Hey everybody, welcome back to the show.
I am super excited because friend of the pod who gosh, I
don't know when the last time we did a pod was a couple years
ago, a couple years ago. Balaji Srinivasan is here in
Singapore and I'm in Singapore. I'm a little bit jet lagged, but
you're a great podcast guest because you got a lot of ideas.
And so I got to go visit you in Malaysia, just north of
Singapore, about 45 minutes. Just slightly West.
Slightly West of Singapore and you have started the network
school, the network state, all the stuff you've been talking
about for years. There's now a there there.
Six months ago, you found a place where there are apartment
buildings and space that is, I guess relatively cheap and
available. And you've got your fan base of
tech Bros from around the world and ladies joining you to build
what, what is the vision here for people who've heard of
Network State Network School and, and this sort of project
you're working on, which seems to be your life's work, what
exactly are you building? So network school is the first
node of a network society where it serves several purposes.
But you know, the United States was started actually not just
with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but with Harvard.
It was like literally a single room schoolhouse when it
started, right? And the Midwest, the land grant
colleges, like, you know, Texas A&M was like agricultural and
mechanical. And so that was meant to build
up the Midwest. Like, so you had a college and a
town kind of, you know, side by side.
You train the engineers and the humanists to help build the
society. And of course, the Bay Area,
Stanford and Berkeley helped build Silicon Valley, right?
So there are three examples in the American context where a
university and a town and a society kind of all, you know,
went together, right? And so that's what we're doing.
We are building a society ourselves, we're building A star
society that's also a template for other * societies.
And the way I think about it is this is the third type of thing.
Internet company, Internet currency and now Internet
community. If you go to likens.com, that's
you can see what we're doing. If you go to NS pretty.
Good domain name NS dot. Comns.com network state, so
right, so it's network school, but it also stands of course for
network state and network states plural, right?
And that's, that's important. So we have if you go to ns.com
dashboard, right front slash dashboard, you'll see more than
100 star societies around the world.
And the reason for this is we have these online communities
people sense if you're watching this, you're spending a lot of
time online, right. Like your, your definition.
Yeah, by definition that's right.
And so all our transactions are online, all our all our
communications are online, but many of our friends are online
and we don't see them in person, but we'd like to do that right.
So bringing those online communities together in person
actually has a physical network effect.
I mean, duh, yes, but also not duh right.
So we've unbundled the world onto the Internet and
everybody's alone at home. Now we rebundle the world into
the physical world. And when you do this, suddenly
you actually solve a lot of problems.
You actually, you reinvigorate democracy because when people
vote with their feet and move to a location, now look at, for
example, Starbase, right? Starbase, Texas, which just
incorporated Elon's new thing, right?
Yeah, where Starbase is located. Decided to take that town and
rename it Starbase and the people who are engineers at
SpaceX voted as well as some of the locals to create a new city
or town. New city or town?
And they won 97% of the vote, right?
97.7%, OK. And it was like 212 to six or
something like that, right? And the thing about this is that
is actually reinvigorating democracy.
It's Internet democracy because you're voting with your feet to
move to Starbase. You're voting with your wallet
to help build up this community, and then you're voting with your
ballot to ratify what you just did.
You're combining all three. You have skin in the game
because you actually move physically, You're physically
there, you're putting capital in.
And then as a consequence that you're also voting to to build
something. And so it's something you have a
lot of alignment in the community, right?
And that aspect of the frontier and the physical world,
obviously that built America, right?
A big part of what built America is you had all these people from
the old world who came out and actually there's a, you know, in
the mid 1800s, people would just, if they didn't like it on
the East Coast, they would go further in and they just build
their own society, right? And even the earliest Americans,
Americans, those were, you know, the European colonists and they
set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Virginia colony.
The whole point was that you had a new jurisdiction to do things.
Now, of course, people say, oh, the Native Americans were there.
That's true. But in many ways they were war
like. And so these new tribes came in.
So you had N Native American tribes.
Now you have N + 1 N plus 2N plus three.
They all slugged it out. And actually the Native
Americans were like brave warriors that lost battles.
But you know, for example, in Mongolia, they make statues to
Genghis Khan and so and they should make statues to Sitting
Bull and all of these, you know, kinds of quarters.
But leaving that aside, that's actually like a war that was
lost, a war that was won. That just happens all around the
world. Nobody has controlled any
territory forever. And so ideally, though, you want
to be able to do that today without any wars, without any
conflict, right? How do you do it without any
conflict? Because everybody thinks all the
land is taken, but it's actually not there's.
All kinds of, there's all kinds of spaces around the world and
when people see cheap space, plus they're nomads and they're
digital nomads, they have a high salary, a low cost of living,
which means more opportunity. And if you put like minded
people together, now you've got a bunch of people who are not
under economic pressure to live in the Bay Area, which we both
saw. What that did to people, it made
people miserable and their entire lives were filled with
this anxiety of not being able to keep up with other people.
And even the people who were supposedly keeping up felt like
they were under massive pressure to spend $100,000 a month on a
crazy lifestyle. And all the venture money that
we were deploying into companies was going to $4000 a month in
rent for a developer to have a one or two-bedroom.
It was insane. And what I saw when I came to
who you know the the network state network school.
This is network school. This is the network school.
In the network school, you have these buildings that were built
and not being utilized, and there's a whole back story
there, but it's not important. You found this incredible
opportunity and people can go live there for $1500 a month.
All in. All in food, gym, exercise and
their apartment and then be part of a community.
So as Paul Graham would talk about that whole like ramen
break even, you know, ramen funded.
It actually exists here. And there were 150 people there
all grinding on a Saturday. And so these people are coming
from 100 different countries to hang out with each other and go
to talks to learn to build what what, what is their motivation?
Because I understand your motivation.
You think there's a new mode of society, a new mode of
governance. We have other people in our
industry who believe in this. Peter Thiel's done seasteading.
Obviously, Elon is doing this town in Texas, and people move
to Texas because there's less regulation.
So I understand your motivation and other people's motivation
create new scientists higher function, but the individual's
coming. Great question.
Get me into their mindset. So several different think of
this as kind of like early cryptocurrency had various
different kinds of people that all came together and.
There's a wack pack of people. A lot of different people there.
There were people, Well, yes, but but successful.
Libertarian. Technical Anarchist.
Exactly. That's right.
So some people were ideological, right?
Some people just were in it for the tech, right.
Some people thought, OK, this could be very valuable someday,
right. Business opportunity.
Yeah, that's right. And, you know, there's a mix of
different types of things for some people came just because
it's cool, right? Yeah, weird, weird, cool,
etcetera. Right.
And so today, for example, at network school, what kinds of
people do we have? So we have those people first
of, you know, like maybe the, the number one demographic are
those folks who are remote workers and who often can't get
a visa into the West. So these are people can't or
won't don't want to go, right? They think it's over and so on
and so forth. But they're, they're Internet
first people, right? So that's how it express our
ideology, Internet first. So obviously I'm, I'm friendly
to, you know, people in the US and I'm friendly to many people
who are conservatives and so on and so forth.
