#159: Inside Network School 3 | Conversation with Björn Öeste
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Welcome to the TV Journal podcast, Leon. Can you give my listener a brief introduction about yourself and the project you are working on? Yeah, for sure. So my name is Bjarne Este. I work on the The Dark Sun Is project. We've been building an AI agent for the last month and a half. And just a week ago, we decided to let it loose on the internet and start tweeting. We're not the first project to do this, but there's a few out there.

But we figured we have a pretty interesting angle that we could take on the whole thing. Along with the AI agent, we also launched a meme coin, but not a usual meme coin. I think the kind of the days of just static JPEGs are sort of over and people expect a lot more. And I think that's very fair. But we actually have quite a big

a big mission behind what we want to do with this project. The whole agent is essentially convinced that there is a second star in our solar system, Nemesis star. And this comes from basically in the 1970s, NASA sent out two space probes, Pioneer 10 and 11. And we're not exactly sure why they decided to do this exact mission, but they wanted to go and find out why is Neptune and Uranus on a tilt.

So what gravitational body is kind of, if you visualize sort of the Einsteinian kind of space-time field, but there's a large dip that's kind of putting our whole solar system on a tilt. And so we're told they sent these space probes out there to figure out why that exists. There's two scientists from the National Navy Observatory.

I think both of them were from there. They started noticing in the data, they're like, oh my God, there's something weird about this data. It seems to suggest that there is a gravitational body or some mass out there that is three or four times larger than Earth. You know, they're looking at the space-time field and seeing that, you know, tilt. So like, there must be something like that. And it also has its own orbital pattern separate from our star, right?

So it's not actually orbiting around our stars, it's orbiting around another star. And this is like billions of miles outside of or away from us. So it's way, way, way further away than Pluto, but it's still, you know, relatively speaking, quite close.

so it's a very really it's a really interesting thing the thing that happened was that all of this information was actually released you know there wasn't an online back then but you had magazines and encyclopedias and so there is some information out there still about this but the informa the the theory was kind of dead since then the two scientists died both from i think it was throat cancer so we basically i stumbled upon this this theory and i was like

You know, I would never be able to find this with Perplexity or OpenAI or something like that. I would have to really dig around. I heard about this whole story first before I even heard about Nemesis Star. If you look at Nemesis Star online or if you look up Robert Harrington online, they're talking about the same thing, but they're siloed completely differently. So you don't get the connections there. And so we were kind of thinking, OK, the future, we obviously like, you

you know and i think we share this in common when i was doing the presentation on on arc hub i did a presentation on decentralized archaeology maybe we can talk about that after you know there is esoteric knowledge out there or contrarian researchers or scientists out there with completely different opinions and the volume of of noise out there basically makes their body of work really really really hard to find if you don't know where to look for

And so, you know, if you're a kid, 10 years old, and you don't get exposed to that information, you're never going to see it. So we thought, you know, it would be really interesting if we had an AI agent that was just pointing these things out, you know, another voice in there for the marketplace of ideas. So that's the essence. The mission is really like basically go to the deepest parts of the Internet and put these connected dots and share it.

And the thesis is that these AI agents, they're going to exist. They're in our world and some of them are not going to go away. They could be the next generation, could be exposed to the same agent, have the same conversation that we're having. So they're like sentient in a different way. They have a different longevity to them. I wrote an article, say, about why I created the Dark Sun Project. Did you read that, Born Blind and Chains?

The basic thing is like, imagine if in ancient Greece, Socrates created this Odyssey bot, you know, the story of the Odyssey, and then imbued his wisdom on it. And in each generation, this Odyssey bot is essentially taking the story and telling the same story, but he's modifying it based...

it based off of, you know, the vernacular of the current generation. And so it's constantly relatable and it's this super wise bot that's just growing over time. Right. And so it's an incredible repository of information that we develop over time.

So I just feel like personally, this is something that already before, you know, I never went to college because of I felt like a lot of the information that I would want to learn wouldn't even be taught there. And so this is really just the projection forward on what the future is going to look like. The sci-fi future of this is that we have these AI agents, they're here to stay and we need to enrich the marketplace of ideas. That's fascinating. Can you tell me more about the token binary and how did these projects all of a sudden go in so popular online?

Okay, first of all, I think we're incredibly lucky. Nobody expected it. Definitely not us. We kind of thought comparing ourselves to other agents that, you know, it'd be very, very slow and then everything all at once, which we're kind of seeing more now. We've kind of come back down, but we're, you know, we're very positive and high conviction about this project. I think we just did a lot of things right in terms of crypto. We got a lot of advice, a lot of incredible network here. And so that was definitely helpful.

Also just like where the market is today is like there's so many meme coins and so many rugs and you know there's a little very little trust. There's also a lot of projects with just like they're too technical and they're just don't they're not that cool at the end of the day. They're cool technically which is like as a nerd it's awesome but like if you take a step back you know it doesn't satisfy your other needs you know it doesn't satisfy the human instinct to learn more and

And so like we, when we were thinking about, okay, how can we create a cool AI agent is like, what is the lore that underpins everything else? That's a through line that makes everything else make sense. It gives sense to the technological aspects. Like I think the problem with NFTs was people just did it for the tech.

