Corey, welcome to New York City Podcast.
Thank you for having me. I don't really like being on
podcasts, but here we are. And so I thought I'd maybe
interview you and then maybe it could be, you know, back, back
and forth, but let's go. But, but maybe just to, to set
the, the, the, the virtual stage, maybe you can just
summarize in like 2 minutes what we just talked about on our
tour. And then from there, I'll dive
into some of the questions that that that I was thinking about
on our in our walk. Totally.
Yeah. So briefly, as we know, it was
easier to start Netflix and reform Blockbusters, easier to
start Bitcoin than reform the Fed, and I believe it's easier
to start a new city than reform San Francisco, and may even be
easier to start new countries than to reform America.
And at least with 99.99% of people working on the reform
path, we should have some small fraction of people working on
the path for building alternatives, which tech is good
at, right? Peaceful reform by just building
an alternative. And then, you know, the
customers of the old come to the new, the parallel institutions.
And in a sense, what we've done here at network school is just
like you take a Google Doc and you print it out, or you take
metaphorically an Amazon shopping cart, you print it out
to your doorstep, right? Like it comes to your door.
Or you take a, you know, Uber and the app and you print out an
Uber to your door. In the same way we're taking a
cloud community and we're printing out in the physical
world and we're showing we can do that here at network school.
And if we prove that here, we can scale that out to other
network school nodes around the world.
And eventually we can do that where we have many students and
many people come to network schools start their own start up
societies and pop ups, become the new startups.
And so that's it. And so how's it going?
I think it's going great. I don't know.
Give me your impressions. You were here.
I think it's pretty cool. Yeah.
Yeah, so I just got here, you know, less than an hour ago and
my, you know, Instagram versus reality is I thought, you know,
it was going to be a little quiet and and not that many
people. But but in fact, when I arrived,
it seemed to be like a bustling sort of place.
And so I was surprised to in a very good way to to see that.
And so I guess how do you think about success in KPIs for this
place? Remind me, how long is it?
It's how long has it been been a place?
Just a year, just a year or so. How long has it been?
I think this has been a place for about a year.
We open network school September 24th, 2024, right?
So it's just a little bit over a year, but a year and a yeah.
And I think we've succeeded in bringing people from more than
100 countries here. And basically, I think it feels
like SFI think it like the good parts of SF, right?
You know, like, it's like the tech.
It's kind of like walking into a tech cafe.
Which surprisingly, they're limited in SF where you can walk
into a tech cafe past certain hour.
Yes, that's right. So we keep ours open late and we
are essentially something where there's a recognition that, you
know, there's many cities around the world that have Unicorn and
so on. Now, tech is decentralized out
of SF. I'm sure you see that in your
founders. The Internet is obviously
outside of SF, most billionaires are not American and so on, as
we were just talking about. So can we just print out the
values of the good parts of SF in California and tech, can we
print them out somewhere else? And that's what we're doing.
Here understood on our walk we were you.
You mentioned about some of the our friends being in denial in
the United States. Yes, talk to me about that.
And what else do you think people are in denial of?
Sure. So the issue is basically that.
Think about, for example, during the Biden administration, too
many people. It was obvious that Biden was
senile, yet he managed to make it through the 2020 election and
four years of a presidency and even the Democrat primary and
then even six months of like the general, you know, election
period until at the very final moment, like 3 months before the
election, it was finally marked to mark and acknowledged.
OK, yes, he was seen it all along.
And it's this is this thing where you can see on Polymarket,
like Biden's chance of being the nominee or so.
And it just then collapsed like this, right?
So and Polymarket was maybe the best tracker we have objective
sentiment because you weren't necessarily doing a real time
poll on that. And and so that's the mark to
market, right? The West right now is in this
weird stage where whether it's SVB or it's FTX or it's Biden,
they are denying that rather than a gradual decline like this
where it's sort of acknowledged all the way down that they are
quote, taking the L, right? They deny and then it's just
digital death, correct? It's like a square wave drop
off, correct? All those things you mentioned
happened. What, what do you think it is
today that they're in denial that it hasn't happened yet?
But. Well, several things.
One is 1 that's happening right now is the death of the dollar,
right? Gold is appreciated by it's
doubled against the dollar in the last two years.
And Bitcoin has quadrupled against the dollar in the last
two years, which means really what's happened is the dollar
has dropped 50% against gold and 75% against digital gold.
And so that's like we're in the middle of this.
