sort of

alternative living environments that are popping up now? I'm Mili. I'm a student, I would call myself. I learned a lot of things I find interesting. Right now I find this pop-up city network state movement very interesting. I like the internet, crypto. AI is very interesting. The AI agent space is very interesting. And

And I'm trying to figure out what to do, you know, business-wise with my life. Lovely. So what brought you guys to network school? This has been something that I've been waiting to pop up since I was able to sort of wrap my head around what Bitcoin really meant and crypto in general. Very early on, I kind of recognized that this would be the foundation or kind of like the layer one, so to speak, that Bitcoin

societies, new models of governance, new ways of organizing and coordinating would evolve out of. And so, you know, like 2015, 2016, I was expecting, I was thinking like, oh, this is what we will vote on. This is what we'll kind of like transfer value globally on. This is how we'll sort of like coordinate people pseudonymously across boundaries and sort of through

across nation states. And then things kind of went meme coin, NFTs, like cat photos, which is fine, but I've been waiting for this sort of moment. And then around 2021, when Balaji releases how to start a new country article in the book, it's

it sort of felt like, oh, it's moving in that direction. And so when the Network State Conference popped up and eventually Network School, I was like, oh, that's something I definitely have to be a part of because I think this is crucially important. It has been for the last, you know, like five to seven years. But moving forward, kind of future projecting, I think it's just going to become more and more valuable.

Funny, you come from the ideology perspective. I came here more because I wanted to travel and I feel like this is a very fun way to do it. You meet a lot of interesting people and a lot of interesting ideas when you have 100 or 150 people staying together in a new place for three months. So that was for me.

I had decided I wanted to travel and go to pop-up cities as much as possible. And then it just happened that Balaji announced this thing. Really good timing. When I was anyway going this fall and going forward, I will keep on traveling. So it was great, great timing.

For me, I follow Balaji since 2021. I think he was on Tim Ferriss' podcast and found this guy super interesting. And since then, I joined his Discord and even earned some Bitcoin from his newsletter bounties. So I think he was like the guy mentoring me to the Web3 space. Although I entered the crypto world in 2017, but I wasn't that interested.

until I read his articles and know his ideology. I think align with my value. So since we've been here more than two months, how's your life? How's your daily routine like? And what's your initial expectation then compared with now you've been living here for more than two months? I work out a lot more. I saw you in the gym.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how effective it is. It feels like I'm struggling every day. That might be just a testament to the organization of the burn team, sort of how they've kept things escalating. I start with that because it's been very impactful to me mentally. Just I'm not a hero. I have had spurts and starts and stops of being very, very active in the past.

But coming in, I was very, that part of me was very dormant. And so, you know, waking up every day and knowing that we're going to have a run and we're going to have some intense exercises kind of like to start your day, breaking past those mental barriers,

I don't think I can do it today. I don't think, and just showing up, pushing, and then eventually kind of like mind over mattering some of those, some of those walls has had kind of a impactful impact or sorry, has bloomed out into other areas of my life that combined with just the intellectual fertilizer that this place kind of creates around people kind of from varying ideologies. But still there is this kind of like

force amongst everyone. It is a very unique individual that picks up their life and moves, you know, somewhere for three months and kind of lives with random people and is able to kind of like to stomach that and engage in that type of way. So that's been very impactful as well in terms of, you know,

understanding where the future is going. I think everyone here is some type of techno-optimist, futurist in some way. And so there are a lot of minds that I think are on the bleeding edge of where the world is heading, or at least like thinking about it and working on it. And so having that, you know,

in a conversation at breakfast is something that is so, so unique that I don't think you could really get anywhere else. So that's been very, very, very helpful and impactful and life-changing for me. Amen. I agree. The daily routine, it has been very simple for me. I think that's valuable in today's society where everything is so complex and difficult. So it's very simple. You wake up, you train, you eat, work, lunch is served.

