#133: Bitcoin Use Case in El Salvador, 1729 Network State, Become a Global Citizen, Speak Foreign Languages in 6 months with Antoine Dusséaux
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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Chewy Journal podcast. I'm your host, Camille Liang. My guest today is Antoine Doucet. Antoine is a legal tech entrepreneur based in London and co-founded Doctrine, the first legal information platform in France. Antoine is passionate about law, economics, geopolitics and languages.

In today's episode, we discussed network state, Bitcoin user case in El Salvador, Antoine's language learning experience about Russian, Chinese and Arabic. We also covered 1729 community-initiated writing challenge. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Okay, let's start from the 1729.

First of all, thanks for organizing the London in Real Life meetup. That was my first 1729 meetup. So nice to meet you in real life. Yeah, it was great. If you could describe 1729 to children, what's the best definition you can give? So first of all, I wonder how I would describe what is a

a normal country to a kid. So not only like a network state like we're doing at 1729, but what is a country? And if I want to describe to a kid what a country is, I would say one part of the world with some limits, some boundaries, some borders with the rest of the world and inside a

common identity, a common sense of belonging, common values, it can be a common language, it can be a common ethnicity, a common group of people. So that's how I would describe what a country is to a kid. At 1729, we want to build a cloud country, network state. So

It's also a country, so a part of the world with boundaries, with national identity and everything else, but it's a new country. Maybe if you're a kid, you live in, I don't know, in France, in China, like countries that are quite old, that have like centuries of history. But in effect, it's a young country created by a group of people who like the same things, share the same values.

and think that they want to live together to have maybe also different kinds of laws, of rules, because in one country, what distinguishes one country from another? It's also the rules inside each country. So that's how I would describe what a network state is to a kid. And when I say that, I realize that it's extremely hard, you know, and that maybe I don't understand it that well myself. You know, it's like the Feynman method. If you're able to

explain something to a kid it means you really understand it and and i and i'm struggling to explain it to a kid so yeah i think even for adults not many people can get the 1729 concept yeah it's a hard question for you yeah yeah i was trying to explain to my friends who are not involved with web3 or blockchain it's hard if i want to explain to an adult

It's easier. I would say, oh, I mean, today we all live in different countries. But, I mean, you can feel closer to someone who is at the other side of the world because you share the same values. So what if you...

create a community online and gradually you move to live together in one place and you can maybe start negotiating to have special rights with the local government, maybe lower taxes, whatever. And if at some point you have like 1 million people in your community, maybe you can negotiate with a small country like Montenegro to have one special economic zone.

When I say that to adults, they understand it because they know what a country is, what the laws are, whatever. But explaining to a kid, you have to explain what a country is. And that's when you realize that a country is just like something, a construct, like it's an imagined community.

Because what is a country? Yeah, that's a question I always wonder, especially when people talk about China, mainland China and Taiwan, and even the Ukraine and the Russian problem. Let's define the country first. Let's define the independency of the country first. Then we can discuss more about this topic. It's so hard. Because it's such a modern concept, only 200 years old, maybe. Yeah, because before it was like...

Kings fighting each other and now... Lord, yes. Yeah, we're defining, oh, this is a country, this is like... And you belong to it and you have to respect like this and that and speak that language to be in this country and everyone has to be like in the same mold. So yeah, this is fairly recent, as you said. I mean, before the rule all around the world was...

multi-ethnic states, empires. And yeah, it has changed a lot. So how do you define the values from 1729? Because you mentioned people have a certain value can be together. I mean, they are the values as defined by Balaji and the team with him. Truth, health, wealth.

I think these are the goals that we want to reach as a community, as a network state. I think if I look at the members, people are technologically progressive. They see technology as a positive force for change to improve the world.

which is in opposition to many people around the world who think, oh, I mean, this is bad. Like this new technology, we should ban it. Even before like trying it, the first thing is, oh, maybe it's dangerous. So people in 1729 tend to be optimistic about technology without being naive. And that's like, I think the second value is

They are truth seekers. They want to know the truth and they think that there is truth and that we can find it. And that is like the value defined also by Balaji as optimalism. Can we find an optimal point? Is there an optimum like when we analyze any issue? So if it's about laws and regulations, maybe like in case of like vaccine regulation, maybe there's an optimum.

And we are not like, we don't have like an ideology about like, oh, we should do this or that. No, it's like, oh, what is the best? So I think these are, yeah, two strong values, technologically progressive and optimalism. That's how I would define so far people I had interactions with. And I mean, and also technology.

freedom-lovers, so people who like freedom and who want more freedom for themselves and also for others. And that's also the whole purpose of these network studies. When was the first time you heard about 1729? How did you get involved with the community? 1729 started as a blog, launched last year in 2021 by Balaji.

posting like various articles about but like really broad initially it was like oh how can you can you earn money by making some tasks

And one of these tasks was to review an article about the concept of network state. I think it was one of the first time that this concept was explained clearly by Balaji. And I answered that, wrote a review. I earned a small amount of money, like $100, I think, at the time.

I think you got that as well, right? Yeah, I did. And then it's like months later that I got contacted again saying, hey, I mean, actually, like we're like launching kind of like 1729 season two. The next step is going to be more than a blog. We're going to create a new country and we want you in. I was like, okay, I mean, sounds ambitious. And that's how it started. So it was November 2021.

