#5 Walk and talk Sterlin Lujan

Mili: what's your name and,

Sterlin: and uh, how are you feeling? My name is Sterling, are we starting now? Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool, cool, yeah, nice. Okay, so yeah, my name is Sterling Lujan.

Sterlin: Yeah. And how am I feeling? I'm feeling fantastic. Have you been to church today? Yeah. Sunday. Have you been to church? I've been to the Church of the Mind today. Nice. I like that. It's with you and your mind. Yeah, that's right. I usually use my Sundays to spend time reading. Almost always.

Mili: What are some of your book recommendations?

Mili: Or some interesting books you are maybe reading right now or in the past?

Sterlin: Yeah, so, I read pretty widely so I'll give a, a bit of a scope of what I've been reading recently. So I recommend that the Psychology of Totalitarianism by Met Mattas Desmond, which is a really a critique on the, the Covid Pandemic Psychological Crisis.

Sterlin: The totalitarianism from the technocratic state. It kind of

Mili: appeared during Covid. We saw its face.

Sterlin: Yeah. Yes. Yep, yep. And that's the, that was a whole agenda from the World Economic Forum. It's kind of built into their way of thinking, agenda 2030, et cetera. So that's, yeah, that's, anyway, that's a really good book if you want to learn more about that topic and how people easily get entranced.

Sterlin: By a state and how they easily follow orders of mass formation.

Mili: Really important. Is it what, what is the agenda for Yeah, I'm not familiar with it.

Sterlin: Yeah, so there's this, this, uh, they had, the World Economic Forum has this agenda for helping to, from their point of view, improve the world. They have these sustainable development goals, SDGs, right?

Sterlin: Where they want to get all of the other countries. Around the world to follow these particular rules and patterns for improving the world. But here's a problem. They're not sustainable and they're not developmental. 'cause they all involve coercion on a grand scale, right? Telling other people how to live and what to do.

Sterlin: Essentially forcing these other governments to adopt their plan, to force people how to manage, how to live their lives, right? It's authoritarian in nature. I see. It's like one world government type of scary shit. So that's one book.

Mili: Yeah, some light Sunday reading.

Sterlin: Yeah, so, another book that I'm reading, I love reading about history.

Sterlin: So, there's a book by Mary Beard called S. P. Q. R. about the rise of the Roman Republic in the fall of an empire. That's pretty epic. Yeah, it's really good, it's really good. So I'm a huge fan of trying to understand why some cultures And some ancient societies went into the memory hole and probably lost touch with it.

Sterlin: Very few people are familiar with the Carthaginian Empire, right, which roamed utterly and completely destroyed. Yeah. I

Mili: mean, how much it rhymes with today's empires, then. Yep. Similar powers of us.

Sterlin: Yep. Yeah, it's a lot of the same kind of Competition over, over land competition, over resources, competition, over control of people, management of people.

Sterlin: Really one of the great tragic affairs and one of the great conceits of our world. Are you writing yourself at the moment? Uh, yeah, so I, I'm a published author. I've written a book called Dignity and Decency, Rhapsodic Musings of a Modern Anarchist. It's a collective works, inspired by a writer in the 19th century named Voltrine de Cleyre, who's an anarchist.

Sterlin: Really? An anarchist, yeah. Cool. And then I, so, I'm working on my second book right now, and it's about network states, and all the, uh, The different way network states can emerge and how parallel governance will help us opt out of the current system and hopefully undermine it over time.

Mili: You are in the right place to write about that.

Mili: You'll probably get a lot of discussions on that topic.

Sterlin: Yep, yep, a ton. I'm actually doing a lecture on Wednesday. On this precise topic, I'm just calling it network history. So we get into some of the history, but also some of the paths, and the praxis to realizing these ideas. That's perfect. I'll upload this on Tuesday.

Mili: Come on, computer.

Sterlin: Nice.

Mili: Yeah, so what excites you about network states? Maybe in the present moment, and then we can talk about the future.

Sterlin: Ah, sure, sure. Yeah, in the present moment, the ability to immediately Not only opt out of the current systems we live in and to engage in the digital nomad mindset, but also the idea of being around people who share the ideas and values.

Sterlin: I think the human connection part is just so important. Like learning to empathize and to connect and to be with people who share a similar mindset. That's extremely powerful. And then all the innovative spirit that's here. A lot of entrepreneurs, creators, thinkers, writers have all come together to try to realize this vision.

Sterlin: And I think that's extremely powerful. It's something special about

Mili: coming together at the beginning of something. There's a lot of energy. Yeah, yes, a ton of it. A lot of creative juices flowing. Yeah, yeah, kind of, yeah. But on the other part, then, on network states, ideally, how do you not avoid creating anew?