work, you talk, it's all kind of set up for you. In a way, we are living in a resort. There's a cleaner coming every day, there's a food that's being prepared for you every day, and you have a trainer every day. So the simplicity of my daily routine has been useful, and it has caused me to really look into the mirror. How am I spending my time? Because I can't make any excuse. I have no daily chores, essentially. All I have is my

and how I spend it. And it's very clear when you are not doing what you're supposed to do. And that's been useful for me here to have this living the same day on repeat, essentially. You can really see yourself and tweak, edit your kind of what you want. Just to piggyback on that, there is very limited...

choice paralysis, right? Because there's just, we are kind of like, it's not fully deserted, but we are isolated. We're kind of like, there is, you know, Singapore is nearby, but we are a bit of a distance from a lot of distractions. And this was very, very apparent to me when I went to Bangkok. I think a lot of all of us sort of went to DEF CON. And then you were just, my senses were overloaded. I was like, there's so much going on. Yeah.

I haven't been around this many people and took

like tuk-tuks and bikes and you got to watch yourself crossing the street and all that, that, that was definitely something that, you know, life has not slowed down, but there's very limited distractions and ability to kind of defer off of the path that you set for yourself here. And, um, and that's been very helpful as well and helpful to just like Millie said, dive in, kind of like cut out a lot of the, the flack and cut off a lot of the, the, the noise and, uh,

and then really have some time to kind of like internally do an inventory and an audit and then just point where your direction is going to be and try to go and achieve it. True, that the distractions is a way to put it. There's less distractions here. And if you do want to be distracted here, they are good distractions. They're like conversations or people or like ideas you can get distracted by. It's not in Bangkok you can get distracted by partying or what is the...

you go to this big event and traveling. It's not like we have distractions, but they're good distractions. Yeah, exactly. On the first week I was here, I talked with so many people that I wrote two sci-fi stories, like a short story, because the inspiration just came up. I said, I need to write it down. Yeah, it's great. And later you hosted the workshop about like a personality test. I found this is super useful.

Are you in this space for a long time, like self-exploration? It came about because I saw a tweet sort of asking ChatGBT and a lot of these AI models about more introspective personal questions. Really, it was just if you have sort of that memory element on chat,

What are some things about me that I may not recognize, strengths, weaknesses that, you know, you sort of picked up or accumulated over the course of our chats? And I don't know about y'all, but I use it. I just will bounce ideas off it. I'll sometimes give some experiences. And so that was very interesting to me when it shot some stuff back at me that, one, I didn't expect. It was a little scary because it was very, I thought, spot on.

But also, it sort of started getting the gears turning around how we can use these models to be more introspective and develop ourselves and kind of understand ourselves better. I'm very much into quantified self and kind of using data to self-measure. And I think we have a lot of different ways to do that.

and more and more popping up, whether that's from a hardware standpoint of the sensors, where we have a lot of physical fitness-oriented sensors that exist, but we also have cognitive data that is out there in the ether. I personally think that everything is data. It's just this conversation is data in a way. It's just a matter of whether we capture it and how we use it in a way. That was very interesting to me as a first step

a first iteration of how we can start using these models to do more analysis. Um, somewhere where I saw is quantified self sort of failing, not failing, but it had a big boom in 2012, 20, 2012 to 2016. You could probably say when you had like Fitbit, Jawbone, Apple watch, all these things coming out, uh, eight sleep. Right. And we were sort of,

identified sort of the base level fitness insights, right? Sleeping is good, right? Eating healthy is good. Like these things that we all sort of know, but it never really evolved out of fitness. And the second thing that I sort of saw with it was it took so much to input a lot of that data.

and track a lot of that data, that there was no time and some people didn't have the ability as a data engineer or a data scientist to analyze a lot of that data and pull correlations out across some of the vertical metrics that we were analyzing. And so I personally think that AI and AI agents are like the killer app for that.