But people, you know, there'll be a point.
I don't know exactly the point. Maybe it's $10,000, you know, an
ounce for gold, or maybe it's, I don't know, $200,000 Bitcoin.
I don't know the exact number. There'll be some number where
people realize I'm not getting wealthier.
It's the dollar that's getting weaker.
There's a loss of confidence. You know, Powell was talking
about stimulating into an already, you know, kind of high
inflation economy because they might need that for the 2026
midterms or something like that. Dahlia was written about this.
Elon went to the government, our best guy who could literally
land a rocket with, you know, chopsticks and do electric cars
and brain machine implants and genuinely have more.
I mean, Tesla humanoid robots, Tesla diner things, the kinds of
things you can manage in parallel.
As you and I know, we know a lot of people in this space.
It's remarkable how many things you Elon said it can't be done
right. So our best guy went in and said
the US government can't be reformed after going all in in
an Elon way. There's been essentially, though
it's not being called this, a surrender to China.
That just happened where essentially, heck, Seth and
Trump said everlasting peace with China after this meeting.
And the new National Defense Strategy, when it's published,
it is reported to essentially be withdrawing American troops from
East Asia back to the Western Hemisphere.
And then of course, there's the political, ongoing political
fighting within the US. And So what they're in denial
about is simultaneous economic, military and political decline.
And it's not just confined to the US, it's happening in all
the G7. If you look at yields, for
example, they're spiking in the USUK, Germany, Italy, France,
Japan, Canada. And there's headlines like the
UK may need an IMF bailout, France may need an IMF bailout.
But isn't the IMF composed of these countries, right.
So you're seeing essentially the simultaneous collapse of the
major countries that fashion, whether you call it the the, the
international community, the rules based order, the Western
world, including Japan, the American Empire, whatever you
want to call it, that's all going down at the same time.
And the issue is that people have seen lots of movies on,
let's say, invasions by aliens or or killer robots.
And it's actually easier for them to envision a post
apocalyptic world like this than a world where actually there's
simultaneous military, economic, political collapse in all
Western countries at once. Similar to what happened with
Biden, but even more severe, right?
That is what I think we're in the middle of.
But they'll be maybe some moment where it's recognized and it's
very dramatic. The way that social media works
is like this. And snap, I can say more of a
let me pause there. Cool.
And I guess my, my follow up to that would be like in a bad way,
but but So what, So what, you know, for people that are in the
Western culture and that are in America right now, you know, do
you think it'll be a a sudden flea or do you think it'll be a
gradual sort of recognition of this?
And I guess more more specifically, like, So what for
the person that's living? Extremely good question.
And you know, Dalia, actually I think if you read Dalia's book,
he thinks the US or the empire, American Empire.
By the way, I say American Empire in a in a most people say
it in a negative way, like it's imperialism or a Republic non
empire. But the left and the right will
say those things. But there was a good version of
American Empire, which was certainly a better empire than
the Soviets were the Nazis. And the central left and central
right version had diplomacy that was the best in the world and
signed all of these trade deals to everybody and the military
that was strongest in the world and generally maintain the peace
in the high seas and blue jeans rock'n'roll.
There are lots and lots of good things about American Empire,
right. So I'm actually somebody who
right and praise of it, you know, it's, it is at a minimum
mixed. So that's so you can't say it's
completely negative. There's a lot of positives about
it. There's, you know, the Internet
itself came out of that, the human genome project, blah,
blah, we could go on and on, right?
So I want to just calibrate and make sure that that that's being
understood. I'm, I'm definitely not a hater.
I am, I am, however, a realist, right?
And sometimes when you look at a company and you see its balance
sheet, you realize this one isn't going to make it.
And you have to give the hard news to the people in that
company that their salary is there.
And so, but you know what life is going to be different.
They're going to have to find a new job and so on and so forth.
However, we, we don't have is and, and by the way, you, you,
you know this overseas as well. Once in a while, you'll flip the
channel and you'll see some country where you know, it's a
failed state. Everybody's yelling and shooting
each other and you'll say, well, that sucks.
And you'll flip the channel because what are you going to
do? Are you going to go and
parachute over there and say that?
Right. And now I increasingly have that
feeling when I look at America. Everybody's yelling and shooting
each other. And so and so it's getting more
and more intense and agitated. But I don't think, I think it's
only a shadow of what it's going to be.
And the reason is dollar inflation is global taxation.
