Hacking State

Garrett Dailey is a designer and brand consultant, and the founder of Lucid, a consultancy that helps startups simplify their pitches and messaging. He is a former philosophy writer and a fixture of the Austin startup ecosystem.

We discuss the death of third places, Walt Disney’s original plan for EPCOT, why the network state fails, charter cities, Dunbar’s number, his three-house co-op on an Austin cul-de-sac, and how to build a neighborhood where all your friends live.

pitchlucid.com | x.com/garrettcdailey | gdailey.com

Listen on your favorite platform:

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

* YouTube

* RSS

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

I sit down with Thomas S. Mullaney — professor of modern Chinese history and the history of technology at Stanford, Guggenheim Fellow, and director of Stanford’s Program in Science, Technology & Society — to discuss his new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W. W. Norton). It’s his eighth book and first with a trade press, following The Chinese Typewriter and The Chinese Computer, and it turns from how information comes into being toward how it degrades, collapses, and disappears.

Our conversation begins with the ordinary ways the past is lost — not fires or catastrophes, but the everyday decisions that quietly erase records, like a family clearing out a box of irreplaceable papers after a death. Mullaney sets this against entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, and his argument that you can’t hack your way out of decay — you can only slow it down.

We discuss his central thesis for the digital age: that digitization is not preservation. Mullaney explains why magnetic and optical media are among the most fragile formats ever made, why even Stanford has digitized only one to two percent of its archives, and why he’d rather see institutions invest in better finding aids than in mass scanning that produces files without meaning.

The conversation turns to why any of this matters. Mullaney argues that writing history is the same act as living a life — both are acts of compression that throw out nearly everything to hold onto a coherent story. We explore how this connects to identity, to compression as a definition of intelligence, to Durkheim’s anomie, and to the difference between biological death and the death of the creative impulse.

We get into the politics of forgetting: the EU’s right to be forgotten, “design for forgetting” as an engineering principle, and Mullaney’s view of what a dignified disappearance looks like — the park bench a stranger sits on without ever knowing whose name is on it, rather than the statue no one reads. He makes the case for being “okay and not okay with it at the same time,” rejecting both nihilism and hedonism as easy ways out.

We close on the AI angle, connecting Mullaney’s finding-aid argument to my own work building tools like an MCP server for congress.gov — the idea that archives need a navigable map more than they need total digitization.

Get the book: How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324020783) (W. W. Norton)

Follow Tom Mullaney: X/Twitter (https://x.com/tsmullaney) | Stanford profile (https://profiles.stanford.edu/thomas-mullaney)

Listen on your favorite platform:

Apple Podcasts:

Spotify:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshakRSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

I sit down with Aidan Beshoff, a qualified hypnotist, certified practitioner of clinical hypnotherapy, past life regression, QHHT, and ceremonial magick, and the founder of Higher Self Hypnosis. For the past five years, Aidan has helped others overcome deep subconscious patterns through an unconventional path that bridges ancient wisdom and modern science.

Our conversation begins with Aidan’s own story — hitting a breaking point during COVID after years of anxiety and depression, and discovering meditation as a gateway into the subconscious mind. He describes the subconscious as a dimension of ourselves that extends beyond what we can directly perceive, using the iceberg model and a VR simulation analogy to illustrate the relationship between conscious awareness and the deeper layers beneath it. We discuss why the subconscious is so difficult to study empirically, and why that difficulty has kept practices like hypnosis in the same category as witchcraft until relatively recently.

We then turn to the mechanics of hypnosis itself — what differentiates it from meditation, how it employs imagery, symbolism, and emotion to bypass the conscious mind’s filtering layer, and why suggestibility and agreeability are such critical factors in whether hypnosis works for a given person. Aidan walks through the surprising efficacy data: a 70-80% success rate for chronic pain versus only 40-45% for addiction, and explains why — with addiction, part of you still does not want to change, whereas with pain, all systems are on board except the one that isn’t.

The conversation goes into deeper territory as we explore past life regression. Aidan argues you don’t need to believe in reincarnation for the practice to be useful — the subconscious is essentially painting a movie you can extract wisdom from, drawing from what he describes as a collective source. He shares that people with narrow belief systems tend to regress to childhood, while those with broader frameworks have reported experiences on different planets or as pure energy. The point, he insists, is never who you were but why you had that experience.