But America's only 4% of the world and red America is only 2%
of the world, right? But if you say Internet first,
you include many of those people.
And you also say, hey, if you're Canadian, Australian, you know,
from the New Zealand, UK, that's this term Kanzuk.
If you're Indian, if you're European, Japanese or American,
the Internet is where you're all equal.
All nodes are equal in the Internet.
You can have the same monetary policy, you can have the same
contract law, smart contract law, you can have the same
transaction certification. Basically what the the
blockchain represents is not rule of law, which is breaking
down in some ways with Delaware and all the crazy things in the
US, but it's rule of code. So everybody's a peer here,
right? So, you know, The thing is a lot
of the sort of progressive values of, you know, equality,
democracy, science, media, I actually believe in those things
just on the recent corrupted versions.
Got it. So the people who are coming,
their motivation is to be around like minded people.
Like minded people that's right and they.
Want to build companies or build a life, So right, so meet
people, find a mate. What what's the motivation when
you talk to them 'cause it's only been six months, yes, but
you've got hundreds of people and yet thousands apply.
So yes, it struck a nerve. It struck a nerve.
That's right. So I think.
This is something where people want to build communities in the
physical world. We spent so much time online, we
want to build things offline, right?
So some of them are coming because they're remote workers
and they're tired of being by themselves.
They want to be with the community, right?
Got it. So it's alone or with people who
are also remote workers. And we've seen that this nomadic
lifestyle there was like an kind of different Airbnb type
startups and office sharing startups that try to organize
these people. But you've got such a big
profile socially and with the crypto community that you can
kind of be a beacon or a lighthouse today.
And I'm just a shilling point, you know, the the purpose is
crucially to this is just like the first one of these.
And I fund vegan ones and I fund carnivore ones.
I fund Hindu, you know, sharp societies and Christian ones and
Jewish ones, all of these different kinds.
There's there's some in Brazil, there's some in, you know,
Honduras, there's some in Switzerland.
And so it's of all different kinds of sharp societies.
That's quote true diversity, right?
Many different kinds of things. There's like Sanskrit immersion,
Latin immersion, many different kinds of sharp societies have a
different thesis on what would be a cool kind of of community
to build. And you'll see where they work.
It's again, just like a tech company.
You know, if we thought about early acts or early Twitter, it
seemed like the silliest thing in the world.
Why would anybody want to treat their breakfast?
But it became really important, right?
And so in the same way, there's many different concepts of what
a startup society is. OK.
So just to answer your question also again, A, remote workers,
B, people who can't get visas to the USCA lot of people who
ideologically want to build startup societies just like they
wanted to build cryptocurrencies.
That's very meta, yes. So they're looking at this
vision and saying the society I'm in is not fulfilling to me.
It feels broken in some way. It feels suboptimal.
And this seems exciting. Yes.
And This is why maybe the press, when they look at you as an
individual and crypto, they kind of look at it like these people
are crazy Internet people who don't want to pay taxes.
They want to, like skirt governments and create their own
world. And they're kind of leaving the
real world. It's not that.
It's their builders who want to build something that fits their
sensibility. That's right.
And The thing is everybody here pays taxes, everybody here obeys
regulations and so on. And the same thing like when I
CTO of coin base, I built a genomic something and so on and
so forth. We dot every I and cross every
T, right? So we make sure to be like
render under seizure what is Caesar's and so on and so forth,
right? But many, many countries
actually want these kinds of people there.
Yes, desperately, desperately, right?
Because most countries aren't rich countries.
Most countries are small countries.
In fact, most countries have actually less than 10 million
people. And so if a network school node
or start society node is open there, suddenly all this talent
and capital from around the world floods in.
All people want to do is be able to drink coffee, hit keys on
their laptop, build cool stuff, right?
Workout, workout. Dinner.
Yeah, exactly. Like have a life.
Exactly. It's really not that hard.
And this is a crucial thing. You don't just need tax breaks,
you don't need subsidization. People are happy to pay in a
sense, a subscription fee to a society where the, you know, the
roads work, the traffic lights are on and so and so forth.
That's fine. What they just don't want is to
be like attacked for being a tech worker or technologist.
And one thing also, I do think is going to be so I mentioned
the remote workers visas, the the network Staters, like
ideological network Staters. Then there's also people some
who want to join a startup societies and others who want to
join with the intent of eventually building 1 right.
So early coin base, for example, has a coin base diaspora of all
these people who've created lots of crypto companies.
So many of the people at Network School are learning the template
that we're building. And for example, there's small
things. It's actually, it's surprisingly
hard to get to San Francisco quality coffee.
It's not that hard, but it's like harder than you would
think, right? And other kinds of things like
parts of what we call the daily loop, like, you know, so for
example, you wake up, work out coffee, you know, office pod,
conference room and so on and so forth.
Once you actually start calculating that out and
minimizing all of the transit times, it's like almost like a
factory like thing, right? So then you can rack and stack
more office pods, more coffee stations as a function of demand
and so on, sort of so you can just save people so much time.
Whereas normally if they're in a big city, they're like, oh, my
gym is like 30 minutes across from me.
And that's like a huge tax on you every single day and so on.
So you can start optimizing daily life.
That gives them more time to just learn or sit on the beach
or what have you, right? Which is kind of like if you, if
you think about about what we do when we build products or
services in technology at our best, we're removing friction to
lighting customers and lowering the cost of it.
Yes. And what I saw today was a bunch
of people who are really happy and who are around like minded
people and who feel like they have a stake in it, which is
also super interesting because if you look at what happened in
America over our lifetime, the last 40 or 50 years, people feel
disconnected from it. They feel like they have no
agency. They feel like they're like
victims in the machine or cogs in the wheel, some something
more dystopian. And they feel like the the
government doesn't represent them.
But what I saw was a lot of agency, like you guys built a
gym and you guys are building the schedule and you have
speakers. So, you know, I, I think it's
pretty easy to be cynical when people look at it.
And I was watching some of the press coverage of I guess there
was somebody also doing this in middle of America.
They bought a lodge somewhere in Wyoming and your name was
mentioned over and over again that they were like inspired by
you. Do you know who I'm talking
about? There's there's some articles
and stuff. There's actually somebody who is
like a Berkeley guy who left. The Wyoming thing the.
Wyoming thing because they're into Dows or whatever, but
that's good. And I was like, I don't
understand why they're so upset. And these are like woke people
from like Wired magazine or whoever who are criticizing this
or I don't know if they were being sensationalistic, but
there seemed to be some animosity towards people saying
I would like to build my own society.
I can put. I can you put it in one
sentence? Please.
Yeah. They don't want us to have self
determination, right? Fundamentally, they basically
have replaced God with Gov. They worship these failing
western States and they are in a sense imperialist where they
want them to have bureaucratic power over the entire world and
everybody in it, right. And so because of that, if you
say thank you very much, you guys are your thing, but we want
to do our own thing, right? We want to basically say, hey,
we want to have our own society and we want to be able to
determine our own rules and we want to be able to live together
and so on and so forth. Even by the way, if you're just
Co living, forget even, you know, there's different stages
by the way, there's like Co living, then you might negotiate
a special economic zone and then, you know, eventually,
eventually, eventually maybe you've got you can get an
island, get sovereignty or what have you.