Mili: Kind of, you know, state, a new totalitarian government type scenario. Sorry, what was the question? How do I You know, I was thinking, just came to my mind, how do you see the future of the network states where we're going?

Sterlin: Yeah, I, so I think already we're seeing there are a panoply of networked states or parallel governance models that are cropping up, first in the form of territorial decentralization.

Sterlin: So, just an example of a few, so you have Prospera, right, in Ireland, and Roton in Honduras. Yep. Uh, and then, uh, Vitalia, which is also part of that, which is a networked state. State that's focused on, or pop up city with a network state that's focused on human longevity, biotech, yeah, and

Mili: research. They seem to be experiencing some trouble with the government right now.

Mili: Are you familiar with that?

Sterlin: I, I'm loosely familiar with, uh, so one of the problems that they've had, I think, is they've pinned. They've been characterized a little bit as colonialists. Right. By the local population. So they, they, they become an effective scapegoat for anything that goes wrong. The government gets offload blame to those guys.

Sterlin: I don't know all of the intricate details of the, and the politics surrounding it, uh, by design. I don't know if I want to burden my head with that, but yes, they've had

Mili: some issues as a result. Even though they are creating all of these jobs and new companies and just a lot of economic

Sterlin: Yeah, correct.

Sterlin: These, that's one of the good things about the network state opportunity. And I want to be clear about something. This is an important discussion.

Sterlin: So, just

Sterlin: because you have a pop up city, or a special economic zone, or a smart city, whatever you want to call it, does not de facto mean that it is a network

Mili: state.

Mili: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And then as Prospera shows, they're still at the mercy of the network state. Whatever government has hosted them.

Sterlin: That's right. A host country will control it. So yeah, a network state ultimately when it comes to full fruition and we realize the vision has its own governance structure set up.

Sterlin: That's a big part of the network state idea. Things a lot of people miss. There's, there's governance both in the cloud and on the land that people voluntarily opt into. And in my opinion, network states do not even have to have a physical territoriality.

Mili: Can you double click on that for Prospera's example?

Mili: What do you think they could do instead? Or what are they

Sterlin: missing? So I, I think they're, so I think they're doing great. Here's the thing, Prospera does have a, a technology stack, a governance application that they use. I haven't looked into the details of how that's working, but it does seem like they have a mindset to developing their own governance model with that.

Sterlin: With rules, with contracts, with tokenization. Yeah,

Speaker 3: yeah.

Sterlin: And, but it hasn't become fully realized yet, but I think they would seek to have sovereignty and autonomy, and I think that would be a goal of a lot of network states. Apology talks about it in his book, The Network State. The idea of gaining diplomatic recognition, and that's akin to having sovereignty.

Sterlin: Personally, I don't even think in the long term vision that will be necessary. Especially if we have networked states that have cypherpunk value built into them. That means a strong privacy and anonymity safeguard. That's a whole other discussion. Yep, yep. Discussion.

Mili: Yep. But like, ideally you would want to be not at all connected to a nation state.

Mili: Correct. Because we know that's like the goal here.

Sterlin: Correct. Yeah, we want to, that whole model is corrupted, perverted, broken, and based ultimately on Coercion and the centralization of power. We're trying to decentralize power. We're trying to escape having to rely on that model or having to mimic that model or be involved in some type of mimesis regarding what they're doing.

Sterlin: So, I, yeah, I think ultimately the long term vision is that we create a society that's built early on a decentralization thesis. It's very interesting.

Mili: So, you say you're What are some other Maybe aspects that you find we should talk more about or are issues or interesting, maybe. Ah, yeah.

Sterlin: Anything

Mili: comes to mind.

Sterlin: Yeah, I think one of the things that's going to be really challenging is for those of us like you and I, Max, we want to, I think we want to be, we do want to have a physical location where we can connect with like minded people. So, because the human, the human element is really important. So, thinking about, So a lot of people when they think about networks say something about the, what I call the logical algorithm, right?

Sterlin: Building the technology, thinking about the way that the governance is structured, thinking about the economics, but also important is what I call the emotional algorithm, which is the idea that we have to learn to connect with each other better, resolve our disputes, have strong communication. And it's through those, those processes that help minimize corruption.

Sterlin: Centralization of power. Infighting. And get this, we're not always going to be able to solve for uh, psychopathy and sociopathy in society, right?

Speaker 3: There's

Sterlin: always going to kind of be that phenotype of individuals, right? That's the game. Yep. But we have to be able to work together to reduce the influence that those people can possibly have in our society, right?

Sterlin: Okay, there's a, there's a famous quote by Frank Herbert who wrote Dune. He said, He was a smart man. Oh man, just a towering genius. He said that it's not that power corrupts absolutely a la Lord Acton, it's that power is magnetic to the corruptible.