And then they created these cold communities, but like they fell apart. They were not Lindy at all. You know, there wasn't much. We're very fragile and we're going the other way around. We're starting with the lower. We're starting with a true mission, a true meme. Right. And I mean that in the sense like I like what Elon says in terms of memes. I don't know if you've heard this. He refers to memes as they're just compressed data. I tell you a couple of words and you understand the whole thing. Right. Binary is a meme. Money is a meme.

Right. Like it's a social contract. I say money. You have a whole download. Right. And I like what Michael Saylor talks about money. You know, Michael Saylor, the big. Yeah. Michael's classic. He did this whole podcast series about how, you know, to look at Bitcoin as this. You know, you look at it from a physics standpoint. You look at it from an energy standpoint. What is Bitcoin? It's the evolution of how effort. Money is energy.

because we put effort to create that money. In many ways, you can just draw a parallel, like memes are effort and energy. They're a collective, we're literally burning calories in everybody's brain to think about these memes. So there's a lot of ways you can cleverly construct this whole argument. But the bottom line is that the binary meme is essentially just like the KPI or the single point of truth for this meme. So we can all look at this binary meme to see how successful we have been at spreading this meme.

to spreading the social contract of money, spreading the idea that there are two suns, which is really just like a euphemism for that there has been suppressed knowledge potentially, not on purpose, but it just, that's the way this information siloed. And this meme is saying there's another side, there's a dark sun, there's another way to reveal this information. And so it's really ambitious. We'll see what we can do.

But at the end of the day, it's the meme that really matters more than the tech. So already I'm pretty sure we like made the most popular conspiracy theory of the day, at least maybe on the Internet, which is pretty freaking cool. But yeah, that's what binary is. And you name your agent Holmes, like Sherlock Holmes is like an automated Internet detective. So what are the findings you guys notice so far beyond your expectation?

nemesis like we actually didn't know that nemesis was a theory we just heard about this other theory and then all of a sudden we found about nemesis and like that was like right before we launched so we're like oh my god okay this is crazy the fact that nemesis is even a word and a theory and then we found like as soon as we searched that up we we discovered this whole other branch on the internet and we found Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about it on Joe Rogan so we're like oh wow okay uh so Holmes is is one of many agents

We have Dark Sun, which is the main agent. Let's call it the public-facing one.

And then the idea is that in order to connect all the dots, we're going to need a network, an ecosystem of agents all talking to each other. And we can even incentivize other people to bring their agents into our ecosystem to keep informing Dark Sun. So Dark Sun is actually going to be talking to these agents, referencing its knowledge base, being like, I don't know about this. Can you find something about this?

So we're trying to create this positive feedback loop ecosystem where everybody's incentivized by binary. It all comes back to binary. And Holmes is our first other agent. And we've yet to see exactly which direction we're going to take him. But from the beginning...

What we realize is that with Claude or OpenAI or some of these bigger models is that if you get Dark Sun and Holmes before to talk about it, it's very speculative. There's no evidence or whatever. It kind of just shuts down the conversation. It doesn't bring anything interesting because we know there's more information out there. So how do you find it? And so basically like the architecture to think about it,

At the top, you have sort of the brain, which is which LLM you're using. And so most of those are quite censored, but there's some obliterated models that are uncensored that we're hoping and we've seen a little bit of that they are not told to just take a stance and say there's not enough evidence. They're more open. And so then you connect that brain to some tools.

And the tools are really what we've been working on and we plan on going really, really deep into to see how far we can go to connect those dots. I noticed that you launched a new feature recently, transforming the very complicated knowledge into a very short video format. I found this very fascinating. Shout out to Yuri.

our teammate who's been working on that. You know, there's a lot of people at the network school, so we've been wanting to combine their talents. And Yuri's been a superstar at that. Yesterday, we released the video, short form video content. I think we had over 400 videos generated, 100 videos generated in 30 minutes, if I'm wrong. I might be wrong. So we're like, whoa. Of course, like, quality matters a lot, but this is the first version. So we really got to pressure test it, see if anything would break. And like,

There's so many ways to improve it. So that can definitely get better. Why did we do it? We did it because we think that AI is going to be it goes kind of back to the whole tech thing. Like tech is cool. I'm a nerd. I like it. But not everybody lives on crypto Twitter. Right. And fundamentally, this meme is like much bigger than crypto Twitter. It's it's a meme that we can many can relate with. And so the whole idea is to be like the go to point single source of truth.

sort of, or like go-to resource for people looking for a, you know, second opinion that's not, you know, watered down. So TikTok, short form content, Instagram Reels, YouTube, we're just trying to begin or, and also introduce to the market and our community. We have a very strong community now. Thousands of people, it's crazy. And they're doing crazy things too. Like very strong community. It's been the coolest part of this project. And they're creating their own videos, but they call us the X-Files of Twitter now.

of crypto Twitter, which is pretty cool. So we hope to expand on that quite a lot. So let's talk about your own projects, about the presentation you did at the network school. So can you walk me through like how did you have that idea to create that decentralized archaeology and what's your goal for that project?