And I was in El Salvador, so I was like, oh wow, I mean, everything is like, there's like this El Salvador revolution, at the same time, like, people are creating a new country, it's amazing, like, the new world and the future ahead seems wonderful. Yeah, I see you write a lot of articles about El Salvador, so...

I have no idea where this country is based. Can you give me a general overview about it? Because I just know they are very progressive in Bitcoin and they have some policies regarding blockchain. El Salvador is a tiny country, really small. I think it has a population of

6 million inhabitants, yes, 6.5. So it's the smallest country in the American continent.

it is um located on the pacific ocean south of in central america so you know like this this area that is like a bit narrow between the pacific and the atlantic yeah near panama honduras costa rica whatever all these countries are more well known than el salvador because el salvador

There is nothing, there is no local production, there was no until recently tourism, and El Salvador was only well known for one thing: gangs and crime. So until recently, El Salvador was the most dangerous country in the world outside a war zone.

So with the highest homicide rate in the world. So that was like seven years ago. So it's quite recent. El Salvador went through a 13-year civil war in the 90s.

El Salvador was like a proxy war between the two empires during the Cold War. So the US supported one side, the Soviet Union supported another side, they gave them money, they gave them weapons, and there were these political parties, one left-wing, one right-wing, one capitalist, one socialist, communist, and they were fighting to death.

because El Salvador is so close to the US that it was like a good opportunity for the Soviet Union to get in the US territory

in the US backyard. Then end of the Cold War, peace agreement in El Salvador because there's no more reason for people to fight but the country is so poor that people like move to the US, a lot of young people move to the US and today 25% of Salvadorans live in the US

So when you're young in El Salvador, your only dream is to go to the US, either legally, so you go to an American school, you study English, you apply to American or you go to high school in the US or you apply to American universities or whatever, or illegally by crossing the border to Mexico. That's the dream. And this has been the dream for the past 30 years. What happened is that recently, I forgot the exact year, but I think 2019,

a new president, Najib Bukele, was elected. He was not from a traditional party. Actually, he used to be, but I mean, when he ran for election, he was not because two main political parties dominated the political life in El Salvador. And he was like, no, I mean, I'm not going to be

any of them, like I'm a new young figure of El Salvador and I want to say stop to corruption, stop to 30 years of like these two political parties who just do the exact same thing and alternating from one to the other, but it's just about like them getting bribes and getting richer each time. He was elected like with massive support

He did all his campaigns on Facebook because the local media were against him. So he started crime decrease significantly thanks to him. Some people say that it's because he reinforced the army and the police force, he gave them more money, more weapons, whatever. Other people say that he simply gave money to gangs so that they stop killing people.

Which I think is fair. I mean, at the end of the day, there are fewer people who die every day in El Salvador. And if the price to pay is to give gangs money, this is not the best way to do so. But I mean, what's the cost of a life? And for instance, the U.S. said in like the U.S. government said, oh, yeah, I mean, the Salvadoran government made a deal with gang members saying

and they send prostitutes to jail for gang leaders in exchange of a ceasefire and of a decrease of killings. I'm fine with that. If the price to pay to divide the number of homicides by five or seven, I think it was, is to send prostitutes to jails, I'm fine. But anyway, this is another story. So...

He did that, so he was quite popular. And then, randomly, one day in 2021 at the...

the Miami Bitcoin Conference in June 2021, he said, "Hey guys, I'm the president of El Salvador. No one knows where it is. You don't know this country, whatever. It's fine. But you're going to know it because we're going to adopt Bitcoin as our official currency." Yeah, that's how I know this country's existence. So that's how this country came back on the map. And now,

Everyone has somehow heard about El Salvador as like kind of Bitcoin land. People don't know exactly where it is. People don't know exactly what El Salvador is, but they know it's like the place where Bitcoin is king. And I think

This is the first success for this country. It's a marketing success. And yeah, then I went there like in November because so Bitcoin adoption was announced in June. Three months later in September, they officially started it.

So it was quite fast. I mean, they had three months to build the whole wallet and payment infrastructure and to educate people. And then two months later, so in November, there was a conference called Adopting Bitcoin to analyze the technical, economical, social challenges of Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador and to see, oh, I mean,

What can we do to improve the situation in El Salvador, but also in other countries if other countries want to follow El Salvador and also Bitcoin? So that conference was extremely interesting for me. First, because I got to travel to El Salvador to see how it was, to see how safe it was now. I mean, I felt quite safe. I went there with my girlfriend and we traveled around the country and also to see

the potential of Bitcoin. Because before, for me, Bitcoin was all about censorship resistance. It's about resisting the government. It's about being able to transact freely. That was one point. Or it's about being an inflation hedge, like gold. It's digital gold. It's how can I protect my wealth from money printing? These, for me, were like the two

interesting features of Bitcoin. In El Salvador, I discovered that for them, El Salvador's Bitcoin value is neither censorship resistance nor digital gold. It's more about how you can kickstart a payment system from scratch. So before Bitcoin in El Salvador, only like 20% of people had a bank account or credit card. And now,

the majority of the population has a Bitcoin wallet. And according to a recent independent survey, not according to the government, because Naeem Bukele is really good at marketing and he gives figures that often seem quite crazy, but there are some independent studies saying that 20% of people in El Salvador use Bitcoin every month now. And that's only less than six months after the law was implemented.