But I mean, that is, it's not just Americans who are taxed by
inflation, it's the entire world who is part of the US financial
system directly or indirectly. For example, all these countries
that buy Treasuries and they save in Treasuries if they hold
U.S. stocks. Even until the mid twenty 10s,
Alibaba and other Chinese companies were going public in
the US, right? If they have Delaware companies,
if and so and so, there's so many ways in which they're
dependent upon the US financial system, right?
Which is why Treasury is able to sanction all these countries and
you know, and so on. But now we're seeing
simultaneous run, and I'll get to your point in a second.
The salaries run from U.S. Treasuries into Chinese
treasuries whose yields are at all time lows, by the way, and
China's bigger than the G7 combined.
So if their yields are low and all the G7's yields are high,
that means neutral global investors who are not mandated
to buy treasuries because some people have that in their
charters, they have to buy treasuries, right?
So those who are not forced to buy treasuries, if you were
forced by the way you lost your shirt or the last few years,
you're complete debt. It's like when the worst times
ever bonds, maybe the worst time ever.
There's some charts that show that.
I think Charlie Bialiu post things like this could find the
exact chart, but it's definitely a bad time, if not the worst
time. So they're going out of U.S.
Treasuries, and they're going into Chinese treasuries, they're
going into gold, and they're going into digital gold.
So this whole thing, this financial system is going to
zero. And you're seeing that with, for
example, seizures of companies. You're seeing that with the
government taking equity stakes in companies.
You're seeing that with the tariffs.
You're seeing that with the wealth taxes.
On the left. You're seeing that would be
remittance taxes on the right. You're seeing that would be
property taxes where inflation is boosting property values.
The pie is shrinking. And even as the numbers are
going up, the actual real value is going down, which is why the
political fighting is getting more intense.
When that pilot collapses, then the last piece of paper holding
blue American, red America together was green, like a
tattered piece of paper, the dollar, because blue Americans
don't certainly don't vote for red Americans.
They don't socialize with them anymore.
They're in blue sky versus X. And they don't actually even
marry them. Only 4% of Democrats are married
to Republicans, right? So that's not actually a
country, It's an economic zone to reverse it.
You know, you've seen the tweet saying it's not an economic
zone, it's a country, right? It's actually an economic zone,
not a country, because these are two tribes like Sunni and
Shiite, right? And Catholic during the 30 years
War. They don't get along.
So green is the last thing holding them together.
When that tears, the whole thing is going to come apart because
the economic union comes apart. And the extent to which American
living standards are subsidized by dollar inflation every time
the trillion dollars is to give it just a very rough
calculation. Let's say there's 3 billion
people out of the 8 billion that are in the American dollar
economic union globally, right? If that contracts back to just
the 300 million of the US, right?
For example, what are the tariffs doing?
They're telling other countries, don't send your shoes from
Vietnam to America for print dollars, right?
Don't send your valuable goods to America for print dollars
because ultimately that's all America is sending back.
That's what the trade deficit means, right?
So you're saying dollars are not valuable outside America
anymore. Fine.
This is something which means the scale of American empire is
going to contract just like the Soviet empire contracted, right?
It went from this thing which had military bases in Cameroon
Bay and in Vietnam and Angola and and had bases in Cuba to all
the way back or like informal bases in Cuba to all the way
back to just Russia. And it lost Ukraine and it lost,
you know, the Warsaw Pact countries and lost Central Asian
countries. That's what's happening.
And what does that mean? Well, first is it means living
standards plummet to and how much they plummet.
If you go from 3 billion people to 300 million people, your
printing is spread over 90% fewer people.
So your inflation is way up, right #1 #2 is they're starting
to be retaliation against the US by the rest of the world. the US
passport has just dropped out of the top ten.
It's collapsed in terms of the number of countries you can go
through because places like Brazil, for example, have
reciprocity rules. If America makes it hard to get
in, they make it hard for Americans to get it right.
So US identity is actually plummeting along with US
currency. US currency is being devalued.
US identity is being devalued. So it becomes hard for Americans
to get out. Taxes go up.
Violence increases the shootings of CEO's, shootings of Charlie
Kirk and so on. And, and basically what I think
what the issue is, most Americans don't, I mean, they
know 1945 and they know 1865, they know 1776, but they don't
really understand 1917 or 1991 or 1949 or 1947.
That's say they don't understand the history of, let's say Russia
or the history of India or the history of China.
