Ben, thank you for speaking at the Never State Conference.
Good to see you Balaji. Ready to go?
Awesome. So you know, Ben, you've been,
you know, a mentor and I think I'd say a friend hopefully for
for for many years now. And you know, one thing is in
the hard thing about hard things in that book you wrote about
your time at Netscape and Netscape in many ways was like
the first Internet company and because it had downloads and so
on and so forth, and it went viral and you guys went public
and you had an acquisition and all, all the monitor, right.
And then we work together on the rise of Bitcoin, which is first
Internet currency and obviously been very heavily involved that
with async crypto and everything and going base and all that
stuff. And now we're building Internet
communities. So I'd love to hear your
thoughts on that. As you know, I, I think of them
as the third kind of thing. Start societies, Internet
communities, network states. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Do you think they're the next big thing or could be?
Yeah. So, so I think they're very kind
of parallel in the development and that, you know, kind of
before Netscape, which was the first thing that kind of brought
all of the Internet pieces together.
You know, there were there were many pieces.
You know, there's FTP and TCPIP and Gopher and this and that,
but you needed something to unify all the technologies.
So it, it, it was a little deceptive and that a lot of
people deep in the tech kind of saw it as well.
What's new here? You know, like, it's just like
you're just putting an interface on it.
And I think that what the network state is, is in network
school is, is very much like that.
And that we have all the primitive building blocks of
community. We've got, you know, Discord and
WhatsApp groups and, you know, we've got, we have Bitcoin now
and we have many kind of different currency stable coins
and so forth. But and you know, nobody's
brought them all to a VR, but nobody's put the whole package
together. And that's really when it gets
unleashed. I mean, my in my experience,
that's kind of where you hit the knee in the curve when is at the
integration. And it doesn't seem in a way it
doesn't seem like a lot because all the pieces were already
there, but the pieces as pieces just aren't that, you know, it's
not, it's not actually the thing.
It's not the product. It's funny because you're right,
the system integration. And The thing is, that actually
has to happen after all the other pieces are mature, because
if any one piece of those is wiggly, then the whole thing
doesn't work. You have to wait for that to to
be there. So only when all those pieces
are mature can you snap them together.
Right, Exactly, exactly. And and that's kind of the
deceptive thing because in until that point, you know, people
might have tried it and failed or, you know, it's kind of like
this. I know that doesn't work, right?
You know that kind of thing. Yeah, same with, same with
Bitcoin, right? Like it put together like a lot
of techniques, you know, peer-to-peer cryptography,
etcetera, that had been around, but they weren't put together in
a way where you could actually have money.
Right, because ECDSA existed. Yeah, hash functions existed,
hash cast existed. And in a sense, I think somebody
exactly as you said. Yeah.
Remarked as just an it was quote, it was a clever
integration of existing things, but they all existed before and
they didn't innovate on cryptography, They integrated on
the on the system, Right, right. And you know, it's funny you say
that because I myself actually had not thought of that before
in quite that way as the analogy to the web browser.
But once you do sample this piece together, then that itself
becomes a platform for other things.
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
And then you have web apps and you had everything else because
then you could write. And So what we're starting to
see is these sharp societies, I call them like the parallel
physical, are each usually inspired by the parallel
digital. For example, there's sharp
society that is like a cul-de-sac, which is based on
all the micro humility stuff and it wants to be a walkable
community, right? And then there's, you know,
Prospera, which has mini circle and it's inspired by the biotech
innovations. And then there's another one
that's booting up which is inspired by all the educational
innovations. And so, so the digital's
inspiring the physical. Yes, Yeah, No, exactly.
And I, and I think that's going to, I, I think the number of
ideas around that is really going to multiply because you
know, one of the things that if you look at the primitive
version, it's all kind of, you know, a community around an
idea. But what about a community
around the intersection of many ideas?
You know, just for, for for my own sake, it would be great if
there was a tech hip hop community.
But you you, you know, you, you could imagine many, many
dimensions, You know, just sort of if you think of every policy
that you might be interested, anything you might be interested
in or any policy you might vote on.
If you took the intersection and found all the like minded people
in the world and put them in a community, that would be a a
kind of very powerful thing. Yes, and you know, one thing is
some of the other folks were having speak the conference, for
example, the CEO of Angel List read the network state book and
they've just opened this Angel List Founders Cafe in San
Francisco and he said he was kicking himself for not doing it
three years ago because it it on the one hand it seems an obvious
thing, but it's also like a non obvious thing because people
drop in, they give customer feedback so you can materialize
the cloud into land. So many, many digital things
that we have that we think that's purely digital have some
physical manifestation that might actually be non obvious.