So it's crazy and it has a huge impact on people's lives. And that also for me was surprising because in the Western world you see cryptocurrencies as just a way to get rich quick like DeFi, oh I'm going to buy NFT, whatever. I mean these are interesting use cases but it's not like for the man in the street.

These are not mainstream use cases that will enable a global adoption. In El Salvador, you see real use cases where you're like, "Oh, I mean, that makes sense." For instance, if you have your electricity bill in El Salvador, if you don't have a bank account, or even if you have one, because of the local payment system, how it works is that you go to...

like a local shop, like a pharmacy, or pharmacy can be a good example, that partners with the government, and at the pharmacy you can pay cash for your electricity bill. So you say, oh, I mean, here's my bill number, you pay the pharmacy, and the pharmacy, I don't know how, but sends the money to either the government or the electricity company.

Which means that if you live in a small village, you have to take the bus to go to this pharmacy, maybe to queue. If you have a bank account, you have to withdraw cash at the ATM, then you give cash to the pharmacy, whatever. It can take like years.

depending on how far you live, can take an hour, two hours, three hours. Now what they do is like they take their bill, I don't know, like this kind of QR code or whatever, like they send it from their Bitcoin wallet and it's instant. So it's three hours saved per month for a normal Salvadoran. If you want to add money to, if you want to charge your SIM card,

It's the same. So you buy a SIM card in a small shop, like for $1, and then you have to activate it and to add money or to buy a subscription online. But if you don't have a credit card, you cannot. Or even in my case, I had a credit card, but only credit cards issued in El Salvador are valid. So on the other hand, I mean, anyone can buy online with their Bitcoin wallet.

And then you see how powerful it is to have this open source payment system that any country can use. Any country could say, oh yeah, now Bitcoin is official and let's all use Bitcoin. You just have to download this wallet and

And yeah, in a matter of a few months, the number of people with a bank account, even if it's, let's say, a Bitcoin bank, goes from 20% to 100%. It's a very good protocol for other countries if they want to invest.

implement Bitcoin for their citizens. That would be very good case studies to learn from. Yes, so I think there will be a new conference in El Salvador this year, so like 12 months after the implementation of the law to see, okay, one year later,

what's going on here, have things improved or not. If there is a bear market, maybe people in El Salvador may be scared about using it, whatever. So we're going to learn about all that and see how we can replicate that model to other countries, if it makes sense.

Yeah, that sounds great. I know you're originally from France, but now you're based in London. How do you regard yourself as a global citizen? I would like to be a global citizen. So I don't know if I am, but I would like to be. And I think a global citizen is someone who has cultural awareness and who can feel at home pretty much everywhere and who can understand the world

other person's point of view. So even in extreme cases like maybe understand in the Ukraine war, what's the point of view of people in Russia who support the Russian government?

I would love to be that person even though it's hard because we all have our own biases, our own preconceived ideas and values and it's hard to

challenge these beliefs. Yeah, if you didn't live, had the first-hand experience, it's pretty hard for you to fully have the empathy or fully understanding of people's culture. Yeah, and

as you say, if you don't have first-hand experience, which means going there to live in the country, then you only learn things through the eyes of journalists who have their own agenda, whether good or bad. And also they see things through their own culture and values. So they analyze things their own way. And

And you may realize that it's totally different when you go there. I mean, El Salvador is a good example. I checked before we went there, I checked the websites of the French government, the UK government, the US government, and they were all saying, yeah, I mean, how dangerous the place is. I mean, you shouldn't go here, you shouldn't go there. And then I called some locals.

And they were like, no, I mean, yes, there's crime, but it's only in some areas. You'll be fine. And I went there and I was fine. So between the news articles saying El Salvador, the most dangerous place on Earth, and my experience there, it was like two different worlds.

So yeah, you need first-hand experience. And otherwise, what you can have is try to talk to people, to normal people who went there or who used to live there. So now, if you live in a global city, it may be easier because there are people from all around the world and you can talk to them. And I think this is better than media or whatever. And it may require to learn the language. And in terms of empathy,

I think that for me, learning languages has proven to be a great way to have more understanding of other cultures. It's weird, but when I learn a language, I become more interested in the culture around that language and I feel like I belong to that community and I defend them more. For instance, after learning Russian, I became...

a bit nostalgic of the Soviet Union, which is really weird because I do not like the Soviet Union and what it represents. But I was like, oh, I mean, now I understand why some people liked it back in the day and why some people may have some nostalgia of the Soviet Union. So that is really weird. I haven't explained that process yet. Yeah.

I don't know if you watch the movie called Arrival it based it based on a novel called The Story uh

I forgot what the name of that novel is. It's about if you learn the language, you will have a new way of thinking. Because in the movie, the main character who learned the language of the alien, so she can see her future because her way of thinking is changed because of learning the new language.

So I find it's very fascinating. Yeah, so there is like this, like, I don't know if I pronounce it well, but like, say, peer worth hypothesis, which, which states that when you speak a language, like your, your way of thinking changes. So this hypothesis apparently may not be true. This is a really, there's a lot of discussion and controversy on that.

I mean, I don't know for you in English and Mandarin, but for me, I'm not exactly the same person when I speak English than when I speak French. Yeah, I feel the same. I feel my personality change when I speak different languages. When I speak English, I'm really more direct, maybe like more open-minded, whatever. When I speak French, I'm going to be like more convoluted, like more philosophical, whatever. It's...