Speaker 3: Mmm.

Sterlin: Right, so when you have a centralized power apparatus, you're going to invite the attention, Of the worst possible people in society, right?

Sterlin: Because

Mili: then you can legally commit atrocities. And it also, it just has to happen one time. You know, you can have good leaders, good leaders, good leaders, and then you get a corrupt leader. And then that kind of destroys it for everyone.

Sterlin: Yeah, it's pretty much game over because the corrupt leader oftentimes are insulated by the regulatory apparatus and by the system.

Sterlin: And then they have a bunch of sycophants following them around.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Sterlin: Wh wha Effectively urging them to continue doing bad because they're also filling their pockets, lining their pockets. So it creates this feedback loop of corruption, decay, decadence, just outright civilizational destruction overall.

Sterlin: And I mean, it's just a skewed incentive structure, right? We're talking about economics. Yes. So yeah, it's a delicate

Mili: thing. It

Sterlin: is. And that's again why we're here, that's why we're trying to develop this network. We're trying to figure out the most optimal solution for governance that tempers the worst parts of our humanity.

Sterlin: I like that. And then you're probably going to break some eggs while making Belknight. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, so Timothy May in 1992 wrote a, an article called Libertaria in Cyberspace, which is an early progenitor for the network state idea. And one of the things he said is that That's important about these ideas is that they have rapid self self selection they have experimentation And they're evolutionary so that we can very quickly learn from our we can build these out feedback loops That's right.

Sterlin: We can learn from our just like the the lean startup model, right? But with ideas in general and

Mili: network

Sterlin: states, yeah, that's right So we experiment with everything we figure out what works and what doesn't and we implement the best practices to reduce corruption violence in the centralization of power over time and also we have to remember the important part of this is to ensure that these there's very low switching costs there's very low exit costs you can easily exit if you don't like

Speaker 3: yeah

Sterlin: the network state that you're involved in you can go to another one and that keeps the ones that exist honest because now they're having to play in a market environment they're having to yes actually serve their netizens or their citizens Rather than try to control and to micromanage them.

Sterlin: The incentives are set right. That's right. It's all about behavioral economics.

Speaker 3: Yeah. At the

Sterlin: end of the day, I think that's actually the key. A lot of people, like Vitalik in his talk yesterday mentioned how solving governance is really hard. Yeah. I think it is hard, probably, he's probably referring to the technological component.

Sterlin: But I would say, philosophically, we have a bunch of tools at our disposal around, you know, It's like our understanding of psychology. Yeah. Over the last few centuries. Mm. And our, uh, most recently, our understanding of behavioral economics. Trying to figure out how to subdue Moloch dynamics, right? Mm.

Sterlin: Understanding game theoretic scenarios and how people respond to the incentives on the, on the market. I think we build, try to build those. I'm gonna talk about this in my talk too on Wednesday. Nice. How can we build those into our governance structures? In a gamified sort of way that enhances good behavior and weeds out bad behavior.

Mili: It's really interesting. We have so many tools. Let's use it and put our attention on this.

Sterlin: Absolutely.

Mili: Where are you from originally? I'm

Sterlin: from Texas. And you're based now? So, yeah, still based in like the Dallas area, Texas. But my wife and I are quasi nomadic. We spent most of the Our time in Europe last year.

Sterlin: How does that look in detail? Quasi informatic. So, yeah, we spend about two to three years, or sorry, two to three months in the States, and then the rest of the time traveling. Roughly two to three months in the States.

Mili: Yeah. Right, right. Is that so that you have tax residents still in the U. S.? Yeah,

Sterlin: yes, and that's a whole other discussion.

Sterlin: I would prefer not to have tax residents in the U. S., but they make it tremendously difficult to get out of that, right? Even if you move to another country, that doesn't negate your tax requirements. You have to renounce your citizenship. Yeah. To get out of the tax requirements. The U. S. is one of the few countries that will actually chase you around to tax you.

Sterlin: And that

Mili: goes back to what we were talking about. This, uh, that the customer can choose. That's right. It's very hard to choose as a U. S. citizen.

Sterlin: It, it very much is. So, uh, assume I decide to, my wife and I decide to join a network state officially. At that point, I will try to go through the process of renouncing citizenship so I can get all the Is it, there's

Mili: some exit tax or everything?

Mili: Yeah, it's a whole ordeal, I imagine.

Sterlin: Yeah, it's really expensive. There's a lot of paperwork, bureaucracy. Typically, you'll have some attorney help you. Yeah, it's a lot. Okay, well,

Mili: uh, I see people still are quite optimistic on Texas. I feel when I hear people in the States, like, people are moving to Texas away from California.