Yeah, I know that for sure. And then when you add the
physical it, it does add the whole another dimension of
possibility for sure. Yes, that's very interesting.
So you know what, one way that we've we we start to establish a
few templates in the space. For example, the pop up, which
is somewhere in between, let's say a conference, which is like
a one day thing and what we're doing in network school is a
permanent where it's like a permanent setup.
Yeah, exactly. That's right.
So a pop up like a like a one month thing ish, right.
And so it's longer than a conference because people, you
know, they have to bring, you know, change clothes, laundry to
you know, it's more than that. So do you have any kinds of
things that you've been, So you mentioned a tech hip hop thing
and obviously we're used to thinking about, OK, we could
solve this with a new tech company, we could solve this
with a new currency. Have you thought about
communities that you'd like to see?
Well, there's so many, you know, like that.
There's the kind of I, I'm part of like a mini primitive
communities in, you know, the form of WhatsApp groups and so
forth. And it would be really like
this. Nice to see those be much more
highly dimensional, maybe have a physical incarnation.
You know, it's everything from like, you know, the LLM
community to, you know, the various different kinds of
things. But they're all so primitive
because there's no money in them there.
You know, there's no, there's no crypto in these communities.
There's no physical dimension, there's no virtual reality
dimension. There's, you know, all you can
really do is chat, which is, you know, one of the things she'll
do in a community. But then there's many, many,
many more ideas that you could have.
Yeah, you know, it's funny you said because the the WhatsApp
and Signal groups, what I like about them is you have a lot of
busy CE OS and investors and so on and we can remain in kind of
lightweight contact with a lot of people.
And then you have the physical like, you know, maybe there's a
coffee and you put in an invite there, a Luma invite and 20 of
the people or 10 of the people from the group show up there and
you can just pick up right where you left off with this long
running group chat conversation. So there's definitely this
amazing thing there. But you know what, what, what's
interesting is when you, when you, when you say what you just
said, you kind of want to be able to boom, hold a meet up
within the chat or like hit a button and, and create a meet up
or boom, hold a meet up and do maybe like a quick VR talk or
something like that. I don't know, maybe the chat
chat interface will get there, or maybe we'll need something
completely new. Yeah, yeah.
Because right now, you know, you can do that, but it's a little
bit of a heavy cognitive and, like, social lift, right?
Like it's a little more risky to say, hey, let's all get
together. You don't want people to go.
Nah. Yeah, yeah, right.
Well, you know, there's something, you know, one thing
that's interesting about that is, you know, with WhatsApp, you
know, a very modern question is where are you?
Because it, you know, if it probably if you analyze text in
the 1800s, for example, it's very rare for someone to ask,
where are you? Where are you?
I'm on I'm on the other side of the table from you or happy, you
know, because there's not that many times, you know, maybe you
sent a telegram, but the telegram, you know, or or or or
you know, you send send a postal message, but it's rare that you
wouldn't know that a person's physical education.
Yeah, you, you would certainly know where they are if you're
sending a postal message. Yes, that's right.
So, but one thing that's interesting, you know, WhatsApp
itself is location aware, but an interesting thing that happens
is people cycle around the globe and they're kind of, you know,
they're in the Spain airport or they're here and they're just
kind of sending messages. And, and we sort of take for
granted the level of mobility there, even though they're in
one place in the chat world, they're moving around the
physical world. So maybe there's something that
would suggest, you know, to reduce the social overhead, as
you mentioned that, oh, these people are nearby, you guys
should meet up, but you need to allow it to do that location
tracking. That's like 1 concept for
example. Yeah, that would be that.
That would be super convenient because then you, you'd also not
have to worry. Oh, hey, let's meet up.
Oh, I'm in France. Right, Right.
That that's going to be hard. OK, well that was a waste of a
message for me. Yes.
The thing is that the people would have to also want to be
location tracked. It has to be done in exactly the
right way that they feel they feel good about it.
So, OK, so Internet communities, I mean, there's another angle on
this, which is for example, things like self driving things
like many of the biotech things that we are interested in, we
can potentially have those within special economic zones.