We close with Aidan’s personal motivation — a childhood obsession with fantasy and magic that was stripped away during adolescence, and how engaging with these practices re-mystified his life. He describes ceremonial magick as “a cross-section between art and math,” and likens these practices to becoming a better surfer: they don’t take away the waves, but they make you better at riding them.

Aidan on Instagram: @hi.subconscious | @higherselfhypno

---

Listen on your favorite platform:

Spotify:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshak

RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

I sit down with Rambo Van Halen to discuss his new book, Hollywood Samizdat, released through Passage Press, which serves as a personal account of his experiences in the film industry.

What was initially intended as a farewell letter to the film industry turned into a more profound reflection—a kind of obituary for a once-thriving sector that he believes is no longer what it used to be. Rambo candidly shares his thoughts on the decline of traditional Hollywood, describing it as a significant loss of artistry and craftsmanship.Rambo highlights the impact of a changing media landscape, drastically altered by feminization, economics, and risk aversion. He discusses the industry's shift away from original content, with more emphasis on sequels and remakes due to a fear of financial loss. This risk-averse culture, combined with the effects of technology and changing societal norms, has led to what he describes as a disheartening era for filmmakers and audiences alike. He reflects on his experiences as a line producer, navigating the complex and often dysfunctional dynamics of film sets characterized by power struggles among executives and a new wave of corporate governance.Rambo candidly shares his thoughts about the corporatization of the industry, attributing the dilution of creativity to a more collaborative but ultimately less decisive approach in decision-making—thanks to the impact of movements like Me Too. We explore the implications of this shift and how it has led to a creative landscape dominated by committee decision-making rather than inspired artistry. The contradictions inherent in this new environment are further complicated by the influx of technology companies entering the film space and their obsession with metrics. This has changed how stories are created and the type of content that gets greenlit, raising questions about the integrity of artistic expression.Throughout our conversation, we reflect on the intersection of identity politics and filmmaking, discussing how diversity initiatives have prioritized representation over competence. Rambo shares anecdotes of the industry's changing dynamics, particularly the challenges of maintaining a meritocratic environment in light of new hiring practices. He draws parallels between Hollywood and the tech industry to highlight the broader implications of these shifts across various sectors.As the discussion winds down, Rambo shares his vision for the future of entertainment—exploring potential avenues outside of traditional filmmaking and the unique opportunities for live performance. We contemplate the value that humanity places on genuine, shared experiences in a world increasingly moving toward digital isolation.This conversation offers a multifaceted view of the contemporary film industry, reflecting on its past glory and the challenges moving forward. Rambo's insights provide not only a personal narrative but also a broader commentary on the state of creativity, audience engagement, and the future of storytelling in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

LINKS:

Rambo on X:

https://x.com/RamboVanHalen

Buy Book, Hollywood Samizdat:

https://passage.press/products/hollywood-samizdat

If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes.

Listen on:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshak

Apple:

Spotify:

RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

I sit down with Matt Parlmer, founder of GenFab, to discuss the re-industrialization of America. Matt came to manufacturing through software engineering, watching supply chains buckle during COVID and realizing how little the country actually makes anymore. His response was to build a new kind of factory—one that replicates itself while maintaining capital efficiency, avoiding the trap of heavy equipment costs that dooms most manufacturing startups before they begin.

We cover the concept of the “parts farm,” a modular approach that sidesteps traditional machinery setups and keeps investment risk low. We discuss how falling component costs and robotics evolution have changed what’s possible, and why electronics contract manufacturing is GenFab’s current focus. Matt lays out his plans for vertical integration and proprietary production capabilities aimed at competing with Chinese manufacturing directly.

The conversation turns to what re-industrialization actually requires: not just technology, but cultural and policy shifts. We talk government investment, trade policy, the skill gaps in the manufacturing workforce, and whether America has the collective will to treat making things as essential to national resilience. Matt makes the case that manufacturing isn’t just an economic sector—it’s civilizational infrastructure.

LINKS:

* Support Nick Simmons’ wife and family’s GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/honoring-nick-simmons-life-and-legacy

* Matt Parlmer’s memorial post for Nick Simmons:

* General Fabrication website: https://www.genfab.co

* Matt Parlmer on X: https://x.com/mattparlmer

* General Fabrication on X: https://x.com/genfabco

If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes.

Listen on:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshak

Apple:

Spotify:

RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

Aneil Mallavarapu is a biochemist, award winning computer scientist, and Managing Partner at Humain Ventures; investing in early stage life science and health tech startups.