They do that very, very well. And so another thing I'm sort of interested in is building that 360 model of yourself, right, across your fitness, across your cognitive, your career, productivity, finances, relational. However far you want to take it, there is something there that can track that. And then if you have a local personal AI agent, it can pull out correlations that you would never even imagine.

dream of sort of attaching together. You know, you eat more sugar after you talk to Bob after work because he stresses you out. Like, that's something that you might not connect yourself, but over time and when you build that bank,

over time it gets more and more robust. And so sort of thinking about how we can use these agents and use these models in that way is something I was very interested in. And that was kind of the idea behind the event. Cool. Yeah, I used to use an Excel chart to document a lot of work. So now I feel like

Just to gather all that. Like you mentioned, this podcast also is data entry point. I can feed my AI agent. I will add one point to this data thing. It's beautiful. You can just collect data yourself and just throw it in a massive. You don't have to organize it. You can just store it. And at some point in the future, the AI agents will be good enough so it can go through this data and sort it for you and kind of make sense of it for you.

That's beautiful. But self-exploration, I don't do much data. I do a lot of introspection, maybe too much. I feel like, how am I feeling at this moment? How did I sleep last night? How is it trying to be present in that way? Although being here, I've become much more turned on to the idea of saving data on sleep. That seems to be the biggest impact thing.

you should try to find trends in how you sleep well. Because if you sleep well, you are just a better human being. So it should be on the top of your list to optimize. So I'm kind of excited for that in different ways right now. That's nice.

You know we have a lot of guest speakers and also student lead events here at the school to keep us busy. So what's the most memorable one, like event or guest speaker you ever had? It's a good question. We had so many.

So many good speakers. Balaji's lectures actually have been my favorite. Because he has had many, so it's unfair to say, but his worldview, we can maybe go into that later, but like history and macroeconomics, Bitcoin and how socialism and capitalism, that's been very interesting. If I had to pick a guest speaker, I really like the one we had today, actually. What was his name?

Ryan Peterson. Ryan Peterson. He seemed to speak from, I didn't know him from before, but he spoke from experience. He was very good, you know, coming to our level. He was talking to us as human beings very nicely about his experience as a founder. I kind of like that. I'd second. If you didn't say Balaji, I was going to cop out and say Balaji. Just because he has such a

He has a wide breadth of knowledge across a lot of different disciplines, but then so much depth. And his mind just moves a million miles a minute, so sometimes it's hard to keep up.

where he kind of like jumps from subject to subject and he's like, oh yeah, I have this chart and I have this chart. Have you seen this? And I'm like, whoa, whoa, slow down. Like run that back by me again. That's been very, very impactful. Even just being able to sort of catch him at dinner, you know, at a couple of times and he just has 10 to 15 minutes just riff on whatever he's excited about has been very, very unique and very,

kind of like a college campus vibe where you might run into your professors, you have office hours and these things. And so that's been very impactful. I did also really appreciate Ryan's talk today, just breaking down how culture is formed, but less from the startup kind of Silicon Valley perspective and more of how it's formed out in the real world and by

by sort of taking like the church and religion as one of the most successful culture building experiments in history, right? And breaking that down into the elements of it and how you can infuse that into communities that you're trying to build. I think it was super, super impactful. I will also say I appreciate Vitalik's talk.

very much so around kind of pop-up cities and kind of the evolution into network states and identifying some of the core issues of where we are with it right now as like a social technology. The concept is it's not necessarily tech, right? It's not necessarily...

community building, it's somewhere in the middle. It's kind of like a humanware type element where you're, it's definitely supported by software, right? But it's really you're organizing and coordinating humans. And so that's a little bit different than building a software product, right? I think some of that has kind of popped up

In our experience, I think there was a moment where we had one of the community events and Balaji was like, "I'm so used to having user queries and issues kind of like often like a triage somewhere and they're never like right in front of me. All you guys are just here."