And you know, do you see my post from a few months ago on the
Special Elon Zone? Oh, I didn't see that.
I got to look at that. That sounds good post.
Yeah, that's all Elon tech gets to work for free.
Or exactly? Yeah.
Exactly, that's right. So my, my thought was what is
the sort of westernized version of the Asian cause of the
special economic zone? The special Elon zone, or more
generally, the special founder zone would be find some swaths
of territory. Maybe it's in the US, maybe it's
Elon Salvador. OK, so Elon gets, you know,
because Tesla's a global business and so on.
So some country gives or some state carves out a piece of
territory and says, OK, Elon, you can move the speed of
physics rather than permits. You can crank out all the
humanoids you want. You can mine stuff out of the
ground. And what they would do is they'd
import existing regulations on, I don't know, graffiti and
stuff. You don't have to rewrite every
single law. You just allow however quick
changes to existing laws. And the crucial thing being that
it's like an essentially an uninhabited territory, as close
to Burning Man as possible. Yeah.
What are your thoughts on something like that?
Yeah, No, I think that's AI, by the way.
I think it's very doable. There's so many states in the US
that would want to do that. I know Nevada would want to do
that and I'm going to have Burning Man.
They they would certainly rather have something that was
productive. So so I think that's super
viable. You know, there are certain
sites, of course you could never do it, but but but for sure.
And then I think it could be, it could only be really productive,
but it would also kind of create a very special community almost
of of kind of both like minded people and then people who knew
how to build things. That's right.
And actually, the thing about this is if it worked for Elon,
then it could work for Palmer Luckey to have the drone zone
and right. And you could have, you know,
different. Kind of, you know, like a more
mundane thing, manufacturing. Exactly.
So on that point, rare, my view mining.
Exactly. That's right.
So like, if you know about how Deng Xiaoping reformed China
when he took over the country was like all brainwashed total
communists and he couldn't like reform at all at once.
So he just set up a few special economic zones, especially
Shenzhen near Hong Kong. And actually he didn't allow
everybody in. They actually there was like a
membership process or an admissions process where only
the most capitalist sympathetic people were allowed in and they
weren't going to make trouble. They weren't still diehard
Maoists, right? And and of course that became
this gigantic, you know, Chinese city there.
And this way they could gradually reform communism
rather than try to change it for the whole country at once.
They could experiment with new laws and and so on and so forth.
So for manufacturing all of the OSHA, you know, EPA type stuff,
right? You could suspend that in this
one zone. And everybody who came in signed
a new social smart contract that would basically say, guess what?
I'm coming into this totally desolate peace territory and I'm
coming because of new rules. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I, I think that, but I think that's a great idea that would
be very good for the, IT would be amazing for the US if we
could do it here. Yes, so.
Here, not there where you are. Well, well, we were there too.
We could do it in Singapore. Yes, so, so I'm, I, I want to,
of course, it'd be amazing for you to do it in the US And in a
sense, if you can do it in the rest of the world, then that
gives you a template to bring into the US potentially, right.
So, so we can we can parallel path potentially.
So, OK, on the on that topic, actually relatedly, there are a
bunch of countries that are pursuing interesting kinds of
protect legislation like digital nomad laws, crypto laws, Dow
laws. I'd love to know your thoughts
on the progressive. For example, in in Wyoming, they
had they did the first outlaw Tennessee had followed up with
the Dow law. I'd love to know your thoughts
on the jurisdictions, politicians, etcetera that are
kind of pursuing the most progress technologically
progressive interactions with not just tech companies, tech
currencies, protocols, sharp communities.
You you must have some thoughts on this.
Yeah. So, so I mean, you know, in the
US it does tend to be the like the the states that want to do
that do tend to be the red states or the purple states at
least. So, you know, Wyoming, Nevada,
Florida, Texas to some degree, a lot of the southern states are
very kind of open to manufacturing and in these kinds
of things, you know, around the world.
It's been interesting. So like World Coin, I think
they're most kind of active country per capita is Argentina.
And I think half the citizens of Buenos Aires are are active
users on World Coin. And then they also made a lot of
progress, surprisingly with Malaysia, which is pretty good.
You know, of course, in the UAE, Dubai has been very, very
aggressive. And so they've been good.