We talk about his pioneering work in systems biology at Harvard that led to the creation of Little b, a programming language for modeling biological systems with modularity and abstraction, the phenomenology of consciousness, the “hard problem” of consciousness, taking consciousness as fundamental, the limits of radical materialism, why our brains are not like classical computers, reconciling theories of consciousness with physics, the computational intractability of consciousness, the specter of AI civil rights, and Austin as the epicenter of the emerging science of the mind.

Aneil on X: https://x.com/aneilbaboo

His paper, "Programming with models: Modularity and abstraction provide powerful capabilities for systems biology"

If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes.

Listen on:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshak

Apple:

Spotify:

RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

Kyle Housley is a writer and co-host of a new podcast, Horizons Review, with longtime friend of the show, Cody Moser, exploring neglected intellectual texts and thinkers. We discuss the pathologization of normal relationship dynamics through misused psychological terminology, and extensively examine Second Amendment jurisprudence, particularly Kyle's disagreement with the Heller case on original meaning grounds.

Kyle critiques how terms like "narcissism" and "transactional relationships" are misapplied to pathologize healthy interpersonal expectations and natural give-and-take in friendships and romantic partnerships. He argues this reflects broader cultural problems with dismissing relational obligations in favor of personal convenience.

The majority of our conversation focuses on Kyle's disagreement with the 2008 Heller case. He argues that the core holding identifying self-defense as the primary protected right is wrong on original meaning grounds. Instead, he contends the amendment's original purpose was to protect citizens' right to bear arms most useful in military service to maintain effective militias, not individual self-defense which was already protected under common law.

Kyle provides extensive historical context on the founders' deep concerns about standing armies versus citizen soldiers, heavily influenced by Roman Republic history and fears that professional armies would lead to the same factional civil wars that destroyed Rome. We explore the distinction between a "right to rebellion" versus organized resistance, the founders' view of standing armies as mercenaries, and how the militia clause connects to republican virtue and citizenship.

We conclude by examining modern challenges to Second Amendment interpretation, including 3D-printed guns and drone warfare, and how technological advances create new questions about effective citizen militia capability in the 21st century.

Horizons Review:

On X: https://x.com/horizonsreview

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@horizonsreview

If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes.

Listen on:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshak

Apple:

Spotify:

RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

If you’re subscribed to Hacking State you may recall that you were promised not just Poli-Phil and Cog-Sci, but also Compute, and boy do I have some compute for you.

About 3 weeks ago I got the insatiable bug to build out an MCP server for the Congress.gov API.

This small, civic-minded project unwittingly became the catalyst for rebooting my startup, and re-grounding myself in a craft and a calling on the heels of one of the most difficult and tumultuous periods of my life.

For those of you unfamiliar, Model Context Protocol (MCP), is a new open standard created by Anthropic that allows LLMs to talk to other computer systems. What this means is that any application or server adhering to this protocol can communicate with LLMs in a way they understand. Essentially, MCP opens the entire internet, as well as local file systems, databases, IoT devices, and anything else running a computer, to LLM-powered chatbots, AI agents, and even other MCP servers.

This means anything with an API, especially a public and free API, like the one for Congress.gov, now has the opportunity to live in your LLM client (i.e. Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc…) where you can interact with it in natural language.

Seeing this as a unique opportunity to 1.) learn more about a frontier technology; 2.) be the first to build something that’s never been built before; and 3.) release a genuinely useful public utility that’s on-brand and folds neatly into my then-dormant startup, LawgiverAI—I couldn’t pass it up.

This is the story of why I built CongressMCP, how I did it in three weeks, and everything that went wrong with its release

In November 2024, as my startup and personal life were on the brink of ruin, Anthropic released Model Context Protocol. For the past 6 months I had been stretching my executive capabilities and finances thin trying to make LawgiverAI work as a first-time solo founder. By this point I had spent months building and releasing an MVP, conducting customer interviews, and trying to solicit investment. I met with angels, pitched early stage funds, had an advisor who promised to make good introductions, and none of it went anywhere. The MVP had a glimmer of something useful, and it worked, but was nowhere near mature enough to make inroads in the B2B legislative tracking space. Moreover, my intimate relationship was starting to fail as I became increasingly stressed and irritable trying to save a sinking ship, promising that it was just a patch job in the hull, with water rising dangerously close to my neck. I was exhausted, overworked, in debt, disillusioned, and losing faith.