But I think this is more about the culture that is behind. And maybe if you start speaking English with an American accent, you're going to be like

behave more like an American, then maybe she starts speaking more with a British accent, you can behave more like a British person. Yeah, that's a very interesting finding. So I know you also speak Mandarin. When did you start to learn Mandarin? So I grew up in and near Paris Chinatown. So there is a huge ethnic Chinese community in Paris.

I think the biggest in Europe, probably the biggest, one of the biggest like outside China in the US. And so it was mainly Tichu people, so Chow Chow Yun and also Cantonese. In my neighborhood, there's also in Paris, there are also like people from Tongpei, from Wenzhou, but they are in other areas of Paris.

And yeah, so I had like one third of my classmates were ethnic Chinese, often ethnic Chinese, but originally from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand.

And yeah, so I was like, oh, I should learn Chinese. So I started learning like Mandarin. And then I was like trying my Mandarin with them. And I realized that they didn't understand because they were there only speaking like Cantonese or like Tichu. Different dialects. I mean, dialects are actually like different languages. I mean, it's not like as different as like French from Spanish or Portuguese. And then I was like, oh, I mean, okay, I'm going to continue Mandarin because I liked it.

and yeah i continue like we went mandarin for some time then i i went to china first like just to visit uh it was like for shanghai um like world um exhibition oh yeah

oh my god i was there oh you were 2010 2010 yeah yeah yeah yeah oh we met already meet in real life but we didn't know yeah we know there are a lot of people so yeah i went to shanghai sujo and then i kept studying and and then i did like an internship in hantan um a few years later well i mean at that time my chinese was really good because i mean i was like

we were like the a few and maybe we're like five non-chinese people in the city of 10 million inhabitants and in the company we were working at that we were like yeah mostly only speaking chinese

So that was a good experience. Because Handan is not even a lot of Chinese people know where it is. So it's going to be a very interesting experience living there. So what's the highlight of your life there? Yeah, so as you say, I mean, it's like a normal, small Chinese city of 10 million people.

Yeah, that was the first, like, the big shock for me. That's, like, a small city that I have never heard of, has, like, 10 million people, and has, like, huge skyscrapers, like, modern things, whatever. I think, for me, like, also what was really that how boring life was there. Because you have such a huge city with people who are, like,

who have a decent standard of living. They have access to all technology, whatever. But still, I mean, you have no restaurants, no cafes, no gym, nothing to do. It was in 2015. I mean, it may have improved since then. I don't know. But this was really surprising to me.

Yeah, just life was boring. I mean, otherwise, I mean, I love China. I love Chinese people. I love Chinese food. So I mean, I was really happy. Oh, and like the pollution was terrible. So I think Hantan is like the most polluted city in China. So I was like biking to go to work. And on some days, I mean, I couldn't see. I was like on one side of the highway. I couldn't see the other side of the highway because it was like so polluted. No.

And I remember one day we went out with our colleagues and they were like, oh, look, there's blue sky today. And we were like, oh. So bad. Oh, wow. And it was like, yeah, that was a great experience. And I think something we discussed in London is...

My job in this factory was to analyze Chinese local workers and how they were doing their job because the management of that factory realized that they had a few factories in China and some around the world, including in the UK. And they were like, oh, I mean, the cost in China is increasing.

and the profitability of our Chinese factory is decreasing. And at some point, if these trends continue, the Chinese factory will make less money than the English one. So they were like, how come? So my job was to tailor, to measure everyone, every movement, everything with the workers.

And what we realized was that Chinese workers were not well trained. So they were making a lot of mistakes down the line. And at the end of the production cycle, there was a lot of garbage. So a lot of things that were produced had to be discarded and thrown away. So that was driving the profitability down.

and why these people were not educated. So there was, I think, a language barrier because all the management, all the engineers were like speaking, whereas the workers, even though in Hantan it's like Mandarin, they were speaking like Hantan. Yeah, they have a local one. Yeah, local, like different tones, whatever. So sometimes they could not understand each other. Also, I mean,

In the factory, it was like 40 plus Celsius degrees, like high nose with the mask and everything. It was like extremely hard to hear each other. So I think this is also hard. And just then lack of training, lack of education.

So something like, you know, before you measure something with a scale, you have to zero the scale. Otherwise, I mean, this is not correct. And a lot of times they were like, they would forget to do that. I mean, a lot of mistakes for like stupid reasons, just because lack of training and no one checking what they were doing. And yeah, that was like really interesting how training is essential and how, yeah, you can...