Mili: Do you agree with this?

Sterlin: Yeah, that's an accurate statement. I think, overall, if you're going to live in the States, Texas is one of the better States.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Sterlin: I believe it, right? There's no States. Base tax, income tax. There's just the, of course, the federal income tax. And also, Texas has become a hub for crypto entrepreneurs.

Sterlin: Right. So, a lot of the mining, a lot of mining operations are actually centered in Texas, leveraging renewable resources like wind energy and solar energy. Cool. Let's turn around so we get to the shade and that super micro is better. Yeah, now, now I'm, now I'm panting and breathing. Yeah, I'm sorry, I promised you

Mili: shade, but I don't know this place.

Mili: Ah,

Sterlin: now it's alright, this is actually really good, this is a very solar pump. It is a beautiful place, for sure. Okay, swimming, not a bad idea.

Mili: Yeah, we'll get to that. What is, so you have one child, what is something you have learned from being a father? Oh, actually, no children. No children, didn't you say a child?

Mili: Yeah, no, no,

Sterlin: no, maybe, yeah, miss. I must have misheard you. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, my wife and I actually, that's another topic we decided that we were going to focus on our travels and my work, and I'm doing a lot of writing. Our life is not conducive to children right now, so we purposely decided not to have children.

Mili: Fair enough.

Sterlin: I understand. At least right now. Also,

Mili: I've been inspired to see people here at the network school come with their children and spouses. That is good. I didn't expect that.

Sterlin: Yeah, I didn't either until I saw that it was a Well, I read that it was quote unquote family friendly, which I thought was amazing.

Mili: Yeah, that's good. I think, uh, if you want something long term, it probably should be somewhat family friendly. That, I, I agree. Yep, I agree. How deep are you in crypto then? What's that? Crypto. What, what's your, how deep are you into it?

Sterlin: Ah, okay, so, yeah, my background is in, primarily in crypto on the communications side.

Sterlin: I've worked in the cryptocurrency industry for ten years. Wow. So I've been, yeah, I came into crypto Yeah, writing for different companies. Like, for instance, I worked in, starting in 2015 with Bitcoin. com. I've been writing here. I did that for three years. Wow, that's early. This goes down, yeah. Yeah, I was, I helped open up that news desk.

Sterlin: Wrote some of the first articles on Bitcoin. com. Nice.

Mili: Okay. Wasn't Vitalik also a writer at the start? Or some Bitcoin related? Yeah, Vitalik wrote for Bitcoin Magazine. Bitcoin Magazine, okay. Yeah, that was nice to see. Yeah, so you've been in,

Sterlin: that's a long time, ten years. Yeah, it is, I've seen it, I've seen it all, man.

Sterlin: I've seen the, I was there for the scaling debate. I was there for all the, the, the crypto market crashes and consolidation phases and then the next run ups. But my, I, so I haven't let the market, this is another, this is a good talk. I haven't let the market perturb my interest or enthusiasm for crypto.

Sterlin: That's my focus. 'cause is always on principle. Cipher. Punk values. Yes. Anarchist values. Yes. So if I'm focused on that, I don't have to worry about yo lowing into some random shit coin. Yes. I mean, that's the beautiful beauty of crypto. The decentralization aspect,

Mili: I suppose.

Sterlin: Yeah, that's, that, that, that's it.

Sterlin: I mean the, the origin, the genesis of cryptocurrency was from doing our value. Some people tried to sweep that under the rug or deny it, but it's very clear that some of the early technology. That went into forming the backbone of the vertebrae of Bitcoin were created by cyberpunks, right? Adam Back is notoriously a cyberpunk, creating hashcash.

Sterlin: What is cyberpunk? Is that something that came along with the internet, or is it before that?

Mili: Yeah, cyberpunk. I'm not familiar.

Sterlin: Yeah, okay, yeah, I'd love to talk about this. So first, I'll give you the history. Cypherpunk is a derivation of the phrase cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is a genre in science fiction that was originally coined and written about by the author William Gibson in his book Neuromancer.

Sterlin: Ah, Neuromancer. I've known that one. Fantastic read, by the way. And so what happened is in the 90s, this group of coding desperados got together at their houses in the Silicon Valley area. And one of, during one of these group sessions, so the people involved in these groups, Timothy May, Eric Hughes. And, uh, one of their friends, her name was Jude Milhon, and she made a joke.

Sterlin: She said, you guys are like cyber punks, except for strong encryption. So, really, you're cypher punks. Right, because the, the, the punk The punk aspect is anarchism. Yeah, the punk aspect is, yeah, it's anarchism, it's fighting back against the system, it's renegade behavior. Yep, okay, I, I get it. That was good.