So I think countries are now seeing kind of tech policy as a
way to really compete. But it tends to be the, you
know, it tends to be countries that want to grow as opposed to,
you know, what's going on in Europe or, you know, some, some
other places are in, you know, California even where they kind
of are like, well, we're rich enough and now we need to divide
up the pie and, and protect our, our children, the people.
That's right. They they're basically
unfortunately, they're taking prosperity for granted and then
they're the you you mentioned this thing about a place that
want to grow. One of the things I've been most
pleasantly surprised by over the last five years or so is small
states putting themselves on the map like El Salvador, but also
like, like small cities like Palau, Marshall Islands, You
know, they've taken very pro crypto kinds of, you know,
approaches. And my, my general pattern on
this is actually that, you know, there's 190 to 193 UN members
and it's there, it's a little bit like a reverse merger or
digital asset treasury company where you've got kind of a
listed company and it's got a symbol and you've got a coin
that wants to be listed. And there's a deal they can do
to kind of list the coin. And then this guy has a symbol
and a sense of political legitimacy, but not capital.
And it says capital but not legitimacy.
And then they merge together. That's a digitalized treasury
company or reverse merger. And that that cannot be done at
the level of the state or whether sovereign state or like
AUS state. Yeah.
Now that is a it's a very, very smart move.
I think by by those states, I mean, I think it's it it it's
really interesting that you can differentiate just by thinking
about how to grow and how to maintain prosperity that there
are whole societies that have given up on that idea.
Yeah, we, Mark and I just had dinner with the one of the kind
of potential candidates for Prime Minister of the UK and she
was going through like, you know, like what's your
differentiation? She's like growth, like, like we
can grow the economy. And I was like, wow, that's a
very interesting differentiator. It's interesting also because
you know, historically people have said natural resources the
differentiator, but I actually think it is, you know, human
resources, so to speak, or or capital like basically.
Letting the human resources do their thing, yeah.
Yes. And and we, we should come up
with a term for that, but I'd like to at some point organize a
conference of small countries and pro growth jurisdictions.
And that's kind of like one side of A2 sided market.
And we have all the tech founders and venture capitalists
is the other side of the two sided market and put, put them
together. I mean, network state conference
is like the V1 of that, right? And we've got a bunch of, you
know, folks here who are who are, who are doing that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Know for sure.
I like think that goes together. You know, people who want the
network state in their territory are probably the exact countries
that are interested in in kind of pushing forward into the
future. Yeah, because we can bring
talent and capital there just like crypto, just like, you
know, just like tech itself. So now are there, what has, you
know, what has surprised you about the last five, 10-15 years
in terms of tech and policy or or did nothing or or maybe maybe
there's so many things, but but what have you found to be to be
interesting or something that we should look at, pursue, pay
attention to? Well, so I think the big wake up
call for me was first kind of how interested, you know, nation
states got in technology policy, which is very like all of the
sudden because we ran my whole career, nobody cared.
I mean you know, like what were the issues?
Stock option accounting. H1B visas like real like
relative fringe stuff compared to, you know, the like, we're
going to ban crypto or we are going to call Google and Meta
and tell them what they can publish.
You know, that that was a real change.
And I think that, you know, my big conclusion is what the state
cares about his power. And Aztec kind of rose in power
to the level of the state. Then they got very, very
interested. So like, you know, it's always
under the guise of of safety, but it's really power.
And, you know, it's been it's been quite interesting.
I mean, like, it took us a long time to unravel, like, why the
Biden administration was so keen on banning crypto and like,
taking the US out of a whole technological space, probably,
you know, one of the two most important kind of technology
platforms for the next 25 years. They are also anti AI.
Yeah, yeah. Why are we calling it?
Yeah, anti AI? Well, both of them, right?
Yeah. Why would you withdraw from
that? And it really has to do with,
well, you know, control if we can, if we can't control the
money, then we can't control the speech.
And if we can't control the speech, then we can't control
the people. And, you know, both AI and
crypto are like, well, we better shut them.
We better have control of those things.
Like they better not be in control of somebody else.
And that's, yeah, it's just a really interesting learning that
that's I, I guess I had to grow up and learn how the world
works. But but that is how it works,
yeah. It, it is interesting because
you know, for, you know, you're, you're a little bit older than I
am actually. I mean $15.
And you know, during the period where for for many years we had
to convince people that tech was important and then suddenly
they're like, it's too important.