the lack of training can drive profitability down and how China has still a long way to go to improve its quality in terms of production. But it was seven years ago and China is growing extremely fast. So I'm pretty sure that the situation

must have improved in the meantime. But it really depends on different regions. If you go to Shenzhen to visit their factory, that's a totally different scenario. But if you go to Handan or even my city,

factories based in northern part of China is still a lot of labor's lack of training. Yeah, because my factory, it was not like high tech like Shenzhen, it was really like industry and it was not automated. It was like, yeah, man powered, man based and old school. I mean, the other thing I learned is that like in the Western world, you know, like they say, oh, I mean, Chinese workers, like cheap labor, like they

there's like this idea that like the working conditions in China are terrible. And even though I said that it was like extremely hot in the factory, whatever, I mean, I think it was the same in the UK just because we were working with like some irons to put like the mold and to heat them. And the heat was like 1,500 Celsius degrees. So of course, if I'm not wrong, if I remember well, so of course it was really hot. But besides that, I mean,

people had like kind of normal working hours so they were doing shift three eight hour shift there was like ice cream for everyone every two hours so then we were like all like eating ice cream and talking to each other there was like yeah pretty good food for everyone we were like eating together like the engineers and the workers no so it was

for me, it seemed to be good working conditions. And I don't think it was because it was a foreign company that the conditions were better there. When I asked

workers told me that it was more or less the same in other local companies. I know there are so many stereotypes or the mainstream media coverage about China, which is not true. So apart from that, what other stereotypes do you think people hold against China, based on your own first-hand experience? So China is huge.

And people can have like stereotypes on both ends of the spectrum. So for instance, they can say, oh, I mean, China is like a communist country. Or they can have like the opposite stereotype, which is, oh, I mean, I don't know, China is like now like capitalist, rich, only like Shanghai, Shenzhen. Both are wrong. I mean,

probably China is maybe less socialist or communist than some Western European countries in terms of like social aid, social welfare, welfare, whatever. At some point in China, I mean, sometimes the state won't help you compared to like France. And on the other hand, no, it's not fully capitalist. I mean, you still have like a lot of government control and you also have a lot of poverty still in some regions. So I think that's one, I mean, two stereotypes like these, like

communist or capitalist. I just think they are not that simple.

Then, I mean, you also have what I said about like, yeah, oh, I mean, China, it's only like low quality products, cheap things, whatever. But you have like amazingly high quality devices built in Shenzhen and abroad. Or they can say, oh, yeah, now China, I mean, they're going to overtake us because, I mean, they are so expert in everything. But still, I mean, for instance, China still, mainland China still imposes

need Taiwan for microchips and even like some elements of microchips are only produced by the US by EU countries so again it's not that simple and I think maybe something more controversial is about how religions and ethnic minorities are treated in China so there is the view that

let's say like the Catholic Church. So in China, there's the official Catholic Church and there is what is called the underground Catholic Church.

And there is this view among in the Western world that the underground church is like persecuted, like people, I don't know, like go to jail or whatever. So, Handan is the most Catholic city in China. Oh, wow. I don't know that. So, it's, there is, I mean, it's really impressive, the Catholic community.

So I went to church in Handan and I went to the underground church. And I was surprised because the underground church was not underground. The underground church was like a proper church, like quite big.

with a lot of people and it was like and there was like the photo of the pope so officially like the the official church doesn't really recognize the pope whereas the underground church still like respects what the pope says whatever so it was like a proper underground church and this was like it was on Pai Tu it was like huge it was full of people and I went there

So I went one week. Everyone was extremely welcoming, super nice. Everything was great. I mean, they invited me to have lunch, whatever. Everyone talking to me, taking picture. I talked to the people. I talked to the priest. I talked to the bishop. I talked to everyone. Seven days later, I go. No one talks to me. Whoa. And I guess someone told them not to talk to me. No one talked to me.

No one. And when I said "Hey, hi!" they said "Hi." And then I checked and yes, there has been some persecution in the past. There has been people put in jail, whatever. But it's just, again, it's not that simple. I don't say there's no persecution. I don't say "Oh, it's terrible." It's just you have the stereotype and you have the reality.

And it's hard to describe the rarity and the stereotype, rarely describe it in a correct way. And I would not be able myself to describe the situation of Catholics in China. I just have this first-hand experience where, yes, it seems that they can practice their faith freely, but at the same time, there are some people put in jail for, I don't know what the official reason, maybe for no reason. And...

There are some examples of stereotypes. Overall, it's always about the complexity of the situation and applying one's own standards on another country. For instance, in Europe we think if a religious movement is persecuted, it means people all go to jail, it's forbidden to practice the religion, maybe we destroy their churches, whatever.

And maybe persecution happens differently, or maybe it's different in China, but because we apply our own model and we use the same word, persecution, maybe it means something different. That's what is hard, I think. Yeah, I noticed that you also learn Arabic, right? Yes. Unfortunately, my Arabic learning hasn't been a success so far. So I've always wanted to learn Arabic since I was a child.

uh and i was like okay now i mean kovid work from home i have more time i know i mean i learned all the languages now it's time to learn arabic and to eventually fulfill my childhood dream and arabic so the big issue with arabic is that there is no such a thing as arabic wow there are many arabic varieties so you have like 10 do you have the arabic from the quran classical arabic you have

one that is derived from that, that is like modern standard Arabic, a bit like Putonghua, let's say. And then you have what they call dialects, but again, it's like different languages. And they write in the standard, but they speak with their dialects. So it's a bit like in China before, when people, they were like, they used to speak Paihua, but they were writing classical Chinese only. But no one was speaking classical Chinese. Classical Chinese was only written.