Sterlin: Yep, that's where the term, that's So it's really an amazing story, actually.

Mili: And I feel like the Internet is such a good place for people who like freedom and other things, I suppose. Like, for the first time, you can do a lot of things without being in the, you know, being shot down by the law that controls violence.

Sterlin: Yeah, that's right. There's a phrase that we use in the space about building open source technology. It's the idea of permissions. So we can build technology, write code, and we can do that without having to ask permission. Can you imagine if someone asked permission to create Bitcoin? Like, they went to the, the, uh, central bank.

Sterlin: They went to the SEC and were like, Hey, we're going to make this new token and it's going to compete with the dollar. They would have shit themselves. Yes. That would have been a hard no. And then they probably would have threw you in jail right there. True that.

Mili: Ew. I think it's Bellagio's. So, like, the Wright brothers, when they started, like, what if they had asked for permission?

Mili: Can we, you know, do this, like, uh, it

Sterlin: would have been a hassle. Take a year. Instead, they just kind of did it. Yes, absolutely. The bureaucratic regime, it's all, when you try to create something new, and we see this all the time in the FDA, morphology talks a lot about, uh, it does a lot of critiques of the FDA.

Sterlin: Yep. When you try to do anything to create change, especially positive change, They, they're going to make your life tremendously difficult. They're going to have a bunch of, uh, likely superficial critiques of your work. Yep. And then all the paperwork and the red tape and bureaucracy goes into that. Like, for instance, I'll just give you one example.

Sterlin: The MAPS organization, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, those guys have been trying to legalize MDMA. I've read about that.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Sterlin: Yeah, for a long time. I think Rick Doblin started the organization in the 80s, maybe? Yeah, like the late 80s, been working on this for a long time. I don't think he got serious until like a decade ago, but recently they were almost there on the cusp that they're like in the third trial clinical trials to create MDMA clinics that allow people suffering from PTSD to get the help they need.

Sterlin: But just recently their partner company, forget the name of it. They were denied, Approval by the FDA in the final stage. Yeah. Yeah. So it it's a huge setback. Right. They can still come back and try to retool those. The step, here's the reason why they did it, though. It's really trivial and trite. So the, when you do a clinical trial for any kind of, any kind of drug trial, you usually have a placebo group that doesn't get the drugs, right?

Sterlin: Yeah. And then you have, uh, which is a control group, and then you have the actual experiment group that gets the drug. Yeah. So, the, the problem is, is that when you take MDMA, you, you now know if you're in a placebo group or not, because you're, you're clearly high, yeah, you're a psycho, it's a psychoactive, right?

Sterlin: It's, you know when you're on MDMA.

Mili: So that's why they, they say that the placebo is not effective. Yeah, yeah, that's why

Sterlin: I said it broke, it broke the trial. Everybody knew about that already. They, they had done multiple trials that were approved to push forward. It was completely arbitrary, and Why do you think they don't want it to, to Yeah, I, I, you know what, so already governments around the world are very much opposed to psychedelic therapy, psychedelic medicine, MDMA, because these compounds dissolve boundaries.

Sterlin: They wake people up from what Charles Tarr called a consensus trance. Where you're numb and you're subdued to the status quo. That's right, the status quo, the cultural consensus. All that stuff, you, well, this is what happened to me. I actually took MDMA back in 2005 for the first time. It completely woke me up and shook me out of that.

Sterlin: Wow, yeah. I started thinking, it was like a quantum personality change. I started thinking for the first time, reading, To actually learn more and understand more rather than escapism. And of course that naturally made me question, why is this drug illegal? Which is the first step. Right, and now you're questioning everything else as a result of that.

Sterlin: And that's what happened to me. Is it

Mili: part of your regimen to do some sort of therapy with MDMA? Or was it just a one time thing?

Sterlin: No, I, so, this is a whole story. But, I, so when I did MDMA for the first time, And I realized how powerful it was. I started giving it to all my friends and family, and then it turned into a business.

Sterlin: And, uh, eventually I got arrested for possession of MDMA, like, to the tune of, uh, 500 pills. In Texas. Yeah, I thought I was, they threatened me with 40 years in prison. Wow. I got lucky and actually was able to get out of that. Well, first of all, lucky because the drugs didn't go outside of Texas or it would have been a federal crime.

Sterlin: It was so, so much. So I was able to hire an attorney and it was just in the, in the city that it happened in, which is in West Texas and I got a deal for 10 years deferred adjudication, probation, deferred adjudication, just meaning that if I complete my probation, I technically don't have a conviction on my record.

Sterlin: Okay, what is, what is probation? So it's like paper prison, right? You have to go check into a probation department, you have to pee in cups regularly, and get your, and have drug tests, and Are you allowed to travel or not? No, you have to get permission to travel. Okay, that's, that's uh, So I did that for five years, from roughly 2009 to 2014 ish.