OK. But that's the last time did
that ever happened, that an actual government knew the
country was formed in the world, on planet Earth.
Yeah, it was the last time. Yeah.
Well, let me show you something. Right.
So actually there's so. Because I understand you're
making these like communes, kibbutzis.
I don't, you know, little societies, pods, however you
would describe what you're doing in this nascent state.
But the idea of like going and finding an island and saying,
hey, we have sovereignty, nobody can tax us.
Yeah, take a look. Ready.
So before I show you this graph, right, what is your mental model
of how many, like going back, let's say to 80 years, right?
What's your mental model of how many new countries were formed?
Wow, I'm trying to think of like countries that seceded from
their mothership would be the primary source of that.
I'm thinking of all the colonies of the British Empire would be
the the first group just logically or other countries in
the Middle East, like, I don't know, Qatar and those kind of
countries were part of UAE and they were forming and unforming.
Here's a graph. So you tell me.
OK, there it is. It's.
Forexed. It's 4X since the Yeah since
4:50 to 200. Yes, and The thing is I can show
you this graph. Well, those are UN member
countries, so they were accepted to the UN, but they maybe
existed as countries. Well, no, I mean The thing is if
you define what is a country that's actually an important, if
you define a country as a UN member, the first thing, most
people are surprised it's almost 4X over 80 years, right?
The second thing is, exactly as you point out, the British
Empire, the French Empire, and then over here, this big bump is
the Soviet Empire breaking down. All right.
And new countries arise, right? Sure.
Now, there's two important features of this.
First, if you go backwards in time, this is actually the most
centralized the world has ever been.
When you go backwards in time. I'll show you some graph.
The number of, you know, independent jurisdictions in
like, Germany. It just rises rapidly like this.
You have thousands and thousands of little, like, you know what
San Marino is. You ever been there?
No. OK.
It's like a little state lit. Let me show you say something.
So San Marino in Italy, right, is like this tiny, tiny thing.
It's a microstate that is like a piece of the past that still
sits in the present. It's like a little city there,
but it's his own sovereign country.
Wow. Yeah.
It's a UN member, right? And the thing about that is
Garibaldi, when he was unifying Italy, San Marino gave him
refuge. So he didn't unify.
He he let it keep its sovereignty.
OK, so that's like a duck billed platypus like this evolutionary
missing link. And it tells you, oh, all the
things we think of as countries like Italy, France, you know,
China, India, they're roll ups of lots of smaller city state
ish, like things that used to exist.
That's what the world used to be.
It used to be like fragmented like that.
And it got rolled up into these big things for the purpose of
conscription and taxation. Because you basically build
these giant, you know, nation states which have as many people
as you can pack in there, like the Soviet Union and so on.
And they all didn't fight each other.
And that's the century of giant wars and conflict and whatever,
right? I'm not saying everything about
that was bad, but a lot of it was bad, right?
OK, so now we're going in a sense back to the future where
just like we went from gold to Fiat to digital gold, right?
We're going from city state, nation state, network state.
Got it. I don't think everything goes to
network states, but I think that will arise.
And the big difference is network states are
decentralized, so they're everywhere and nowhere.
So CC is only in one place, but network state is decentralized,
just like Bitcoin is decentralized.
You've got nodes everywhere and you unify them as an
archipelago. Got it.
So they'll be these little outposts in different countries
of network state, errs, people who believe in the network state
concept that you've created. And then if any one of the nodes
goes offline, like when China was like, yeah, no more Bitcoin
or Korea had no cryptocurrency for a bit, I think then they
relented the distributed network heals because people could just
leave, that's good and go to another place.
And this seems to be sort of interested on your take on this
even in the United States where you think moving from one state
to another would be your right and would be a a great choice
for a human being to make. Like maybe I like the weather or
the people or the culture more in a different state or I just
want to change a pace. I've lived in three different
States and four different major cities in my life.
And I it's one of the great joys of my life is to discover those
new ones, but I've never had as much vitriol or questioning of
my decision to go to Texas from California, from California.
It seems like there's a group of people who are like, you're
doing this for nefarious reasons.
And and then even deciding to live on a horse ranch as opposed
to living, living in the city was also like, people are a
little critical. Like, why are you doing that?
Like, well, I can have my cake and eat it too.
I can go to California and New York anytime I want.
And then Keith Raboy was also derided for going for the sin of
going to Miami. You know why I, I, I'd argue by
it's because California's been under one party, Democrat
control since 2011. So you, California's not a
democracy, No, right. And that's actually why all of
the stealing for the NGOs, for the homeless encampments, the
homeless industrial complex has been out of control because they
destroyed democracy in California.
There's no democratic accountability for the Democrat
Party basically looting the conference.
That's how I'd put it. And so because that's the only
true vote against that is to leave.
Which is why I left. Which is why you.
Left, that's right. And so that's why Elon left,
right? He couldn't even to sign in San
Francisco, right? And there's like some signs of
life or what have you. I know some people.
I don't think it's falling into the Pacific, but I do think it
is in a very. It's a downward, it's a spiral.
It's yeah, I think, I think it is.
At a minimum, it has lost a lot relative to what it could have
been. It's a doom loop and I, I
consider it a doom loop and I consider Austin, what you're
doing here, what I'm seeing in Dubai, in the Middle East, Abu
Dhabi, this kind of like a boom. Spiral.
I think that's right. Where it's kind of working its
way up. That's right.
Energy seems to be people who are interested in it.
So OK, so we know that those people feel like they're losing
control and they also feel like they're losing high earners who
are creators. And I think this is like a very
pernicious thing because. They think of you as a slave,
right? Like basically.
But I'm a creator in capital. I know, I know.
But they want you to see every communist state was like this.
North Korea, East Germany, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and actually
also Nazi Germany. They all didn't want people to
leave. They put exit or they shot
people for leaving. They built the Berlin Wall
because their citizens were basically slaves.
That's what communism is. It's slavery, right?
It means 100% taxation is slavery, right?
You get there by being so far left for the workers paradise
that all the workers are in gulags, right?
So they don't want you to leave because they basically want you
to just work for them, right? Right.
And so exercising. I mean, The thing is, one thing
that's good though, is the right to exit.
He is actually a fundamental right.
It's in like the UN Charter of human Rights, right?
In a sense, the right to exit is the thing that distinguishes,
quote, leadership from dictatorship, right?
The leader let's you leave, right, Right.
That is, if people can't distinguish the two, the
difference is the dictator doesn't, it's a prison state,
right? But leadership is you've
voluntarily opted in to be there, and you can voluntarily
opt to leave. Right.
And they and they have to earn you being a citizen.
That's right. And they're of service to you,
which is how it didn't feel for a lot of us in California, New
York. And that's when this great
migration happened. People felt like, well, why am I
buying into this society which feels dangerous and deranged at
times, and I could go somewhere where it's more constructive or
more in line with my ideals. This is right.