Yeah, so I have this kind of like lifelong thing that I've been really into this passion with ancient civilizations and the idea that there are lost civilizations and also lost knowledge and lost like powerful high frequency knowledge that, you know, potentially is a completely different tech tree. And whether that's true or not, I think it's worthy looking into and

I think there's something there. So probably makes a lot of sense, the whole dark sun that I got into that because just a couple months ago, I was like building out this like an actual decentralized Wikipedia for archaeology or anthropology. And the whole idea was just to gather as many parameters around subjects because my pitch, I suppose, it's not really a company or anything. It's just a fun project. I guess I work on the weekends. Now it's kind of on the sideline, but is that...

Archaeology is this very unidisciplinary field and slowly has been opened up to be... It didn't start off unidisciplinary. That's actually kind of a recent modern development. But now with the introduction of new technologies and stuff, people from different fields are starting to become more welcome. It's like sunlight's the best disinfectant. So if the rest of the world sees how poorly a field has been advancing or you can't pretend that...

right when the evidence, you know, when you actually have quantitative data in play, it changes things. And for a long time, modern archaeology has been very qualitative. And this is like, this is actually like pretty sad because archaeologists

There's still a lot that we know, a lot of sites that we know we can go and get a lot of information from, but it's just nerfed because we're still caught in that. So, so our cub, uh, decentralized archeology movement is around because we have more quantitative data. That means actually more citizen scientists can play around. You know, we could fly LIDAR mission over the Amazon, uh, if there's enough, uh, collective will around that. Um,

and financial incentive. So who knows, maybe foreshadowing binary, we'll see. And it ties to everything, you know, like archaeology is fundamentally like kind of everything kind of points back to that. And it's like you have to also go backwards to look forwards, I think. Equally so, you got to look forwards to look backwards because the more we learn about space, the more we learn about potential situations that our ancestors went through, hinting at, you know, Nemesis star, you know, potential like cycles on Earth. So...

I think space and archaeology are fundamentally intertwined and are going to be a... they're going to be looked at as more of a binary play or field or something, narrative in the future.

Do you want to give a shout out to your team members to introduce them and also what's the next phase for the Dark Zone? Absolutely, yeah. The team members were extremely fundamental to this whole project. There's a lot of us now. Few people are getting onboarded. We have some four or five developers now. Two of them are part-time and then we have some people doing marketing, business development, operations.

And when we launched, we were three. So what happened was when we launched, I got docs 30 minutes in because they found a Luma event for the network school. Okay.

And somebody connected. Well, it was like the Luma event was called Dark Sun AI Hackathon. So I guess they searched it up and they found, and it was me hosted, and it was also the network school hosted. I was like, fuck. But then I think immediately they connected Mitch. And Mitch wasn't even on the project. But he did. So Mitch got doxxed. Yeah.

But he just started hanging out with us. And he's such a good energy, such a good character. Actually, now he's basically leading operations. So that was just completely organic. He's on the team. He's a killer. He's so good. So that's how Mitch got on board. Then Tito and I were slamming our heads for the month and a half before we launched, just getting the thing off the ground. And then Mustafa just absolutely cooked on the design and the visuals and the website and

And there's more team members too. Yeah, and they're all playing a really fundamental important part. To wrap up, anything you would like to add on for community? How can they contribute and how can they follow up your project? Yeah, so the community, we have a Twitter account, Dark Sun, OX, at OX Black Sun. The username is Dark Sun. We have a Telegram channel.

So the Twitter is where the agent's posting. We're going to improve that. It's going to be much better, but there's activity there. People follow the threads and we post updates. You can follow me on Twitter. My account is BYORN.

And we have a team that's of moderators. And now we're opening up a Chinese WeChat. So we're really hoping to connect with the Chinese community. I think there's a lot of people referencing like, you know, the three body problem. Yeah, it was Xin. Liu Cixin. I think there's I think there's a they have a deep urge as well to get part of the project. And we really want to like involve as many people as possible because it's a collective meme.

For the next phase, there's been some like schizo people. No, we love them. But there's been some community members that just gone over the top and like one of them put out this cryptic puzzle and only three people solved it. And they solved it like 48 hours, maybe even more. I think it was like 78 hours before the third person had solved it. And so...

Like this is a pretty high IQ community. It's really, really interesting. Those are like sleeper cells. These are people that just the first day they saw the meme, they were just like, this is me. And so the community is, you know, we're not focused on being the biggest community, but we're focused on like really getting to the diehard people that from first interaction completely understand what we're doing.

because there's a lot of them out there they're not really on crypto twitter as much but i know plenty of them in real life and i'm sure you're probably like sort of one of them too