And those countries have histories where America's in a
current state that's more like a like a just state space theory.
Share More. OK, in in control theory, in
math, right, Like a, for example, a car, you don't
summarize its current state by just its position or its
velocity or its acceleration. You have all three of those in a
vector, right? And each of these are themselves
vectors. And then you have all these
other variables like how much fuel does have in the tank,
right? What is the state of each of the
tires? So it's like this big vector
that has all of these components on it, right?
And then given all of that, there's a system in the car that
says, given all this stuff, OK, we'll spend this much fuel to
accelerate. And you know, you can have a
very sophisticated kind of mechanism here where perhaps,
OK, we're running lower on fuel. So we're going to reduce the
velocity and, and so on and so forth.
So to to optimize fuel mileage, for example, right.
What it means is that the state of many complex systems is not
univariate. You can't just point to an
interest rate, for example, but it's multivariate, it's interest
rate, it's unemployment rate, but it's also how many people in
the country know math and you know, how many of them are
married to each other versus like childless and so all these
other variables, right? So if you think of a country as
having a vector of variables, I think the vector of variables
that the US is most similar to now is not 1945 certainly, which
is very highly homogeneous aligned integrated country with
the rest of the world collapsed. It's 3 examples, the Soviet
Union in 1991 when it was on the verge of collapse because it had
both ethnic nationalism in the union and and basically the
economic system was at the end of its legs.
India during partition. OK, so India had essentially 2
what were today Bangladesh and Pakistan flanking India and
essentially the borders were announced and people just ran
across the borders, right? And the Chinese civil war
between communists and nationalists.
And so you're actually seeing people pattern recognize at
least the last one of these now where they're like, wow, OK,
after this moment ANI election, it's communist versus
nationalist in America. OK, so that's one piece.
The second piece is Indian partition.
The geography is very similar to the East Coast or the you know,
West Coast is blue, Northeast is blue, heartland is red.
That's actually very similar to how Indian partition looked.
If you go and look at at the map, right?
And the migration back and forth is similar to Hindu Muslim
migration with partition where Reds are going to red States and
Blues are going to blue states. And finally the end of the
Soviet Union. People understand the economic
issues, they don't really understand the ethnic issues.
In 1989, a census came out that show that the Russian ethnic
group was down to 51% of the Soviet Union.
Many Americans just think of the Soviet Union as Russian, but
actually had like, you know, Turks and Uzbeks and Koreans.
It was this huge EUR Asian empire that spanned every kind
of thing that had Eastern Europeans.
And all these different ethnic groups started to feel oppressed
by the Russians and the Russians in turn felt oppressed by them.
The Estonians felt oppressed by the Russians.
The Russians moved in and made their country Russia fun.
And then vice versa, the Russians felt they were carrying
the weight of the union. And so the whole thing broke
about an ethnic terms, not just economic terms.
Both those kinds of factors are there in the US today.
Why the like wokes and Magda's both feel that each other is
oppressing them ethnically #1 right and #2 Keynesianism is a
lot like communism. Should I explain that?
I know, I know. I'm just like, rallying.
Go, go. No, no, no, I'll, I'll, I'll
what one thing I want to kind of shift to is, is kind of talent
pipelines, yes. And so there's maybe a clear
distinction whether you're in America or out of America of
where to go. If you are, you know, super
young and ambitious or just, you know, period ambitious, yes,
let's talk about America. You know, the ones that, you
know, they end up on the coast, most likely, you know, New York,
San Francisco or Boston. Where do you think that will be
in the future? How do you kind of think about
talent pipelines here where we are today?
And then kind of more broadly, if you're like 16 to 22.
Great question. What should you do now, given
everything that you just said? So at a minimum you should visit
Dubai. So visit Warsaw and Poland,
Dubai, Riyadh, Bangalore, Singapore.
If you're here at Singapore, come and visit NS Ho Chi Minh
City in Vietnam and and then go to Shenzhen in China.
But then also go to like the number 52 city in China.
Now you'll finally be calibrated on where the world is, right?
And what you'll see is that Poland, which is where Warsaw,
you know, so Warsaw and Dubai and Riyadh and even Bangalore
actually, and certainly Shenzhen and Ho Chi Minh City and
Singapore and some, you know #50 city in China you've never heard
of, have higher living standards than much of the US.
And so they're not Third world countries.
They're not backwaters, which they were in 1991, right?
