Network States Mini Series: - Building Antifragile Network States | Green Pill Podcast

Transcript

Hey Mark. Hey Chris. How's it going? >> Good. Good. How you doing Kevin? >> Things are good. I'm really excited to learn about anti-fragile network states and what y'all have been up to at Vau and I'm excited for the guest season that you're putting together. For the audience that hasn't met you before, maybe we'll do a quick intro of yourselves in a VO and then let's get into talking about anti-fragile network states. >> Awesome. Uh I can go quickly. So my name is Mark running fifth word which is basically a company that designs and builds autonomous regenerative properties including energy, water and food infrastructure. And Va is a is a community that we started that you know is all about bringing together people from the crypto side and people from the

permaculture side uh knowing that they share the same ethos around self-custody of digital and physical respectively and uh Chris has been a co-founder uh with me on Vow and I'll let him introduce himself. >> Hi. Yeah, my name is Chris Miller. I'm the crypto director at Fifth World and co-founder at Val and yeah, like Mark said, we've been really focused on building out this community uh under the the topic of like resilience um and self- sovereignty. I had a really great time hosting you all out here in Boulder. I think that was like 9 or 12 months ago, but um I remember learning a lot about permaculture and sort of regeneration and where you all think the network state movement is going. And so, uh, I think it was there that I was

like, I should give the guys, these guys the mic of the podcast for a whole season and, uh, they can take some of those vibes and export them out to the world. So, really excited about this season, anti-fragile network states. Can we start off with just what is that? What is an anti-fragile network state? And that questions for you, Mark. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um, and yeah, just quick one. Definitely loved the the Boulder Hangouts and looking forward to to coming back there. Maybe maybe soon. We'll see about that. So antifrag states I think uh when we first started with the vow stuff maybe two years ago at at E Denver we pioneered this concept of regenerative network states and uh the answer fragile network state is kind of

a continuation of that and kind of a realization from us and our community that it's a bit kind of broader than just regenerative. It's also about like fundamentally anti fragility and regenerative is kind of a subset of it. Fundamentally what it is is basically it's a network state with kind of the one moral commandment of let's be antifragile. If we look at kind of the the history of or or like basically if we look at where we are right now right from a human you know civilization perspective we are relying on so many centralized uh systems and structures that you know they they served their purpose for a while. They created a lot of efficiencies. They also created a lot of negative externalities and a lot of

fragility. And I think we're at this point now where the negative externalities, the fragility element is compounding. A lot of people say even exponentially, right? And you know, some people call this the meta crisis, some people call it, you know, different things. And we believe that what we're doing is kind of one of the answers to those problems. We believe that we live in a time where we also now have the tools and the different solutions to empower any individual or community to be sovereign across multiple dimensions. You know, starting from the crypto side and the digital side of things going down to the physical side of things and even like expanding it into health and other aspects of you know our human lives. And then the second element of it is we do have the tools to basically uh

create resiliency and antifragility into the systems we use and the structures we rely on so that uh we can uh sustain any you know future stress or catastrophe and even thrive in some cases if you know stress is applied. one of maybe like a analogy I I sometimes use like you know how uh Elon Mus talks about you know becoming a multi-planet civilization and basically the risk of only kind of limiting ourselves to planet earth is that if something happens to planet earth we're basically done and so that's why we need to kind of go and you know inhabit other planets we're kind of taking a slightly different take on this from the perspective of well you know we still want to preserve our planet earth so if something happens to planet earth we

still want to have the systems and the residency and fragility and the anti-fragility to to survive that and not even just survive but also thrive and we believe that you know there are people who are working on those different elements and we're trying to go bring them all together into building this network state. >> Great. Yeah, it feels like um there's something really important here to to feel into an anti-fragile. Well, I understand the the definition of anti-fragile is that it's a system that hits a stressor and then it bounces back more strong as opposed to a fragile system which uh which hits some sort of roadblock or or issue and then it collapses. And so it's it's basically about building communities that are resilient in the 21st century is is my

takeaway in reductionist definition. How did I do? Does that leave anything on the table? >> No, I think you did well there. So it's basically a spectrum, right? So you can go from fragile to resilient to antifragile. We're using antifragile in a more of an aspirational way. Not everything can be antifragile, but at the very least, you know, everything can be at the very least resilient. And so when you think about what this means, this means basically building circular systems. It means building regenerative systems. It means building decentralized systems. All that kind of different components of like how do you kind of set up your structure and systems to to get there ultimately. And just a very basic example like if you're able to build communities where a large percentage of their food intake is basically grown within the community not

only like you know it's it will probably be done in a better way from an organic or regenerative perspective it's it will be you know higher density in terms of nutrients it will just lead to a better lifestyle in general but also in cases of like some crisis or something like COVID for example you don't have a huge problem right because you're basically growing a lot of you know your needs within within that community instead of relying on like this big supply chain to source your food. So that's just a tiny example of like you know how could how we think about this from a concrete perspective and then you know you can kind of expand that into other verticals and see kind of you know the logic there.