And this is also actually the counter argument.
When people are like Elon, it's techno monarchy.
It's not techno monarchy, it's actually techno democracy.
Why every single person who's gone to Starbase chose to be
there? Yeah, and any person there can
leave. They opted in with their
presence. And I think that's like,
actually, if you think about voting like your vote doesn't
matter in California, New York, when to a certain extent, but
voting where you live, that is the ultimate vote, I believe.
Yes. And actually this is a important
paradigm shift because essentially what is democracy?
It's the consent of the government, right?
And I mean that's, you know, like the process and
reformation, they took away all the Catholics, you know, the
nothing against Catholics, OK, but like the the Catholic
Church, the Pope, all the stuff is in the Bible, right?
That's like superstructure that was added later.
Fine, there's all these precedents, whatever.
But the process and reformation said, let's clear away all that
and talk about the root. Go to the radical.
That's what radical means. Go to the root and say you know
the direct relationship with Jesus and you know so.
Yes, and so. Sorry.
So if you go to the root of democracy, it's the consent of
the government. And the problem is 51% democracy
is that 49% have not given their consent to the current, you
know, rulers, right? So and that's what you keep
getting. You get a 49 percent, 51% of
this back and forth. And the guys who win by 51% try
to govern like they've got a 99% majority and that produces
backlash. And we've seen that back and
forth, right? And then the elections become
more and more hard fought and that 2% flips the other way.
And then you get a huge seesaw this way.
The alternative to that to the two party system, is the 1000
city system. Migrate to the one that fits you
best and have consensus in that society that eighty, 9097% in
the case of Star Base agree that rocket ships going to Mars and
the noise pollution caused by them is not pollution, it's joy.
That's right. And every time we hear that
noise, we are excited and thrilled at progress, whereas
another person might consider that noise absolutely why they
didn't move to that area. They wanted quiet.
And here's The thing is, let's say that you take that as an
important cost, right, because the frontier is a filter, right?
The frontier filters for a certain kind of person who's
willing to take some pain for some gain.
We see that all the time in startups.
It's not a big company employee, right?
So take that example of Mars. So let's say you, you say, OK,
we want to get to Mars. We want to tell it the rocket
launches. So everybody just has ear
protection stuff at home. Sure, fine, you can solve that.
Maybe there's better sound perfect at home.
There's there's ways you can solve that.
When you set this as a goal of getting to the stars, then you
can use technology to mitigate the downsides, right?
And but it's whether people have that can do attitude.
They're aligned on the goal, right.
So my view is that the thousand city system as opposed to the
two party system is how you get genuine diversity.
And actually, you know what, there's already a prototype of
this. We've actually been doing this
for 20-30 forty years. You know why?
So imagine if at age 18 or age 21 you picked your country like
you pick your college. Right.
But that's actually already the case for millions of people from
Asia. Why Asia?
India at age 21, they would apply for their master's degree
at MIT or Stanford or what have you, and they would have the F1
student visa for college. They'd have the H1B visa for
their company, and then they'd get a green card or permanent
residency and then eventually citizenship at the country
level. So college company country where
like this is, is a labyrinth that an immigrant tech immigrant
has a stack. It's a stack.
That's right. So college company country,
we're right. And The thing is, nobody has
packaged that together. That's one of the things we're
doing in network school. We want to just like, you know,
with cryptocurrency, part of the reason you bought cryptocurrency
is to get more Fiat currency and it says people would get BTC to
get more USD. That was one important metric,
right? Part of the reason to come to
like a crypto society or a network society is to improve
your Fiat passport. So lots of people who come from
countries, they're American, notorious, they're smart, right?
We can get them worker visas, we can get them maybe to buy golden
visas, things like that. We can let them see the world,
right? Because people don't understand
that if they're born without what people call passport
privilege, they're basically like in prison, they're locked,
right? It's very hard to see the world
to get to other countries. And so we can upgrade that.
We can get them, you know, employment passes and so on and
so forth. And they're hard working and
they deserve all of that, right? And, and they'll do a good job
with that, right? You know, it's, this is my first
trip internationally, well, first time in Singapore.
What'd you think I? Am really fascinated by places
that are like start up cities because this is a 60 year old
city. They're having their 60th
anniversary in August. I found out and I was like, this
is one of the few times I've gone to a country that is
younger than America. Usually when Americans go
abroad, they're going to a country that's older, much older
typically. And, you know, I have the same
experience when I go to the Middle East, which is, you know,
Dubai, Dubai. And like, these are new cities
that in 1950 were deserts, right?
So it's fascinating to see those countries and the enthusiasm
that people have for them. And also it was also a little
bit sad for me because as an American, as a high profile
American who has an opinion that sometimes people listen to or at
least they hear it. Yeah.
But they don't have to agree with it.
But, you know, there were a lot of people asking me to explain
what's going on in our country and asking me to explain it
because they're perplexed and saddened by how America is
interacting with the rest of the world.
So putting aside my belief system, just the candid feedback
I got, I, I would say I've been heartbroken, crestfallen at how
people were talking about America.
And it's the first time in my life I've ever had it.
It's like it's actually kind of heavy on my heart the last three
days because people were saying what, why don't you want this
stuff? Why are you doing this to us?
Why can't we come to the country?
Why don't you want us to come to America on vacation?
I was talking to some folks who are extremely successful.
These are the most .1% of the 1%.
The 1% of the 1% were telling me my kids can go anywhere and on
vacation. They want to go to China because
they believe it's the future. They don't want to go to America
for college and they don't want to go to America because they
feel like they might get harassed at the border.
And then we want to do business with your country.
And we thought that the new administration would be
embracing the rest of the world, getting rid of regulation, and
that we'd have this great era of interoperability and we'd have
like an acceleration in business.
And now you're just rattling the cage constantly.
And we wanna do business, but you're sending us to go do
business in other places and we can't rely on you anymore.
And that actually I think maybe is the heart most heartbreaking
thing is that they feel like we're not a reliable partner is
what they were telling me. This is not my position.
This is the input from people in Singapore who I think represent
a certain level of sophisticated, globalistic,
world savvy people. And so maybe you tell me how as
an American. So you're an American who lives
abroad now, like you. What do you think of what's
happened? You know, and it we can't get
away from politics. We can't get away from Trump
because it's it's defining a lot of what's happening in the world
right now. Yeah.
So tell me the perception and your perception here's.
How I think about this, and I actually did shed a single manly
tear, OK, when writing the Network State book, Yeah,
because I had some of the same emotions on that you're talking
about. And the way I look at it is
Britain, America, the Internet, OK, right.
Britain was an amazing, amazing thing, honestly, for the world.
The British Empire, a lot of people attack it and they had a
lot of faults, but it did on net advance civilization.
There's a lot of good things Britain did, but eventually the
British Empire, exhausted, handed the torch to America and
it's no longer an empire. The British Empire is just, it's
a country, UK, it's just a country.
That's right. And the start of the American
Empire was arguably 1939. There's this great book called
Tomorrow the World by Stephen Wertheim that actually documents
that the fall of France was actually the moment.