Over the last 30 years, history's run in reverse.
And in many ways the former first world is becoming quote,
third world and vice versa. The reason I'd say that's the
first thing to do is you have to calibrate on where the world is
and media reports of this kind of thing.
There aren't Hollywood movies on this right?
The The New York Times, Anglo media is more and more and more
insular focus on the, the, the Civil War within or cold Civil
war or quasi cold civil war, whatever you want to call it.
And they're not showing images really of what's happening
outside because it's depressing to people who are still caught
in that Anglo kind of world. And our friends will.
They'll they'll tell me the we're building, we're building.
And I love them. I love them so much, right?
But to me, it's as if imagine, you know, they're on the
Titanic, OK. And they're like solving the
Reman hypothesis on the Titanic, right?
They're mashing the keys. They're they're having
breakthroughs in math, computer, whatever.
All this is happening, it's real.
It's genuinely real. But the vector on which they're
accelerating is not the vector on which they're decelerating.
And so the physical platform that people are taking for
granted, the reason I brought those historical examples is
nothing that most Americans have experienced, certainly most 10th
generation Americans, right? The longer you've been in
America, the less you've experienced genuine catastrophe.
And whereas if you're an immigrant, you have like, that's
other part of it, like if you're from Cuba, if you're from China,
if you're from India, which it was when socialist, if you're
obviously from Russia and you know, certainly the Jewish
community came from, you know, obviously Germany.
They've got maybe the most memory that things can go wrong
in America right now. The people who've been there for
a very long time think it will always get better.
You know, it's AUSA, don't count us out.
They'll basically quote homilies like this, right?
And that's similar to people thinking, oh, real estate always
goes up, you know, And so unless you look at the history of other
countries, you don't have a sense of how far it can go down.
Like actually, I'll put it a different way.
In tech, you know that just the fact that something has never
happened before doesn't mean it can't happen.
Example air flight, right? Like for thousands of years,
humanity could not fly. And you're crazy to think if you
could fly. And then one day we could,
right? Like AI is like that, right?
You know, space travel is like that and so on and so forth,
right? These things literally were not
possible and then it happened. So that's in a sense a positive
surprise. But now you have to visualize a
negative surprise like this, like like what COVID was, like
what the collapse of the Roman Empire was.
That's that's what I think. And so let's.
See, for talent, right? Yeah.
Talent calibrates by going outside the US, number one.
Then they're gonna see it's actually possible to build in
the physical world. The reason we've been confined
to building in the digital world is because of regulations and
rules in the Western world. Outside of that, those don't
exist. And at the 1 silver lining to
the American empire receding is that regulatory harmonization
also recedes. Do you know what that is?
Share it for those who don't. Sure.
OK, So FDASEC, all these three letter agencies, some anonymous
bureaucrat in Silver Spring, MD is setting essentially the
health rules for the whole world because like until recently the
Czechoslovakian FDA or the Chinese FDA, even the Chinese
FDA would respect the American FDA's decision.
In fact, even the fact that there was a a cognate of them
that those countries were structured in such a way that
they had AFDA equivalent, SC equivalent, they basically were
copying the American political system and how it was set up.
So the reason that both the government and pharma companies
like this is pharma could get its approvals in the US and they
could ship around the world. It was a homogeneous market in a
sense, right? This is called harmonization.
All those countries essentially sing together in harmony.
The big problem with this is some anonymous bureaucrat who
you've never heard of who was not elected and can't be fired.
So neither electoral nor market theories of accountability
actually, you know, deal with this.
They're saying the rules for the whole road and if they make a
mistake then whole swath of technology are are knocked out.
And this has happened with biotech, which is area very
familiar with and there's various kinds of holes on the
side of the system. For example, right to try laws
or LDT and CLIA for clinical laboratory tests or compounding
pharmacies for mixing, mixing drugs or off little prescription
or medical tourism. Those are five different
workarounds to get outside of the FDA system.
And we saw with, with the, with the first with Uber and Airbnb,
how much regulation was holding back innovation in the physical
world. And then with crypto AT100X
scale, how much the SEC and, and FTC and so on, CFTC were holding
back innovation in the digital world.
I think now we're going to see how much innovation in the
physical world is being held back by regulatory
harmonization, right? So the major opportunity for
talent is be mobile, be global, and realize that there's
actually advantages of being outside 20th century regulatory
spheres. And that doesn't mean by the no
regulation, it just means better rules.