This confluence of conditions made me so myopic that when MCP came out, I couldn’t see it as anything other than an existential threat to my startup. The MVP I had built featured a chat-with-PDF interface, in-line citations, semantic search, and intelligent tagging with a backend using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) on a vector database of every congressional bill. At conception it was an application of the latest AI tools and prompt engineering in a novel space; but by the end of the year its core features had already become commonplace, and the paradigm of development I was in—static RAG without evals, agentic flows, or proprietary data, was already seeming outdated. Such is life in an AI startup. MCP, which offered the potential for instant access and reasoning on that very same data pipeline I had worked for weeks to build, looked like the death knell for my barely fledgling startup. I was out of money, out of time, and the stress left me out of ideas. So I stepped back.

A friend and mentor, Nick Cassimatis, generously offered me a job, part time, at his startup—he knew mine was failing and this would give me the opportunity to stabilize my finances a little, buy more time to find investment, and maybe decide to stay on if things didn’t work out. He threw me a lifeline, and for that, I’m extraordinarily grateful. Within days of accepting the offer, however, my long term girlfriend pulled the trigger and broke up with me. This devastating blow left me without the emotional bandwidth to creatively pivot or pitch my way out of the hole I was in. I could work and slowly rebuild my startup, but I couldn’t work, rebuild my startup, and grieve all at the same time. I stopped working on Lawgiver completely, took a full time offer from Nick a few months later, and thought maybe I’d try again some day with something else.

While I was working my interest in MCP began to grow, not because I had a good idea of what to do with it, but because the platform we were building, a no-code collaborative database that let you chat with anything and had some very secret sauce for working with AI and structured data through a unified system of ontologies, began to look threatened by it as well. I experimented with MCP on my own time and after several conversations with Nick and our product lead about the potential of MCP, its threat to our business, and what to do about it, we determined to co-opt it by integrating MCP totally into the platform. It worked. A week of dev time and some UI decisions later, we had a system whereby anything and everything on the platform could be talked to in Claude Desktop through MCP. It didn’t solve the platform’s other problems, and it didn’t exactly present an obvious use case, but it did stave off obsolescence and it gave myself and the team an opportunity to work on something new and exciting. Then, I was let go at the end of April with a couple months severance. I began formulating what I should do next.

After several weeks of grinding job applications, learning about new AI automation workflow tools, and trying my hand at freelancing, I noticed myself returning again and again to a desire to get deeper into AI. I had experience as an AI developer, but was not quite a machine learning engineer, and given the job market for devs, was beginning to worry that what skills I had were already outdated. Worse, I had taken a non-developer role at Nick’s startup, and had stopped coding for the most part while there. In the span of 5 months my skills had degraded. I was also concerned that the proliferation and success of AI automation workflow tools like Make.com and n8n meant that even coding itself was perhaps becoming passé. Vibe coding was another trend I didn’t see favorably, since it meant junior developers, designers, and PMs could quickly spin up prototypes and even full-fledged products, in some cases, without significant experience at all. How could I differentiate myself in a market with a collapsing middle, where all the jobs and money flowed to deep specialists and ML engineers, while the bottom became swamped with AI-empowered hungry vibe-coders vying for attention and opportunities?

The answer, as cliche as it sounds, was to follow my genuine interest. Through all this I still had an interest in political philosophy and governance, in how technology changes our relationship to power, each other, and ourselves. I had taken some of my newfound free time and doubled down for a period of weeks on my Youtube channel, which was going well, but not at the level where I could draw life-sustaining income before money ran out. After earning a pittance freelancing on Upwork, having a few AI automation consulting gigs fall through, and also finding I didn’t quite enjoy the attempt at pivoting into an agency model, I decided to face the music and return to what I know best: building things. I was going to return to coding, learn the new AI developer tools, and find something worthwhile to work on that would at the very least increase my chances of landing a job.

A few months back I had taken a half-hearted crack at a congressional MCP server one weekend night. I managed to get a very dysfunctional demo up in the span of 3 or 4 hours, but it barely worked at all. Shortly after leaving the company, I had spun up a comprehensive MCP server for the Podbean API, both to learn more about MCP,…

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Herman, a philosopher and senior research fellow at the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.

We explore a distinction that Charles has been developing, which revolves around the concepts of honor versus dignity cultures. Drawing insights from his Substack post titled “A Short Survey of Honor and Dignity,” we look at how this theoretical framework can help explain significant pairings throughout Western history, including the philosophical debates between Epicureanism and Stoicism, Romanticism versus Classicism, and the modern cultural divide between liberalism and conservatism.