And then you had this movement of people saying, "Oh, I mean, we should write Paihua." And gradually, they added more and more Paihua in the books. So that, for instance, Honglomung, I think it's mostly written in Paihua. And at some point, Paihua became official. No one now writes in Paihua. But in the Arabic world, you still have this situation where you have classical Arabic,

that everyone writes in but no one speaks it. It's no one's native language. And then you have the dialects, the Paihua, that are native language. And you have many of them. You have, in the same way that you have Cantonese, you have Mandarin, you have Chaozhouhua, you have Wenzhouhua, whatever. So you have Egyptian Arabic, you have Syrian Arabic, you have Iraqi Arabic.

and they don't understand each other. It depends. If they live close to each other, they can. If they live far away... Morocco doesn't understand Iraq, but an Egyptian will understand someone from, let's say, Palestine. So yeah, there is a good parallel with China.

And so that's why it's such a mess. So it's like, imagine if you had to learn Chinese 200 years ago, you would need to learn classical Chinese to be able to read and write and to learn Paihua to be able to speak and to understand. And maybe you would need to learn as well Cantonese. So it's a mess. And there's no standard good method to learn all of that.

So it's hard. That's a pinpoint. Some entrepreneurs should develop something helping people learning. Yes. But so the issue in this is that there is a lot of emotions in this debate. So for most Arabic speakers, for most Arabs, the only pure language is classical Arabic.

and they see all spoken varieties or dialects as corrupt versions of the classical one. So for them, it is bad to teach these spoken languages. So if an entrepreneur, for entrepreneurs who would start teaching them, they would like get a lot of backlash. So it's

It's not an easy situation and that's why most learning materials nowadays, they are done by foreigners like me, who are learning the language and who are the ones saying "Yeah, I mean, we are foreigners, we want to learn Arabic, you guys, you only teach us the classical version but no one speaks it, so no one understands us, so we're going to create methods to learn the spoken version."

But this is not...

welcomed by many Arabs. Oh, I see. Same situation in China. A lot of Cantonese speakers, they think Cantonese should be the official language, not Mandarin. And also the traditional Chinese written should be the one we keep because they contain a lot of meanings in their characters, not like the simplified Chinese lost the symbolic meaning.

yeah there's a debate in China as well. Yeah there is this debate but I think the difference is that like the difference is that like this classical Arabic no one speaks it, it's no one's native language, parents don't speak it to their kids but yeah you have all around the world debates about language and what is right and what is wrong and I think like for instance

in the traditional Pan Tzu against Jian Tzu debate, traditional Chinese against simplified Chinese, some people say, "Oh, I mean, simplified is bad because it was introduced by the communists." And they're like, "Oh, this is bad." But I mean, this is not true. Simplified Chinese, simplified characters have existed long before communist China.

People used to simplify when they were writing on paper, and you can see them centuries ago. There are some texts, I think you can Google it, there are some written letters, I think from some Taiwanese leaders, where you see that when they write, they use simplified characters, handwritten. Even a lot of calligraphy is hundreds of years ago, it's a simple fact. And

And what communists said, for me, it's a bit like, oh, we're going to go from classical Chinese to Paihua, to spoken Chinese. They said, oh, I mean, everyone now writes these simplified characters, so we're going to make them official and let people write them. So, I mean...

traditional characters i think they're just really complex no i don't know yeah it is a lot of strokes yeah i i i as a foreigner who who's like learning the language i can't i see what about the russian is there also a lot of variations in russian or this is a standard one oh it's an excellent question because russian is the opposite russian has like

almost no variation. Wow. So, someone wrote an article, a paper about that, a scholar, because when you open your computer and you select one language, usually you select the language and the country.

So when you select English, they say, oh, do you want British English? Do you want US English? Do you want Irish English, South African English, whatever. If you want Chinese, you have like, oh, do you want Chinese Taiwan, Chinese mainland China, Chinese Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, France, you have Belgium, everything, Spanish. Is it like you want Mexico or Spain?

for Russian, there's just Russian usually. Even though Russian is like one of the most spoken languages in the world and it's spoken, it's official in maybe a dozen countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, it's also like spoken in Azerbaijan, Moldova, whatever. But Russian is

And I think because of the Russian culture, it's really standardized and there's one correct Russian and it's the Russian from Moscow. And there is no allowed variation, kind of. And I think that's also an issue and it would help to...

recognize and acknowledge that there are local variations of Russian and maybe the Russian spoken in Ukraine isn't exactly the same as the Russian spoken in Russia, the same way that the French spoken in France is not exactly the same as the French spoken in Switzerland or in Belgium. But by saying that there is only one Russian, this also is a way to defend the ideology of the Russian world.

that all ethnic Russian people belong to the same community and that they should all be in the same country and that's the ideology that is

behind some Russian political leaders. Yeah, I think Putin stated this in his speech. Exactly. So this would mean merging or unifying Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, but also Baltic countries with significant ethnic Russian populations, also Moldova, also north of Kazakhstan, and maybe other places.

I see. When I was briefly working in Latvia and Kazakhstan, I do see local people have different

attitude towards Russian. Some are very pro and some they even they can speak Russian, but they don't want to. They want to speak their own local language, especially in Latvia. A lot of local people, if you speak Russian to them, they can understand, but they won't speak back to you. Yeah, yeah. I've never been to Latvia, but I know some ethnic Russian Russians from Latvia. And yeah, they told me the same. And I mean,

There are apparently huge tensions and this is bad because then these tensions are used by the Russian government to say: "Oh look, Russian speakers are discriminated against in Latvia." And that may be true. For instance, I think that the Latvian government forced Russian schools to either close or to now speak Latvian.

which means that ethnic Russian kids cannot be taught anymore in their native language. And I don't think this is great. And then this can be used as a way to say, look, I mean, our ethnic Russians are discriminated against. We have to defend them. Yeah, I see. I'm very curious because since you speak many languages and have a

the culture, understanding. So where do you get your media source? How do you consume information? So unfortunately, I don't speak all the languages I learned. But so regarding media sources... Take the Ukraine-Russia war as an example, if you want to fully understand the situation. For the war between Russia and Ukraine,

I receive a newsletter in Russian every day about a Russian independent, one of the few remaining Russian independent media called Meduza. They also have one in English. I read it a bit. I mean, I can read a bit in Russian, but otherwise I translate with Google. You know, when you receive the email, you can one-click translate.