And so I was like, oh, this is a little bit different than building like a software product. And so Vitalik's talk kind of like highlighted some of the issues on where we are in that iteration right now of how do you solve governance issues? How do you solve not necessarily gatekeeping, but you sort of have to have some type of filter, right? But you don't want it to become elitist. And so that is a very, it was a very unique perspective on sort of where we're at with

with this type of concept and where the future's heading and some of the problems that can be addressed and solved right now. Balaji is very clearly, he's been a professor at Stanford. You can see he's in his element when he's teaching in a way. And that was a part of him I didn't see before. So he's been a good professor. I was doing his VR lecture before he published that book. So back then, I was already kind of used to his lecturing style. But it still feels...

different when you really sit in front of him, see him as a real person. I can feel his passion and his focus. And also I'm surprised that he did like 101 with us, each person for 30 minutes. That's crazy amount of time. When you face to face talk to him, he really listened to your feedback and you know his vision better.

So when you read his book, The Network State, or listen to his lecture, what's your takeaway of The Network State? Do you think our network school is heading that way? I think so. I think there is that kind of commonality I spoke about earlier between people here where we are... There's some differences in the way people think and ideology, but there is a foundation of...

not only futurism and techno-optimism, but a desire to co-create the future in a way. Everyone sort of has different, slightly different flavors of what that looks like, right? But I think some of the things that we're learning here, just about kind of the history of nations and somehow some have gone like Singapore from like zero to 100 in a very short span of time. And then others have fallen from 100 to 10, right, in a very short span of time as well. And sort of the factors that impacted that and drove that

is very interesting to look at it from a like building perspective, like view, right? You do a lot of history and learning and in school, but it's never from, from that angle. It's kind of like, these are just the facts. This is kind of what happened. But I think Balaji has done a really good job of digging into like why and the components of, and the certain changes in society that have driven some of these radical changes over time and

And then as we're sort of like trying to build something here where people are essentially going to go off and create their own network state nodes, I think it's kind of like the point of everyone being here that is very informative to sort of have that context. And also to understand that this isn't necessarily a monolith. So when I read the book,

I encourage people to read the book. I tell them that to think about it as more of a protocol rather than a prescription, right? And so like, I think there's certain elements about it that people can very much align with. And then some people are, you know, there's some pieces that people might not necessarily align with. But I think the power in what he's done is identify some of the underpinnings of how this can be done step by step in a real, a

real world implementation way where it's not kind of like this this theory and ideology and and you know this could happen in the future it's like no this is actually how you can identify spots that are ready to sort of infuse these type of concepts this is how you can build in a place so he has this sort of like sister city concept where you want to pick a location that is close to a

technologically active kind of future thinking, future forward place that may be a little bit too mature and advanced to be able to infuse a network state in it. But if it's close and you have a place that's close to that, you actually will draw people from that area. And so those types of things, thinking about where these kind of concepts can work is a very like grounded implementation focused way of thinking about it. I think that's been really impactful.

I don't know if network state will, what it will look like. I think there's room for a frontier where people can create new things, a sandbox and try new legal systems, new ways of living. And so I hope it becomes reality. What I do know is that this iteration of the network school that we've been at is already a very useful thing. Like we do maybe, is it university, but it's 20% school.

or if even that, 10 to 20% you can spend on learning and the lectures. And then other than that, it's just a lot of people from different all around the world together doing whatever they are working on, their projects and intermingling. And this kind of pop-up city is in itself a very useful product that I would pay money for to, well, throughout life, honestly, I would like to go on 20% university. I keep learning interesting stuff and being with interesting people.

I could see myself like this could continue as is and I hope it becomes much more than that and time will tell. You mentioned you want to go as many as possible for the pop-up cities. Have you been to any and compared with the network school, what's the difference?