And that happened right in the mid twenty 10s or thereabouts,
after about 30-40 years of building the Internet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Crazy it is it is it's just so
so we're probably, you know, it's the same with all the I
mean the first thing the first sign I got of it was, you know,
the big push for like women in tech and like, which was always
surprising to me because it was like, well, you guys are
discriminating against women. There's not enough women in
tech, but like nobody wanted to go into tech.
Like going into tech was like a weird ass thing When I went into
like I, I got like ridiculed and my friends like, what are you
doing that for? Like, you know, like really
computers this and that, you know, it's so hard and like, you
know, there's not that much money in it and this and that
and the other. And like all you do is work and,
and so like going in in that world and then all of the
sudden, you know, Google and meta hit and people are getting
so rich. And and then people all of a
sudden it's like, well, you guys are discriminating.
You're not letting people in. And it's like, oh, OK, you walk
in. OK, no.
One cares about the demographics of of plumbing, for example,
right? Like they haven't yes.
So now. But the other part about that is
tech is actually in a real sense and very globally meritocratic
because we've got people from just about every country that
are participating in tech in some sense.
Well, that's how we always thought of it, right?
Like it's like, oh, there's all these Jews, Chinese, Indians,
like all these people are coming from all over the world.
They're doing tech, you know, like it's, it's not the, you
know, kind of canonical white man or whatever who's doing it.
But, but it was all self selected.
You know, it wasn't like there was no, no, nobody ever cared.
Like there was never a conversation in any of the
companies that I worked at. Like that would get you to think
anybody cared what race or gender you were like.
Like it just was never a thing. But nobody wanted But but
nobody. Applied.
You know this. Is one of those things.
And look, if you were kind of not Jews, Chinese or Indians,
you would definitely feel low on the outside because that's what
most people were. I mean, it's just like that,
yeah. Well, yeah, the thing about.
The Midwest too, I guess. Yes, that's right.
So we, I mean, basically we have many different demographics.
But you know, the thing about this is one thing I've been
formulating is the thesis of the Internet is to America as
America was to Britain, like the version 3 point O, it's like 10X
bigger. And in particular, lots of
traditional American values like freedom of speech or protection
against search and seizure, You can protect them on the Internet
with encryption in a way that is is stronger than the protections
of of a law, for example, right. And so like a smart contract is
rule of law. You know, for example, Delaware
is melting down, but small contracts are booting up, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We just actually moved the we
reincorporated the firm into Nevada.
And that's an opportunity, right, for many countries.
I mean, I know you guys are like are in Nevada now, but the fact
that, you know, Delaware was was a stable jurisdiction for for
decades, maybe centuries, depending on, you know, how long
you think the chance to record was, was the main event.
And so now I think there's sort of a jump ball where if you
know, there's some jurisdiction that could say, hey, guess what,
we've got a better Dow law and we're better than Delaware
because we allow you to port your company from place to
place. We've got the crypto stuff.
It feels there's a real opportunity in Rule of law
integrated with rule of code. If it may, maybe you'd agree
with that. Well, I definitely think so,
because the thing that we've seen, you know, in the US over
the last, probably mainly over the last five years is, you
know, we've always kind of a huge strength of the US has been
rule of law and the amount of case law and like the
predictability of the law. But that kind of presumed that
you didn't have people who were above the law who are judges
and, you know, prosecutors and these kinds of things.
And so then what's happened in the last five years is, you
know, particularly in the Delaware Chancery Court is the
chair of the Delaware Chancery Court just chose to completely
ignore the law and make up her own law, which, you know, it was
quite stunning. You know, like the board of
directors didn't have a say and then even the shareholders
didn't have a say in how the company.
Is the Tesla case. Whatever she imagined would be
the right thing. And, you know, like, it took a
lot of us by surprise. It's like, OK, wow.
So Delaware doesn't have rule of law anymore, which it doesn't.
Like. It absolutely doesn't.
And it's hard to even get to a point where you think it does.
But yeah, there was also, if you look at yeah, there was the
prosecution of Trump over the real estate deal, which was
also, you know, like, forget about the law.
Like I, the prosecutor and I, the judge will just go like the
law about, you know, what it means to have an agreement with
the bank to get a loan is no longer the law.
It's what I believe. And because I believe that they
shouldn't have given you a loan because I don't like you then
therefore you were cheating other people.