It wasn't actually post world of truth at the beginning.
The fall of France was the moment that the Americans at
that point, they were, they'd been happy to let the British do
all the empiring and just build up their country.
But once they saw that the Nazis or maybe the Soviets could build
an empire that was bigger than the British and like, oh, we
have to do this. So that moment was when America
turned truly into a global empire and they set out to to be
a global empire. That's why there's 750 military
bases worldwide. That's why the headquarters of
the UN is in New York. That's why, like, for example,
Harvard Kennedy School of Government alone has 20 heads of
state that were trained there, right?
That's why the US has regulatory harmonization.
All these countries around the world use US regulations.
There's like a Hungarian FDA. That's why there's US
multinationals everywhere. And I could go on and on, right?
The the number of Internet searches being done at Google.
Google is the number one search engine in every country except
for like Korea, China, Russia and maybe still Japan and maybe
it's 5050 Japan now. Yeah, I don't know.
But I think it's maybe four countries.
It's like 4 countries. That's right.
But here's the thing. The issue with empire, any
empire, is you get this global footprint, but it also ends up
sort of eating away the core of the empire, right?
And it does so in two ways. The left is mad because they
feel that your people are oppressing people around the
world, which is sometimes true. And the right is mad because
they feel that your people are bearing a burden of the rest of
the world, which is also sometimes true.
So eventually the left and right basically get tired of empire
and shut it down and then they often regret it, right.
So that happened with the British Empire, that happened
with the French Empire and it happened within our lifetime
within the with the Soviet Empire.
Everybody thought that the aftermath would be something
great. And was actually it was, it was
mixed that, you know, Eastern Europe was free and it did well
and so on. Estonia did well.
Russia itself did very poorly for a long time.
And then it's like someone started to recover.
But you know, fine. Point being, we are in the last
stages of American empire, OK, because four forces, you know,
the the red America doesn't is against the deep state, blue
America's against the Trump administration tech America's
against the regulatory state and China's against use hegemony.
So all four of those vectors are pointed down.
So nothing is keeping the current establishment up.
Every day there's another hit to it going down.
That's never it's like a solar eclipse.
It's never happened in our lifetime before, right?
And you can't cut off foreign trade and foreign travel and
foreign tourism without also eventually cutting off foreign
capital flows into the dollar. And then without the reserve
currency, Americans here as a living will fall very rapidly.
I don't know how much, 50%, ninety percent, 99%.
But this is similar to what happened after the fall of the
Soviet Union. The ruble hyper inflated.
Now, one thing, we're actually in the middle of something.
If you're, you know, being in a Tesla's actually very noticeable
acceleration. Have you ever been in a bullet
train? Yeah, So if you're in a bullet
train, it can accelerate in such a seamless way that you don't
even realize how fast you're going.
Right, right. So do you know how much the US
dollar is devalued against Bitcoin since inception?
100 million X because Bitcoin started at .1 cent.
Actually, you wrote honestly one of the best early articles on
Bitcoin. Yeah.
Where actually there are a lot of things that.
That were, it was, I said it's the most dangerous open source
project I've ever seen because it could destabilize the entire
world, because the sovereignty of countries is, you know,
military and their currency. And this could change history
forever. Yeah, I was.
I was shook when it was at $0.12.
So The thing is that as soon as Bitcoin appeared, capital
started flowing into it and it's gone up 100 million X against a
dollar and there's only like another 10X to go or 100 X.
But that last 10X will be felt in a different way.
See, The thing is at $100,000 for Bitcoin, everybody's happy,
but $1,000,000 for Bitcoin, people understand like empire's
over. There's something about that as
like a round Number. And so and so people like, wait
a second. And when we're thinking about it
is like normal inflation supposed to be like 2% a year,
that works out to like .2% a month.
It's an arbitrary figure comes from New Zealand.
It should really be 0%. But let's say, OK,
hyperinflation is 50% a month, right?
So .2% a month normal inflation, hyperinflation. 50% a month.
What if we define superinflation as 5% a month?
Right. If you work it out, the
compounded rate at which the dollar has been devaluing
against Bitcoin is like 10.41% a month for 16 years.
OK. So we're actually already in the
middle of the global run on the dollar.
It's like that bullet train that's being accelerated without
people seeing it. That is like the alternative is
already here. And you're seeing BlackRock
saying Bitcoins is an alternative to the dollar,
right? The other alternative, by the
way, is gold, physical gold that's also at all time highs.
So gold and digital gold are the things that will be obvious
warning symbols in retrospect that this order is changing,
right? And so then what comes on the
other side, right? My, my view is that the future
is China versus the Internet and the heirs to American empire.
China has the military and the manufacturing.
And it's one of these things where guys like Peter Zihan will
say China is going to fall into a ditch.
It's going to get old before it gets rich.
The US can blockade China, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And in actuality, a lot of those things are happening in reverse.
For example, China's blockading the US, China's proxy, Iran has
its proxy, the Houthis. That's blockading Suez, right?
And in many ways, US demographics are worse than
Chinese demographics. Why?
Because you've got this polarized society, everybody
fighting each other. You have all this ethnic
conflict. You have young minorities
expected to pay for old people's Social Security and on and on.
US, you have men and women hating each other and whatnot,
right? So US demographics, there's a
cauldron of ethnic, gender, political, economic conflict and
resentments waiting to bubble over, right?
China for its false, has like homogeneous society, right?
And so the problem is China's very strong, right?
I think of the people who downplayed China as the stealth
on the Chinese stealth bomber, right?
They're not doing anybody any favors.
China's extremely strong and it's very competent.
And if we can't build an alternative, then it will just
be dominant. You believe the what Trump is
doing in terms of shutting the borders and changing this sort
of a tariff regime is an isolation and isolation and then
getting rid of immigration largely.
This is a very dangerous strategy.
It's a very dangerous strategy. It's not.
At this time. Well, it's it's like not it's
not even like it's like a, you know, the thing like a nice
strategy caught and let's see if it works for them, right.
Just take the tariff thing alone, OK?
Those were simultaneous tariffs on the entire world, right?
So Vietnam got hit, Cambodia got hit all.
Grays good. They're strays.
Stray bullets.
Exactly, like I analogize it to like firing into a crowd to like
get China, right. Everybody who got hit by the
stray is not going to care that you were trying to get China.
They're going to care how careless and random you are with
the lives of all these people. And just talk about the tariffs
for a second. First, everybody who is pro
American in all these countries, they're the ones with American
customers, with American vendors, American suppliers, all
those people who were the political faction of those
countries that pushed for good relations with America, that
pushed to travel to America to trade America, all those people
just got discredited, right? They just got economically
harmed. They got absolutely naked
because they trust in the stability of the United States
of America. They trust in the stability of
the trade system. They trust in predictability.
Yeah, exactly. That's right.
And when you add it up, it's basically the US no longer wants
to be the hub of this global financial empire.
They don't want the foreign workers, they don't want the
foreign trade. There's a faction of MAGA that
is incorrect in their own way, as economically irrational as
the far left that actually thinks that 77 million MAGA can
compete with 1.4 billion China, let alone the entire world.