>> Amazing. Chris, anything to add there before I move into next questions? I think Matt covered it, but I maybe just add like it's it feels like the right response at this time in history where there's like so much accelerating change happening all around us in so many different domains to to just pause and think about like how can we become more resilient at the level of individual and the local community. Uh that's really where we're we're coming at this this from and bringing together like-minded people that that that see that that need and want to try and build these antifragile systems together.

>> Great. Well, I'm curious now that we've laid out the theory of change for the broader season and sort of like our vision of the world and why anti-fragile network states are going to be so important. What's the plan for the green pill season? So, you've got a gaggle of episodes coming up. What themes and topics are you going to cover? and uh you know what what are you looking for from listeners? What should listeners be excited about as the as the season comes up? >> Sure. So, we're we're really excited to to kick off the season by welcoming Joe Libin um the consensus co and Ethereum co-founder. And this this episode really sets the scene by putting the need for antifragile systems in a historical context and thinking about like the this

sense of the the super cycle that we're you know there's there's this arc of history and there's these transitions that happen between uh different periods of history. And so we're gonna kind of explore that with Joe uh and set the scene for why antifragile network states are are a kind of appropriate response or like a an interesting experimental space at this point in history. And then following that uh session, we're going to start thinking about like how can we build in the real world like practical examples of autonomous antifragile systems focusing specifically on properties. And for that, we'll bring in Rob Avis, who's one of the co-founders

of Fifth World, but also like a a long-term permaculture expert with a lot of experience of building real world antifragile systems. So we really want to make this season as concrete as possible to give real world examples taking it like there's some theory obviously and some kind of philosophy if you like but it's really also about bringing it down into the here and now and saying like okay well what does a antifragile system look like? What does a autonomous regenerative antifragile property look like? And the second episode is really going to go into that in in some detail with Rob. And then we'll move on to to think about like what anti fragile communities will look

like. Um we're going to bring in a couple of people from Val. We've also got a session uh with Simon Brown from consensus network state. We're going to be looking at bit of the tooling that's been built around kind of bringing communities together that are building network states. look ahead to what they're building in uh for founders in the space that that want to kind of experiment in in building network state tooling and so on. And then finally we're going to come on to look at like the infrastructure side. So like energy systems, water systems, food systems in the in the final episode. But yeah, I think the core thing that I would want to kind of get across is that it's not just a theory. It's about like how this

can be applied at the level of individual and and local community. >> Mark, anything to add there? >> Yeah, I want to add a couple things. So, yeah, I think this was great, Chris. Uh, just to to highlight a little bit kind of the key takeaways of like what people should expect from like uh going on this journey with us. I think the the first thing is what is a network state, right? This is not really defined in general. Like I think there are multiple attempts at defining it, you know, starting from Balaji's book and you know what about other people and kind of different takes on it. Uh so throughout the series we're going to be going through that and asking different people their thoughts about it and um you know you you should see some interesting perspectives there.

Why crypto is an essential component of it is another kind of thing that uh you know people will take away from it without going into too much detail there. uh but I think primarily it's basically about understanding this kind of duality between like individual and community level you know sovereignty and and and I guess localism with or combined with kind of global coordination or like effective global coordination and I think this is where crypto is you know probably the best uh tool uh to to enable that and unlock that and then the third thing is the non-crypto side of it right because even the ter network state didn't start within crypto. It started like in the 60s or even before that. Even permaculture like doesn't use the word

network state but talks about alternative nation states. So this idea of like can we organize ourselves as you know human society in a different way compared to what exists today has been around for a while uh and I think it's getting more traction today and and even like is this like a replacement of what exists today? Is it an exit? Is it a complimementaryary thing? These are all kind of, you know, uh, discussions we we'll be having throughout this series. >> Amazing. So, last question for y'all. Name one thing that you're excited about this season. Maybe we'll go to you, Chris first.

>> I'm excited just to present network states in a very practical way and look at how we can bring them to life as permanent antifragile hubs. >> Yeah, that's that's one thing. I agree with that. Uh I think uh I'm excited to see some of the concrete examples of what different people have been doing with this topic. So like for example, we know that consensus has done uh the subs.xyz thing which was pretty cool. Uh there's there's the other kind of initiative related to Ethereum values. We're currently thinking through some of these things and how to use prediction markets related to that. Uh so there will be some discussions around that. Uh, and I'm excited to see kind of uh, yeah, what what our guests will be will be

sharing as it relates to those uh, kind of very concrete uh, experiments. >> Great. Well, up until now, my experience with the Green Pill podcast is recording the episode. I feel like a deer in the headlights just trying to keep the episode on on track. Uh, and then I listen to the episode and I'm like, that slaps. I'm excited about this. Uh, and so for this season, I'm excited to go into the listener seat and to just listen to uh all the amazing content and educational material that y'all are putting together. So, um, here's the keys to the car. Looking forward to your season. Thanks so much for for this and uh, yeah, again, really looking forward to it.

>> Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. Enjoy it. >> Peace and love.