So what I mean, I guess the B mobile part, you know kind of go
visit the cities you go and see like how do you think about
accelerating if you're, you know someone that's 20 years old
today and you go visit insert one of those cities you've spent
a lot of time in San Francisco, Do you think one will find that
communities there yet? So San Francisco is interesting
because it is possible San Francisco could go.
It depends if like someone like either Zuck or somebody like
Zuck who has yet to show themselves.
You know, like we're in a time where someone can come out of
nowhere politically like the Kelly or Madani or something
like that. You need somebody who has the
drive of a Zucker and Elon. And I don't know who that person
you'd have to either. Zuck is the only person in the
Bay Area who kind of has that level of of drive.
Go ahead. Go for it.
Say influence, drive, etcetera. Influence, drive, capital, and
so on to like what Elon is doing at Starbase, right?
What actually Republicans are doing in Florida is possible
that someone could do that in the Bay Area.
But it's also, I don't think most people in the Bay
understand the severity of their situation.
Should I explain why, please? They're building AI and other
things, but especially AI in the bluest city, in the bluest state
in the union and saying very publicly they're going to make
billions by putting lots of Blues out of work, right?
Because where they're putting out of work, they're putting
where they say they're putting them out of work.
I don't think they actually are, by the way.
I think AI, as I've said, does it middle to middle, not end to
end, but they're saying they are.
And that's being believed by other people.
So lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats, journalists,
artists like film makers, all these people who are already
being hit by inflation are seeing these people making
billions by putting them out of work in a state where the tech
guys are massively outnumbered. So when they're setting self
airing cars on fire in San Francisco, shooting CEOs calling
for wealth taxes, they proposed, by the way, 5% of all tax in
California. Did you see that?
I haven't yet. OK, so it's only targeted 200
billionaires and it's only a one time tax, but it's already
retroactive. So if it's passed in 2026, if
the quote billionaire was in the state in 2025, they are taxed.
Here's how it works. It's like it's taxed on the
value of your stock in 2025. So that means is they've got
some probability that this bill passes in 2026, right?
And it's a referendum or something.
If it passes. And the worst thing would be if
they they had let's say a billion in stock and it declined
in 2026. That means they need to
liquidate at least 5% of their stock this year in order to to
cover the tax bill next year or they have to budget for some
giant lawsuit to fight this if it does go through because the
retroactive tax or what have you.
The point is tech is in an extremely precarious situation
on in San Francisco and they've been lulled into a false sense
of security by this. It's kind of like a stock that's
dropped 90% and it's come up 30%.
We don't have the metrics to look at how badly San Francisco
fell and rose Like, yes, Lurie is better than before, right?
But think about you went from de Blasio to Eric Adams, who was
better and then you went to Mamdani, right?
So it can get worse. And so I think San Francisco is
in it's Eric Adams era, so to speak.
And it could get much worse if economic conditions deteriorate
and and especially if tech guys are doing OK or even great as
those conditions through because the Internet is fine, right?
Like the future in many ways is not blue America versus red
America, but the Internet versus China.
And so if it's because that's where capital and wealth and so
on are going, and so talent should be mobile tech talent
should not centralized in the Bay Area.
It should understand how well the rest of the world is doing
in the same way they're they're buying Bitcoin, right?
They're at least hedged against the dollar, right?
You should lease hedge against serious political instability in
the USA. So basically second passport is
much more important than your first home for many people.
By the way, you don't even may not even need a passport, you
can get visas, right? Why you can get like for
example, if you're of Jewish descent, you can you can make
Aaliyah to Israel, they'll give you a password.
If you're of Indian descent, you can get an OCI card overseas as
of India if you're of Irish descent, If you're of European
descent, there's there's procedures.
If you're like Italian American, you can get something right.
Many of the old world countries have some provision for like
citizenship by blood, not by law right?
You can also there's lots of digital nomad visas around the
world. It's like 3 dozen countries with
digital nomad visas. China just opened up AK visa.
Super interesting. So I, I, you know, I, I meet
with a bunch of people that are just starting their careers that
are, you know, all over the world and like the, the thing
that they're looking for, the thing that I can kind of sense
is they want to be in San Francisco, like trying to get a
plane to get out to San Francisco.
So you think, you know, passport should be, you know, second
passport should be kind of number one thing.
What other things you think people should strive for when
they're not in San Francisco but trying to further their careers?