The first one, Zuzalo in Montenegro, I can say which ones I've been to. I was there, and then I was in Edge Esmeralda in California, and I was in India in this kind of meditation type thing where we were a lot of people meditating together for a couple weeks. That was kind of pop-up city as well. Now I'm here. I think network school has been the most organized. There's clearly daily workouts. There's clearly the...

lectures, it's kind of rigid. Whereas Zuzalu and Edge were more free, more like wavy. There was also some structure there, like common breakfast or common dinner, and people could organize their events. So fairly, they are all quite similar. They're more similar than they are not. They're similar, but there are some key differences that this one is more maybe...

like the military, whereas the others were more, or not male, but masculine or feminine. I feel this one's been slightly more masculine. The others were maybe more feminine. - This is actually my first pop-up city that I've actually made it to. I've been ancillary to a couple. I definitely wanna go visit more. I think, you know, from the, you know, without having

anything to sort of compare against I think that this has been this does have Some more masculine energy to kind of like take Middle East concept there and the gender parity is is you know a little I think I think we all probably could assume that's how it would kind of go coming in, right? Yeah, it's very tech bro oriented but I'll also say it there. I think there's a lot of room for growth and

and that there is an impetus to create. So there are a couple people that, you know, people have flowed in and out over time, but I have seen like a rapid iteration where there was sort of like identified problems, whether it was like just from, you know, the top down and kind of like these are, you know, you,

you might not have an idea of all the issues or all the needs across both genders that may pop up. But as they've sort of, at least from my masculine perspective, as they've been identified, it seems like they've been corrected. I think it speaks to need, widen the scope of people that are interested in this concept and invite more people in, right? And so I think the more...

not just in terms of sort of gender or race or sort of the traditional diverse kind of like, uh,

light signposts. I think diversity of thought is super important because everyone's ideas and, and vision for the future can kind of get infused. And then the beauty of this is kind of like the first node is you can take learnings and, and understandings and kind of data from this experience and then go and spin off your own and sort of adjust and tweak as, as you see fit and,

And that speaks kind of like the protocol over prescription piece of things. Just to add on that this pop-up city movement that we are in now, the network state, is from crypto, from Vitalik, from Ethereum community, very crypto-heavy. But there has been before this so many hippies that have tried different regenerative villages in Bali. And there are so many projects that are almost this, but they are just...

not on our radar. So there's a lot of possibility here. I think many people are interested in something like this. - Just to add to that, something that's been really interesting to me is sort of like how do you codify all of these? 'Cause you mentioned there are like a lot of concepts that are existed before. Some trend a little bit more culty than others, but then you have like eco villages and intentional living communities and regenerative community. Something that I think is very valuable. So in terms of codifying them,

I've really sort of struggled with it in terms of like, what do you call these, right? Because there's all different types of flavors. Like I think in Balaji's sort of iteration and his vision is that there is an impetus to sort of like plug into the traditional governance structure and sort of gain diplomatic recognition and something that's like a hard step

or like a core step in his sort of implementation model. I think there are other models out there that don't necessarily see that as like a core value. I think he sees like the recognized founder and sort of leader as a very valuable part of things. There are others that may pop up that may be more decentralized or have a different governance model.

That's one has been very beautiful to see that evolve here. Just the experience of watching people work through that. I had one night where up on the 13th floor, we have all those kind of like karaoke rooms, right? So I like to tuck off and then work in those for kind of like the third shift or whatever. And

And so I just had dinner and I was making my way there. And as I turned the corner, I just hear this intensely fiery discussion happen. And I'm like, what is going on? It sounds like people are like yelling at each other. And this is maybe like my first or second weekend. I was like, oh, my gosh, is this blowing up already? And I turned the corner and it was there were people talking about free speech and the limits of free speech.