But it, it's like, well, if I go to borrow money, I disclose the
thing, you kind of evaluate my collateral and I lend you the
money. That's not legal in New York or
it wasn't legal for that case. So, you know, you get into this,
we're we're in a different world where the law has been very
politicized, I would just say. And you know, as a result of
that, you're kind of we're in like uncharted territory a bit.
So I do think that creates an opening.
I mean, yes, my, my view on that is if you imagine like a house
and there's two factions and they're fighting over the
territory, that house is now a battleground and it can have a
window blown up here or some guys can take it and shoot down
from here. And so all of these formerly
neutral institutions are now political battlegrounds, you
know, one side and then maybe another will will weaponize.
You know what I mean? I think it's on now, right?
Like I think we've got we've we've gone through a bit of a
one way door on this because I think that once one side does
it, like I don't think the other side is like morally higher on
higher ground. I think they'll it's going to be
the same kind of thing but in reverse for sure.
Exactly so. So that is why my view is with
crypto, with the blockchain, with the Internet, with the
special economic zones, we can potentially rebuild a new
Internet first version of those things, which now puts more of
the OR as much as possible of the rule of law into rule of
code. So that, for example, the
property can't be seized since the private keys, you have to
break encryption in order to seize the property.
For example, to break the contract, you have to break the
smart contract. Yeah, So what's?
Your contract then a little bit. By definition, there's no room
for a judge to say the contract was invalid, which is which is
kind of the case in both the Delaware courts and in the kind
of Trump New York real estate case where there was a contract.
And that's all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that contract,
the state decided the contract was invalid.
And OK, that, that that's, that's interesting.
But if it was a smart contract, then there's no, you know,
there's not third party. That's right.
And you know, one of the things I think about a lot is when I'm
at a tech conference in, for example, Dubai or in Singapore,
the vast majority of people there are not American, often
not white. They're from Africa, they're
from the Middle East, they're from, you know, Asia.
But they all trust Bitcoin, they all trust smart contracts.
And so that is something which actually addresses the concerns
of both the left and the right because clearly people of every
race, religion, ethnicity and so on trust Bitcoin and smart
contracts and so on. But it's also fair certainly to
the right, because it's now like it is, it is sort of provably
fair, which is new. And that's like a new standard
that can you know, outweigh what you know what, what is what is
no longer thought to be fair by by both sides.
Yeah, I the, this is actually one of my kind of favorite ideas
of yours is, you know, they are called consensus protocols and
they are a way of getting kind of mathematically strong
consensus to the point where everybody in the world agrees to
the penny who owns every bit of the whatever it is $3 trillion
Bitcoin market cap. Like that's a hell of a magic
trick if you think about it. I mean, everybody in the world
to agree to a thing like that is, is quite spectacular.
And I think that the, I think it's probably the only future
that works given, you know, what's what we're seeing now
with the US in terms of the law. I think that's so.
And the reason, part of the reason also is everybody from
every culture can read code, can diligence code, can do the math,
can determine for themselves it's correct whether they're,
you know, Pakistani or Indian, Japanese or Chinese, right,
Democrat or Republican. And so that is, I think part of
the goal of Network State is to come up with a series of
templates that can serve restore order from the cloud.
You actually, you know, you guys pioneered this in some ways like
reboot from the cloud. Yeah, yes.
Right. Like in a in a data center, you
know, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know for
sure. So restore from cloud backup is
kind of how I think about a big chunk of what we're doing, but
not simply the state of a server, but the state of a
society. You know, we can, we can do
that. And you know, an interesting
question is how far we can take that.
Because you can, you can have like -1 and plus one Bitcoin and
you can have a smart contract that governs identity, But
actually many other kinds of contracts.
For example, you could have a marriage and a birth registry on
chain people. People have started to do things
like that. You can even have a jury of
peers where people all turn their keys like Claros and you
know, things have done things like that.
So I think a really interesting question to see how creative we
can get, how much of the old world we can replace or or at
least partially replace with Internet first variance.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Yeah. I, I mean, I think that I think
we have to get the infrastructure deployed more
broadly first. Like, so I do think Step 1, you
know, that the, the biggest challenge right now, you know, a
big challenge for the world is like we did crypto is not
pervasive. Like not everybody has a wallet,
not everybody has keys, but it's really important that they do,
you know, first of all, just from a security standpoint, like
having all of your PII in the cloud and 400 different websites
is the most dangerous thing. People are going to look back on
that and go like, that was crazy.
That was much worse than driving without seatbelts and smoking 3
packs of cigarettes a day like that.