It's simply not true. Well, no, I was going to say,
the idea that Americans want to rush in and make iPhones in a
factory is like, so farcical. It's not that iPhones can't be
made in America. They could when?
You bring this up on X, people will say they'll get really mad
and then they'll say, well I want someone else to be able to
work in a factory. Right.
But you can't find anybody in your family who said, wow,
wouldn't it be great if I could do that?
Now, listen, we do make Teslas in factories in America.
It can be done. We're making rockets in America.
It's not the question of if we can make them there, but if
we're going to close the border and we have 4% unemployment,
who's going to work in these factories?
Yes, but let me give, let me give also the Steelman case for
MAGA because I understand where their worldview comes from.
So first is they would say, OK, sure, maybe why is it white
collar worker, whatever don't want to work in a factory that
they would say that, but it's way better than blue collar
worker has opportunity to work in a factory than dying of
fentanyl or whatever. True.
OK. Number 2, they'd say factory
work produces skills and stuff that, you know, there's all
kinds of mechanical maintenance and whatnot, which you don't
want to over offshore and incentives.
I'd agree with that as well. Third, they'd say as red
American, they've gotten a hard time from blue Americans.
Red America has been sent over, ceased to die and so on.
And so with blue Americans have exploited them.
There's some truth to that as well.
OK, I could go and I could say quite a few things.
Another thing that says we're running these trade deficits for
so long. We can't run them endlessly, and
we need to be able to make things at home.
We'll be too dependent on others.
We're too dependent on China, too bad on the rest of the
world. There's some truth to that as
well. OK, But what they get wrong is a
they're in a huge hole and they think that they can just get out
with some sudden move, right? You cannot get out of 45 years
of deindustrialization with 45% tariffs.
There's no overnight fix for this right?
2 maybe yes, blue America and red America have been fighting.
That doesn't mean Vietnam is the enemy of red America.
It also doesn't mean like Canadian conservatives are the
enemy of red America. What they managed to do by
threatening to invade Greenland and and Canada and and doing
these tariffs and so on is just like the wokes built the anti
woke coalition, the Magas have built the post American
coalition. Even Canadian conservatives who
are their natural allies, if Canadian conservatives like
Pierre Paulivery and so on are getting crapped on, right.
And do you see the graph of the Canadian?
Conservatives. So basically, if if we are this
unpredictable to the rest of the world, the world will look for
more predictable partners to partner with.
And it's happening as we speak because we're five months into
this presidency and already you have China, Singapore, Russia,
India and everybody in between going.
Well, if we can't figure out how to work with the Trump
administration, if we can't figure out how to work with
America, I guess we should just work with each other.
And that's a very dangerous place to be.
Like perhaps we're overplaying our hand.
And absolutely how important we are to China, how important we
are to India, Like, how important are we?
Do they have other customers? I think they have a lot of
other. Customers.
They have a lot of our customers.
And in fact, look, in 2015, China was taken aback by the
trade war. But over the last 10 years,
they're now prepared for it. And like a lot of Trump tactics
don't work anymore. They're not surprised anymore.
It's just the same kind of thing.
And they reduced their share of revenue for the US.
It's only 15 percent. 16% of Chinese trade goes to the US,
85% is overseas. They've built up these other
markets. So whereas the US needs the
parts that are from China. Let me tell you a little story,
right? So in the late 2000s, around
2008 with the Beijing Olympics, you remember that, right?
So there was pollution in Beijing.
Now they've actually solved it, but there was.
Heavy pollution for the long term.
The runners would not want to run a marathon there.
Yeah, that's right. So China, basically, they knew
all the people who were polluting and they went to them
like a few weeks before and they told them to shut all their
stuff down so they'd have clear skies for the Beijing Olympics.
OK. So I was operating the clinical
lab at that time and there was a global shortage of a specific
kind of chemical precursor that was used in various biomedical
reactions. And the price like skyrocketed
like 100 X for that time because one of those factories like
China was just the the scale supplier of like the whole
world. Single pound failure.
Yeah, yeah. Now, that meant like research,
clinical testing and so on, ground to a halt for anything
that used this compound or you had huge spikes in costs just
for a few weeks. Now, look, this wasn't the end
of the world because it did resume, but a lot of people had
lab test interruptions, research interruptions and so on.
And that was 20 years ago. And that gave me a sense of what
China is, right? It is just upstream of the
physical world like the US military is made in China, like
Tomahawk missiles. You know, there's a report $400
million the Pentagon paid Govini to go and study the US military
supply chains, Tomahawk missiles.
J Dams, the supplier suppliers in China, right?
The former Secretary of the Navy Carlos del Toro, 2023 He says
the US Navy one Chinese shipyard can build more ships than the
entire U.S. Navy combined.
They have 13 shipyards. In some cases, their shipyard
has more capacity. One shipyard has more capacity
than all of our shipyards combined.
You have Hegseth recently on a podcast, Sean Ryan Podcast, and
he said Chinese hypersonics can sync every US aircraft carrier.
Our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers
and the ability to project power that way strategically around
the globe. And yeah, we have a nuclear
triad and all of that, but a big part of it.
And if you know 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10
aircraft carriers in the 1st 20 minutes of a conflict, what does
that look like? You have basically this U.S.
Navy chart that shows China's 200X US ship billing capacity.
China now has a world's largest Navy, right?
And people say, oh, it doesn't have the aircraft carriers yet,
but that's like saying Netflix. Has the number of ships, but it
doesn't have the tonnage. But these are semantic.
Arguments, arguments because it's like saying how many
Blockbuster stores does Netflix have?
You know, they're they're paradigm shifting.
They're going with standoff missiles and hypersonic.
Anyway, point is to the predictability part.
All these countries, it's even worse than them just trading
with each other. They're all re centering around
China because it's a global hub for trade.
China has ships in every port. It has relationships with every
country. Every country needs Chinese
goods, right? And so China just has more
leverage. And people think that the US has
leverage because it's the consumer.
But what's it giving? It's giving basically dollars.
Why are dollars valuable? Now we have to ask deeper
questions. The only reason the US can
maintain its current level of consumption is that there was a
global financial empire where the right built the US military
and the left did US diplomacy underappreciated by the right.
Look, you and I, we've been on lots of capitals.
We've done lots of deals. Imagine a capitale with 196
people on it. That's a huge pain.
Yeah, OK. Now imagine 196 countries and
how hard it is to get them to sign on the line which is
dotted. That's a huger pain, right?
Yeah. A lot of work and.
So things like the WTO or the WHOUS diplomats got 196
countries to sign on to this stuff.
Yeah, OK, They got 196 heads of state, 100 like all kinds of
crazy standouts, holdouts. US diplomats were the best ever,
and so was the US military the best ever.
And because of this, the left and the right state and Pentagon
worked together to build the greatest empire of all time.
Right. And is it just over now?
I mean it's just over now. It's just over as your position.
Or it's ending and people haven't marked it to market.
Basically, hard power is China and hard money is, is Bitcoin,
right? That's, that's the future
political axis. CCP is total control.