Sterlin: Okay, really, that's, you know, Yeah, so, that was an extremely tough time in my life. I also, was, had a lot of trouble finding jobs of working in the traditional ecosystem.

Mili: This is crazy how huge it affects people's lives. Oh yeah,

Sterlin: so there's just been so many people have their lives ruined as a result of the criminal justice system in the U.

Sterlin: S. and especially the drug war.

Mili: What's some story you can share from your times as an MDMA dealer?

Sterlin: Yeah,

Mili: well. Something especially wild or interesting? Yeah,

Sterlin: I think the interesting I would say is I went to a lot of raves and I actually did the distribution. Let's go back. Fort Raicher. Yeah, I did the distribution for raves.

Sterlin: You were the main guy. I went to underground rave parties And I I thought they were absolutely beautiful. Yeah, there was some debauchery. Of course It was a like a drug party that we that was during a time in texas when tribal underground ecstatic dance music was extremely popular That's so beautiful people dancing to these Dancing and they're on mdma and they're connecting and i'm not going to say it's like a perfect mini utopia but but certainly it it It was a culture that inspired thinking outside the box, learning to connect fellow humans.

Sterlin: And overall it was just an amazing experience. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I can imagine. Yeah, it was a very formative period in my life. Some of the people that I was in contact with then are still friends to this day.

Mili: I'm sure, yeah. Wow. Are many of, do you see, what trends do you see in that group of people?

Mili: You have a very special life path, kind of. Have they gone back to the normal 95, or are they also on the fringe?

Sterlin: Yeah, I would say most of them You know what, I don't want to speak to this, but I don't know. Like, the majority of them, I don't have any contact. A lot of my friends, though, have made contact.

Sterlin: Have had some kind of interesting path or even if they stayed in the traditional system They're more awake and attuned and they understand the nature of the system But it wasn't in the cards for them for whatever reason to aspire to do anything Uh particular or peculiar, you know what we call peculiar.

Sterlin: Yeah

Mili: That's a good point that you can stay within the system and still, you know have a really nice effect Just being a good person within whatever confines you are.

Sterlin: It's not in everybody's bones, no matter how awake they are, to be an activist. I became an activist, that takes a certain type of person.

Sterlin: I'm not saying that I'm special, but I am saying that I, I got into, mine were mainly cops. So a lot of those folks didn't get arrested. Where I got arrested and I had that direct experience with the criminal justice system in the U. S. And that turned me into an anti state actor. One hundred percent, I was, it was very personal for me.

Sterlin: Yep, yep, yep, for

Mili: sure. It's brutal when you realize they can actually stop all your freedoms like that.

Sterlin: It's completely savage where they can come after you and they can really put your life to an end. Either on paper or physically by putting you in a cage, right? Yeah,

Mili: they, they have a lot of, uh, power.

Sterlin: Oh yeah.

Sterlin: Which is exactly why we're all here at the network state to try to minimize this. Because what's happening is not only, um, so a lot of people don't talk about the us. They, they talk about it as a, a. Progressive nation as a place where people have their rights, as a place of freedom. You hear people carry the idea that people are free in the U.

Sterlin: S. So the U. S., let's have some sobering down to earth facts. It has the largest, one of the largest prison populations in the whole world. That's correct. Most people in prison, uh, these guys do regular no knock raids on people who allegedly possess a certain quantity of drugs in the house. There's so many laws on the books right now that a guy named Harvey Silverglate wrote a book called Three Villains a Day.

Sterlin: So you wake up as a normal citizen, go about your normal routine, go to work, come home and by then you've committed three villains. Because, because there's so many erroneous, silly, trite, Incomprehensible laws on the books that you can literally be breaking one every, you know, every part of the day,

Mili: potentially.

Mili: America also has this very poor, like, poor part of the population, and it also has the majority.

Sterlin: Yeah, it's got, there's a super, yeah, that's a huge disparity in the elite versus the, the sort of the lower classes, and it's a really, it's among, I mean, it is a behemoth. Really, the U. S. is an empire, in the traditional and classical sense of

Mili: the term.

Mili: What's your intuition on, on what type of network state, like examples, what it could look like for, for you maybe, like an ideal?

Sterlin: It's hard

Mili: to say because it's so early, but what are your sketches of it?

Sterlin: Yeah, I, I would say that, uh, a network state that embodies the ideal, so, I'm going to be talking about voluntary consent.

Sterlin: Like the idea that all of our relationships are as consensual as humanly possible. Yeah. So you asked me to come and do this talk with you and I voluntarily consented and I didn't apply for work. And so everything that we do that doesn't harm another person is consensual. Right, like I wanted to give, if I wanted to give an MDMA pill to someone here, that's consensual.