Fucking insane. Like what are you guys doing?
But we we have to get that underpinning in order, you know,
and I think that needs to be the way that money gets distributed
to citizens and the way people vote and the way.
And then, you know, when you have that basis, then there's a
basis to move the law on chain. But I think it's the the
trickiness of it now is it's just not pervasive.
And and then we really need it to be, we need it to be like the
Internet and it's not quite there yet.
And then, you know, a lot of that has to do with, you know,
the the kind of assault on it over the last four years from
the Biden administration. And so it's fragmented around
the world and and and and so forth and so on.
But I I think like it's definitely the future.
The question is just how fast. So yeah, I think we have
actually. Years of years.
But by some measures we have hundreds of millions of crypto
of holders at least, right. And it's funny because it is
whatever trillion dollars and it's a big enough deal that it
was like a camp major campaign issue and you know blah, blah.
But it's a weird thing where like on a like I use it actually
quite a lot for wire transfers and other stuff.
But my view on that is we're just in the first year where we
have Solana and bass, which basically means you could just
blast transactions on chain as well as as well as other L ones.
And we have USDC and cable coins legal.
We have Apple removing its issues where it's blocking a lot
of apps in the App Store. Hey Apple is a huge problem.
A huge problem, right? And we also have the regulatory
assault has been pulled back. So there should be like, you
know, a spring of a of a bunch of stuff that was pent up that
should come out there and then two other things.
I do think we need more developers back in the field.
So one of the IT did is it, you know, the, the combination of
the assault from, you know, the administration and the powers
that be. And then the rise of AI kind of
shifted a lot of the, the software development energy over
to AI from crypto. And we we need to get a lot of
that back to rebuild. Well, so I actually think AI is
going to subsidized crypto in the sense that AI makes
everything fake and crypto makes it real again.
Yeah. Right, right, right.
So because how do you know? AI is probabilistic.
As probabilistic crypto is deterministic and that that
wallet allows you to digitally sign something to show it came
from you and then you can have and you know, essentially a
content ID on everything. And I actually think exactly
we're going to have proof of human social networks.
I think world coin could help boot something like that up, for
example. So so I think that that is
another subsidy here and then you're on your point on privacy.
You know, I've talked with some of the folks in, you know, the
Etherium community, C cash community on HTPZ, like, you
know, HTPHPSHPZ, which is conceptual, whether it's
literally HPZ, but it's basically zero knowledge.
Zero knowledge. Very good, yeah.
Yeah, I know it's clever, right? And so we could a lot of the
privacy sets, another major potential subsidy for crypto is
the all the zero knowledge techniques that are being built
up for not just privacy, but also scaling could be applied.
For example, homomorphic encryption and secure
multiparty. All that kind of stuff is now
starting to be something that you might be able to use in
traditional web apps with the with the right packaging of it.
And that packaging has to be done.
Maybe we can put out some prizes or something.
To yeah, yeah, there's definitely work that's going on
on the on the packaging that's getting better.
I mean, I write it the usability of, of being on chain.
You know, that was one of the big two things that you know
when the assault started that we needed to get better at where
performance and and usability and they kind of are related.
We made a lot of progress on performance, not as much on
usability. Yeah.
And I think with hopefully we can get a lot of that over the
next year or so. I think starting to see of the
forecast with bass and and and and s.com earned.
Yeah, he's back. Let's.
Go It's a good idea then, It's a good idea now.
Yes, you know what's funny is we're my, my view on this is you
know how Evan Williams, he did Blogger and they did Twitter, he
did Medium, right? And his iterations on a theme.
And so I think Earn 20252026 is kind of like that.
It'll be iterations on a theme from everything we learned from
6-7 years because lots of stuff works now that was only just
barely starting to work back in 20/17/2018.
So we'll see. OK, cool.
All right. So anything, so anything else
that people who are building sharp societies.
So actually, if you're building sharp society intro community
network state should come to interest in Horowitz and and
pitch interest in Horowitz. Yeah.
I mean, I, I, I think that for sure we're very interested in it
where you know, where, where investors in networkstate.com.
Ns.com, exactly. Yes, that's right.
So yes, exactly. That's right.
So. No, we believe in it.
We believe in it. We're, we believe in the, you
know, the, the whole thing from the sovereign individual on up.
So we want to be part of it for sure.
Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Ben.
All right. Thank you.