Yes, so I think so. I recognize that it's consensus
for many people SF and but in many ways the most important
things happen when they're in informed numerical anti
consensus view. It's like contrarian but right
example. The TL fellowship right was the
consensus was you need to go to college.
Teal had seen ZOC and he'd seen Mark Anderson.
He'd seen others who had either dropped out of college, dropped
out of grad school and done very well and realized that that was
at least a pattern for some of the very smartest and he started
the Teal fellowship to prove the point is extremely non consensus
at the time. People forget how non consensus
it was. That's what I'm kind of excited
to be here since I think this is non consensus.
Yes, that's right. Exactly.
So, you know, but it produced Vitalik and Bruce.
Dylan Fielder produced a bunch of really, really, really
amazing people. And he was contrarian, but right
on an important trend and and he actually did the experiment
right. And so my view is I like a lot
of people who are going to SFA, lot of our friends are.
I just think they think about technical risk but not political
risk. And is that it just purely kind
of like? That's that.
I mean, that's it. But that that's like it's a huge
hit for sure. Exactly.
It's it encapsulates so much in it because political risk is
regulatory risk. Like actually, you only give it
a tech analogy, right? If you think of the state as a
platform, right? There's often debates about what
should the public sector do? What should the private sector
do? Let's have a different analogy,
which is, you know, like Apple's iOS or Google's Android, right?
These are developer platforms and people can build apps on the
platforms and they can they can do well, right?
But the platform maker also builds their own first party
apps. And sometimes if they see 50
people who are building something, you know, let's say
some location services, say, you know what, let's offer a
platform level service for this. We take an abstraction that all
of you guys can use and that's actually in a sense, the public
sector as a platform, like a really smart, you know, rational
public sector creates these kinds of services, right?
And so the platform in which you're building is ridiculously
important. If you make the wrong platform,
chase, if someone built on BlackBerry as opposed to
building on iOS or Android, they would just lose, no matter how
good a coder they were. They were just trying to fight
gravity. If you, if you start with a
Windows desktop app at the time that everybody's going to web
apps, you just, you know, lose. And So what are examples of bad
platforms building on Delaware, right?
So many people have had problems, you know this already,
right? Holding U.S.
Dollars. That's gone down a lot relative
to holding Bitcoin. What's what's your if you don't,
if you feel comfortable sharing like what percentage of your net
worth is in Bitcoin or digital assets versus the US dollar
versus gold versus. Well, I would say this, I hold,
I hold, you know, in a sense, I love Americans.
I love my American friends and, and all my people there and so
on. But minimum necessary America in
the sense of basically U.S. dollars.
For example, during the whole SUV kind of crisis, there's a
meme that said if you have like a, if you have more than 250K in
AUS bank account, then it's not protected by FDIC insurance and
some and so forth. Now what they did is actually
they replace that with Fed DIC insurance in the sense of the
Fed essentially said we will just print the difference or
what have you, which basically means.
So it's a little bit technical. Banks are supposed to have a
reserve ratio that say you, you put in 100 million there.
They can only lend out a certain amount and they're supposed to
keep some back. Most people don't know that in
2020, the Fed set the reserve ratio to 0.
It's no longer even fractional reserve banking.
It's fictional reserve banking. OK, so banks don't actually have
deposits on hand to, to support you pulling cash out.
So when there was like a, an attempt to pull out those
deposits there, they weren't there.
And also these banks actually have massively negative equity.
They owe far more than they have because they bought these bonds
that went underwater. So the entire thing is the
zombie financial system. And what that means is like you
don't only invest in U.S. dollars, what you can afford to
lose. So that's.
Is that your answer though? That's my answer, yeah.
You tend to vote with your feet. You're here.
You're not in America. And and and and.
To be clear, I hope I'm wrong, right?
But basically I just feel the platform underneath which we are
at has, has systemic risk. And now if that said, if you
hold Fiat currency by possible nation, what's the best Fiat
currency to hold? I'd say don't hold any of the G7
Fiat currencies because it's not just the dollar, it's a Canadian
dollar. It's, you know, like the, the
British pound and you know, all, all the, the euro and so on and
so forth. All of these are kind of in the
same like class class of of things that are basically in the
American empire broadly, the three things that have
historically been supposedly outside that.
So Switzerland is supposed to be independent.
It's no longer independent because they did the Russia
sanctions. Obama basically essentially
ended Swiss bank accounts with, you know, all this stuff.