To start, Charles defines the core attributes of honor and dignity cultures. In an honor-based culture, esteem is earnestly sought and is predicated on notions of trust, respect, and earned merit. Individuals are expected to exemplify socially approved behavior to maintain their standing and reputation. In contrast, dignity cultures center around inherent worth and individual rights, grounded in the belief that all human beings deserve a certain measure of respect, regardless of their achievements or failures. This fundamental distinction, as Charles elaborates, has immense implications on behaviors and social interactions within these cultures.As our conversation unfolds, we discuss how the perception of status differs radically in honor versus dignity systems. Honor cultures traditionally elevate status through established hierarchy, often venerating elders and those who have earned their merit. This contrasts sharply with dignity cultures, which emphasize equal rights and universal dignity upheld by rationalism, a legacy of Enlightenment thought. Charles analyzes how these two cultures negotiate relationships, particularly in contractual matters, shedding light on cultural tensions witnessed in historical and contemporary political negotiations.

Charles' Substack: https://charlesherrman.substack.com/Diverting into the realm of risk, Charles highlights that honor cultures appear more accepting of death and risk-taking, viewing these as part of a dignified existence. This differs from the almost preventative, risk-averse mindset prevalent in dignity-based societies. The conversation probes deep into the psychology of risk, challenging us to consider how these frameworks fundamentally affect ambition and the pursuit of personal goals.We further contemplate the adaptive qualities of these cultural systems. While Charles notes that 90% of the world's current population embraces honor-based systems, he suggests that adaptability is not inherently tied to type of culture. Rather, he points out that historical shifts—such as the changing landscapes of governance in modern China—demonstrate that various political systems can exhibit forms of adaptability.The discourse also touches on the implications of free riding within dignity cultures, especially in the context of immigration policies in Europe. Charles critically examines how dignity frameworks, which emphasize inherent worth, may inadvertently neglect the pragmatic implications of individual contributions to society, illustrating a vulnerable point in the dignity culture paradigm.As we wind down, the conversation shifts to the philosophical roots of dignity, questioning how secularization and the loss of metaphysical foundations may impact its future longevity. Charles argues that while dignity is a relatively recent sociocultural construct, the progress made in this aspect over the last few centuries cannot be overlooked. Yet, he emphasizes that the respect and adherence to human rights remain critical challenges that practitioners of dignity culture must navigate moving forward.This episode invites listeners to reflect upon the nuanced interplay between honor and dignity within their own contexts. We draw conclusions on how these cultural frameworks influence our personal interactions and societal structures, highlighting the potential for mutual understanding and respect across differing cultural ideologies. Concluding our dialogue, Charles encourages the audience to explore his works on various platforms, as he captivates with further examination of these critical themes.

If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes.

Listen on:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshak

Apple:

Spotify:

RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe

In this episode, I sit down with Uberboyo, a prominent YouTuber and Nietzschean thinker, to explore the complex relationship between Christianity and Nietzscheanism.

Our conversation begins by examining what it means to be "Nietzschean" - not as an ideology, but as a methodology for approaching morality and understanding psychological patterns in society. We discuss how moral systems evolve with changing demographics, comparing the nationalist God of the Old Testament with the more universal God of later Christianity. Uberboyo presents a fascinating neurological perspective, discussing how the brain's threat detection center influences both religious belief and tribal identity, suggesting both are rising among younger generations disillusioned with modern culture.

The conversation goes into the psychological distinction between "life-affirming" and "life-denying" worldviews, with parallels drawn between ancient Rome's decline and our current cultural moment. We discuss the challenges facing Western civilization, the generational divide between institutional "Boomer" thinking and the more tribalistic instincts emerging in Gen Z, and whether there might be a path forward that incorporates elements of both Christian and Nietzschean thought. Throughout our discussion, we grapple with profound questions about metaphysics, morality, and meaning in an age of decadence and cultural transformation.

Despite our challenges, Uberboyo offers a white pill of hope: the possibility that younger generations might organically develop healthier moral instincts, potentially leading to cultural renewal in the West.

Uberboyo's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrk8Y2fsR5i_5c1iTR9tZpg\

Uberboyo's website: https://uberboyo.com/

If you enjoyed this talk, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes.

Listen on:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexmurshak

Apple:

Spotify:

RSS: https://feed.podbean.com/hackingstate/feed.xml

Get full access to Hacking State at www.alexmurshak.com/subscribe