Bitcoin's total freedom right now, total freedom can also be
total anarchy, right? So I'm, I'm very sympathetic.
Bitcoin, I'm certainly more on this side of things, but I think
you want some balance between total control and total anarchy,
right? And that's where network states,
that's where Dubai, that's where maybe India, that's maybe
Eastern Europe and other places will will have to be.
And so to your point about predictability, the problem is
lots of countries are now thinking of China as a less
unpredictable partner than the US, even after the Shanghai
lockdowns of 2022 when China put the country, which is crazy, but
it's actually really bad. Well, A.
Dictatorship that will put a million Uyghurs into a
concentration camp. A dictatorship that will put
their country under surveillance, that will take the
entire sector of entrepreneurship and say we own
the companies now and Jack Ma is going to go into re education or
oil painting classes like. These two that's.
Yeah, that's more reliable than the United States.
Like, let that sink in that people are making that choice.
And the problem is that basically it'll be they'll be
the version 3 point O, which which is the V1 is so the
instinctive conservative reaction, Chinese Communist
Party and so on and so forth, right?
The V2, there's certain kind of sophisticated international
commentator who'll say, say something like this and let me
explain it and then I'll give a counter argument to what they're
saying. They'll say, well, the US blew
up the Middle East and China's building up Africa. the US got
in all these wars, killed these people.
China hasn't done that. the US wrecked its cities and China's
built up its cities. Therefore, China's peaceful
rise, China's good right? Now my counter argument to that,
accepting some of that is true, that China did build itself up
and so on and so forth. If you think about the US, it
was generally the better actor of the US versus USSR up to
1991. Like West Germany was better off
than East Germany. South Korea is better off than
North Korea. Capitalist countries, wealthier,
freer than communist countries, right.
But after 1991, it became so powerful that it lost its way.
Hyperpower went to its head. They started blowing up these
countries. It started basically like a like
a really wealthy grandkid or great grandkid interventionism.
They for no reason. They put the fortune up their
nose, right? Like, there's a saying, shirt
sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, being born
really, really, really rich is actually sometimes a curse
because they don't understand the value of hard work, right?
So all these people inherited an empire that they can never
build. And the last 30 years of
management since 1991 has been some of the worst management
maybe of any empire ever in history, right?
OK. Problem is that on the current
path, when China wins, right? Meaning, like the US has its
sovereign debt crisis because all these things on the tariff
they're doing, they're reducing the demand for the dollar, The
demand for the dollar, The only thing that's keeping the US
economy afloat because, you know, the Feds Plunge protection
Team don't. That is, Yeah, it basically buys
stocks with printed money, right?
It's upward redistribution of wealth in a sense, right?
This has been going on at least since the 90s you know with the
feds mortgage-backed securities it's admitted it's buying assets
with its own balance sheet. Many other times it uses like
shell entities and so on so that it spots people money and so on.
But it props up the market with printing, OK when and obviously
20/22/2021 with up until 20/22 the, the post COVID market was
propped up by printing. When there isn't global demand
for the dollar, when you have weak treasury auctions, when
people aren't, aren't able to trade with the US, why would
they want to hold U.S. dollars anymore, right?
They can't send their people in. They can't send their workers
in. They can't, they can't even come
there for tourism. Why do they want to hold U.S.
dollars again, especially because they can be frozen with
sanctions, especially when there's Bitcoin and gold and so
on. They won't, right?
So when that happens, you get a markdown and China just rises
into the vacuum. People don't understand that
it's like #1 in, in many research fields, right?
It's number one in in many manufacturing fields.
It's way stronger than people think.
And the problem is China will be even meaner than you think when
it's dominant right now, it constrains China.
Internally, China is not constrained.
So it can throw all its people in lockdown for in like Shanghai
2022. But externally it's still feared
the US and and the US is almost the opposite.
Internally, there was Republican Democrats who was somewhat
constrained, but externally he was bombing all these countries
because it didn't feel constrained, right?
So his absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So we need a counterbalance. This completely unleashed China
and that is the Internet, right? Because with the Internet, we
can actually, that's the heir to American values, right?
Of course it's it's capitalism, it's freedom.
It's a it's a manifestation of democracy.
But it's also that it's right, it's the libertarian values and
the progressive values, right? In the non corrupted form,
right? So it's freedom, it's
capitalism, it's contracts, it's cryptocurrency, but it's also
democracy, equality, media, science.
In a real sense, I'm one of the biggest funders of those things
in the world. For example, I fund all this
decentralized science, right? I fund all these decentralized
media, all these decentralized citizen journalists, things like
provenance, you know, The Who, what and where, why, how of a
story like the where is proof of location, right?
The Who is proof of human right? And there's all these
decentralized ways of doing this to get to truth, right, to get
to media, to get to science, to get to equality, because that's
what crypto is it. It's an equal system for the
whole world. Hernando de Soto has written
about this. Like all these people in Latin
America are artificially poor because they don't have property
rights. Now we can deliver that to them
over the Internet, right? And and this is no longer
theoretical. 10 years ago, talking about like crypto in
poor countries was theoretical. Now it's not.
These people need crypto like in in lab Lebanon and Nigeria and
like Venezuela, their phones are their life lines.
They are crypto first. They are Internet first people.
And when I when I'm talking to them, they it's not theory that
we're talking about, it's practice, right?
Yeah. So Internet first.
I think that is the one thing that can build an economic union
that can balance China. Interesting.
Let me ask you, just as a total aside, it seems like the Bitcoin
game that everybody's buying into was based upon it not being
centrally controlled. And now you have an actor who
has 600,000 bitcoins out of the well, Michael Seller I think has
600,000 now. Something like that.
Yeah. So he's the largest holder other
than I guess the dead Satoshi wallets.
Yes. So I'm friendly with all these
guys. Sure.
It's not a character thing as much as does it break the game
that somebody wants to buy up that much of the supply of
Bitcoin. And then just as we wrap, like,
I think we all expected that maybe Bitcoin would be replaced
or hacked at some point. It hasn't been hacked.
And I mean, I guess you can make arguments about, you know, the,
I guess, layer twos as Solanas, the Ethereums, you know, serving
a different purpose. But is, is Bitcoin here to stay?
And does this consolidation of Bitcoin into a small number of
holders jeopardize that? Good question.
So how should I? How do you think about this?
First is. Sounds like you're thinking of
how to be politically. No, no, there's like like 10
different dimensions to it, so I want.
To give, well, let's just go right at the sale.
OK, so absolutely it is. So you know, I'm actually also
like an advisor to one of these Bitcoin treasury companies like
Komodo Holdings just came out, Jack Muller's has done 1/21.
It's funny, two of the names that I had, 21 and Nakamoto are
both being used for these Bitcoin treasury companies,
right? So I think on balance it's good,
but it has risks. OK, on balance, why is it good?