And we had on one side like free speech absolutists, and then we had people on the other side, people that weren't necessarily coming from a Western sort of America flag, eagle bearing type ideology, right?

it started out very spicy because people had very core ideals they were holding to but it was very interesting to watch and kind of just be a fly on the wall as those two sides sort of came together and worked out that kind of like messy the messy bounds of what that looks like and what that could look like in the future here it almost felt like early like

Really like the early building of nations. I obviously wasn't there, but it felt like this could be what the early kindlings of like Continental Congress and some of the early American Revolutionary

sort of meetings might have sounded like in a futurist tech bro crypto context. And so that was, that's been very, very interesting to watch develop. I'm sure it's happened in all these sort of communities where I think this particular concept is a bit stronger. It doesn't, there's no,

There's no forcing function of centralization, right? So when you start sort of cloud first and internet first, you don't have to force people to make a strong, heavy decision of uprooting your family and moving somewhere and ditching your passport and kind of like investing in something that may, may not work, may turn into a cult, may not like, there's all these different things. And in terms of these previous concepts, some of them have driven like more, more hippie, right? Where that has been a part of it, where it's like,

all right, we're going to move to this spot and everybody has to come. And if you don't come, you're just out of it. It's like, well, I might not be ready to come and live with you guys yet. I don't even know you that well yet. And so, but there's no way to stay connected. There's no way to support. Whereas this, you might have a hundred thousand,

500,000, a million people in the cloud that are interested and that are maybe willing to support with their skills or developing content or investing or whatever. And then you have a small sort of test group, like 150 people that are willing to go somewhere and work out some of this messy stuff on the ground. And then people are still able to stay connected. You have the power of that cloud community behind you and there's no sort of forcing function where you have to be involved. And if not, you're on the out group. I think that's very, very valuable in this context.

Yeah, great. I think we are like, here we have more than 50 nationalities among the people. We counted the amount of countries, like 35 at least we came to, we just went through.

Of course, there are going to be a culture conflict or culture shock when you deal with people here. But I do feel like this is a safe space. Even we have some disagreement, but everyone is so open-minded. We can openly discuss our disagreement, have a logical debate on different issues. That's a great part. I quite enjoy living here.

And on this day, we're recording this podcast, Bitcoin just hit 100k mark. So I'm curious to know, how did you get into the crypto space? And what does that mean to you for Bitcoin hit 100k? Got into the crypto space in the same way a couple of people did. So my friend was, one of my roommates in college was selling things on Silk Road.

And so he was engaged in the market, we'll say. And he told me, hey, I know you're into kind of like peer-to-peer technology, decentralization, kind of like distributed governance-type concepts. I don't think he used that exact term.

but he got the point across. And he's like, there's this thing called Bitcoin and I don't really get it, but you should know about it. And so I started looking into it and it really took me a couple years to actually fully, fully wrap my head around it.

it. I think that's kind of a lot of people's story where I think it's very rare that somebody, unless you're just a gigabrain, that you kind of like read the white paper and like, oh yeah, I get it. And I see the implications of this and I see how it actually is anti-fragile and how it can't, because immediately you start thinking, oh, this is not something that will be allowed to exist. Like there's no way. And then you start digging into it more and you're like, oh wait, but like, what would it take to actually shut this down? And then you start getting deeper into the rabbit hole of anti-fragility and game theory and

you know the it's not going to be applicable to every type of nation state or every type of person and there are different value props within it that are going to be applicable and useful for different types of people over you know i think maybe like one to two years i started to kind of wrap my head around it once i actually started to understand it it became like the only thing i could talk to talk about like everything kind of faded into the background one because it forces you to

I won't say become an expert, but to become competent across so many different vectors of information. Like you don't just, it's not just, you have to understand financial markets in a way. You have to understand geopolitics in a way. You have to understand kind of the psychology is a huge one. Game theory is a huge one.

