Weekly: Network States, Helium & Psychedelics

Weekly Review 012

Author

George Samuels
July 24th, 2022

In last week's review, we discussed bio-geometry, environments, and community behavior. This week, we'll look at the collapse of economies worldwide and the solutions surfacing as a result.

Before we get started, here’s a review of my last week:

Week in review

Last week’s premium newsletters:

Interesting shares from work:

Over the last week, the president of Sri Lanka resigned after fleeing to Singapore (signaling the height of the collapse of Sri Lanka's economy). Chinese banks employed tanks to protect them from local protestors. And the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Monkeypox a global health emergency (here we go again 🙄).

However, despite the gloom, many interesting new areas are currently being explored. My last week's research covered areas such as "Network States," IoT-centered blockchains, and even the resurgence of psychedelics to combat mental health issues.

Let’s dive in.

What are these new solutions?

  1. Network States

  2. Helium Blockchain (IoT)

  3. Psychedelics (old is new again)

1 - Network States

I speak about meta-communities extensively, but the recent discovery of a book titled Network States by Balaji Srinivasan caught my attention the most. This is because it describes a future that’s very much in line with my meta-community concept but in the context of building digital nations.

Luckily, someone mentioned how Balaji had stumbled upon my blockchain work with the Tuvalu government, so we’re both thinking along the same lines, even if divergent on the how.

But this idea of the ‘Network State’ got me thinking about digital-nation building in general. And how right he is about why it may become a thing.

It’s hard to imagine, but once upon a time, the idea of a “nation” didn’t exist. Before it did, we had a lot of various city-states around the world. And before then, towns and villages.

Each time human populations have expanded beyond their traditional boundaries, they’ve come across new challenges and had to come up with new names.

The Internet has helped many of us connect virtually, transcending geographical and time boundaries; it has also caused us to think differently about how we label ourselves and navigate the world.

And as a result of COVID, knowledge workers realized they could work from anywhere, and coming into the office was not mandatory to get work done. This has drastically shifted the landscape of metropolitan cities, causing many office leases to lapse but decreasing overall traffic and increasing time near home.

This also has huge ramifications for many nations whose citizens still think they must travel overseas to make a living and send money back home to their families. The Internet allows them to work straight from home without sacrificing the family unit. This applies to nations like Tuvalu and others that rely heavily on remittances.

2 - Helium Blockchain

Someone shared this tweet with me, describing a blockchain called Helium, which focuses on the IoT market. According to the author, “Helium built the biggest IoT network in the world in less than three years.” They aim to “provide the infrastructure for 5G, WiFi, VPN, CDN, and other networks.”

According to Mario Gabriele, the five key things you should know include:

  1. Its use of crypto. Helium’s tokens are used specifically to incentivize the network.

  2. A new revenue opportunity. Helium hotspots and devices earn $HNT tokens in exchange for contributing to the network.

  3. Leveraging unlicensed spectrum. Traditional telcos rely on a ‘licensed spectrum’, which is typically purchased from the FCC (in the case of the US) and promises uninterrupted service. Helium uses a “noisier, but cheaper” unlicensed spectrum band.

  4. Growing opportunity and complexity. Though Helium’s network has a massive range, it is processing relatively little data. To bring more demand into the system, Helium is expanding beyond IoT.

  5. “Cellular Summer” is about to begin in earnest. Helium’s quest to build a decentralized 5G network is expected to kick off later this month. Participating hotspots will earn a new token, MOBILE.

My take: I checked out their website, whitepaper, and explainer video (pretty entertaining), but I’m still not convinced about the technology. Tokens are being used to incentivize adoption, but I don’t know how much of their IoT-connected devices are leveraging actual on-chain capabilities. I’ve also never heard of this blockchain until now, so I can’t comment further about how it compares to other blockchains in the market. I see they have around 171K followers on Twitter already, but very easy to buy these days. They seem to know how to play the attention game.

3 - Psychedelics

Instead of rehashing everything I’ve written about on this topic, I’ll let you peruse these past articles in your own time: The miracle treatment they couldn’t talk about, DMT Elves, and Magic Mushrooms.

The main point I wanted to make here is a growing interest in psychedelics (again), which is very different from the ‘60s. From Netflix documentaries to universities approving dedicated research centers, the psychedelics industry is expected to top $8 billion by 2027.