That's great to get a better understanding. Otherwise, I am in some Telegram channels that are really pro-Russian government. Because I already have the pro-Ukraine version because this is the version that is mainstream in Western media. And I also have Ukrainian friends. But I have fewer...

I don't know Russian people, I mean I know a few who are like really pro-Putin.

So yeah, the best way for me to get the other side is to be in these channels. I'm very curious about your method to learn languages. How? Because a lot of people think if you become adults, it's hard for you to learn new language. What's your method and tips you can give people who want to learn new language? So yeah, I mean, I think it's harder when you're adult, but it's mostly because you have less time.

And again, maybe your brain also functions not as fast as when you were a kid, but it's still possible. And there are many examples of people who learn languages being adults. So for me, I use usually an app called Pimsleur. P-I-M-S-L-E-U-R. The name is terrible. I mean, they should change it.

And that app is wonderful. I mean, I learned like, I used it like for Mandarin, for Russian, for Spanish, for Turkish, for Arabic. And yeah, that's it. And so the way it works is that it mimics the way that kids learn a language. So when you're a kid, like your parents don't teach you grammar. They don't teach you how to read and write. They don't teach you

All the things that you were taught when you learned a language at school. Your parents, they just tell you, oh, what is this? Bottle, bottle, water, water. Do you want a cake? Cake, cake. And at some point, you're going to say cake as a key. And you just repeat words. And then once you have these small words, you start creating sentences. And often you repeat what you've heard and then you start creating sentences yourself.

So that method does the same thing. So the first lesson, they're like, oh, let's listen to this conversation in Mandarin. And you listen to a one or two minute conversation in Mandarin. Like, ni hao, ni hao, ni hao ma, wei han hao, ni ne. And you're like, of course, you don't understand anything. You're like, what the fuck is that method? And then they're like, okay, let's repeat after me. Hao, ni, ni, ni.

"Hello" means "hello" in Chinese. Say "hello". So you repeat in sometimes a stupid way. You repeat words, but like in reverse order. You start with the last syllable, like "Hello". You repeat sentences, but without order. And you repeat and you're like, "What are they? Why?" And at the end,

they're like let's listen again to the conversation you heard 30 minutes ago and you understand everything and that's mind-blowing so each lesson is 30 minutes long and you have 30 lessons per level and depending on the language you have one to five levels per

per language. So that's a total of like, for languages that are well covered, it's 150 lessons. So you can, if you do like one every day, in six months,

you have with that method, you have like a decent pronunciation, really actually a great pronunciation. And you have like the basic vocabulary, kind of the basic vocabulary. You can like ask people, I mean, if you were in the street, oh, where is this place? How much is this? Can I order that? I would like to do that. Can you help me? Like basic conversation, but with a great accent. And I think that's essential because

The issue with all the methods, all the methods are based on written materials. And often, they would write... Let's say if you're learning Chinese, they're going to start teaching you with pinyin. So with Chinese transcribed using a Latin alphabet. So the issue with that is that

if you're, let's say, an English speaker, you're going to use the pronunciation of letters that you know in English to read the opinion. So if you say like, oh, my father, you will say, like this. And no one says, because the B, even though it's written B, it's not pronounced B as the English B.

So it's more like an English P, almost P actually. But this is really hard because this is in your brain, the connection between letters and pronunciations. And you know it for your native language.

And I think that's why Pimpster is amazing because it's only audio. So you will not have this bias and these issues with applying the pronunciation from your native language that you already know. But this is not enough. Then you need vocabulary, you need some grammar, and you need to practice. But I think Pimpster is...

an amazing and necessary basis to start. And actually, I mean, I wrote an article about that, about language learning and how I think anyone can be

Pretty much fluent in six months in any language. I'm going to take this challenge to learn my Portuguese. Oh, yeah. So that was for me the point. I was like, okay, I mean, I know nothing about Russia. I want in six months to better understand Russia and to speak some Russian. And I'm nowhere fluent in Russian because I don't practice it anymore.

But I think I reached my goals and I'm pretty sure in six months you're going to fluently walk around the streets of Lisbon and saying "Hola, tudo bem? Muito plaisir!" Yeah! "Quand tu accouches, t'as..."

Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I do feel like, yeah, if I learn the letters, because I already knew the different pronunciation for different letters, like A, B, C, D, they pronounce different in Portuguese. It takes my brain power to switch it. It's terrible. And then when you want to speak, you're thinking about how it's written, as

As a way to remember. But this has to become, like, the pronunciation has to become something automatic that is in your brain. And for that, you have to forget the reading part. And once you have the pronunciation of the sounds, especially the sounds that do not exist in your own language, like in Portuguese, you have like this...

and like Sao Paulo and this is hard or you have like all the shows especially in Portuguese from Portugal I mean it's really hard it is yeah I'll try my best we haven't covered your career path yet and I never asked about you can you share a bit about career your personal story so short version I was born and raised in Paris and then

Fast forward, university, I studied maths initially, and then I moved to biomechanical engineering. But I've never actually really practiced biomechanical engineering because I did internships and I realized that it was a bit too slow innovation in the field because of regulation. So in healthcare, in the medical industry, it was too slow for me.

So I was lucky because in my university there was also an entrepreneurship program where you could go to the US, like to UC Berkeley for six months and there try to launch a startup.

I did that, I tried to launch a startup, it didn't work. But back in Paris, with friends of mine, we were like, oh, we want to launch something. We brainstormed, we found that the legal industry was kind of antiquated and using methods from the past, and they were not yet using the most...

cutting-edge technologies. So we're like, oh, what if we have them? What if we apply well-known and proven technologies to the legal industry? So we use legal data to create a better, faster, and more efficient search engine for French lawyers.

And that was in 2016. So six years later, it's going well. We have thousands of customers in France. It's called Doctrine, Doctrine.com, Doctrine.fr. We are mainly focusing on the French market. And then there was COVID. So we switched to remote work like most companies. And I was like, oh, I mean, whether I work from my home in Paris or from my home anywhere, it would be the same. So I took...

advantage of remote work to travel a bit and also to move to London because I met my girlfriend and that's where she happened to live. So now I'm in London which is a city I really like and I'm also now looking at other opportunities in addition to overseeing my existing business and I'm also participating in

different communities including 1729. So what's the goal you would like to achieve with 1729? I mean of course I think the dream would be oh yeah we're gonna create that new network state like and we're gonna all move in these different like hubs of the network state okay this is maybe like the project of a decade or of a lifetime. I mean first goal is to meet this amazing community because

We are now 600 and so far every single person I met was interested and we had great conversations. And how I can also leverage this community to organize events, to create a sense of belonging. And then something I think that I may do with 1729 could be some...

eventualization. So maybe we did like meetups with people from 1729. We could also organize meetups open to anyone and explaining, oh, what is network state? What are these concepts? What could we do with that? To have more people aware of that. And maybe they could start their own community. They're

Not everyone will like 1729's values, but the concept behind it, I think, is universal. And the last step would be, Balaji wants to create a tech tree, so like the different building blocks that were once built, enable the tech stack of a new country of Antwerp State.

So if there is one building block I can contribute to from a technical point of view, I would be happy to do so. I also noticed that the community is also doing some writing challenges and we have been writing for five weeks non-stop now. Every week we publish some articles relevant to the network state.

What's your takeaway from this community initiative activity? So yeah, this is an example of the power of the community because we have a lot of smart people. So we are starting to have some bottom-up initiatives. So it's not only Balaji telling us what to do. So I think that's great. And so you're a prolific writer.

and you already have a great community. And for me, writing, I have to force myself a bit to write. This challenge is a great way to force myself because otherwise I would still be like, oh, I'm in this week, I don't have time, I don't want to, whatever.

And with this, I'm like, okay, every week, one article. And before that, because I mean, I did like previous challenges with Grant. It was like, it was one article per day. Whoa, no way. It's actually, it's great. It's a great experience. So I did that twice. It's time consuming. It's a bit tiring, but it's a good experience. Because yeah, you discover that, I mean, you just have to do it, actually. There's a lot of mental pressure and

And if you want to write something short, it's great. It's actually way better to write something short. It's better for your readers, it's better for you, it's going to be more straight to the point. So yeah, I admire people who write like every day or every week for like years. And it's a way to refine your own thoughts on a subject.

And it's a way to build your personal monopoly. There was an article that someone published in this writing challenge about how you can increase your luck volume. And it's based on another concept of luck surface area. There's no luck in life. Your luck is proportional to how much you're doing something you're passionate about.

and how much you effectively communicate what you're doing to people. So by writing, you communicate who you are, what your values are, what you're doing. And it's amazing. And I guess, I mean, it's probably the case for you, but I realized that after I started publishing some articles about

things I care about, like network states. People are starting to contact me, to invite me for events. It's also like

It's great when you can send your content to people. If someone asks me, "How did you learn languages?" I can say, "It's easy, just read my article. I wrote about it a few months ago." It's amazing and it's hard to realize the potential of writing until you start doing it.

Everyone. Created serendipity. Yes. Yeah, great. Yeah, great way to express that. I think that's how we met each other online. I think I wrote something about how to make friends. Oh, yeah, exactly. You wrote about that. And I answered on Twitter. I was like, oh, I mean, what about like meeting them in real life, whatever? Yeah. And then you meet and then you can chat. And that's how you build a relationship. And then you can meet in real life. Yeah. Yeah.

It's amazing. And for me, over the past 12-20 months, the most interesting people I met during the past two years were people I met online. Same. And it's often an article I read, like a blog post.

And then I answer the, I send something to the author and then we chat and then, oh, you also live in London. Oh, let's meet. And then like the person becomes a friend. That's great. If people want to connect with you, where should I direct them to? Twitter, like ADSSX or my website, ADSSX.com. Cool. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. This is great. Hope we'll see each other again in real life soon. For sure. For sure. Thanks a lot, Camelia. See you.