Sterlin: Right, even if it has risks, that's their choice. Right. Right? Freedom. That's right. And then the second part is I, I'm, this is, this differentiates between a lot of other people who are thinkers in the network state space. I actually am invested, I, you know this is personal for me, in trying to undermine the traditional systems.

Sterlin: Even if I'm outside of the scope of it because it hurts and harms and damages so many people's lives. So I'm a huge fan of embracing like what I call network agorism. Right, so agorism is a philosophy that was developed by anarchist thinker Samuel Edward Compton III. And his idea. Was that we create these black and gray circular economies for trade outside the regulatory apparatus of the nation state to Take the power away from it.

Mili: Was this pre

Sterlin: internet or yeah, this was Yeah, mostly pre internet I think he's writing in the 80s So something like indexed

Mili: a bit I think into the 90s because that was hard to do before internet But now with the internet you can kind of imagine how we could form our own networks of Trade and whatnot

Sterlin: Yeah, absolutely.

Sterlin: So his thing was, uh, yeah, horizontal agorism. These, uh, networks of people doing trades under the table. Black and gray, which means things that are illegal, but also things that are quasi legal. Maybe we do one more. And so my, sure, my idea is that we apply this agoristic philosophy to network states, and that's what I'm calling network agorism, which I'm working on an article about this right now.

Sterlin: Right,

Speaker 3: right.

Sterlin: And so what this, what this means is that we set up these governance solutions. It means to sap power. We talked a little bit about this, or touched on it earlier. Sap power from the nation state. Incrementally over time. Because having a competing governance model means that the nation state has a chance of losing its people.

Sterlin: As bright as we like human capital flight, brain drain. And now they're thinking they have to compete. So it's not like necessarily abolition of the state, but it is an abolition on the territorial monopoly on violence. And

Mili: do I understand correctly that just by building a good alternative, we are kind of undermining it?

Mili: Yes, yes. Because we don't have to actively do bad, we can just do very good. Yes, yes, and I want

Sterlin: to be clear that, like, I'm not an advocate, thank you, this is clear for you, I'm not an advocate of violence or any kind of insurrectionary, insurrectionary spirit of the old school anarchist. I do think that.

Sterlin: But I am a huge fan of, uh, Gandhi's idea of Satyagraha. What is that? So Satyagraha is loosely translated as truth force. And it's, uh, non, non violent resistance. I like that. Purposely resist Like Gandhi, uh, fighting against colonialism in India, he actually went out there and basically stood in front of the British regime and said, no, you're not gonna do this, and they just chilled there, right?

Sterlin: Right? And some people died as a result.

Speaker 3: Yeah,

Sterlin: but they'd also, but they didn't enact violence themselves and they didn't have an army, so it's a really good way to hurt it 100%. And

Mili: eventually, you know that, that work. Now GHI is immortalized in this work. So this is one aspect of it, creating this, uh, what do you call the network of, uh, network algorithm.

Mili: Yes. So what about some more, if you were sketching it more, what it could look like? Ah, examples.

Sterlin: Yeah. I, I, I think. So, one of the things that has to happen too, aside from the activist components, which I'm a fan of, we also have to figure out a way to offer the, uh, certain public goods, right, and public services that governments offer as an actual service, rather than being a mandatory.

Sterlin: So there's things like, basic things like police or defense, uh, insurances of various kinds, different types of charities, right, so we do that.

Mili: Could this not be provided just as companies, as services? Yes. In a capitalistic environment. Yes,

Sterlin: yes, yes. That's part of it. The network state itself as a decentralized hub, uh, technology infrastructure could offer like smart contract based technological solutions as well alongside private enterprises that may not be as technologically advanced.

Sterlin: Yeah. So there's an interplay of private market versus technology that could emerge to offer these services. So there's a guy named Trent McDonald who wrote a piece in 20, wrote an article, a very detailed, really good article called Unbundling the State. So his idea was to unbundle, unwrap these governance services from the state, and then offer them, yes, on a dynamic market.

Mili: As a free market, kind of. Yeah,

Sterlin: that's right. Each individual piece is offered, and then there could actually exist overlapping governance models, but he would suggest that this could happen in the same territory, right? So you don't need territorial decentralization, you could actually do this. In the same territory where people get to opt into their different governance

Mili: Models live

Sterlin: in the

Mili: same

Sterlin: place

Mili: because even just by allowing for competition You know, people could choose whether they want the open market or the government alternative.