And then also the Credit Suisse debacle that happened recently
where bondholders got wiped out. So Switzerland ain't Switzerland
anymore. What is Switzerland?
Bitcoin, right? Crypto.
That's genuinely neutral rule of law, right?
Truly neutral. It's not based on the human
opinion, right? OK.
But then in the Fiat world, I would say the UAE and Singapore
now the, the they're on the AD is pegged to the dollar and Sud
is soft pegged to the dollar. But they run on their own
ledgers and they've got very sophisticated financial managers
running both countries. And so if you had to hold and
they're, they're also very large currencies by float.
So lots of capital flows through.
So whatever your deposit won't even be seen in the noise of
that. So if you must hold Fiat AED and
SGD in my view. Now the one counter argument,
everything I'm saying to take the other side of it is stable
coins, the massive expansion of USD stable coins.
It may have a weird scenario where you know how all local
papers collapsed against the when all the papers went online,
the newspapers went online, all local papers suddenly lost their
geographical monopoly. They're printing the same news
as each other, they no longer have the trucks and so on to
give them a geographical monopoly.
So all of them lost to NYTWSJ Washington Post, which then in
turn lost to Internet first social media competitors after a
huge fight, right? So imagine all global Fiat
currencies lose to USD, maybe the Chinese yuan, maybe a few
other kinds of stable coins like this.
And those in turn get devalued against BTC and other
currencies, right? So lots of Fiat currencies are,
and we're kind of already there. Like in Bolivia, for example,
prices are quoted in USDT, right?
So the world first dollarizes and then bitcoinizes or
cryptoizes. That'll be a huge crazy kind of
thing, even crazier than the media wars of the of the 20
tens. The last question that was on my
mind was about trust and credibility.
Yes, thing you're doing here. What do you think the, you know,
what, what can you sort of take from the elite institutions, the
Stanfords, the San Francisco's, the, you know, United States,
the US dollar, you know, most people do think that is sort of
trust and right, high trust, high credibility.
What, what's your kind of take and and what are you learning
from that to to bring to here? Yes.
So I think the Internet is to America as America was to the
UK, right. So it's a version 3 point O.
So clearly like the Internet is as American as America was
British. So obviously America was a debt
to Britain. It speaks English.
It was, it was populated by British columnists and on and
on. All kinds of names there are
British and you've got a special relationship there.
And so the Internet is as American as America's British
because America eventually became something larger than
Britain. It went from common law to
constitution. The next step constitution to
smart contract right from 30 million ish 30 to 50 million
Brits, 300 million Americans, billions of Internet users.
So how do we rebuild trust? The next rules based order is
the code based order, right? So it is smart contracts.
It is Bitcoin, which you can trust more than dollar smart
contracts. You trust more than Delaware
crypto identity. You can't be denaturalized.
You can't have your crypt, your ENS, your SNS, your Etheremian
system login that can't be yanked from you in the same way
that perhaps your American identity can be.
And so we essentially restore trust by reducing the need for
trust with cryptographic trust. And so from that we can build an
entire parallel essentially legal system, which we've
already done. It's at multi trillion person
scale. It already manages, it's like
the the 3rd or 4th largest exchange in the world.
Nyze and NASDAQ are about to get flipped by crypto.
It already passed, I think Shanghai, right?
So I mean, you know, it's a big system, hundreds of millions of
people are in it and it's growing, right?
So something that's at hundreds of millions of people and it's
growing. That eventually is the successor
to the rules based order. It's a code based order.
So we take lots of concepts from that.
And with the crypto we can you know when, so when the system
crashes, what do you do? You reboot from cloud backup,
right? So that's what we'll do.
We'll reboot from cloud backup. Got it, got it.
And then sorry, last, last thing.
Let's say everything in your wildest dreams becomes true with
this place. And 1st kudos for you doing
this. And they're not not that many
people that create TL fellowships are kind of bold,
contrarian. That's like what you're doing.
What will be the next thing to do?
I might do this for the rest of my life in some ways because
it's a big thing. And you know, Zuck once said
like if he sold Facebook, he would just go back to doing
Facebook and so and so forth. So this is something in a sense
I've been working on for 10 plus years and I work on it every day
and I work on every hour of every day because I think we
need an alternative. In the same with the United
States was an alternative to the wars of Europe, right.
And I, I think the Internet and Internet societies are going to
be an alternative to what has come.
All right. Cool.
Thanks.