The solutions that psychedelics provide (e.g., “magic mushrooms” when it comes to mental health) include lowering stress, fear, and anxiety. All significant symptoms of modern-day living.

What’s most curious about these natural psychedelics are people's shared experiences despite not knowing one another. Many are typically life-altering or “spiritual” in nature, even if the person is non-religious.

What’s old is new again

Much of the understanding of things like "magic mushrooms" comes from indigenous communities who kept their traditions alive.

I sincerely hope we give back to these tribes financially instead of doing to them what happened to the "founding mother" of the psychedelics movement, Maria Sabia. Maria was a Mazatec curandera, shaman, and poet who died destitutely and was hated by her village for sharing her knowledge with Westerners.

You can read more about Maria's story below or skip ahead:

MarĂ­a Sabina's interactions with the Western world, starting with R. Gordon Wasson, have been described, from an indigenous perspective, as "a story of extraction, cultural appropriation, bioprospecting, and colonization." MarĂ­a Sabina was the first contemporary Mexican curandera (also known as sabia i.e. "one who knows"), to allow Westerners to participate in the healing ritual known as the velada. All participants in the ritual ingested psilocybin mushroom as a sacrament to open the gates of the mind. The velada is seen as a purification and a communion with the sacred.

In 1955, American ethnomycologist and banker R. Gordon Wasson, and his wife Valentina, a Russian pediatrician and scientist, as well as a passionate mycology enthusiast, visited MarĂ­a Sabina's hometown, where Gordon Wasson participated in a velada with her. Wasson was the first outsider to take part in the velada, and to gain access to the ceremony (which was used to locate missing people and important items), Wasson lied and told her that he was worried about his son back home and wanted information about his whereabouts and well-being, later admitting that this was a deception. The Wassons collected spores of the fungus, which they identified as Psilocybe mexicana, and took them to Paris. The fungus was cultivated in Europe and its primary psychoactive ingredient, psilocybin, was isolated in the laboratory by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1958.

Wasson wrote a book about his experience of the ritual in a 1957 Life magazine article, Seeking the Magic Mushroom; María Sabina's name and location were not revealed. However, as author Michael Pollan notes, "Wasson was halfhearted in his desire to protect María Sabina's identity" – Wasson later published 512 copies of his two-volume book called Russia, Mushrooms and History, the second volume of which revealed her identity and location, an action which has been described as violating her consent and abusing her hospitality. The information was contained in an account of his and his wife's first velada with Aurelio Carreras, María Sabina's son-in-law, on 15 August 1953, two years before they consumed the mushrooms themselves.

Young people from the United States began seeking out MarĂ­a Sabina and the "magic" mushrooms as early as 1962, with numerous hippies, scientists, and other people visiting the remote isolated village of Huautla de Jimenez. Many 1960s celebrities, including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Keith Richards, were rumored to have visited MarĂ­a Sabina, but these claims cannot be substantiated as no photographic evidence or written reports of the visits by the rock stars themselves have ever been reported.

Their lack of respect for the sacred and traditional purposes caused MarĂ­a Sabina to remark: "Before Wasson, nobody took the children simply to find God. They were always taken to cure the sick."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%ADa_Sabina

What problems are all these areas solving?

When it comes to the aforementioned sectors, here’s what they address specifically:

  1. Evolution of human groupings and economic scaling issues (geographic limits)

  2. Using ‘crypto’ mining to power localized IoT networks (so you don’t require the Internet)

  3. Psychological issues Western science has yet to solve healthily or naturally, but indigenous societies have

What can you apply from these areas specifically to improve your business?

  1. Are you building your own community yet? Why or why not? This can help your business grow more without being completely bound by geographical limits. This is also a moat by which most brands are able to defend their networks, without having to compete on other commodity-based elements. People can copy business models and ideas, but they can't copy execution and culture.

  2. Are you thinking about how blockchain can be used to prepare you for the future? This is a growing industry expected to hit $163.83 billion by 2029. Just like the Internet marked Web 1.0, then social media defined Web 2.0, blockchain is defining Web 3.0 and is here now.

  3. The psychedelics industry is expected to hit $8b by 2027. Is this a new investment area for you? Outside the practical benefits currently being explored, many businesses are forming around this sector daily. Is it a possible investment sector to explore too?

Until next week, remember: through patience and persistence, it will come.

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