And just how technology is definitely obviously the core of it. And how just the current currency system actually works and like what supports. The first question is like, well, how are you going to just create a new currency? There are all these other ones that exist. And then that forces you to dig into actually what a currency means and what backs it. And then like in terms of like dollar hegemony, what backs that? And you start actually unraveling this onion of,

How the kind of like the global system works and then once that wool is pulled off your eyes It's like everything ends up connected to at least for me like oh, yeah It becomes like you can fix the money you can actually fix a lot of stuff So people are talking about like war and I'm like have you bought Bitcoin and they're like what I'm like, trust me It's it's irrelevant. They're like, okay. Well now you're just a Bitcoin skit so but

This moment for me means that I can take laser eyes out of my profile photo. Finally, finally the meme was achieved, so I'm happy. Crypto was for me, also my roommate in college was using Silk Road. Engage in the marketplace. And even before university. But then during university, the same roommate came to me, like this Ethereum stuff is quite interesting. We went in Ethereum and look at how it worked and it,

We kind of skipped Bitcoin totally. We went into Ethereum, Ripple, IOTA. This must have been 20, I think 2018, but I'm not sure. Yeah, IOTA. There were like all these new technologies coming out. And it just made sense that this decentralized world computer is going to be useful somehow. You know, it was an intuition. But it took me then many years. I went, I mean, like...

going into Ethereum ecosystem for years ago, hackathons and playing around with the technology. But then actually here at Network School was the first time I met someone who was like Bitcoin maxi. Because I went straight, I kind of skipped Bitcoin, went to the Ethereum conferences. I went into that whole world.

And I always looked at Bitcoin like that's bad for the environment. It's slow, inefficient. Why would you have this? I'm like a bit autistic. This is better technology. Why would you use something that's worse?

But now, being here at Network School, I've seen, yes, it's useful to have this simple thing. It's proven to work. It's going to keep working for the foreseeable future. There's no changes. It's just there. Okay, it's not perfect, but so be it. It's good enough for our purposes. So that's kind of my crypto story. My ex-boyfriend, he's an Ethereum miner. So back to 2017, I think. Yeah.

we had a room and he got all the graphic card. I think the whole graphic card in New Zealand, he bought everything. That room is a sauna room for sure. Yeah, back then I just couldn't understand why you spend a lot of money, purchase those things, and what are you mining for? Then he kind of explained that. Then I learned from podcast and YouTube video. Then I said, okay, that's very interesting.

Then I start to do some investment on the projects. So a lot of my friends start to, in tech, they start to build on Ethereum or other chains. So, okay, it's actually, it's very practical. I let my curiosity lead my way. I wasn't like, oh, I don't understand that. I'm not touching it, but yeah. Yeah.

So I'm holding everything since then. So I'm happy. Yeah, I think that's valuable. And it's definitely a commonality that I found amongst crypto people is like they, we collectively lean into curiosity. I like that because it's very easy to dismiss a lot of this stuff just on the basis of what it has been marketed as to the general population or the normies or whatever you call them, right? There's a lot of misnomers and kind of like,

whether it's intentional or whether it's just incompetence or misunderstanding, there are a lot of places where the traditional definitions fail. And I find that particularly within, within Bitcoin around like the environmental conversation, right? I mean, you can look at it from a sort of aggregate energy consumption perspective, or you like, you know, just kind of a absolute or relative, right? Where I tend to look at it in terms of like, what is it,

what is it designed to replace? Right. And so like the central banking system, if you think about the energy that that consumes from buildings, private flights, like the just that's just the people element of it, the technology that supports all this, that is a huge amount of energy and the ability and the technology that can replace that, I think, is, you know, if that is Bitcoin, which I copy.

obviously believe it is, it's a fraction of that. And so as humans, we kind of spend are willing to spend energy where that's like environmental energy, where that's human energy, whatever, I think money is a type of energy as well. We spend that on things that we find valuable, right? And I think this is valuable for humanity in a very positive way. And it's just cool to see something sort of a positive good speculated into existence.