Mili: And you could see what cost is. The government is probably a lot more inefficient. So they would just lose. Yeah. If you get this on a

Sterlin: free market. That's right. On a market, if you're inefficient and you don't serve your customers, you're doomed. Right? Traditional governments, the nation state, doesn't have to.

Sterlin: Those incentives don't exist, right? Because it just prints money at will, right? The guys can press a red button, right? Federal Reserve Bank. Print a, print a button, or hit a button, print out as much money as they want, expropriate wealth from the population via taxation, and just run their institutions however they see fit because there's, they're not, they created a monopoly, there's no competitors allowed in most of these situations.

Mili: Right? Maybe they had good intentions at the start, but it's become a bit slow, and,

Sterlin: how do you say it? Yeah, cumbersome, slow, cumbersome, inefficient, broken, corrupt. Yeah, yeah. All the words. All the words.

Mili: All the words. So, what do you see as the biggest threshold for this change coming about? What? What is?

Sterlin: Yeah, I think we're gonna what?

Mili: Yeah,

Sterlin: I think we're gonna see a continue to see a critical mass of people interested in this idea, especially as we create models that work, right? I mean, work by it. We have a government regime of some kind and that we have a success story, right? Population

Mili: That's why I feel, it's what's so sad that Prospera and Vitalia now is under attack by the locals, because it looked like a success story, and now that sort of set, let's hope they make it.

Sterlin: Yeah, I think they're going to be okay. So what, also what happened is governments are going to, so if they're not going to outright come after us with guns and bombs and drones and whatever autonomous weapons that they may dredge up, what they're, what they're going to do, they're Oh, watch your step. Holy shit, that was nasty.

Sterlin: So what they're gonna do, the government's first line of attack is always through propaganda, using media, information, that's right, character assassinations, smear campaigns. So this is already probably what's happening in Prospero to Mercury. They're going to paint them in the most damnable light that they can and make them look as bad as possible.

Sterlin: And then, of course, all the drooling, slobbering masses, of course, are going to rally in the defense of government. So this is probably going to happen for the longest

Mili: time. Mainstream media will push this, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Sterlin: But I think, you know, I think we're already in a stage where a lot of people have lost faith in mainstream media.

Sterlin: Things are starting to change, right? Yeah. Because of the information circulation. There's a good chunk of people waking up. In this sense, I'm very much an optimist. I do think that there's always going to be Sort of lower vibrational people. Somebody would use the phrase lower IQ people. I just say lower vibrational people.

Sterlin: But what, how we create change in society all the time is by having that critical mass of people actually create the change. And then laggards, right, lower IQ people. Lower vibrational people immediately kind of follow the

Mili: trend. Right. What I hear is it's a lot about information warfare and making it mainstream.

Mili: Also by creating it, but also by talking about it and writing about it and doing whatever,

Sterlin: decentralized media about it. That's right, yep. And we have decentralized media now, we have alternative media, and there's a ton of resources out there for anybody who wants Yes. Mentally, they can do that right now.

Sterlin: They don't have to be locked into a mental prison.

Mili: Yeah. But do I, I mean, the mental prison of today is this attention scarcity. We are so locked in our phones, locked, kind of busy, busy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a different topic.

Sterlin: Yeah. That's a, yeah. I mean, that's, that's, there's, um, there's two sides to that coin, right?

Sterlin: If you don't have a focus or a goal yourself, it's very easy just to get distracted. Entrapped and entranced by the, by various forms of media. Some of it very ridiculous or not useful, mentally sabotaging. And you definitely don't want to do that, right? You want to be, you want to have an understanding of where you're going and you want to be conscious and aware of what you're consuming media wise.

Sterlin: Where,

Mili: where can people find you online? What are you?

Sterlin: Yeah, so I have, you can find me on, on, uh, X at, uh, At Sterlin Lujan, S T E R L I N L U J A N, easily. And then I have a website, also my name, www. sterlinlujan. com. And then you can also check out the crypt, uh, the network state stuff that the organization that I work with is working on.

Sterlin: It's called Logos. Nice. So Logos. co.

Mili: Okay, cool. What organization is this?

Sterlin: Yeah, so, Logos is a technology stack. That is developing digital infrastructure for

Mili: network states. Beautiful. That should, uh, maybe you can get some inspiration from some existing states. Absolute, absolutely. Yeah, there's gonna be a, there's gonna be a lot of stuff happening and it's gonna be legit.

Mili: Very cool. I, I think we, we could do another one of these once we are further in this network school experiment. Like three months from now, what ideas have emerged and where are we at? Absolutely. I really enjoy our conversation. I think that would be fun. But I actually enjoyed it as well. Thanks for taking the time.

Mili: Yeah, no worries. Thanks, brother. Yeah. Ciao. Thanks. That was really fun. Yeah,

Sterlin: it was good.