Because it allows Travfi, all these other people who could not
put capital into Bitcoin to put capital into Bitcoin and it
boost Bitcoin. It is quite possible, perhaps
even likely, that at some point there will be an attempt for a
seizure. OK, because Bitcoin at 100,000
again, everybody's smiling. Bitcoin at a million, let alone
10 million. A lot of that, that is the
flippanting, right? Somewhere, you know, a long time
ago, my friend Olaf and I calculated that somewhere
between 100,000 and $1,000,000 for Bitcoin is the billionaire
flippanting. When most billionaires become
crypto, there's about 2000 gold billionaires somewhere around
that range, there's a flip. Most billionaires become crypto,
right? And then, of course, $1,000,000
isn't worth what it's worth anymore.
Faith in the dollar is eroded. And it could go very quickly
from like, I don't know, maybe 300,000 to 1,000,000.
There'll be a point which there's a loss of faith in the
currency. And it just goes like this.
OK, Now at that moment, see, remember 2021 when Trump was not
allowed to tweet right after Jan 6, right.
You and I saw the emergence of social media and in in the year,
let's say 2010, remember the Social Network movie came out.
Yep, you know it was absent from that movie completely.
The winkle eyes. No, they were in.
They were in. Politics.
Oh yeah, right. That movie basically treated
Facebook as like Universal Studios or like Disney.
It was like, it was like a playground, right?
It was impressive from a financial standpoint and a user
based standpoint. There's not a single mention of
politics. No one understood what was to
come, right? But over the 20 tens, all
politics became social media, right?
And if in 2010, I told you that in 2021, the president of the
United States will be defined by whether or not he's able to
tweet, even given that the Arab Spring and other stuff had
happened, you just said biology. You're just exaggerating.
Social media just isn't that important, right?
It would have seemed surreal. Literally, he was silenced by a
cobble of four or five companies.
Yeah. And now if I tell you de
platformed, I don't know the exact year, but by some time
plus minus maybe 2035, a country will not exist if it doesn't
have gold or digital gold. Like it literally would be
insolvent. Like you're not the president if
you don't have social media. You're not a country if you
don't have cryptocurrency or maybe gold, right?
I think physical gold is interesting because of the
complement to crypto. It has different failure modes.
States will go with physical gold and individuals and
start-ups will go with digital gold.
The reason is physical gold requires trucks, it requires
guys with guns, it requires like.
You know, facility. Magnetometers and so on.
So like something like China, like a state can protect that
because they've got little guys with guns around it and they go
and you know, like the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
You can imagine something like that between Russia and China
where they just hang each other gold bricks every day or
whatever, right, to do settlement, right?
So something like that could work between countries that
basically their embassies become places for gold settlement.
I think that's very possible, but that's too much fixed cost
for an individual, right? Right.
And also gold bricks can be detected when you go through
metal detectors. That may be the real purpose of
TSA actually, Right. OK.
So point being though, to your to your point, it is possible
that seizure orders do happen when Bitcoin gets to a certain
level, then what happens? All the Bitcoin that is not able
to be seized, it's free Bitcoin is actually more valuable #1 #2
is, I think that even in an economy which is Bitcoin
maximalist, don't, I don't, I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist.
But they don't understand or they don't want to accept this
point that there will be other assets besides digital gold.
Of course, because you're, you know, the Bitcoin itself is
like, it's expensive to transact.
When you're transacting, it'll be a small number of daily
transactions. Relatively.
It's about the scale of Fedwire, by the way, Fedwire about
500,000 daily transactions. Bitcoin's about the same high
denomination transactions that are infrequent.
That's what Bitcoin is. Everything else will go to
Ethereum, Solana, you know, like privacy coins and so on and so
forth, right? And and other chains like this
because you just want to have all that traffic on just one
chain. So already you have, you know,
for example, USTCUSTT on other chains.
You have smart contracts under chains, you have privacy under
chains because Bitcoin is immutable and these other things
aren't. Now what are the risks of
Bitcoin? One is seizure, 2 is quantum
right? So we definitely need quantum
resistant Bitcoin. And that's that's not farcical
in. Your that's not farcical.
No, no, it's completely it's. Probable, and it's possible in
the short term, and it's probable in the long term.
Yes, the main issue with with quantum is not that there isn't
a solution on the radar for Bitcoin, because with quantum
decryption you can also have quantum encryption.
The key question is, is quantum decryption something where we
can put a quantum safe algorithm in in place and time and people
think we can. The hard part is moving every
coin from the old address to the new quantum safe address could
take almost a year. So a lot of old coins could get
raided in that time, right? So then there's various.
Wild to think about that you might even be better off just
starting a new product. There might be a QBTC or
something like that, right? But in a sense, even if Bitcoin
only achieves its objective now, one thing you get by the way is
what's called social reset, right?
Social reset could be something where the community just agrees
between themselves that we're just going to snapshot the chain
at this point in time and move it over to this new chain.
Wild. OK, so that is a non-technical
but social kind of thing, which I think is absolutely going to
happen at some point. Wow.
Right, because Bitcoin is there's more Bitcoiners than
there are Americans, right? More many hundreds of millions
worldwide, right? And importantly, Bitcoin appeals
to a lot of people in China. Why?
Because money. The party can't cease.
Yeah. So even as American culture
unfortunately becoming less appealing to people in China,
Internet culture is still valuable, right?
They still need the free Internet.
They still want GitHub, right? They still want Bitcoin, They
still want these things. Hundreds of millions of people
in China still like these things, right?
That's what I call the Chinese capitalist party, right?
So, you know, as sad as it is to see America lose its soft power,
the Internet still has it and it's still rising, right?
So to your point, I think we're going to see all kinds of crazy
drama. Remember, with social media all
the edge cases that people talked about.
Actually, you remember in the late 2000s when people talked
about deplatforming, it was corporate deplatforming.
It was like, oh gosh, what was the company with AZ Zynga that
got, you know, Mark Minkus's company?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or Meerkat pushed off at
Twitter, right? So that was corporate
deplatforming. Then there was ideological
deplatforming, but every possible abuse of social media,
the censorship, this and the other happened.
And in the years to come, every possible crazy attack on crypto
is going to happen. But because there's so many
coins, it'll be very difficult to take the currency of the
people, by the people, for the people from this earth.
On that note, gosh, congratulations on taking a lot
of theories and making them into reality.
You're six months into this journey but it's clear you
struck a nerve and I think that you're doing important work as a
backstop against. You know, people being cynical
and not thinking that new things can't be tried.
So I wish you great success with your network, school, state and
the the believers in it. I think that's kind of the most
interesting part is that you've assembled hundreds of people in
person and 10s of thousands of people online who actually
believe that this audacious project is worth their energy
and their time and their geography.
So. Congratulations.
Thank you. I'll say one last thing, which
is people you're watching supply to networkschoolns.com and also
if you're an Angel investor or VC and so on, we have space.
So personal runway, basically $18,000 a year.
Like that'll carry you a. 125K incubator check will go with two
founders. Couple years more, yeah.
Well, so actually way more than that, right.
So basically, so if you have, if you're, if you can't get to the
US on a, on a visa, if you just want to cut your burn, apply to
NS and if you're an investor, we can take your companies.
We've got plenty of space and so and so.
It's a great pitch. Great.
All right, we'll see you all next time.
Bye. Bye.