think there was a point where it could have been we like to say that it could never have been stopped but there was a point where it actually could where it was centralized and small enough where if it was perceived as enough of a threat it could have been stopped but the

absurdity of the concept, we're going to create an internet currency based on algorithms, math, and energy consumption was so out there that it almost didn't justify the powers that could stop it to try to. I think that's also something. In a way, the absurdity and how

how big of an idea it is actually ended up insulating and protecting it, which allowed it to develop into something that could not be stopped eventually. Right. And I think the same thing, the same concept exists with the network state where, you know, when I introduced this to my normie friends, they're like, oh, well, you're going to start a new country. Good luck. You and what army, all that. Right. But that kind of ends up being a protective layer. I think this actually has a little bit less protection than Bitcoin because it is directly there. You can find direct competitors. Right.

of trying to start something new in that way, it actually has 80% of the population dismiss it, right? But then there's a 20% that like looks into it and then you might have like a 10% that's just like outspoken

out there and ideologically like crazy enough, but talented and smart enough to actually speculate it and build it into existence, which at that point you hit kind of escape velocity of, oh, now it actually can't be stopped because we have developed this open source protocol of how you can do this in practice. And so I think that it has some of those same elements. It gives me that same gut feeling that I felt when I kind of started to understand Bitcoin.

Yeah, but I'd like to just repeat that the people connected to crypto and also this network state concept are very curious people in a positive way. And that's...

that's so much fun just being around these these ecosystems for that reason because they are it's not necessarily about just purely now blockchain and network state but it's all about technology and this 21st century and how humanity is changing you need to be very curious and open-minded because it's changing a lot and those people are coming to these topics as a shelling point but on average it's very good so it's a

it's a nice place to be for for also for non-crypto people i think this like network state or pop-up cities are very interesting places because we are discussing these topics so we only have 20 days left at school so any achievements you want to reach by the end of the school term and what's your plan for the future

personally i want to stay stay consistent and and discipline with these with these burn workouts that's one thing i think if i can do that then that will kind of continue in other areas as i stated um i also just want to take advantage of the the community i think something that's very valuable about uh conferences and sort of like some of these events on the crypto side is that it's such a distributed community that's very valuable to have everybody in one spot at one time

And then this network school is kind of like a microcosm of that is, like you said, the natural curiosity, the breadth of knowledge. And I think there are people definitely have specializations here. But something I've found super, super cool about this is there aren't many like

hardcore specialists, right? So like when you talk to like a PhD in one subject, it's like they know about that thing. And it's like, oh, well, like what about this? And it's like, oh, I haven't heard about that. I'm like, what? You haven't heard about chat GPT? Like, what do you mean? And they're like, oh yeah, I'm just dialed in. I have so much depth about whatever I am specifically interested in that I kind of put the blinders on. I think that's valuable. I think that was valuable in the, you know, the last century or so.

We can argue about why, whether that sort of specialization helps with like org charts and business organization, all that. But I think now there's like a here in particular, I won't say everyone is a generalist, but everyone sort of has that like that team model where you have breadth across a lot of different subjects, but then you might have depth in one or two. And that kind of creates this environment where you have.

Very similar to like an Elon Musk where he has kind of a foundational tree trunk of knowledge in physics and math, but then he applies it in all these different contexts and is able to see the cross sections and intersections between them. That's something that I really want to dig into more in terms of, I don't know if that looks like developing content with people or just continuing to engage in these conversations. But that's something that I really, really want to take advantage of because it seems like it's very short-lived.

That's a good point. Enjoy the breath of people while they are here. My mission when coming here was to create more than I consume. So I wish I will continue creating these last 20 days. I'm not sure exactly what. Maybe it's content, maybe it's writing, maybe it's technology, but I'll keep doing that as much as possible. Great. Okay. Thank you guys for today's conversation. And if people want to find you and connect with you, where can they go?

Yes, thank you. This has been really awesome. I am Black Netter everywhere in E-T-E-R. Twitter is probably the best place to get me. I'll probably continue doing some writing and definitely write about more Network State stuff. And yeah, any type of products or stuff I release will definitely be announced over there. And I'm Maximilian Ren on X. That's the best place. Thank you. This was really fun.